News
Every year, ILGA produces maps on Gay and Lesbian rights in the world as well as its State Sponsored Homophobia report. Most material is available in English, Spanish, Portuguese and French, this year the world map has been also produced in Chinese, Hindi and German. You can download them on this page.
Founded in 1978, ILGA, the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association is now a association of over 900 groups in over 115 countries campaigning for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex (LGBTI) rights.
To raise awareness on the extent of State Sponsored Homophobia in the world, we’ve created a few items (in English, French, Portuguese and Spanish) you may want to use around you:
- ILGA State-Sponsored Homophobia report: A world survey of laws prohibiting same sex activity between consenting adults. The research, by Lucas Paoli Itaborahy, Brazil, was updated in May 2012.
In Spanish (to be uploaded soon)
In Portuguese (to be uploaded soon)
In French (to be uploaded soon)
The proposed law results from consultations between the state and traditional leadership structures. It ignores the voices of millions of rural women disenfranchised by those structures.
The Traditional Courts Bill is meant to replace the Black Administration Act of 1927 with a law that is constitutional.
Instead, if passed, it will in effect strip between 17 million and 21 million people living in rural South Africa of many of the rights we enjoy in the rest of the country.
About 59% of these people are women, who, along with other members of their communities, will cease to be citizens and exist only as subjects.
As is stands, the bill creates a separate legal system for rural folk, geographically recreating the old Bantustans with no irony on the eve of the centenary of the 1913 Land Act.
Kristin Palitza interviews GABRIELLE GAUTHEY, executive vice president of global telecommunications provider Alcatel Lucent
CAPE TOWN, South Africa , May 8, 2012 (IPS) - On a continent of over one billion people, where half the population have mobile phones, the use of mobile communication and internet technologies is crucial to boost development in Africa.This is according to Gabrielle Gauthey, executive vice president of global telecommunications provider Alcatel Lucent. She was one of the presenters at the United Nations Millennium Development Goal (MDG) Review Summit held in Cape Town, South Africa, from May 3 to 4.
"We did not anticipate how rapid mobile broadband would be appropriated in Africa. There will be a computer in every pocket sooner than we think," Gauthey told IPS. She added that Kenya has made rapid progress, having already rolled out 3rd generation mobile communications
URGENT CALL TO ACTION - SAVE THE SAARTJIE BAARTMAN WOMEN'S CENTRE FROM CLOSING
How can YOU help - WATCH the video of the Saartjie Baartman Women's Centre appeal.
TWEET @HelenZille - use the hash tag #saartjiebaartmancentre in your tweet - let's make this trend!
Why tweet to Helen Zille? Because she is leader of the Democratic Alliance party which has political control of the Western Cape and is the Western Cape Premier. She can DO something.
EMAIL Helen Zille - leader [at] da [dot] org [dot] za
Visit the Saartjie Baartman Women's Centre website HERE to read more
EMAIL the Director of the Centre Synnøv Skorge with letters of support or donations! synnov [at] womenscentre [dot] co [dot] za
Telephone +27 0 (21) 633 5278 Fax: +27 0 (21) 637 6487
The Saartjie Baartman Centre for Women and Children in Manenberg, Cape Town has a local and international reputation as one of the finest one-stop centres to provide free shelter, legal and counselling services, job-training programmes and other resources to abused women and their children. As one of the shelter residents says, “The Centre is for abused women. But it shouldn’t be called “for abused women”! This is the only place where there is never any abuse against women – it’s against abused women!” She was laughing as she explained this, despite the fact that she lost a pregnancy three days ago because her husband kicked her in the stomach. The Centre has for the past 13 years been a vital part of Cape Town’s response to the issue of violence against women, in their homes and elsewhere. In 2011 alone, over 4000 women and children drew upon their services for safety, housing, legal and medical support, job-training and overall support.
I spent a full day yesterday focusing on the intersection of feminism, activism, and Information Communication Technologies (ICTs). And I kept running into the same women (the feminist Twitterati?). And these women were mostly already known to me from my own work on the issue (alongside Miz Raftree). This worries me a little bit. Could it be that there are so few feminist / female Techies in the world that we all know each other?! This is an important space. As Valentina says ‘Internet is a strategic feminist issue’. Especially if u subscribe to the opinion that the web is just a new space for old kinds of bad behavior; then this is absolutely a space that requires our intervention. And this should be broadened out even more – technology is a feminist issue. We need to be wary of falling into complacency in thinking ICTs are empowering without recognizing how they have been co-opted. In other words, we need to differentiate between the practical uses of ICTs which are democratizing and the political uses of ICTs which are mapped onto existing unequal social relations.
At the CITIGen session Srilatha Batliwala posed a hypothesis – that ICTs have given rise to a new social paradigm – The Network Society. And this is a paradigm that requires a feminist intervention seeking social justice as it is reproducing power imbalances, and we are taking part in this reproduction. Anita Gurumurthy posed that women have been innovating within the Network Society, and these are sites of subversion, but not of struggle. Feminist activism has concerned itself with appropriating and co-opting of ICTs, but we have not treated ICTs as a determinant of the political economy. So we are trapped in the user discourse, while this discourse is being shaped by the ‘powers that be’. We are meeting, as ‘activists’, in a space that is a vector of capitalism. And this is actually de-politicizing civil society. We now see the rise of new actors such as the Gates Foundation who are hugely active in the areas of technological health innovations and human rights, and yet they are representing capitalist profit driven interests.
We are far from easing the drudgery of women farm workers. But there is growing interest in designing technologies to improve their lives, report M Sreelata and Naomi Antony.
The seemingly simple act of removing the husks from maize cobs by hand is tougher than it sounds. A female worker uses her fingertips on average 522 times, her fingernails 144 times and her palms 55 times for every single kilogram of grain she produces, according to a survey carried out last year by India's Ministry of Agriculture.
Women — whether young or old, healthy or sick — can be found across the developing world working long hours without rest. They pick tea, process tobacco, shell cotton pods, spread fertilisers on fields and transplant rice.
In the developed world, this work is usually done by machines. But in poor countries, much of the labour is done by hand — and a woman's hand at that.
"It's shameful," says Anil Gupta, executive vice-chair of India's National Innovation Foundation (NIF).
"India can send up ten satellites in a single launch in different orbits. The science and technology capacity that we have is enormous. And yet when it comes to problems that women face, there's a huge silence, there is a huge indifference."
The invisible workforce
The drudgery of women's work in agriculture, its impact on their education, food security, health and productivity, and the potential role of technology in reducing its effects, were the focus of an international conference in New Delhi in March 2012.
The meeting was organised by the Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR), the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, and the Asia-Pacific Association of Agricultural Research Institutions.
More than 700 participants from 50 countries attended the meeting, which took place in the context of two reports on the role of women in agriculture — one in 2010 from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, and the other from the World Bank, released in 2011.
The UN report estimates that women contribute 47 per cent of global agricultural labour. But this international average is misleading. In many countries it is far higher; in Lesotho, Mozambique and Sierra Leone, for example, women carry more than 60 per cent of the agricultural workload. In Egypt women make up less than half of the agricultural workforce but account for 85 per cent of unpaid farm labour.
The ILO launches its annual report “World of Work Report 2012: Better Jobs for a Better Economy”. The new study examines the performance of
different countries since the start of the global crisis through the prism of the quantity and quality of jobs.
Women and youth are disproportionately affected by unemployment and job precariousness.....
Non-income dimensions of inequality are on the rise. Additionally, there are non-income dimensions of inequality that are not reflected in the data coefficients. These dimensions of global inequality include inequalities in health, access to education, employment, gender, etc., which, apart from exacerbating poverty, also lead to greater marginalization within society.
The share of informal employment remains high, standing at more than 40 per cent in two-thirds of emerging and developing countries for which data are available. This Report calls for countries to put in place the necessary conditions for a dramatic shift in the current policy approach. It highlights the need for an approach that recognizes the importance of placing jobs at the top of the policy agenda and the need for coherence among macroeconomic, employment and social policies. This requires a significant change in domestic and global governance, which is a complex task. Though the task is demanding, even progressive steps in this direction will be rewarded with better job prospects and a more efficient economy.
The call to decriminalise prostitution in South Africa by the ANC Women’s League (ANCWL) could lead to a more effective clampdown on human traffickers supplying the local sex trade, advocacy groups argue.
This follows the ANCWL’s mid-April confirmation that they will present an argument for the decriminalisation of prostitution at the ANC’s national conference in Mangaung this December.
Some opposed to the decriminalisation of prostitution have argued that such a move will lead to an increase in human trafficking into the sex trade. But according to several South African women’s rights organisations, this is not the case.
“Decriminalisation of sex work in South Africa will not result in an increase in sex trafficking or child sex work, based on evidence from New Zealand [which decriminalised prostitution in 2003],” says Stacey-Leigh Manoek of the Women’s Legal Centre. Manoek points to research which shows that decriminalisation in New Zealand did not lead to any increase in sex trafficking or under-age sex work.
In a trend that is becoming all too familiar, distribution of an alleged gang rape video has again made the news this week. Like the Jules High School case, the cell phone video went viral and was finally reported to the police by an upset parent who found the video on a teenager’s cell phone. The video triggered outrage online among netizens, with many users expressing their anger using the hashtag #RapeVideo on Twitter. Sadly, at the same time, a number of social media users made requests to see the video and jokes about it.
Women’sNet supports the criticism of organisations like Media Monitoring Africa, who have criticized the initial coverage of the story for revealing details about the alleged victim, and the Daily Sun’s publication of a picture of the girl involved. Survivors have a right to anonymity, and according to our law those who circulate and use images from this video are liable for prosecution.
The Film and Publication Board reminded the general public last Wednesday that possessing or distributing such videos is a crime, and is the equivalent of the possession and distribution of child pornography. This incident not only amounts to the creation and distribution of child pornography but has far reaching implications for those filmed not to mention the role it plays in perpetuating sexual violence against women and children. Coverage of this topic by the media must therefore be sensitive to these implications, and to the rights of the survivor.
Recently, the African National Congress (ANC) released a discussion document on communications, entitled ‘Building an inclusive society through information and communication technology (ICT)’, in preparation for its elective conference in Mangaung.
Many media commentators will probably focus on whether the ANC has varied its position on the statutory Media Appeals Tribunal (MAT). However, the document as a whole merits serious consideration, as it is likely to have an important impact on the nature of South Africa’s communications environment.
What is particularly noteworthy about the document is that, for the first time, ANC policymaking on communications focuses on the state of the ICT sector, and not just on the legacy media.
Any forward looking policy must also include an assessment of past transformation efforts. The document provides a very useful assessment of the gains and losses since the transition to democracy, and is, at times, highly critical of the lack of transformation. Many of the sector’s key institutions are in a mess, and South Africa is underperforming in terms of key ICT indicators. The authors blame these problems on fragmented and uncoordinated policy and institutional arrangements.
In this edition of Global Voices podcasts we have company in the voice of co-host Yazan Badran, a Global Voices author from Syria based in Japan. The topic this month is global social media campaigns: the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Coming at a time when WHRDs have received little attention in the human rights arena, the Global Report on the Situation of WHRDs plays a crucial part in advancing the recognition of WHRDs.
It is intended that the Global Report is primarily an advocacy and capacity building tool, both important measures for WHRDs’ protection and the prevention of further abuses. The Global Report is a contribution to the ongoing documentation of the situation of WHRDs that will enable informed advocacy from the local to regional and international level.
To download the report in pdf click here.
Hard copies are available by email request to whrd [at] apwld [dot] org.
Girls & Football SA focuses on the development of girls and women through sport, media and education. In this short video, the role of football in creating a safe space for girls and women in South Africa is explored, with a specific focus on the prevalence of corrective rape in the country.
Drawing on findings from APC's MDG3i: Take Back the Tech!i project with women's rightsi organisations in twelve countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, this paper explores the links between the interneti, cell phones and violence against womenwww.takebackthetech.net/whatstheissue " class="glossary-indicator">www.takebackthetech.net/whatstheissue " href="http://www.genderit.org/glossary/12/letterv#term986">i and illustrates that technology related violence impacts women as seriously as other forms of violence. Women'sNet, a member of the APC, participated in the research that lead to this paper.
The complex relationship between violence against women (VAW) and information communication technologies (ICTs) is a critical area of engagement for women's rights activists. ICTs can be used as a tool to stop VAW, while on the other hand VAW can be facilitated through the use of ICTS. However few women's rights activists are working actively on this issue. Consequently, a political and legal framing of the issue is not established in most countries.
The purpose of this paper is to assist women’s rights groups working to end VAW to understand some of the implications of the intersection between these violations and ICTs. It also aims to encourage these groups and other key actors to invest in policy- making processes and advocacy work in this area.
Download the full paper here.
Read also the executive summary of the paper.
Last February, women in South Africa marched to reclaim taxi ranks in Johannesburg following an incident where 2 young women were harassed for wearing mini-skirts. Bhatupe Mhango reflects on the situation of women's rights in Malawi after a very similar incident occured in her country.
Women’s rights activists in Malawi say despite laws that protect them on paper, there are still societal barriers that treat women as second class citizens.
Bhatupe Mhango, a Malawi human rights worker now based in Liberia, said during one recent incident, women wearing skirts and shorts were molested and harassed by vendors. She said this highlights the obstacles facing the country’s females on a daily basis.
“They [activists] are really asking for society to change their attitudes, their mindsets on how women are perceived in society as a whole,” said Mhango.