myMADRE

UNiTE to End Violence against Women

Last year, the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon launched a Campaign to End Violence Against Women.  This effort seeks to generate and coordinate high-level attention to this issue, and their website is one good place to turn for resources and research on violence against women.

For example, in answer to the question of "how widespread is violence against women," here are some of the sobering realities:

• Violence against women is not confined to a specific culture, region or country, or to particular groups of women within a society. The roots of violence against women lie in historically unequal power relations between men and women, and persistent discrimination against women.
• It is estimated that, worldwide, one in five women will become a victim of rape or attempted rape in her lifetime.
• Rape has long been used as a weapon of war. Women as old as grandmothers and as young as toddlers have routinely suffered violent sexual abuse at the hands of military and rebel forces.
• Many women face multiple forms of discrimination and increased risk of violence. Indigenous women in Canada are five times more likely than other women of the same age to die as the result of violence. In Europe, North America and Australia, over half of women with disabilities have experienced physical abuse, compared to one-third of non-disabled women.
• Young women are particularly vulnerable to coerced sex and are increasingly being infected with HIV/AIDS. Over half of new HIV infections worldwide are occurring among young people between the ages of 15 and 24, and more than 60% of HIV-positive youth in this age bracket are female.

Progressives and Obama: Another Take

As part of our efforts to identify effective strategies to advance a progressive women's human rights agenda with the new US administration, we're keeping an eye out for debates emerging on this issue. Here is a video from the Real News Network, in which Nation Editor and Publisher Katrina Vanden Heuvel is interviewed by Paul Jay.

While Katrina focuses on the openings for progressive action and on the way in which Obama's campaign was able to "oxygenate the grassroots," Paul Jay seems more skeptical. He calls attention to the disturbing plans to escalate the US military presence in Afghanistan. The conversation leaves off somewhat abruptly, without talking about how progressives can organize to counter bad policies in Afghanistan or elsewhere. Perhaps there is another segment to the video--if you're able to find it, please post in comments.

What are your thoughts on the conversation in the video?

MADRE Op-ed on RH Reality Check

To follow up on this post from last week, Yifat’s op-ed “Ungagging Women's Human Rights” was just posted on RH Reality Check.  Click here to read it (if you missed it last week).  RH Reality Check hosts a wealth of information on reproductive health, so be sure to check out some of the other news and commentary featured on the site.

AFRICOM’s First Massacre

Less than a week after MADRE took a position against AFRICOM, the new US military command for Africa, we learned the horrifying consequences of the command’s first mission in Congo: 900 civilians dead, entire families massacred and whole villages burned to the ground. 

The mission, carried out by Ugandan troops, but planned and paid for by the Pentagon, was an attempted raid on the Lord’s Resistance Army, the brutal rebel group that has been killing, raping and enslaving people in Uganda and Congo for years.

The operation “went awry” according to the Times. The fighters from the Lord’s Resistance Army escaped the raid and rampaged through “town after town in northeastern Congo, hacking, burning, shooting and clubbing to death anyone in their way.”

US officials admitted to the New York Times that villagers were left unprotected by the planned operation. As a result of the botched mission,

“The Lord’s Resistance Army is now on the loose, moving from village to village, seemingly unhindered, leaving a wake of scorched huts and crushed skulls. Witnesses say the fighters have kidnapped hundreds of children and marched them off into the bush, the latest conscripts in their slave army.”

This is why we have to press for political—not military—solutions to conflicts in Africa. And this is why we will continue to Build a New Agenda and press the US administration to create a human rights-based foreign policy. We want to hear your ideas on this, so post your comments.

Still More Ways to Get Your Voice Heard

Some of you have already clicked over to the Build a New Agenda section of the blog, and we want to thank you for leaving your comments. We have just added new updates to the discussion topics, so you may want to revisit that section--or check it out for the first time!

We have opened the discussion on Iraq, where Obama has made some commitments to draw down the occupation, and on Africa, where US economic and military policies threaten peace and exacerbate poverty.

Quick Post: "Un-Gagging Women's Human Rights"

A couple of weeks ago, we were happy to announce that President Obama had repealed the Global Gag Rule, a policy that had jeopardized the lives and health of women all across the globe.  MADRE Communications Director Yifat Susskind wrote this piece in Foreign Policy in Focus, which catalogues the harm caused by such systematic attacks on women's health and looks ahead to the next steps that will be necessary to safeguard women's reproductive rights.  An excerpt is below:

According to the UN Population Fund, family planning "has the potential to reduce poverty and hunger, and avert 25-35% of all maternal deaths and nearly 10% of all childhood deaths. It would also contribute substantially to women's empowerment, achievement of universal primary schooling and long-term environmental sustainability."

That's because women's ability to control their fertility is a precondition for exercising autonomy in other realms of life. When women can decide when to have children, they generally choose to have smaller families. They participate more productively in their countries' economies and political processes, are healthier, and raise and educate healthier children. These are the foundations of a more peaceful and prosperous world.

myMADRE Has a New Look!

As part of the continuing evolution of this blog, today we’re happy to introduce our readers to our new blog design!  We’ve changed some of the things we didn’t like about the old blog and added some new things.  And I got the chance to learn about CSS!

Let us know in comments what you think, or if anything can still be changed for the better.

Quick Post: "Climate Change is Not Gender-Neutral"

Last month, MADRE Communications Director Yifat Susskind was interviewed by Anna Lappé, co-founder of the Small Planet Institute. In the exchange posted on Anna Lappé's blog Take a Bite out of Climate Change, they talked about the disproportionate impact of climate change on women around the world, who make up 70% of the world's poor. Yifat also shared stories of the solutions being implemented by MADRE sister organizations. An excerpt is below:

Women’s livelihoods and social roles – in particular those of rural and Indigenous women – depend directly on the ecosystems that are being destroyed by climate change. It’s mostly women who are responsible for subsistence agriculture and for collecting water and biomass fuels for household use. So, for example, when water sources are depleted by drought, it’s still the job of women to provide water for their families. Only the job becomes much harder. We know women who used to walk 7 kilometers a day to haul water, and now they walk 15 because the river closest to them has run dry. [...]

Women are not only disproportionately victimized by the confluence of climate change and gender discrimination. Women also have specialized knowledge that’s critical to their communities’ capacity to survive and adapt. That’s because women traditionally navigate the relationship between their communities and the ecosystems of which they are a part. [...]

These are the very skills that need to be developed and institutionalized now that storms and floods are increasing with climate change. Policymakers should be asking for help from these women. Instead, rural and Indigenous women are seen by policy makers primarily as poor and illiterate and victims of climate change, not as resources with expertise that needs to be developed and adapted.

*Photo credit: MADRE