Thursday, March 15, 2012

Women's Views on News

Women's Views on News

Human trafficking crackdown rescues 24,000 in China

Posted: 14 Mar 2012 02:00 PM PDT

Karen Whiteley
WVoN co-editor

A government crackdown on human trafficking in China has led to the rescue of some 24,000 women and children during 2011, say official government sources.

According to the country’s Public Security Ministry, police rescued 15,458 abducted women and 8,660 children in 3,195 raids against human trafficking gangs.

Human trafficking is a serious, widespread problem in China.  The government has no figures on the total number of abductions, but given the size of the country and its vast population, they are almost impossible to obtain on a national level.

However, China’s insistence, in 2009, that there were fewer than 2,500 cases of human trafficking each year certainly seems to have been an underestimate, if the latest  figures are anything to go by.

Women and girls are trafficked for a variety of reasons in China.  Many are forced into prostitution, others are used as slave labour.

They are also in demand as brides for unmarried sons, as the consequences of China’s one-child policy and the resulting drop in the number of females of marriageable age start to have an impact.

Unlike the situation elsewhere, boys as well as girls are vulnerable to abduction, again in part due to China’s one-child policy.

Once abducted, they are often sold to couples who are unable to conceive or, having already had a girl, are not legally allowed to have another child.  In China, sons are particularly valued over daughters, especially in rural areas.

The Ministry re-affirmed its hardline stance on trafficking and also announced that it had created a microblog account to help gather intelligence on missing persons cases.  An “anti-abduction” DNA database has been set up to match missing children with their families.

Indian village holds mass wedding to save women from prostitution

Posted: 14 Mar 2012 01:00 PM PDT

Karen Whiteley
WVoN co-editor

A Gujarat village held a mass wedding last week in an attempt to save the women involved from a life of prostitution.

Wadia, known to locals as the ‘village of prostitutes’, has a tradition of prostitution which has existed for centuries.

The women of the village do not marry and work as prostitutes in nearby towns.  Some do so willingly, others are forced through a mixture of poverty and coercion. Many men in the village live off the women’s earnings and act as pimps.

Another aspect to the tradition however, is that if a women does marry, or becomes engaged, she can no longer be forced into the sex trade.

The wedding was organised by Vicharta Samuday Samarthan Manch (VSSM), a non-governmental organisation working with marginalised nomadic communities.

The event was the culmination of five years’ work by the organisation gaining the trust of the grooms involved, who previously viewed any girl from the village as unworthy of marriage.

Eight brides were married while another 12 girls became engaged at the event.

According to Mittal Patel of VSSM:

‘Marriage means that the young girls will be saved from the traditional profession of prostitution.

‘These marriages are likely to bring about a social revolution for the women of this community and would be the beginning of the end of a regressive tradition that they have been following [for] generations.’

In addition to marriage,the women will require further assistance to end the cycle of sex work.

‘Alternative employment to the women is necessary such as teaching them embroidery, boosting irrigation for their fields and for them to do animal husbandry. This will end this cycle. No woman wants to do this by choice,’ said Patel.

Global silence over Afghan edict that women are “secondary” to men

Posted: 14 Mar 2012 11:30 AM PDT

Credit: Carol Mitchell, Creative Commons

Julie Tomlin
WVoN co-editor 

The world’s eyes are again on Afghanistan following the shooting on Sunday of 16 villagers in Kandahar by a US soldier.

But as the world’s leaders discuss the planned withdrawal and the handing over of frontline duties to the Afghan army, little has been said about the restriction of women and girls that is already in motion.

On 2 March, Afghanistan’s top religious council, the Ulema, adopted an edict which set out a strict code of conduct that women should follow.

"Men are fundamental and women are secondary," it said, adding that women should avoid "mingling with strange men in various social activities such as education, in bazaars, in offices and other aspects of life."

It added that "teasing, harassing and beating women" is prohibited "without a sharia-compliant reason," which has been interpreted as suggesting that domestic abuse is appropriate in some cases.

The Taliban were also notorious for beating women who were not considered appropriately dressed.

Though the edict is non-binding, President Hamid Karzai's endorsement of it four days later has increased fears that the progress women have made will be reversed as part of a peace deal with the Taliban (see WVoN stories).

While politicians around the world remained silent on the issue, young Afghans responded with a mixture of anger and humour, the BBC reported.

Cartoons lampooning the religious council's recommendations appeared on many sites and others wrote on Twitter and Facebook:

“Could I please ask the Afghan girls not to comment on my posts unless they have permission from their fathers or husbands or the Ulema council?” one man tweeted.

Muzhgan Ahmadi, a student from Kabul, told the BBC the use of humour was a deliberate ploy against the edict:

"Young people want to show that we don’t care and we won’t obey,” she said on air on BBC Persian.

Women's rights activists are concerned that Karzai's government is paving the way for the Taliban to control Afghanistan.

The MP Fawzia Koofi told the BBC's Orla Guerin the statement is "an alarm" for Afghan women:

“I think it’s the beginning of taking women back to the dark period of the Taliban,” she said.

“They have started taking some of those basic rights, like working together, living together, going out like a free human being. I am worried for my daughters and for all the girls and women of Afghanistan.”

Koofi believes the president and the clerics may be testing the water to see if there is a backlash either domestically or internationally.

On that basis, the Karzai government is currently being given a green light to bargain away women’s rights as the coalition manoeuvres its way out of Afghanistan.

And, as Koofi concludes, if there is no resistance, there may be worse to come.

Pussy Riot band members on hunger strike after arrest

Posted: 14 Mar 2012 10:00 AM PDT

Julie Tomlin
WVoN co-editor

Two members of the Russian punk phenomenon Pussy Riot have gone on hunger strike after being arrested for performing an anti-Putin "prayer" in a Central Moscow cathedral.

Several women were arrested after the all-women band ran into the Christ the Savior Cathedral wearing mini-dresses and masks on 21 February and performed a song entitled “Holy Shit”.

The "punk prayer" included an appeal to the “Holy Mother, Blessed Virgin” to “chase” president Vladimir Putin out. A video of the performance was posted on the band’s Youtube channel.

Only two alleged band members – Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhin – have been held in custody and charged with hooliganism.

Both of the women have children and are refusing food after they were were remanded in custody for two months by a Moscow court.

Supporters of the band picketed police headquarters in support of the women on International Women’s Day.

If found guilty of the charges, the women could face sentences of up to seven years in prison.

Part of the growing protest movement against Vladimir Putin, the masked band has become notorious for its provocative “guerrilla" performances over the course of the recent presidential election campaign.

In January members of the band were arrested and fined after a spontaneous performance of one of their songs “Putin is peeing his pants” in Moscow's Red Square.

Describing themselves as "activists of the opposition movement, dealing with the problems of feminism, ecology, as well as rights for the L.G.B.T. movement,"  the band is reported as saying its name was  ”inspired by the famous punk-feminist movement called Riot Grrrl which was active in America in 1990s”.

The band explained the idea behind their Cathedral performance on their blog:

“Seeing as peaceful demonstrations involving hundreds of thousands of people are not producing an immediate result, before Easter we will be asking the Blessed Virgin Mother to get rid of Putin more quickly”.

Activists debate impact of ‘blue bra woman’ in Egypt

Posted: 14 Mar 2012 09:00 AM PDT

Julie Tomlin
WVoN co-editor

The brutal attack of a woman whose blue bra was exposed as soldiers beat her in Tahrir Square quickly became an icon of the ongoing struggle of the Egyptian people.

But did the focus on her treatment  divert the world's attention from the widespread violence meted out by Egypt's Supreme Council of the Armed Forces during protests in the days before December’s elections?

The question was raised during a discussion about women and the Arab Spring as part of the Women of the World Festival at Southbank in London from 8-11 March to celebrate International Women’s Day.

Although she welcomed the protests that followed the brutal treatment of the woman (see WVoN story), activist and blogger Salma Said was concerned there had been little coverage – and no protests – when 30 people were killed that same day.

Said, who was shot during protests following the February 1 Port Said football stadium tragedy (see WVoN story) said:

"I was very happy that there were protests when the woman was stripped of her clothes, but all the focus was on one image and the fact that other activists were killed was ignored.”

The reaction to the treatment of the female protester was “very problematic”  she said.

“I was concerned that women called on men to protect them, which seemed to me to be sexist and I was angry that they were not taking to the street when men were beaten up.”

Filmmaker Hanan Abdalla said the image of the woman wearing the blue bra revealed the extent to which the Egyptian military had "overstepped the mark":

"These men were not beating women up because they think they should be treated equally to men," she said.

"For them to behave in this way was very symbolic and relatively small things like this do trigger a new consciousness."

Abdalla concluded that it is currently impossible to separate women's issues from the greater issues Egyptian society is facing:

"If anyone wants to support and empower women in Egypt, then you have to help all of Egypt,” she said.

Birth control and communism in Romania – the aftermath

Posted: 14 Mar 2012 07:30 AM PDT

Teodora Totorean
Freelance writer

As Britain considers changes to its current adoption laws, freelance writer Teodora Totorean looks at pro-birth politics under communism in her home country, Romania.

While in the UK British women took full advantage of the sexual revolution and feminist movements of the 60s, other women around the world struggled to have a voice.

From the compulsory following of a strict dress code in some Far-Eastern countries to the denial of control over their own sexuality in East European ones, a lot of women have been the victims of some type of abuse, whether religious, cultural or social.

In Romania, starting from the late 60s and up to 1989, the abuse was political.

On 1 October 1966, the then president, Ceauşescu, signed off a decree that changed women's sexuality and health care for over three decades: the banning of abortion.

As this was one of the main birth control methods at the time, the decree interfered in the most intimate aspects of a woman's life. The pro-birth politics practised by the dictator were supposed to give the country a pure communist generation in order to strengthen the nation.

With some exceptions – women over 45, mothers of five or more children, at risk pregnancies – abortion was illegal and doctors and patients faced prison.

The IUD (intrauterine device) was also banned and the contraceptive pill went from being rare to completely absent from pharmacies in 1985.

Left with no other choice, some women went on to have illegal abortions, resulting at times in failure to terminate the pregnancy, damaging the health of both the child and the mother, or even in death.

The dictator also fined anyone over 25 who wasn’t married, as well as married couples who hadn’t had children after two years – getting married and giving birth weren't only  matters of personal choice but a duty to the country.

One of the changes that took place immediately after the uprising in 1989 was the liberalisation of birth control methods. Yet the sociological and demographic impact of the 1966 decree still exists.

Romanian women are still healing from the wounds left by the communist regime.

While some postpone marriage and motherhood, with worrying consequences for birth rates, others continue to abandon their babies. Statistics show that there is one abandoned baby every six hours, which puts Romania first among European countries.

Poverty still plays its part, but so does the prejudice of having children outside marriage which is deeply rooted in Romanian culture.

There are indications that social workers and educators are trying to find viable solutions to the problem.

The advice on a foster home website for priests, teachers, parents and community members to be tolerant towards those mothers is a good example.

Currently there are 40,000 infants in orphanages, far fewer than the outrageous 170,000 in the communist era.

Before 1990 the issue of abandoned children and the conditions in which they lived were hidden from the general public. But now the international press monitor Romania's progress in eradicating these institutions – since this was one of the conditions for the country joining the European Union.

So Romania decided to do something positive about its orphans. It identified that the number of families interested in adopting exceeded the number of children available for adoption.

In July 2011, the Romanian television network Pro TV started a campaign – "I want my parents too" (Vreau şi eu părinţii mei) – to change the adoption law, by modifying the criteria by which an infant could be declared available for adoption.

Previously the law aimed to re-integrate the infant into their extended family as far back as four generations which made adoption a very long process.

As most families want to adopt children under three, the children were often too old by the time they were finally put up for adoption.

Over 75,000 people signed a petition supporting this change, which were approved in November 2011 and implemented in February 2012.

Now infants are put up for adoption after one year of no contact from their families. New born babies abandoned in hospital are put up for adoption after 30 days if the mother and the family do not indicate that they want them back.

These changes could have a positive impact not only on Romania's image, dominated by orphans over the last two decades, but also on people's attitudes towards contraception, social status and prejudice – elements that still play a big part in (single) women's decision to have and then to bring up a child in Romania.

Saudi students continue protests despite violent crackdown

Posted: 14 Mar 2012 06:00 AM PDT

Julie Tomlin
WVoN co-editor

Thousands of young Saudi women staged a second protest at a university after a violent crackdown by security forces on a demonstration last week.

The protests at the all-women King Khalid university in the southern town of Abha started when the university cancelled cleaning services, saying students needed to take better care of their campus, Reuters reported.

When the rubbish began to smell on Wednesday, the students boycotted classes to express their anger at the conditions at the university and at wider discrimination.

Protests are banned in the Kingdom and one woman was reported to have been killed and 50 injured when the security forces and religious police moved in to break it up. The violence has prompted an investigation, according to the BBC.

On Saturday students at the university again took part in protests, as did fellow students on the male campus.

Protests in Saudi Arabia are rare because of the ban, but there have been several at Saudi universities, or involving recent female graduates over the past year focusing mainly on the way that education is biased against them.

They have been taking place as women across the country have been challenging traditional attitudes towards women.

The high-profile Women2Drive campaign (see WVoN stories) went underground as a result of a government crackdown but has recently made a comeback after apparently winning concessions from the religious authorities.

Professor of anthropology of religion at King's College University, Madawi Al-Rasheed, said on the BBC World Service on Monday that although the 'Arab Spring' had not reached Saudi Arabia it has seen "much more mobilisation" in the past year than it has in the past:

"The mobilisation that has taken place centres on specific issues, such as women's rights or land confiscation," she said, adding that the Saudi dictatorship had succeeded in fragmenting the population.

Trades unions, student unions and women's organisations are currently banned in the country.

People are very active on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter but they are mostly used to mobilise people on single issues and don't link up with other groups, Al-Rasheed said.

The protest by the female students, the decision by male students to join them and calls for protests at other universities are a sign of change, Al-Rasheed argued:

"I see change in Saudi Arabia coming from the inside," she said.

"They have watched the Arab Spring continuously for over 18 months now and at the moment they experimenting with peaceful demonstrations and new forms of mobilisation."

Tearfund: just surviving isn’t enough

Posted: 14 Mar 2012 04:00 AM PDT

Photo credit: Kieran Dodds/Tearfund

Sara Guy
Media officer, Tearfund

In a series of five features to mark Mother's Day on March 18, Sara Guy from Tearfund presents a feature of case studies of mothers from around the world.

The third is on Uganda.

Grace Imeu from Uganda is a widow: her husband died five years ago, leaving her to raise eight children on her own.

Grace lives in a village called Ogongora in Eastern Uganda. In 2003, during the civil war, most residents fled from advancing militia leaders.

After two years of living in camps, they returned  to find their homes destroyed and their crops, cattle and other livestock gone.

Many Ugandans work as small-scale farmers and struggle to grow enough to feed their households. Fluctuating global prices of cash crops only add to their problems.

The effects of climate change are increased droughts and flooding. Not only do these have an impact on farmers, they also have a knock-on effect on malaria and water-borne diseases.

When Grace and her family came back to Ogongora they had precious little. Then her husband died of malaria and their life became even more difficult.

There were times when they only had enough food for one meal a day and had to forage for wild vegetables. Her children were malnourished, often ill.

One of Tearfund's partners, a local church in the area, had started to offer practical help to the community.

Understandably, Grace had many questions and little faith at this time: "I kept asking 'Why me, God?' I felt like God had rejected me. My life was confused. I didn’t go to church."

At 40 years of age, Grace undertook some farming training run by the church. She learnt techniques to help her get a better harvest – for instance, which crops to plant at certain times of year.

Putting her new-found skills to use, Grace planted three plots of cassava (a starchy root vegetable that is a staple in Uganda) and green-grams (also known as mung beans).

Now they have enough food for three meals a day, which means that her children are happier, healthier and can go to school regularly.

Life has definitely improved for Grace and her family but times can still be tough. Although they are much healthier than they were, her children do still get sick and she then needs money for medicine. Or new books and uniforms for school.

Dan, Grace's son, would like to be a driver or a teacher, as they are well paid. But Grace still worries about earning enough money for all her children to finish school.

Grace has hopes and dreams for her children: "I want my children to finish their education. This will give them a better future and I will feel like my husband is still alive."

Rather than handouts and food parcels, the approach in Ogongora is to empower communities to use the resources they already have to bring about change. One of the most powerful resources, if not the most powerful, is the people living in the community.

Mobilising the community is seen as the key to achieving truly sustainable transformation in villages like Ogongora. Transformation that has real meaning for people like Grace and her children.

American-style abortion protests come to London

Posted: 14 Mar 2012 02:00 AM PDT

Karen Whiteley
WVoN co-editor

Bedford Square in the heart of London is quiet at the weekends.

But Sundays recently have seen an increased level of activity because that’s when the Bloomsbury Pro-Choice Alliance (BPCA) sets out its stall and fights for a woman’s right to choose.

Given that Bedford Square is the home of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), an organisation which provides abortion services and counselling for pregnant women, it seems an odd choice of venue for a pro-choice protest.

But BPCA is there because 40 Days for Life (40DFL) has set up shop outside the BPAS offices.

40DFL is a religious organisation which holds vigils, 40 days at a time, outside organisations offering abortion services.  According to its website, the organisation aims to ’[draw] attention to the evil of abortion’.

Founded in America, the vigils have spread to other countries including Australia, Canada and Spain. Within the UK, the group also holds vigils in Brighton, Birmingham and Manchester.

Kerry Johnson, 28, founded BPCA in direct response to the group’s efforts in London.

‘I have to walk past them all the time, watching them handing out flyers and looking intimidating to women going into the clinic.

‘If [the group] recognise somebody new going in, they do try and speak to them. I was just sick of seeing them.’

BPCA plan to hold a counter-protest every Sunday until the vigil ends.  They are three Sundays in, with another three to go.

A small group, Johnson is nonetheless clear on the importance of BPCA’s stand:

‘I think it’s really important to protest this kind of action.  We want to make sure that American-style tactics don’t come [to the UK].

‘There’s such a stigma now around abortion in America that people who are pro-choice don’t dare say anything in public; it would be terrible if things were allowed to get like that over here.  We need to make it clear we’re not going to stand for it.’

A few metres away, 40DFL members stand across the road from the BPAS offices.  An even smaller group, they number only two people.

Poppy Macdonald, 26, a member of 40DFL, disagrees that they’re intimidating women.

‘We’re here to offer hope to women, to give them another option.

‘We offer them a leaflet, if they don’t want to take it, that’s fine.  If they do, we put them in touch with a Crisis Pregnancy Centre, which offers them any kind of support they need to continue with their pregnancy.’

Macdonald is also clear on her feelings towards the women entering BPAS:

‘They’re in a really difficult situation.  We don’t stand here to judge them.’

Macdonald’s words, however, don’t seem in keeping with the group’s actions the following day, when police had to be called to the BPAS offices because the group were seemingly filming women going into the clinic.

40DFL has denied it authorised any filming, but as BPCA noted: ’the camera was pointing directly at the clinic – they can't have been more than a couple of metres away – [and] the woman [in front of the camera] was clutching a 40DFL magazine.’

This is not the first time that the group has been accused of harassing pregnant women, having faced similar accusations when it protested outside a Marie Stopes clinic in 2010.

Speaking to WVoN, BPAS spokesperson Clare Murphy says Macdonald’s words don’t ring true:

‘It’s bizarre to suggest they’re not passing judgment on these women.  They’re very clear about the kind of impact they want to have on them.’

Murphy is also clear that American-style tactics are coming to the UK:

‘BPAS is supportive of people’s right to protest, but increasingly we’re seeing moral boundaries being crossed by protesters, such as the filming of women and staff on Monday.

‘We do seem to be entering a different era in terms of what protesters think are acceptable forms of behaviour and that’s very troubling.

‘At the protest in Brighton, which has been very aggressive, protesters stand with massive posters of dismembered foetuses which they wave at women going into the clinic there.’

Given the divergent nature of the views on abortion held by the two groups, will it ever be possible to reconcile them?  Murphy thinks not:

‘We’re more than happy to engage in debate about the ethics of abortion, but these people don’t seem to have any interest in debate.  They just want to pick on women.’

40DFL ‘s is holding a vigil in Bedford Square every day until April 1.  BPCA’s protest will continue for another three Sundays, 12-4pm.