Women's Views on News |
- Time to sort out damsels in distress
- Doing nothing is not an option
- Danger increases as sex sells for less
| Time to sort out damsels in distress Posted: 12 Jun 2013 09:26 AM PDT
Once upon a time there was a damsel in distress. From Perseus saving Andromeda; to Sita being kidnapped by Ravana in Ramayana; through to the Sleeping Beauty, Goldilocks and Rumpelstiltskin, stricken and beautiful young women in need of saving by men has been a dominant theme of literature. Except it didn’t just happen a long time ago, in a far away country. The same story is being replayed again and again in the 21st century, throughout Britain – and worldwide. For this theme has been taken up with passion by the makers of video games, who are increasingly making their stories more ‘Grimm’ than any kind of fairytale, with no obligatory happy ending. The violence against women is routine, graphic and usually sexual. To combat this, to highlight this phenomenon, feminist and critic Anita Sarkeesian, founder of Feminist Frequency, crowd-sourced cash to set up a video project in 2012 called Tropes vs Women in Video Games. Sarkeesian’s work focuses on deconstructing the stereotypes and tropes associated with women in popular culture as well as highlighting issues surrounding the targeted harassment of women in online and gaming spaces. The second video in this series has just been released. Sarkeesian said: “In this installment we look at "dark and edgy" side of the trope in more modern games and how the plot device is often used in conjunction with graphic depictions of violence against women. “Over the past decade we've seen developers try to spice up the old Damsel in Distress cliche by combining it with other tropes involving victimised women including the disposable woman, the mercy killing and the woman in the refrigerator.” The woman in the refrigerator is a reference to a website set up 15 years ago to chart that it was ‘unhealthy’ being a female in comics, but it is now a term to highlight the dangers of being a woman ‘online’ in the fantasy world of gaming. Sarkeesian has received much abuse for her work, and this second video was taken down by YouTube within hours of it being put up, because other users had flagged it as having objectionable content, as the Financial Post reported. Sarkeesian appealed and it was back on play within 45 minutes. Rock, paper,shotgun last year detailed the extreme reaction to Sarkeesian setting up the project. Although Jen Bosier of Forbes seemed more concerned that the repetitious nature of these storylines is harming gaming, as opposed to women, she did point out that these plot lines are also played out in Hollywood. WVoN reported on the Bechdel test last year about the portrayal of women in film. In spite of harassment, Sarkeesian is continuing with her work, and, as she told interviewer Paul Dean of IGN, she has these words for feminists who are similarly attacked: “If other women find themselves targeted either by a large scale cyber mob, or by a handful of hateful or harassing comments, it's important to remember that you are not alone! “Gendered harassment is sadly a very common occurrence in many online and gaming spaces but that doesn't mean it's okay or normal or that we should just "get used to it".  |
| Doing nothing is not an option Posted: 12 Jun 2013 03:45 AM PDT
Dina Meza says she had little choice about what type of reporting she would pursue when she left journalism college in Honduras. Just as she was graduating in 1989, her brother Victor was "disappeared" by the security forces – one of the hundreds to vanish at the behest of the regime militias in a particularly terrible decade. He was tortured by them for a week with electric shocks and beatings before being presented by the military at a press conference as being a "captured guerrilla fighter" and being thrown into jail. "It made me angry, the injustice. I knew then that I had to cover human rights abuses. I never had any choice!" she explained recently to Jim Armitage for the Independent. Her brother was freed in an amnesty after a campaign she led for his liberation. Then in 2004, Meza joined the feisty Revistazo website. Private security firms have often been used in the country to break up protests and civil unrest, which has been rife in the country in disputes over land rights. They are regularly accused of violent conduct. “Revistazo were covering abuses committed by the security firms, against labour rights, the kind of stories the mainstream media didn't want to cover," she explained. Her work was dangerous. As well as reporting on human rights, Revistazo also worked on behalf of victims who could not afford legal representation in judicial disputes. On 4 December 2006, she and the company's lawyer Dionisio Diaz had arranged to meet in the Supreme Court for a hearing into alleged abuses by security firms. He was on his way to the courthouse when two men on a motorbike shot him dead. “Right in the middle of the street,” she said. The attention then focussed on her – and the harassment has rarely ceased since. First it was the most unsubtle of verbal threats; then her children were followed at school and college and threatened; and she has received phone calls and text messages with disgustingly graphic sexual threats against her. And although she has passed on her suspicions to the police, along with the phone numbers of the abusive callers, nothing, she says, is ever done about it. Since President Lobo took power after a 2009 coup, at least 23 journalists have been murdered, according to the Honduras National Commissioner for Human Rights. The most dangerous subjects for reporters to cover include the police and disputes between mining companies and local peasants. Meza spoke to Armitage in the London headquarters of Amnesty International, having just completed a four-month human rights course at the University of York. She was, she admitted, partly in the UK to give herself and her children a break from the harassment they all suffer when she is at home. But she is also doing a lecture tour of Europe, telling her stories and publicising the plight of journalists and human rights workers in Honduras. She would like Europeans to put pressure on their MPs to get the Honduran government to bring and end to the abuse of journalists and on the more general human rights abuses in Honduras. Asked if she would ever consider just giving up and take up living a quiet life, she said: "Never! The worst thing I could possibly do is nothing. We are going to keep struggling." "I could not look into my children´s eyes," she explained, "and tell them I can do nothing about the situation, because to do nothing would be far worse than the threats, beatings or bullets of the police and militaries."  |
| Danger increases as sex sells for less Posted: 12 Jun 2013 01:09 AM PDT
A report in February 2013 said that ‘saturation of the [sex work] market has increased competition, meaning that some sex workers are now selling sex for less money and providing a wider range of services, some of which present higher health and wellbeing risks.’ The report was produced by the Praed Street Project, a sexual health and support service for women from all over the world who work, have worked or are associated with any part of the sex industry within London. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Westminster Council's Sex Worker task group's April 2013 report said that ‘the risk of violence has increased substantially," and that "female sex workers in particular [are] taking more risks.’ Through interviews with sex workers, the task group discovered that there has been ‘a 50 per cent reduction in prices over the last few years,’ which has resulted in ‘many sex workers accepting clients who appear to be more dangerous in order to make enough money.’ Councillor Ian Rowley, chair of the task group, calls the drop in prices a ‘collapse.’ At the start of its eight-month investigation into the health inequalities faced by sex workers in Westminster, the task group identified violence as the number one public health and community safety problem for sex workers. Last year, London Assembly Member Andrew Boff published a report entitled Silence on Violence: improving the Safety of Women. In that report, Boff wrote that all available evidence demonstrated that female sex workers were at a far higher risk of violence than any other group of women. The extreme vulnerability of these women comes from a combination of factors, including the traditional focus by police on the illegal status of prostitution, rather than the violent crime being reported. In 2005 a World Health Organization (WHO) report said that ‘among street-based sex workers, a majority of incidences of harassment, assault, rape, kidnapping and murder are not reported to the police.’ Boff's more recent research corroborates those findings, and goes further, saying that gangs were increasingly attacking and robbing sex workers since they ‘believe that their attacks will be underreported’. Trafficking is an additional concern, and a growing body of research shows that increasing numbers of women trafficking other women, often as a replacement for themselves in a brothel. A study by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime found that in some countries, ‘women trafficking women is the norm.’ One female former-sex-worker turned trafficker who spoke to the Guardian said, "I felt like I had stuck a knife in my own stomach, knowing what I was taking them to, but I could not stand one more day [in the brothel]." Evidence from the Association of Chief Police Officers suggests that a minority of female sex workers in London are trafficked; however, due to the secrecy of both sex work and human trafficking, exact figures are impossible to gather. Both Boff in his report and the Westminster task group call for ‘all crimes committed against sex workers [to be] treated as Hate Crimes,’ especially following the success of the Merseyside model. The Merseyside model provides multi-agency support for sex workers reporting crime, something the Westminster task group is asking the Metropolitan Police to put in place, as well as for a particular focus on improved collaboration and communication between local government, the Metropolitan Police and health services. The task group is also calling on police to make it a clear and well-communicated policy that crimes reported by sex workers will be addressed as a priority. This includes prioritising such reports above petty crimes the sex worker may have committed and the basic illegality of sex work. Helping sex workers, and particularly female sex workers, feel more confident about reporting crime could help remove violent offenders from society much sooner than might otherwise occur, and most importantly, could help save the lives of some of society's most vulnerable women.  |
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