Respect for Women and Maltreatment against Women

http://www.mfa.gov.kp/en/respect-for-women-and-maltreatment-against-women/

The issue of ensuring the rights of women, a half of country’s population, is one of important criteria for evaluating the level of civilization of a given country and its situation of human rights.

From the early days of the revolutionary activities, President Kim Il Sung regarded the issue of women as one of the key components of social revolution and paid a deep attention to addressing this issue. On July 30, 1946, year after the liberation of Korea, he took a measure to enact and promulgate the “Law on Gender Equality in North Korea.”

During the past 75 years since then, the women in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) have grown into powerful force shouldering one of the wheels of revolution, enjoying legal guarantee of their rights to freedom and equality under the full attention and protection of the state and society.

In the field of political life, our women participate freely in the activities of the state and society as full-fledged masters of the country and demonstrate their dignity and honor by making enormous contributions to the development of society.

In the labor field alone, the state provides women with the right to work, right to protection at work and right to social security, all being equal to the rights of men.

The state provides free medical care for our women – flowers of the family and the country – and preferential social benefits to those who have borne many babies, even giving them the title of “maternal heroine.”

This is the reality of our socialist country where women are genuinely provided with all the rights as social beings, including the rights to existence, equality and development.

The Russian Newspaper “Zavtra” and Internet News Krasnaya Vesna carried an article in this regard that women’s issue comes as a serious international problem until today because numerous women in the world are still undergoing sufferings caused by deprivation of political rights and equality, but the women in the DPRK fully display their creative ingenuity and talents in all areas for defending socialism and building an economically strong country and enjoy proud lives, and this is the reality of the DPRK which draws attention of the international society.

Egyptian Newspaper “Al Nashir” and Internet Newspaper “Event” gave a wide coverage of the DPRK, saying that this is the country where the international legal norm for gender equality has been put into reality and the dignity and rights of women are provided at the highest level, and that the women of the DPRK are contributing to the building of prosperous and powerful country, enjoying all the benefits under the care of the Party and the state.

In Japan and other capitalist countries, however, a large number of women are currently undergoing all kinds of contempt and maltreatment such as trafficking in person and family violence, thus being subject to the ruthless infringement upon their dignity and rights.

Nearly 7,000 women committed suicide and the violence against women in families increased by 1.5 times in 2020 alone. This fact fully lays bare the true situation of women’s rights in Japan which is trumpeting too well about human rights.

In March this year, thousands of women in one of capitalist countries gathered in major cities and held massive protests to expose and denounce the aggravating situation of the society beset with the trafficking in women, labor exploitation and sexual violence, and demanded that the government address gender equality and eliminate sexual violence.

Discrimination and maltreatment against women widespread in the capitalist societies are not a mere historical inheritance of male supremacy.

These are the inevitable products borne of the capitalist system where the omnipotence of money, immorality and depravity, and jungle law are rooted in the foundation of society.

So much so that we all keenly realize once again from the two different dramatic realities mirrored in the lives of women that the socialism – where the politics of highly valuing and respecting women are applied – is paradise for women, whereas the capitalism – where the social climate of despising and discriminating against women is prevailing – is hell for women.