Countries that wage war mistreat women

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.