Bride burnings, honour killings, female infanticide, sex trafficking, mass rape as a weapon of war and many other hideous forms of violence against women are documented in a report released last month by the United Nations. The report, a compilation of many studies from around the world, should have been seen as the latest dispatch from that permanent world war — the war against women all over the planet. Instead, the news media greeted its shocking contents with a collective yawn. The war analogy is not an overstatement. In many parts of the world, men beat, torture, rape and kill women with impunity. In Ciudad Juarez, a Mexican city on the Texas border, 300 to 400 women have been murdered over the past several years. Many were raped and mutilated. Each year, thousands of wives in India are murdered and maimed -- many of them doused with kerosene and set ablaze — by husbands dissatisfied by the size of their dowries or angry about their wives' behaviour. In Ethiopia, the abduction and rape of young girls is a commonplace way to obtain a bride. Not only are we not doing enough to counter this wholesale destruction of the lives of so many women and girls, we're not even paying close attention.