By: Susan O’Malley, IFBPWC UN Representative NGO CSW/NY, Chair ex officio  Professor Emerita, City University of New York 

 UNChair@nfbpwc.orgsusanomalley4@gmail.com  

RE: Oral Statement during the CSW68 General Discussion, 

Widows for Peace Through Democracy. Margaret Owen, 

President, read by Susan O’Malley, UN Representative IFBPW 

19 March 2024, UN Conference Room 4 

If we are serious about reducing poverty, we must address the extreme poverty of uncounted millions of the world’s widows, since it is their poverty that is a root cause of 

extending and expanding poverty down through the generations, impacting negatively on their children’s futures. Extreme poverty and inequalities are the fuel of conflicts and instability and frustrate efforts towards peace. Armed conflicts cause women to suffer most, especially those who are widowed.  

There is no hope of achieving the SDGS, if we continue to ignore the status of widows. Widowhood is the most neglected of human rights and gender issues and has rarely been mentioned in the CSW Agreed Conclusions. (Currently Rev 2 for CSW68 does mention widows with “single, divorced women” on page 25!) Widows are of all ages, from child widows to young mothers, and elderly grandmothers; (we must dispel the myth that widows are mainly elderly women, supported lovingly by their families).  Especially in the global south and in conflictafflicted countries, widows remain uncounted and their voices unheard. Nor is attention paid to uncounted “halfwidows” (the wives of the missing, or forcibly disappeared) whose lives may be even more wretched than those of formal widows, since there is no closure for them; they live in legal limbo.  

The number of widows worldwide is increasing exponentially, due to unsolved armed conflicts, genocides, civil wars, terrorism, natural disasters, the earlier mortality of males over females, and the fact that many women are married to older men. Also, COVID 19 created manymore widows since the pandemic tended to kill more men thanwomen. It is essential that data on widows is disaggregated to include “age” and “marital status”.  

Member States need to work with widows’ associations to register widows, record their circumstances and needs, ensure that they are given social protections, such as pensions, shelter, food, and that their children are educated, and that they enjoy support for their societal roles, including representation in relevant decision-making bodies.  

Across a wide spectrum of cultures, religions, ethnicities, especially in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, widows’ lives are determined not by modern domestic laws, nor international ones, but by deeply enshrined patriarchal interpretations of religion and customs.  

These dehumanize and stigmatize widows, and deny them their basic human rights to inheritance, land and property ownership, access to credit, to mobility, and decent employment. They may be subjected to appalling harmful traditional practices. Widows are often “chased off” from their homesteads, if not forced into marriage with the dead husband’s brother. They may be subject to the sexual torture of “ritual cleansing”, and if elderly, may be stoned to death as witches. Impoverished widows, made homeless, are vulnerable to many forms of economic and sexual exploitation, abandoned without the education or training to obtaindecent work.  

Research has shown that their poverty is a key driver of widows’ withdrawing their daughters from school, giving, or selling them into child marriage to older men or into the clutches of traffickers.  These young girls are fated to become child widows, vulnerable to further exploitation and abuse.  

The 2030 agenda speaks about leaving no women “left behind”. But millions of uncounted widows, of all ages, as well as “half widows” are left behind. I have been trying to get widowhood on the agenda of the CSW for over 30 years since our first international workshop on widows at the 1995 Beijing Fourth World Women’s Conference. The good news is that two years ago the GA adopted a Resolution on Addressing the Situation of Widows, Res.76 but will it be implemented? Not unless there is funding for widows’ NGOs so they may take advantage of this Resolution and urge accountability from their governments.  

Surely the desperate poverty faced by widows is a call to the Human Rights Council to appoint a Special Rapporteur on Widowhood, and for UN Women to establish a special desk for this scandalously neglected aspect of the feminization of poverty. This indifference cannot continue.