 Let's start this video by asking the question, are the rights of minority groups valuable? This sounds like a very strange question because, well, for one, we don't even really often actually know what a minority group is. So let's start there. What is a minority group? Well, mostly when you think of this, you think of the word minority when you think of it as being a number. Think of it as being a group of people who are smaller than the other group of people. But that is actually not truly how it really works in the real world. How it really works is that minority groups and minority rights have to do with disempowered groups. I maybe heard the word empowerment before. In this case, disempowered means that there are groups that have had traditionally less power than other groups. So disempowered groups. These disempowered groups, they really range across the spectrum of society. You can think of disempowered groups as anything from something like age. Old people, young people. You can think of things like gender, so men and women. You can think of things like sexual orientation. Let's see, sexual orientation. You can think of things like ethnic background. So what group you come from. Maybe think about religion. You're starting to maybe recognize some names that we've talked about or some words or ideas that we've talked about in previous courses or in previous lessons in this course. You also have things like cultural, and this is a very important one, cultural role, not culture, have issues of wealth. So different groups who are less or more, usually in most cases, less wealthy. You have a rhyming word that has very different connotations. Health, so whether you're a healthy person or not, or maybe whether you have a certain kind of different ability or a different set, ability set than the sort of standard population. So all of these groups and really many more groups are what we call minority groups, and they are what we're talking about when we talk about minority rights. A really good example of minority rights is actually women's rights. Women's rights are kind of fascinating because they're old but at the same time still kind of new. There have been women's rights movements and strong women leaders in societies going back throughout history, but the women's rights movement is still in some ways quite young. And I guess you could kind of divide the women's rights movements or different rights that involve women into dimensions, and that is maybe just the way that we can think about it right now. So if you remember our dimensions, what was our first dimension? Civil and political rights. Second dimension, those were being the economic, and a short knit economic, social, and cultural. And this word right here kind of gets at something we're going to talk about in our next lesson. And then our third dimension, those collective rights, which we're going to talk about less in the case of this lesson right here. So if you take a look at something like the first dimension, as it relates to women, you have rights like voting, for example. So the right to vote. Or maybe you have something like the right to... well, not the right to safety, but safety is a very important aspect of maybe your civil and political rights. And your economic rights and your social and your cultural rights might have things relating to your wages. Many of these have to do with the workplace right here. And then under your collective rights, obviously this has to do with environment, with society, with things like that. And we're not going to go into detail right there, but that is maybe one way of thinking about those rights as well. We're going to talk though in detail about this right here, this sort of conversation, around the rights of women relating to their safety. And to do that, we're going to talk about one of our heroes here at the All-Versity office. This awesome lady right here. Her name is Maria. She is from Brazil, and her whole name is Maria de Peña. And Maria is a very fascinating case of a person who's taken her human rights very seriously and she's taken them places that have actually helped a lot of other people. Maria was in a marriage. She was a successful woman working as a pharmacist, a bio-pharmacist, and her husband was beating her. So she was the victim of what's something we call domestic abuse. Domestic abuse is when one partner in a relationship abuses the other. So it can be between a man and a woman. A woman beating a man, a man beating a woman, women beating women or men beating women. That is all domestic abuse. And it is also parents beating children or children abusing parents as well. So it's violence within family units. Well, Maria's case was very extreme. Her husband tried to kill her at least twice. And the second time, he tried to shoot her. He actually succeeded in shooting her. And that bullet landed in her spine and put her in this wheelchair here, which is why she's sitting in a wheelchair in this picture. And her friends and people around her who cared about her were saying, you need to take this to the authorities. And she tried. She took it to the court. And the courts were letting him off because the thing was that courts are based on laws. And if you don't have any laws about something, well, it's kind of hard to convict someone of a crime that they've committed if there's just no law about it. And so after years and years and years of fighting, he ended up serving, I think, two years. 20 years after the whole thing happened, he served two years for his act of violence that he committed. But because it was domestic abuse and because there wasn't a whole lot of legal precedents or legal boundaries based on his actions, he really kind of got off quite easy. And her friends and her support system said, well, you know, this is not good. And she said this herself. She said, this is not a good situation. We need to fight for rights in our community. So she took the case to a regional organization, the Inter-American Human Rights Commission. We'll be talking more about these in another lesson, organizations like this one. But together with this organization, she then took the case to the country's highest courts and to international media and lots of different places and pushed for laws. She pushed for laws that would allow for restraining orders. So when a husband beats a wife that she can file a restraining order or when a domestic partner, we shouldn't say wife and husband, we can say domestic partners, they can get restraining orders. She pushed for things like individuals being able to go to courts so they actually created special courts dedicated to domestic violence, which is really important because there are so many cases of domestic violence around the world. And most importantly, I think this is fascinating that there wasn't even language about this. They actually worked to define domestic violence in the first place. Define domestic violence and create the entire concept for the legal community. So all of this might seem, you know, the question is like how is this related to human rights? Well, we mentioned it in the last slide. Domestic abuse is deeply integrated with your safety and that safety is being violated by that person who is abusing you or your friend or whoever might be involved. And that safety is a first dimension right. That's something that the state is required to offer you. And so that's why someone like Maria can go to her country and say you need to create a system of courts. You need to create the ability to tell someone to stop bugging me with something like a restraining order. I'm missing there. My spelling. Anyway, and we also have even the very definition, even being able to know exactly what violence is or not, is important, all relating back to our first dimension rights. So Maria is a big hero and in 2006, there actually was a law that was created in her name. Now when people have problems in their homes and when they have cases of domestic abuse, they can take it to a court and they can be heard and they can fight for their right to be safe and happy and live a better life. So it's a great example of someone doing something about human rights in their community and we should all be thinking about people like Maria when we're thinking about positive movement, good things in human rights. So you've got an example there of minority rights, in this case for women. There's lots of other stories about minority rights on the Alvarsity website and buried inside of the course. So go dig around at Alvarsity.org.