Women's Rights Violations - They NEED to Stop

Hey SOCHUM delegates!

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas, stuffing yourselves with turkey and ham and whatnot. It's also good to point out that HSMUN 2012 is less than two months away! Isn't that exciting? That means that it's time to put our noses to the grindstone and start researching!

I previously had a post with several questions for Topic 2, so now I return to Topic 1: The question of dealing with women's rights violations in countries which only formally prohibit them.

Firstly, I want to explicitly state that this question does NOT intend to go against cultural or religious beliefs: we are not a group of religious pilgrims land-basting other beliefs or values. We are only focused on women's rights.

While it's true that the majority of women's rights violations occur outside of the Western world, I want all of you to also take into consideration violations within our own country, within our civilization. As an example, Canada and the United States both have issues with sexist prejudice, and those should be taken into consideration as well.

Next, as we turn our focus upon the most serious violations of women's rights, they do tend to congregate within Asia and the Middle East. Regardless of other factors, basic women's rights must be protected. So, my question is, how do we accomplish that without infringing upon sovereign rights or cultural beliefs?

Countries like China are notorious for blatant sexist preference, with an appalling number of female orphans compared to males. Yet China has signed onto the 'Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women', and ironically, the United States has not. How can we deal with these kinds of problems, when a government officially takes a stance, yet their internal policies or the behavior of their citizens directly contradicts said stance?