Int'l Women's Day: Worldwide

One year ago, I launched a campaign calling on people and governments the world over to unite to end violence against women and girls. The campaign will run through 2015, the target date for achieving the Millennium Development Goals. The link with the Goals is clear. We must stop the habitual and socially ingrained violence that mars lives, destroys health, perpetuates poverty and prevents us from achieving women's equality and empowerment.

Violence against women is also linked to the spread of HIV/AIDS. In some countries, as many as one in three women will be beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime. Women and girls are also systematically and deliberately subject to rape and sexual violence in war....

To mark International Women’s Day, women across Afghanistan will come together for a Prayer for Peace with Justice. The gatherings will take place at 10:00 a.m., 8 March throughout the country in Kandahar, Bamyan, Kabul, Herat, Mazar, Daikundi and Jalalabad. At the gatherings, the women will wear scarves whose blue colour matches that of the burka, the garment widely regarded as a symbol of women’s oppression under the Taliban regime.

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UNIFEM is supporting the Prayer for Peace with Justice on 8 March that is expected to be the first gathering of this size and scope in Afghanistan. The idea for the prayer gathering was born last year, when a small group of women in Kandahar, one of the most volatile areas of Afghanistan, spread the word to friends and colleagues, expecting only a few women to show up. In the end, more than 1,500 women gathered in Kandahar on that day.

"Afghan women are tired of being subject to egregious acts of violence, they are tired of watching their family and friends being killed, and they refuse to accept the pervasive political, cultural and economic violence that woman face on a daily basis, both at home and in their pursuit to participate in public life," says Rangina Hamidi, a women's rights and peace activist in Kandahar.

This year the Prayer for Peace with Justice will be supported by radio messages, broadcast throughout the day, from prominent women and men in the region and from the International Community, such as Nobel Peace Laureate Shirin Ebadi and UNIFEM Executive Director Inés Alberdi.

In order to press for our demands that have been ignored and brushed aside by mainstream women’s organizations, lawmakers and our elected representatives, we, the members of All India Forgotten Women (AIFW) and Mothers and Sisters Initiative (MASI), are organizing a Dharna on the occasion of International Women’s Day, 8 March 2009, in front of the office of the National Commission of Women between 10:00 am and 1:30 pm.

In India, we not only have a Ministry dedicated to women’s welfare but also a National Commission for Women and several regional and local organizations representing the cause of women.

The Government of India is constantly doling out pro-women policies in the name of providing equal rights, imparting education, improving health, and encouraging women’s participation in all walks of life. It has passed several laws in the name of addressing problems such as dowry harassment, dowry death, marital cruelty, domestic violence, rape, indecent representation of women, to name a few.

...In spite of all the above, we continue to hear that the status of women in the country is only worsening every day. One is bound to wonder why granting more and more privileges and protections to women would lead to worsening of the status of women in the society? Here is why:

The Ministry of Women and Child Development, the National Commission for Women and other powerful women’s organizations comprise of radical feminists who are anti-men and anti-family....

Women in China may be celebrating early with pillow fights, songs and ceremonies, but human rights advocates hope the Mar. 8 event will draw more sober attention to three imprisoned women activists.

According to the Feminist Peace Network:

“Mao Hengfeng petitioned for redress of coercive and abusive implementation of China’s Family Planning Policy. Shuang Shuying petitioned for official intervention in cases of forced eviction. Ye Jinghuan petitioned for a government investigation into an investment scam that cost Chinese workers tens of millions of dollars from their life savings.

The response to their exercise of the right to petition, protected under Chinese law: all three are in detention and subject to ongoing abusive treatment, including solitary confinement, physical punishment, and denial of medical treatment.

“In the final lead up to the Olympics, instead of cracking down on and rounding up petitioners and other activists, the Chinese authorities need to constructively address the serious problems petitioners are raising,” said Human Rights in China Executive Director Sharon Hom.

Each month in 2008, as part of its Olympics Campaign, HRIC features a person imprisoned for “exercising his/her human rights.” This month’s petition focus is on Mao Hengfeng.

In the run-up to the March 8, Mr Medvedev met with women working in professions traditionally dominated by men. Among the women present at the meeting were, in particular, flight instructor I class and sports plane test pilot Svetlana Kapanina, specialist in emergency diving and rescue operations Irina Vorozhbit, President of the Women’s Boxing Development Foundation Natalia Karpovich, welding engineer and technology specialist Alexandra Chekulayeva, and engineer and candidate cosmonaut Yelena Serova.

  In the Soviet Union feminism was elevated to the status of official state policy and ultimately was destroyed as an ideology and a social movement. The dominant concept was one of a general, global equality; as a result, a separate movement for the rights of women simply could not exist. The feminist reference points of Soviet social policy took the form of a set of rights for women: employment in the workforce on an equal basis with men; political rights; equality before the law, and so forth. The gaining of formal rights, however, resulted in the restricting of particular, specific rights of women, which in practice proved very difficult to realise.

Women are forced to dash continually between work and family, while in order to achieve and maintain their professional status, they are compelled to work twice or three times as hard as their male colleagues. Meanwhile, sociological research shows that working women who are married with children constantly feel guilty toward their families. In the prevailing social consciousness, for a woman to neglect her family and parental responsibilities, even for the sake of work and a career, is almost criminal. For a man it is almost a mark of honour, or at least is considered natural. This is the case even though women are now the main or sole breadwinners in 40 per cent of Russian families.

...The problem of the left in Russia lies in an organic failure to accept feminism in any form.