NGO prepares to publish major survey of Kurdish women

Looking at Kurdish society in northern Iraq, it's not hard to see that women very much take the back seat: in the ministries they're the secretaries and cleaners; in the villages you're lucky if you see them at all. It is a situation women's organisations here have been fighting to change since 1991, when Iraq's three northern governorates broke off from Baghdad's control. But their efforts have always come up against one major difficulty - the total lack of reliable statistics to back up their cases. No more. After two years' work, Norwegian People's Aid, a mainly Norwegian-funded NGO based in Sulaymaniyah, is preparing to publish the largest ever survey of women in the region. Running to over 1,400 pages of statistics and analysis, the survey synthesises the results of four months of interviews with 20,000 women (approximately 2 percent of the target population) throughout the Kurdish-controlled region. Interviewed by 87 volunteers from 23 Kurdish women's organisations, women randomly selected for the survey answered questions on subjects ranging from education levels and healthcare to gender violence and attitudes towards marriage. "They say women are second-class citizens in our society," Soran Abdulqadir Costa, the NPA project manager who designed and headed the survey, told IRIN. "This study shows they're lower down than that." He leafed through the draft. Just over 15 percent of rural women interviewed said they married before the age of 17, 1.9 percent when they were younger than 12. In cities, the figures were higher, 17.2 percent and 1.7 percent respectively. "By the time a woman reaches the age of 27, she's more or less passed her sell-by date," Costa said. The figures for illiteracy are even more striking: 13 percent of unmarried women, 51 percent of married women and 87 percent of widows surveyed said they couldn't read or write. A reflection of the standard ways of distinguishing between women in Kurdish society, these three categories are used throughout the survey, and have been criticised by some for condoning the patriarchal traditions the study sets out to expose. In as much as they are roughly equivalent to a division into age groups, Costa said, they frequently produced results showing a clear progression between youth and old age, married women expressing opinions between those of unmarried women and widows. There was one part of the study, however, where that was not the case - experiences of sexual harassment and violence. Here, 18 percent of widows reported they had been harassed, compared to 48 percent of unmarried women. Married women suffered the worst, with 58 percent saying they had been harassed. Meanwhile, 6.3 percent of unmarried women and 7.6 percent of widows said they had received death threats, four-fifths of the time from family members. "The image that builds up as you read through the results is of people who are often lonely, cut off from the outside world and severely limited in what they can do," Costa said. "That 90 percent of respondents said they were 'satisfied' just shows how low their expectations are." In the pilot scheme they began to run in November 2002, Costa and his colleagues included among the 140 questions asked a section about sexual relations and attitudes towards sex. Respondents were to be interviewed alone by an all-female team of volunteers, and he was convinced the section would pass muster. He turned out to be wrong. "Some parts of the Kurdish-administered areas, particularly Arbil governorate, are very conservative places," he explained. Breadth of information may have suffered as a result, Costa said, but compromises like this did ensure the survey succeeded in its second major aim - to federate as much of Kurdish society as possible around the project. As well as the women's organisations which provided expertise and volunteers, NPA also worked closely with two Kurdish universities and five ministries from the two administrations that have divided the Kurdish north since civil war broke out in 1994. "Mass participation was a means of ensuring that nobody can turn around and say 'this cannot be proved' or 'this is not correct'," Costa said.