The United Nations’ Role in Women and Children’s Well-Being

• Post by: Janice Shaw Crouse
• December 24, 2016

The United Nations was founded right after World War II in the hope of providing a mechanism that would resolve conflicts without nations resorting to armed conflict, thereby fostering peace and prosperity around the globe. The UN was meant to become the hub through which the Member States (now numbering 193 nations) could communicate, and bring the weight of the assembly of nations in order to solve problems together. In 2015, as the UN celebrated its 70th anniversary,[1] Dr. Kim Holmes, Distinguished Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, wrote that the anniversary was “a chance not only to look back on the history of the organization, but to think about its future.” He added, “The UN has accomplished many things; it also has been a disappointment in many areas.”[2] Holmes’ critique of the UN is fair enough. With a budget of US$5.4 billion (not counting the peacekeeping budget of $9 billion or the disaster relief budget that exceeds $29.8 billion),[3] it is rather shocking to find in a quick Google search more than 24 million entries on “what’s wrong with the UN.”[4] “The UN gets into trouble,” Holmes writes, “when it engages on issues that are primarily political, especially controversial ones.” He added, "It is not only that developing countries tend to look upon the U.N. as a stage to redress their grievances against the West and to use these grievances as a means to shame it into providing more foreign aid. It is also the fact that Europe’s dominant liberal culture of social democracy tends to prevail in the workings of the UN’s social and economic bodies."[5] Many of the problems related to the UN originate in a shift in emphasis from the stated mission of establishing peace and prosperity around the globe to a focus on promoting a radical leftist social agenda. That radical social agenda stems largely from the not-so-gradual rise of the radical feminists’ influence and power within the UN’s operations.[6]I have written ab