Women's Views on News |
| Posted: 13 Jun 2014 06:14 AM PDT
UN Women along with OHCHR has launched the UN Secretary-General's Guidance Note on Reparations for Conflict-Related Sexual Violence, a blueprint for promoting gender-sensitive approaches to the design and delivery of reparations for victims of conflict-related sexual violence. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, UN Women's executive director, presented the newly adopted guidelines against the backdrop of this week's Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict, the largest so far gathering of the international community to focus on ending sexual violence in conflict, and called for the urgent need to focus on reparations, which are the most victim-focused, and yet most underfunded justice tool in post-conflict countries. Global outrage has grown as grim reports from northern Nigeria, Syria, South Sudan, Central African Republic, Afghanistan and other crises points pour in daily detailing the horrors of conflicts that affect women. Highlighting that the conviction of perpetrators, while essential, does not address the root causes of violence or deliver the redress due to victims, the Guidance Note makes a strong call to the international community to usher in transformative reparations for individuals and communities affected by sexual violence in conflict. Reparations, most often overlooked in access to justice processes, are of great importance for women as direct victims and as widows, wives, mothers and caregivers in settings where there is social and economic discrimination. Ranging from specialised healthcare and education programmes for victims of violations to land restitution, formal apologies and victim commemoration days, reparations can provide acknowledgement of survivors' rights as equal citizens and crucial resources for recovery. "Stronger action is the need of the hour, and sexual violence in conflict is a front line concern for us. "Reparations are routinely left out of peace negotiations or sidelined in funding priorities, even though they are of utmost importance to survivors. "We need to move this agenda forward in order to ensure real change in the lives of survivors who have seen the horrors of sexual violence in conflict up close," Mlambo-Ngcuka said. "UN Women stands ready to support the international community in delivering on the promise of reparations as a means for substantive change in the lives of women and men, boys and girls affected by conflict and to reflect the needs of victims for both courtroom justice as well as comprehensive redress." The Guidance Note is the result of extensive consultations and research, and seeks to distill experiences across the globe into actionable principles to inform access to justice policy and programming in post-conflict societies. Studies show that often policy and laws are in place, yet implementation and gender-sensitive delivery of reparations programmes continue to lag behind. To address these challenges, UN Women and OHCHR developed the guidance for the UN system, with principles applicable to all parties, including Member States and civil society actors who are developing, supporting, and implementing reparations policies and programming. Underlining the need to invest in gender equality as a foundation to ensure societies with lasting peace, the principles call for long-term, in-depth solutions, such as, not just a once-off cash payment, but access to land and inheritance rights for the wives of the disappeared; land restitution for those affected, coupled with land redistribution and access to credit, skills and means to transform that land into a source of livelihood; and providing fistula surgery to rape victims, as well as income-generating skills to help them build a future. Key principles in the Guidance Note include: Urgent need for reparations to be transformative in impact. Transformative reparations mean redressing both the single violation as well as the context of inequality that renders women vulnerable to violence and informs the consequences and impacts of this violence. In the spirit of UN Security Council resolution 1325 and the six resolutions that have followed, the Guidance Note calls for survivors of conflict-related sexual violence to be at the centre, as agents of reform. Survivors must be meaningfully involved and consulted in the mapping, design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of reparations programmes. Human rights violations impact men and women differently and in multiple ways, and there is an urgent need to develop reparations programmes that acknowledge and respond to this reality and to men and women's different needs. Key recommended actions include: Awareness-raising activities and outreach campaigns are essential, and must make victims aware of their rights in a language they understand. Equally important are transport provisions and childcare facilities so women can register as beneficiaries; and confidentiality measures to create safe environments for those coming forward. Effective consultation with survivors of sexual violence requires building better processes and systems. Being transformative requires moving beyond business as usual. The Guidance Note also highlights the need to promote comprehensive reparations programmes which include different forms of reparations with individual and collective reparations complementing and reinforcing each other. To find out more about UN Women's work on addressing sexual violence in conflict, click here.  |
| Being a “difficult” older woman Posted: 13 Jun 2014 04:28 AM PDT
Our regular cross-post from Bitchflicks. By Ren Jender. I remember a woman artist friend talking about Barbra Streisand: "When people called her 'difficult,' it was probably just because she asked for a microphone that worked." Broadway musical star Elaine Stritch's reputation for being "difficult" is familiar even to those of us who can't stand Broadway musicals. But all through the documentary Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me (directed by Chiemi Karasawa, who first met Stritch in a hair salon), I couldn't help wondering if an 87-year-old man behaving the way Stritch (who was 87 when the documentary was shot) does in the film would be denigrated the way she has been (men are rarely called "difficult"–no matter what they do). Certainly the men Stritch has worked with in her long career don't seem easygoing. In one scene Stritch reads aloud a letter Woody Allen wrote her in the '80s listing point by point the circumstances under which he'll work with her. One of his many conditions is that she can't second-guess his wardrobe choices. Earlier we see Alec Baldwin have a hissy fit on camera because he thinks Stritch is stepping on his laugh line (Stritch is playing his character's mother on 30 Rock). When he stalks out she laughs at him–as does the crew. This partially Indiegogo-funded film has some superficial resemblance to Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, another documentary that followed a famous older, "difficult" woman as she prepared for and performed in shows, but Stritch doesn't seem interested in using the film as a tool to bolster her image, the way Rivers did. Shoot Me has no scenes as cringe-worthy as the one in which Rivers takes her grandson to deliver meals to people with AIDS (as if Rivers headlining a fundraiser wouldn't be a better use of resources) or the one in which Rivers mentions that she pays for the private school tuition of her employees' children. Stritch makes her home in a hotel, never had children, and her husband died 30 years ago, so she is free to focus on her own health, career and legacy–and doesn't feel the need to launch a revisionist propaganda campaign. Stritch isn't afraid to mumble wry asides when fans in the street approach, and she raises her fists in victory when she learns that she will still be paid for a gig canceled in the wake of a hurricane. Stritch's legendary directness and humor are aimed right at the filmmakers and audience, when, in the middle of talking about something else, she looks up to say, "Don't you think that camera is awfully close?" When the camera pulls back she continues, "We're not making a skin commercial here." Like many other artists, Stritch is working decades beyond the age most people retire. But the activities many senior citizens take up after they stop working–travel, singing, dancing, and acting–have been the staples of Stritch's career since just before the end of World War II. When she was based in London (a fact that doesn't make its way into the film though she even starred in a successful TV series there), she worked with the great English actor Sir John Gielgud (in the 1977 film Providence), who made his last film appearance in 1998 when he was 94. Gielgud was able to temper the exertion of his later work by taking smaller roles in films and also acting in radio dramas. For Stritch, her continued career is much more demanding: song and (in a limited way) dance in live appearances where she is the show. Stritch has diabetes and some memory loss (her recall of long-ago events like her improbable–but photo-verified–two dates with a very young John F. Kennedy is razor-sharp) as well as an unsteady gait (she sometimes uses a cane and although she is unassisted while onstage, she needs assistance to make it there) and her voice shows the effects of age, but she's still an effective performer. Before I saw the film I thought that audiences must go to her shows for nostalgia or for the same reason people in the mid-1990s went to see Courtney Love live, to see if she made it all the way through her act without collapsing or having a breakdown onstage. Some of the film's reviews seem to want to reframe the film as a pathetic spectacle with Stritch as an object of pity. They call Shoot Me "grim," "painful," and "about aging and its myriad horrors." These reviewers seem determined to review their own fears of aging (or what they imagine the life of an older woman is like) instead of what is actually onscreen. In the same way that disabled and older people shouldn't be called "inspiring" just for living their lives in ways many of us who aren't disabled or very old do, the film shows us that the effects of aging for Stritch aren't tragic–any more than they are advantageous–but just inconveniences and obstacles for her to work around. Stritch herself says of her worry about forgetting song lyrics, "The fear is part of the excitement." Excerpts of the show in the film, as well as vintage clips of her recording her signature "Ladies Who Lunch" for a cast album, and even a clip of her acceptance speech for winning an Emmy show that she lets the audience (or in the cast recording, her songwriters) not just see her vulnerabilities, but share them and empathize with them. We see her in rehearsal for the show forgetting the lyrics to "I Feel Pretty" repeatedly and then, during the show, she forgets again, but makes the moment a comic one, getting the audience to root for her as she (eventually) comes up with the next line. Stritch has a lot of friends, many of whom are much younger than she is: every time we see a shot of her bed at the hotel where she lives we also see a wall covered in post-it notes of names (some of them well-known to us through movies and television) with the phone numbers digitally blurred. Though Stritch has no children we see unrelated, younger people pitch in to help her: during the show and rehearsal, musical director, Rob Bowman, for an upcoming dedication, an assistant who sorts through old photos and other memorabilia and for miscellaneous errands a woman who sat next to her at an AA meeting long ago and in spite of Stritch's demands (Elaine not only wanted a ride home from the woman; she told her she needed to clean up her car before picking her up again), credits Stritch with helping her maintain sobriety. Stritch, after many years of recovery, informs us that she allows herself one drink a day, then after a hospitalization (for diabetes) stops drinking again, then during a birthday party at the end is back to "one drink a day." But the definition of alcoholism is the inability to have just one drink. The revelation that since her retirement (always just around the corner in the film, which was shot two years ago, but as of last year, when she did one last show and moved out of New York seems permanent now), she has upped her limit to two drinks is worrying. In the film she argues that at 87 a limited amount of drinking won't harm her and is something she feels like she deserves. She says, "It's wonderful being almost 87. You can get away with just about anything." Now that she's 89, she might be right.  |
| Say no to anorexia: irresponsible? Posted: 13 Jun 2014 01:09 AM PDT Shocking images? Yes. But is it not irresponsible to suggest anorexia is a choice? When this image from Brazilian model agency, Star, appeared in my facebook timeline, I certainly stopped and looked twice. It had the desired effect: I was shocked. This image is one of three images being used by the model agency in an advertising campaign aimed at persuading the fashion industry to say ‘no’ to anorexia. Each ad contains two images: a picture of a model in a fashion designer’s sketch and a picture of a ‘real’ model. The fashion sketch is typical of those found in fashion houses the world over, depicting women with long lean limbs and exaggerated proportions. The corresponding images of the ‘real’ models show women with the same proportions as those depicted in the sketch. Underneath the ad is the tagline: ‘You are not a sketch. Say no to anorexia.’ The models are not actual models but women who have been airbrushed to add the unrealistic proportions of the sketches. The images have an enormous impact when you first see them – perhaps, because we’re only too aware that real fashion models are not a million miles from the proportions depicted, and that the waif-like frame is increasingly popular and desired in the fashion industry. But while I believe the ads can effectively raise awareness, the tagline seems wholly inappropriate. The tagline ‘you are not a sketch. Say not to anorexia’ indicates the ads appear to be aimed at models, or women buying clothes rather than actual fashion designers. And how realistic is it to assume someone can just say no to anorexia? Anorexia is a disease which cannot be turned on and off. It is a serious mental health disorder. According to the Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCP) girls and women are ten times more likely than boys and men to suffer from anorexia or bulimia. Anorexia is a mental health illness caused by many factors in a person’s life – it is not a choice. This article in Psychology Today highlights the issues that contribute to the occurrence of anorexia. ‘…it may be useful to think about anorexia in the context of other physical and mental disorders, and to think about the factors that affect the beginning of anorexia and its ending. ‘All illnesses and disorders are affected by both heredity and environment, and might be located somewhere on a spectrum according to the extent to which environment, lifestyle choices, and/or what we might call ‘personal responsibility’ play a role, in terms of precipitating or avoiding the illness…’ ‘It is always difficult to disentangle genetic and environmental factors, and in anorexia there has generally been an overemphasis on social and familial factors at the expense of genetic ones: the espousal of the thin ideal in the fashion industry and the media has perhaps most notably been blamed.’ I am no medical expert, and I have not suffered with an eating disorder, but it takes only a few moments to research anorexia to understand it is nowhere near as simplistic as the ad suggests. And while Star model agency has caused a stir with it’s anti-anorexia ads, I can’t help but consider it irresponsible and ill-informed. Is it not time to target instead, the designers who insist on making clothes for women with starved bodies?  |
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