Gender discrimination is a chronic malady in the United States. According to a report of the Inter-Parliamentary Union in January, the US Congress is made up of only 12.9 per cent women.

The latest survey from the National Women and Police Centre showed that from 1990 to 1997, the number of women in law enforcement departments across the country increased by just 3.2 per cent. One-third of 176 police organizations surveyed have no women as senior officers, according to a report in USA Today on April 14, 1999.

Women, who make up some 45 per cent of the US work force, earned on average only 75 per cent as much as men, black women only 65 per cent, and Hispanic women only 57 per cent, according to a Reuters report on July 14, 1999. It also said that women with higher education earned only 76 per cent of what men did.

The United States has poor labour rights protection and social security for women. American women have only three months of unpaid maternity leave, and are not allowed any time off for breast-feeding after they go back to work, according to an International Labour Organization study of 152 countries released in February 1998. It also showed that about 40 per cent of the female employees with children have no medical insurance.

Reuters reported on September 21, 1999 that the US marriage rate has plummeted by a third since 1960. It said there were about 73 marriages per 1,000 unmarried women aged 15 and up in 1960. In 1996, the rate was about 49 per 1,000.

An AP report on November 23, 1999 said that a survey of the University of Chicago showed that the percentage of American households made up of married couples with children dropped from 45 per cent in the early 1970s to just 26 per cent in 1998.

The number of single-mother families in the United States is increasing, and poverty is becoming a bigger threat to these families. From 1995 to 1997, the income of the poorest single-parent families headed by women, which make up one-fifth of the total number of American families, has dropped by nearly 7 per cent, according to an article in the British journal the Economist released on August 28, 1999.

Women are the major victims of domestic violence. The US Department of Justice estimated that there are at least 4.2 million cases of domestic violence in the country each year, and 95 per cent of the victims are women.

The human rights of female prisoners are seriously violated in the United States In 1997, some 138,000 women were incarcerated in the United States, three times more than in 1985, according to a report from Amnesty International in March 1999. Male prison guards are also accused of sexually harassing women inmates during routine searches, and female inmates are often raped.

According to the report, 41 per cent of the personnel who come into contact with women inmates in the United States are male, which runs counter to regulations established by the United Nations.

In 1997 to 1998, more than 2,200 pregnant women were imprisoned and more than 1,300 children were born in prison, said Amnesty International. In at least 40 states, babies are taken from their imprisoned mothers almost immediately after birth or at the time the mother is discharged from hospital. In many American prisons, female inmates have to wait for several months before they can receive medical care from doctors.

The state of children in the United States is grim. The United States, one of the few countries which have the death penalty for juveniles, has the highest number of juveniles sentenced to death in the world.

Since 1994, 43 American states have revised their juvenile delinquency laws, and made sure juvenile delinquents receive the same punishment as adult criminals, which violates the regulations of the United Nations.

According to an AP report on November 29, 1999, in the United States, 14.5 million children - nearly one in five - experience poverty. In 1998, 11.1 million children younger than 18 had no health insurance. And each year, 3 million American teens are infected with AIDS, HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. And about 6.4 per cent of the population at or under 12 use illegal drugs.

The use of child labour is rampant in the United States. A 1997 survey based on federal government data found that 290,000 children were working illegally, 14,000 under 14 and some under nine years old, according to an article carried by Reuters on July 14, 1999.

There are many children of migrant workers in the farming and horticultural sectors, where between 400 and 600 were injured and many killed annually in accidents, the article said.

Children are the leading victims of the culture of violence in the United States. Many juvenile delinquents have learned to shoot people with guns from seeing films, TV and playing computer games which have violent and sexually explicit content.

A 1999 survey by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) showed that in 1997, 268 out of every 100,000 juveniles were arrested for crimes involving violence, almost double the figure of 1970. A report by the US Department of Justice in June of 1999 said that among all gun-related murders, nearly one-fourth were committed by young people between 18 to 20 years old, most of whom were students.