Is all we need a little more justice?

In a panel sponsored by Crossroads International and Women in Law and Development in Africa, a series of women representatives from Togo, Swaziland, and Ghana gathered together to discuss “Decreasing Violence against Women through Access to Justice” in their different contexts. Agreeing that all women’s organizations have a unifying goal of violence prevention and obtainment of equal rights, the women on this panel aimed at opening women’s access to justice in their countries, specifically by the passing of empowering legislation and the insurance of its implementation on the ground. And, in order to do so, these women shared how their organizations strive to strike a balance of working with both government and civil society through gendered perspectives in order to promote women’s empowerment from the grassroots level up.

In order to set the stage, panelists from Togo, Swaziland, and Ghana explained the social and legal climate surrounding women’s issues in their country. In Togo, 42% of married women are subjected to physical and/or psychological violence, and these victims are left unsupported without the backing of the law. While a ‘family code’ exists within the current legal framework of the nation, this code is against discriminatory treatment in general – but not specific to women and girls. Without this specificity, perpetrators abusing women and girls remain unpunished and unaccountable for their actions and their actions’ consequences. This lack of justice and accountability is exacerbated by a disorganized national police force that does not have precedents or protocols established for properly handling cases of violence against women, leaving many abusive situations inadequately addressed. 

In Swaziland, legislation against gender-based violence does in fact exist, however its writing is archaic, dating back between the years 1880 – 1920 and has not evolved to address the threats and dangers that women face in modern day. For instance, violation of a women through anal penetration or penetration with an object is not mentioned under the law, and is regularly considered a simple assault through the eyes of the court. Magnifying this problem is Swaziland’s monarchical system of government that allows the nation’s King to veto any bill that he does not see fit, such as he did with recent legislation designed to protect women in both public and domestic spheres in modern day.

Prior to the passing of any legislation in Ghana, one out of every three women in the country was physically abused and one out of every five women in the country was psychologically abused. Now however, Ghana can serve as a slightly more positive example, boasting quite progressive anti-violence laws for their region, the most recent passed in 2007. Nevertheless, Ghanaians are not immune to the aforementioned obstacles of their region, as demonstrated by the seven-year long struggle it took for such legislation to be passed. Additionally, it is important to note that the act of passing legislation does not automatically translate to the adoption of such practices on the ground, as many Ghanaians continue to struggle unaware of the law or unsure of how to properly use it.

Therefore, while these women interestingly represented three different organizations hailing from experiences in three different nations, the synchrony of their underlying fights and aspirations was striking. The whole panel agreed that the struggle to protect women against instances of violence and to open their access to the justice system is an ongoing, uphill battle against the region’s inflexible customs of patriarchy that are so deeply embedded in their legal and social systems. The panel also believed that “advocacy, advocacy, advocacy” was the solution to overcoming these barriers. Firstly, the panel wants to use advocacy to target the way that people think, challenging their mentality that domestic violence should be kept in the secrecy of the domestic sphere, and hope to raise awareness that such abuse is not a family issue to be dealt with privately, but a societal issue that should be fought against publically and without stigma. From this, the hope is that all those in the region will begin to take issues of domestic violence seriously, both personally as well as legally, with the ultimate goal that all forms of domestic violence should and will be criminalized and persecuted in the future.   

Always Keep Girls in School: An NGO Example in South Africa

By Xia Zhao, Lehigh University, USA

Girls are lag behind in South Africa. What are the challenges in South Africa about girls? How can we help girls through NGOs with the partnership with others? In March 12^th 2015, NGO representatives from South Africa with P&G sponsors had a presentation at Armenia Convention Center in New York. The panel session titled “Partnerships that Accelerate Change to Always Keep Girls in School”, which discussed the Small Projects Foundation’s programs for keeping girls in school in South Africa.

Ms Nanga Magadla, the marketing manager of Small Projects Foundation, introduced the serious girls’ educational problems in South Africa. In poor areas of South Africa, parents don’t see the value of education. Families prefer boys rather than girls to go to school. Child, early and forced marriages are illegal in documents in South Africa, but it has not been executed. Mothers never communicate with their daughters.

Small Projects Foundation has the partnership with P&G. They create a project in South Africa, called Bright Futures Programme, which began in 2007. The main goal is to empower youth in South Africa to complete school and have the skills to find or great their own jobs and develop bright futures for themselves.  Ms Magadla said that, “Bright Future is beautiful. It empowers girls.” Because of this project, teachers and parents have more interactions than ever before. Parents began to send girls to school. Children have time to do homework. Mothers have more communication with their daughters.

The session was ended by playing the video “Always Like a Girl”, which is very powerful. Girls should be proud of themselves and do what they really want to do. 

Empowering Young Women's Leadership as Human Capital in the Post-2015 Agenda

The 59^th CSW Conference is a precious opportunity to review the Beijing Platform about global progress and development in gender equality and to consider the next steps, though different degrees of the gender gap still exist in various parts of the world. This seminar was started by Ravi Karkara, who was involved in the Global Migrant Campaign which focused much work on young women. He stated that many more opportunities have opened up for women, especially girls’, and Beijing +20 has had more specific goals for young girls. The year 2015 also marks the 70^th anniversary of the United Nations and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). He questioned:

·   Where will the voices of young women and partnerships for them be?

·   Do women and young women have resources and capacity to participate at present?

Global citizenship education has been placed as the 16^th priority in SDGs. It should have, instead, pushed to the first priority. Ravi has been eager to hear from responsive governments for adolescent girls and young women to end all forms of violence – including gender based violence. Young Women’s Leadership Alliance should be sited in every single neighborhood to raise awareness of culture and civil rights, as well as to create a fundraising mechanism for promoting gender equity.  

Hazami Barmada, a social entrepreneur working on public-private partnerships, believed that youth has been an agent of change on national and international levels. Empowering women should be done through education and advocacy. Yet, determining the power of girls can be problematic on the international level. What does empowering mean? It can vary depending on the cultural and geographic contexts, and it needs to depend on institutions when there is an inequality to build equal systems across countries. For example, 60% of chronically hungry people are women and girls. These need to be broken down in order to localize issues and dissect the complex problems and cultural nuances. Strategic partnerships and coalitions have to be established on the business and economic reality. For instance, human trafficking is related to some economic reasons. We should negotiate local issues with global visions.

The work of Jennifer Astuto, Research Assistant Professor of Applied Psychology, Assistant Director of Steinhardt’s Child and Family Policy Center, and the Director of the Human Development and Social Intervention Program at New York University, is mainly concerned with the injustice in urban environments in America, specifically in Early Childhood Education. She strongly believes that early experiences do matter in a critical and meaningful way, particularly from pre-natal to five years old. This period shapes their mental development that promotes memory, interactions, and self-control. For instance, poor environments will lead to inactivity of children’s brains and their future disengagement. Education does not have to happen in the classroom, but also occurs within the peers, families, on the streets, and in the playgrounds. Therefore, structure of invention and prevention with care becomes parts of society to lift up the injustice when children face racism.

Lorena Arriaga, the First Lady of Mexico, affirmed that young girls and women have shaped their own histories. In her country, universal education has been implemented all the way to junior high school. Though girls usually have better performances in school, they start having fewer opportunities due to focusing more on domestic work from about the age of 15 years old. This phenomenon manifests deep stereotypes and generates inequality. There is a pressing need to develop institutions with global visions to eliminate gender inequality. Education is important to generate other rights, opportunities, and social justice in the immediate future. Education also extends beyond classrooms and needs to involve boys and girls in the family to make sure that gender inequality is broken down. It requires working with civil society to make it successful, so that young women will become major agents in their families and societies. 

This session ended with the speech by Gabriela Mora from Young Women’s Leadership Alliance that women have to listen and speak up for what they believe.

Real Men Do Not Hurt Others: Ending Sexual and Gender Based Violence by Working with Men and Boys on Positive/Transformative Masculinities

Nowadays, more attention has been placed on men to work together with women on gender socializing and peace building. In this session, three men shared their experiences of how they transformed masculinities from a Christian perspective. The first one, from The Center of Violence Prevention based in Quebec, Canada, emphasized children’s rights. He believed that children should be safe, strong, and free, including rights and responsibilities. When he works with children, there is no sexual segregation. Because power plays a role in every relationship, resistance always occurs when power is taken away.  Traditionally, females lack opportunities and tools, whereas males are socialized to participate in the world in different ways. Therefore, he teaches the next generation not to use power in an arbitrary way and to react tactfully in the complex societal dynamics, with the strength-based approach to gender responsiveness. In other words, men must think about their roles regarding the marginalization and injustice of women.

The second speaker from Sonke Gender Justice has been working with the Catholic and Lutheran Church for social justice in South Africa. He stated that the biblical perspective had a stronger element of masculinity. He believed that fathers and men are critical in building the capacity of the next generation in realizing gender equality.

The third speaker from Christian Aid, a development agency based in the UK, has mobilized Christian leaders for the movement of speaking in once voice about gender justice. He identified himself as a feminist who has supported engaging men and boys as essential to gender justice. However, he was also mentioned his disappointment at seeing so few men at the CSW Conference.  

Christian Aid focuses on the alternative way of non-violent masculinity for women’s rights in 40 countries for a total transformation of gender perspective. The best way to get possible solutions to work is by using partners in all of these countries as they are all under similar the cultural norms and practices.  For instance, they collaborate with the Center of Violence Prevention in Nicaragua to change the traditional perceptions of men in order to break the cycle of violence against women and foster the culture of peace. This project was formed by a group of psychologists and social professionals in 1997 to challenge masculinity and patriarchal relationships to promote equal relations. 

Ending Violence against Women Online: Effective Responses to Promote Women's Rights and Safety

The prevention of violence against women used to get less attention from the public than other issues such as health, hunger, and poverty of girls and women. Since 2009, Take Back the Tech, the Association for Progressive Communications, Gender IT, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands launched a project in 12 countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia to investigate how women have used technology. They looked at what particular experiences online could be, what online harassment and stalking, such as black emails and images could provoke, and its related violence and injustice, as well as how the internet has changed their lives. The countries involved in this study are The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mexico, Colombia, the Philippines, and Pakistan. However, there has been very little that women could do to tackle these problems. Therefore, these organizations are looking into available remedies.

            In terms of methodologies, the organizations develop a map of the countries regarding what has happened with individual cases. The organizations also stress the importance of gaining consent from the participants, which is a vital piece of the internet world. From their investigation, the organizations found that some women are affected even when they are offline. For example, one woman was filmed accidentally in a video which was placed on YouTube later and circulated among a group of boys. She was threatened by having sex with these boys for not sharing this video with her parents. Moreover, invisible actors play important roles behind the scenes. The most common scenario is that the sexual harassment is done by a known person. It doesn’t only cause physical and emotional harm, but it is also invasion of privacy. Sadly, there is a lack of attention to Global South regions.

Currently, the biggest challenges are the absence of an international convention toward those who violate women’s rights and a lack of legislation against cyber crime. Many reports have been ignored or even deleted. Many feminist accounts are hacked as well. By 2003, only six countries had internal laws for protecting women on the internet.  Some countries have laws on cyber crime; however they are mainly bank-oriented, such as the disclosure of credit card information. Nevertheless, online sexual harassment definitely includes psychological violence, which is the most difficult to report and to prove in the courts on the national level. In Kenya, people affected do not know how to use technology. By the end of 2014, Take Back the Tech, the Association for Progressive Communications, Gender IT, and Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands started approaching the police for partnerships to ensure the urgency of carrying out legislation. So, how is the international community going to handle it? This is the question that we must continue working on.

Imagine a World…

It has been 20 years since the first the Beijing Platform. In this 59^th CSW Conference, the gap between the vision of BJ+20 in gender equality and actual realization on the ground is evident.  Among all the nations, Nordic countries have the smallest gap in gender equality. Interestingly, Pathways to Peace works closely with the Institution of HeartMath for the practices of science and mathematics, using the perspective of behavior changes to promote the notion of peace, whereas governments’ leaders usually emphasize the reduction of violence and absence of war as indicators of peace.  The audience was asked to speak up about what they feel about the status of peace versus the status of conflicts.

In this session, two female young Heart Ambassadors from Palestine in Israel shared their stories about how they have been empowered through Pathways to Peace and the Institution of HeartMath. One of them experienced sexual harassment in the university, which was a common occurrence for those with a lower standing of ethnicity in the country. As a result of this condition, domestic violence and human trafficking could occur with more ease. Luckily, she received an apology from the “oppressor”, which was a rare case. Meanwhile, the other young woman opened a day care to cater Arab and Jewish families in the Palestine in Israel to demonstrate the oneness of humankind.

This seminar taught that discourse has been one of the main pathways to solve various kinds of discord. Discourse can generate meaningful conversation, offer insights from all walks of life, raise the public awareness of different issues, and shape the political, social, as well as cultural dynamics. Obviously, the United Nations does need more sincere dialogues and discourses with the civil society to work on the progress of gender equality for the betterment of the world.

论贫困地区科学学科对女性的必要性

    美国东部时间3月13号下午，来自全球妇女基金会（即Global Fund for Women）的代表在纽约联合国针对尼日利亚贫困地区的女孩们的科学学科教育问题举行了一场讲座。

       

    在会议上，演讲者们指出在尼日利亚地区，大部分人们认为科学学科是男性的特权，相反地，女性读科学科学却被认为是不合常理的。同时，人们认为科学学科对于女性来说是一项挑战。当前情况下，社会上并没有为女性的使用计算机和社会媒体的能力提供足够的培训机会，是女性学习科学学科的一大阻碍。另外，尤其对贫困的家庭，无法支付昂贵的科学学科课本又是一大问题。一位来自Anambra State University的生物化学专业的女学生讲述了她自己是如何突破重重障碍，顶着巨大的压力来完成她的科学专业的，赢得了全场的掌声。接着，一位来自尼日利亚的医学教授强调了指导者在女性教育方面的重要性。对于年轻女性来说，如果一位合格的指导者在旁边指导鼓励女性去接受挑战，最后可能会产生巨大的影响力。最后，一位来自尼日利亚大学的教授指出了改变这个社会认知的重要性，当女性有能力去影响社会的时候，整个社会就会有更大的进步。同时，这位教授所在的组织做的一些调查也证明了那些接受科学教育的女性的确在社会进步上发挥了巨大的影响力。

    在会议的最后，大家针对这个话题进行的热烈的讨论。不管怎样，大家在女性需要接受科学教育的观点上达成了一致。在平等接受教育的基础上，女性应该有着和男性一样平等的选择权，在尼日利亚这个相对贫困的地区，这样的认知仍需要广泛传播。

The Situation and Tendency of Gender Equality in China since 1995 《北京宣言》后中国性别平等的发展现状

By  赵霞 (Xia Zhao)， 美国里海大学(Lehigh University)

美国东部时间2015年3月12日上午8点30分，来自中国大陆和香港地区的非政府组织代表于亚美尼亚会展中心（Armenian Convention Center）就关于1995年《北京宣言》后中国性别平等问题的现状和发展趋势进行了深入地研讨。具体而言，会议针对中国女性教育，农村地区以及少数民族地区的女性发展问题进行了精彩的演讲。

教育方面，柯教授讲到，中国初等教育女童入学率和辍学率都大于男童。课本中对男性和女性的描绘具有不平等性。中国高等教育入学率女性高于男性。但女性在找工作过程中处于明显的劣势。

中国妇女发展协会的周副会长同时表示，中等教育是中国农村女童教育的一大瓶颈。进入中学后，女性入学率开始大大降低，特别是落后的农村地区。经济原因和男尊女卑的传统观念是导致这一问题的主要原因。

来自云南的杨教授表示，改变云南少数民族地区女性平等问题的关键在改变文化对人们思维观念的影响。社会应该渐渐抛弃传统陋习，给予女性更多选择的权利。这种权利来自于整个社会对女性的帮助，包括健康医疗，社会保障，教育机会以及就业等帮助。

此次报告吸引了世界各国人民的参与，会后观众就中国女性发展问题进行了相关的提问。

Uniting Our Voices Against Violence

The panel conducted by Soroptimist International, World Association of Girls Guides and Girls Scouts, and World YWCA discussed the issues of women violence. Regarding to that, some possible solutions and suggestions were provided at the same time.

Women are the less powerful groups than men, which decides that women are easy to be violated by men most times. Although some organizations have been established and try to help women get out of that situation, most women have not developed an awareness of asking for help from those organizations. A speaker gave an example that a women was violated by her husband for ten years, but she was reluctant to ask for help from women organizations. Currently, the real problem is that women have realized that they were wrongly treated, but they gave up their hope to change that situation.

The next speaker suggested a solution that is based on education. Education can empower girls and women to make change. Through the formal education curriculum, girls and women will learn that they can be powerful to change. Moreover, receiving education will support them to build relationships between social communities. Therefore, not only girls but also young boys will learn from each other, and prevent the violence. Another speaker pointed out that most women are experiencing discrimination in the environment, communities, societies, workplaces, and even homes; women are also experiencing physical, verbal, sexual, and emotional violence. The curriculum will make young teenagers realize this issue and stop the violence at the early age.

To effectively prevent the violence, some strategies were provided during the session, such like building women shelters, raising awareness, and creating equal relationships between women and men. In addition, conducting focus groups and dynamic discussions is also suggested to encourage women to make their voices speak out.