N°14   Sunday July 6












Prostitution
Debating Prostitution: the Great Divide
by Emmanuelle Schneider, 09/26/03

Running on parallel tracks that never seem to merge, the current debate on prostitution, has, if anything, split feminist movements, human rights advocates, intellectuals and social workers, while stretching divisions within the international political arena.
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Jail
A War On Women in The U.S
by Emma Pearse, 05/19/04

It’s an established phenomenon that the population of women under the control of the U.S criminal justice system has increased dramatically in the past two decades. The national media has reported on it extensively and analysts have offered various theories and research to understand and explain it. Studies show an 81 percent rise in the number of women under correctional control between 1990 and 2000, compared to a 45 percent rise in the number of men under correctional control during the same time period.
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India
Indian Women’s Uneven Pace to Power
by Anita Katyal, 09/28/04

As vice-chairman and managing director of HSBC Securities and Capital Markets, 47-year-old Naina Lal Kidwai is arguably one of India’s foremost businesswomen. She is the country’s highest paid female executive, the first Indian woman to graduate from Harvard Business School in 1982 and has been featured by Fortune magazine in its list of the world’s top 50 corporate women.
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Aids
In the Epicenter of the HIV/AIDS Epidemics
by Lauren Johnston, 09/28/04

Many women living with HIV or AIDS are too young to remember a time when the deadly virus was largely considered a men’s disease. Infected women today are part of a global community that is millions strong.
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Darfur
Darfur : A Human Disaster
by Lauren Johnston, 05/09/05

The western Sudanese state of Darfur is a place where ashes have replaced pastoral villages. It is a place where the Karthoum government and its Janjaweed militias have orchestrated what has become one of the most appalling human disasters of this century in an effort to exterminate the non-Arab people of the region. Nearly 200,000 people have died since February 2003 as a result of the conflict there and nearly two million have been burned out of their villages and moved to displacement camps.
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Tsunami
In the Eye of the Tsunami
by Anita Katyal from New Delhi with Caitlin Miner-le-Grand from New York, 05/10/05

The giant tsunami waves seemingly failed to distinguish between men and women when they rolled through 12 Asian countries last December 26, leaving a death toll of 220,000 people in its wake. Four months after it struck, however, statistics began demonstrating that a much larger number of women than men were killed in one of the worst natural disasters to have been witnessed in recent years.
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Balkans
Ten Years Later, Srebrenica Remembers
by Tea Rozman-Clark, 09/14/05

Executed in school gymnasiums or buried alive in open fields, 8,000 men and boys died at the hands of Serb soldiers during a five-day slaughter that marked the culmination of the fall of Srebrenica in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Ten years later, as the international community gathered last summer to commemorate one of the worst massacres committed in Europe since World War II, widows and mothers kept memory alive.
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Pakistan: 4 months after the quake
Surviving in Freezing Pakistan
by Kamila Hyat, 01/25/06

Even natural disasters are discriminatory in nature. The most vulnerable are almost invariably worst hit, and the quake that shook northern parts of Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir on October 8th is no exception. The worst sufferers are the women and children, as well as the elderly.
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Egypt
A Complex Society Where the Integrity of the Family Comes First
by Catherine Weibel, 04/02/06

The pro-democracy rally organized by women activists and journalists in downtown Cairo last May went wrong. Groped and stripped of their clothes by members of the National Democratic Party that has kept President Hosni Moubarak in power for 25 years, demonstrators were warned by officials that they would be arrested as prostitutes should they try to sue the government. “They were not attacked as journalists or militants, but as women,” a journalist* of the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram recalls. The rally is a stark reminder of the deep psychological and physical pressure women face in a complex society torn between an authoritarian government and an Islamic revival.
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U.S. Immigration
A Chance to Come Out of the Shadows
by Lauren B. Johnston, 07/04/06

They are nannies and housekeepers. They work in laundries, kitchens and hotels. Some fall victim to the sex trade. These are just some of the millions of undocumented immigrant women who are trying to build a better future in the United States. Though their numbers are strong and they occupy a space in our daily lives, their lack of legal status pushes them into the shadowy interiors of domestic work and leaves them all but invisible when it comes to basic rights. But now there’s a movement–historic in its strength–about to change that.
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Canadian Natives
Gender Discrimination, a Legacy of History
by Léa Roboam, 10/06/06

Canada and its native people share a long history of confrontation and mistrust. Colonization, which forced the European and Christian concept of female inferiority upon their society, was especially hard on the women. In sixteen and seventeen century’s England and France, a woman was considered a minor and expected to obey her father or husband. This was not the case in most Canadian native communities where man and woman were seen as equal. The repercussions of the inevitable culture shock are felt even to this day as Canada opposed the adoption last june of an international declaration on the rights of the indigenous people.


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Argentina
The Search for Grandchildren Continues
by Karina Mirochnik, 04/18/07

Last February in Paris, the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance was opened for signature. For Argentina, which was among its first signatories, that event marked another step towards closing out one of the most painful chapters of its history. No political thriller could do justice to the harsh realities of Argentina’s dark past. Even The Official Story, the Argentine drama which won an Oscar in 1985, posed far more questions than it could hope to answer. That chapter lasted a decade, from the ‘70s until the ‘80s, but for the military junta then in power, it was time enough to get Argentina into the Malvinas (Falklands) war and rip the country apart with its policy of terror.
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Child soldiers: Democratic Republic of the Congo
War is Over but Violence is Not
by Barry Malone, 07/15/07

The horror of the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is well documented. And the war in DRC was as disgusting as wars get. Babies and old women raped. Children forced to murder and mutilate. Mothers made to eat the flesh of their families. What many call Africa’s First World War has had an untold impact on women and their children.
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Politics
Israel: Can Tzipi Livni Rise to the Top?
by Roi Ben-Yehuda, 07/17/07

In the last two years, Tzipi Livni has been a major political player in the region of the Middle East. In 2005, as a member of the Knesset, she defied the odds and managed to get the divided Israeli parliament to ratify Ariel Sharon's controversial plan to withdraw Israel's settlements from Gaza. Shortly thereafter, she made history by becoming the second woman ever to take the post of the Foreign Ministry in Israel.
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Mary Robinson's Human Rights Legacy
How Often Have We Said, “Never Again”?
by Jeanette Càceres, 04/02/06

A Voice for Human Rights clarifies Mary Robinson´s persistent efforts in globalizing human rights through a collection of a series of speeches delivered between 1997 and 2002 during her term as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. The book is as much an homage to Robinson as it is an historical account of her efforts to spread human rights and awareness of sustainable development throughout the world.

Mary Robinson was the first female President of Ireland from 1990-1997, and her term has come to be known as the “Robinson years,” for her emphasis on fostering a socially inclusive society centering on education and prudent management of the national finances. She resigned the presidency four months prior to the end of her term to serve as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, a position she filled until 2002.
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Le Livre Noir de la Condition des Femmes
A Dark Glance on a Dark Situation
by Linda Bator Lô, 07/04/06

There is a common belief that the condition of women today is not as bad as it used to be, that it has reached a certain level of acceptability and therefore only a few changes are needed to achieve gender equality worldwide. A collection of articles, testimonies, portraits, essays and analyses on the situation of women around the world, Le Livre Noir de la Condition des Femmes (The Black Book on the Condition of Women) is making up for these misperceptions and is shedding a brighter light on the specific inequities confronting women in today’s world. From the Bollywood scenes to the European suburbs; from the tribunals in Maghreb to the streets in China; the plight of women is presented from a women’s point of view.
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Infidel
A Conflicted Vision of Islam
by Roi Ben-Yehuda, 04/18/07

Every once in a while, you come across a book that compels you to realize that human beings are more than the sum of their experiences: That there is something mysterious to why an individual strives to transcend the limitations of their environment. The recently released bestseller Infidel, by the Somali-Dutch intellectual Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is one such book. Infidel tells the extraordinary story of a young woman who grew up in a highly patriarchal and tribal Muslim society, turned to religious fundamentalism for guidance, and eventually embraced Western liberalism.
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Maroc
Morocco Affirms Equality between Men and Women on Paper
by Catherine Weibel, 01/28/05

As of January 2004, women in Morocco belong to the second Arabic-Muslim country (after Tunisia) to have legally asserted equality between men and women. The new Family Code, approved unanimously by the Parliament in January 2004, radically reformed the former Code of personal status also called the “Moudawana.” Based on pagan traditions and on the Muslim law of “sharia,” (Muslim Law) and the Maleki rite* the “Moudawana” ruled the relations between men and women. Passed in 1957 following the independence of Morocco, its biased implementation had turned women into eternal minors who had to submit to their father’s, brother’s or husband’s will. Before 2004, women could not marry without the authorization of their tutor. In turn, the husband had the right to throw them out of the home at any time without going in front of a court simply by saying, “I repudiate you.”

Many women suffered from the Moudawana. “Being suddenly repudiated brought shame on our head,” explains a young divorcee who lives in the capital city of Rabat. “Some women were repudiated only several days after the wedding, the husband’s family thinking that they were no longer virgins when getting married. They were left with nothing but poverty and their own family often did not want to support them financially.”
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Turkey
Turkey Under European Scrutiny
by Marie Boeton, 05/09/05

The adoption of a new civil code and the recent amendment of the penal code by the Turkish legislature have been referred to by some as a small “revolution” and by others a big “revolution.” In either case, these legal reforms mark significant change in Turkey. The pressure of the European Union (“EU”) on the Turkish government played a decisive role in prompting these reforms. Whether the Turkish population is prepared to accept them remains to be seen.
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Shirin Ebadi
An Exclusive Interview with Shirin Ebadi, 2003 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
by Interview by Emmanuelle Schneider, Translated from the Farsi by Carmel Kooros, 09/14/05

The Iranian lawyer and human rights activist Shirin Ebadi has been campaigning tirelessly in her country to strengthen the legal status of women and children. Not only did she establish two non-governmental organizations, the Iranian Society for Protecting the Rights of the Child and the Center for the Defense of Human Rights but she also drafted the original text of a law against physical abuse of children that was passed in 2002. With her unwavering determination she explains that with a correct interpretation of Islam, it is possible to pass laws that are more equitable. Voices Unabridged met her in New York City.
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Mukhtaran Mai
From Rape Victim to Human Rights Defender
by Kamila Hyat, 04/02/06

An air of serenity surrounds 33-year-old Mukhtaran Mai as she stands outside one of the schools she has set up in the tiny village of Meerwala, Pakistan. Buried deep within the impoverished southern Punjab, Meerwala is some 300 kilometers from the city of Multan. Despite the incredible suffering she endured here three years ago, Mukhtaran seems at peace with herself and with her transformation from rape victim to human rights advocate. In her pleasant, lilting voice, she tells Voices Unabridged about her welfare endeavors, “By the grace of God, the schools I have established are running very well, and now I have also been able to purchase land where I plan to set up a hospital.”
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Banda Aceh
“Satan is the Third Person Here”
by Sophie Boudre, 10/06/06

Dressed in the typical Indonesian Muslim attire of long skirt, long-sleeved blouse and a soft-colored headscarf (or jilbab), 18-year-old Purnama Sari shivers. It’s not that the girl is cold, it’s that she’s frightened at the mere recollection of how the Sharia police or Wilahyatul Hisbah (WH) broke into her all-female tent.
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Battered Souls and Bodies
by Sophie Boudre, 10/06/06

In the Indonesian province of Aceh, the December 2004 tsunami has battered both the landscape and the souls. When the giant waves hit Aceh on December 26, 2004, more than 168,000 people perished, families were torn apart, hundreds of thousands of houses and public buildings were leveled and government structures were annihilated in a province that was already wracked by a deadly 29-year-old separatist conflict.
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Japan
No Girls Allowed on the Chrysanthemum Throne
by Abigail Somma, 02/01/07

A surprise pregnancy this past February turned out to be a big blow for gender equality in Japan. When Prince Hisahito was born on September 6, 2006, it was a joyful day for the Japanese. In the tradition of a classic fairytale, the birth of the next heir was marked by celebrations throughout the country. Not only would the child eventually take the helm of the Chrysanthemum throne, but his birth eased the tensions of a polarizing national debate that had been brewing for years.

The nature of this contentious debate: whether or not females should be allowed to inherit the crown. The baby’s birth averted the crisis (for the time being) but it begs the question—what if Prince Hisahito had been a girl? Would disappointment have taken the place of delight?
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Somalia
Engulfed in Mayhem
by Caroline Simon, 04/18/07

More than sixteen years of anarchy, chaos and violence have taken a severe toll on Somali women living in one of the most underdeveloped and volatile nations of the world. Somalia’s incessant civil war since the central government collapsed in 1991, not to mention natural disasters, has led to a rapid deterioration of women’s social situation.
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Born Into Brothels
Born Into Brothels
by Erin Marie Daly, 01/28/05

“I wish I could take Puja away from here,” says Gour, 13, of his 11-year-old best friend. “When she grows up, she’ll end up on the street.” The children of prostitutes living in the brothels of Calcutta’s notorious red light district, Gour and Puja’s prospects of a better life seemed unlikely. That is, until documentary filmmaker and photographer Zana Briski came into their lives.

Born Into Brothels chronicles the years filmmaker Ross Kauffman and photojournalist Zana Briski—or Zana Auntie, as the children affectionately refer to her—spent in Sonagachi teaching the art of photography to the children of prostitutes.
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Cry no more
Cry No More, the Hereditary Malediction of a Moroccan Hamlet
by Catherine Weibel, 05/09/05

“A people is great when it can tell love without being ashamed,” Narjiss Nejjar writes at the beginning of her first movie. “Cry No More”, also called “Dry Eye” for the francophone audience, tells the story of Mina, a former prostitute who languishes, forgotten in a Moroccan jail for almost thirty years. The ghost of former Moroccan King Hassan II discreetly haunts the beginning of the movie, as do the numerous political opponents who were buried alive in prisons for several decades.

When she is finally released, Mina asks young Fahd, a former prison guard turned bus driver, to take her back to her native Berber country, a place lost between the high Atlas Mountains of Morocco. It is in Tizi, a remote all-women hamlet of prostitutes where men can only gain entrance with money, that Mina discovers her daughter Hala has become the leader of the community.
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Faith without Fear
Faith without Fear, the Journey of Irshad Manji
by Roi Ben-Yehuda, 02/01/07

"My name is Irshad Manji. I can't show you where I live. My home has bullet-proof windows and a lock on the mailbox to prevent letter bombs. My journey is about speaking out against injustice, no matter who's offended. As a Muslim, my faith is unshakable. But my conscience is being shaken. Terrorists are killing civilians under the banner of Islam. I won't abandon my God - or my voice."

Thus begins Irshad Manji's new PBS documentary Faith without Fear, a film which explores Manji's journey into Islam in the 21st century. On first glance, Faith without Fear mirrors the contents of Manji's internationally best-selling book, The Trouble with Islam Today.
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Human Rights Watch Film Festival
From the Balkans to Iraq, Five Destinies Explored
by Isabelle Dupuis, 07/17/07

The 18th edition of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival featured, from14–28 June in New York, a number of films that followed heroic and formidable women in their personal, political, and professional journeys: prosecutor Carla del Ponte tracks war crime criminals in the Balkans, Malalai Joya seeks a seat in the Afghan parliament, prostitutes organize a soccer team in Guatemala to shed light on their predicament, Lumo recovers in the Congo after a gang rape, and a mother tends to her terminally ill son in Iraq. Though a mixed bag in terms of quality, there are a few gems in here that keep all the promises of a great movie.
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Paul Rusesabagina
A Man Not So Ordinary
by Katherine Stephan, 04/18/07

"Words are the most effective weapons of death in a man’s arsenal. But they can also be powerful tools of life. They may be the only ones."

- Paul Rusesabagina


A single attack on a plane outside Kigali airport in the Spring of 1994 set off a three-month campaign of slaughter in Rwanda that left some 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates dead. As his country slipped quickly into chaos and the international community stood silent, Paul Rusesabagina mobilized. Armed with diplomacy, connections and a quiet courage of conviction, Mr. Rusesabagina turned the luxury Hotel Milles Collines, where he was general manager, into a makeshift refuge for more than 1,200 Tutsis and moderate Hutus targeted by the presidential guard. His extraordinary moral fortitude made him an unlikely hero. His experience was the subject of the Oscar-nominated film, Hotel Rwanda.
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Indian Women Uneven Pace to Power
A slideshow by Ruhani Kaur


India: The Perils of Womenless Societies
Slide show
This is the first series of pictures taken in the Haryana State of northern India by contributor and photojournalist Ruhani Kaur. In 2004, Ruhani was awarded a fellowship grant from the National Foundation for India to document female feticide, a social issue that needs greater recognition on the national agenda. Through traveling exhibitions and media exposure, Ruhani aims to bring to the surface the perils of womanless societies with a view to impact public policy and social consciousness.
India´s Invisible Women
A slideshow by Ruhani Kaur
35 million* Indian females are missing today. Some were killed in the womb, some as infants, while others succumbed in their desperate bid to have a male child. As the pendulum swings alarmingly towards a lopsided sex ratio, women find themselves being tugged from both ends.

On the one hand, they find themselves pressured to aggravate the female shortage by acting as fertility machines for male heirs. However, as the number of 'bare sticks' or bachelors grows, they are also made to fill the deficit by being trafficked for marriage or even shared among brothers. As the situation gets more and more precarious, cracks in the walls of the family unit are beginning to show.

This visual narrative looks at some of those left behind…

This photo-essay is a compilation of the work of photojournalist Ruhani Kaur as a National Foundation for India Fellow of 2005. e-mail: ruhani_k@rediffmail.com

*Source: Political Economy of Missing Girls in India- Dr Vibhuti Patel, Centre for Women's Studies
The Mukhtaran Mai School for girls. Meerwala, southern Punjab, Pakistan.
A slideshow by Tariq Saeed
While the Mukhtaran Mai School for girls has been providing educational services for girls since 2003 in an area where such services are non-existent, its origins are dark. Opened with the money granted to Mukhtaran Mai by the Pakistani government in compensation for the rape she suffered, (see article From Rape Victim to Human Rights Defender) the school now enrolls 200 students between the ages of 3 and 13, has 5 classrooms, and even desks and furniture. Educated girls from the village teach English, Math, Science, Urdu and Islam. Once a week Mukhtaran discusses gender issues and women's rights with the girls as well.
Assam, the Forgotten Conflict
A slide show by Vivek Singh

Northeast India has witnessed protracted conflicts and displacement of thousands of people in the last few decades. In Assam, in Northeast India at the last count (August 2004) a total of 37,677 families (2,37,768 people) were staying in makeshift camps in three districts of western Assam - Kokrajhar, Bongaigaon and Dhubri. The troubles of "The Northeast" are little known. It was one of the ten least reported stories from around the world during 2005 and now in 2006. The obscure politics and the protracted low-intensity nature of the various conflicts and it's human toll needs extensive documentation. The following pictures are a part of an ongoing project aimed at documenting internally displaced persons -- those uprooted from their homes by conflict, human rights violations, natural disasters and other comparable causes, who remain within the borders of their own countries -- are subject to human rights violations, both during and after displacement. Frequently, they are discriminated against for being displaced and exposed to discrimination on racial, ethnic and gender grounds.
Brazil : Babaçu Nut Breakers in the Bico do Papagaio
A slide show by Rodolphe Hammadi, Text by Marcelo Silva

The warm waters of the Rio Araguaia join up with the cold waters of the Rio Tocantins in the center of Brazil. Seen on a map, the two rivers joining together shape the outlines of a beak, more precisely a parrot's beak, which explains its regional name, Bico de Papagaio. This very region gained international notoriety for the violence of its conflicts around its land in the 1970s and 80s as well as for being the largest scene of land plundering in the world.
While their husbands were engaged in the fight and occupying the land, the women supported their families by practicing a primitive type of activity that still exists today, that is breaking babaçu nuts. These women are known by the name of babaçu nut breakers in the Bico do Papagaio.' They lead an exhausting daily life as they are confronted by all sorts of difficulties in the quest to gather just enough money to buy one kilo of rice and one of sugar at the end of the day.

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