Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

The case of Noura Hussein has brought the controversial subject of forced and child marriages to the forefront once again on the world stage. Noura is a Sudanese youth, now nineteen, who was given away in marriage by her family when she was only 15. Shortly after the marriage took place—against the teen’s will—Noura escaped but eventually, after a three-year hiatus, was returned to the custody of her legal husband by the hand of her own father. Once locked up again in her husband’s home, Noura continued to refuse the physical advances of her imposed spouse. In order to consummate the marriage, according to the young woman’s defense, members of the husband’s family held Noura down while he raped her. When he tried to rape her again on his own the next day, Noura stabbed him to death. Seeking help, Noura returned to her own home, but her family turned her in to the authorities. Sudan is one of a large number of countries in the world where marital rape is not considered a cr...

This month marks the 97 th anniversary of women’s suffrage in the United States of America. Although long considered the framework model for much of Western democracy, the US only granted the vote to its female citizens in 1920, ratifying a women’s suffrage amendment to the Constitution on August 18 th of that year. And it was hardly a right justly recognized and bestowed upon women out of a progressive sense of democratic constitutional correctness. It was, rather, a hard-fought right won through the tenacity and sacrifice of a handful of women leaders who little by little convinced a huge following to back their demands for what should have been rightfully theirs from the outset: the right to an equal voice in choosing those who would govern and make the country’s laws. It would take eight decades of struggle for American women to win the right to vote. And the means by which they pursued that civil right provides an exemplary case study of peaceful protest and non-violent c...