46th meeting of Lunch Box Club for English: Gender equality

Much evidence has proved that Vietnamese women have many good qualities such as diligence, hardcompassion and devotion. Like any other women, they are worthy of respect and love. However, they are the very targets of gender violence, involving actions that cause physical, mental and sexual traumas, intimidation, coercion, and oppression under different forms.

"This term reflects the inequality between genders in a society and this can happen to anyone, including men. However, women and girls have to suffer the most", said Khanh Linh, representative of the Club of Humanities and Gender Equality.

Gender violence has many forms: domestic violence, rape, adultery, trafficking of women, sex selection, sexual abuse and harrasment; all of which cause social disturbances.

A study by the United Nations and Vietnam General Statistics Office in 2010 showed 58% of the Vietnamese women had to at least once suffer from physical, mental or sexual violence after marriage. Each year, there were more than 1,000 cases of female child sexual abuse and 87% of the victims of domestic violence had not received support. From 2005-2009, nearly 6,000 women and children were marked as victims of human trafficking in Vietnam.  

"The difficulty here is to improve the overall awareness and correct the thinking, remove the double burden faced by women in domestic and social contexts and negligence of the laws on the prevention of gender violence" 

Etienne Mahler (student of Faculty of Vietnamese studies and language) said: "To prevent this problem, it is necessary to communicate well to improve the public awareness, first of all at universities".

The meeting brought to USSH's students many thoughts on the role and power of Vietnamese women in modern society.

On the Club of Humanities and Gender Equality (CHGE):

• Founding year: 2016.
• Part of the Student's Association of University of Social Sciences and Humanities (VNU Hanoi)
• Motto: Humanistic persons - Equal environment
• The club is aimed at disseminating knowledge of gender issues, gender stereotypes, and gender equality; perform action programs with the purpose of increasing access to education, job and promotion opportunities for women and girls, finding the causes and solutions to issues related to gender, gender stereotypes, and gender equality.