Saturday, November 3, 2012

Women's Views on News

Women's Views on News

Oxfam focuses on gender justice

Posted: 02 Nov 2012 08:00 AM PDT

Gender justice is one focus for aid and development charity Oxfam.

The others are: economic justice, essential services, and rights in crisis. focusses

There are many, often complex, reasons why women are not reaching their full potential, and domestic violence, discrimination, and lack of education are among the biggest barriers.

But with education comes literacy, and with literacy comes confidence and the chance to earn more money, to become self-sufficient – and to speak out against violence.

Long-held and deeply entrenched prejudices may well take time to break down, but Oxfam has become committed to supporting women in claiming their rights, and making decisions that affect their lives.

One example of how it does this is Oxfam's ‘We Can’ campaign, which has been making violence against women a public concern.

Oxfam has been working on undoing the shame and stigma attached to talking about violence against women and triggering a desire among ordinary people to change social attitudes that support such violence and other gender inequality.

Launched in late 2004, with the goal of ‘reducing the social acceptance of violence against women’, the campaign started off in six South Asian countries – Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka – but it has since spread to Indonesia, the Netherlands and British Colombia in Canada.

The campaign focuses on domestic violence, which in South Asia comprises a wide range of forms of abuse, from preferential feeding of male children to honour killing.

And the message is:

• That violence is never acceptable

• That violence against women is a public, not a private matter

• That everyone has the right to a life free from violence

• That small actions can bring about big changes

• That each one of us can find our own actions to end violence

The ‘We Can’ campaign has been built on the idea that people change – and that people change people.

It works on the premise that when enough people embark upon a change they can influence and transform the institutions, communities, and societies of which they are a part.

And working through ‘Change Makers’ -  ordinary women and men who commit to rejecting violence against women, changing themselves, and reaching out to influence ten other people around them – the Campaign has already reached out to tens of millions of people across South Asia.

It does not prescribe actions, it offers people an idea: that violence against women is not normal, it is not acceptable and it must end.

For women and men trapped in cycles of violence, this can be a transformative idea.

At another level, Oxfam also publishes a journal called Gender & Development, which is the only journal published to focus specifically on international gender and development issues, and to explore the connections between gender and development initiatives, and feminist perspectives.

Gender & Development has, in partnership with the UK Gender and Development Network (GADN), been running a major Learning Project on Beyond Gender Mainstreaming.

The term ‘gender mainstreaming’ (GM) took off after the 1995 UN Conference on Women at Beijing, and was taken up by a wide range of development institutions, governments and NGOs.

GM is the process of assessing every proposed policy or action from a gender viewpoint, in order to to understand how women and men may be differently affectedly it.

The Learning Project aimed to chart the different ways in which GM has been attempted, identify the barriers and challenges it faces, and celebrate its successes.

The project has three components: the Eldis Online Discussion in November 2011; a Beyond Gender Mainstreaming Learning Workshop, held in February 2012 and  a special Beyond Gender Mainstreaming issue of the journal bringing together the many different strands of the project.

This special issue will be published in November 2012.

Gender & Development is a print and electronic journal, available by subscription.

Sugar coating women’s stories on film

Posted: 02 Nov 2012 07:10 AM PDT

Why do film adaptations targeted at women give us all the sugar and none of the spice?

Guest post by Amanda Keats.

I love a good ‘girly’ story. Romance, drama, you name it. I love following a female protagonist through the ups and downs of life and love.

Why am I confessing this? Because it feels like I have to.

Because reading romance novels or anything ‘girly’ – according to many sceptics – makes me a one-dimensional imbecile. Sometimes, a comforting, romantic story is just what I'm in the mood for – whether it's a classic Jane Austen tale or a modern-day drama. I am, of course, not alone in this. Women across the world devour romance novels and ‘girly’ books of all varieties and it remains one of the highest selling genres within fiction.

Sometimes, though, I want something a bit different, a bit more challenging and shocking and many female authors are happy to oblige and to break from the mould of safe and reliable romantic fiction and throw in something taboo and daring.

Take Jodi Picoult. The bestselling author has made her living by writing about taboo topics. Story after story, Picoult examines the grey area between right and wrong with care and courage.

There is nothing predictable about her books – which, to date, have dealt with abuse, terminal illness and organ donation, to name but a few of her chosen topics. There isn't always a comfortable, happy ending and she forces you to think, to put yourself in the shoes of her protagonists.

Audrey Niffenegger’s début novel, The Time Traveler's Wife, sold worldwide even though the complex story jumped back and forth chronologically and took a rather dark look at an epic, passionate and immensely complex romance.

Relatively new author Rosamund Lupton broke out as a writer with her début novel, Sister – a book which looked at one woman's quest to find out the truth behind her sister's disappearance. It was dark, it was gripping and it was about the unbreakable bond between sisters.

These books all offer something a bit grittier, while still using female leads to cater to a largely female audience who want a break from the more formulaic stories. So why can’t this grit be kept when they are adapted to the big screen?

Because it seems that filmmakers don't believe these female readers could stand that something a little bit different on the big screen.

It still makes me angry when I think back to the horrendous adaptation of Picoult's My Sister's Keeper. Those behind the film took a powerful, heart-breaking story about terminal illness and family loyalty and turned it into an overly-sentimental tearjerker.

Of course, if that's what you signed up for then great! Job done! But why use My Sister's Keeper as the source text if all you wanted to do was make yet another formulaic tearjerker about a family dealing with a sick child? Fans of the book were outraged at the appalling changes made to Picoult’s text and – rather tellingly – the film did quite badly as a result.

Similarly, much of what made Niffenegger's tortured romance, The Time Traveler's Wife, so darkly compelling was cut for film audiences. The ending was, at least, unaltered but the whole feel of the film was completely different – resulting in a far less severe and intense story.

Kathryn Stockett’s The Help managed to stick fairly close to the original text but once again gave the female heroine of the piece a much neater, happier ending than the original.

This dumbing down of a complex romantic story is not just reserved for female authors or female protagonists.

In the film adaptation of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, Ewan McGregor got the traditional ‘happy ending’ author Paul Torday denied him in in the book.

It happens, it seems, with any film targeted at a largely female audience. Apparently women can’t handle an ending where the hero dies, the woman doesn’t get the man or the happy ending is not delivered to us in a neat little bow.

Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule.

The phenomenal We Need to Talk About Kevin was just as dark in the film as it was in the book and thanks largely to an incredible central performance from Tilda Swinton, proved that a book written by, and about, a woman can enrapture audiences with more than romance and happy endings.

An enormous factor in this may be the director in question.

The brilliantly insightful directorial talents of Lynne Ramsay brought We Need to Talk About Kevin to the big screen. Sofia Coppola’s directorial début was the well-received adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides and Lone Sherfig brought both An Education and One Day to cinemas.

These films were based on dark books about teen suicide, the downsides to unrequited love, drug abuse and sex with a minor.

The adaptations, miraculously, lost none of that severity and were all well-received by audiences.

Notice anything about the directors of these films? Is it just an accident that films targeted at women, that are also directed by women, allow the darkness and complexity of the original books to remain on screen?

Perhaps, then, it is not all filmmakers that need to give more credit to female audiences and realise that there is so much more to us than our love of Love Actually and Bridget Jones. Just the male ones. And to those men, I make a plea:

Stop taking women’s favourite powerful books and turning them into something generic and tame. Women’s lives, like all the best books, can be complicated, and at times, dark affairs. It’s high time that reality was allowed to shine on the big screen.

Government abandons abortion counselling consultation

Posted: 02 Nov 2012 02:00 AM PDT

A government health minister has announced that plans to force women to endure independent counselling before undergoing an abortion have been scrapped.

At a Westminster Hall debate on Wednesday, health minister Anna Soubry announced that since the government had no plans to change the current law on abortion counselling, a consultation on the issue would be “an otiose exercise”.

“I have carefully considered how we move forward on abortion counselling. I believe that the best way forward is about contraception, how we reduce the repeat abortion rate, how we empower young men and women and how we improve abortion counselling services for women generally,” she said.

The cross-party consultation, set up by the former health minister Anne Milton, had been established in spite of the comprehensive defeat of a similar proposal, raised by Nadine Dorries, in a parliamentary debate last year. The cross-party group, which included Dorries, Fiona Bruce, and Louise Mensch in its pro-life ranks, were understood to be investigating how the “spirit” of such proposals could be incorporated into new regulation.

They had been examining a number of options for abortion counselling including restricting in-house counselling services, like those offered by BPAS and Marie Stopes, as well as creating a register of counsellors – which would have included anti-abortion outfits, as well as GPs and pro-choice organisations.

The initial proposals laid out by the consultation had been met with hostility among abortion campaigners. Tracey McNeill, director of UK and Europe at Marie Stopes, said: ‘We simply don’t believe that organisations whose own publications describe abortion as a ‘most grievous sin’ can provide impartial pregnancy counselling to women.’

In like manner, shadow health minister Diane Abbott, who resigned from the cross-part group earlier this year, claimed that it was simply a vehicle for the government to drive an anti-abortion agenda without suitable debate in parliament.

Following Soubry’s cancellation of the consultation, Abbott described it as, ‘A victory for women, families and pro-choice campaigners’ and urged the government to desist from further using the issue as a ‘political football‘.

Dorries, however, has accused the government of reneging on an “absolute commitment to consult“, calling Soubry’s decision “bizarre“.

“Jeremy Hunt believes in a 12-week limit but he is not trying to push his agenda on women because he acknowledges it is his personal belief. Anna Soubry has a personal belief. What she has done is try to impose her personal belief on her role and that is out of order.”

Nonetheless, the announcement has been welcomed by pro-choice campaigners; Abortion Rights, who said in a statement: “From the start we have been clear that the proposals were misguided, unnecessary and not in the best interest of women’s health.

“Politicians should be on notice that the UK’s pro-choice majority will not accept any further restriction on our right to choose, whether it’s through counselling, reducing the abortion time limit or any other measure.”

Further restriction remains high on Nadine Dorries’ agenda and abortion may face further threats next year. At the same Westminster Hall debate that Soubry announced her decision, Dorries renewed her intention to raise the issue for further debate in May 2013.

“My campaign” she recently said in an interview with Mehdi Hassan, “is for a 24 to 20 [week abortion limit]. It has been since the day I got here.”

Those personal pronouns seem to tell of Dorries’ own very “personal belief”, the imposition of which, in her own words, really is “out of order” to the pro-choice majority.