For how long do we have to keep demanding our rights? Credit: Mercedes Sayagues/IPS

For International Women’s Day there was plenty of activity, with celebrations and commemorations around the world. More ordinary women and men now know about this international day to celebrate women than ever before. Just ten years ago you might have struggled to get a significant positive response if you went out into the streets and asked random people if or what they knew about March 8th.

The theme for this year, “Equal rights, equal opportunities, progress for all”, mirrors what the first organizers of IWD had in mind 100 years ago when they organised for millions of women and men to come out on the streets in Europe to demand equal rights for women.

But this year I did not get the feeling that 8th March was used as a real rallying point for activism on a particular issue on women. This seems to have been the general feeling coming out of the Beijing +15 meet in New York as well.

Following the events there I got the impression that the feeling was one of lost gains and lost focus in contrast to the vibrant activism of that global meeting of women 15 years ago. We have ever multiplying to-do lists of things that need to be achieved within set time frames but the progress in terms of women’s lived realities has been very slow.

One of the statements in Wendy Harcourt’s guest blog from the CSW last week rang true for me where she quotes a delegate from Latin America saying, “why do we expect the UN and governments to take up our agenda? We have to make our own agenda.”

Part of that agenda relates to the proposed new UN gender entity to be headed by a new Under Secretary-General that women’s rights activists have been pushing for over the last three years. But not only is progress on that machinery slow and mired in controversy, it still places the onus for progress on the UN and governments.

Here in Southern Africa there is also growing dissatisfaction from young women who feel the women’s movement has not created room for them. For the most part, they are going out and creating their own agenda that the broader women’s movement needs to acknowledge and actively support if we are to move forward.

Getting in here can be a real hassle. Credit S.Zacarro/IPS

Well, two predictions of mine are bearing out. First, the chaos of organising such a large meeting led to some people queuing for five to eight hours to register for the official CSW meeting. On the bright side, such long waiting times did mean unplanned networking and a sense of solidarity among the thousands of participants despite the indignity of it all. It also led to the absurdity of one of the key speakers of an official opening panel failing to get in to speak because she was stuck in a queue.

Once people managed to get their badges, the next hassle was getting into the sessions. There are passes for official meetings — which of course ran out — and in the NGO parallel space the large numbers and fire restrictions meant even those willing to stand or sit on the floors were being turned out.

Rumours have it there are over 8,000 women here.

Personally, I had a lucky time of it. I only waited one and a half hours and used the time to chat to an old friend and meet new ones. I had heard about the queues on the first day, so I got there first thing on the second day. And I managed to squeeze into the sessions, even got to sit on a chair in one.

And the other prediction was that the sense of economic crisis looms large. From snatched corridor conversations it is clear that most women are not celebrating Beijing as such. There is a sense that Beijing promises were great on paper but the implementation has not brought women’s rights nor freedom and autonomy to the centre of development.

There are still vast inequalities among women and men and many are more marginalized from power, poorer and much more vulnerable than they were in 1995.

One of the sessions I attended was by Social Watch, the Association of Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) and Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), on the impact of the financial crisis across the regions. The statistics and indicators show there are very different worlds that women inhabit depending on where they live, their education, assets and access to decision making and bargaining power.

For most though, the financial crisis is just building on the other crises of food, care and climate. It is further proof of the failure of the economic system. Poor women who have never experienced the benefits of the economic system do not see crisis as new, just that it is now more talked about. Life continues but is perhaps a little harder.

Some, who had gained employment through globalization particularly in Asia and Latin America, are losing those same jobs. Government bale outs are not for the sectors where women are employed but for those where mainly men work.

Women know how to cope if circumstances allow. The problem is the system is not listening to those ways of coping and building on them. And there are not enough knowledgeable women in the right places to make the difference. There is anger over the failure of decision makers to take into account the information, analysis and knowledge of gender in trade, taxation, decent work, the care economy, informal sector and migration.

As one woman from Africa commented, women have been saying the same thing for years. Why are people not listening?

That seems to be the main issue in the sessions so far: how to change the system so that women’s rights, economic and political realities are seen as core to a fair and just and sustainable development.

But as another participant from Latin America said, “why do we expect the UN and governments to take up our agenda? We have to make our own agenda.”

Perhaps this talk of crisis, of needing governments not markets, has to create a much stronger demand for new systems that move away from the UN’s old approach of business as usual.

From Pakistan, another participant pointed out that the Millennium Development Goals, the framework in which development is practiced, is not looking at rights and freedom of women to choose their lives, including having children, having jobs, having pleasure, making change happen in their lives.

Rather it is about how to provide education, how to avoid maternal mortality how to stop HIV and AIDS. Women’s rights, particularly their sexual and reproductive rights, disappear in the barrage of neatly divided silos and indicators, which bear little resemblance of messy reality of women’s lives.

Are there new forms of democracy and politics that can answer to today’s realities? How do the women here counter the floundering corrupt governments, of rising fundamentalism and racism, the frank greed of businesses and capitalism, of conflict and ravaged environments?

As usual, I and most of the women here have many more questions than answers. We will see how the next days unfold.

SID Gender Matters - http://www.sidint.net/category/gender/gm/

Dr Wendy Harcourt

Guest Blogger Wendy Harcourt on Beijing +15 -– Commission on the Status of Women March 1 to 12

When told about the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) some might think, so what? Surely this is just yet another big U.N. affair with little impact in the real world? So why, then, are thousands of women from around the world coming to New York during the first two weeks of March? So many indeed that registration closed early and those who managed to register on time are being warned that there will be restricted entry both in the official U.N. event and in the NGO sessions that are held parallel to the main events. Undeterred, more events are being scheduled in New York and emails are whizzing around with invitations to impromptu sessions set up as the parallel of the parallel.

An event not since repeated

So why? Very simply, this event held around the Commission on the Status of Women is the one official opportunity on the U.N. calendar for women to participate in holding their governments accountable to the promises made 15 years ago at the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing, China. It is, if you like, a substitute for another World Conference on Women.

Beijing remains the largest and most influential of all the World Conferences on Women. Nearly 180 government delegations and 2,500 nongovernmental organizations met to discuss a broad range of issues concerning women.With high profile speakers such as Hillary Rodham Clinton, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Jane Fonda and many heads of UN and government ministers it was an event that has not been repeated.

Many women’s organisations see the Beijing Conference as a turning point in the world’s understanding of women’s human rights. And the official document agreed to — the Platform of Action — remains the standard to which governments committed to meet their promises to the world’s women.

But why come to New York to do so?

This is perhaps one of the most vital differences between women’s and other movements that satellite around the U.N. This is a learning space for intergenerational knowledge sharing. New York becomes a meeting point, a source of information sharing, and a place to strategise on the world today. These crucial activities will not be happening so much in the official panels and discussions but in the corridors and in the parallel sessions to official talks.

The discussions wont just be about the 12 points of action, but rather the impact of the global financial, food, environmental, care and other crises on women today. In some ways the world looks much bleaker than 15 years ago, but in others it is a world much more understandable, better known as a result of communication technologies and one where women are figuring much more prominently even though there are still only nine female incumbent heads of state.

But at the top of the list is still the deep economic crisis related to systemic failure with entrenched gender inequalities and continued marginalisation of women in access to resources, jobs and leadership. Women are still the majority of the world’s poorest people, and the financial crisis and the deepening economic recession is impacting on them most.

Last year, the 53rd CSW looked at economic and political empowerment of women. It will be important in this 54th session not to lose sight of how important economic analysis from a gender perspective will be in order to face and overcome the crisis. Economic analysis has to become gendered and in a no nonsense way, full of the political and social realities as much as the technical measurement of the ups and down of indices. In sharing information in New York and in the myriad of reports, tweets, blogs, messages and reports, the CSW promises to be a place to understand how decisions happening at the global and state level are making profound differences to women struggling to make livelihoods meet at the ground level.

In short, the sessions in their no doubt organizationally chaotic way will help those concerned about women’s rights, gender inequality and empowerment to go beyond the figures. These figures can mask the tough realities but also they miss the places for hope and change. We need both to face the grim situation we are in but also to look at the energy and resolution in overcoming what can appear impossibly hellish situations.

Continued search for change

In the SID Forum coverage of the CSW we plan to look at the multi-faceted reality of the impact of economic crises on women. It is crucial to get this right. But even more importantly through investigating how women are seeing the crisis, embedded within their lives, their analysis, we also want to search out their strategies for change.

In this way the SID Forum will delve deeper into how the economic crisis could create opportunities for change that recognizes the complexities of women’s productive and reproductive lives and ways forward out of the crises. Beijing’s Platform for Action is an important document because it is built on many thousands of discussions around the world that brought out just such complexities and the vision for change and then distilled them into a doable Platform of Action.

Beijing still needs to become a reality, but also 15 years later, even more is needed with the current scenarios we are facing. It is these scenarios we plan to report during our discussions on the CSW in our continued search for change.

Dr Wendy Harcourt is Senior Programme Director and Editor of Development at the Society for International Development (SID) in Rome. Born in Australia she has been working with the SID International Secretariat in Rome since 1988. Through her programme and editorial work at SID she has organised and attended many conferences on gender and development as well as undertaken collective research projects leading to four edited books, the most recent being Body Politics in Development, 2009. She is currently series editor of the ZED Books Gender and Environment series, was Chair of Women in Development Europe (WIDE), Member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge and on the board of the International Feminist Journal of Politics and International Women’s Association for Human Rights, The Great Transition Initiative and the International Feminist Working Group on Biotechnologies.

Women live longer than men but these extra years are not always healthy, says WHO. Credit: WHO/UNAIDS/K.Hesse

With the Beijing +15 review coming up next week at the Commission on the Status of Women, it seems an appropriate time to have a look at where we are globally in terms of gender equality and women’s empowerment in line with the 12 Critical Areas under the Beijing Platform for Action.

Women and poverty
Vulnerable employment has decreased globally by three percentage points since 1997, says UNIFEM in its 2008 annual Progress of the World’s Women report. But about 1.5 billion people are still in this category and the share is larger for women at 51.7 per cent. While global progress is important, national-level data indicate that women are still more likely than men to be poor and at risk of hunger because of the systematic discrimination they face in access to education, healthcare and control of assets. For example, in Malawi, there are three poor women for every poor man, and this proportion is increasing.

Education and training of women
According to findings from the twelve African countries where the UN Economic Commission for Africa’s African Gender and Development Index (AGDI) was piloted, at primary level, South Africa and Tunisia show higher female enrollment compared to males. Parity in primary enrollment also appears imminent in seven countries (Cameroon, Egypt, Ghana, Madagascar, Mozambique, United Republic of Tanzania and Uganda), while for Benin, Burkina Faso and Ethiopia achievement of the MDG 2 target of ensuring that girls and boys will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling by 2015 is likely to take longer.

Women and health
HIV, pregnancy-related conditions and tuberculosis continue to be major killers of women aged 15 to 45 globally, the World Health Organisation says in its November 2009 report, ‘Women and health: today’s evidence tomorrow’s agenda’. The report also notes that lack of access to education, decision-making positions and income may limit women’s ability to protect their own health and that of their families. Though major differences exist in women’s health across regions, countries and socio-economic class, women and girls face similar challenges, in particular discrimination, violence and poverty, which increase their risk of ill health.

Violence against women and Women in Conflict
According to the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), more than 8,000 women were raped by warring factions in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) last year, while over three million young girls are at risk of undergoing female genital mutilation worldwide. The scourge of gender based violence is worsened by the impunity enjoyed by perpetrators.

The U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) estimates that out of nearly 1,000 sexual abuse and over 1,500 domestic violence cases reported in Sierra Leone last year, there wasn’t a single conviction.

Women in power and decision-making
Women currently comprise an average of 18.7 percent of both the lower and upper houses of parliament globally, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU). Rwanda, with 56.3 percent, heads the list, followed by Sweden (46.4%), South Africa (44.5%), Cuba (43.2%) and Iceland (42.9%). But according to UNIFEM, even at the current rate of increase of less than one percent from 1975 to 1995, it will take developing countries nearly 50 years to achieve parity unless countries continue establishing quotas or other temporary positive action measures. You can check IPU to see where your country stands. http://www.ipu.org/wmn-e/classif.htm

Institutional mechanisms for the advancement of women
Although most countries have established national machineries to deal with the Beijing Platform for Action commitments, inadequate financial and human resources, lack of clear focus; uncertainties in co-ordination and limited research have rendered the vast majority of these institutions ineffective.

Human rights of women
The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) is the international human rights treaty for women. Adopted by the U.N. General Assembly on 18th December 1979, it recently marked its 30th anniversary and has been ratified by 186 countries. Among the AGDI pilot countries, all 12 countries have ratified CEDAW. However, three (Egypt, Ethiopia and Tunisia) have maintained reservations to date. Particularly in the cases of Egypt and Tunisia, these reservations relate to “CEDAW core areas”: Articles 2 and 16, which deal with enforcement of non-discrimination and equality in marriage and family life.

Though many countries have integrated non-discriminatory clauses into their constitutions and put in place gender sensitive legislation on marriage, family and property relations, implementation tends to be limited by the continued operation of customary law and limited capacity of enforcement agencies.

Women and the media
According to the 2009 Gender Links study, ‘Glass Ceilings: Women and Men in Southern African Media‘, men remain the predominant employees in media houses in the 14 Southern African Development Community member countries, with men constituting 59 percent of employees. In top management, women comprise only 23 percent of top managers.

On the positive side, where reporting is concerned, there is gender parity (50/50) in the coverage of sports in Botswana, while women constitute 40% of sports reporters in South Africa. Women (83%) also dominate in the coverage of economics/business/finance in South Africa and in Namibia (71%).

Women and the environment
According to the U.N. Population Fund and the Women Environment and Development Organisation (WEDO), poor and disadvantaged women are disproportionately affected by natural disasters and are overrepresented in death tolls. For example:
• Women and children are 14 times more likely to die than men during natural disasters;
• More than 70 per cent of the dead from the 2004 Asian tsunami were women; and
• Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans, USA, in 2005, predominantly affected African American women—already the region’s poorest, most marginalized community.

The girl child
Female genital mutilation (FGM) remains one of the commonest harmful traditional practices in many parts of the world, says the UN. It is practiced in more than half of the countries in Africa, with the prevalence ranging from 98 percent in Somalia to five percent in the Democratic Republic of Congo. At least 100 million women and girls in Africa have been victims of FGM.

Girls also continue to be affected by son preference, early marriage and pregnancy, trafficking, violence in conflict and post-conflict situations and other forms of gender based violence.

Queen Elizabeth I kept a reign on power by becoming "The Virgin Queen" Credit www.PDImages.com

This question has been puzzling me since a late-night, noisy get together with friends where we got talking (some might say gossiping) about the alleged cross-party sexual politics taking place in our government. The men, it was said, were using sex as a strategy to silence the women from the opposite camps. The woman targeted  loses her standing once she’s been seduced as it quickly becomes general knowledge among other politicians.

“Once you see that so and so who used to be so vocal has gone quite then you know they’ve been had,” said one friend. Much like the boarding school strategy employed by male students to remove the top performing girl student’s ranking as number one in class I’m told. But, never having been to boarding school, much less a co-educational school, I am not aware.

As much as this dirty trick is an age-old male strategy to silence female opponents, women throughout history have used their sexuality, that is — whom one has sex with (or not), in what ways, why, under what circumstances, and with what outcomes — as a strategy to gain power.

I’m thinking Anne Boleyn, Cleopatra and Eva Peron. Make no mistake about it. These were no dimwitted women bumbling their way to power. Neither were they the most attractive of women. No doubt their intelligence, wit, charm, humour and deep passion to succeed all combined to give them charisma, which played an important part in their sexual allure. And their sexual power lay in this desirability, not in handing out sexual favours.

More recently, we had general head shaking disapproval from many quarters over German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Christian Democratic Union Parliamentary candidate Vera Lengsfeld’s bosomy “We have more to offer” poster, which featured in last August’s election campaign. The posters were put up by Lengsfeld, who said she wanted to give the campaign a bit of humour. Reading up on Lengsfeld I found out she has a degree in Philosophy of Religion and is a civil rights activist which was my confirmation that she really thought this poster idea through. I wonder if there would have been less head shaking if the bosoms had not been middle-aged ones.

The example of all these women got me thinking that male politicians’ strategy of using sex against women could be turned on its head after the style of Anne Boleyn. It seems that sexual unavailability will get you ahead. Anne Boleyn’s “Queen or nothing” strategy worked well with Henry VIII. She refused to be his mistress and all the while his attentions and favours towards her flourished. Eventually he married her, annulling his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. But no sooner had she become Queen than Henry VIII began to lose interest and eventually got around to beheading her.

Elizabeth I (Anne Boleyn’s daughter) perfected her mother’s strategy. She came into power at age 25 despite being declared illegitimate and stayed in power for 44 years until her death. Sometimes called ‘The Virgin Queen’, she never married. Not only did Elizabeth avoid losing her power to a husband by marrying, she also avoided the problem of succession. Personally I’m not convinced Elizabeth was really a virgin, but either way, her strategy of sexual aloofness certainly kept her in the game of politics.

I can just picture many readers are tsk tsking, thinking this type of discussion is not going to help advance the feminist cause. Some will argue that in those days women may have had to use their ‘feminine wiles’ in addition to their intellectual skills to get ahead but now we have to employ ‘fair’ tactics and play strictly by the book. The problem for me is that men’s unfair tactics — violence, money and character assassination being the primary ones — are rarely questioned. In fact, they tend to be rewarded.

Surely denying women use of their sexuality in the game of politics and power is yet another reflection of the power imbalances between women and men where women’s sexual rights are limited while men’s sexual freedom grows. In the so-called “dirty game of politics”, are we stifling women’s progress to the top by refusing them the right to use their sexuality while we applaud men’s use of the same?

Espero entre indignada y divertida el próximo 8 de marzo, Día Internacional de la Mujer… El anterior me deparó una pasmosa sorpresa. Sobre mi escritorio había una enorme rosa de pétalos amarillos y bordes rojos y una tarjeta dirigida a las mujeres del siglo XXI, en su día.

“Las mujeres han seducido a los literatos, han vuelto frescos a los piadosos, han empobrecido a los ricos…” “… para ellas se construyen los palacios, se tienden las cortinas, se compran los esclavos y corren las lágrimas…” “para ellas son el almizcle, las joyas y el ámbar, por su causa se reúnen los ejércitos, se construyen los cuarteles, se almacenan las provisiones y se cortan los cuellos…”

El texto es una cita de “Las Mil y Una Noches”, la célebre compilación de cuentos árabes del siglo XI. Y el remitente del supuesto elogio al eterno femenino, Random House Mondadori.

¿Por qué escogieron este texto los encargados de relaciones públicas de Random House Mondadori? Apuesto que les pareció un conjunto de alabanzas y zalamerías exóticas, impactantes y perfumadas.

Pero, ¿cuál es la imagen femenina que describen estas citas? Una creada en el medioevo por el mundo masculino. La mujer era capaz de enloquecer o arruinar al hombre, de hacerlo embarcar en las empresas más locas, audaces y crueles, un ser por el que valía la pena saquear, esclavizar, matar…

Ese ser, casi mítico, funcionaba como justificación literaria y poética de las reglas de juego que regían el mundo masculino de entonces: el dominio a toda costa y la acumulación de territorios y riqueza.

Las mujeres reales de esa época, a las que se dirigían esos dudosos elogios, permanecían, por ejemplo, esclavizadas en un harén.

“Las Mil y Una Noches” es un relato que da a pie a otro: El sultán Shahriar asesina a su esposa cuando descubre que le es infiel y, a partir de entonces, ordena que se le presente cada día una nueva mujer, que pasa con él la noche y al amanecer es ejecutada.

Una locura cruel. Pero con nuestros ojos del siglo XXI podemos verla como lago más: una perfecta muestra de violencia sexista, perpetrada con total alarde de poderío.

Entonces, la joven Sherezade rompe ese círculo de muerte: urde el plan de fascinar al sultán con el relato de un cuento y dejarlo inconcluso justo al amanecer, con la promesa de terminarlo a la noche siguiente. Así logra sobrevivir mil noches y, al final, consigue que el castigo le sea perdonado a ella y a todas las que la hubieran seguido.

Sherezade es un símbolo, como lo es el sultán. Hoy, la elección de la cita elegida por el gigante editorial también tiene significado simbólico.

Random House Mondadori Sociedad Anónima es, según su propia definición, uno de los líderes en edición y distribución de contenidos escritos en lengua española.

Es un emprendimiento de riesgo compartido entre Random House, división editorial de Bertelsmann AG, la mayor empresa internacional de comunicación, comercio electrónico y contenidos interactivos, y Mondadori, editorial que posee un tercio del negocio de libros y revistas en Italia, una de las propiedades del primer ministro italiano Silvio Berlusconi.

Random House es el mayor grupo editorial del mundo.

Desde 2001 forman parte de Random House Mondadori todos estos sellos:

Areté, Beascoa, Caballo de Troya, Debate, DeBolsillo, Collins, Electa, Grijalbo, Lumen, Mondadori, Montena, Plaza & Janés, Rosa dels Vents, Sudamericana.

Distribuye y exporta sus títulos a más de 45 países de América Latina, Asia, Europa y Estados Unidos.

Bertelsmann AG opera en 63 países y da empleo a más de 100.000 personas. Posee empresas de radiodifusión, editoras de revistas y de libros, sellos discográficos, el mayor grupo de distribución de libros y de música, logística, diseño y contenidos multimedia, entre otros negocios.

Literalmente, grupos como Bertelsmann AG tienen el poder de imponer ideas, modelos, contenidos. Decenas de miles de periodistas, escritores y comunicadores trabajan para estas empresas.

Pero su influencia va mucho más allá, porque crean y sostienen cultura y formas de ver, que se reproducen fácilmente en cada sala de redacción, por pequeña que sea. Y en cada calle. Son un posmoderno sultán Shahriar.

¿Qué es lo mínimo que la sociedad de hoy debería exigir a medios tan poderosos? Por lo menos que los contenidos con los que dejan semejante huella cultural sean un reflejo de este mundo, el del siglo XXI, y no uno del siglo XI.

Claro, este mundo no es precisamente un mar de rosas.

Las mujeres siguen siendo objeto de violencia y atropellos, aunque ya quede mal decir que todo se hace en nombre de su belleza. Y la presencia femenina sigue siendo poca y distorsionada en los medios de comunicación.

El 10 de noviembre del año pasado, el Proyecto de Monitoreo Global de Medios llevó a cabo su cuarta investigación para evaluar “cómo ha ido cambiando la representación de género en los medios de comunicación” de distintas regiones del mundo. Los resultados estarán listos a tiempo para la conferencia que las Naciones Unidas celebrarán en marzo, en Nueva York, con motivo de los 15 años de la Cumbre de Beijing.

Algunos resultados del estudio anterior, de 2005, indican que las mujeres eran apenas 21 por ciento de los actores de las noticias (y los hombres el restante 79 por ciento), 17 por ciento de las fuentes expertas y 14 por ciento de las portavoces, pero duplicaban a los hombres entre las fuentes que eran víctimas.

En fin, no necesitamos más sultanes, ni tampoco queremos más Sherezades. Necesitamos estar alerta.

How does one tell a child that it is for his own future that his mother has to go offshore in search of the proverbial ‘greener pastures’, leaving behind a family that has never known the meaning of separation?

Just what does that assurance mean to a child anyway whose notion of a secure tomorrow could simply be waking up each morning with his mother by his side.

A couple of days ago, I heard about Mikey (not his real name), an extremely smart 13-year-old boy, who was found crying by his teacher during a class break. Mikey was confiding to his friend that his mother, a nurse, would soon be leaving the country to work in some hospital thousands of miles away from home. The thought that he was not going to see his mother over the next 12 months that she would be contracted with her foreign employer was simply unbearable to him.

Hearing about Mikey’s ordeal tugged at my heart and mind. Something is awfully wrong when either or both parents – especially mothers – must leave their children behind in hopes of giving them a better future, I thought to myself.

Every day thousands of Filipinos – driven by poverty of varying degrees – leave the country to work abroad. A significant number are females. Of the 2 million Filipino contract workers who left the country between April and September 2008, 48.3 percent were women.

“Since the early 1980s, there has been a marked increase in the number of women working outside the country,” said Atikha Overseas Workers and Communities Initiative, a non-governmental organisation in the Philippines trying to raise awareness of the social costs of migration as part of its overall advocacy of addressing the plight of migrant workers.

“Nurses and midwives headed for Europe. Domestic helpers went to Hong Kong, Italy, UK, Spain and other countries in Asia and Europe. Entertainers flew to Japan and European countries,” said the NGO in its report, ‘Children’s Response to the Challenge of Migration’.

With more Filipino women jumping on the migration bandwagon, it’s hard to imagine what its social cost is to the family, to children like Mikey, in particular? From what I’ve seen and heard, I’d say the cost is enormous and sometimes irreversible. Studies have shown that when mothers turn migrant workers, the family goes awry – and so do the children.

Hilda Simbulan (not her real name) got the shock of her life when news reached her in Singapore, where she was working as a domestic helper, that her daughter whom she thought all along was pursuing her college studies had quit school since she got pregnant out of wedlock. The distraught mother soon packed her bags and flew home to salvage what remained of her shattered family.

As Mickey’s mother tearfully bids farewell to him, her two younger children and spouse, her suitcase filled with dreams of a bright future for her family and her heart full of sadness, for her 13-year-old, the future has never looked so dim without his mother by his side.

Paula Fray, IPS Africa Director

Guest Blogger: Paula Fray, IPS Africa Director

Early in January, I joined project managers from around the world at UNIFEM’s “Women Deepening Democracy: Transforming Politics for Gender Equality” workshop in India. Its apt that the workshop was held there. With over 714 million voters, India is arguable the world’s largest democracy with a long record of women in all levels of politics.

One such woman, Brinda Karat, Raj Sabha Member for the Communist Party of India, touched a nerve when she wondered whether we really want women to be part of the mainstream politics or whether women should reclaim the subversive role they have played in history.

Surely women do not want to be part of the mainstream – they want to change it?

Karat’s rallying call was to “feminize resistance”.

In Uganda, this month, women activists took to the street to demand that their voices be heard. IPS Africa’s MDG3 podcast reports that these women demand to speak for themselves.

Is the call for radicalization is needed? Judge for yourself. Only 26 out of 192 UN member states have more than 30% female participation in national elected office - and even then their impact is mixed.

Should it matter? UNIFEM’s Dr Anne-Marie Goetz uses the example of women’s participation in peace talks to illustrate how – if women are not involved – their concerns are not raised. In the last 300 peace accords for 45 conflict situations in the previous two decades, sexual violence and gender based violence is raised only 18 times. It is listed as prohibited in just six ceasefires. As a result, there is no response for sexual and gender based violence in justice, reparations, Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) and Security Sector Reform (SSR) provisions and ceasefires – contributing to post-conflict escalation. The level of female participation in peace talks? A lowly 2.1 percent.

Speaking to IPS in Peshawar, Pakistan, women’s rights advocate Zahira Khattak says that women can do more in establishing peace and stability in the region if they are given their due place within the socio-political structures of society.

On October 31, 2010 we mark 10 years since the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security which acknowledged that women remained marginalized in peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction processes and demanded their full participation.

Article 8 calls on

“all actors involved, when negotiating and implementing peace agreements, to adopt a gender perspective, including, inter alia: … measures that support local women’s peace initiatives and indigenous processes for conflict resolution, and that involve women in all of the implementation mechanisms of the peace agreements; measures that ensure the protection of and respect for human rights of women and girls, particularly as they relate to the constitution, the electoral system, the police and the judiciary.”

Its time to stop talking.

Looking across the room in New Delhi, I saw many women – and men – working hard to increase the participation of women in politics. The challenge of getting more women into public office and participating in political decision-making is linked to globally accepted goals to deepen democracy and eradicate poverty.

So the question is: Why are we not doing more?

Its not a great way to start the new year, but my head has been puzzling over the growing militarization around the world and its catastrophic impact on women in particular. What got me going is a book I’m reading by journalist Christina Lamb called ‘The Sewing Circles of Herat’. The book, which traces the war in Afghanistan and its particular effect on women, came highly recommended by my husband, a prolific and speed reader, who picked it up as the only remaining piece of literature in English abandoned by previous tenants at a lodge where we stayed in Namibia late last year. The remainder of the reading material was in German.

Its taking me a long time finish the book not only because I’m a slow reader but as I go through it I become deeply disturbed by the complete and utter impunity with which men with guns can and do commit atrocities and their particular desire to strip women of all human rights. I have to put it aside and move on to another of the books my bedside table.

Over the holidays I caught up with one of the BBC World Service’s best documentaries of 2009, ‘Chechnya’s Missing Women’ which traces the kidnapping of women and girls by bands of armed young men in Chechnya’s capital Grozny. The women are forced into cars at gunpoint and some are forced to marry their captors while others simply disappear to possibly turn up dead in a vacant field. Their families are helpless to stop it.

What is troubling me most is that like many others, I read the news and perceive what is happening to women in Afghanistan and Chechnya as remote occurrences in distant lands that have little to do with me. But when I look closer I see it happening at my doorstep.

Naively perhaps, I would never have thought that the systemic rapes, beatings and killings of women and girls that took place in Kenya post the December 2007 elections and in Zimbabwe ahead of the Presidential run-off elections in 2008 were possible. Then there were the women who were brutally raped and some killed in Guinea in September last year. And who doesn’t know about the thousands of women who are raped and killed regularly by both government and rebel troops in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

In all cases government has been somehow complicit and impunity has been the order of the day. The affected women and their families have had little recourse and are generally expected to shut up about it for “the greater good”. The argument being that progress and peace processes will be derailed if these issues are dredged up. And so women are silenced and violence against women in normalized.

As a follow-up to United Nations Resolution 1325 (2000), which obliges groups in armed conflict to protect women and girls from violence, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1888 on 30 September 2009. UNSCR 1888 establishes a UN Special Representative to deal specifically with sexual violence in armed conflict and enables the Security Council’s sanctions committee to take into account rape and sexual violence as criteria when considering sanctions against nations and individuals. Personally, I’m not feeling particularly optimistic that this latest resolution will make much more of a difference for women faced with guns and impunity. After all, there is also UNSCR 1820, which affirms the Security Council’s intention to consider targeted sanctions against perpetrators of sexual violence in armed conflict. As with many of the other UN Resolutions – and there are so many – the laudable words are taking time to translate into action. In the meantime it seems as though groups struggling for power and resources are actually learning from each other that its okay to battle on the bodies of women and that this can be a quick and sure way to ascendancy.

I am moving to Maputo, Mozambique,  to work in health reporting. Gender Masala will remain in the IPS Gender Portal with a more collective identity,  infused by several  IPS writers.

Passenger in transit: "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." Marcel Proust. Pic by Claudio Corallo.

I like the word transitions: it evokes change, birth, adaptation, growth.

This has been an exciting journey of discovery of a new medium. As the philosopher George Santayana wrote: “There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar; it keeps the mind nimble; it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.”

Over seven months, , the pictures got bigger, the voices varied, my style freer. It was intellectually rewarding to look every week at the rich variety of IPS stories on gender and be inspired by them to write a new blog.

I will miss the weekly postings on gender, although I will continue blogging on health issues in Mozambique here:

http://knight.icfj.org/OurFellows/FromtheFieldFellowBlogs/

I want to thank my fellow bloggers, you, the readers, and, most importantly, IPS, for this opportunity to add a spicy mix  to the MDG3 Gender Portal. I enjoyed it immensely and I hope you did too.

Peace in 2010.