Christian women in Lebanon ought to have advocates to defend them. Muslim women ought to as well, but it is more difficult for them because of the divine sanction given to wife-beating (Koran 4:34).
"Violence Against Women: Lebanon; 90% Victim Of Abuse," from ANSAmed, November 25 (thanks to Insubria):
(ANSAmed) - BEIRUT, NOVEMBER 25 - At least 90% of women in Lebanon are, or have been in the past, victim of physical or psychological abuse. This statement was made on the occasion of the tenth international day for the elimination of violence against women, by the Lebanese Council to Resist Violence Against Women (LCRVAW). "Only very few of these crimes are reported, because in Lebanon it is considered normal that a woman is beaten by her husband or a relative; therefore judges and policemen often underestimate the problem" said to ANSA Raghida Ghamlush, head of the LCRVAW office in Beirut. Despite the election of a woman as finance minister, "the situation in Lebanon" Ghamlush continued "is not good: the crime of domestic violence is not provided for in the penal code". For the Lebanese law, cases of maltreatment and abuse are part of family law, and are therefore handled directly by the confessional communities. "Only if injuries are reported by a doctor" the NGO leader said, "they can take legal action, but the chances of success are slim". Even worse, according to Dalal Chehade, head of the Lebanese NGO Najdeh, is the situation of women in the Lebanese refugee camps. "They are discriminated twice as much because they are refugees and because they are women", he told ANSA. Considered foreigners by the Lebanese Sate, "in case of abuse, before reporting their aggressor they must turn to the peoplés committee that handles these reports with the Lebanese authorities. This obstacle is sufficiently high for most crimes to remain unpunished", he concluded. (ANSAmed).
The CIA factbook gives the proportions of Muslim to Christian as 59.7%, to 39 %. (In 1932, Christians comprised an estimated 55 % of the population. It is not only that the Muslims have 'increased' their percentage of the population both by immigration and by overbreeding, but that in past decades many Christians from Lebanon, under increasing pressure from Muslims, have emigrated.
This means, therefore, that domestic violence affects many Lebanese Christian as well as Muslim women. Given the fact that human beings tend to 'mirror' their surrounding social environment, this is not surprising, though it is saddening. (I recall reading that Jewish communities living in Arab Muslim lands took longer than their western counterparts did, to formally and explicitly renounce and anathematise polygyny; probably for similar 'environmental' reasons).
Brigitte Gabriel emphasises in her book, 'Taught to Hate', that the denigration and indeed active hatred of women which suffuses the surrounding Islamic population, has - tragically - seeped into and poisoned attitudes toward women in the Lebanese Christian community; so that, for example, the birth of a daughter is greeted with less joy than the birth of a son (her own birth was unusual in that, as she was the unexpected change-of-life surprise baby of older parents who had given up all hope of ever having *any* baby at all, she was greeted with rejoicings and showered with parental love and devotion).
Mr Fitzgerald, and Ms Gabriel, and others, have noted that Lebanese Christians absorbed and reproduce the vicious Islamic antisemitism and nonsense and lies about Israel (though the Orthodox churches also have - sadly - their own native version of Jew-hatred, distinct from the Islamic variety).
It would still be interesting to have more of a breakdown of the *types* of violence within the different communities: e.g. does one find ritual daughter-murder ('honor' killings) among Lebanese Christians in numbers comparable to those that occur among Lebanese Muslims? And, what is the prevalence of incest (rape of a woman or girl by her father, brother, uncle or male cousin) among the nominally Christian versus the Muslim communities?
Sorry! I got the name of Ms Gabriel's book wrong.
It's not 'Taught to Hate', but, 'Because They Hate' (the 'they' being Arab Muslims and Muslims generally).
Great book. A good one to painlessly teach teenage girls about what Islam does to women and to a country, since at least half of the book is Ms Gabriel's lively and detailed account of her childhood and her experiences as a teenage girl in the middle of the Lebanon War of the 1970s/ early 1980s (Muslims vs non-Muslims, whether the Maronite Christians within Lebanon *or* the Jews of Israel).