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.