Kachin women from Myanmar ‘raped till they get pregnant’ in China

Combined with a scarcity of alternative for secure migration, an absence of social safety measures, and challenges in obtaining documentation, border communities are left with few options. The report’s findings present that arranged marriage serves as a coping technique burma women for families in the Kachin and northern Shan states, lots of whom reside in poverty or monetary insecurity, explained report co-author Casey Branchini.

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We don’t have any such tradition in Burma, but I do not suppose that our women feel inferior consequently. They have appreciable authority within the home — they normally deal with the family funds, for example —and in some ways more freedom than Western women. Because of our household system, there are nearly at all times cousins or sisters or aunts or different relatives who stay within the family. This means that there’s all the time somebody within the family to deal with the kids and the mother is free to have a job or career outside the house.

The remarkable victory of Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy, brought a recent influx of feminine lawmakers. Has something changed for the better since reformist President Thein Sein took workplace four years ago? Khin Lay, director of the Triangle Women Support Group, says that, whereas the latest interval of liberalization has given “more space for discussion of gender equality and girls’s rights,” there was little in the way in which of concrete change past that.

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All property should be handed on according to the laws of succession. This signifies that during a marriage a husband and wife are joint owners of all property acquired throughout their marriage. If the person dies first, the woman routinely inherits — and, apart from, she turns into the pinnacle of the household with full authority. In the identical means, if a girl dies first, the person inherits. If he has multiple spouse, there are legal guidelines laid right down to take care of the complications of inheritance that this situation might elevate, laws, that is, which resolve which a part of the property was accrued before marriage, which part through the marriage, and how it ought to be divided.

In politics we now have by no means had much of a feminist movement as a result of in our society the issue of equal rights had never arisen. However, beneath British rule Burma was thought-about part of India and we have been governed based on the same constitution. In 1927, therefore, we did have somewhat bit of a feminist movement to abolish the clause which provided that ladies couldn’t stand for election to the Legislative Council. We Burmese women took it without any consideration that this disqualification clause ought to be deleted, so we thought we might have a token demonstration. About ten of us sent out an enchantment to the women of Rangoon to affix in exhibiting our support for a decision introduced within the Legislative Council for the deletion of the sex-disqualification clause.

Burmese women trafficked into sexual slavery in China, says new report

A few weeks later came one other report of an alleged sexual assault by a government soldier, who was said to have been caught making an attempt to rape a 72-yr-old Kachin woman. A key challenge for women, notably those from the nation’s myriad ethnic minorities, is the six-decade-lengthy civil war between the central government and the ethnic armed teams. Thirteen years in the past, the Thailand-primarily based Shan Women’s Action Network issued the first report on acts of sexual violence dedicated by the Burmese military in the midst of the conflict. The report documented 175 cases in which 625 Shan women had been raped or sexually abused by government troops throughout five years of war, from 1996 to 2001, in Shan State alongside the country’s japanese border.

In my own research work within the village system of Burma I have even found vestiges of a matriarchal system which should have flourished here at one time. The inheritance of sure oil wells, for instance, belonged completely to women; in some cases the inheritance to the headmanship of a village was via the feminine line. To today we have no family surnames in Burma and a woman keeps her personal identify after marriage. These horrific accounts have been revealed in a Thursday report revealed by Human Rights Watch, which found Burmese security forces had “committed widespread rape” against Rohingya women and girls as part of a brutal ethnic cleaning that has pressured more than 600,000 Rohingyas to flee their houses.

“Myanmar and Chinese authorities are looking away whereas unscrupulous traffickers are promoting Kachin women and girls into captivity and unspeakable abuse,” mentioned Heather Barr, performing women’s rights co-director at Human Rights Watch and creator of the report. With this background of history and custom in Burma, it isn’t actually shocking that Burmese women have accepted their place in public life as a pure part of their status in society. On landed estates in the past it often happened that a lady, after she had been left a widow, greater than doubled or trebled the family property by way of her own efforts. Before the struggle, companies have been principally in the palms of foreigners, however in postwar Burma, as enterprise opportunities arose for Burmese, the ladies in addition to the lads took advantage of them.

Burmese Women Not Allowed to Marry Foreigners, The Irrawaddy, 25 May 2010.

My foreign associates have often told me that they’re shocked to see an ordinary Burmese woman sitting at her stall in a bazaar, dressed in the ordinary htamein and jacket, her hair arranged on high of her head within the traditional manner, often smoking a cigar—and dealing with her trade with all of the exhausting-headed business acumen of a man. Or, in an agricultural family, the wife may be serving to with the planting, the reaping, the winnowing. If her husband is a cartman, a Burmese woman may perform her share of the labor. You can see her in business houses, signing contracts and making choices for the agency, or find her in any of the professions or in parliament. It all seems quite completely different from the familiar image of the down-trodden, backward Asian woman.

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The 112-web page report, “Give Us a Baby and We’ll Let You Go,” reveals that weak young women from Burma’s conflict-ridden northern Kachin and Shan states are being tricked into pressured marriages in China the place the earlier “one-youngster policy” and preference for sons has created a huge gender hole. The report calls on donor governments and U.N. companies to apply stress on the government of Myanmar to declare a unilateral nationwide ceasefire to end the violence in Kachin and northern Shan states. It also requires humanitarian aid to internally displaced people and cross-border refugees to be able to reduce their vulnerability to being exploited and trafficked.

“Myanmar and Chinese authorities are trying away while unscrupulous traffickers are promoting Kachin women and girls into captivity and unspeakable abuse,” mentioned Heather Barr, women’s rights co-director at Human Rights Watch. Many of the Kachin women are trafficked out of Myanmar by their relations, friends or people they trust; in a single case a woman was betrayed by somebody from her bible research class. They are often promised jobs throughout the border in China, and discover only after they cross over that they have been sold into sexual slavery.