SCARS ACROSS HUMANITY:
Understanding and Overcoming Violence
against Women
By Elaine Storkey
SPCK. 276 pages. £9.99
ISBN 978 0 281 075 089
In Scars Across Humanity, Elaine Storkey sets out to investigate the reasons for female oppression and to consider how violence against women can be challenged. This is a laudable aim. I hoped to find the book enlightening. Sadly, I found it unsatisfying on various levels.
The first nine chapters represent a phenomenal amount of work, and catalogue the ‘global pandemic’ of violence against women. Well over 100 million females are missing in the world due to gender selective abortion, infanticide or neglect. Globally, women and girls are more likely to be kept in slavery and be the subjects of sex trafficking and forced prostitution. Other markers of female oppression include so-called honour killings, mass rape, female genital cutting and high levels of maternal mortality in many countries (terribly exacerbated where girls are forced into early marriage). Sadly though, these chapters read rather like an academic listing. Half the Sky: How to Change the World by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn, Virago Press 2010, provides a more readable and compelling treatment of the same theme.
