Brocke-Utne and the Reality of Peace

   While reading Brigit Brocke-Utne's piece, "Feminist Perspectives on Peace and Peace Education," I was a little confused as to her motives. While I can comprehend the ideas of positive and negative peace, I did not understand how she could bring in such a heavy subject such as wife-beating and condense it to such an extent. I understood that she believed that as long as men were either repressing or physically harming women, positive peace could not exist. I think the author has unrealistic standards, as she defines positive peace as the "absence of indirect violence reducing the quality of life, the absence of repressing in microstructures leading to less freedom of choice and fulfillment, and the absence of repression in a country of free speech the right to organize, etc." Although it seems like she has noble intentions here, I don't think that any society can ever have a complete absence of violence.
    While I talked in my last post about making social changes in order to decrease the amount of violence that occurs, I don't understand how a culture could be so perfect as to fulfill all of the requirements. All of her statistics are very striking, but I feel like she clumps together different forms of violence against women into one group that need to be investigated singularly. FGM and wife beating, while both horrid forms of violence against women, happen for different reasons. While they both represent control and retaining the current hierarchy, there are different solutions for each of these problems.
      Also, I felt like the article went in completely different directions that didn't seem to mesh well together. First, she discusses peace and the dichotomy between positive and negative, and then three-thirds of the way down I am reading about polls stating that women are more anti-military and how money spent on the military would be better served to feed the hungry. I felt that she glossed over some areas and used a large number of generalizations. The last line of the article reads, "We can say that patriarchy denies many women a voice, no matter under what economic system." I don't believe that it is purely the economic system that is created these inequalities. I suppose she is using a radical liberal voice and only speaking from one perspective, but it was a little frustrating for me for her to state that we can only have positive peace in any society when there is 0% direct or indirect violence. Her Thomas More view conflicts a bit with my slightly Hobbes-ian feel today. However, I have to give her props in her analysis of war time rape, and the fact that for the most part, only rape that is committed by the "other side" is ever reported. I never truly thought about this, but it makes sense given that as unemployment and hardship increase, so does violence against women. I just wish that she would be able to focus more specifically on a topic such as this, as I believe her views would be better supported.