The Women’s Media Center reported that the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charity of media network Thomson Reuters, released results of a survey of experts last week on the most dangerous countries for women. Of those countries, India was found to be the most dangerous, and the United States made the top 10 —the only Western nation to do so.
This is the second time the Thomson Reuters Foundation has conducted the survey, the first being in 2011. The U.S. did not make the top 10 in the 2011 results.
US makes the list of top 10 most dangerous countries for women https://t.co/TfX7eJebGN pic.twitter.com/5Pp4XuJB4y
— The Hill (@thehill) June 27, 2018
The survey was conducted in October 2017, aka post-#MeToo, so it’s unsurprising that views of women’s safety in America have shifted. Of the six survey questions, which focused on health, culture and religion, non-sexual violence, discrimination, sexual violence and human trafficking, the United States made the top 10 for two: they ranked third-worst alongside Syria for sexual violence, and sixth-worst for non-sexual violence.
The Thomson Reuters Foundation’s definition of sexual violence includes “rape as a weapon of war; domestic rape; rape by a stranger; the lack of access to justice in rape cases; sexual harassment and coercion into sex as a form of corruption,” according to their website. This aligns with much of the #MeToo and #TIMESUP movements, and the Thomson Reuters Foundation attributes those movements to perhaps affecting the answers of the 548 experts contacted for the survey.
Their definition of non-sexual violence includes “conflict-related violence and forms of domestic physical and mental abuse.” The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence reports that in the United States, a third of women have been victims of physical violence by a partner, and that domestic violence accounts for 15 percent of all violent crime in the U.S.
This is not the only recent report that puts the United States in a bad light, either—last month, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley made headlines for disagreeing with a UN report that shed light on poverty in the United States, according to Fortune. Philip Alston, Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, referred to the United States as “the most unequal country in the developed world” after it was found that 40 million Americans are in poverty, with another 18.5 million in extreme poverty and 5 million more in absolute poverty.
No U.S. government officials have made a comment on the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s survey or the U.S. ranking as of yet, but I imagine this will spark even more conversation about women’s rights and safety in the United States.