Ninety per cent of women in Britain hate their bodies. They'd rather look like a composite. Without looks you are nothing.

In the United States four women are killed daily by their 'loved one'. Perhaps they had become the insignificant other. In a culture increasingly dominated by strange euphemisms, their deaths are listed as being the result of 'domestic violence", you know, murder. Half of the attendees at one Promise Keepers event admitted to dabbling in porn. 'Snuff movies' follow the orgasm not with a cigarette but with the killing of the woman. This adds to the intensity of the experience for the man. Also for the woman. To object to pornography in the United States is to reveal yourself as a politically incorrect Philistine, possibly even that most loathsome of creatures, a Christian.

Elsewhere the sexual abuse of women is not dealt with so coyly. Marriage at the age of twelve in African countries often results in the destruction of the abdominal tissue of these children bearing children. Unable to control their bladders, they spend the rest of the lives shunned by their society.

The arrival of consumer culture via the TV screen has added an increased pressue to the practice of marriage dowries in India. Once the dowry would once have consisted of a bed and some pans, but now more exhorbitant demands are being made by poor Indians with middle class aspirations, including TVs, refrigerators and other large appliances - an impossiblity for most impoverished Indians. The solution for four sisters was suicide.

In addition to their traditional role as the 'spoils of war', women are increasingly the victims of war. Rape is still the punishment meted out to woman on the losing side in Indonesia, in East Timor, in the Congo as well as in the more publicized cases in Bosnia. The complete segregation of a generation of educated, professional women in Afghanistan is well publicized as is the punishment of stoning for adultery in Iran. That this cruel behavior is not a tenant of the religion of Islam is not so well known in the West, which prides itself on the equality of the sexes. But in the United States women's wages stagnate as the incidences of violence against women soar. More and more women find themselves raising children alone in the United States where only one in four households consists of children and both parents.

Liberals pride themselves on salvaging social security from the Bush people. But what is social security but a pittance paid out at the end of life to those who raise the children of society, in increasing numbers alone and many on little over half the money men make. Not a big thank you.

In Iraq women bury their children from the various effects of the ongoing Anglo-American war, starvation, polluted water, and the general effects of living in the toxic waste dump to which the country has been reduced. Palestinian women have been burying their children for years, those famous rock singing children who are defending their land from the most sophisticated military in the Middle East. The question asked by Americans is why the Palestinians are sending their children to war. Actually they were sending them to school.

To quote the Le Monde piece in this issue "UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan acknowledged in June 2000 that since the Fourth World Conference on Women five years earlier, violence against women had been made illegal almost everywhere but such violence had in fact increased." Seems to me that you've got a long way to go, baby.