-
As a matter of fact,
-
I was trying to think about my career
since I left the White House,
-
and the best example I have is the cartoon
in "The New Yorker" a couple of years ago.
-
This little boy is looking up
at his father,
-
and he says, "Daddy, when I grow up,
I want to be a former President."
-
(Laughter)
-
Well, I have had a great blessing
as a former President,
-
because I have had an access
-
that very few other people
in the world have ever had
-
to get to know so many people
around this whole universe.
-
Not only am I familiar
with the 50 states in the United States,
-
but also my wife and I have visited
more than 145 countries in the world,
-
and the Carter Center has had full-time
programs in 80 nations on Earth.
-
And a lot of times,
when we go into a country,
-
we not only the meet
the king or the President,
-
but we also meet the villagers who live
in the most remote areas of Africa.
-
So our overall commitment
at the Carter Center
-
is to promote human rights,
-
and knowing the world as I do,
I can tell you without any equivocation
-
that the number one abuse
of human rights on Earth
-
is, strangely, not addressed quite often,
is the abuse of women and girls.
-
(Applause)
-
There are a couple of reasons for this
that I'll mention to begin with.
-
First of all is the misinterpretation
of religious scriptures, holy scriptures,
-
in the Bible, Old Testament,
New Testament, Quran, and so forth,
-
and these have been misinterpreted by men
who are now in the ascendant positions
-
in the synagogues and the churches
and in the mosques.
-
And they interpret these rules
to make sure that women
-
are ordinarily relegated
to a secondary position
-
compared to men in the eyes of God.
-
This is a very serious problem.
It's ordinarily not addressed.
-
A number of years ago, in the year 2000,
-
I had been a Baptist,
a Southern Baptist for 70 years.
-
I tell you, I still teach
Sunday School every Sunday.
-
I'll be teaching this Sunday as well,
-
but the Southern Baptist Convention
in the year 2000 decided
-
that women should play
a secondary position,
-
a subservient position to men.
-
So they issued an edict, in effect,
-
that prevents women from being priests,
pastors, deacons in the church,
-
or chaplains in the military,
-
and if a woman teaches a classroom
-
in a Souther Baptist seminary,
-
they cannot teach if a boy is in the room,
-
because you can find verses in the Bible,
-
there's over 30,000 verses in the Bible,
-
that say that a woman shouldn't
teach a man, and so forth.
-
But the basic thing is the scriptures
are misinterpreted
-
to keep men in an ascendant position.
-
That is an all-pervasive problem,
-
because men can exert that power
-
and if an abusive husband or an employer,
for instance, wants to cheat women,
-
they can say that if women
are not equal in the eyes of God,
-
why should I treat them as equals myself?
-
Why should I pay them equal pay
for doing the same kind of work?
-
The other very serious blight
-
that causes this problem
is the excessive resort to violence,
-
and that is increasing
tremendously around the world.
-
In the United States of America,
for instance, we have had
-
an enormous increase
in abuse of poor people,
-
mostly black people and minorities,
and putting them in prison.
-
When I was in office
as Governor of Georgia,
-
one out of every 1,000 Americans
were in prison.
-
Nowadays, 7.3 people
per thousand are in prison.
-
That's a sevenfold increase.
-
And since I left the White House,
-
there's been an 800 percent increase
in the number of women
-
who are black who are in prison.
-
We also the only country on Earth
-
that still has the death penalty
that is a developed country.
-
And we rank right alongside
the countries that are most abusive
-
in all elements of human rights
in encouraging the death penalty.
-
We're in California now,
and I figured out the other day
-
that California has spent
four billion dollars
-
in convicting 13 people
for the death penalty.
-
If you add that up, that's 307 million
dollars it costs California
-
to send a person to be executed.
-
Nebraska this week just passed a law
abolishing the death penalty,
-
because it costs so much. (Applause)
-
So the resort to violence and abuse
of poor people and helpless people
-
is another cause of the increase
in abuse of women.
-
Let me just go down a very few
abuses of women that concern me most,
-
and I'll be fairly brief, because I have
a limited amount of time, as you know.
-
One is genital mutilation.
-
Genital mutilation is horrible
and not known by American women,
-
but in some countries, many countries,
-
when a child is born that's a girl,
very soon in her life,
-
her genitals are completely cut away
by a so-called "cutter"
-
who has a razor blade and,
in a non-sterilized way,
-
they remove the exterior parts
of a woman's genitalia,
-
and sometimes, in more extreme cases
but not very rare cases,
-
they sow the orifice up so the girl
can just urinate or menstruate.
-
And then later, when she gets married,
the same cutter goes in
-
and opens the orifice up
so she can have sex.
-
This is not a rare thing, although
it's against the law in most countries.
-
In Egypt, for instance,
-
91 percent of all the females
that live in Egypt today
-
have been sexually mutilated in that way.
-
In some countries,
it's more than 98 percent
-
of the women are cut that way
before they reach maturity.
-
This is a horrible affliction
-
on all women that live in those countries.
-
Another very serious thing
is honor killings,
-
where a family with misinterpretation,
again, of a holy scripture
-
-- there's nothing in the Quran
that mandates this --
-
will execute a girl in their family
-
if she is raped
-
or if she marries a man
that her father does not approve,
-
or sometimes even if she
wears inappropriate clothing.
-
And this is done by members
of her own family,
-
so the family becomes murderers
-
when the girl brings
so-called "disgrace" to the family.
-
An analysis was done in Egypt
not so long ago by the United Nations
-
and it showed that 75 percent
of these murders of a girl
-
are perpetrated by the father,
the uncle, the son, or the brother,
-
but 25 percent of the murders
are conducted by women.
-
Another problem that we have in the world
-
that relates to women
particularly is slavery,
-
or human trafficking it's called nowadays.
-
There were about 12.5 million people
sold from Africa into slavery
-
in the New World back in
the 19th century and the 18th century.
-
There are 30 million people
now living in slavery.
-
The United States Department of State
now has a mandate from Congress
-
to give a report every year,
-
and the State Department reports
that 800,000 people are sold
-
across international borders
every year into slavery,
-
and that 80 percent
of those sold are women,
-
into sexual slavery.
-
In the United States right this moment,
-
60,000 people are living
in human bondage, or slavery.
-
Atlanta, Georgia, where
the Carter Center is located
-
and where I teach at Emory University,
-
they have between 200 and 300 women,
people sold into slavery every month.
-
It's the number one place
in the nation because of that.
-
Atlanta has the busiest
airport in the world,
-
and they also have a lot of passengers
that come from the Southern Hemisphere.
-
If a brothel owner
-
wants to buy a girl
that has brown or black skin,
-
they can do it for a thousand dollars.
-
A white-skinned girl brings
several times more than that,
-
and the average brothel owner in Atlanta
and in the United States now
-
can earn about $35,000 per slave.
-
The sex trade in Atlanta, Georgia, exceeds
the total drug trade in Atlanta, Georgia.
-
So this is another very serious problem,
and the basic problem is prostitution,
-
because there's not
a whorehouse in America
-
that's not known by the local officials,
-
the local policemen, or the chief
of police or the mayor and so forth.
-
And this leads to one
of the worst problems,
-
and that is that women are bought
increasingly and put into sexual slavery
-
in all countries in the world.
-
Sweden has got a good approach to it.
-
About 15 to 20 years ago, Sweden
decided to change the law,
-
and women are no longer prosecuted
-
if they are in sexual slavery,
-
but the brothel owners and the pimps
and the male customers are prosecuted,
-
and -- (Applause) --
prostitution has gone down.
-
In the United States, we're taking
just the opposite position.
-
For every male arrested
for illegal sex trade,
-
25 women are arrested
in the United States of America.
-
Canada, Ireland, I've already said Sweden,
-
France, and other countries are moving now
towards this so-called "Swedish model."
-
That's another thing that can be done.
-
We have two great institutions
in this country that all of us admire:
-
our militaries, and our great
university system.
-
In the military, they are now analyzing
how many sexual assaults take place.
-
The last report I got,
there were 26,000 sexual assaults
-
that took place in the military.
-
26,000.
-
Only 3,000, not much more than 1 percent,
are actually prosecuted,
-
and the reason is that the commanding
officer of any organization
-
-- a ship like my submarine,
or a battalion in the Army
-
or a company in the Marines --
-
the commanding officer
has the right under law to decide
-
whether to prosecute a rapist or not,
-
and of course, the last thing they want
is for anybody to know
-
that under their command,
sexual assaults are taking place,
-
so they do not do it.
-
That law needs to be changed.
-
About one out of four girls
who enter American universities
-
will be sexually assaulted
before she graduates,
-
and this is now getting
a lot of publicity,
-
partially because of my book,
but other things,
-
and so 89 universities in America
are now condemned
-
by the Department of Education
under Title IX
-
because the officials of the universities
are not taking care of the women
-
to protect them from sexual assault.
-
The Department of Justice says
that more than half of the rapes
-
on a college campus
take place by serial rapists,
-
because outside of the university system,
-
if they rape somebody,
they'll be prosecuted,
-
but when they get on a university campus,
they can rape with impunity.
-
They're not prosecuted.
-
Those are the kinds of things
that go on in our society.
-
Another thing that's very serious
about the abuse of women and girls
-
is the lack of equal pay for equal work,
-
as you know. (Applause)
-
And this is sometimes misinterpreted,
but for full-time employment,
-
a woman in the United States now
gets 23 percent less than a man.
-
When I became President,
the difference was 39 percent.
-
So we've made some progress,
partially because I was President
-
and so forth -- (Applause) (Laughter) --
-
but in the last 15 years,
there's been no progress made,
-
so it's been just about 23
or 24 percent difference
-
for the last 15 years.
-
These are the kind of things that go on.
-
If you take the Fortune 500 companies,
-
23 of them have women CEOs,
-
out of 500,
-
and those CEOs, I'll tell you,
-
make less on an average
-
than the other CEOs.
-
Well, that's what goes on in our country.
-
Another problem with the United States
-
is we are the most warlike
nation on Earth.
-
We have been to war
with about 25 different countries
-
since the Second World War.
-
Sometimes, we've had soldiers
on the ground fighting.
-
The other times,
we've been flying overhead
-
dropping bombs on people.
-
Other times, of course, now, we have
drones that attack people and so forth.
-
We've been at war
with 25 different countries
-
or more since the Second World War.
-
There was four years,
I won't say which ones,
-
where we didn't
-
-- (Applause) -- we didn't drop a bomb,
we didn't launch a missile,
-
we didn't fire a bullet.
-
But anyway, those kinds of things,
the resort to violence
-
and the misinterpretation
of the holy scriptures
-
are what causes, are the basic causes,
of abuse of women and girls.
-
There's one more basic cause
that I need not mention,
-
and that is that in general,
men don't give a damn.
-
(Applause)
That's true.
-
The average man that might say,
I'm against the abuse of women and girls
-
quietly accepts the privileged
position that we occupy,
-
and this is very similar
to what I knew when I was a child,
-
when separate but equal had existed.
-
Racial discrimination, legally,
had existed for a hundred years,
-
from 1865 at the end of the War
Between the States, the Civil War,
-
all the way up to the 1960s,
-
when Lyndon Johnson got the bills passed
-
for equal rights.
-
But during that time,
there were many white people
-
that didn't think that
racial discrimination was okay,
-
but they stayed quiet,
-
because they enjoyed the privileges
of better jobs,
-
unique access to jury duty,
-
better schools, and everything else,
-
and that's the same thing
that exists today,
-
because the average man
really doesn't care.
-
Even though they say, "I'm against
discrimination against girls and women,"
-
they enjoy a privileged position.
-
And it's very difficult to get
the majority of men
-
who control the university system,
-
the majority of men that control
the military system,
-
the majority of men that control
the governments of the world,
-
and the majority of men that control
the great religions.
-
So what is the basic thing
that we need to do today?
-
I would say the best thing
that we could do today
-
is for the women in the powerful nations
-
like this one, and where you come from,
-
Europe and so forth, who have influence
and who have freedom to speak and to act,
-
need to take the responsibility
on yourselves
-
to be more forceful in demanding
-
an end to racial discrimination
against girls and women
-
all over the world.
-
The average woman in Egypt
-
doesn't have much to say
about her daughters
-
getting genitally mutilated and so forth.
-
I didn't even go down
to detail about that.
-
But I hope that out of this conference,
-
that every woman here
will get your husbands to realize
-
that these abuses on the college campuses
and the military and so forth
-
and in the future job market,
-
need to protect your daughters
and your granddaughters.
-
I have 12 grandchildren,
four children, and 10 great-grandchildren,
-
and I think often about them
-
and about the plight that they
will face in America,
-
not only if they lived in Egypt
or a foreign country,
-
in having equal rights,
-
and I hope that all of you will join me
-
in being a champion for women
and girls around the world
-
and protect their human rights.
-
Thank you very much.
-
(Applause)