Women's Views on News |
- Women, weapons and war in 2015
- Petition for an endometriosis strategy
- Protest call as Indian PM visits
| Women, weapons and war in 2015 Posted: 11 Nov 2015 04:54 AM PST
The negative impacts on our society of patriarchy and male privilege are perhaps nowhere more pervasive and pernicious than in the field of weapons, war, and militarism. But much of the discussion on disarmament perpetuates the highly problematic gender constructions of men who are violent and powerful and women that are vulnerable and need to be protected. Gender perspectives in disarmament, peace, and security must be about exposing and challenging this state of affairs, not about including more women in the existing systems of structural inequalities and violent masculinities. Developing a holistic approach to the small arms, arms trade, and women, peace and security agendas is critical to ensure that these agendas contribute to the reduction and prevention of armed conflict and armed violence. This should be the objective of any instrument dealing with weapons, war, or violence. A new briefing paper from Reaching Critical Will considers the synergies – and contradictions – related to gender and women in a number of multilateral resolutions, treaties, and commitments on conventional weapons and women’s rights and participation, including the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), the UN Programme of Action on trade in small arms and light weapons (UNPoA), and resolutions from the UN Security Council, the UN Human Rights Council, and the UN General Assembly. The paper provides a gendered critique of these instruments in order to address problems with categorising women as a vulnerable group, undermining women’s participation and gender diversity in disarmament, reinforcing violent masculinities, and perpetuating structures of patriarchal militarism. It offers several concrete recommendations for states and other actors to change our framing, implement existing tools holistically, and develop stronger norms, standards, and laws to advance gender diversity, disarmament, and peace. What is needed, it says, is an approach that prevents gender-based violence without categorising women simply as vulnerable victims; that promotes a positive role for women in ending conflict rather than participating in it; and that includes a critique of the gendered dimensions of militarism and armed violence, including by analysing and taking action on militarised violent masculinity norms. We must also, the paper continues, work to ensure that the instruments and commitments developed have an impact in the real world. Having good language on paper is only the first step in achieving change. Thus, implementation of the ATT, UNPoA, UNSC and UNGA resolutions, and other relevant instruments must utilise the synergies created by: recognising and addressing the unique or differential impacts on women of weapons use, trade, and proliferation without merely treating them as victims; promoting gender diversity in preventing and ending conflict, including through the promotion of women's full and effective participation; and incorporating gender perspectives in challenging the structures and institutions of armed conflict, armed violence, the arms trade, arms production, and militarism. To do so, and to gain the most from the potential synergies between the instruments considered here, states, international, regional, and national organisations, and civil society groups should consider the following recommendations: 1. Gender-based violence must be interpreted as violence based on socially constructed norms, perceptions, and power relations of gender. This can indeed include violence against women. But it also includes attacks based on other forms of gender and sexuality norms and discrimination. 2. Women must not be categorised as vulnerable or innocent victims and harm specifically to women must not be framed as a problem in itself. Instruments and initiatives should recognise the differential impacts of weapons use, trade, and proliferation on women and others without rendering them helpless victims that lack agency and without implying that harm to women makes the mechanism of harm more egregious. 3. States, international organisations, and civil society groups must strengthen the collection and analysis of sex- and age-disaggregated data on the impact of weapons, including through the implementation of systematic casualty recording. The motivation in documenting and highlighting differential impacts on women should be to ensure that they receive equal and adequate protection, care, rehabilitation, and participation as men in preventing and recovering from armed conflict and armed violence. 4. Gender diversity in disarmament, non-proliferation, and arms control must promote the participation of women but also of those not conforming to dominant gender or sexuality norms. Armed violence also has differential impacts on LGBTQI people, which should be reflected in discussions about weapons, conflict, and violence. It should ensure a range of perspectives can be presented in discussions and negotiations, including critiques of dominant structural inequalities and normative framings. "Effective" participation of women and others creates space for alternative conceptions of security and focus on preventing armed conflict and armed violence rather than on responding to it with military force. 5. Initiatives promoting gender diversity in any of the above should include an explicit critique of militarism and war, including of the patriarchal structures that sustain them. As Carol Cohn put it, to truly challenge war, we must address "the pernicious, pervasive complexities of the gender regimes that undergird not only individual wars but the entire war system."20 And as Cynthia Cockburn argues, we should also recognise gender power relations "as a predisposing, and thus causal, factor in militarization and war." Without a critique of hegemonic violent masculinities, we are held hostage by militarist states and military institutions, as has been seen in the implementation of UNSCR 1325. Therefore, relevant initiatives should include constructive criticism of these frameworks with a view to advancing the overall objective of peace. 6. All treaties, resolutions, commitments, and declarations on the production, possession, transfer, proliferation, or use of weapons must have a gender perspective. They need to take into account differential gendered impacts; gender diversity in the negotiation or elaboration of relevant instruments; and an analysis of the gendered dimensions of the challenges being confronted. 7. Similarly, instruments dealing with women, peace and security or women's human rights must incorporate issues related to weapons, war, and violence. They should promote disarmament and arms control as integral to enhancing women's human rights, preventing gender-based violence, and preventing and ending armed conflict and armed violence.  |
| Petition for an endometriosis strategy Posted: 11 Nov 2015 03:47 AM PST
Endometriosis UK is calling for the UK government to create a National Strategy for endometriosis, a long-term condition. This would set quality standards for endometriosis care and set out a clear clinical pathway for patients who have endometriosis. A national strategy would reduce diagnosis time, raise awareness of the condition and improve the quality of services. And it could promote a multi-disciplinary approach, support patients to take an active part in their care and develop an evidence base to improve outcomes. Currently, the average time to diagnosis is 7 years. Campaigners consider that this is #TooLong and constitutes a huge injustice for women and girls across the country. Women are suffering right now – with nowhere to turn. It is simply unacceptable. Campaigner Carol Pearson wrote ‘In 2011, endometriosis cost me my career at the age of just 39. ‘I suffered excruciatingly painful periods and sex for years before I was finally diagnosed with severe endometriosis at the age of 33. ‘By then, my bowel and bladder were badly diseased from endometriosis. ‘I had a series of major surgeries and lost the lower part of my bowel and a lot of my bladder. ‘Late diagnosis left me unemployable and infertile from a common, yet unheard of, disease that affects 1 in 10 women. ‘It is as common as diabetes in women. ‘My symptoms started at the age of 11, but I wasn't diagnosed until I was 33. ‘It doesn't have to be this way.’ Please sign this petition to call on the government to take endometriosis seriously. Campaigners also want to determine the total number of years that women have had to collectively wait for a diagnosis of endometriosis. So please join the 'Too Long' donation campaign and tell Endometriosis UK how many years it took for you to be diagnosed with endometriosis. Endometriosis UK needs to raise money to enable campaigners to continue to provide vital support services, reliable information and a community for those affected by endometriosis. Over 20,000 of you have already signed the petition. Even if half of those who signed donated the average diagnosis time of 7 years (£7), £70,000 could be raised from this campaign. Endometriosis UK receives minimal funding for the work it does and is financed almost entirely through donations and annual membership subscriptions. Please support it. Thanks.  |
| Protest call as Indian PM visits Posted: 11 Nov 2015 03:12 AM PST
On 13 and 14 November 2015 the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, will be visiting the UK. His visit is significant for a number of reasons, but most of all because it marks the rehabilitation of Modi on the world stage. The UK and other western powers who were once exercised by his abysmal human rights record – especially towards Muslim minorities – are now cosying up to Modi and wilfully turning a blind eye to his brutal and authoritarian Hindu Right regime – a regime that is more characteristic of fascism than it is a thriving democracy. In Gujarat in 2002, as its Chief Minister, Modi presided over a vicious outbreak of violence, the murder and rape of thousands of Muslim men, women and children and the mass looting and destruction of their homes and property. Hindu mobs and paramilitary forces rampaged through Gujarat incited by the inflammatory speeches of Modi and his extreme right wing Hindu cohorts, including the avowedly Hindu fascist organisation, Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) of which he is a member. The event was nothing short of genocide, but to date Modi has shown no remorse. Instead, he has abdicated moral and political responsibility by directly or through his agents blocking and persecuting anyone who attempts to seek justice. And far from delivering his election promise to 'modernise' and 'develop' India, under his watch as Prime Minister, Modi has continued in the same vicious vein; he has fostered intolerance and hatred and unleashed a litany of brutal violence against Muslim, Christian and other minorities and suppressed civil liberties. Modi's government is responsible for widespread human rights violations and abuses of power being carried out with impunity. These include: Dismantling and subverting the secular, democratic and inclusive constitution of India; Instigating widespread censorship by banning books and films and policing social media and the internet; Fostering an anti-intellectual culture through the wholesale undermining of educational, arts and science institutions; Closing down the operations of a range of NGOs and charities such as Greenpeace, the Ford Foundation and others; Generating a culture of fear and silence within civil society; Initiating violence and extra judicial killings of those deemed to be a 'threat' to the state; Failing to stem horrific levels of rape, sexual and other forms of gender-related violence against women and reinforcing structures of patriarchal power; and Presiding over environmental destruction and encouraging corporate greed and institutional unaccountability by eliminating all legal safeguards to protect the environment and tribal and worker's rights. Dozens of Indian writers – among them Nayantara Sahgal, Dalip Kaur Tiwana, Maya Krishna Rao, Krishna Sobti and Shashi Deshpande and Arundhati Roy – have returned top national awards in a protest against what they call a "climate of intolerance" after a series of incidents of communal violence and attacks on intellectuals since the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won power in a landslide election victory in India last year. As far as observers and human rights campaigners are concerned Modi has blood on his hands, yet he remains unapologetic and defiant. Far from being a force for social progress, he spells disaster for the future of Indian secular democracy whose very existence now hangs in the balance. For all these reasons – and more – Modi should not be welcome in the UK. Southall Black Sisters (SBS) stand for the values of human rights, human dignity, equality and plural democracy in which the rights of all are respected and protected. Southall Black Sisters and the Awaaz Network are calling on all those who also value these principles to take a stand and support efforts to bring Modi to account for crimes against humanity. The Awaaz Network is a UK-based secular network of individuals and organisations committed to monitoring and combating religious hatred in South Asia and in the UK. Its members include: the Anti Caste Discrimination Alliance (ACDA), the Dalit Solidarity Network UK (DSN-UK), the Indian Muslim Federation UK (IMF) , the Indian Workers Association GB (IWA), the Muslim Parliament, the Oxford South Asia Forum, the South Asia Solidarity Group, Southall Black Sisters, Southall Monitoring Group, The Sikh Federation (UK), and Voice of Dalit International. What you can do: Don't buy the stage-managed, internationally-orchestrated hype about Modi. Find out more. Look up the RSS, the BJP, Narendra Modi and the ideology of Hindutva. Ask why Modi doesn't take questions from the general public – taking public questions is the job of any politician. Ask why his supporters manage his audience so carefully. Don't attend his stage-managed November rally in Wembley. Don't confuse the myth of Modi with the blood-stained reality. Get involved with Awaaz. Volunteer with Awaaz. Organise teach-ins and speaker meetings. Start an Awaaz student support group on your campus. Mobilise your friends for the Day of Protest and demonstrations in London on 12 November at 10 Downing Street during Modi's visit to the UK. Modi Not Welcome in London: A Day of Protest starts at 12noon. The meeting point is 10 Downing Street, and the demonstration will move on to Parliament Square for a 3.30pm meeting at the House of Commons. For inormation, click here.  |
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