Legal perspectives on women's health

Prostitution was one of the many topics broached during Thursday's panel -- hosted by International Council on Women's Health Issues and Penn's Global Women's Health Initiative -- entitled "Women, Ethno--Political Conflict, Health and Well-Being." Experts from across the globe gathered in the Nursing Education Building to discuss how women in different countries had disparate, yet strikingly similar, health concerns. Nursing Professor Kathleen Brown kicked off the panel with a discussion of forensic nursing. She said that while the term sounds exotic, the premise is simple: it is "nurses practicing nursing in the realm of law." She then explained that people in this field are trained to document injuries and collect evidence in a way that does not compromise a prosecution's case. Moving from the litigious to the long ago, Taeyoun Ahn, a visiting scholar and lecturer at Penn, gave the conversation a more historical tone. Ahn recounted the history of Korean "comfort women." These women, she explained, were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese army and were "treated only as military property." After the war, these individuals had a variety of problems, including venereal diseases, social stigmas and post-traumatic stress. Even today, organizations are lobbying the Japanese government to apologize and raise awareness in the international community. Lee Cassanelli then turned the conversation to contemporary Somalia. Cassanelli, the director of Penn's African Studies Center, demonstrated how political turmoil can negatively impact women's health. He also explained that "a lot of the problems in women's health have to do with the nomadic and rural" character of the population. The picture he painted, however, was not entirely bleak -- a few new hospitals are in the works, the government has taken a public stance against female genital mutilation and immunizations are widely accepted. But the discussion didn't stop with Somalia. Siriorn Sindhu, a Nursing professor at Mahidol University in Thailand, discussed problems that affect Thai women. Rape rates are extremely high, she said, noting that part of the problem is that "punishment is nothing -- three months in jail." Moreover, rates of cervical cancers are unnecessarily high, and birth control is in short supply. Sindhu emphasized that the solution to these problems would not come from medicine, but rather from politics. "The issue is the mass media," she said, explaining that few women are in leadership positions. The result, she argued, is a society that accepts exploitation of women. Hanneke van Maanen, a Nursing professor at the University of Bremen in Germany, wrapped up the panel with a discussion of sex slavery in Europe. Intelligent Eastern European women are lured with job offers to the border, where they are forced into prostitution by pimps, she explained. "These women are willing to do anything to get out of their social and economic misery," she said. Though the topics covered were disturbing, Philadelphia resident Helen Watt -- one of the approximately 75 professionals and professors in attendance -- left satisfied with her newfound knowledge. "It was interesting."