We are so pleased to have you join us as we investigate this crucial topic. Violence is a leading cause of death, disability and health care use worldwide. Violence is a complex problem and can only be understood and reduced though a multidisciplinary approach. This course introduces you to experts who study different forms of violence and we will discuss the various causes of violence. You will also learn about efforts to reduce violence and engage in a day of compassion. We are very fortunate that PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER is participating in our course. He delivers a lecture on the efforts of the Carter Center to end violence around the world, and he engages in a discussion with us about his life and work in human rights. Do join us for short videos, readings and discussions. And also see our coffee chats, where we (Pamela and Deb) summarize and reflect on each module. And we want to hear from you! Feel free to reach out via Twitter or through the course, or through our Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/understandingviolence01/.
Interview with President Jimmy Carter
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来自 Emory University 的课程
Understanding Violence
98 个评分
从本节课中
Controlling Violence
We close this course comparing different types of violence prevention programs (primary vs. secondary; public health vs. criminal justice) and identifying key elements of successful violence prevention programs.
与讲师见面
Deb Houry, MD, MPHAssociate Professor
Emergency Medicine
Pamela Scully, Ph.D.Professor
Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and African Studies
Hello.
Welcome to our conversation violence with President Jimmy Carter,
we're very pleased to have you here today.
I'm Professor Pamela Scully of Emory University,
and this is Doctor Deb Houry, also Emory University.
We're going to be talking about various topics around violence
Stemming from the work of President Carter.
While President, and in his role as head of his Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia.
President Carter, recently in the last few years,
your center has taken a leading role on bringing religion into the domain
of conversation and activism around women's humans rights.
And I would love to hear more about how you came to make that
a really part of your legacy for the world.
>> Well, the Carter Center's been active in 80 countries in the world,
and dealing with some of the poorest and most deprived people on Earth.
Primarily in Africa, but also in other parts of the world.
And the more we went to small villages, and talked to individual families
who were living in poverty and who needed assistance, sometimes in war zones,
we found increasingly, to our partial surprise and despair,
that the plight of women and girls was much worse than we had anticipated.
For instance, if a family is poverty stricken,
the girls are the last ones to get decent food to eat.
The girls quite often do not have a chance to go and get an education,
even though the boys are given an education opportunity.
The boys have a chance to be trained for some kind of a profession.
The girls are not.
And quite often the young girls, even eight, nine,
ten years old are sold by their families because of poverty restraints,
into marriage, over which they have no control.
And they become in effect a slave in the house
of an older man who might have two or three other wives.
And so these are the kind of things that we found that were happening.
Also, we had a massive agriculture program in Africa, I think
in 15 different countries, and almost invariably, the women did all the work.
But at harvest time, the men collected the money, and
sometimes spend it on beer and that sort of thing.
And the women were pushed to the back of the forefront.
When we deal we the health programs,
we find out that the women are the stalwart champions of health.
Because they are the ones responsible for the well being
not only of their own children, but also their husband and themselves.
So when we deal with trachoma, the number one cause of preventable blindness,
it's the women and little children who suffer.
When we deal with malaria,
it's the women and children under five years old who suffer.
And the same thing happens with other diseases.
And so, we found that women were our main stalwart group of advisers and helpers.
And they did actually work, but they got very little credit for it.
And we also found that in some societies, women are horribly abused.
For instance,
I would say female genital mutilation is one that I haven't mentioned earlier.
And that's quite prevalent in many countries.
It's against the law in most countries.
For instance, we have a lot to do with Egypt.
In Egypt, for instance, of all the girls and women living, at this moment,
90% of them have had their sexual organs mutilated when they were quite young.
In some countries, like Djibouti, and Somalia, the percentage is 97%.
So almost all of the women have had their sexual organs removed, the exterior parts.
So these are the kind of things that happen to girls and women.
But we learned about them, just as we dealt with agriculture and health care,
and trying to preserve peace in the poorest areas of the world.
>> And did you find that, in bringing together those issues with religion,
was it in part that religion was seen as a justification for
the kind of low status of women?
>> Yes.
In 2008, I believe it was, I made a speech to the international conference on women,
on religion rather, in Australia.
I think there were about 9,000 people there and
I made a speech to them about this subject.
What is the result of misinterpretation of the Holy Scriptures in Christianity and
in Islam and in Buddhism and Hinduism and so forth, and
it turns out that after, and Christianity, I'll limit my talk to that.
[COUGH] In Christianity, until about the third or fourth century after Jesus Christ
lived, women played a very major role in the early church community.
But as men became dominant, they began to select one or
two of the verses out of 34,000 verses in the Holy Scriptures to prove
that women were inferior to men and were not equal in the eyes of God.
And this was a major contributing factor to the abuse of women, because if
a husband has a wife and he wants to abuse her, then his rationale might be,
if she's not equal in the eyes of God, to me, why should I treat her as an equal?
And this would even go down to employers in big corporations,
who're otherwise quite enlightened.
And they said well, if God doesn't think women are equal,
why should I pay women the same salary for the same I'm out of work, full time work?
And, so, this results in honor killings and so forth.
It also results in sexual organ mutilation among women.
So, misinterpretation of scripture is a major
contributing fact that the men assuming that they are superior to women.
If God thinks so, then why shouldn't I?
And this is a major factor.
Another one is what we mentioned earlier, and that's violence.
The more acceptable prevalence of violence, and violence and
the struggle for power, and misinterpretation of the holy scriptures,
are the major contributing factors of the derogation of women to a secondary
position in our societies.
>> Well I must say I really admire the Carter Center's work in making a space to
talk about how religion can be a force for good, as well as for harm against women.
>> Well the last two years we've brought in religious leaders from all different
religions, Christianity, Judaism, as well as Islam and so forth.
And they have contributed to our understanding
of how their scriptures are misinterpreted.
And we have very good help, for instance, from the Grand Imam of al-Azhar,
who's a Sunni Muslim leader in the world, a spiritual leader.
And he's also the president of a university that has 120,000
students in Cairo, Egypt.
And he's working with us to convince Muslims that the Koran
does equate the status of women with men, in the eyes of Allah or God.
>> Thank you.
>> So in your book, you talked a little bit about when you were governor, about
a brave young woman, who came forward and told you that she'd been raped.
Can you tell us a little bit more about that and
where you think we are now in regards to college sexual assault.
>> Well, when I first became Governor in 1971, we had a young woman from another
state with whom we had friendship with her parents.
And she was enrolling at a university in Atlanta.
And so we just told her she could stay at the Governor's Mansion for
a few weeks until she got settled into college.
And so about the third day she was in college, she came home that night, crying,
and woke us up and said that she had been raped by one of the boys in her class.
And so I was governor, I thought I was a big shot, and I had control over
the safety of people in my state, so I demanded the people from Decamp Country,
which is just close to Atlanta That the attorney general and
the sheriff come to my office, at the governor's mansion so
I can tell them about the rape, with the girl's permission,
and they can get the perpetrator and put him in prison for rape.
And so when they came there,
they explained to me that this was not possible.
That the girl would be put under cross examination by the young man's attorneys.
She would probably have to resign in disgrace from the college,
that she would have to answer to her own parents for
exposing herself to the possibility of rape.
And that the chances are that unless the young man was black
student that he would never be found guilty, because you couldn't
convince the jury that a girl did not provoke the sexual assault on herself.
So that was a very grievous thing to me, the girl gave me permission to talk to her
parents and I explained the situation to her parents.
So she withdrew from the college near Atlanta and
she went back to Oklahoma State and she had a very successful future life, but
she was blighted in her life with a rape of a fellow student in the college.
So when I gotta my present status of dealing with women's abuse
around the world, I brought that subject up with the president of Emory University
as an example of what happened way back in ancient times, back in the 70s.
And so Emory University has moved forward,
I think, as well as any university I know, to correct the problem of sexual assault,
which exists on almost any college campus in America.
>> What do you think, and I think, just hearing that when you were governor,
that you still couldn't get this case to move forward, do you think we're in
a better place today for women to come forward about campus rape?
>> No, we're not.
I think there's still a prevailing synonym among leaders on college campuses,
even the finest universities.
The presidents, the deans, and so forth, let's conceal sexual assault cases on
our campuses, because it'll just bring a bad image to Harvard or
Yale or Princeton or Emery, or wherever it is.
And so, 51% of all the universities in America have
never reported a single case of sexual assault in the last five years.
And everybody knows that it takes place, and
just recently I've spoken at the university campus,
big groups of students were the presence of the college there, at Harvard,
and Yale, and at Preston, as well as some other college I need not mention now.
So it's prevalent in almost every university in America.
But there's a great version to prosecuting a boy,
and very rarely is a boy expelled from college, because of this crime.
And very rarely is a girl encouraged to bring the case to, the attention
of law enforcement officers so the boys might possibly be put on trial.
The same thing even happened, I went to the US Naval Academy in Annapolis and
just recently there was a case of three football players raping a girl
on the campus, who was a midshipman at the Naval Academy.
And in fact, the superintendent of the Naval Academy just decided that they
would not bring the case to the attention of the law enforcement officials.
>> So, it seems like social norms haven't changed that much in the past 30 years.
>> No.
>> How do we move them, how do we change them?
>> Well, as you may know, the department of education of the United States which
I originated when I was President, has a section nine,
title nine in the legislation that set it up, and it was designed originally
to give girls equal chance, girl students equal chance to participate in sports.
But now that section nine has been interpreted, title nine to protect girls
from sexual assault or rape on campuses, because they're not being treated equally.
So now, the Department of Education are investigating
a large number of college campuses in America.
I think about 88, the last time I heard, Emory happens to be one of them,
and some of the other major universities are the same.
To make sure that the college is taking at least some steps to let
the girls express their plight when they are raped and
to have a chance, at least, to deter boys from perpetuating a rape.
The problem is that when boys get on college campus, they know they can
rape a girl with impunity, so a boy that might have been quite cautious when he was
a high school student, because he knows he'd be brought to justice,
and they get on college campuses, they are free to rape as they choose.
And we've seen the embarrassment of a number of a,
number of fraternities in America because they have opened a promulgated
to their own members of their fraternity.
What's the best way to rape, particularly a college freshman girl,
by getting her drunk or giving her drugs and that sort of thing.
It's a common practice on the university campus, which is equated,
as I mentioned earlier, in the US military, which is the other major
institution in America that is revered by almost everybody.
>> So hopefully, we're entering a new era with the White House Task Force
precious entitle nine, but I think it is about changing social norms.
So in terms of talking about social norms, the Carter Center is very famous for
its work in reforming and
helping people with ill health around the world and getting rid of Guinea worm, etc.
I think, it's also increasingly becoming know for the work in conflict resolution
and then trying to really prevent violence before it even starts by helping people
find ways of talking to one another and really preventing conflict.
And I'd be really interested to hear how that became a focus of the Carter Center
work and some of the programs that you find most successful and interesting.
>> Well yeah, one of the greatest handicaps to dealing
with potential conflict is the unwillingness of governments
to relate directly to people who cause the conflicts.
Because quite often they are pariahs,
they may have been invited by the International Criminal Court.
Well, they might have been declared terrorists which when I was President
they used to declare people communists so we couldn't deal with it.
So one of the things that I've done at the Carter Center is to continue with an open
mind about whom, I will meet to try to prevent
a war and a civil war, to prevent a horrible human rights abuse.
So I go to record to international outcasts to work with them and
try to prevent a war or the evolution of a nuclear capability and so forth, and
so I go quite freely to North Korea, for instance, and deal with the leaders there.
I go through Nepal and work very closely with the Maoists,
I go to Cuba when the United States presence, I haven't been there at all,
I go to Cuba when I get ready, and I try to ease the tension in Cuba.
We deal with both Hamas and
Fatah among the Palestinians to try to get harmony between themselves, and
to induce them to take a peaceful, a non violent approach, in dealing with Israel.
And we deal with people like al-Bashir in Sudan,
who has been invited by the International Criminal Court.
We've been to the to deal with Milosevic, and with Karadzic, and with Mladic.
All of whom had been brought to trial, and well, we deal with bad people.
>> Exactly.
>> And we go freely, people do, into Syria now to talk to Assad and
to talk to the people who are fighting against President Assad and
our key trouble resolved at Carter Center.
He's from Lebanon, he goes into Lebanon and drives from Beirut to Damascus,
125 miles or so, safely.
And when he gets into Damascus in the center of Syria,
he talks to all sides where the United States won't do it.
The United States government won't do it.
So that's what the Carter Center is able to do.
And quite often we are quite successful.
In our efforts sometimes we are frustrated, sometimes we are not.
One of the most assistive areas we went into was Haiti.
Back in 1994 the United States was prepared to invade Haiti with
30,000 troops marshaled.
And I went into Haiti with some other people helping me and
we negotiated a settlement for that thing.
So even though there were 51 planes that took off from
Fort Bragg filled with paratroopers to invade Haiti.
We reached a peace agreement and
the planes turned around and came back to base.
>> [LAUGH] >> So
those are the kind of things that the Carter Center can do on occasion
because we go where we want to, we meet with who we choose.
And we say what we really believe.
>> And you have credibility from your years as president.
>> Well, if I hadn't been president I wouldn't have access to people, so
that's a great treasure for
me at the Carter Center to have been president of a great country.
>> Well I think Pamela and I first started teaching this class because we
wanted the opportunity to educate as many people as possible about violence,
because we do believe you can prevent.
It's not an easy task to do.
When reading your book I thought you had a lot of great examples about,
whether it's micro finance or
some of the agriculture that women were doing that then reduced violence.
Do you have some ideas or suggestions or other examples from the book on what we
can do today or tomorrow in the United States?
>> Well, as a matter of fact the last chapter in my book I have 23 things listed
that we can do.
And one of them is to enforce
a United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 that mandates
by law that women must be at the table when a peace negotiation is conducted.
But men are in charge, as you know, including the Secretary Generals of
the United Nation, and they have not enforced that provision.
And then the United Nations General Assembly has passed resolutions now,
three times, condemning mutilation of sexual organs of women, of girls.
And all of that's against the law.
In many countries, it's still a prevalent thing.
So I also advocate that the United States remove commanding
officers in the military, their right to prevent
the prosecution of a man who has raped a girl in the military.
And we are very much encouraging the strict enforcement of Title IX in
the education law, which would require colleges to take firm action
in turning over cases of rape on a college campus to law enforcement officials.
Even though it might be embarrassing at first to the college campuses,
to the college administrators, it would result I think in a great reduction
in a fairly prevalent crime that exists in our institutions.
So those are the kind of things that we have advocated.
And I don't think that action has yet been taken enough.
We are not been able yet to pass a law in the United States
that will deal with victims of slavery.
The State Department reported in its last official report that there are 60,000
people living in the United States right now under human bondage or slavery.
And most of them are girls who have been inadvertently, against their will,
excuse me, sold into sexual slavery, sometimes from overseas.
But even within the country itself.
And we have the worst case of that is in Atlanta, Georgia,
where we're sitting right now because we have the busiest airport on Earth.
And a lot of our passengers coming in here are from the Southern Hemisphere.
And a brown or black skinned girl is
sold to a brothel owner now in the Atlanta area or
in the southeastern part of our country for an average of $1,000 total.
For an unwilling, forced sexual slave or prostitute,
the brothel owner can realize $35,000 in profit every year for a $1,000 investment.
And this is a very prevalent thing all over the world.
And very few are trying to do anything about it.
>> Well, I really appreciate your time, and Pamela and
I have just really been impressed with what you've done as President and
really the work of the Carter Center, we've talked about it in the course.
All the work that you've done on the global and domestic level,
we really appreciate your time today.
>> Well, it's a very worthwhile subject and I'm delighted to have a chance to
let my voice be heard through this wonderful opening to the outside world.
>> Thank you so much. >> Thank you.
>> Really a pleasure.
>> Thank you.
