International Women's Day - March 8 2012

On the 17 of February, Women marched on Bree street taxi rank following the harassment 2 young women wearing mini-skirts were victims of at Noord street taxi rank last December. Organised by the ANC Women's League, the march gathered the support of COSATU, Women and Men Against Child Abuse and the Commission for Gender Equality. According to the Sowetan, a group of men followed the 2 women pulling their clothes and groping them. This is not the first incident of this nature in Johannesburg as similar marches were organized in 2008 by the Remmoho Women’s Forum and more recently last  September  a "slut walk" were organized Johannesburg to bring awareness to sexual harassment and violence against women perpetrated un public spaces.

Last December Women'sNet undertook different activities during the 16 days of activism against gender based violence notably by encouraging members of the public to donate their old cellphone to organisations working with victims of gender based violence. This initiative subscribes to global campaign called Take Back the Tech! supported by the Association for Progressive Communication's Women's Networking Support Program (APC WNSP).

Jac sm Kee of the APC WNSP underlines the successes of this year's campaign:

Take Back the Tech! started in November 2006 with a small but important idea: the increasing availability and reliance on new information technologies was transforming them into a political space, urgently in need of a feminist lens for engagement, understanding and envisioning. Women's contributions to the historical development of internetⁱ technologies were getting lost and forgotten, the reality of violence faced by women and girls all over the world was already seeping into online spaces and was not being given the attention needed.

The gendered culture of science and technology which acts to create hierarchies and alienation in technology use needed to be confronted and dismantled. At the heart of it, we had to take control of technology to define and shape a transformative space and platform, instead of one that becomes another form of structural inequality and discrimination.

 In 2011, Women'sNet conducted 2 sets of workshops on e-advocacy techniques and digital actvism in the framework of the OWRAP Program and with the Building Women's Collective Power project. More specifically, those workshop have focused on the use of social media platforms and a set of online tools that can help feminist actvists in their advocacy campaigns. Recently, the Arab Spring, and more specifically the Egyptian and Tunisian popular uprisings of 2011, were fuelled by online activists, organising through blogs, SMS, and social networking platforms like Twitter and Facebook. How can the feminist movement in South Africa can take advantage of new online and mobile tehnologies to improve their advocacy practices? The following publications start a reflexion on activism and technology in our hyper connected world.

Mary C Joyce of the Meta-Activism project summarizes in a recent blog post the key functions of technology for activist purposes: to shpae public opinion, plan an action, protect activists, share a call to action and take action digitally.

  In Egypt volunteer activist and technical experts have united their efforts to create a tool to enable women to report sexual harassmentvia SMS. Using a combination of software: FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi, the Harass Map project provides an advocacy, response and prevention tool highlighting the pervasiveness of the problem in the country.

While this project is being deployed Grady Johnson debates: "Can we map gendered-based violence without spreading it?" on GenderIT:

Feminist campaigners and activists have raised the question of the possible conflicts between the "I don't forward violence" action and the push to map gender-based violence. Does it contradict each other? How can we report on violence without spreading it, and forcing victims to relive their experience?

A valid question. And a tough one.

The short answer is we can't. Worse, by showing the sheer extent of gender-based violence worldwide, both its volume and its ferocity, we run the risk of "normalizing" this behaviour. This is something we absolutely do not want.

But the long answer is that there are many ways to bear witness. As Take Back the Tech!ⁱ coordinator, Jac Sm Kee puts it:

"Looking is a political act. The act of looking, seeing, changes what is being seen. When you see something, you are witnessing an act. It becomes embedded in you as part of history in both a personal, social and political sense.

 Africa has been the world’s fastest growing region over the last decade in terms of mobile penetration. While fixed line penetration has stagnated at 4% in the continent, mobile has grown at an astonishing rate to 45% with North Africa leading at 73%. However broadband is lagging behind considerably when compared to other continents.

The reason: lack of an adequate infrastructure and high costs of service provisioning. Currently the average broadband penetration in Africa is only 1.5% with South Africa leading at approximately about 3%. Owing to coverage restrictions and lack of bandwidth, large parts of the region continue to witness connectivity delivered via satellites or mobile technology. Lack of bandwidth availability and limited connectivity with rest of the world has arrested the development of Africa and has constrained the continent from achieving its full potential.

 The submission, made to the Portfolio Committee on Correctional Services, is in lead up to a hearing on the prevalence of torture in Department of Correctional Services (DCS) facilities. As a form of torture, prison rape is a clear violation of offenders human rights. There are also critical links between sexual abuse and gender inequality and HIV in DCS facilities. This joint submission examines the gendered aspects of sexual violence in correctional centres, how rape shapes offenders understandings of gender and sexuality, and how it fuels a cycle of violence both in and out of prisons. We also underscore the connection between HIV and sexual violence in prisons, and highlight the specific needs of male survivors of sexual assault, who are largely invisible in our society.

There are promising developments which will lay the foundation for the work needed to protect the rights of inmates against sexual abuse. There is a draft policy framework to address the sexual abuse of inmates that is currently pending, and the Correctional Matters Amendment Act, passed in May 2011, contains a provision requiring the assessment of new detainees for vulnerability to sexual abuse. The new National Strategic Plan for HIV, STIs and TB 2012-2016 (NSP) also calls on DCS to enforce laws and policies to prevent sexual abuse of inmates as a strategy to stem the spread of HIV. In addition to adopting these pending documents and enforcing existing laws, Sonke and TAC made recommendations for DCS to do the following:

• Engage with the development of operational plans for the NSP (which calls for prevention of prison rape),
• Integrate training on sexual violence and HIV into DCS training college curricula, and
• Work with other governmental departments and civil society to ensure the provision of appropriate services to offenders

Download: The TAC & Sonke Parliamentary Submission

Ending gender-based violence will mean changing cultural concepts about masculinity. This includes recognition of the importance of active engagement of men and women at all levels, whether they are policy makers, parents, spouses or young boys and girls.

It is significant that the organizers of the Africa UNiTE campaign have chosen to climb Mount Kilimanjaro as a way of drawing attention to the terrible and pervasive scourge of violence against women and girls in our continent.

Yes, Africa must shout it from the mountain-top, and the highest mountain-top in Africa, for all to hear because the resounding silence down below has been deafening.

It is instructive and quite ironic that commitments made by African countries, through ratification of various international and regional instruments that specify obligations for the elimination of violence against women, speaks volumes about their paper commitment to address violence against women; but this commitment is not adequately reflected in action.

Signatures by African Heads of States and Ministers to the “Say NO Petition in 2009” signifying their commitment to end violence against women and girls at the national level, is another paper commitment, and the symbolic “turning on” of the light for their country on the map of Africa, at the launch of Africa UNiTE in January 2010, as a sign of their commitment to participate in the United Nations Secretary-general’s UNiTE to End Violence against Women campaign.

In order to raise awareness on ending violence against women and to accelerate efforts and implementation of commitments in Africa, a climb to Mount Kilimanjaro has been organized for 5-9 March 2012, under the theme “Climb Up, Speak Out”, as a major advocacy event of the Africa UNiTE Campaign.

The Mount Kilimanjaro Climb to End Violence Against Women and Girls is coordinated by the Africa UNiTE Secretariat, working with participating agencies and in partnership with the Kilimanjaro Initiative and with support from the United Nations Federal Credit Union (UNFCU), SAY NO-UNiTE and the UN System.

It is only when women start to organise in large numbers that we become a political force, and begin to move towards the possibility of a truly democratic society in which every human being can be brave, responsible, thinking, and diligent in the struggle to live at once freely and unselfishly.

8 March is the International Day of Women first proposed by Clara Zetkin (1857-1933) at the Second International Conference of Socialist Women in Copenhagen in 1911. Zetkin, who had lived some years in Paris and was active in women’s movements there, was building on the 1889 International Congress for Feminine Works and Institutions held in Paris under the leadership of Ana de Walska. De Walska was part of the circle of young Russian and Polish intellectuals in Paris around Gerard Encausse, a spiritual writer who wrote under the pen name of Papus. For this turn-of-the-century spiritual milieu influenced by Indian and Chinese thought, ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ were related to the Chinese terms of Yin and Yang. Men and women alike have these psychological characteristics. “Feminine” characteristics or values include intuitive, nurturing, caring, sensitive, relational traits, while “masculine” characteristics are rational, dominant, assertive, analytical and hierarchical.