International Women’s Day 2009

The interactive network portal http://www.grassrootsfeminism.net is a new and unique feminist meeting point. This website aims to establish transnational feminist networks and to archive cultural and political activities of the grassroots feminist movement worldwide.

Grassroots Feminism: Transnational archives, resources and communities is a user-generated Web 2.0 tool, encouraging anyone with an interest in feminist culture, activism or politics to participate – by uploading their projects, viewing or adding to the digital archives, sharing interviews with feminist activists and media makers, and creating their own profiles.

The website is founded and maintained by Elke Zobl, the creator behind the popular Grrrl Zine Network web portal. She says: “Young women, queer and trasgender folks in many countries today are engaged in an exciting variety of activist, cultural and political practices which need to be documented before they are lost to history. The aim of Grassroots Feminism is to counter some of the stereotypes about the post-feminist or third-wave feminist generation being preoccupied with pleasure and personal lives. But this site is not just for young women and their allies: we hope it will also become a tool for people of all ages and backgrounds to link up their struggles and create more cultural, social, political, environmental, and economic coalitions.”

By providing an interactive network and research platform, this website aims to make the work and activism of transnational feminists more accessible, as well as to establish a “living history” archive. The website provides a democratic tool for providing and sharing information and resources on feminist practice and theory, to used by feminist activists, supporters and scholars alike.

Website adminstrator Red Chidgey, a self-confessed DIY feminist and grassroots media historian, states: “For any feminist activist or researcher interested in mapping women’s movements worldwide there is always the problem of access and fragmentation. Grassroots Feminism aims to bring together the benefits of the internet and broadcast a lively, constantly updated, feminist museum into your living room. By reclaming cyberspace for a united feminist archive and platform, we believe this site will provoke and sustain conversations and actions across countries and cultures. And because tool-kits for social change are crucially important too, there are also facilities for uploading how-to guides and teaching materials. The ethos of the site is mutual aid, empowerment, shared information, and connections.”

A 10 minute Grassroots Feminist Media Survey is also featured online. With feminist media being so diverse and ephermeral it is important to collect our histories and trace connections between countries and generations. There are also opportunities for grassroots media producers and consumers to participate in longer interviews, with material going towards a proposed book that the website team are working on from the material on the site.

Other preview highlights include graphics from a second wave poster-making collective, Ladyfest digital archives, a guide to anti-racist audits of activist spaces, and fully searchable project listings. Contributors and projects span Latin America, Europe, Africa, Asia, New Zealand, and North America – all are invited to access and contribute to this growing archive to represent a truly global picture of feminism today.

About:

Grassroots Feminism: Transnational archives, resources and communities is a feminist interactive network site and “living history” archive.

The site is organized and maintained by Elke Zobl from Salzburg, Austria (http://www.grrrlzines.net), with Red Chidgey, UK (http://www.redchidgey.net), and Jenny Gunnarsson Payne, Sweden.

Work on this the website forms part of Elke Zobl’s research project “Young women as producers of new cultural spaces”. The “Grassroots Media in Europe Archive” has been established by the web site team within the research project “Feminist Media Production in Europe”. Both research projects are funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and are based at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria.

Website graphics are provided by intricate paper-cut artist Nikki McClure, http://www.nikkimcclure.com

Contact/Interview Requests: Elke Zobl elke@grassrootsfeminism.net

Celebrities mark International Women’s Day (8 March) with a powerful call to do more to help expectant mothers in the world’s poorest countries. With an introduction by Sarah Blakemore.

Celebrity Oxfam supporters and high-profile women, including Angelique Kidjo, Annie Lennox and Zoe Ball, and Oxfam’s Director Barbara Stocking, are sending an open letter to The Times (UK). The big occasion? International Women’s Day, a celebration of the achievements of women. At Oxfam, we’re all for celebrating women – after all, they are invariably at the very heart of communities’ efforts to get out of poverty.

But, it’s also an opportunity to raise awareness of some of the challenges they face. Like Annie, Anqelique et al, I think a good place to start is the reality that millions of women worldwide still can’t have a child without having to gamble with their lives. The letter demands action to end the scandal of maternal mortality in the developing world. And you can read it in full here:

Letter to The Times

Tomorrow, as we celebrate International Women’s Day, it is important to remember that millions of women around the world are still being denied a fundamental human right: the right to have a child without being forced to gamble unnecessarily with their lives.

Today, one woman will die every minute in pregnancy or childbirth; that’s more than half a million each year. In the developing world, this remains the leading cause of death amongst women of reproductive age. But a vast majority of these lives could be saved if only mothers in poor communities had access to the basic healthcare that we take for granted: hospitals, medicines, doctors and midwives.

As women we believe that this situation is deplorable. Many of us, through our work with Oxfam, have had the opportunity to visit developing countries and to witness at first hand the incredible challenges that pregnant women face. And yet, where even a comparatively small investment is made in free, accessible public healthcare systems, the numbers of women dying in pregnancy and childbirth can be dramatically reduced. Just one extra midwife will save the lives of more than 200 mothers.

As the global economic crisis deepens, the need for action becomes ever more urgent. Faced with slowing economies and the prospect of receiving less aid from richer countries, many poor governments may be forced to cut back their public spending on vital projects and programmes such as healthcare, education, and social protection: the very programmes that people living in poverty need most in times of crisis. Without them, millions of people won’t be able to meet their basic needs, and women and children will suffer most as they take over responsibility for providing the resources and services that their governments cannot.

In this time, it is more important than ever that we maintain pressure on rich governments such as our own to keep the promises they have made to the developing world; promises to increase aid and to give more to help poor country governments provide the basic public services their people dearly need.

Women across the world deserve nothing less.

Sincerely,

Barbara Stocking, Chief Executive, Oxfam
Zoe Ball – TV and Radio Presenter
Angelique Kidjo – Singer and Oxfam Campaigner
Joanna Lumley – Actress
Emily Eavis – Festival organiser
Oumou Sangare – Singer
Mariella Frostrup-Journalist and broadcaster
Beverley Knight – Singer
Melanie Hall – Lawyer
Annie Lennox – Singer
Vanessa Branson-Hotelier
Ruby Wax-Comedien
Sandra Kamen-Theatre Owner

http://www.oxfam.org.uk/applications/blogs/pressoffice/?p=3876&newsblog

Dear friends,

Individual women, and women’s organisations, have been celebrating and remembering International Women’s Day, Sunday 8 March 2009, in the streets of cities and villages across the globe:

These women have come out in honour of women like themselves, who through their fearless actions and words have forced governments and institutions to recognise their social, political and economic rights.

These same women have also come out to voice specific demands for justice that are still unmet; in many countries women are better represented in structures of power, and yet the silence on gender issues – sexual violence, early and forced marriages, polygamy, FGM, adultery laws, dress prohibitions, restricted mobility, and unequal access to clean water, security, education and health services – has become intolerable.

This year we remember women caught in conflicts, who suffer social and political insecurities and violations on a daily basis, carrying the burdens of war and military assault by state and non state actors.

On behalf of WLUML, the International Coordination Office would like to wish you all a peaceful as well as a defiant year ahead!

In solidarity,
Women Living Under Muslim Laws

http://www.wluml.org/english/newsfulltxt.shtml?cmd[157]=x-157-563888

As International Women’s Day nears the century mark (the first IWD was held in 1911), women have made enormous progress in many respects. But the present global economic crisis will have a profound negative impact on women, and the long struggle to end violence against women remains far from victory.

For the past decade, the United Nations has chosen an annual theme to mark International Women’s Day. This year, the slogan is “Women and Men United to End Violence Against Women and Girls.”

As UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said on IWD 2007, “Violence against women and girls continues unabated in every continent, country and culture. It takes a devastating toll on women’s lives, on their families, and on society as a whole. Most societies prohibit such violence – yet the reality is that too often, it is covered up or tacitly condoned.”

Facts and figures from the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) show that this is the single most pervasive human rights violation on a global scale.

At least one out of every three women around the world has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused in her lifetime – with the abuser usually someone known to her.

For women aged 15 to 44 years, violence is a major cause of death and disability. In a 1994 study based on World Bank data regarding selected risk factors facing women in this age group, rape and domestic violence rated higher than cancer, motor vehicle accidents, war and malaria.

Moreover, studies have revealed that women who experience violence are at a higher risk of HIV infection: a survey among 1,366 South African women showed that women who were beaten by their partners were 48 percent more likely to be infected with HIV than those who were not.

The economic cost of violence against women is considerable. A 2003 report by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the costs of intimate partner violence in the United States alone exceed $5.8 billion per year, including $4.1 billion for direct medical and health care services, and productivity losses accounting for nearly $1.8 billion. A recent survey by the American Institute on Domestic Violence found that domestic violence victims lose nearly 8 million days of paid work per year – the equivalent of 32,000 full-time jobs.

Women are more at risk of experiencing violence in intimate relationships, and in no country are women safe. Out of ten counties surveyed in 2005 by the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 50 percent of women in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Peru and Tanzania reported having been subjected to physical or sexual violence by intimate partners, rising to a staggering 71 percent in rural Ethiopia. Only in Japan did less than 20 percent of women report incidents of domestic violence. An earlier WHO study puts the number of women physically abused by their partners or ex-partners at 30 percent in the United Kingdom, and 22 percent in the United States.

Based on several surveys from around the world, half of the women who die from homicides are killed by their current or former husbands or partners. Women are killed by people they know and die from gun violence, beatings and burns, among numerous other forms of abuse. A study conducted in Sao Paulo, Brazil, reported that 13 percent of deaths of women of reproductive age were homicides, of which 60 percent were committed by their partners. According to a UNIFEM report on Afghanistan, out of 1,327 incidents of violence against women collected between January 2003 and June 2005, 36 women had been killed – in 16 cases by their intimate partners.

By the year 2006, 89 states had some form of legislative prohibition on domestic violence, and a growing number of countries had instituted national plans of action to end violence against women. This is a clear increase from 2003, when only 45 countries had specific laws on domestic violence. Yet high levels of violence against women persist.

Limited availability of services, stigma and fear prevent women from seeking assistance and redress. This has been confirmed by a study published by the WHO in 2005: on the basis of data collected from 24,000 women in ten countries, between 55 percent and 95 percent of women who had been physically abused by their partners had never contacted NGOs, shelters or the police for help.

Sexual violence by non-partners is also common, but estimates of its prevalence are difficult to establish, because in many societies, such violence remains an issue of deep shame for women and their families. Statistics on rape extracted from police records, for example, are notoriously unreliable because of significant underreporting.

It is estimated that worldwide, one in five women will become a victim of rape or attempted rape in her lifetime. In a study of nearly 1,200 ninth-grade students in Geneva, Switzerland, 20 percent of girls revealed they had experienced at least one incident of physical sexual abuse.

According to the 2005 multi-country study on domestic violence undertaken by the WHO, between 10 and 12 percent of women in Peru, Samoa and Tanzania have suffered sexual violence by non-partners after the age of 15. Other population-based studies reveal that 11.6 percent of women in Canada reported sexual violence by a non-partner in their lifetime, and between 10 and 20 percent of women in New Zealand and Australia have experienced various forms of sexual violence from non-partners, including unwanted sexual touching, attempted rape and rape.

In many societies, the legal system and community attitudes add to the trauma that rape survivors experience. Women are often held responsible for the violence against them, and in many places laws contain loopholes which allow the perpetrators to act with impunity. In a number of countries, a rapist can go free if he proposes to marry the victim.

Trafficking involves the recruitment and transportation of persons, using deception, coercion and threats to keep them in a situation of forced labour or servitude. Persons are trafficked into a variety of sectors of the informal economy, including prostitution, domestic work, agriculture, the garment industry or street begging.

While exact data are hard to come by, estimates of the number of trafficked persons range from 500,000 to four million per year. Although women, men, girls and boys can become victims, the majority are female. Various forms of gender-based discrimination trap millions of women and girls in poverty. This puts them at higher risk of becoming targeted by traffickers, who use false promises of jobs and educational opportunities to recruit their victims. Trafficking is often connected to organized crime and has developed into a highly profitable business that generates an estimated US$7-12 billion per year.

Trafficking is usually a trans-border crime. According to a 2006 UN global report on trafficking, 127 countries have been documented as countries of origin, and 137 as countries of destination. The main countries of origin are in Central and South-Eastern Europe, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and Asia, followed by West Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. The most commonly reported countries of destination are in Western Europe, Asia and Northern America. By 2006, 93 countries had prohibited trafficking.

The victims in today’s armed conflicts are far more likely to be civilians than soldiers. Some 70 percent of the casualties in recent conflicts have been non-combatants, most of them women and children. Women’s bodies have become part of the battleground for those who use terror as a tactic of war – they are raped, abducted, humiliated and made to undergo forced pregnancy, sexual abuse and slavery. Violence against women has been reported in every international or non-international war-zone, including Afghanistan, Burundi, Chad, Colombia, Cote d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Peru, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Chechnya/Russian Federation, Darfur, Sudan, northern Uganda and the former Yugoslavia.

A 2002 UNIFEM-sponsored report on the issue quoted a UN official in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo, on the terror of daily life for people in the region: “From Pweto down near the Zambian border right up to Aru on the Sudan/Uganda border, it’s a black hole where no one is safe and where no outsider goes. Women take a risk when they go out to the fields or on a road to a market. Any day they can be stripped naked, humiliated and raped in public. Many, many people no longer sleep at home, though sleeping in the bush is equally unsafe. Every night, another village is attacked. It could be any group, no one knows, but they always take away women and girls.”

Recently, UN Emergency Relief Coordinator John Holmes reported that more than 32,000 cases of rape and sexual violence have been registered in South Kivu Province alone since 2005 – just a fraction of the total number of women subjected to such extreme suffering.

UNIFEM says that “Protection and support for women survivors of violence in conflict and post-conflict areas is woefully inadequate.” Access to social services, protection, legal remedies, medical resources, and places of refuge is limited despite the efforts of local NGOs to provide assistance. A climate of impunity further exacerbates the situation, and serves as an incentive to ongoing violence.

UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, adopted in 2000, calls for women’s equal participation in peace and security issues. But almost a decade later much more effort is needed to strengthen mechanisms to prevent, investigate, report, prosecute and remedy violence against women in times of war, and to ensure their voices are heard in building peace.

(The article is from the March 1-15, 2009, issue of People’s Voice, Canada’s leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited.)

http://www.peoplesvoice.ca/Pv01mr09.html#1_VIOLENCE_AGAINST_WOMEN:_MOST

This International Women’s Day (8 March) we are drawing inspiration from courageous women standing up for equality in the face of violence and marginalisation. Women like Justine Bihamba.

Living in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Justine has experienced first-hand the sexual violence of war. Like many war-torn and post-conflict countries, rape is used here to terrorise, demoralise and humiliate whole communities.
Despite threats and opposition, Justine has established an organisation to help women who have been raped or assaulted. Because sexual violence is so commonplace and justice is rarely served, women don’t come forward to identify their attackers. Justine is determined to stop this destructive cycle of fear and rape -”All we want is an end to this impunity”, she says.

You can take action this International Women’s Day by calling on the Congolese Authorities to protect Justine Bihamba, her family and colleagues so they can continue to help victims of rape rebuild their lives.

Justine is just one of the many women around the world that Amnesty International is campaigning for. For more information on other cases and actions to take, check out our Stop Violence Against Women campaign centre.

“When two sides fight, the one punishes the other by raping women” – Justine Bihamba

Celebrate International Women’s Day by taking action for women in conflict.

Sincerely,
Amnesty International
Protect The Human

http://www.amnesty.org.uk/e_preview.asp?web=1&MessageID=542&TransmissionID=2118&Body=HTML&User=Y9Cz%2F0w

On March 8, 2009 Amarc(*) will broadcast 24 hours of programming produced by women, about women. Listen live online, starting at 1am GMT or rebroadcast a program on your community radio station.

Below you will find the schedule of the broadcast. Please consider streaming some of the March 8 broadcast on your community radio station. You may also download and broadcast individual programs.

Programming schedule
Asia-Pacific/Kathmandu : 1:00-8:30 GMT = 6:45-14:15 local time
Middle-East/Amman : 8:30-8:48 GMT = 7:00-7:18 local time
Africa/Johannesburg : 8:48-13:57 GMT = 10:48-15:57 local time
Europe/Rome : 13:57-16:03 GMT = 14:57-17:03 local time
Latin America/Buenos Aires : 16:03-18:29 GMT = 13:03-15:29 local time
North America/Montreal : 18:29-2:51 GMT = 13:29-21:51 local time

http://march8.amarc.org/index.php?l=EN

March8 Program: Check out the Program

(*) World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters