Women’s rights have been in the forefront of international concern over the last few weeks.

Making the biggest headlines were the massive demonstrations in New Delhi and other cities in India provoked by the brutal gang-rape by six men of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student in a moving bus in the Indian capital. The crime, which saw the victim suffer extremely serious wounds in her genitals and intestines, proved to be the trigger for the release of popular anger that had built up over the years over the rise in violence against women.

The statistics are horrific. According to government estimates, almost every 20 minutes, a woman is raped in India. In New Delhi, dubbed the “rape capital of India,” the incidence of rape rose from 572 in 2011 to 661 so far in 2012. Of the 256,329 incidents of violent crime reported for 2011, a total of 228,650, or close to 90 percent, were committed against women.

What accounts for what one writer describes as the “increasingly predatory sexual culture”? For some analysts, the rise in sexual aggression is related to male resentment of the erosion of the traditional subordination of women in India’s patriarchal society by women’s increasing role in the workforce, their increased mobility, and their growing social and economic empowerment.

Also a major factor has been police laxness in dealing with rape reports and increased impunity by rapists owing to the victims’ feeling that the legal processes are stacked against them and their wish to avoid the stigma associated with being raped or abused. India is, in this regard, much like other societies, and is little different from, say, the United States, which analyst Shenali Waduge, citing government estimates, says tops the rape chart.

Yet the current protests may turn out to be a turning point, for while much of the media reporting has focused on spontaneous demands like the death penalty or chemical castration for rapists and sex offenders, the recent developments may well mark the emergence of a massive militant mass movement in India that will focus on confronting head-on the patriarchal norms propping up the social subordination of women that is at the root of much sexual violence.

Even as India’s gender equation may be in the process of transformation, the women’s movement registered a historic victory in the Philippines with the passage of the Reproductive Health Bill. The law, which makes family planning an obligatory policy for the current administration and for future ones, was passed Dec. 17 in the House of Representatives and the Senate in the teeth of ferocious opposition from the super-patriarchal Catholic Church hierarchy.

Key provisions of the new law include, among others, the provision of free or cheap contraceptives to poor couples, institutionalization of sex education for students from the sixth grade up, the establishment of maternal care facilities in state-run hospitals, and provision of reproductive health counseling and treatment for women in all hospitals, including those suffering from post-abortion complications, while ensuring respect for the rights of health professionals who cannot offer these services owing to religious belief.

The passage of the RH bill was seen widely as an enormous debacle for the Catholic Church, to which some 80 percent of the population nominally belong. For 14 years, the Church hierarchy had thrown everything, including the proverbial kitchen sink, at the campaign to have the bill enacted into law. How did the RH advocates manage to beat an institution that has been a massive force in Philippine society for nearly 500 years?

Well, first of all, the Church was fighting a rearguard battle whose outcome could not be in doubt in the long run. Survey after survey had shown large majorities of the population favoring family planning and that these majorities got larger over time. Whereas 61 percent of respondents in a Social Weather Station survey conducted in 1990 agreed with the statement that “the choice of family planning method is a personal choice of couples and no one should interfere with it,” by 2011, respondents agreeing with it came to 82 percent.

While the Church and its political allies continued to portray the bill as a foreign-inspired attempt to control the population of the country, the pro-RH forces were able to popularize the bill to politicians and to the public as one that would allow women and their partners free and informed choice in deciding the size of their families and the spacing of their children in order to achieve a better quality of like by providing them access to free or low-cost contraceptives.

In the end, the Church hierarchy and its allies were reduced to becoming, like their counterparts in the climate front, denialists ― that is, denying flat-out the results of surveys, medical statistics, and demographic calculations. Or they were cornered into making fallacious arguments such as the claim the RH bill was unconstitutional because it was anti-life, uttering silly statements like the classic assertion of one congressman that “contraception is abortion,” or trotting out outrageous remarks like that of Lipa Archbishop Ramon Arguelles, who compared President Benigno Aquino III to the shooter Adam Lanza, who massacred 27 children and adults in Newtown, Connecticut.

The events in India and the Philippines are steps forward in the struggle against gender oppression and for women’s rights. Yet that the road ahead promises no easy struggle for women is underlined by recent developments in the African country of Swaziland, where, according to a Agence France Presse report, police “have banned women from wearing miniskirts and midriff-revealing tops, saying they provoke rape.”

The article goes on to quote police spokeswoman Wendy Hleta as saying, “The act of the rapist is made easy, because it would be easy to remove the half-cloth worn by women.” Further, according to Hleta, “women wearing revealing clothing were responsible for assaults or rapes committed against them.”

Swaziland may have gone farther than other societies in banning what its ultra-conservative authorities regard as unacceptable women’s wear. But the blaming-the-victim syndrome they exhibit is still far too common an attitude among men, whether in the United States, India, Africa, Europe, or Latin America.

More broadly, misogynist and patriarchal attitudes are not only resisting stubbornly. In many societies, they are making a comeback.

Witness recent developments in Egypt, formerly one of the Arab world’s most secular societies, where Islamists in power are pushing hard, as in Iran, to resubordinate women to traditional gender roles.

Women throughout the world are on the march, but the struggle against sexual oppression and gender rights will continue to be a difficult one, where significant steps forward will be matched by occasional steps back.

By Walden Bello

Columnist Walden Bello is representative of the party Akbayan in the House of Representatives of the Philippines. ― Ed.