Whose Reality?

Jennifer Siebel Newsom and Jennifer Pozner

IMOW just hosted an awesome event with Jennifer Siebel Newsom, first lady of San Francisco and documentarian, and Jennifer Pozner, author and executive director of Women in Media, about the portrayal of women in media, and specifically reality television.

Newsom's film, Miss Representation, and Pozner's book, "Reality Bites Back," really lay bare just how the media distorts women's images, confining them to easily digestible stereotypes in front of the camera, and shutting them out of positions of power behind the camera. In fact, Newsom said something like 80 to 90 percent of positions of power--in politics, media, business, etc.--are held by men.

Both Pozner and Newsom said that one way to hold the media accountable about the way they portray women is to speak up. "Women sometimes discount their own authority," said Pozner. "But you are an authority, and even your own experiences give you authority." Pozner and Newsome encouraged women to write letters to the editors of newspapers and magazines, call in to talk shows, and generally "talk back to the media."

So what do you think about how women are portrayed in the media, and specifically reality television? Any ideas about how we can affect these distorted portrayals? And why don't women speak up more often?

How Vital is the International Violence Against Women Act?

Last week as I strolled through rainy Paris to La Poste to send off my absentee ballot to America, I kept reminding myself, Barbara Boxer will triumph. So will Kirsten Gillibrand. With election outcomes that cannot be called anything less than challenging, victory for these two women Senators seemed essential to help ensure the passing of the International Violence Against Women Act (IVAWA).

Originally introduced by John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, along with Boxer to the House and the Senate in February 2010, the International Violence Against Women Act (IVAWA) was highlighted by Her Blueprint in late August in a MAKE CHANGE article while the act was making its way through Congress. In late September, the bill stalled.

However, the same statistics remain: Amnesty International cites that "one out of every three women worldwide has been physically or sexually abused during her lifetime with rates of domestic violence reaching 70 percent in some countries."

Erin Kennedy, Policy Advocate for CARE, an organization that works to end global poverty by empowering marginalized women and girls to bring lasting change to their communities, recently shared her thoughts on why she has been advocating to gain more support for IVAWA.

Based in Washington D.C. along with a team of policy and advocacy professionals, Erin advocates CARE’s mission: to focus on pivotal policies and legislation that will impact poor women and girls and work to influence the U.S. Congress, the Administration, and other key agencies. Right now, her focus is on the International Violence Against Women Act for a variety of sound reasons.

As Erin shares, "There is unprecedented support and momentum for the legislation with over 150 U.S. groups including faith-based, human rights, refugee and women’s organizations that support the bill. In addition, support from the American public is strong as well. A 2009 poll found that 61% of voters across demographic and political lines thought global violence against women should be one of the top international priorities for the U.S. government, and 82% supported I-VAWA legislation when it was explained to them."

IVAWA promotes efforts to reduce women’s and girls’ vulnerability to violence through programs aimed at improving their economic status and ensuring access to educational opportunities. The legislation also aims to support community level efforts to change harmful norms that lead to social tolerance of violence against women and girls. IVAWA will also buttress programs to help women and girl survivors of violence gain access to the legal system, and ensure safety and support throughout the legal process. In these multi-sectoral holistic efforts, IVAWA supports the development of societies where women’s and girls’ rights are recognized and promoted, and the problem of violence against women is effectively reduced.

That said, thousands of bills are up for legislation and many never make it into practice. The reason, Erin says, that IVAWA is so essential is that it is a first. "IVAWA is the first coordinating effort by the U.S. government to tackle violence against women and girls throughout the world. It aims to address Gender-Based Violence (GBV) by increasing violence prevention and response efforts within U.S. foreign assistance and diplomacy."

In August, Her Blueprint also reported in Health Versus Harm: Zero Tolerance on Violence Against Women and Girls that Gender-Based Violence amounts to an uncontained crisis. Accordingly, IVAWA would direct the State Department, in coordination with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), to create, develop, then implement a comprehensive five-year strategy to prevent violence against women and girls for five to 20 countries which are experiencing significant levels of violence.

Erin asserts that through "decades of experience working with communities to address poverty in more than 70 countries globally, CARE has found that empowering women and girls yields dramatic benefits for families, entire communities, and nations. But we [CARE] has also found that violence against women and girls is one of the key barriers to empowering women and addressing issues of poverty and inequality. So a bill such as IVAWA, that addresses violence, is important not only because it will help to protect and empower women and girls, but also because this will help to reduce poverty and support community development efforts."

In February 2010, when the bill was introduced, Dr. Helene Gayle, president and CEO of CARE stated in a press release, "The introduction of IVAWA sends a strong message that the United States will not stand by while women and girls are repeatedly abused and subjected to violence. The passage of this legislation would be a historic proactive step forward in improving lives around the world, and I urge the American public and members of Congress to support it."

Pictured is an IVAWA advertisement supported by the Family Violence Prevention Fund and Women Thrive Worldwide, two of the 150 organizations pushing for this pivotal bill to pass.

CLIO TALKS BACK: Should economic emancipation – the right to earn an independent living – be the most important priority for women today?

Clio recently attended a panel discussion at Stanford University. The topic was “Beyond the Stalled Revolution: Reinvigorating Gender Equality in the Twenty-First Century,” and the panelists included a number of leading feminist scholars. The focus was on the United States.

Achieving women’s equality in the marketplace emerged as an important focus of the discussion. The terms “equal pay” and “glass ceiling” blended with concerns about the politics of appearance and the dilemmas of old age. Resolving the conflict many women face between “work” (as paid employment) and “family” (parenthood, especially motherhood) emerged clearly as a priority for action: paid maternity leave, a national childcare policy are absent in the United States of America. For many women, this is a long-standing dilemma, born of our society’s still deeply-entrenched convictions that men should be the breadwinners and women should care for the children, even in an economic climate where, for many, two incomes are increasingly necessary to sustain families.

In thinking about what she had heard, Clio revisited a comparable period in the development of English feminism during the 1920s and 1930s, following attainment of the vote for all women in 1928. It was then, in planning for the future, that English feminists began to disagree sharply over how to reformulate their political agendas. Two distinct currents emerged, each of which had important economic implications for women. And in the struggle that ensued between them, the words “feminism” and “feminist” turned into “dangerous” words. Clio thinks that knowledge of what has happened in another culture can be helpful in reflecting on our own.

In 1925, an editorial appeared in The Woman's Leader and the Common Cause, entitled "What is Feminism?" The editorialist recounted Rose Macaulay's definition: "attempts of women to possess privileges (political, professional, economic, or other) which have previously been denied to them on account of their sex." But, the writer added, "this is not enough:" This editorialist asserted that:

The mere throwing open to women of all privileges, political, professional, industrial, social, religious, in a social system designed by men for men is not going to carry us all the way to our feminist ideal. And what that ideal is, becomes clear when we define feminism as "the demand of women that the whole structure and movement of society shall reflect in a proportionate degree their experiences, their needs, and their aspirations."

This included, in the writer's estimation, the social recognition of motherhood as having an equal claim "to be economically produced and legally protected."

Embedded in these lines was the thinking of Eleanor F. Rathbone, Member of Parliament, who had succeeded Millicent Garrett Fawcett as president of the now-renamed National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (NUSEC; formerly the NUWSS). For nearly two decades Rathbone had been insisting that women's needs should be dealt with in women's terms. Her important book, The Disinherited Family (1924), had laid out her views on the woman question in the guise of an appeal to those in post-war England who, like their French colleagues, were concerned about the low birthrate and the shrinking power of the nation. Sylvia Pankhurst, in her small book Save the Mothers (1930), joined the campaign by calling on the government to supplement the voluntary provisions of the 1918 Maternity and Child Welfare Act with an effective nationally-funded maternity care system. In the wake of the Soviet Russian measures on behalf of maternity, however, even Rathbone's proposal for a family endowment act, with an allowance to be paid to the wife/mother rather than to a wage-earning husband, encountered serious resistance, though it was based on government allocations established during the war to support British soldiers' wives.

Significant opposition to family endowment came from within the English feminist movement itself, spearheaded initially by Fawcett, who cautioned that such payments to women would undermine men's sense of responsibility as husbands and fathers. By degrading men's roles as economic providers, endowment would thereby destroy, rather than stabilize the family, Fawcett affirmed.

Rathbone, in her rejoinder to Fawcett, "The Old and the New Feminism," castigated the strictly egalitarian approach that had for so long been the most visible feature of British feminism. Closer in her arguments to the Continental feminists of pre-war Germany and France, she insisted that:

At last we can stop looking at all our problems through men's eyes and discussing them in men's phraseology. We can demand what we want for women, not because it is what men have got, but because it is what women need to fulfil the potentialities of their own natures and to adjust themselves to the circumstances of their own lives. . . . The achievement of freedom is a much bigger thing than the breaking off of shackles.

In 1927, the English feminist movement fractured over these issues of work-related protective legislation and endowment of motherhood. Tensions that had long been building manifested themselves as schism. In a period when nearly half of the women in England were still without a political voice (though they did obtain it in 1928), Eleanor Rathbone's brand of "new" feminism and the pursuit of state support for mothers made the advocates of formal legal equality for women extremely uneasy.

Some English partisans of individual equality viewed all legal "protection" or privileges for mothers or for working women as a trap. This view characterized the feminists associated with the Six Points Group, and with the publication Time and Tide and its editor-benefactress, Margaret Haig Thomas Mackworth, viscountess Rhondda. Following the franchise victory in 1928, Lady Rhondda wrote that "the real task of feminism" is to "wipe out the overemphasis on sex that is the fruit of the age-long subjection of women. The individual must stand out without trappings as a human being." To such advocates of pure equality in the law and in the workplace, it seemed reprehensible for other feminists to play the motherhood trump in the way it had been and would repeatedly be played, for instance, in France, Germany, and later in Sweden and other Scandinavian countries.

The schism between these two approaches to feminism, one highly relational and woman-centered and the other highly individualistic, subsequently became enshrined in the somewhat misleading formulation, "equality versus difference," which complicated finding solutions into the 1980s. Both factions desired equality, but each understood the term "equality" in a different manner. The split between them would be reinforced and reified by subsequent developments, in particular by the construction of an explicitly dependent motherhood and wifehood in the post-World-War II British welfare state.

Clio asks: if you had lived in England in the 1920s and 1930s, would you have been on the side of Millicent Garrett Fawcett and Lady Rhondda? Or would you have agreed with Eleanor Rathbone? Which version of “equality” would you have supported? What version do you support today? Is economic equality the most important form of equality? Let’s have a discussion……

Source: adapted from Karen Offen, European Feminisms, 1700-1950: A Political History (Stanford University Press, 2000), chapter 10.

MAKE CHANGE: Promote Peace

via Flickr / J.L. McVay

Though they aren't always at the front lines of battle, violence against women is too often used as a tool of war in conflict countries. In 2000, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1325 on women and peace and security. But since then, little progress has been made.

Our partner organization The Global Fund for Women is spearheading a petition to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, asking her to take the lead in implementing Resolution 1325.

The petition reads, in part:

"We know women and children bear the greatest brunt of war as violence against women is used to break and humiliate women, men and communities. On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, the global women’s movement asks that the United States takes the lead in ensuring, to the largest extent possible, that peace processes around the world have the full participation of women at all stages."

Take a moment to add your name to this important movement! Sign the petition today>>

Haiti Post-Quake: Cholera Outbreak

From The Economist, a Haitian mother and her child's health are in intense need due to the cholera outbreak 40 miles north of Port-au-Prince. Before the outbreak, the safety of women and children, the need for focus on long-term strategies in the tent cities, putting up water points, lights in the latrines, staying goal-oriented in terms of long-term moves versus camp eviction were all gaining higher importance. Yet, as of last week Haiti was again reminded how hard their country's short-term recovery because of cholera alone.

According to the Economist, "The [Cholera] outbreak originated in the Artibonite valley, 60km (40 miles) to the north. By October 27th more than 300 people had died and more than 4,500 cases were confirmed, according to the Haitian Ministry of Health."

However, as per most major news sources the outbreak is one that needs attention and comittment due to the fact Haiti remains a country in heavy and immediate crisis.

Photo credit: The Economist

1000 WORDS: Sing Her Praises

A singer in Sao Paolo, Brazil, warms up. From Isabela Senatore's series in Picturing Power and Potential, "Women in Music."

Haiti Post-Quake: The Past Ten Months and Counting

On January 12, 2010, Haiti was ravaged by a catastrophic 7.0 earthquake that extensively damaged the country's main city of Port-au-Prince. By January 24, over 52 aftershocks were recorded that measured at least 4.5. Ten months ago exactly, on January 20, the New York Times published Aftershocks, by Évelyne Trouillot sharing those first days post-quake.

The family has set up camp in my brother’s house. I live just next door, but it makes us feel better to be all in the same house. My brother, a novelist, is writing his articles; I am writing mine. From time to time a tremor will make us pause and run back outside, just in case, to be safe. I wonder how long we will have to be so cautious, and I long for normalcy.

We sleep; we listen to the radio; we exchange information. Mostly, we have been trying to stay alive and sane since that Tuesday afternoon a week ago when the earthquake changed our lives forever. It doesn’t help that the earth continues to convulse. Just this morning, we felt another tremor, the most violent since the earthquake itself. Let us hope it did not cause more deaths and damage.

In an already impoverished country, the level of displacement due to this cataclysmic environmental disaster escalated to epidemic proportions. With 230,000 deaths at least, 300,000 injured, and 7.8 billion dollars in damages, in August Her Blueprint published Haiti: Displacement, TB, and Progress?, which cited over 1.2 million people were living in tent cities and that safety and health concerns for women and children were fast-becoming a highly relevant issue post-earthquake. Although Évelyne Trouillot's eloquent Aftershocks calls in vain hope for the short-term aftershocks themselves to not bring more death and damage, what kind of long-term aftershocks are the country facing and what kind of strategies are evolving to protect the most vulnerable?

Six Months Post-Quake

Recently, I spoke with Joanne Blakemore who arrived to Port-au-Prince, Haiti on June 12, the quake's six month anniversary. With a background in third-world travel, humanitarian causes, and relief work, Joanne had done Katrina hurricane relief work as well in Mississippi.

"I was in Haiti pre-hurricane season. Commercial enterprise seemed to be functioning. Children seemed not to be starving. But, I thought it made Biloxi, Mississippi [post-Katrina] look like West Chester. The tents these women and children are living in are miniscule. You can’t stand up in them."

Outright distress, post-traumatic stress disorder, and health and safety concerns was the tone coming out of the camps when Ms. Blog broke the story along with AWID of MADRE's report, Our Bodies Are Still Trembling: Haitian Women's Fight Against Rape, and its findings regarding rape in the tent cities.

"Six months after the earthquake in Haiti, we see a continued crisis of safety and security in the displacement camps that has exacerbated the already grave problem of sexual violence. We found that women are being raped at an alarming rate-every day-in camps throughout Port-au-Prince. The Haitian Government, the UN, and others in the international community have failed to adequately address the situation. Women, especially poor women, have been excluded from full participation and leadership in the relief effort."

Enter acknowledgment of one of the biggest challenges of Haiti along with eviction, education, and myriad health concerns: the safety of women and children.

Nine Months Post-Quake

In September, the tent cities were still just as large as ever with around 1 million people displaced, and the weariness of those contained within them were again being expressed by major news outlets as were the overt safety concerns for women and children. On September 19, the New York Times published Haitians Cry in Letters: ‘Please — Do Something!’. The title of the article is culled from a direct quote from Ms. Saint Hilaire, 33, who shared in a letter posted to the boxes put up by the International Organization for Migration, about how she and her children are "stranded in a camp annex without a school, a health clinic, a marketplace or any activity at all."

"Please — do something!" she wrote from Tent J2, Block 7, Sector 3, her new address. "We don’t want to die of hunger and also we want to send our children to school. I give glory to God that I am still alive — but I would like to stay that way!"

Ten Months Post-Quake and Counting

On October 7, 2010, Bloomberg published Haiti Earthquake Camps Expose Women to Sex Violence, which cites that as a country Haiti had significant problems with sexual violence pre-quake, but that post-quake the numbers are staggering. “Living in squalid, overcrowded and spontaneous camps for a prolonged period has aggravated levels of violence and appalling standards of living,” the Refugees International report said. The humanitarian response to the earthquake “appears paralyzed.”

In fact, the title of the Refugees International October 6 report, Haiti: Still Trapped in the Emergency Phase, shares the exact issue at hand: long-term strategies are not taking shape or evolution. The report explains in detail how "enhancing proper leadership, enhancing the security for displaced women, improving camp management, bridging the communication gap, and decentralizing resources to promote recovery" are integral to moving past the emergency phase into effective long-term strategies for the country's recovery.

Photo credit: Ms. Magazine Blog

BOOKS: Survivor's Ed

After finishing her book, I am incredibly excited to hear Ingrid Betancourt, former Colombian senator and political hostage, tell her story in San Francisco on October 28 for IMOW's next Extraordinary Voices, Extraordinary Change Speaker Series event.

Betancourt's book, Even Silence Has an End, is completely engrossing. I read it cover to cover and frequently had to remind myself that it was a nonfictional memoir; the life she and other prisoners endure, for six and a half years, are unimaginable.

One thing that struck me in Betancourt's telling of her experience is her constant attempts to mentally and emotionally overcome her physical imprisonment. She writes about how, lining up to receive a daily meal, she and the rest of the prisoners became greedy and desperate to get the largest portion. She admits that she tries and fails over and over again to overcome the impulse to grab what she can for herself in the jungle, where it truly is a survival situation.

It's a lesson she tries to embrace over and over again--fighting against your most base nature to rise above circumstances beyond your control. Near the end of her captivity, Betancourt experiences and articulates this lesson most profoundly:

"Having lost all my freedom and, with it, everything that mattered to me--my children, my mom, my life and my dreams--with my neck chained to a tree--not able to move around, to talk, to eat, and to drink, to carry out my most basic bodily needs--subjected to constant humiliation, I still had the most important freedom of all. No one could take it away from me. That was the freedom to choose what kind of person I wanted to be."

An admirable goal indeed, and one that I've thought about in my daily life since reading the book. For all the painful physical struggles and the miserable injustice of having spent more than six years as a political prisoner, it seems to me that the hardest part of surviving captivity would be embracing your freedom to be a stronger, braver person.

CLIO TALKS BACK: Reconciling Women’s Employment with Motherhood in Sweden, 1930s: Alva Myrdal

www.nobelprize.org

Alva Myrdal

Women in many countries today think that the problem of reconciling motherhood with employment is a new problem. Unfortunately, it is an old problem, one that has been debated repeatedly throughout the previous century in many countries.

Among the first to address this issue and come up with workable solutions was the Swedish social reformer and political activist Alva Reimer Myrdal (1902-1986).

Sociologist, author, politician, diplomat, and Nobel laureate (Nobel Peace Prize - 1982), Myrdal first entered public life with her plans for reconciling women’s employment with motherhood in the 1930s. Myrdal was educated at the universities of Stockholm and Uppsala. She married the economist Gunnar Myrdal in 1924, the year she graduated, and working together (while raising three children of their own) they revolutionized the ideas of both Swedish socialists and the Swedish women’s movement.

Why Sweden? For a variety of reasons, including extensive emigration and a falling birthrate, Sweden in the 1930s had been experiencing severe problems with lack of population growth and replacement. Social Democrats in Sweden, who controlled the government then and since, had advocated the spread of birth control information in order to improve the living standard of the poor – but this approach was opposed by those who feared further population decline.

Alva Myrdal succeeded in reframing the view commonly held not only in the socialist movement but in many other sectors of society, including the religious right-wing – that married women should not be permitted to remain in the labor force. On the contrary, she insisted that women workers should be aided, not penalized, if they married and bore children. As Myrdal described her accomplishment, “The old debate on married women’s right to work was turned into a fight for the working woman’s right to marry and have children.” In order to implement such a policy, a support system for women including family planning, child care, sex education, and modification of domestic labor and even of domestic architecture would, she believed, have to be instituted by the government.

The Swedish government set up a Population Commission and appointed Alva Myrdal secretary of the Government Committee on Women’s Work. In that capacity, from 1935 to 1938, Alva Myrdal was able to realize enactment of many of her ideas, with help from her husband, who was a guiding member of the Population Commission. In her book Nation and Family, Alva Myrdal documented both the evolving ideology and the Swedish government’s implementation of her plan to facilitate a dual role for women – as participants in the labor force and as mothers of families. Among her proposals were several radical ideas – to attack the then-prevailing notions of sex-role socialization and to promote the participation of fathers as well as mothers in household and childrearing tasks. She extended her analysis in a subsequent book with Viola Klein, Women’s Two Roles: Home and Work, published in 1956 and most recently reprinted in 2003.

Clio recommends that everyone interested in this question of reconciling motherhood and employment revisit Myrdal’s writings and the subsequent solutions implemented by the Swedes which made their country one of the most prosperous and peaceful nations in the world.

Further suggested reading:

Alva Myrdal, Nation and Family: The Swedish Experiment in Democratic Family and Population Policy (London, 1945; reprinted 1968 by MIT Press; originally published in Swedish, 1940)

Yvonne Hirdman, Alva Myrdal: The Passionate Mind (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008; originally published in Swedish).

1000 WORDS: Secret Garden

A women tends to the Victory Garden in San Francisco, from Anne Hamersky's series for Picturing Power & Potential, "Cultivating Change."

Team Congo Races the 20 Kilometers of Paris

Paris is known for its incredible light. When I was training for the 2009 Paris Marathon to race for Girls on the Run International, one of my last training runs found me at Place de la Concorde. Just as my running shoe hit the center, the Eiffel Tower lit up as did all the surrounding street lamps. The natural light here can be just as profound.

This past Sunday Alice Phan, pictured here triumphant at the 20K de Paris finish line, took to the city streets along with Run for Congo Women's Team Congo Paris in sunlight that marked beauty to the highest degree. Autumn. 20,000 runners. Unite.

In early September, I met Alice in person as we ran Parc des Buttes Chaumont together in training for the 20K de Paris. At the time, she was running about five miles. Later that month, we chatted excitedly at the start line of La Parisienne, a 6K for women's health, which also marked the ninth anniversary weekend of September 11.

When Alice initially emailed me about joining Team Congo Paris, she shared how she had always wanted to work with Girls on the Run Manhattan while living in New York, but that her work hours had always been an obstacle. Phan, an optometrist, is now living in Paris due to her husband's job transfer, and while acquiring her work visa, she volunteers at a hospital and has also become an invaluable asset to Team Congo Paris. To explain Alice's energy is like harnessing a surge of fresh air, a full deep-belly laugh; she is the kind of person who congratulates herself out loud on a fantastic idea and keeps on in the face of adversity with determination and a smile.

For the first ten minutes of the 20K de Paris race, I ran alongside Alice before I launched onward. On Sunday night post-run, I checked in with her and she shared that the first eight miles she was at a consistent 10 minute mile pace, but then a major cramp kicked in. "I probably could have walked faster than what I was running, because I was pretty much crawling," she told me, "but then when I saw the 19 km sign, I was so excited and was ecstatic to finish!"

She finished in under 2 hours and 15 minutes.

Born to first-generation parents who came to the United States from Vietnam then settled in Southern California, Alice often embraces Run for Congo Women's shared reason for being. She gets it. We are out there running together raising awareness, pushing our own bodies as a metaphor for Congolese women and children whose bodies and beings have been pushed far past any fathomable sense of resiliency. We keep on as a testament to their profound hardship. Around the time I met Alice, I wrote Resiliency, Congo, and Rape As a Weapon of War, which highlighted the July 30 attack of 300 women and children in Eastern Congo, only ten to twenty miles from a UN compound.

According to the Guardian's October 6 article, Militia Commander Mayele Arrested After Mass Rape of Congo Villagers, "Over four days, at least 303 people were raped – 235 women, 52 girls, 13 men and 3 boys – according to a preliminary UN investigation published last month. Many of the victims were raped repeatedly."

In a statement from Congo, Lisa Wallström, the UN's representative for sexual violence in conflict, says the arrest of Mayele is a victory for justice. "The numerous criminal acts committed under 'Lt Col' Mayele's command cannot be undone, but let his apprehension be a signal to all perpetrators of sexual violence that impunity for these types of crimes is not accepted and that justice will prevail," she said.

Although human rights activists have commended the arrest, they have also highlighted that Mayele was not a major player or the only assailant, and this act of small justice is only one step toward a more comprehensive and effective resolution. How that resolution takes shape – or if it will – ultimately depends on a variety of upcoming actions, reports, and initiatives.

In the meantime, Team Congo Paris will continue to race in support of the women and children in Congo. For their deserved safety and well-being, at least.

You can still join Team Congo Paris and race on November 7, 2010 or you can support us via donation.

Pakistan's Humanitarian Crisis at Scale

During July and onward, Pakistan was devastated by a surge of flooding that now encompasses one fifth of the country. That amounts to a mass of water larger than the size of England. In consequence, the response teams initially called in attempted to assess just how extensive the physical damage, which was readily apparent from the broken bridges, destroyed homes, and 20 million displaced people. Yet, as time passes the shift from immediate emergency response to effective, long-term strategies is essential. In a country where gender issues were already highly prevalent pre-flood, now they are even more pressing, if not dire.

When the Pakistan floods began, I looked at victim photos in the same way I did when Haiti experienced its massive earthquake almost ten months ago. In both situations where environmental and climate crisis created extensive displacement, there were also unique threats facing women and children.

In August, Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID) released a statement on the post-flood humanitaran crisis that clarified some of the harsher realities for Pakistani women. "Many of the flood-affected areas of Pakistan have spent years in conflict marked by rising religious fundamentalisms. Reports from the ground indicate that fundamentalist groups are mobilizing aid and providing relief services in areas unreachable by the government with potentially dangerous implications for women’s rights."

The acquisition of women's rights in daily life are a struggle for most Pakistani women, but how extreme must these challenges become when faced with urgent disaster? Pakistani women already experience myriad religious and social inequities. As such, AWID's statement acknowledges that even while government outreach is not enough for a disaster of this proportion, that the rise of organizations functioning within the country in the relief effort that have incentives which are not human rights-based, much less in any way working toward positive outcomes for women and children, need to be halted.

Along with reports of missing women and children as well as women having significant issues accessing relief support and health care, AWID makes a call to action by inciting, "the government of Pakistan and the international community to take immediate action to ensure that the very much-needed aid is committed and actually delivered in a timely and effective fashion. Also, the well-being of women and girls has to be ensured through the provision of both emergency relief and significant longer-term support for reconstruction and development that responds to the gender-specific needs and circumstances of Pakistani women and girls. In particular, we [AWID] call for the full participation of women at all levels of reconstruction and for sustained efforts to be centered on the long-term development needs of women and girls and the promotion and protection of their human rights."

Any effectual response to Pakistan post-flood must encompass the strategic knowledge that human rights and women's rights are even more essential during times of disaster, because they were already extremely vulnerable pre-crisis.

Photo credit: Guardian

Read Kate Stence's article Haiti Post-Quake: The Past Ten Months and Counting about Haiti's struggles with displacement and the challenges to support women and children in long-term strategies of relief.