The devastation lingers for the petite and fragile Kenyan girl in braids who was repeatedly raped by the pastor when she was just 7 years old. I trusted him because he said he was a man of God, she told me. Now 13, she says she didn't understand what he was doing to her. But she knew it hurt, and she was terrified when he warned, If you tell your parents, I'll kill you.
A new United Nations report estimates that 51,000 women and girls were killed last year around the world by their partners or family members – the equivalent of a good-size war. The highest number of these femicides, and the highest rate per capita, was in Africa, the U.N. found.
Violence against women is a serious problem here in the United States, of course. But there has been some progress in America while in many countries a cloak of silence continues to enable such violence. This is one of the great moral struggles of our time, and we should exercise bipartisan American global leadership to address it.
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