Women, leadership and peace

I often wonder what the world would look like if women were in power. Maybe you do too.

By power, I mean in formal positions of power, prominent in public life – if there were, for example, 502 women and 145 men in the UK Parliament. (There are 502 men and 145 women by the way…) Would childcare be so expensive? Would, across the water in Ireland, women die for lack of abortion (as happened recently)? How would priorities be different?

A recently published report, From the Ground Up, produced by the Institute of Development Studies and funded by ActionAid and Womankind Worldwide, shows how perspectives on peace are different from women’s point of view. Peace, as I’ve said before in this blog, is the first prerequisite for health. The Ottawa Charter points out this fact -  it should be obvious, but it isn’t always given its due.

The From the Ground Up report suggests that women define peace more broadly than men, and did not consider that their lives were peaceful, even if there was no civil conflict occurring, because their lives were not free from violence, harassment and abuse. Men viewed peace as the opposite of formal conflict, and the gender difference is summed up by an Afghani woman: “we’re not talking about big war, but peace for us also means no domestic violence”.  Afghanistan was one of the countries surveyed, along with Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nepal, and Pakistan. It’s well known that conflict and lack of peace affects men and women differently but what the report also points out is how women are largely absent from high level negotiations at national or international level, despite a UN security council resolution in 2000 which called for more equal participation of women in maintaining and promoting sustainable peace worldwide. In 17 out of 24 recent major peace treaties, there were no women involved in signing agreements; there have been no female chief mediators in UN-mediated peace talks. Women are renowned peacemakers in homes and communities, and some feminists would argue that if there were more women heads of state, there would be fewer wars.  Women as a peace-keeping resource is thus being under-used, but also the prominence of men in peace negotiations means that women’s and girls’ needs are not emphasized.

Women have been prominent in local peace movements, from Asha Amin and Starlin Abdi Arush in Somalia, Ana Guadalupe Martinez in El Salvador, Luz Mendez in Guatemala, Martha Karua in Kenya, plus all the women in the Northern Ireland peace coalitions such as Monica McWilliams. It was marvelous to see Fatou Bensouda appointed as the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court but this prominence at the top of a key international agency is rare. Women are more likely to be involved in peace making at the informal stages, forming local coalitions and peace groups, or brokering peace in their neighbourhoods and communities. These grassroots activities receive no funding very often, and women’s skills as bridge-builders, conflict resolvers, in dialogue and building trust, is often devalued.

The report From the Ground Up recommends that 30% of those involved in all local, national and international peace negotiation processes are women.  It also calls for 15% of peace building aid to be directed at aid to address women’s needs.  Some of the report’s findings however, also echo some of the UN and WHO’s declarations about peace, that it is not merely the absence of war, (just as health is not merely the absence of disease) – peace must also mean an absence of the structural violence caused by the unequal distribution of wealth, resources and other ‘goods’ within societies. This structural violence is often reified into patterns of discrimination, such as under apartheid in the ‘old’ South Africa, or into systematic oppression on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, age and so on.

It has been claimed that investing in health is investing in peace. See http://www.who.int/hac/techguidance/hbp/Conflict.pdf

Many of these high-blown and well-intentioned statements emanating from summits can be found in UN and WHO documents. Implementing their content so as to enable people to live in greater peace is another matter, and doesn’t appear to be happening. As the From the Ground Up report suggests, unless women are represented at all levels of decisions making, peace is less likely.

Navi Pillay, UN commissioner for human rights is one prominent woman calling attention to global conflict. Recently she has written about the upsurge of violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Last week, Goma fell again into the hands of armed men, the M23 movement. One of its leaders is Bosco Ntanganda, who has been indicted by the international criminal court for the mass killings in 2008 in the DRC. Navi Pillay was one of those compiling a report documenting 617 violent incidents in the DCR from 1993 to 2003, all of them involving gross violations of basic human rights. The Congolese army, let alone the rebel groups have perpetrated acts including extreme sexual violence, mass rapes, violent dismantling of refugee camps, using forced child soldiers, and murder of civilians. The UN expert panel report published last week shows that the rebel groups have received assistance form neighbouring countries, such as Rwanda. I often use Rwanda as an example of a country where more than half of the MPs are women – 52% - yet in this specific case, they do not appear to be helping to bring peace to their larger neighbour. These neighbouring countries are essential to brokering peace.

I have just returned from contributing to a symposium on empowerment and health promotion in Germany, as along with Glenn Laverack and Mark Dooris and a few other invited speakers, we were helping German colleagues to establish the idea of empowerment in German public health discourse. I went along to a mass in Regensburg cathedral on Sunday to hear the famous boys’ choir. Speaking as an atheist, I was struck by the display of white male privilege, all the priests and officiates men, and the opulence in this wealthiest of European countries was very clear. I have no idea how it all relates to the message of Christ in the new testament (and I do know my new testament) but no matter. What was clear was that women did not have a place here except in the congregation and of course this is in the same week that the Anglican Church in England has decided not to allow women to become bishops. I know that male leaders of the church – many bishops – were devastated, and that women in the laity were amongst those leading the no vote. It does seem extraordinary and a missed opportunity for women to play leadership roles in the church, to make it more relevant to the 21^st century, and to have a voice in peace-making. If the church cannot do this, what is it for? The tiny African country of Swaziland already has a woman bishop, and if the vote had gone through in England, Rose Hudson-Wilkin, a woman of black African descent might have become the first bishop. Wouldn’t that have been great? I am at a loss to understand why anyone would not think that women have a role to play at the highest levels.

Shakespeare wrote 788 parts for men and 141 for women. I’m not changing the subject here – I’m still talking about women as peacemakers. Phyllida Lloyd, the successful feminist film and theatre director is currently directing a production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, a play all about male power, conflict and war. This production is different as it’s all female cast. A play about fallen dictators, regime change, war and peace clearly has modern relevance. Harriet Walters will play Brutus, and as she says, “There is something in… the ‘alienating’ effect of seeing women paly these parts. The play is essentially about the power vacuum after a dictator falls, and how you tend to fill it using the template of what has gone before. And there’s something about an all-women cast doing that”. Showing women making war points out how odd it is for them to do so – and conversely, how ‘normal’ it is for (some) men to do so.

Austerity Kills

Bradley Wiggins’ high profile accident has brought attention to cycle safety and the government has used it to publicise the £30 million it has set aside for improvements to road junctions with cyclists in mind. We now that the danger of cycling is the major factor putting more people off using this as a healthier way to get around, or for leisure. In fact, the £30 million is about the same amount that the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has cut from the capital’s road safety budget and also amounts to £64,000 per council in the UK – not enough to improve even one dangerous junction.  Last year London alone had a 23% increase in cycling casualties and there was also an increase in pedestrian casualties after a decade of seeing reduced numbers.  In the cycling mecca of Holland, the government spends £25 per person per year on cycling infrastructure. Our government spends £1.  The impetus created by the Olympics and the success of the cycling team did start to get more people on their bikes. Now though it looks as if people will weigh up the odds and decide that the risks are too great, so any putative health benefits will go. And it looks as though dedicated cyclists will be at greater risk of death or injury in the future.

These kinds of cuts are happening in many sectors of public life. However, the austerity measures being endured by the population of the UK are being disproportionately administered across the country – to the extent that Hilary Benn, the shadow secretary for local government has said the cuts are “politically motivated”. He has stated that of the 50 worst hit councils, 43 are Labour and of the 50 least hit, 42 are Tory. The 50 councils least affected are seeing cuts of £16 per head, many of them in more affluent parts of the south of England. The 50 worst affected are seeing cuts of £160 per head and are predominantly northern, in Liverpool, Rochdale, South Tyneside, or in inner London such as Hackney.  Haringey in London, often cited as a deprived local authority (and is indeed the 11^th most deprived in Britain) has £84 million of budget cuts, amounting to £170 per head.

Some of the things happening at the moment are not likely to be captured by the conventional methods of measures of deprivation. The Carstairs deprivation scores for example, which are based on adult unemployment, car ownership, social class composition and overcrowding, show how one area can differ from another in terms of relative deprivation, but does not take into account aspects of personal behaviour such as drug use, smoking or poor diet. It’s acknowledged the Carstairs measure no longer captures relative deprivation as effectively in the 21^st century compared to the 1980s.

Whilst academics are clearly extremely concerned about the effects of austerity and poverty on health, there will be a time lag before data are collected to demonstrate the effect and also before robust measures are developed to measure the effect. In the meantime, some journalists are doing an excellent job in showing the impact of austerity. Amelia Hill for example, in this weeks’ Guardian newspaper (19/11/12) shows the pernicious rise of food poverty. She reports research from the Joseph Rowntree Trust which shows that food price have risen by 32% since 2007, twice the EU average. FareShare, a charity which feeds 36,500 people every day is seeing people coming for help who are living on “what were once regarded as reasonable salaries” but who “can no longer afford to eat enough”.  A Save the Children report shows that of 5,000 families in the UK earning £30,000 a year, two thirds had to go into debt, avoid paying bills, not replace worn out clothing and for the parents to skip meals, in order for the children to have enough to eat. A survey of teachers shows that four out of five teachers see children who are hungry in the morning.

The government’s own statistics show that eating healthily has become more expensive, with the price of vegetables rising by 22% since 2007 and fruit by 34%. Between 2007 and 2010, low-income households cut the amount of food they buy by 11%. If you believe, as many health promoters do, and as I certainly do, that the food we eat – the stuff we put into our bodies – is one of the very most important determinants of health, then these effects of austerity are potentially the most worrying. Already the UK has the highest rates of obesity after the USA and rates of liver diseases associated with it are suddenly in the media. The lack of micronutrients and other essentials in the diet are likely to affect immunity and store up health problems. What’s as depressing to me is that those on poverty incomes and poverty diets no longer enjoy food. Food is one of the great joys of life – there’s a celebration of good food in the UK and we seem to have caught up with some of our continental neighbours in enjoying good food, grown and cooked carefully. Amelia Hill’s article though, sadly ends with one of those she interviewed saying, of the food he’d been forced to buy due to his low income, “it all looks so cheap and nasty. To be honest, just looking at it takes my appetite away”.

Austerity not only kills, it also kills quality of life and takes away any joy.

Empowerment and President Obama

We were teaching about empowerment today on our Masters course in Public Health – Health Promotion here at Leeds Met. My colleague Dr. James Woodall was, as part of the session, asking students to critique a paper he and two other colleagues had written. The paper questions whether ‘empowerment’ has lost its radical roots and is now used too casually and without precise definition. (Woodall et al 2011)

Power is a key concept that we dissect when we discuss empowerment, and this inevitably leads to a discussion of powerlessness. Powerlessness, according to Solomon (1976) comes from three potential sources: firstly there are systems which systematically deny powerless groups opportunities to take action; secondly there are the negative images which oppressed people have of themselves, a form of self-oppression, and thirdly there are the negative experiences which oppressed people undergo in their everyday interactions with systems, institutions or the media.

In this week where Barack Obama has been re-elected (Hurrah!) it’s interesting to think about the effect of such an election on power structures and empowerment. When he was elected first time around, black people all over the world were delighted – what a message – to see a black man as the President of the world’s most powerful country, meaning that for the first time, a black man was the most powerful person in the world. (That depends, of course, on how much power you think a President can have, given the forces of capitalism and conservatism in the USA). In terms of the second of Solomon’s sources of powerlessness, Obama’s victories have had a huge impact on positive images and thus on dismantling self-oppression.

Marginalized people – and health promotion is principally concerned with those who are marginalized – have been able to use the election system to their advantage. This doesn’t happen often. In the election that took place this week, for once, the white, male majority did not get their candidate of choice. Exit polls show that 45% of men and 55% of women voted for Obama; of white men, 35% voted for him and 42% of white women. 87% of black men and 96% of black women and 65% of Latino men and 76% of Latino women voted for Obama. In terms of ‘race’ alone, 39% of white voters voted for Obama, 93% of African Americans, 71% of Latinos and 73% of Asians. Those earning less than $50,000 were more likely to vote for Obama – 60% as opposed to 44% of those earning over $100,000.

So all in all, poorer, female, black, Hispanic and Asian people were able to make their vote count and to elect someone who they felt would represent their interests. This is essential if one of the key outcomes of empowerment – systems change – is to happen. It also resonates with the first of Solomon’s points about sources of powerlessness, that systems operate to exclude certain groups in a systematic way. There is a good chance, with a second term, that Obama will be able to bring about permanent systems change. The implementation of the reform of health services must be a major plank of this systems change. One thing which seemed to make a difference this time around was persuading those who don’t normally vote, to get out and make sure they did.  They stopped Mitt Romney doing what he had pledged to do in cutting after school programmes, job training programmes, Head Start, Planned Parenthood and other social projects which primarily target the marginalized. Now, we have a President who has pledged to invest in education, tackle climate change, reform immigration policy; this means for example, that the eleven million undocumented immigrants might be able to gain a path to citizenship. I don’t agree with all aspects of America’s foreign policy but I’m certain it will be a lot more enlightened than it would have been if a Republican had got into the White House.

No doubt Obama will not be able to be as radical as he’d like, given the opposition of Republicans, but in terms of empowerment, it’s a great stride forward.

The change of leadership in China, also happening this week, gives hope that the two most influential countries in the world could take us into a different era of politics.

References:

Solomon, B.B. (1976) Black Empowerment: Social Work in Oppressed Communities, Columbia University Press, New York

Woodall, J., Warwick-Booth, L., Cross. R. (2012) Has empowerment lost its power? Health Education Research. 27 (4), 742-745.