From the editor.

• Author: Kiernan, James Patrick
• Position: Editorial

Recently, the Inter-American Commission of Women (CIM) met in Washington to estimate the success of their efforts to advance the equity of women in public life and dignity of women at work. The cardinal focus of their meeting was to measure the extent to which the OAS member stares have instituted policies and legal structures putting into effect the inter-American treaty to protect woman from domestic violence. While there are different levels of compliance within the thirty-four member states, it was generally recognized that abject poverty and lawlessness greatly exacerbate a problem shared by all American states. In this issue, we explore some of these myriad difficulties and their potential solutions.

Jane Regan and Peggy Jennings report from Haiti on how a group of rural women, many of them teachers, have begun to create their own popular theater and radio plays to raise community awareness about life-threatening and interrelated crimes of domestic violence, rape, and child abuse. In spite of deepening problems in their troubled homeland, these "courageous women" (also the group's name in their Creole tongue) persist in their energetic struggle to change lives of "misery and poverty." Inn...