Women march for their rights on Mar. 8, 2023, in Brasília. Every International Women's Day, Brazilian women take to the streets in towns and cities to protest against sexism, racism and other factors of gender inequality. CREDIT: Lula Marques / Agência Brasil

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 6 2024 (IPS)

Brazil is beginning to test the effectiveness of a gender pay equality law passed in July 2023, a new attempt to reduce inequality for women in the world of work.

This Friday, Mar. 8, International Women’s Day, is the deadline for companies with more than 100 employees to publish their first half-yearly salary transparency reports, with comparative data on remuneration and the distribution of hierarchical functions between men and women, and between different ethnic groups, nationalities and ages."If you are a black woman, your chances of suffering inequality increase. Restrictions pile up for women who are black and poor from the outlying urban neighborhoods, who are over 40 years old and have had little to no education." -- Marilane Teixeira

To break down the inertia of gender inequality, the United Nations agency that promotes women’s rights, UN Women, decided that this year’s theme for International Women’s Day would be “‘Invest in Women: Accelerate Progress”, which the global community has pledged to achieve by 2030.

The wage equality law “is a measure that just remains on paper, not a practical one,” said Hildete Pereira de Melo, an economist who has been studying gender inequality for more than 40 years and doubts the effectiveness of the new legislation.

Equal pay has been legally established in Brazil since 1943, when the Consolidation of Labor Laws was approved, but it is not enforced, she argued. Even in the courts, women accept any agreement as “the weaker party,” she told IPS in an interview in Rio de Janeiro.

Wage inequality is now punished

But now it is different: a penalty will be imposed on companies that do not publish their semi-annual report, a fine of up to 100 minimum wages, totaling 141,200 reais this year (28,500 dollars), argued Marilane Teixeira, a researcher at the Center for Trade Union and Labor Economics Studies (Cesit) of the University of Campinas.

With the reports from the companies and the data it obtains through other means, the Ministry of Labor and Employment will be able to publish the first results, with an overview of how the more than 50,000 large companies in Brazil deal with the issue of gender- and race-neutral wages.

Previously a company was subject to penalties in the case of “inequalities motivated by segregation,” identified through inspection by the authorities. But now there is a new requirement of a public report, Teixeira told IPS from Brasilia.

The new exposure of companies triggered widespread complaints and arguments that improper data would be revealed, but the report does not include “any stealth data, just averages and percentages of women employees and their positions” in the corporate hierarchy, she explained.

Reactions from businesspersons and repercussions in the media reflect “the impact of the measure” and the changes it will foment, said the economist, who helped the government draft the new law.

“It is a step forward and we hope that it sticks” and is effective, unlike many laws that remain only on paper, said Isabel Freitas, a social worker and technical advisor of the Feminist Center for Studies and Advice (Cfemea).

In a Jul. 30, 2023 demonstration, black women in Rio de Janeiro protest against racism, violence and inequalities of which they are the main victims. CREDIT: Tania Rêgo / Agência Brasil

Legislative advances

Her positive assessment is based on the “two novelties”: the requirement of the half-yearly report, which constitutes a “public transparency tool” and fosters equality, and the fine imposed on companies that do not comply, of three percent of the total wages and salaries paid by the company.

But the law has limits. It only applies to companies with more than one hundred employees, which means its effect does not reach the small and micro businesses that provide 70 percent of formal sector jobs nor the informal ones that account for about 40 percent of the total number of workers. And the fine cannot exceed the equivalent of 100 minimum wages.

It does not benefit, for example, domestic workers, who number six million in Brazil, mainly black women, who suffer the worst discrimination, Freitas lamented.

But the law is “one more step” that could help in the fight against “the basket of inequalities” affecting Brazilian society, especially women, she told IPS by telephone from Brasilia.

“If you are a black woman, your chances of suffering inequality increase. Restrictions pile up for women who are black and poor from the outlying urban neighborhoods, who are over 40 years old and have had little to no education,” she said.

Inequality suffered by women is not just a matter of wages. They are concentrated in lower paid activities, such as domestic work, basic education and the poorest paid parts of the health care system.

The scarce representation of women at all levels of power is a major obstacle. There are only 91 women in a lower house of 513 deputies and 15 women senators out of a total of 81. In other words, they make up only 17.8 percent of the current Congress (2023-2026) dominated by conservative legislators.

One of the main causes of these inequalities is the sexual division of labor, which assigns to women practically all the work of social reproduction and care tasks, the three interviewees concurred.

A meeting of women ministers of the current Brazilian government with 42 female mayors of large towns and cities to discuss women’s participation in politics and the Brazilian economy. CREDIT: Ministry of Health

Cultural hurdles

Added to this is a cultural heritage that uses promotion evaluation criteria that favor male workers, said Teixeira.

When it comes to promotions, companies generally take into account activities “that exclude women, such as weekend courses, trips and dinners with clients,” which are unfeasible for those who have to take care of the house, the children and sick members of the family, she said.

“In Brazil 42 percent of women are solely homemakers, and the other half who are in the labor market are also homemakers,” said Pereira de Melo.

The basic solution to the tangle of factors leading to inequality against women are full-time basic education schools and day care centers providing care for 10 hours a day, with universal coverage for all children in order to neutralize disadvantages for women in the workplace, she said.

The ideal would be full-time school for adolescents as well, but it should be available at least in the first stage, until students are 14 or 15 years old and the absolute need for maternal care is reduced, she said.

In addition, a broad cultural transformation of society would be necessary, especially in relation to the role of women, but culture is something that changes very slowly, she acknowledged.

Initiatives on several fronts are underway in Brazil to drive these changes.

On Mar. 5 the   launched, for example, the campaign “Justice for all women”, to highlight women’s rights in general, including girls, adolescents, pregnant and disabled women, and to promote a gender perspective in all the country’s courts.

Violence against women, reflected in the increase in rape, domestic violence and femicides – gender-related murders of girls and women – is currently a priority of the campaign and the judicial system.

The Articulação das Mulheres Negras do Brasil (Network of Black Women of Brazil) is working to coordinate the action of 45 organizations distributed throughout the country that in the month of March this year are planning 140 demonstrations.

For November 2025, it is preparing a “March against racism, violence and for the good life”, a national mobilization that will culminate in Brasilia, repeating the first march of its kind that took place in 2015, with about 100,000 participants, to demand the rights of 49 million women, that is, a quarter of Brazil’s population of 203 million.

It is a global struggle. “The global economy is based on the systematic exploitation of women,” concludes a study by Oxfam, a confederation of 21 social organizations around the world.

According to its data, women earn only 51 percent of what men earn, as they are concentrated in precarious and poorly paid jobs.

Excerpt:

"He who loves does not kill, does not humiliate or mistreat" reads a poster carried in a protest against violence against women in Lima, the capital of Peru, which is part of a slogan repeated in demonstrations against femicides and other forms of sexist violence in Latin America. CREDIT: Mariela Jara / IPS

By Mariela Jara
LIMA, Nov 24 2023 (IPS)

“The Latin American and Caribbean region has made many advances in the fight against gender violence, but now we are facing reactions that show that our rights are never secure and that we must always be on the alert to defend them,” said Susana Chiarotti, a member of Mesecvi’s Committee of Experts.

The Committee of Experts is the technical body of the Follow-up Mechanism to the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence against Women (Mesecvi), known as the Convention of Belem do Para, which will celebrate its 30th anniversary in force in the countries of the region in 2024. The committee is made up of independent experts appointed by each state party.

Chiarotti summed up the regional situation of progress and setbacks in a conversation with IPS from her home in the Argentine city of Rosario, ahead of the United Nations’ Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, commemorated on Saturday, Nov. 25.

Gender violence violates the human rights of one in four women in this region with an estimated female population of 332 million, 51 percent of the total, and escalates to the extreme level of femicide – gender-based murders – which cost 4050 lives in 2022, according to figures confirmed Friday, Nov. 24 by the Gender Equality Observatory for Latin America and the Caribbean.

Likewise, UN Women‘s regional director for the Americas and the Caribbean, María Noel Vaeza, told IPS from Panama City that the emblematic date seeks to draw the attention of countries to the urgent need to put an end to violence against women once and for all by adopting public policies for prevention and investing in programs to eliminate it.

She pointed out that Nov. 25 is the first of 16 days of activism against gender-based violence, which run through Dec. 10, Human Rights Day.

Vaeza said that less than 40 percent of women who suffer violence seek some kind of help, which clearly shows that they do not find guarantees in the prevention and institutional response system and therefore do not report incidents.

“This has serious consequences for their lives and those of other women, as the perpetrators do not face justice and impunity and violence continue unchecked,” she said.

Uruguayan María Noel Vaeza, UN Women regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean, draws the attention of countries to the urgent need to put an end to violence against women through the adoption of public policies for prevention and investment in programs to eliminate it. CREDIT: UN Women

Vaeza said that, despite these worrying trends, there is more evidence than ever that violence against women is preventable, and urged countries in the region to invest in prevention.

“The evidence shows that the presence of a strong, autonomous feminist movement is a critical factor in driving public policy change for the elimination of violence against women at the global, regional, national and local levels,” said the UN Women regional head.

She explained that many studies have shown that large-scale reductions in violence against women can be achieved through coordinated action between local and national prevention and response systems and women’s and other civil society organizations.

So in order to move towards regulatory frameworks and improve the institutional architecture and budget allocations to prevent, respond to and redress gender-based violence, strengthening the advocacy capacity of feminist and women’s movements and organizations is indispensable.

She also mentioned that whenever progress is made, there are setbacks as well, and “unfortunately history shows us that social changes against things like machismo/sexism and violence require the efforts of society as a whole and plans and policies that give answers to the victims today, but also make it possible to improve the system in the medium and long term.”

Vaeza stressed that violence against women and girls remains the most pervasive human rights violation around the world. Its prevalence worsened in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and is growing further due to the interrelated crises of climate change, global conflicts and economic instability.

She also mentioned the proliferation of new forms of violence and the persistence of those “who believe that we do not have to guarantee women’s human rights, and organize themselves, and in the region we have situations such as attacks against women human rights defenders and activists that have become more frequent.”

Vaeza, from Uruguay, underlined that there is more evidence than ever that it is possible to change this reality and that in order to have peaceful societies, reducing inequality and poverty is key, and all this will depend on advancing gender equality and the rights of those who have historically faced discrimination.

They are mainly, she said, women living in poverty, indigenous women, women of African descent, rural women, women migrants, and women and girls with disabilities.

Susana Chiarotti is a member of the Committee of Experts of the Follow-up Mechanism to the Belém do Pará Convention, which has been monitoring the performance of States in their obligation to prevent, punish and eradicate violence against women for the past 30 years. CREDIT: Cladem Argentina

Strong reactions to progress

Chiarotti said: “I have been with Mesecvi for 20 years and I can see the changes. Let’s remember that it was only in 1989 that laws on violence against women began to be enacted and that we did not have services, shelters, specialized courts and even less a specific Convention to address this issue, which was the first in the world.”

The lawyer and university professor emphasized that in 40 years the women’s movement has put the issue of violence against women on the public agenda and has made such huge strides that “we could be called the most successful lobby in history in positioning an issue in such a massive and global manner.”

And she added that “we did not believe then, in 1986, 1987 or 1988, that the phenomenon had permeated all structures, not only the intimate sphere; there was symbolic, institutional, political and many other forms of violence, which led us to demand more answers, especially from the State, which, being patriarchal, admitted women only with forceps.”

Chiarotti, who is also a former head of the Latin American and Caribbean Committee for the Defense of Women’s Rights (Cladem), warns that they are now facing reactions to the extent that unimaginable alliances have arisen to stop them, such as that of the Vatican with conservative evangelical churches and far-right groups.

She also mentioned the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that in June 2022 overthrew the right to abortion in that country, which had been in force for almost 50 years.

“That makes you realize that our rights are never secure, that we must always be on the alert to defend them. And it is difficult for a movement that is cyclical, that has waves, that rises and falls, to be always alert,” she said.

In addition, she mentioned the recent victory of the candidate Javier Milei as future president of Argentina and the dangers he represents for women’s rights, sexual diversity and the historical memory of human rights abuses.

“This will not be the first time that this people, and women especially, will enter a stage of resistance, because we have been resisting misogynistic attacks and fighting for life for centuries, but we have a very hard time ahead of us,” Chiarotti said.

She added that Latin America has fragile democracies that are only a few decades old and in crisis, which impact women’s rights. “Many of our countries came out of dictatorships, the longest has had 50 or 60 years of democracy. We will have to work to defend democratic institutions, to use them to defend our rights,” she said.

Holding up signs demanding “No to violence” and “No to machismo,” women demonstrate against gender violence in front of Peru’s main courthouse in Lima. CREDIT: Mariela Jara / IPS

Prevention: a task eluded by the States

The expert argued that since the work of preventing gender-based violence is more costly and time-consuming than that of punishment and less politically profitable, the efforts of countries are weak in this area despite their importance.

“Limiting the work to punishment and addressing incidents is like seeing a big rock that people stumble over and bang up against, and they are cured and taught to go around it, but without removing it from the path. Without prevention we will always have victims because the discriminatory culture that reproduces violence will not be transformed,” she warned.

But even adding up what countries invest to address and eradicate violence against women in the region, none of them reach one percent of their national budget according to the Third Hemispheric Report published by Mesecvi in 2017, a proportion that has apparently not changed since then.

In September of this year, the United Nations published a study showing that an investment of 360 billion dollars is needed to achieve gender equality and women’s empowerment by 2030, established as one of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This would help to eliminate the scourge of gender-based violence.

Excerpt:

On the suspension bridge that crosses the Vilcanota River, in the village of Secsencalla, in the Andes highlands region of Cuzco, Peru, a group of men who have been taking steps towards a new form of masculinity without machismo pose for a photo. From left to right: Saul Huamán, Rolando Tito, Hilario Quispe and Brian Junior Quispe. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

By Mariela Jara
CUZCO, Peru , Oct 6 2022 (IPS)

“My father was very ‘machista’, he used to beat my mother… It was a very sad life,” said Dionisio Ticuña, a resident of the rural community of Canincunca, on the outskirts of the town of Huaro, in the southern Peruvian highlands region of Cuzco more than 3,000 meters above sea level.

Today, at 66 years of age, he is happy that he managed to not copy the model of masculinity that his father showed him, in which being a man was demonstrated by exercising power and violence over women and children."I have been married to my wife Delia for 35 years, we have raised our children and I can say that you feel great peace when you learn to respect your partner and to show your innermost emotions.” -- Dionisio Ticuña

“Now I am an enemy of the ‘wife beaters’, I don’t hang out with the ones who were raised that way and I don’t pay attention to the taunts or ugly things they might say to me,” he said in an interview with IPS in his new adobe house, which he built in 2020 and where he lives with his wife and their youngest daughter, 20. Their three other children, two boys and a girl, have already become independent.

In this South American country of 33 million people, tolerance of violence, particularly gender-based violence, is high, and there is a strong division of roles within couples.

A nationwide survey on social relationships, conducted in 2019 by the governmental National Institute of Statistics and Informatics (INEI), showed that 52 percent of women believed they should first fulfill their role as mothers and wives before pursuing their dreams, 33 percent believed that if they were unfaithful they should be punished by their husband, and 27 percent said they deserved to be punished if they disrespected their husband.

The survey also found that a high proportion of Peruvians agreed with the physical punishment of children. Of those interviewed, 46 percent thought it was a parental right and 34 percent believed it helped discipline children so they would not become lazy.

Katherine Pozo, a Cuzco lawyer with the rural development program of the Flora Tristán Peruvian Women’s Center, told IPS that masculinity in Peru, particularly in rural areas, is still very machista or sexist.

“The ideas acquired in childhood and transmitted from generation to generation are that men have power over women, that women owe them obedience, and that women’s role is to take care of their men and take care of the home and the family. This thinking is an obstacle to the integral experience of their masculinities and to the recognition of women’s rights,” she said in an interview at her home in Cuzco, the regional capital.

Dionisio Ticuña, a resident of the rural community of Canincunca, in the Andean region of Cuzco in southern Peru, stands in front of his new adobe house, built in 2020. At the age of 66, he has achieved the tranquility of a life without machismo, which he experienced as a child in his family. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

Based on that analysis the Center decided to involve men in the work they do in rural communities in Cuzco to help women exercise their rights and have greater autonomy in making decisions about their lives, promoting the approach to a new kind of masculinity among men.

In 2018 the Center launched this process, convinced that it was necessary to raise awareness among men about gender equality so that women’s efforts to break down discrimination could flourish. The project will continue until next year and is supported by two Spanish institutions: the Basque Agency for Development Cooperation and Muguen Gainetik.

IPS visited different Quechua indigenous villages in Cuzco´s Andes highlands to talk to farmers who are working to shed gender prejudices and beliefs that, they acknowledge, have brought them unhappiness. Now, they are gradually taking significant steps with the support of the Center, which is working to generate a new view of masculinity in these communities.

“I have been married to my wife Delia for 35 years, we have raised our children and I can say that you feel great peace when you learn to respect your partner and to show your innermost emotions,” said Ticuña, a participant in the initiative.

“Being head of household is hard, but it doesn’t give me the right to mistreat. I decided not to be like my father and to be a different kind of person in order to lead a happy life with her and our children,” he said, sitting at the entrance to his home in Canincunca.

Hilario Quispe, a farmer from the Secsencalla farming community in the town of Andahuaylillas, in the Peruvian highlands region of Cuzco, poses for a photo with his wife Hilaria Mena. For him it was a revelation to understand that the tasks she performs at home are work, and his commitment now is to share them. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

Recognizing that women do work

Hilario Quispe, a 49-year-old farmer from the Secsencalla community in the town of Andahuaylillas, told IPS that in his area there is a great deal of machismo.

In his home, at 3100 meters above sea level, he said that he has been able to understand that women also work when they are at home.

“Actually, they do more than men, we have only one job, but they wash, cook, weave, take care of the children, look after the animals, go out to the fields…And I used to say: my wife doesn’t work,” he reflected.

Because of the distribution of tasks based on stereotyped gender roles, women spend more time than men on unremunerated care tasks in the household.

INEI reported in 2021 that in the different regions of the country, Peruvian women have a greater overall workload than men because the family responsibilities fall on their shoulders.

In rural areas, women work an average of 76 hours per week, 47 of which are in unpaid activities involving work in the home, both caring for their families and their crops.

In the case of men, their overall workload is 64 hours per week, most of which, 44 hours, are devoted to paid work.

Saúl Huamán is a family farmer in the rural community of Secsencalla. He recognizes that machismo is still a daily reality in Peru’s Andes highlands regions, but he strives to demonstrate day by day that he can be different and can achieve a life based on respect with his partner and their six-month-old son, Luas. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

Breaking down stereotypes

Pozo, with the Flora Tristán Center, cited data from the official report that found that in the countryside, married women spend 17 hours a week in kitchen activities and men only four; in housekeeping seven and their partners three; and in childcare 11 and their husbands seven.

Quispe, who with his wife, Hilaria Mena, has four children between the ages of six and 17, said it was a revelation to understand that the different activities his wife performs at home are work.

“If she wasn’t there, everything would fall apart. But I am not going to wait for that to happen, I am committed to stop being machista. Those ideas that have been put in our minds as children do not help us have a good life,” he remarked.

The department of Cuzco is a Peruvian tourist area, where the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu is the main attraction. It has more than 1.3 million inhabitants, of which 40 percent live in rural areas where agriculture is one of the main activities. Much of it is subsistence farming, which requires the participation of the different members of the family.

This is precisely the case of the Secsencalla farming community, where, although the new generations have made it to higher education, they are still tied to the land.

Rolando Tito sits next to his mother Faustina Ocsa. He believes that men can experience their masculinity differently, without machismo or violence, with equal relationships with women. The university student is also actively involved in agricultural work in his rural village of Secsencalla, in the Andean region of Cuzco, in southern Peru. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

Rolando Tito, 25, is in his third year of systems engineering at the National University of Cuzco, and helps his mother, Faustina Ocsa, 64, with the agricultural work.

“I want to better myself and continue helping my mother, she is a widow and although she was unable to study, she always encouraged me to do so. Times are no longer like hers when women didn’t have opportunities, but there are still men who think they should stay in the kitchen,” he told IPS, with his Quechua-speaking mother at his side.

Sitting by the entrance to the community’s bodega, which is often used as a center for meetings and gatherings, with the help of a translator, his mother recalled that she experienced a lot of violence, that fathers were not supportive of their daughters and that they mistreated their wives. And she said she hoped that her son would be a good man who would not follow in the footsteps of the men who came before him.

“I have learned about equality between men and women,” her son said. “For example, I am helping in the house, I am cooking and washing, that does not make me less of a man, and when I have a partner I will not have the idea that she has to serve me. Together we will work in the house and on the farm.”

Brian Junior Quispe, a 19-year-old from the community, who is about to begin studying veterinary medicine, said he now knows that “men should not take advantage of women, but rather support each other to get ahead together.”

The same sentiment was expressed by Saúl Huamán, 35, who has become a father for the first time with his baby Luas, six months old.

“Now I have to worry about three mouths to feed. I used to be a machine operator but now I only work in the fields and I have to work hard to make it profitable. With my wife Sonia we share the chores, while she cooks I watch the baby, and I am also learning to prepare meals,” he says as his smiling wife listens.

Pozo the attorney recognized that it is not easy to change cultural patterns so strongly rooted in the communities, but said that it is not impossible.

“It is like sowing the seed of equality, you have to water and nurture it, and then harvest the fruits, which is a better life for women and men,” she said.

Women’s Day (Auret March) in 2018. Despite the growth of feminism and activism against gender-based violence, women still fear attacks in public places in Pakistan. Credit: Zofeen T Ebrahim/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim
Karachi, Oct 12 2021 (IPS)

The mauling, groping and tossing of a young woman by a crowd of between 300 and 400 men in a park in the eastern city of Lahore, in the Punjab province, may have caused a wave of country-wide disgust, but speaks volumes of how unsafe public spaces are for Pakistani women.

“If I’m not safe in my own city, I can never be safe in any corner of the world,” said the woman survivor, also a TikTokker, in an interview narrating the incident that occurred on Pakistan’s 74th day of independence and was captured on videos that went viral soon after.

Actor Ushna Shah echoed the same sentiment on Twitter: “What else has to happen for every single person to accept the fact that women are not safe in Pakistan. Women are not safe.”

Sheema Kermani says her dancers pack up and leave public spaces when confronted.

“Over the years, public spaces for women in Pakistan have been decreasing,” lamented Sheema Kermani, a renowned classical dancer, and founder of Karachi-based Tehrik-e-Niswan, a women’s rights group. She and her group have had their share of unwarranted episodes, performing in public spaces, even doing street theatre. They have had stones hurled at them or have been asked to stop their performance, in which case they pack up immediately and leave to “avoid confrontation”.

Despite more women joining the workforce and the emergence of young feminist groups that have “actually pushed for making public spaces safe for women,” Kermani observed, “the last couple of years has taken Pakistani society back many hundreds of years” where women are “hated, demeaned, exploited, abused, even raped”. She added: “It is as if their lives are of little consequence.”

And that is what the TikTokker felt when she said: “They [men] were playing with me,” as they ripped off her clothes.

This incident comes just weeks after the beheading of a former diplomat’s daughter in the capital. Another undated video that went viral, following the TikTokker’s assault, showed a man lunging towards two women riding on the back of a rickshaw and is heard kissing one of them. Police are investigating yet another video of a woman being stripped by a group of men in a park.

Prime Minister Imran Khan does not make it easier either when he blames women for these crimes that he says are “spreading like cancer”. “Wearing very few clothes,” he said, will have an “impact on the men unless they are robots”. In 2019, the information minister quoted the Prime Minister for blaming TikTok, a social media platform, for the “growing obscenity and vulgarity in society”.

“But I was not even vulgarly dressed,” the TikTok survivor had said in her interview.

Maria Memon was shaken to the core after experiencing verbal abuse.

“I can well imagine this woman’s trauma,” said TV anchorperson Maria Memon.

She had faced an unruly mob while covering an anti-government protest sit-in by the now ruling Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI), in Faisalabad, also in Punjab, in 2014, that had left her “shaken to the core” after being attacked by a volley of verbal abuse.

“They wanted to see me break down,” she said. When that did not happen, they started “throwing empty plastic water bottles and sticks at me,” she told IPS over the phone from Islamabad, the country’s capital.

Seven years later, said Memon, Pakistani women journalists remain “untrained”, “unprepared”, and “vulnerable” to a crowd that can quickly turn violent. While media outlets want to send women to these events, they seldom have a contingency escape plan to quickly evacuate them when things get rough.

In 2018, the London-based Thomson Reuters Foundation ranked Pakistan the sixth most dangerous country and fifth on non-sexual violence, including domestic abuse in the world for women.

Sana Mirza recalls her own humiliating incident and salutes those who report harassment.

“Unless these men are not punished, there will be no stopping them,” said Sana Mirza, Memon’s colleague, who faced a similar situation in another PTI rally in Lahore, just a few weeks after Memon, in 2014.

Unlike Memon, she broke down in front of the camera, “feeling humiliated,” she said, and the episode continued haunting her, and she refused to go out in the field for a good eight months. “I even removed myself from social media as these platforms had become too toxic, and I was unable to sleep,” she told IPS over the phone from Islamabad.

While many women, had they experienced what the TikTokker’s went through, would have kept silent, Mirza said, she saluted this woman “for her courage to lodge a complaint to the police”.

So far, over 60 men have been arrested after they were identified through the video using the national database. The police have geo-fenced 28,000 people and shortlisted 350 suspects, and the arrests continue.

But Mirza remains unconvinced the arrested men arrested will be punished. “They never are. Just look at the statistics!” she said.

According to Karachi-based War Against Rape, while sexual assault and rape cases have increased, the conviction rate is less than 3%. And this figure is about the crimes that are reported.

Amna Baig believes that women should report incidents as non-reporting emboldens the perpetrators.

While the “system may not be perfect”, Amna Baig, an Islamabad-based policewoman, defending the police system by not reporting such incidents was “emboldening” perpetrators. She termed the complaint filing by the TikTok user, albeit three days late, a very “courageous” step.

In her five years of being in the force at various cities in Punjab, she said, she had come across several murders of women by their spouses. Still, neither the deceased nor any family member ever filed a complaint of domestic violence (DV) before the murder.

“You can save so many lives if you report,” she said, adding, “Just lodging a complaint can act as a deterrent because the person knows he will be held accountable”.

Interestingly, Baig feels “safer” and “empowered” in a police uniform than in plain clothes. “I think the uniform exudes both the fear factor as well as respect,” and has never been harassed while on duty.

Still, it is not too late to ensure “women’s choices, voices, and lives count” if you ask Senator Sherry Rehman.

It was time to bring to life the domestic violence bill that she had first introduced back in 2004, as a member of the national assembly, but which she continues to stumble “on the barriers of misogyny and anti-women lobbies”.

The Council of Islamic Ideology (CII) is vetting it to ensure it is in tandem with the Shariah [Islamic law].

“Why are only legislations related to women sent to the CII?” asked Rehman. “Like the rest, these too, can be discussed in the parliament, and their fate decided through voting just the way other bills are discussed and passed,” she added.

While she admitted no one law or series of laws would change the game, moving the law is the starting point, not the endpoint for change.

“Without baseline laws against domestic violence, for instance, such as the one in Sindh, the courts won’t have the legal scaffolding to provide the relief even if they are so inclined,” she pointed out.

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Red Brigade, a female-only collective, equips Indian women and girls with self-defence techniques and targets males who have committed sexual assault. Credit: Neeta Lal/IPS

By Neeta Lal
NEW DELHI, Dec 7 2016 (IPS)

Last month, Delhi Police launched a unique initiative to check spiralling crimes against women in the city, also known dubiously as the “rape capital” of India. It formed a squad of plainclothes officers called “police mitras” (friends of the police) — comprising farmers, homemakers and former Army men — to assist them in the prevention and detection of crime and maintenance of law and order.

In another scheme, police chiefs launched their own version of “Charlie’s Angels” — a specially trained squad of crime-fighting, butt-kicking constables in white kimonos who take on sexual predators across the country. The 40-member women’s squad trained in martial arts guards “vulnerable” landmarks in the city such as schools and metro stations, while undercover as regular citizens."I carry pepper spray and a knife with me as I return late from the office." -- Shashibala Mehra, 52, an accountant in New Delhi

India, considered one of the world’s most unsafe countries for women, has lately seen a raft of innovative initiatives to safeguard women from sexual crimes. Ironically, despite increasingly stringent laws and a visible beefing up of police protection, crimes against women have surged.

According to a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, such crimes (primarily rapes, molestations and stalking) have skyrocketed by a whopping 60 percent between 2010 and 2011 and 2014 and 2015.

A report by the National Crime Records Bureau found 337,922 reports of violence, including rape, cruelty and abduction, against women in 2014, up 9 percent from 2013. The number of reported rapes in the country also rose by 9 percent to 33,707 in 2014, the last year for which such figures were available.

In addition, sexual harassment on Indian streets or in other public spaces is a common experience for women. A survey by the NGO ActionAid found 79 percent of Indian women have been subjected to harassment or violence in public.

The rise in attacks on women has also led to a mushrooming of volunteer-led projects which provide a valuable social service. For instance, one such initiative — Blank Noise — in one of its campaigns #WalkAlone, asked women across the country to break their silence and walk alone to fight the fear of being harassed on the streets. In another campaign, women were urged to send in the clothing they were wearing when they were harassed which were then used to create public installations.

By engaging not only perpetrators and victims, but also spectators and passers-by, Blank Noise, launched in 2003, relies on ‘Action Heroes’ or a network of volunteers, from across age groups, gender and sexuality to put forth its message. Effective legal mechanisms, staging theatrical public protests and publicizing offences help the organization mobilize citizens against sexual harassment in public spaces. Week-long courses are also offered to teach women how to be active in building safe spaces.

Schoolboys are sensitized about sexual crimes at a seminar in New Delhi. Credit: Neeta Lal/IPS

Although the Indian Parliament passed a strong anti-rape law while also making human trafficking, acid attacks and stalking stringently punishable, it hasn’t translated into diminishing crimes against women. Some women’s rights activists believe that women are inviting a counter-attack by claiming their right in public spaces.

“There’s a lot of media coverage, candlelight marches and social media angst if women are outraged but in reality little has changed, ” says Pratibha Malik, an activist with a pan-India non-profit Aashrita. “I feel the very presence of women in non-traditional spaces like offices, in bars, restaurants etc in a patriarchal society like India’s is responsible for this backlash.”

The trigger for much of legislative and police action was the December 2012 rape of a 23-year-old Indian medical student in a moving bus when she was returning from a movie with a male friend. The couple were attacked by a group of men, including one aged 14. The woman was raped several times and later died, while her friend was beaten with an iron rod. The incident sparked mass protests demanding action.

Following the episode, which created global headlines, a committee — Justice Verma Committee — was instituted and its report cited “the failure of governance to provide a safe and dignified environment for the women of India, who are constantly exposed to sexual violence.”

The three attackers in the 2012 rape were sentenced to death and within months the government passed a bill broadening the definition of sexual offences to include forced penetration by any object, stalking, acid violence and disrobing.

However, such actions by the State haven’t really resulted in much succour for the fairer sex.
They feel they have to take charge of their own security. Many women IPS spoke to, say they feel danger still lurks around street corners, especially in the big cities, where venturing out at night is still considered an `adventure’.

“I don’t feel safe in public places at all nor while using public transport. I know nobody will come forward to help me if I get into trouble,” says Rekha Kumari, 30, a cook.

“I carry pepper spray and a knife with me as I return late from the office,” says Shashibala Mehra, 52, an accountant in New Delhi. “Throughout my 40-minute commute back home I keep talking to my husband on phone just so that he knows when I’m in trouble.”

Laxmi Aggarwal, 27, an acid attack victim who has now become an activist championing the ban on the sale of acid in India, says the government has done little to prevent its sale. “Young, vulnerable girls are attacked in many parts of rural India,” she says.

Aggarwal has joined hands with an organization called Stop Acid Attacks to assist other victims of such attacks and also fight for their rights in local courts.

Realizing how some Indian law enforcement agencies can no longer be trusted for their safety, many women are also resorting to buying weapons and pepper spray, downloading security apps, signing up for self-defence classes, and joining self-help groups.

Campaigns which help victims of violence fight social stigma have urged the government to enforce stricter laws and promote gender equality. Red Brigades, a female-only collective, for instance, equips women and girls with self-defence techniques and targets males who have committed sexual assault. Blank Noise, another volunteer-led project, is working to tackle street harassment and change public attitudes towards sexual violence.

Such initiatives, say activists, are vital to safeguard Indian women who are stepping out of their homes to work, travel and lead a full life.

“We try to make erring men see reason after talking to the man and his parents. If he still doesn’t listen, we go to the police station,” says Usha Vishwakarma. “If he’s still adamant, we go into the action stage.”

An important part of the support Red Brigade offers involves helping victims get rid of the self-guilt that the violence they suffered was their fault.

Hasna (left) and Marwa (right), nurses in their early twenties, were reluctant to be photographed on the street—primarily because of attention this drew from male Somalilanders—but were more comfortable in a quiet café. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

By James Jeffrey
HARGEISA, Somaliland, Jun 10 2016 (IPS)

Amid the hustle and bustle of downtown Hargeisa, Somaliland’s sun-blasted capital, women in various traditional Islamic modes of dress barter, argue and joke with men—much of it particularly volubly. Somaliland women are far from submissive and docile.

Somaliland’s culture is strongly influenced by Islam—Sharia law is included in its constitution—while this religiousness appears to co-exist with many signs of a liberal free market society, a dynamic embodied by Somaliland women whose roles in society and the economy undercut certain stereotypes about women’s Muslim clothing equalling submission or coercion.

“The West needs to stop obsessing about what women are wearing—whether those in the West who are wearing less or those in the East who are wearing more,” says 29-year-old Zainab, relaxing in a new trendy café after her day job as a dentist in Hargeisa. “It should focus on what women are contributing to the community and country.”“It’s about what’s inside your head, not what’s over your head.” -- Zainab, dentist.

Somaliland has had to develop a strong entrepreneurial streak since 1991 and its declaration of independence from Somalia never being recognised by the international community, leaving it to rebuild its shattered economy and infrastructure alone following a civil war.

Today, many small businesses are run by women, who in addition to bringing up large numbers of children are often breadwinners for families whose husbands were physically or mentally scarred by the war.

“Here women are butchers—that doesn’t happen in many places. It shows you how tough Somaliland women are,” Zainab says. “It’s about what’s inside your head, not what’s over your head.”

The issue of how the Quran, the central religious text of Islam, instructs women to dress is a source of continuing debate around the world, although a traditional stance is taken in Somaliland with all women covering at least their hair in public.

“Everyone is free to follow their religion and this is what the Islamic religion says: that a woman should cover their body,” says Kaltun Hassan Abdi, a commissioner at the National Electoral Commission, responsible for female representation in elections.  “It’s an obligation, so women don’t see it as discrimination or violation of rights.”

But some Somalilanders express concern about a steady drift toward Islamic conservatism in Hargeisa: music no longer blares out from teashops; colourful Somali robes are increasingly replaced by black abayas; more women are wearing niqabs—face veils—than a year ago; and no woman goes about town bareheaded as happened in the 1970s.

“The last 15-18 years have witnessed a dramatic change in the extent to which religion influences how people live their daily lives,” says Rakiya Omaar, a lawyer and chair of Horizon Institute, a consultancy firm that works on strengthening the capacity and self-reliance of institutions in Somaliland. “There is pressure to live as a serious Muslim—it may be subtle or overt; it may come from family or it may be the wider society that you interact with.”

But it’s hard to find a woman in Hargeisa who says she feels pressurised by Islam or society’s adherence to it (women in smaller towns or rural areas are more likely to face increased religious conservatism, Omaar notes).

“I asked myself why I wear the hijab, and decided because that’s Allah’s will, and it’s part of my religion and my identity, and since then it’s been a choice,” Zainab says.

Zainab at work n Hargeisa, Somaliland. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

During Mohamed Siad Barre’s communist-inspired dictatorship throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, Islam was suppressed in Somalia. Since Somaliland broke away, Islam has been able to reassert itself—including the flourishing of madrassas, Islamic religious schools—with positive effects, according to some.

“There are problems for women here but they’re not due to religion rather they are Somali cultural problems,” says Khadar Husein, operational director of the Hargeisa office of Transparency Solutions, a UK-based organization focused on capacity building in civil society.

“The man is mainly dominant in Somali society—things like domestic violence go back to that culture but has no root in Islam. Getting a more religious society means eliminating those cultural problems.”

But religion doesn’t appear to be easing restrictions on women in Somaliland’s political life.

“Without a women’s quota I don’t think there will be any more women in parliament,” Baar Saed Farah, the only female in the 82-member Lower Chamber of parliament, says about current lobbying to give 30 seats to women from forthcoming elections in 2017 (no women are permitted in the 82-member House of Elders in the Upper Chamber).

“In normal employment there is no differentiation between genders but when it comes to political participation it becomes very difficult for women because of a culture that favours men,” Farah says. “It has been there for a long time—even women may not accept a woman running for election as they’re so used to men always leading and making decisions.”

Somaliland remains a strongly male-dominated society. Polygyny, where a man can take several wives, is widely condoned and practised. Marriages are frequently arranged between the groom and the family of the bride—without the latter’s consent—and it’s easier for men to initiate a divorce. The prevalence of female genital mutilation in the Somalia region stands at about 95 percent, according to the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund.

And while Somaliland women may be a force to be reckoned with among markets and street-side trading, they still face many limits to full economic opportunities.

“They only operate small businesses, you won’t find many rich business women here,” says Nafisa Yusuf Mohamed, director of Hargeisa-based female empowerment organisation Nagaad Network. “For now there aren’t many alternatives, but this could change as enrolment in higher education is improving.”

Expanding female education is also affecting Somaliland’s increasing religiousness, Mohamed explains, as today’s young women better understand than their mothers the Quran, becoming more avid adherents in the process.

She notes how many young Somalilanders such as her 17-year-old daughter, who recently started wearing the niqab of her own volition, use social media to discuss and learn more about Islam once they finish attending madrassas.

There are also other more prosaic reasons for wearing the likes of the niqab, observers note. Some women wear them because they are shy, or want to protect their skin from harsh sunlight, or want to fit in with friends wearing them.

Changing Muslim clothing trends may be most noticeable to the outsider, but other developments also illustrate Somaliland’s increasing religiousness: the extent mosque prayer times affect working hours, both in the public and private sector; the higher proportion of adults praying the full five times a day; and the increasing numbers of mosques built.

“These changes are also a response to wider regional and international developments which have affected the Muslim world, in particular the growing perception that life in the Western world is becoming more hostile to Muslims,” Omaar says.

Although for most Somalilanders, exasperation with the West appears to primarily stem from how countries such as the UK—Somaliland was a UK protectorate until 1960—continue to not recognise its sovereign status, resulting in enormous financial drawbacks for the country.

Hence, as Somaliland celebrates its 25th anniversary of unrecognized independence this year, its economy remains perilously fragile, with poverty and unemployment rampant among its roughly four million-plus population.

“If you look at the happiness of Somalilanders and the challenges they are facing it does not match,” Husein says. “They are happy because of their values and religion.”

Long before the attack in Paris that inspired the slogan “Je Suis Charlie”, a young French publisher had released a collection of stories titled je suis favela about life in Brazilian slums.

In an ironic twist of history, sales of the collection have taken off since Jan. 7, when gunmen targeted the offices of satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, leaving 12 people dead.

French publisher Paula Anacaona

Some readers apparently thought the je suis favela stories were an attempt to shed light on the situation of marginalised communities in France, but instead they learned about marginalised populations in South America, where similar forces of exclusion may push young people into crime.

“We can all learn from what is happening elsewhere in the world, because we’re all affected by similar social and economic issues,” says Paula Anacaona, the publisher of je suis favela and founder of Éditions Anacaona, whose mission is to publish Brazilian books in France.

Educated as a translator of technical texts, Paris-born Anacaona, 37, became a literary translator and publisher by chance. On holiday in Rio de Janeiro in 2003, she happened to start chatting with a woman who revealed she was a writer and who promised to send her a book.

Back in Paris, Anacaona received the book two months later and “loved it”, as she told IPS in an interview. She translated the work, written by Heloneida Studart and later called Le Cantique de Meméia, and managed to get a Canadian company to publish it.“To understand the favela, you have to understand the grandparents who came to the cities from rural areas, often with nothing and unable to read or write” – Paula Anacaona, founder of Éditions Anacaona

Studart, who died in 2007, was also an essayist, journalist and women’s rights activist, and the book caught the attention of French-speaking readers in several countries.

Other writers got in touch, and Anacaona found herself becoming a literary translator. But by sending out the works to publishing companies, she was also taking on the role of agent, a time-consuming task.

“With all that was involved, I thought why not publish the books myself?” she recalls. She set up Éditions Anacaona in 2009 and decided to focus initially on literature from and about the ghetto or favela in Brazil, because “no one else was doing it.”

The first published book under her imprint was le Manuel pratique de la haine (Practical Handbook of Hate), a very violent and dark work set in the favela and launched in 2009.

Two years later came je suis favela, published in 2011. Anacaona selected the writers for the collection, choosing authors from both the favela and the “middle class” and translating the works written in Portuguese into French.

Her motivation, she says, was to try to change perceptions of those considered to be living on the fringes of society. The cover of je suis favela features a young black woman sitting on a balcony and doing paperwork, possibly homework, with the city in the background.

“As you can see, she’s not dancing, so this isn’t about stereotypes,” Anacaona says.

Cover of ‘je suis favela’

The book has since been published in Brazil, with the title Eu sou favela, giving Anacaona a certain sense of accomplishment. “In Rio, twenty percent of the population lives in the favela, so the book is relevant to many readers,” she says.

In France, where there has been national soul-searching since the Charlie Hebdo attacks – with Prime Minister Manuel Valls calling the social exclusion of certain groups a form of “apartheid” – the book provides insights into the reasons and consequences of marginalisation, albeit from a distance of 8,620 kilometres.

“French readers have responded to the book because people really are trying to understand the space we all share and the reasons for radicalisation,” says Anacaona.

Now representing more than 15 authors, she has widened her company’s scope to include “regionalist” authors such as the late Rachel de Queiroz and José Lins do Rego, from the northeast of Brazil, who wrote about characters outside urban settings.

“To understand the favela, you have to understand the grandparents who came to the cities from rural areas, often with nothing and unable to read or write,” Anacaona says.

Her company’s contemporary writers include the award-winning Tatiana Salem Lévy, named one of Granta’s Best Young Brazilian Novelists, and the stand-out Ana Paula Maia, who began her career with “short pulp fiction” on the Internet and now has numerous fans.

Both writers were part of the contingent of 48 Brazilian authors invited to this year’s Paris Book Fair, which took place from Mar. 20 to 23.

Billed as “un pays plein de voix” (a country full of voice), Brazil was the guest of honour, and the writers discussed topics ranging from the depiction of urban violence to dealing with memory and displacement. Anacaona had a central role as a publisher of Brazilian books, with her stand attracting many readers.

Brazilian writer Ana Paula Maia. Credit: Marcelo Correa

She has translated and published two titles by Maia – Du bétail et des hommes (Of Cattle and Men) and Charbon animal (Animal Coal) – which focus on characters not normally present in literature. Maia writes about a slaughterhouse employee and a worker at a crematorium, for instance, in an unsentimental manner with minimal dialogue and almost no adjectives.

“She really can’t be categorised,” says Anacaona, who adds that despite Maia’s fashion-model appearance, the writer identifies with those living on the margins because she grew up among people who did not fit into the mainstream.

Both publisher and writer bear a resemblance and even have a name in common, and Anacaona acknowledges that she is attracted to Brazil and its literature because of her own mixed background – her French mother is white and her South American father is of African descent.

“In Brazil, it’s possible to be both black and white, and that’s something that is important to me,” she says.

As for the books, she has recently published a boxed set of 14 Brazilian plays, with the translation sponsored by the Brazilian Ministry of Culture, in an attempt to make Brazilian theatre more known in France.

There is also a second favela collection, titled je suis toujours favela (I am still favela), that includes literature as well as journalistic and sociological articles about the slums.

Between the first and second collections, Anacaona says she has found that the “favela has changed so much”, which she credits to the impact of policies to diminish inequality, launched by former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva  – perhaps a lesson for France and other countries.

Edited by Phil Harris 

She is just 14, but Janida avoids eye contact with others, preferring to look down at the ground and nodding her head if someone tries to engage her in conversation.

Janida (not her real name) was once a sociable and playful child, but that was before she was sexually abused by her stepfather and giving birth to a baby who is now four months old.

Her days marked by trauma and depression, Janida is just one of many girl children in Kenya who have been abused and robbed of their childhood, leaving them emotionally scarred.

“The little girl [Janida] underwent both physical and mental torture,” Teresa Omondi, Deputy Executive Director and Head of Programmes at the Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA) Kenya, told IPS. ”Her best option was to terminate the pregnancy rather than suffer the mental and physical torture, but she could not afford the cost of a safe abortion.”Many of the induced abortions taking place continue to be unsafe and complications are common” – Teresa Omondi, Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA) Kenya

Under Article 26 (4) of the Kenyan constitution, “abortion is not permitted unless, in the opinion of a trained health professional, there is need for emergency treatment, or the life or health of the mother is in danger, or if permitted by any other written law.”

In September 2010, Kenya’s Ministry of Health released national guidelines on the medical management of rape or sexual violence – guidelines that allow for termination of pregnancy as an option in the case of conception, but require psychiatric evaluation and recommendation.

Then, in September 2012, the health ministry released standards and guidelines on the prevention and management of unsafe abortions to the extent allowed by Kenyan law, only to withdraw them three months later under unclear circumstances.

According to Omondi, “the law has not yet been fully put into operation and many providers have not been trained to provide safe abortion, meaning many of the induced abortions taking place continue to be unsafe and complications are common.”

The health ministry is responsible for doctors and nurses not being permitted to be trained on providing safe abortion, said Omondi, so “it is ridiculous that while Kenya’s Ministry of Health accepts that post-abortion care is a public health issue regarding numbers, practitioners have their hands tied.”

The issue of unsafe abortions in Kenya hit the headlines in September last year, when Jackson Namunya Tali, a 41-year-old nurse, was sentenced to death by the high court in Nairobi for murder, after the death of both Christine Atieno and her unborn baby in a botched illegal abortion.

Various inter-African meetings attended by Kenya have been held on reducing maternal mortality rates by providing safe abortions, with health ministers agreeing that statistics show that countries that do provide safe abortions have reduced their maternal mortality rates.

In a recent analysis, Saoyo Tabitha Griffith, Reproductive Health Rights Officer at FIDA and an advocate at the High Court of Kenya, said that despite Kenya having adopted a Constitution that affirms among others, women’s rights to reproductive health and access to safe abortion, Kenyan women continue to die from unsafe abortion – a preventable cause of maternal mortality.

For Dr Ong’ech John, a health specialist in Nairobi, perforated uteruses and intestines, heart and kidney failures, anaemia requiring blood transfusion as well as renal problems are just a few of the health complications arising from an abortion that goes wrong.

“Unsafe abortion complications are not just about removal of the products of conception that were not completely removed. One can evacuate but the perforated uterus has to be repaired, or you remove the uterus and it is rotten,” Dr Ong’ech told IPS.

“When the health ministry issued a directive in February this year instructing all health workers, whether from public, private or faith-based organisations, not to participate in any training on safe abortion practices and the use of the medication abortion, many questions were left unanswered,” said Omondi.

A highly respected Kenyan doctor, Dr John Nyamu, spent one year in prison in 2004 after his clinic was raided following the discovery of 15 foetuses on major roads together with planted documents from a hospital he had worked for but had since closed.

Speaking of his ordeal with Mary Fjerstand, a senior clinical advisor at Ipas, a global non-governmental organisation dedicated to ending preventable deaths and disabilities from unsafe abortion, Nyamu said that the publicity surrounding his imprisonment helped people to “realise the magnitude and consequences of unsafe abortion in Kenya; women were dying in great numbers. Before that, abortion was never spoken of in public.”

He went on to say that Kenya wants to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of a 75 percent reduction in maternal mortality, but that “it can’t be achieved if safe abortion is not available.”

A May 2014 World Health Organisation (WHO) updated fact sheet indicates that every day, approximately 800 women die worldwide from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth, with 99 percent of all maternal deaths occurring in developing countries.

Edited by Phil Harris   

By Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 2 2014 (IPS)

Almost two decades ago, in Beijing, 189 countries made a commitment to achieve equality for women, in practice and in law, so that all women could at last fully enjoy their rights and freedoms as equal human beings.

They adopted a comprehensive and ambitious plan to guarantee women the same rights as men to be educated and develop their potential. The same rights as men to choose their profession. The same rights to lead communities and nations, and make choices about their own lives without fear of violence or reprisal.

Credit: OHCHR

No longer would hundreds of thousands of women die every year in childbirth because of health care policies and systems that neglected their care. No longer would women earn considerably less than men. No longer would discriminatory laws govern marriage, land, property and inheritance.

In the years that followed, the world has witnessed tremendous progress: the number of women in the work force has increased; there is almost gender parity in schooling at the primary level; the maternal mortality ratio declined by almost 50 percent; and more women are in leadership positions.

Importantly, governments talk about women’s rights as human rights and women’s rights and gender equality are acknowledged as legitimate and indispensable goals.

However, the world is still far from the vision articulated in Beijing. Approximately one in three women throughout the world will experience physical and/or sexual violence in their lifetime. Less than a quarter of parliamentarians in the world are women.Attacks against women who stand up to demand their human rights and individuals who advocate for gender equality are often designed to keep women in their “place.” In some areas of the world, women who participate in public demonstrations are told to go home to take care of their children.

In over 50 countries there is no legal protection for women against domestic violence. Almost 300,000 women and girls died in 2013 from causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. Approximately one in three married women aged 20 to 24 were child brides.

In many parts of the world, women and girls cannot make decisions on their most private matters – sexuality, marriage, children. Girls and women who pursue their own life choices are still murdered by their own families in the dishonourable practice of so-called honour killings.

All of our societies remain affected by stereotypes based on the inferiority of women which often denigrate, humiliate and sexualise them.

Today we have the responsibility to protect the progress made in the past 20 years and address the remaining challenges. In doing so, we must recognise the vital role of women who defend human rights, often at great risk to themselves and their families precisely because they are viewed as stepping outside socially prescriptive gender stereotypes.

We must recognise the role of all people, women and men, who publicly call for gender equality and often, as a result, find themselves the victim of archaic and patriarchal, but powerful, threats to their reputations, their work and even their lives.

These extraordinary individuals – women’s human rights defenders – operate in hostile environments, where arguments of cultural relativism are common and often against the background of the rise of extremist, misogynistic groups, which threaten to dismantle the gains of the past.

Attacks against women who stand up to demand their human rights and individuals who advocate for gender equality are often designed to keep women in their “place.” In some areas of the world, women who participate in public demonstrations are told to go home to take care of their children.

Consider the recent example of a newspaper publishing naked photos of a woman, claiming she was a well-known activist – an attack designed to shame this defender into silence. In other places, when women claim their right to affordable modern methods of contraception, they are labelled as prostitutes in smear campaigns seeking to undermine their credibility.

Online attacks against those who speak for women’s human rights and gender equality by so-called “trolls” – who threaten heinous crimes – are increasingly reported.

These attacks have a common thread – they rely on gender stereotypes and deeply entrenched discriminatory social norms in an attempt to silence those who challenge the age old system of gender inequality. However, these defenders will not be silenced, and we must stand in solidarity with them against these cowardly attacks.

This is why my office has decided to launch a campaign to pay tribute to women and men who defy stereotypes and fight for women’s human rights. The campaign runs from Human Rights Day, Dec. 10 this year, to International Women’s Day, Mar. 8, 2015. We encourage everyone to join the ranks of these strong and inspiring advocates, on social media (#reflect2protect) and on the ground.

As we approach the 20-year anniversary of Beijing, discrimination and violence against women, and the stereotypes that confine them into narrowly fixed roles must end. Women have the right to make their own decisions about their lives and their bodies.

Guaranteeing and implementing these rights are non-negotiable obligations of all states. Women human rights defenders were instrumental in securing the ambitious programme laid out in Beijing. Their work, their activism and their courage deserve our recognition, our support and our respect.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Circumcisers in the Gambia publicly declaring that they have abandoned the practice of FGM. Credit: Saikou Jammeh/IPS

By Saikou Jammeh
BANJUL, Jul 13 2014 (IPS)

Women’s rights activists in the Gambia are insisting that more than 30 years of campaigning to raise awareness should be sufficient to move the government to outlaw female genital mutilation (FMG).

The practice remains widespread in this tiny West African country of 1.8 million people, but rights activists believe that their campaign has now reached the tipping point.

Two years ago, GAMCOTRAP, an apolitical non-governmental organisation (NGO) committed to the promotion and protection of women and girl children’s political, social, sexual, reproductive health and educational rights in The Gambia, and one of the groups behind the anti-FGM campaign, sponsored a draft bill which has been subjected to wide stakeholder consultations.

Several previous attempts to legislate against FGM have failed, with no fewer than three pro-women laws having had clauses on FGM removed from draft bills. But activists now appear determined to make the final push and hope that when introduced this time round, the bill will go through.“We’ve caused lots of suffering to our women ... if my grandparents had known what I know today, they would not have circumcised anyone. Ignorance was the problem” – former circumciser Babung Sidibeh

The time has now come for final action, says Amie Bensouda, legal consultant for the draft bill. “There can be no half measures. The law has to be clear. It’s proposed by the law that FGM in all its forms is prohibited. This discussion cannot go on forever. The government should do what is right.”

“The campaign has reached its climax,” Dr Isatou Touray, executive director of GAMCOTRAP, told IPS. “A lot of work has been done. I am hopeful of having a law because women are calling for it, men are calling for it. I know there are pockets of resistance but that’s always the case when it comes to women’s issues.”

“In 2010, we organised a workshop for the National Assembly,” she continued. “They made a declaration, pledging to support any bill that criminalises FGM. I am happy to report that, since 2007, more than 128 circumcisers and 900 communities have abandoned the practice. This trend will continue to grow.”

Seventy-eight percent of Gambian women undergo FGM as a ‘rite of passage’. However, after more than three decades of the anti-FGM campaign in Gambia, a wind of change is blowing, sweeping even conservative rural communities.

Sustained awareness-raising programmes have resulted in public declarations of abandonment of FGM by hundreds of circumcisers. Babung Sidibeh, custodian of the tradition in her native Janjanbureh, the provincial capital of Central River Region, 196 kilometres from Banjul, was one of them. The old woman assumed the role after the death of her parents, but she has since “dropped the knife”, as no longer practising FGM is known here.

Sidibeh did so after receiving training in reproductive health and women’s rights. “Soon after we circumcised our children in 2011,” she told IPS, “Gamcotrap invited me for training. I was exposed to the harm we’ve been doing to our fellow women. If I had known that before what I know today, I would never have circumcised anyone.”

With a tinge of remorse, she added: “We’ve caused lots of suffering to our women. That’s why I told you that if my grandparents had known what I know today, they would not have circumcised anyone. Ignorance was the problem.”

Mrs Camara-Touray, a senior public health worker at the country’s heath ministry confirmed to IPS that her ministry has since taken a more proactive role on FGM.

She explained: “The ministry has created an FGM complication register. We’ve also trained nurses on FGM. Until recently, when you asked most health workers about the complications that can arise with FMG, they would say it has no complications. That’s because they were not trained. Since 2011, we’ve changed our curriculum to include these complications. After we put the register in place, within three months, we’d go to a region and see that hundreds of complications due to FGM had been recorded.”

In March, Gamcotrap organised a regional religious dialogue that sought to de-link FGM from Islam. Touray said that the workshop was a prelude to the introduction of the proposed law in parliament.

“Islamic scholars were brought together from Mali, Guinea, Mauritania and Gambia,” she told IPS. “We had a constructive debate and it was overwhelmingly accepted that FGM is not an Islamic injunction, it’s a cultural practice. It was recommended that a specific law should be passed and a declaration was made to that effect.”

However, there is resistance in some quarters. An influential group of Islamic scholars, backed by the leadership of the Supreme Islamic Council, continue to maintain that FGM is a religious injunction.

With a large following and having the ears of the politicians, these clerics have in recent times also intensified their pro-FGM campaign.

“It will be a big mistake if they legislate against FGM,” Ebrima Jarjue, an executive member of the Supreme Islamic Council, told IPS.

“Our religion says we cut just small. We should be allowed to practise our religion. If some people are doing it and doing it bad, let them stop it. Let them go and learn how to do it. If circumcising the girl child when she’s young is causing problems, then let’s wait until she grows up. That’s what used to happen.”

Meanwhile, the Women’s Bureau, the implementing arm of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, is hesitant about legislating against FGM.

“As far FGM is concerned, the position of the Women’s Bureau is that there’s need for more sensitisation and dialogue to push the course forward,” Neneh Touray, information and communication officer of the Women’s Bureau, told IPS. She declined to comment on whether the bureau thought that the bill was premature.

Education of girls is helping women learn about their rights in Kashmir. Credit: Athar Parvaiz/IPS

By Athar Parvaiz
SRINAGAR, India , Dec 24 2013 (IPS)

Mehnaz Bano (not her real name), a 37-year-old woman in a hamlet in Indian Kashmir, is living a “satisfied and peaceful” life ever since she secured her daughter’s property rights before her remarriage – though not without a long and tedious struggle following her first husband’s death.

When her first husband died in 2003, she was just 27 years old. But her in-laws stood in the way of her second marriage. According to Bano, they argued that since they had invested money in their son’s wedding, they couldn’t let that money go to waste by allowing her to remarry.

“Initially, I took it as my fate and lived with it for six years. And I also wanted my daughter to grow up a bit. She was just a year old at the time of her father’s death,” Bano told IPS.

But, she added, as time went by, she started getting the feeling that she was no more than a slave in their household, given that she had no legal right to the family’s property.

“I asked them to leave me alone with my daughter or to allow me to remarry, in which case I would leave my daughter with them provided they registered one-third of the property in her name. But they agreed to neither of these two options,” said Bano, who has a master’s degree in history and teaches at a government school.

“I could easily provide my daughter with a quality education given that I had a steady monthly income, but they refused it vehemently.” She said that if her in-laws had allowed her to take her daughter with her, she wouldn’t have remarried, for the sake of her daughter.

But her in-laws’ “stubborn stance” compelled her to wage a legal battle against them. And once the case went to court, her in-laws approached her with a “compromise,” agreeing to register property in the name of Bano’s daughter on the condition that the girl would live with them.

“When I saw them budging, I was happy to settle out of court. So I withdrew the case,” she said. Bano now has two children – a daughter and a son – with the new husband she married in 2009. “I am glad that I pushed for my rights, and my daughter’s,” she said.

A recent trend

Women are just starting to become aware of their rights in the region of Kashmir in northwest India.

“It was mainly because of illiteracy. Women’s education used to be considered against the norms of Kashmiri society,” Bashir Dabla, a leading sociologist at Kashmir University in Srinagar, told IPS. Women’s employment has also long been looked down upon, he added.

But this trend, said Dabla, has been changing in the past few years. “Now women are not only seen in good numbers in educational institutions, but also in workplaces,” he said.

According to the 2011 census, female literacy in the state of Jammu and Kashmir increased from 20 percent in 1981 to 58 percent in 2011, compared to 44 and 78 percent for males in the same period.

The result gazettes at Kashmir’s school board examination reveal that girls have topped the 10th standard annual exams six times in the past ten years. In Kashmir University a number of departments have an almost 50:50 male to female ratio.

The impact

Results have begun to be seen on the ground. Tasaduq Ahmad, assistant divisional commissioner of Kashmir, said his office received 917 complaints this year from women who were denied their share of the family property.

“We straightaway asked the concerned revenue officials to cancel the land registration of all the households where women had filed complaints,” Ahmad told IPS.

According to Ahmad, legislation passed by the Jammu and Kashmir legislative assembly in 2007 made it easier for women to claim their share of the family property. Earlier laws were not clear on women’s property rights.

Ahmad said women have increasingly filed complaints since the legislation was approved. “This was not the case 10 years back, but now such numbers go up each passing year,” said the assistant divisional commissioner, who has been serving in Kashmir’s revenue department for 23 years.

But social activists say women in Kashmir have a long way to go in fighting social prejudices against them.

“For example, when it comes to decision-making in a household, men continue to call the shots. Women are not yet in a position to assert themselves,” said Abdul Rashid Hanjoora, a prominent rights activist.

The 2011 census reflected the continued preference for boys over girls among Kashmiris, with the child sex ratio falling from 964 girls per 1000 boys in 2001 to 862 girls per 1000 boys in 2011. The national average in India is 940 girls per 1000 boys.

Libyan writer Aicha Almagrabi says women were part of Libya’s revolution but seen no political benefits from their participation. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
TRIPOLI, Dec 19 2013 (IPS)

Unless immediate changes are enforced, Libya is heading towards an “Afghan” model regarding women´s rights, Aicha Almagrabi, a Libyan writer and senior women rights activist, told IPS from her residence in Tripoli.

Women who fight for their rights in Libya “are constantly insulted, harassed and threatened,” lamented the 57-year-old university professor, who also chairs the Organisation for the Defence of Freedom of Thought.

Almagrabi studied philosophy in Libya and France and is the author of four books of poetry, a novel and a play which has just been published in Arabic. She´s currently working on three other books, a task which she combines with her activism and lessons on “Philosophy of the Plastic Arts”.

Q: Last October marked two years since the overthrow and brutal killing of Muammar Gaddafi. What has changed for Libyan women since then?

A: Things have changed but not for the better, and we´ve lost the few rights we had. As an example, polygamy is still common currency in Libya but, at least, a man needed his wife´s approval to marry a second wife under Gaddafi (1969-2011). That is no longer required.

Actually, reviewing the law on polygamy was the first thing Mahmoud Jibril (head of the National Transitional Council) mentioned in his famous speech at the end of the (2011) war, even before talking about reconstruction or rebuilding civil society…

Changes? Libyan women were handed over as spoils of war.

At a street level, when women protest they face a lot of violence. Women advocating their rights are constantly insulted, threatened and harassed. We were part of the revolution, we had our own female martyrs, but we didn´t get any political benefits out of it.

Q: But some women do hold government positions today, don´t they?

A: They do, but they´re struggling to keep their seats. Their parties used them for mere electoral purposes. In the Committee of 60 (the group to be set up to write Libya´s constitution) there are only six seats for women.

One of the members of the General National Congress (the Libyan legislature) even suggested measures to prevent men and women from sharing the same space during meetings. Some figures are also eloquent: 90 percent of teachers are women but only two percent have reached the decision-making level.

Q: Nonetheless, politics seemingly play a lesser role compared to that of Libya´s mufti (religious high authority), Sadeq al Ghariani. Many say he is the country’s de facto leader.

A: The mufti holds religious power and is also backed by both the political and military bodies. They want Sharia (Islamic) law to be at the core of the penal code and the future constitution.

What they want to implement is actually based on their own interpretation of the Quran, so we could say that it´s more dangerous than the holy book. There´s always been a lot of talk about Sharia but few seem to notice that there are many versions of it: do we want the Iranian one? The Afghan? Maybe the Moroccan?

One of their main goals is to control women through their own vision of the Quran; that´s one of the reasons it is mandatory to keep religion separate from politics.

Girls at school are now forced to wear the hijab (a headscarf that covers women’s hair and necks but not their faces) and the mufti is also campaigning for all women to always cover their hair.

I´m a professor at Zaytuna University (in Tripoli), and I´m the only one who doesn´t cover her hair. The rest of my female colleagues wear either hijab or niqab (a headscarf and veil which reveals only the eyes). Their number is growing not because of the law – it´s more about group pressure.

Q: There are also rumours about a new fatwa (Islamic ruling) to be enforced from January 2014, according to which women won´t be able to travel across the country without a muharram (male companion).

A: It wouldn´t surprise me at all. I live outside the city, and on Feb. 13 I was stopped by a group of armed men on my way to work. They held me at gunpoint for an hour and a half because I had no muharram travelling with me. I took the issue to the media and it got the attention of the general public. On Mar. 14 we organised a protest called “the march for the dignity of women”. As usual, we were insulted, beaten and harassed.

Q: Is increasing violence in the country the most pressing problem for Libyan women today?

A: It´s just one among several. Women are limited by strong domestic ties. Besides, the streets are not safe for them. There are many street assaults and even kidnappings, but there´s still no visible will to grant women rights in the new constitution.

A low level of participation in civil society is also a big issue. We were very strong at the beginning (of the 2011 revolution) but growing pressure led to a decline in that strength since the end of the war.

Today we are very disappointed because we also took part in the revolution and now they want to change our ideals of freedom and justice through fatwas and religious speeches which have a very strong influence among the new generations.

Even Gaddafi switched to religion back in the 1980s when he realised that Islam could be an effective tool to gain greater influence over people. However, the lack of rights and freedom during his rule pushed many to more extreme positions, such as the Muslim Brotherhood or the Jihadists.

Q: What can help Libyan women in such a difficult scenario?

A: Even in the unlikely case that we finally get a constitution based on human rights, we would also need to conduct another revolution to change the mindset of Libyan women.

Nevertheless, a key question is to break the militia rule as well as that of all armed groups outside the umbrella of the national army and police before the constitution is written. If that doesn´t happen, we´ll be heading towards an “Afghan model” in women´s rights.

The burden of domestic chores and the lack of flexible work schedules limit women’s access to management-level positions in state enterprises in Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Ivet González
HAVANA, Jul 18 2013 (IPS)

Despite the progress made by Cuban women in education, where they account for 64 percent of university graduates, they continue to have a limited presence in management positions.

“We still face many barriers in access to management-level and executive jobs,” Mirtha Reina Reyes, head of the legal department for the state Construction Enterprise Group in Havana, told IPS.

The 44-year-old lawyer took her current job in 2008 as a way of working closer to home so that she could devote more time to her youngest son, who has Down’s syndrome. “I never imagined that I would be in industry,” said Reyes, who previously worked in a courtroom.

“What is hardest for women is the high cost that comes with being in management jobs,” she said.

She added that women “are too tied down to domestic work, even if they don’t have children or elderly family members to take care of.”

Extended workdays (longer than the regular eight-hour day and sometimes involving weekends), a need for strategies to gain respect as managers or executives, and an excessive burden of domestic chores are among the principal hurdles identified by women managers studied by psychologist Dalia Virgilí.

She is one of the few researchers who use a gender-based approach in the unexplored world of the Cuban state-run business enterprise, currently comprising 2,250 companies, according to 2012 figures from the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI).

“There are major inequalities between men and women in the business world, at the executive level and at all other levels,” Virgilí told IPS.

“Women pay higher costs; they face conflicts because they are women, and they are forced to find strategies for keeping their jobs,” she said.

“This is a level to which everyone wants access,” she said. After women gained ground in the world of academia and research, they began to move up in the country’s public enterprises.

These companies, especially in productive areas and tourism, represent the best employment opportunities in Cuba’s depressed economy. In these sectors, workers who have gone through the “sistema de perfeccionamiento empresarial” or “business improvement system” receive performance-based pay and better bonuses.

The system, implemented since last decade with the aim of increasing productivity, autonomy and efficiency, was revised as part of the current economic reforms, which include a focus on giving a boost to state enterprises, according to excerpts published from the latest session of parliament.

Despite the limits they still face, five state companies that are implementing the system in the municipality of Isla de la Juventud – the second largest island in the Cuban archipelago – achieved productivity levels in 2011 that enabled them to pay monthly salaries of more than 550 Cuban pesos (about 22 dollars).

That year, the average monthly salary nationwide was 455 Cuban pesos, an indicator that rose slightly – to 466 pesos – at the end of 2012, according to ONEI. The highest salaries are paid in the construction sector.

While men and women are supposed to receive equal pay, activists and experts warn that in practice women tend to receive lower wages, because they tend to miss work more often to take care of their children and older relatives. They also have less access to high-income jobs.

The International Labour Organisation reported a reduction of the gender-based salary gap between 2008 and 2011 in countries where statistics were available, which did not include Cuba. However, this reduction was not always caused by better conditions for women; sometimes it was due to fewer men obtaining jobs due to the global crisis, the ILO reported.

“When Cuban women obtain business management positions, they and their families are economically empowered,” Virgilí said. “The potential of women in that sector is not being fully exploited, even though they graduate from their higher education studies with better grades than their male counterparts.”

Cuba’s public enterprises need to make changes to fully incorporate women, she said. “We find women in an identity crisis because they feel like they need to become men when they become managers and executives, and they encounter serious difficulties in reconciling their work and home lives,” she added.

The changes that she proposed include: less masculinised management styles, a ban on the extended workday, advocating women for management jobs, gender training, and recreational activities for personnel that include families.

In addition, more changes are needed for working toward gender equality within families, changing sexist mentalities, and ensuring better services for the care of children and the elderly, Virgilí said.

But not all women managers have the same story.

Consuelo Díaz, an oil industry manager, told IPS that she experienced “certain moments” of discrimination when she started her business career. “But following my own firm ideas, without losing sensitivity or respect, day after day gave me key elements for success.

“I’m very demanding when it comes to quality work performance, but I never allow mistreatment or rudeness. I have never used profanity in addressing my workers,” said Díaz, an economist who has worked for almost 30 years in different management jobs in a liquefied gas plant, where most of the employees are men.

Two Saudi Arabian women’s rights activists are filing an appeal on Friday after being sentenced to 10 months in prison for helping a woman who had allegedly been abused by her husband.

On Jun. 15, Wajeha Al-Huwaider and Fawzia Al-Oyouni were convicted by a district court in Al-Khobar of “takhbib”, an element of shari’a law that states they incited a woman to defy her husband and supported a wife without her husband’s knowledge. A two-year travel ban will follow their prison term.

Saudi Arabia follows conservative interpretations of Islam that often place tight restrictions on women’s rights. Credit: Retlaw Snellac/CC by 2.0

The women came to the assistance of a Canadian woman, Nathalie Morin, who called Al-Huwaider asking for help after being locked in a room by her husband without adequate food or water.

But as the women approached her house they were ambushed and arrested, Suad Abu-Dayyeh, programme consultant on Middle East and North Africa for Equality Now, told IPS. Equality Now, an international human rights organisation, is calling on supporters to send letters in preparation for the appeal deadline on Friday, Jul. 12.

“They did not conspire to turn Nathalie against her husband or attempt to convince her to abandon him. In fact, they have never met her,” Abu-Dayyeh told IPS.

Abu-Dayyeh believes the allegations against the women are false and that Saudi Arabia is instead cracking down on the two women for their history of human rights activism.

“The Saudi government has clearly created a scenario whereby Fawzia and Wajeha, brave women who wanted to help another woman in need, were arrested for the activism they carry out,” Abu-Dayyeh said.

“These two women have been activists for a long time, and the Saudi government has been keen to silence them for a long time. They are now being made an example of to ensure that other activists don’t speak out either,” Abu-Dayyeh added.

Al-Huwaider and Al-Oyouni have been active in a number of human and women’s campaigns in Saudi Arabia, including Women2Drive, which encouraged women to defy Saudi Arabia’s ban on women driving.

In a YouTube video filmed on Women’s Day in 2008, Al-Huwaider is seen driving around an empty countryside and talking to online supporters from the driver’s seat. Saudi Arabia follows very conservative interpretations of Islamic law that forbids women from driving.

Last year, Al-Huwaider was listed as number 82 on Arabian Business’ list of the 100 most powerful Arab women, but she was missing from the list this year. She is also the co-founder of Association for the Protection and Defence of Women’s Rights in Saudi Arabia."[Wajeha Al-Huwaider and Fawzia Al-Oyouni] are being made an example of to ensure that other activists don't speak out."
-- Suad Abu-Dayyeh

“These two women are being persecuted for their work on human rights and women’s rights,” Joe Stork, deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa division at Human Rights Watch, told IPS. “It’s not a criminal offence.”

The application of “takhbib”, where a man or woman interferes with a marriage or engagement, turning one spouse against another, is curious in this case, and it is possible that it is being used to mask what authorities see as the real crime: Al-Huwaider’s and Al-Oyouni’s activism.

“It seems a little unusual from the point of view of classical Islamic law, which may not line up with current Saudi practice… takhbib is more usually associated with seducing a woman to leave or divorce her husband, or marry somebody unauthorised,” Marion Katz, associate professor in the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies department at New York University, told IPS.

When Al-Huwaider was first questioned over a year ago about the incident, the questions authorities asked were mainly about her work as a human and women’s rights activist, Stork said.

The success of Friday’s appeal, based on Saudi Arabia’s track record, seems unlikely, Stork said.

“I wouldn’t count on it,” Stork said. “[Saudi Arabia] has made a decision to really stamp out human rights activism.”

On the ground in Saudi Arabia, gaining support is difficult for Al-Huwaider and Al-Oyouni, as women cannot speak out freely in the country and the government controls the media.

“The rights of women and girls are often deeply compromised,” Abu-Dayyeh said. “In Saudi Arabia, there are no civil society organisations that can pick up such issues.”

Despite recent small glimmers of positive developments to improve and expand the rights of women in Saudi Arabia, including sending its first female athlete, Sarah Attar, to the Olympic Games in London last year and giving girls in private schools the right to play sports, as well as allowing women to ride bikes, the case of the two activists is a step backwards for the Kingdom.

“Saudi Arabia still needs to do a lot more to ensure that women and girls are protected and that their fundamental human rights are safeguarded,” Abu-Dayyeh stated, pointing out, “Allowing this to happen would benefit the entire society.”

Ultra-Orthodox worshipper Jenny Menashe argues with Rabbi Nahum Weiss. Credit: Pierre Klochendler/IPS

By Pierre Klochendler
JERUSALEM, Jun 12 2013 (IPS)

The struggle for gender equality and Jewish pluralism took a highly symbolic turn on Sunday at the Western Wall, Judaism’s most revered site and emblem of unity, as a group of women known as “Women of the Wall” prayed legally and in a way they saw fit.

For 24 years, the Women of the Wall, a Jewish feminist group, have demanded the right to carry and read aloud the Holy Book of Judaism at the Western Wall (“Kotel”, in Hebrew) while wrapping themselves in prayer shawls, donning phylacteries and wearing skullcaps.

According to the Jewish Orthodox Law, only men may don the Tallith, the Tefilin and the Kippa and read the Torah aloud while praying during religious ceremonies. As such, the women’s demand is anathema to Jewish Orthodoxy, Israel’s prevailing stream of Judaism.

The conservatives, reformist, progressive and liberal movements with which the Women of the Wall are affiliated, though prominent in the United States, are a minority in Israel.

The Kotel’s esplanade on Sunday resembled a fortified battlefield, with two opposing camps deeply divided on religious duties and gender rights readying themselves for yet another showdown."It's a shame we're relegated to pray like lepers."
-- Ya'ara Nissan

Approximately 300 women, who intended to mark the first day of the Jewish month of Tamuz in full regalia, fought their way through a crowd of similar size of infuriated ultra-Orthodox men.

“These women want to tear Judaism apart. Secular Jews wouldn’t dare falsifying the word of God, but these women, they change Judaism from within,” warned Nahum Weiss, rebbe of a Talmudic school.

Hundreds of police officers – at least two per woman – were deployed between the two camps to prevent the violence that characterised the previous monthly prayer, when Yeshiva boys and seminary girls hurled garbage, diapers and eggs at the Women of the Wall.

This time, men let loose a flood of abusive invectives against the women: “Go pray with the Muslims!”; “Go home to America!”; and “You don’t belong here!”

Jenny Menashe, from the group Women for the Wall, the Women of the Wall’s Orthodox alter ego and whose motto is “preserving the sanctity of the wall”, called on fellow male coreligionists to “allow women to handle these women”.

Placards read, “You make up a new religion, built a new wall!” The group Women of the Wall responded with an Orthodox Hassidic hymn, “The whole world is a narrow bridge; above all, don’t be afraid.”

Policewomen escorted the women to the Kotel’s female section, where they were kept behind barriers to avoid further conflict with Orthodox worshippers. A prayer-like lamentation arouse from the male section to cover the women’s prayers. To practice their faith at the Kotel, men have at their disposal a space twice as large as the women’s.

“It’s a shame we’re relegated to pray like lepers,” deplored Ya’ara Nissan, “It shows what happen to women when they get out of the kitchen.”

A turning point

Two months ago, as if abiding by Orthodox edicts, the police would arrest women for praying at the Kotel in their own way. But on Apr. 25, the Women of the Wall won a historic victory in the long struggle for recognition of their practises and against the Orthodox authorities in charge of prayer rules at the holy site.

Judging that their unorthodox behaviour does not disturb the peace and that, on the contrary, ultra-Orthodox Jews are those who cause disorder, the Jerusalem District Court ruled that the Women of the Wall could pray at the wall.

Judge Moshe Sobel, an Orthodox Jew himself, wrote in his decision that the Women of the Wall’s practices constitute neither a violation of “local custom” nor a provocation.

The court also ruled out police interpretations of a previous Supreme Court ruling from 2003, stating that women are neither forbidden from holding their own prayer services at the Kotel nor required instead to congregate at the nearby Robinson’s Arch.

“Today the Women of the Wall liberated the Western Wall for the entire Jewish people,” clamoured Anat Hoffman, the organisation’s chairwoman.

In response to the court ruling, Western Wall Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz protested, “I implore the authorities as well as the silent majority who care deeply for the Kotel to prevent extremists from turning it into a site of antagonism between brothers.”

On Sunday, the ultra-Orthodox rabbis called for married and seasoned men to demonstrate their opposition to the Women of the Wall, instructing the hot-tempered single pupils to remain in their Talmudic schools, so as not to turn the protest into yet another unmannerly and disgraceful brawl.

But instead of the thousands expected, only hundreds answered the call.

By and large, the prayer service was peaceful. A few eggs landed at the feet of the Women of the Wall’s male supporters. “They planned a demonstration of force and demonstrated their weakness,” noted one.

“They’re getting used to us,” Hoffman observed cautiously. “The Kotel is a place for all communities and streams of Judaism,” declared spokeswoman Shira Preuce, adding, “The Orthodox Rabbinate fears women empowerment, fears changes.”

A shifting political balance

Indeed, Orthodox Judaism is gradually losing power in Israel.

The political landscape is now such that the Orthodox lobby at the Knesset is unusually weak, and ultra-Orthodox legislators sit in the opposition with liberal, progressive and Arab parties. The relationship between state and synagogue is now shifting in favour of more progressive Jewish currents.

A draft conscription law could break the ultra-orthodox Jews’ longstanding exemption from serving in the Israeli army, while non-Orthodox rabbis now receive state salaries and Jewish Israelis are allowed to marry under any rabbinical council within Israel.

Ndomi Magareth, sows bean seeds on her small piece of land in Njombe. The lives of Cameroon's women could change for the better now that 20 women were elected to the country's upper house of parliament. Credit: Monde Kingsley Nfor/IPS

By Dorine Ekwe
YAOUNDE, Jun 6 2013 (IPS)

Marlyse Aboui, a 40-year-old nurse, has still not gotten over the astonishment she felt when she heard that Cameroon’s President Paul Biya had nominated her to the senate.

“I feel like I am in a dream that I will wake up from at any minute. When I first learnt that I had been appointed to the senate, I told myself that it couldn’t be true. I asked myself what I could possibly have done to receive this high appointment from the president,” she told IPS.

As the local party chair of the National Alliance for Democracy and Progress, an opposition party in eastern Cameroon, Aboui is one of only 20 women in the 100-member Cameroonian senate. Seventy senators, 17 of whom are women, were elected on Apr. 14 in the country’s first-ever senatorial elections. Biya was required to nominate the remaining 30 senators, and included in his nominations were three women.

“It is a great honour that I truly appreciate,” Aboui said.“Women can contribute much to politics. We have often seen that some conflicts are narrowly avoided thanks to their powers of persuasion." -- Justine Diffo

Nicole Okala Bilai, a senator from the ruling Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (CPDM), shared Aboui’s excitement. The female politician, who was elected in Mbagassina in central Cameroon, hopes to use her presence in the senate to radically reform this Central African nation’s schools.

Women’s rights organisations and politicians say that the appointment of women to the upper house of parliament was timely.

Yvonne Muma Bih, a national executive committee member of the main opposition party, the Social Democratic Front, is one politician who welcomed the appointments.

“The rise of women to this office offers some encouragement to those still suffering under the yoke of male domination, who believe that women cannot pursue political careers. We have done better than certain European democracies and this is something to be celebrated,” she told IPS.

The secretary general of CPDM, Jean Nkuete, told IPS “female candidates were strongly encouraged throughout the course of this election, not just to meet gender quotas, but mainly to highlight the place our party gives to women and to their vision.”

However, Justine Diffo, national co-ordinator of the NGO More Women in Politics Network, a support network for women’s political participation, told IPS “20 percent is inadequate.”

“Women can contribute much to politics. We have often seen that some conflicts are narrowly avoided thanks to their powers of persuasion. Why then deny them the 30 percent (women’s representation demanded by women’s groups)?”

According to Diffo, the only way to fully address women’s marginalisation “would have been for the president to nominate 15 women out of the 30 senators that he is mandated to appoint.”

However, the Association to Combat Violence Against Women believes there is reason to applaud the progress made.

In fact, Cameroon’s Electoral Code of Apr. 19, 2012 provides a way to reduce the existing gender gap in electoral contests, through various forms of affirmative action during the electoral processes. Articles 151, 164, 181, and 218 of the Electoral Code aim to increase women’s participation in politics.

A study by the National Institute of Statistics (INS), published on International Women’s Day, Mar. 8, pointed to a slight overall increase in the number of women in Cameroon’s national assembly.

According to the INS, between 1992 and 2002, the number of women in the national assembly dropped from 23 to 10 out of 180 members of parliament. However, between 2002 and 2012, the number of female members of parliament increased from 10 to 25.

At the local level, between 2007 and 2012 out of 360 mayors only 24 were women. Furthermore, Cameroon has six female ministers of state out of 30. There are also four female director generals in state-owned entities.

Claude Abe, a sociology lecturer at the Catholic University of Central Africa in Yaounde, the capital city of this country of 20 million people, explained the causes of poor female representation in decision-making positions.

“Structurally, Cameroonian society sits between tradition and modernity. As a result, there are many persistent and long-standing elements from tradition that continue to play a part in our society,” he told IPS.

“There is one category of women who remain stumbling blocks for other women – they are not prepared to vote for a woman simply because she is a woman,” he said.

He added that many men still believed that a woman’s place was in the home, while a number of women still believed that they could not play a role in politics.

In addition, he said, “Politics also requires a lot of money. Invariably, the majority of women are financially dependent on men and this limits their ability to get involved in politics.”

Latin American states are still failing to provide guarantees for women’s educational, sexual and reproductive rights, according to activists from different regions of the world meeting in the Mexican capital.

“Pending issues include economics, education, violence and sexual and reproductive health,” María Oviedo, the Argentine training manager for the Latin American and Caribbean Committee for the Defence of Women’s Rights (CLADEM), told IPS. “Enforcement of the laws is the weakest link. Governments lack a comprehensive policy to address these issues.”

Oviedo, together with dozens of women’s rights defenders from Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa, attended the May 7-10 seminar “Incidencia en red: el desafío que los estados cumplan con los derechos humanos de las mujeres” (Networking: Challenging States to Respect Women’s Human Rights).

CLADEM, founded in 1987, launched a campaign in 2011 with the slogan “For a state that fulfils its duties towards women’s human rights. The time has arrived!” Financed by the European Union and the Dutch organisation Oxfam Novib, the campaign will conclude in 2015.

In Latin America, indicators on primary school education, employment and incomes have improved over the past decade, but there are still significant gaps between the status of women and men in this region with a highly patriarchal culture.

There are some 163 million economically active men and 113 million women in the region. By 2020 these figures are forecast to rise to 188 million and 141 million respectively, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

There is an upward trend for women’s employment, and ECLAC estimates that by 2020, 56 percent of women will be working outside the home, compared to 52 percent in 2010.

“Inequality and injustice underlie day-to-day violence,” Gabriela Delgado, of the human rights programme at the state National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), told IPS. “The bottleneck for women’s struggles is the justice system. This means that structural changes are needed.”

Among the states’ pending debts in this area are legislative reforms to establish formal equality under the law, and the enforcement of policies to achieve the goals of access to economic resources, violence-free lives, sexual and reproductive rights and non-sexist education to combat discrimination.

Activists have identified laws that tolerate marital rape and other kinds of rape, endorse different minimum ages at which men and women can marry, or grant greater rights to men on marriage, in countries like Argentina, Bolivia, Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua and Panama.

Between 17 and 53 percent of women in the region are victims of violence, and this scenario is exacerbated because 92 percent of reported crimes go unpunished.

And abortion largely remains illegal in Latin America.

In the view of Rosa Cobo, an academic at Spain’s public University of A Coruña, a mixture of age-old forms of violence are reemerging, together with new phenomena linked to the illegal economy and organised crime.

“We are living in a world characterised by geopolitical, economic, political and patriarchal disorder, which produces excessive violence that always affects the most disadvantaged and the weakest sectors,” Cobo told IPS.

She cited as examples the femicides (gender-based murders of women) in Guatemala and Ciudad Juárez, on the border between Mexico and the United States; gender violence in armed conflicts; the trafficking of women for sexual exploitation; and the sale of women into marriage in Asia.

The activists called for guarantees from states for equality between men and women and girls and boys, through the elimination of discriminatory rules and practices, and the promotion of equality and shared responsibilities for domestic chores, in order to eradicate poverty and usher in a life free from violence for women and girls.

They also called for sexual and reproductive autonomy for women, access to reproductive health resources and services, and secular, intercultural, non-sexist and anti-discriminatory education.

“There is a worrying debt to women that is going to take years to overcome,” Oviedo said.

CLADEM, which is based in Lima, launched a campaign in 2009 for non-sexist and anti-discriminatory education to promote education based on respect, equality and cooperation between the sexes.

“Isn’t it likely that there is a relationship between this extreme violence against women and the progress made in winning women’s rights in recent years?” Cobo asked.

This kind of violence “shows a compulsion to control, in response to the social reality that criticises the status of women. Violence has been displaced from known spaces to the unknown, so that men are now killing women whom they do not know,” she said.

Nafis Sadik, renowned women's right advocate, and Cathleen Miller discuss Miller's book about Sadik, "Champion of Choice". Credit: Joan Erakit/IPS

By Joan Erakit
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 24 2013 (IPS)

Once dubbed “the most powerful woman in the world” by the London Times, Nafis Sadik learned at an early age that persistence leads to opportunities for change – and backlash from the Pope.

“Champion of Choice”, a book by acclaimed author Cathleen Miller, details the life and times of Sadik, the extraordinary women’s advocate who served as executive director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) from 1987 to 2000.

A dynamic collaboration between Miller and Sadik, “Champion of Choice” stands as an example of dedication and the power of the human spirit. The journey began 12 years ago in a quest for a story that led Miller all over the world.

“The main thing that connected me to her was my tremendous respect for her,” Miller told IPS about her decision to write a book about Sadik. She emphasised the importance of spending time with Sadik’s family, the local communities with whom she had worked and the women whose stories remained poignant contributions to “Champions of Choice”.

“People are not going to open up and tell you their life’s story over the telephone, to a stranger,” said Miller. “It was just about spending time with people and getting them to trust you, getting them to tell you things that were personal and sometimes very painful.”Sadik fought tirelessly for women's rights and opened a global conversation on family planning.

On Mar. 20, UNFPA, Friends of UNFPA and the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) hosted a book launch at the Ford Foundation in Manhattan to celebrate both author and subject.

The importance of advocacy

Sadik’s work focused heavily on the health of women and girls. She fought tirelessly for women’s rights in sexual and reproductive health and opened up a global conversation on family planning.

As an undersecretary general at the United Nations, Sadik noted that her position gave her “a platform to really say what I always wanted to say about the rights of women, about sexual and reproductive health – including family planning – and how important it was and is for women to be able to exercise those rights”.

Not to be outdone by her male counterparts, Sadik became well known for her outspoken views and disarming clairvoyance. Advocating for her fellow women to advance themselves within the UNFPA, Sadik changed how the organisation was set up.

When she joined, she set up a task force to examine how women could advance in the organisation. “I let it be known in the office that if a position was open for advancement, I would consider both women and men,” Sadik described. “For a while, if they were equal, I would promote the woman.”

Advancing not only UNFPA but also the conversation surrounding global health, Sadik defied stereotypes and set out on a historic mission that fought to give women control over their bodies.

In 1994, Sadik was appointed secretary general of the International Conference on Population Development (ICPD) in Cairo that brought together world leaders, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and activists to discuss population development and human rights. She called her work there “my best achievement”, describing, “what I did was get people to the negotiating table”.

Spearheading an initiative for marriage equality and the empowerment of women, Sadik believed that when a woman has the right to reproductive health and the power to decide what’s best for her and her family, population management and sustaining global development become possible.

“Of course couples should make decisions together, but in the end it should be the woman who should be able to decide about her own life and about her own health and about her own needs,” Sadik said. This, however, “is not the case for the majority of women in the developing countries”.

A special narrative

With her many contributions and the occasional controversy – the Vatican opposed Sadik’s stand on sexual and reproductive health – Sadik’s story found its own special voice through Miller.

“This kind of narrative story that’s very much about storytelling – and very intimate – had the power to affect people in a different way than a book that’s historical or policy driven,” Miller told IPS.

Asking tough questions and relying on Sadik to recount stories, Miller wrote from a place of learning. The outcome was an incredible account of advocacy. In a era when the world is driven by instant gratification and immediate results, Sadik remains one of the most dedicated activists for women’s health and rights, an inspiring story and legacy in her own right.

“The main thing I learned from Dr. Sadik is that you have to have courage,” Miller shared. “Not just courage, but the determination to keep after a task or a change for decades.”

U.N. Human Rights Council president Laura Dupuy. Credit: United Nations

By Gustavo Capdevila
GENEVA, Dec 14 2012 (IPS)

The first woman to preside over the United Nations Human Rights Council, Uruguayan diplomat Laura Dupuy, has made it with flying colours through one of the periods of greatest tension and conflict since the council replaced the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in 2006.

It has fallen to Dupuy to preside over regular and special sessions this year with heated debates over the dramatic events in Arab countries like Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and especially Syria.

The Permanent Representative of Uruguay to the United Nations Office at Geneva has won recognition from her colleagues and from non-governmental organisations for getting occasionally stormy sessions back on track.

Dupuy told IPS that being a woman was not an obstacle to fulfilling her role, which concludes Dec. 31. “Luckily I did not encounter hurdles,” she said. “In fact, I think that countries that could have put difficulties in my way were very careful not to do so.”

Q: What reactions have you observed since the annual sessions commenced last March?

A: It’s possible that some people had doubts about what might happen with a president they did not know. But they soon saw that I stuck to the rules and was firm. After that they respected me.

Q: But did you run across any stumbling blocks because you are a woman?

A: I had some problems, but…I don’t think they were very serious. The most difficult moment was when we discussed the case of Bahrain, because there were protests about my intervention and complaints about the intimidation being suffered there by human rights defenders who attended the debate in Geneva for the Universal Periodic Review on the situation in that Arab country.

Q: Were there any other tough times?

A: Yes, but they weren’t personal. What I have unfortunately seen in the chamber is that some countries, basically the Islamic nations, still have a fairly retrograde discourse. In fact, I am worried that there may be a regression with respect to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, approved in 1948.

I am also concerned that something similar may happen among the Islamic states in regard to the Vienna Declaration, adopted in 1993 by the World Conference on Human Rights, which reaffirmed that women’s rights are human rights.

Q: Have you noted this regressive tendency at any other time?

A: We see it when they continue to question or attempt to limit the scope of the new Working Group on Discrimination against Women in law and in practice. The fact that, although they did not vote against it, they expressed discontent with the new mandate, is an indication of the situation.

Q: Do you think this bias still persists?

A: It does. Unfortunately, it is being confirmed. For instance, in Egypt now, with the draft constitution. The Egyptian expert has just told me that the paragraph referring to non-discrimination for any reason, including gender, has been eliminated from the draft. This is serious. It is a central principle of human rights.

Q: Is this issue restricted to a single region?

A: No, it also arises in the declaration of human rights approved in November by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The text was negotiated merely between governments, without consulting civil society, and there was a major problem with women’s rights in the drafting of the text.

United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay was not satisfied. But after the ASEAN declaration was approved, another resolution was added, saying that the declaration would be implemented in accordance with the 1948 Universal Declaration.

We hope that this will be the case, and that as matters develop they will comply with this aspect. To sum up, from the point of view of women’s rights, I think there is still much that remains to be done.

Q: What have been the highlights of your presidency of the Council?

A: The period has been marked, unfortunately, by all the serious and urgent human rights situations that the Council has examined, with the willingness to listen to all the parties, including the voices that are often silenced, such as the victims of rights abuses.

In future periods, the U.N. Human Rights Council will have to discuss the best ways to tackle these crises, and ways to prevent them.

Q: Are there any indications of how the Council can deal with the problem?

A: When the Council reviewed its work and operations in 2011, among other issues it addressed the ways in which it can deal with serious cases of human rights violations.

Among other proposals, the draft suggested establishing mechanisms that would act as external, objective and independent triggers, in the case of urgent situations. The initiative was discarded, and as a result the Council continues to face critical situations mainly through the means of holding special sessions of its members.

Q: What results have these special sessions had?

A: To an extent, the special sessions have proved quite successful at dealing with urgent situations. We have always managed to reach the minimum number of 16 member states to sign the request to convene such a session, as seen by the 19 special sessions held so far.

However, it must be acknowledged that the results of these sessions always depend on negotiations.

Q: This year, what stands out is that the situation in Syria called for four special sessions of the Council.

A: Some people may think that holding four special sessions did not really help to improve the situation on the ground in Syria.

However, by holding so many special sessions as well as an urgent debate, the Council has fulfilled its political responsibilities, keeping a close watch on events and sending a commission of inquiry charged with gathering information and evidence, with a view to potential future criminal proceedings in respect to the current conflict.

Q: What are your conclusions about this case?

A: After many months of crisis and armed conflict, there is mounting pressure not only to come up with political solutions, but also to hold accountable those responsible for crimes against human rights and against international humanitarian law.

As a consequence, the priority that emerges is a political solution with peace, justice and an end to impunity.

Excerpt:

By Julia Kallas
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 11 2012 (IPS)

Today, approximately 125 countries have laws that penalise domestic violence – a great advance from a decade ago. Yet 603 million women around the world still live in countries where domestic violence is not a crime, and up to seven in ten women are targeted for physical or sexual violence, or both.

One organisation that has worked for the past two years to protect and empower women is U.N. Women, the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. Lakshmi Puri, deputy executive director of the organisation, described what it has achieved so far.

Lakshmi Puri, assistant secretary-general of the United Nations and deputy executive director of U.N. Women. Credit: Ryan Brown/U.N. Women

”U.N. Women is today a coherent, unified organisation that has achieved concrete results that go from…enhancing women’s voices in decision-making in communities, to leveraging and influencing national and international planning processes,” Puri told IPS.

But as the statistics indicate, much more remains to be done before women’s rights are fully realised. Puri spoke to IPS correspondent Julia Kallas about the achievements, challenges, expectations and future of U.N. Women. Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: U.N. Women turns two in January. What have been some high points since the founding of U.N. Women?

A: U.N. Women has heavily emphasised increasing women’s political participation. Women must have a say in the decisions that affect their lives and their communities. Our efforts in 14 countries contributed directly to five countries’ increasing the number of women elected to office. And in one year the number of countries with women comprising at least 30 percent of parliament has risen from 27 to 33.

We are also actively supporting women’s representation at the local level. In India, for example, U.N. Women is training 65,000 elected women representatives in village councils to become more effective leaders.

To enhance women’s participation in peacebuilding and post-conflict recovery, U.N. Women has successfully advocated for an agreement to earmark at least 15 percent of all U.N.-managed peacekeeping funds for programmes on gender equality.

Women’s economic empowerment is another key area of our work. Financial security gives women the independence they need to take informed decisions for themselves and their families. So our interventions try to enhance governments’ abilities to improve women’s access to assets, markets, services and decent work.

Ending violence against women remains a top priority. It is a scourge of pandemic proportions, affecting up to 70 percent of women and girls. U.N. Women is working in 85 countries to prevent violence in the first place, to end impunity for these crimes, and to expand essential services to survivors.

Gender equality and women’s empowerment remains a universal challenge and requires actions by all. We know there is still a long road ahead, but we are on the right track. We are working with and in all countries to carry out our universal mandate and we are constantly making progress.

Q: What do you consider the greatest challenges for U.N. Women and women around the world next year and beyond?

A: Many obvious gaps remain in protecting women’s human rights and in advancing their rightful role in development, peace and security. In 2012, our priorities were to make a renewed push for women’s economic empowerment and political participation.

In the months ahead, we will focus on ending violence against women. Next March, the focus of the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women will be to tackle violence against women and girls. Expectations are high for governments to agree on strengthened international frameworks to end violence against women and girls.

In this context, U.N. Women launched COMMIT, an initiative that encourages governments to implement international agreements on ending violence against women and commit to new, concrete steps to end it.

Funding is another challenge we face. Women still constitute a majority of the world’s poor. They are directly and indirectly affected by the financial and economic crisis, as is funding for U.N. Women and women’s organisations around the world. We need all donors to prioritise funding for gender equality and women’s empowerment at this critical time.

In addition to being the right thing to do, it is also the smart thing to do, as evidence shows that investing in women’s empowerment will have an exponential impact on social and economic development.

Q: As emerging economies such as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) countries grow in political and economic influence, how well have women’s rights kept pace with this development?

A: Some countries have shown deep commitment to gender equality and women’s empowerment and have adopted special policies and measures to rectify deep rooted poverty, customs- and tradition-related biases and gender stereotyping.

Yet we have seen that economic growth does not necessarily translate to greater gender equality. In middle income countries – including the BRICS – remain large numbers of poor people. A disproportionate majority of them are women. As a result, governments, including the BRICS, continue to proactively address this issue.

Q: What are your expectations for getting a comprehensive gender perspective into a post-2015 development framework and the Sustainable Development Goals that are currently being negotiated?

A: What we need is a truly transformative development agenda that can drive change on systemic issues and structural causes of discrimination, including unequal power relations, social exclusion and multiple forms of discrimination.

The framework should therefore focus on women’s rights, eliminating gender-based violence, promoting sexual and reproductive health and rights, access to essential infrastructure and services and political and economic empowerment – all in the broader context of poverty eradication.

The framework should also recognise that gender inequality is the mother of all inequalities. It is not yet clear what the format of the post-2015 development framework will be, but in any case, U.N. Women advocates for a strong focus on gender equality and women’s empowerment.

If we are about to turn a new leaf in terms of a more sustainable, equitable and people-centred development model and framework, we need to empower and fully tap the talent and potential of half of humanity.

Excerpt:

Most women in Cuba are unaware of the struggle it took to gain recognition of women’s rights. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Ivet González
HAVANA, Nov 28 2012 (IPS)

There are no purple billboards on city streets, and no public service announcements on television to mark the date. But many different voices in Cuba remember that this year marks the centennial of the birth of the local feminist movement, a platform for fighting for equality and against gender-based violence.

“On this 100th anniversary, we need to paint the island purple,” historian Julio César González Pagés told IPS, referring to the colour that symbolises feminism around the world.

Cuba does not have any self-described feminist organisations at this time, even though the feminist current of thought has its followers here and is studied in universities. The anniversary “is passing without much glory,” lamented González Pagés, who invited everyone to pay tribute to the Cuban women who stood up to fight for their rights in 1912, as well as those who have continued their legacy.

It was in November of 1912 that the Partido Popular Feminista (Feminist Popular Party) was born. And in December the Sufragistas Cubanas (Cuban Suffragists) and the Nacional Feminista (Feminist National) parties were founded, marking the start of a political movement that was aimed first and foremost at winning the vote for women. And other women’s rights associations continued to emerge.

The movement persevered until winning most of its demands, such as the 1917 parental rights law and the 1918 divorce law, which made Cuba the first Latin American country to legalise divorce. However, the right to vote was not fully exercised until 1934.

“Ideas about women’s emancipation had existed in the country since long before,” said González Pagés, coordinator of the Ibero-American Masculinity Network. “But they became more visible in 1912, when women came together in feminist organisations.”

“When we appropriate that philosophy, we can fight for equality and against gender-based violence,” the activist said this month during a series of concerts that are being held in eight provinces as part of a prevention campaign.

Between January and March of this year, González Pagés and singer Rochy Ameneiro led a tour through 11 Cuban provinces in an effort to fight violence in music. The tour, which was called “All Women Against the Current,” included concerts, workshops for art students, and visits to places that are important in the history of Cuban women.

Many Cuban feminists applauded the creation in July of a national network for connecting the efforts of people and institutions for gender equality. The idea came up during a talk sponsored by the Mirta Aguirre Department of Gender and Communication at the José Martí International Institute of Journalism.

In separate efforts throughout the year, various organisations, universities, media outlets, blogs and others have discussed the feminist movement in Cuba, which went into decline after 1939. In response to the debates over this date, writer Teresa Díaz Canals called for a moment of “collective reflection.”

“We have to come to an agreement and clarify that the history of women is not just the history of feminists,” she said in an interview with IPS. “We cannot toss out our legacy to the ‘mute ones,’ our mothers,” she said. For her, many people continue to confront machismo “quietly, without making any declaration of faith or winning any battles.”

National oblivion has thicker layers, which writer Inés María Martiatu tears apart as a way of vindicating the struggle of black women in Cuba.

“Ignorance about Afro-feminism in Cuba reduces the history of the movement to a certain era, and emphasises the leadership of middle- and upper-class white women,” she told IPS.

“When black and poor women are excluded or minimised, that history is incomplete,” said Martiatu, who is the co-author, along with Daysi Rubiera, of the compilation Afrocubanas: historia, pensamientos y prácticas culturales (Afro-Cuban Women: History, Ideas and Cultural Practices), published in 2011. The conditions they live in and their demands have been different, she said.

And other voices highlight the struggle of lesbians for their rights.

To fight against that oblivion, historian and researcher Raquel Vinat de la Mata has devoted many years of her life to highlighting the role of women in the 19th century. “It is painful that we still do not have a book about women’s history,” she lamented, holding an unpublished book about the biographies of outstanding Cuban women.

“The lack of information about the Cuban women’s movement and its actions has really hurt us,” she said. “People tend to think that we were just given all of our rights, and that is why many women do not do more to defend the ones they have,” said Vinat de la Mata, who said she has observed “a resurgence of machismo” in society today.

Cuban women earn the same wages as men, have access to free abortion on demand, and enjoy paid maternity leave and shared paternity, among other benefits. At the end of 2011, women held 43.3 percent of seats in parliament and 36.7 percent of leadership posts, and made up 61 percent of university students.

However, women workers face a double workday, given that they shoulder most domestic work, and they are a minority in jobs with high economic remuneration and decision-making power. And inequalities include the persistence of gender-based violence, although no statistics exist to reflect its magnitude.

After the decline of the first wave of feminism, which was described as liberal, the struggle slumped until it reappeared as part of the leftist guerrilla forces that won the 1959 revolution.

Vinat de la Mata recalls those years “very fondly,” when she was one of the anonymous protagonists of the “revolution within a revolution.”

She was referring to the emancipation of women within the socialist transformations that began at the time. In 1960, various organisations in the country merged to form the Federation of Cuban Women, the only legal group representing women in Cuba today.

Through the Federation, women have increased their participation in the public sphere, for example. In 1993, the Asociación de Mujeres Comunicadoras (Association of Women in Communication), Magín, was created, to work for gender awareness in the media. But it never received the official authorisation it requested, and was shut down in 1996.

“Feminist awareness should not be based solely on an organisation, but on each one of us,” Vinat de la Mata said. “It has cost those of us who are feminists today a lot of work to open the way,” she said, recalling the stigma that was associated with the term “feminist” until the 1980s, when studies on women and gender emerged in Cuba.

The families of thousands of girls and women who have disappeared in Mexico are spending everything they have in the search for their daughters – and for justice.

The families, who are mostly poor, face not only the steep legal costs involved, but also the negligence of justice system officials in Mexico when it comes to solving disappearances and murders of women.

The costs include the fees of lawyers and outside experts, appeals procedures, and travel expenses involved in the search for their daughters and the numerous visits to courtrooms or prosecutors’ offices.

To cap it all, some victims’ mothers have to pay for the meals and cell-phone bills of the judicial agents assigned to their case.

The outlay adds up to an average of 23,000 dollars per family – although the total can be higher depending on the complexity of the case and the length of the investigation, human rights defenders say.

The monetary cost of justice for women victims of violence “is very high and is invisible,” said lawyer Irma Villanueva, coordinator of the legal department of the Centre for Women’s Human Rights (CEDEHM) in the northern state of Chihuahua.

“No one talks, either, about the loss of employment, the expenses of food and transport, the mothers’ lack of care for their other children and grandchildren, as well as their physical and emotional exhaustion. All this remains unacknowledged,” said Villanueva.

The panorama is repeated virtually all over the country, where the disappearance of women, femicides (gender-related murders) and impunity are routine.

The National Citizen Observatory on Femicides (OCNF) reported that from January 2010 to June 2011, 1,235 women were killed in Mexico for gender-related reasons.

Between 2005 and 2011, in the state of Mexico, adjacent to the capital city and notorious for violence against women, the OCNF recorded 922 victims of femicide.

In Chihuahua, in 2010 alone there were 600 cases of femicide, according to civil society organisations. The state is home to Ciudad Juárez, on the border with the United States, regarded as the global capital of murders of women.

Villanueva said that for 2007 and 2008, the Office of the Special Prosecutor for Crimes of Violence Against Women had 17,700 case files under investigation, of which only 531 were forwarded to a judge.

“Most women who are victims of violence have no idea how to present a complaint; very few case files make any progress if they don’t know about legal procedures or how to keep track of the work of the public prosecution service, so they need lawyers to support them,” she said.

Nor can the women afford to follow up the procedures, so their cases are just left “on ice,” she said.

A bottomless barrel

Villanueva said that hiring a lawyer to work on bringing a gender violence case to prosecution costs between 6,000 and 7,800 dollars.

Yuridia Rodríguez, an OCNF defence lawyer, said that in the case of Nadia Alejandra Muciño, a femicide victim in the state of Mexico in 2004, seven appeals were presented, each costing 540 dollars, for a total amount of 3,780 dollars.

Muciño’s mother, María Antonia Márquez, said that in eight and a half years of seeking justice she has spent close to 23,000 dollars. And since she reported her daughter’s murder, she has travelled three times a week to Cuautitlán, Toluca or Tlanepantla, spending over 15 dollars a day on fares and food.

Moreover she had to pay 410 dollars to make copies of her daughter’s 3,600-page case file. “At first I hired two lawyers; I gave the first one an advance of 15,000 pesos (1,150 dollars) and the second 8,000 pesos (610 dollars). They both abandoned the case,” she said.

In another example, the mother of a 21-year-old young woman who disappeared in 2011 in another municipality of the state, who requested anonymity, said she has spent over 15,300 dollars in the past year and a half.

In addition to the costs of travelling to the Crime Victims Attention Units, to the interior of the country and even abroad to find her daughter, and the payments to an independent expert, the mother also had to pay 80 dollars a day for the food, gasoline and cell-phone bills of prosecution agents.

“When I saw no results, I hired a private detective who worked for two months, and I was paying him 1,000 pesos (80 dollars) a day, as well,” she complained.

Given the inaction by the authorities over the disappearance of Esmeralda Castillo Rincón on May 19, 2009 in Ciudad Juárez, her parents had to travel last March to the Federal District of the capital city, to look for their teenaged daughter.

The family sold hamburgers on the street to pay for the trip, as Castillo’s father, a cancer patient, lost his job because of the time he spent searching for his daughter, and the girl’s mother has been unable to find a job because of her age.

* This article was originally published by the Mexican news agency Comunicación e Información de la Mujer AC (CIMAC).

By Marianela Jarroud
SANTIAGO, Nov 9 2012 (IPS)

We must work “for all of the human rights of women,” not just sexual and reproductive rights, said Coca Trillini, describing the challenges facing the ecofeminist movement that she has embraced since becoming an activist in Católicas por el Derecho de Decidir (CDD – Catholics for Choice).

Dealing with its own contradictions, and understanding that social processes and changes move slowly, are the main challenges for ecofeminism at this time, Trillini told IPS.

The movement, which in her words combines “radical feminism with environmental consciousness,” works with the profound conviction that women’s oppression and the destruction of the planet arise from the same patriarchal system.

“Environmental awareness allows us to add the defence of environmental rights to feminism,” said Trillini, who sat down with IPS during a trip to Chile. The Argentine theologian is a member of the Latin American Network of Catholics for Choice, made up of 12 local CDD organisations of Catholic women who work for gender equity and women’s rights, combating religious fundamentalism.

“Ecofeminism is based on a radical defence of women’s rights, and environmental awareness.” Credit: Courtesy of Coca Trillini

Q: How is ecofeminism constructed?

A: With a radical defence of women’s rights, and environmental awareness. When I say “radical,” I mean the definition of feminism I was taught years ago, which means asking myself and others if we can recognise the occurrence of abuse and lack of recognition of women’s human rights.

If the answer is yes, the next question is whether you are willing to work for those rights so that all women and men can attain equality.

And if you ask the same questions about planet Earth, then that environmental awareness allows us to add the defence of environmental rights to feminism. That is how, in combination, we understand ecofeminism.

Q: Do you agree with those who regard the environmental and feminist movements as being among those who have done the most to promote social change in the 20th century?

A: Yes, I think so. And it’s not just me who says so, but a number of research studies, because in one way or another we have been able to shine a light on the areas where respect has been lacking.

In the case of women, it is simply because they are women. That is why we can talk of femicide (gender-related murder). And in the case of the environment, it is because no matter who comes after us, we are using all the water and rendering the land infertile. Here we can talk of ecocide (destruction of ecosystems).

In recent times, we were the ones who sounded the alarm in defence of the dignity of women and of the ecosystem. We brought together many voices, and at times led activism on day-to-day issues that needed to be denounced.

Q: What role has ecofeminism played in the social movements that are active in different countries?

A: We have supported the student protests in Chile, and have participated in the “indignados” (Occupy) movement and others. In every case, we have contributed not just theory but also concrete practices, taking to the streets and joining in the demands.

Sometimes, for a certain type of social movement to emerge, particular circumstances have to arise, but prior to that there has been an accumulation of reflection and synthesis coming from several converging lines. I dare say one of these is ecofeminism.

Q: What are the main challenges facing ecofeminism?

A: Our own contradictions and the need to understand that social processes and changes take time.

When I talk about contradictions, I mean that recently sectors have emerged that have tried to return to a far more essentialist discourse, and are trying to defend only the sexual and reproductive rights of women.

But we feminists do not agree with this. We continue to work for all of the human rights of women, which certainly include sexual and reproductive rights, as well as the right to decide whether to have an abortion.

On the other hand, we must understand that we are all bound by a patriarchal structure. I think progress is slow, and so is the road to awareness of the domination that enthrals us, but that we are not condemned to repeat.

What we are compelled to do constantly is to re-revise and deconstruct, and reconstruct taking the elements we regard as somehow being able to push us towards freedom and the defence of women’s rights.

No one changes overnight, certainly not by means of speeches and theories.

Q: What does feminist theology propose?

A: There is no single feminist theology. But there is a very simple definition that I like to use because I find it helps me: it’s theology that tries to reflect on the image that we have of what we call God.

Whatever that image may be, we have discovered that traditional theology has given women only the answers to questions we have never asked.

For instance, we ask ourselves about our relationship with God when we have to make choices in critical situations, because we are being violently attacked, and we are forced to believe in things that have nothing to do with our lives.

Historically, women have not been recognised as persons with rights, and capable of taking ethical decisions in life.

In the early history of the Catholic Church, there were even doubts as to whether women had souls. There is inequality, oppression and symbolic violence against women that feminist theologies have tried to deconstruct in order to find, through reconstruction, meaning in our daily life.

Q: You belong to the Catholics for Choice movement. What is it like to confront such a conservative tradition?

A: Our group does not exist to confront anyone, but to propose, to demand action by the state, and to defend people’s rights.

There are different theological views within the Catholic tradition – it is not monolithic. There is a lack of information among the faithful about being able to take decisions with freedom of conscience.

In Latin America, the Catholic Church and the state are intertwined, and this relationship was granted legitimacy by the constitutions adopted after the Spanish colonial period came to an end. Unfortunately, this relationship has conditioned our culture and exerts an influence beyond the personal choice of a particular religion.

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