Social Science and Women's Rights

There are places in the world where people get killed because of their sex. In Afghanistan, there was an incident in which a woman was killed because her mother in law was unhappy that the murdered woman gave a birth to a girl, her third daughter according to the Huffington Post, and thus, the mother killed the woman. The 2-months old baby is still alive, unhurt, but such an incidence awakens us and makes us think why this kind of incident still occurs. As bland as my statement seems, the issue is complex. It is complex because the issue of "honor-killing" and "son preference" involves various elements that are economic, social, religious, familial, and/or personal. Because of this incontrovertible complication concerning the issue, we take social science classes at college.

Personally, the purpose of learning social science is that we learn different theories and ideas from a wide range of various subjects so that we can make sense of this complex world and, hopefully, cooperate with each other to come up with solutions for the betterment of our life. Social science in nature is an interdisciplinary subject. Take a gender studies class. We, as students, need to learn various subjects raging from political philosophy to psychology (e.g. from Marxism and Freudian psychology). And, yet, there are a lot more to cover in the course.

In case of "honor-killing" and "son preference," although women's rights should be upheld and such demeaning practices should be condemned and abolished, reconciliation among those who feel need for liberation of women, those believe in deeply embedded local religious practices, those who actually experience in exiting economic realities, and those who accept widely spread different social norms world-wide is a challenge. How do we stop someone from engaging in religious practices without violating one's right to religion; how do we create economic opportunities for women where there exist economically illiberal states; how do we transform social norms into supposedly better one so that women gain access to equality without violating state sovereignty? These are questions we need to deal with. With taking social science classes, we are encouraged to see this world in a bigger picture and have a broader and flexible perspective to answer those questions.