Y. researcher finds war link to the treatment of women

Look closely at the way women are treated, says Valerie Hudson. Look at the nonchalance with which a nation's men beat their wives, or the dismissive way a country condones genital mutilation. These are clues, she says, about that nation's likelihood of waging war.

Hudson, professor of political science at Brigham Young University, is lead researcher of a seven-year study looking at the connection between the treatment of women and the peacefulness of nations.

The project is called WomanStats, and although the name suggests an arid landscape of demographics, the project reveals vivid layers of pain and injustice — marital rape and the infanticide of baby girls, sex trafficking and prohibitions about owning land, government exploitation of women and the cultural belief that a wife can be "inherited" as if she were property.

It has been widely assumed that other factors are more predictive of whether a nation might be unstable or aggressive. The three most likely candidates were poverty levels, lack of democracy, and the nation's adherence to Islamic values.

But the WomanStats project offers a fourth predictor of a nation's instability. Violence against women (VAW, in the shorthand of WomanStats) trumps the other explanations, proving to be three times more predictive of a nation's instability than whether a country is Islamic, and one-and-a-half times more predictive than whether a country is undemocratic, Hudson says.

Hudson is a gentle, energetic woman, a feminist in a culture that has often felt uneasy about feminism. She is a groundbreaking researcher, and a mother who has seen her share of heartbreak.

One morning earlier this spring, having just returned the night before with her husband and children after a three-month research stint in Australia and a two-day plane delay, Hudson sat on the sofa in her living room in Orem and talked about WomanStats, stifling an occasional yawn as she tried to overcome a serious case of jet lag. Two large suitcases and several backpacks sat in the middle of the floor. Her six children slept soundly upstairs.

Hudson made headlines in 2001 when a peer-reviewed medical journal published her research into the use of glutathione in the treatment of cystic fibrosis. Hudson's expertise is international relations, but in her usual dogged fashion she set about trying to find a treatment for the genetic lung disease, motivated by the fact that two of her young sons were born with cystic fibrosis. Since then, there have been a half-dozen more peer-reviewed publications, and a formal clinical trial is now beginning in Italy.