News:
This week, a 72 year old ‘Nobel prize’ winner, Sir Tim Hunt, was ridiculed and forced to resign his university post for joking that the mixing of men and women in university laboratories creates problems, while on a related theme, an esteemed scientific journal published research on desperate attempts to solve the problem of rapes in Canadian universities. The latest edition (June, 11th 2015) of The New England Journal of Medicine contains a revealing scientific article of great interest to those concerned with the right of women to pursue higher education in the West, without becoming a victim of rape. The article is entitled: “Efficacy of a Sexual Assault Resistance Program for University Women,” and the background for the article is given as: “Young women attending university are at substantial risk for being sexually assaulted … but effective strategies to reduce this risk remain elusive.”
Comment:
The article presents research on a new program of training for women to help them reduce the risk of sexual assault at 3 universities in Canada. The incidence of sexual assault is given as a staggering 20% to 25% over a period of 4 years, and while universities are said to be addressing the issue, “most campuses use programs that have never been formally evaluated or have not proved to be effective in reducing the incidence of sexual assault”. One of the approaches the article describes is called the ‘bystander approach’, which aims to educate men and women who witness a situation that could result in rape to help the potential victim before it is too late. However, this and other past programs of training “have been disappointing” according to the article.
This new Canadian study did produce a significant result, and it sets its measure of success as the number of rapes 1-year after women received a training course in risk awareness and avoidance techniques with some martial arts. Only 5.2% of the girls with training got raped, compared with 9.8% in the control group! While this may be a success for science, it is a poor success for female education in a democracy. Democracy is claimed to be the ideal model for women across the world, but the figures revealed by this and many other studies are a disaster for women, education and society.
Islam established both values and a defined system to shape the relationship between men and women in society as a whole, and these have upheld the dignity and honour of women for fourteen centuries, without the need of higher education courses to teach men to be sympathetic and women to handle risk better. In the absence of relevant societal values, western democracies have turned to science to define and measure a problem that democracy itself nurtured through its sanctification of freedom as a core value. Being a scientific article, the problem with rape is expressed not in human terms, but in tangible economic and health terms as follows: “Being sexually assaulted can result in post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, alcohol use, and decreased safer-sex practices, among other negative health outcomes. In addition to the specific health consequences for the woman, the social and financial costs to society are also high.” That may be an acceptable scientific justification for the article’s research, but it is sad that such justification, and the research built upon it is deemed necessary when the creator of the world’s has revealed a perfect system of life, called Islam, to address the complexities of human nature and has placed women at the position of highest honour and sanctity in society.
Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by
Dr. Abdullah Robin