The multi-billion dollar trade that puts women in the firing line

The multi-billion dollar trade that puts women in the firing line
Oxfam International

Women are paying an increasingly heavy price for the dangerously unregulated multi-billion-dollar trade in small arms according to a new report issued today on the eve of International Women's Day.

There are now estimated to be almost 650 million small arms in the worldtoday, mostly in the hands of men and nearly 60 percent of them in thehands of private individuals. Women and girls suffer directly andindirectly from armed violence:

• An attack with a gun is 12 times more likely to end in death than anattack with any other weapon;
• In South Africa, a woman is shot dead by a current or former partnerevery 18 hours;
• In the USA, a gun in the home increases the risk that someone in thehousehold will be murdered by 41%; but increases the risk for women by272%;
• In France and South Africa, one in three women killed by theirhusbands are shot; in the USA this rises to two in three;
• Family killings are one category of homicides where women outnumbermen as victims with her partner or male relative the most likelymurderer.

... The report also examines a wide range of gun control measures adopted by states around the world usually as a result of the campaigns women are spearheading against gun violence.

• Between 1995, when Canada tightened its gun laws, and 2003 the gun murder rate for women dropped by 40%;
• Five years after the gun laws in Australia were overhauled in 1996, the gun murder rate for female victims had dropped by half;
• Brazil has recently banned access to ownership of weapons before the age of 25 because young men and boys mostly perpetrate the massive level of gun violence.