Celebrating Women Campaigners

International Women’s Day is coming up (March 8^th), in a tradition started in 1910 after Clara Zetkin, a German activist, called for such a day to mark women’s working conditions. The first International Women’s Day was held in four western European countries in 1911. Since then it’s clearly grown, and is an opportunity to celebrate women’s achievements.  It’s now even an official holiday in many countries -  Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, China (for women only), Cuba, Georgia, Guinea-Bissau, Eritrea, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Madagascar (for women only), Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Nepal (for women only), Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uganda, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Zambia.

It wasn’t until 1977 however, that the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution proclaiming a United Nations Day for Women's Rights and International Peace that could be observed on any day of the year by Member States. The UN called for women’s role in peace building to be recognized and for an end to all forms of gender discrimination.

IWT started with women realizing the need to campaign for rights, and this need hasn’t gone away. This month’s Amnesty International magazine highlights a number of women who are fighting for human rights (www.amnesty.org.uk).

Jestina Mukoko is the national director of the Zimbabwean Peace Project. It has 420 community-based field workers, and the aim is to monitor political violence. She herself was tortured and detained for three weeks in a maximum-security prison in the violent elections of 2008, when 200 people were killed, 10,000 injured and 28,000 displaced from their homes. Despite her horrendous treatment, she carries on campaigning, asserting that “The role of civil society is to continually remind government that our constitution gives us rights, and we must be able to enjoy them”.  (Thus Human Rights Watch has recently queried the spending of a reputed $1million on the 90^th birthday celebrations of Robert Mugabe!) (http://www.hrw.org/home)

Manizha Naderi is the executive director of Women for Afghan Women. In 2006 she started to open refugees for abused women, many of whom previously had only prison to take shelter in. Now WAW also provides family guidance centres, homes for children whose mothers are in prison, and campaigns on issues such as child marriage.  Clearly Afghanistan is not an easy place to be a women’s rights activist!

Maryam al-Khawaja works at the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, though she was forced into exile in 2010 but still campaigns for rights in this small Middle Eastern country (bahrainrights.com). “It’s about finding the cause that’s worth fighting for despite your fear”. She and her sister Zainab are featured in the documentary We Are the Giant (wearethegiant.com) which shows the non-violent resistance of activists in Syria, Bahrain and Libya.

Monica Roa campaigns for women’s’ sexual and reproductive rights in Colombia; her work led to changes in the abortion laws, finally allowing women an abortion if their life was in danger or if they had been raped. As a lawyer working for Women’s Link Worldwide, she has been subjected to death threats, intimidation and break-ins.

Other activists highlighted are Sanya Eknaligoda, campaigning for rights in Sri Lanka after all the ‘disappearances”; Yorm Bopha, a housing rights activist in Cambodia; Liu Xia in China, an artist under house arrest after her husband criticized the government.

These are just a few of the women bravely acting “Even if we lose our lives”. (http://iceandfire.co.uk/even-if-we-lose-our-lives-london/)

I’m not sure that I could be that brave.

Another brave activist in the UK is 17-year-old Fahma Mohamed who is campaigning to get everyone to sign a petition calling on the Education Secretary Michael Gove, to highlight the practice of female genital mutilation. Fahma wants all head teachers to train and inform all teachers on the horrors of this practice, given that an estimated 66,000 girls and women have been subjected to FGM in the UK. Girls are not only mutilated in the UK but are also sent away during the school holidays to undergo the process. A couple of weeks ago, on the 8^th February, the Scottish education secretary Michael Russell said he would write to all Scottish head teachers warning them of the risks of FGM and pointing out the warning signs that it was about to happen. Whilst Fahma congratulated Scotland on taking action, she noted that Westminster has so far not responded to the campaign, despite questions directed at it by the Guardian’s ‘end fgm’ campaign (theguardian.com/end-fgm).

Other anti-fgm activists, Leyla Hussein and Nimko Ali, who founded the campaigning group Daughter of Eve comment how strange it is that an education secretary does not seem to be concerned about the social welfare of girls.

Despite FGM being illegal in Britain since 1985, with new legislation in 2003 making it illegal to take a child out of the UK for the purposes of cutting (with a 14 years prison sentence), there has not yet been one single conviction. An estimated 24,000 girls are at risk in the UK; in Scotland for example, the African population has increased from 22,049 in 2001 to 46,742 now, and there are many reports of girls being cut there, as well as in Bristol, London, Birmingham – in fact anywhere where large numbers of people from ethnic minorities are found. The increased costs of air travel has also been part of the trend for cutters to come to the UK rather than girls being flown to their countries of family origin.

An estimated 6000 girls are cut somewhere in the world every day and 130 million women are living with the effects of being mutilated. It’s a deep-seated practice, signifying massive sexual inequality and a gross violation of women’s rights. It’s still hugely prevalent though – in Somalia the prevalence is 97.9%, Sierra Leone 94%, Egypt 91.1%. 

Progress towards eradication is painfully slow. France, with its zero tolerance approach, has imprisoned 100 people, in 40 trials. There, parents are regarded as accomplices. One lawyer, Linda Weil-Curiel has been working to bring cutters and parents to justice.  She notoriously said “Can you imagine the outcry if this was happening to white, blonde girls?” and refuted the claims of those who say it is a ‘cultural practice’ – “children have a fundamental right not to be mutilated”.  The UN called for Zero Tolerance of FGM on 6 February this year – better late than never, perhaps.

Scotland has a Detective Chief Superintendent as the officer in charge of combatting FGM, Gill Imery. She is, she says, absolutely clear that this is a crime, that it’s child abuse.  

 Warshan Shire, London’s first young poet laureate has also lent her support recently to Fahma Mohamed’s campaign, writing a new poem “Girls”, which complements her previous poem written when members of her Somali family were sent away to be mutilated, “The Things we Lost in the Summer”.

That there are women in powerful positions, with a voice to make demands and also the ability to carry out actions, is clearly part of the battle in making headway on women’s rights. It’s not only important to have women in powerful positions for the sake of women’s rights however – when women are in powerful places, they can make a difference to all sorts of policies and practices and thus become part of making the world a safer, more peaceful, more health promoting place. For the first time, four European countries have women in the role of Defence Ministers, in the form of Ursula von der Leyen (Germany), Ine Eriksen Soreide (Norway), Karin Enstrom (Sweden) and Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert (The Netherlands). In my view, to quote one tweet, “That’s how global peace can be reached”.

Lloyds Banking Group has also just called for a numerical target, for women to fill 40% of the top 5,000 roles in the bailed-out bank by 2020.  The campaigner Helena Morrissey, chief executive of Newton fund managers, who set up the 30% Club, calling for more women in boardrooms, has welcomed the Lloyds target, though I cannot help but be cynical about the banking sector wanting to repair its reputation. Let’s wait and see what happens in terms of meeting the 40% target.

Everyday Sexism is still rife, as shown by the website of that name, set up by the activist Laura Bates (http://everydaysexism.com/). Having women in key positions must surely challenge this everyday sexism, so it’s ominous that so many high profile women seem recently to have had their positions terminated by the current UK government.  Diana Warwick from the Human Tissue Authority, and Lisa Jardine from the lead role of the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority have recently had their contracts terminated.  Although Lisa Jardine and others campaigned to save the HFEA, she was told not to reapply for her job. Dame Liz Forgan from the Arts Council, Dame Suzi Leather from the Charity Commission, Lady Andrews from English Heritage, have all been stood down and replaced by Tory men.  Anne Watts, chair of the independent NHS Appointments Commission (which selects and trains people as chairs and non-execs to NHS Boards) was more or less fired when the Commission was abolished. Sally Morgan was sacked from her role leading Ofsted, with Michael Gove wanting to replace her with another Tory male, a banker. All these roles are meant to be independent of government, kept at arm’s length in the cause of fairness.

On 7 February, Detective Chief Superintendent Keith Niven, who has the sexual offences and child abuse brief for the Metropolitan Police, has criticized the Department for Education for not taking action on female genital mutilation, saying “it’s not happening”. Finally on 11 February, the Education Secretary Michael Gove agreed to meet Fahma Mohamed – not that it’s happened yet, but maybe it took a senior man (DCS Keith Niven) to shame Gove into some kind of action.  Watch that (male) space.