January 25th, 2011
Forensic doctor, since 2008 Lorente is the delegate of the Spanish government for Gender-based Violence.
In an article of yours recently published in Pikara magazine entitled “El posmachismo está aquí”( Post male-chauvinism is here) you state that “The critical reaction towards equality is not very different from those that took place before when trying to put an end to privileges of blood, religion or race”. What privileges do you think you have for being a man today in Spain?
I think I am a little different man in this sense. Since I was a child I was aware of the privileges that I had for being the son of a rural town doctor, but I did not want them because they did not depend on me. I wanted to be more myself in the sense of being one more, to be able to keep in touch with more people, to break the norms of behaviour that were supposed I would have followed for being the son of the doctor, for being a man.
Nevertheless men do have privileges, the fundamental of which is being a man in an unequal society. It is not the fact of obtaining certain things as much as that all of them are designed so that there are men who can benefit from them. This does not mean that all men do it, but we have an added value, especially as far as the concept of authority as a reference is regarded.
When I’ve talked about gender-based violence my words have had more weight and credibility than those of many women with more experience and knowledge. Not to mention that delegating certain elements of care and affection to the woman and profiting from this situation without ever questioning why something doesn’t work is an injustice that we cannot allow neither as a society nor as men. There should be no situation where a man doesn’t have to take responsibility for the simple fact of being one.
Spanish version
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January 13th, 2011
For Ciudad Juárez 2010 ended with more than 3,000 violent deaths. The rate of murders in the city, adjoining with the United States, raised considerably during the last years until being one of the highest in the world since it became the scenario of brutal confrontations between drug cartel gangs of Juárez and the close Sinaloa.
More than 28,000 people have died in Mexico during the last four years since president Felipe Calderón began an offensive against the drug cartels in December 2006 by sending to the city 10 thousand soldiers with the objective of closing the door to the 90 percent of the cocaine towards the United States with the use of military force. According to many militarization would be responsible of the increase of violence.
Among the main targets the opposing cartels members, police officers, social activists (the last one Susana Chávez, 36 years old, poet fighting for the clearing up of the well-known female homicides in that border, killed and mutilated of one hand last week) and journalists.
Besides the war among the cartels, corruption (with police officers who round off their starvation wages protecting the bosses), perverted effect of delocalization and an urban extremely degraded area with one high school for 500 thousand inhabitants, reign in the city.
This is where Sandra Rodríguez and Luz del Carmen Sosa work as reporters at El Diario de Juárez. In 2010 they were awarded with the Reporteros del Mundo prize (in memory of Julio Fuentes and Julio Anguita, correspondents of the Spanish awarding newspaper El Mundo and who were killed in Afghanistan and Irak respectively) for “having shown an extraordinary courage in every sense, signing their chronicles in spite of knowing that they put their lives at a risk” and for being “firm defenders of the freedom of expression in their country, denouncing the fight among cartels for the control of drug, the indiscriminate murders of women and the general atmosphere of violence going on in the streets of Mexico”.
Spanish version
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December 15th, 2010
Farmer, stock-breeder, wells builders, water seller, owner of a bicycle’s repair-shop, Mullah’s assistant and occasional religious police, even cook for one day for a group of Talibans. All this was Nadia Ghulam during the ten years she was a boy. The happy little girl with her long circling skirt she had been had left the day a bomb had hit her house in Kabul burning the 60 percent of her body. She was eight years old then, or at least that’s what she guesses. Nadia doesn’t remember very well those two years she spends her time half inside and half outside the hospital. “But I do remember Mujahideen bursting into the houses taking us in –and even into the hospital- and forcing us to leave, the pain of my wounds, the fact of being homeless and always starving and the voice of the bombs”.
While her mother is always with her two younger sisters, her elder brother and her father live with an aunt of theirs or they sort out their lives. When they have no house and Nadia is out of the hospital, they go to people’s houses, first families, then strangers, or sleep in shelters. “It is curious, and also a little sad”, she says between bites of melanzane (aubergines) alla parmigiana I then find out not to be only an Italian but also an Afghan typical dish (the latter use goose cheese instead of mozzarella and parmisan). “Here in Spain I read Anne Frank’s diary. She explained how it was I don’t know whose birthday, that they had made a cake and then had it…I kept thinking: unbelievable. Because during war there are no cakes”, she says. “She also explained they used to have vegetables and we never did”.
Nadia is around ten years old. Her father tells her and her mother that her teenage brother, Zelmai, was shot in the streets and is not working in Pakistan as they had been thinking for more than a year. “I then understood why my father had little by little stopped living. He was his pride”. Almost simoultaneously Soraya, her doctor’s assistant, tells her that with the arrival of the taliban women won’t be able to work. “I thought, so what am I going to do? If my father is ill, my brother isn’t here and my mother is like that, what are we going to eat? I have always been a person who relieves in her own things and who doesn’t like other people’s help. I say, if this person works and has his things, why can’t I have mine? I cannot be waiting for the others, you know?”.
Spanish version
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December 5th, 2010
Lawyer and professor of commercial law at the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello (UCAB) and at Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV), in 2004 Adrián was the first Venezuelan citizen appealing to the Constitutional Assembly for the recognition of her identity. In spite of having a gender reassignment surgery in 2002 in Thailand she still legally has a male’s name, the name she was born with. Until today she has not received any answer on her petition yet. On 18 October 2010 Adrián postulated as judge of the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice with the side objective of also “claiming transsexuals’ rights and testing the tolerance of a country with homophobic institutions”. The resolution on her postulation (she has already passed the first selection phase) will probably be public by the end of the year. She is a lesbian, a feminist, a member of the Latin American and Caribbean Region of the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA-LAC board) and the founder of the DIVERLEX association (Difference and Equality through the Law) working for the implementation of legal measures protecting sex and gender related human rights.
From a legal point of view what is the situation of transsexuals and transgender in Venezuela?
We simply don’t exist. There exist no public politics for the recognition of one’s identity, nor for medical treatment or protection against discrimination in all fields: labour, studies, etc.
You underwent sex-reassignment surgery in 2002 but your ID still says you have a male’s name. What does this mean in your daily life?
For some day-to-day activities, like the gym or the grocery store, I use a fake ID, always letting civil servants know it is and that they can denounce me if they want to, which until now no one has. Anyway, my transsexuality is not visible so also when using my real ID people generally think that there is some mistake behind the name they see. At the same time I am a well known person in my country and that makes everything easier. But for the majority of the transsexuals in Venezuela daily life is not easy at all, that is why I am carrying out this struggle, for civil responsibility and for the respect of human rights, so other people in the future can achieve their constitutional right to the ‘self-determination’ more easily.
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November 25th, 2010
The sentences in the drawing came out of a three days European and Spanish forum against gender-based violences that took place last weekend in Barcelona. I thought I would only dedicate this post to it so to have for this International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against women more datas, rational analysis and facts to contribute to an understanding of the issue. Then I thought that maybe, if I really wanted –as I do- to do my small part to keep changing things- that for once I would also express my feelings, something ‘women’ are often not taken into account for doing and ‘men’ are better avoiding.
When do I myself feel I receive violence for being considered a woman?
Anytime I am scared to walk alone at night. Anytime I am treated as a possession, a doll to dress and undress, a everlasting kid or ‘condemned’ as a witch, a slut, a hysterical if I rebel. Anytime I hear a male-chauvinist comment or someone calls me whistling in the streets like if I were a dog. Anytime I receive the message that I would do better hiding my intelligence. Anytime I see that inspite of the immense cultural, social, economic, sex and gender orientational factors (that make it impossible to reduce it all to men and women and least at a global level) the basic message of the patriarchy is one, common and mostly accepted and I don’t know how to fight against it. Anytime I hear some high school student I am working on gender issues through theatre with that it has always been like this and it will always be. Anytime my will of doing well my job and to have a child collide with a system that desperately need them both but doesn’t allow them to be possible unless I am willing to fight it all in an uneven game. Anytime I need a 25 November.
And I am undoubtedly a lucky woman.
Here goes the original post:
A three-days space “to break the silence towards violence against women thanks to active participation, sharing of experiences, reflection on the causes and mechanisms that allow, justify and perpetrate it and to express the necessity that we, as members of society, have to maintain other kinds of relationship, until the day that it won’t matter which sex or gender we belong to”, Montserrat Vilà says. “And, of course, an event to sensitize public awareness and so to prevent such violence”.
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November 16th, 2010
Haleh Esfandiari is the director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. She is an expert on women’s issues and democracy in the Middle East, as well as contemporary Iranian politics, and she has also worked as a journalist. A dual citizen of Iran and the United States, in 2007 she spent 105 days in Tehran’s Evin Prison, accused by Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence with espionage and “endangering national security through propaganda against the system.” In My Prison, My Home: One Women’s Story of Captivity in Iran (2009, Ecco Press), Esfandiari recounts her experience while setting it within the context of Iran’s recent history.
What is it that you think you’ll never forget about those months in prison?
Prison leaves its marks forever and little things keep triggering your memory. For example, if I see the moon I always remember that the third time I saw it from the bars of my cell I knew that I had been in jail for three months or every time I see a butterfly I remember that one day, when I was walking on the small terrace of the women’s ward, I saw a white butterfly and I thought to myself ‘I am stuck here, what are you doing here?’ I will never forget being blindfolded during my interrogation for days and weeks and months, I will never forget being interrogated for eight, nine hours a day, I will never forget the day I was released, I will never forget the day my mother passed away and I wasn’t there.
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November 11th, 2010
To be in the right place at the right moment brought the 25 years old photographer Annie Griffiths from the local Worthington Daily Globe in her home state, Minnesota, to travel around the world for National Geographic. Since that hailstorm hitting the region and her answering the phone and being asked by one of the most prestigious magazines in the world to take some pictures of the damages provoked, time has passed. Griffiths, always concerned with environmental issues, one year ago founded Ripple Effect Images, a photojournalists’ association documenting programmes that help women of emerging nations dealing with the effects of climate change. She is also part of the National Geographic Speakers Bureau and still works for the magazine. Griffiths is the author of “A camera, two kids and a camel” (National Geographic Society, 2008).
When you started working at National Geographic you were one of the first women and the youngest in the editorial team. Did you experience any difference in treatment because of that?
No, I think it was a benefit to be a woman because the director of photography was really trying to broaden his team. He had too many American white guys and really wanted to reach out and have a more diverse group of photographers. I really felt supported.
How old were you when you started bringing your children with you?
I was 36 when my first child was born and 39 when the second one arrived and even during my pregnancy they were always with me when I was travelling. Now they are 20 and 17 years old.
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November 2nd, 2010
“The majority of the aggressors are common men, typical citizens, often models, recognized and many times respectful and cordial at work. They are men who base their personal safety in values that represent the traditional male stereotype; power through physical strength, competitiveness, aggressiveness and a superiority and privileges status towards women. Men who are not able to reconvert themselves to a new kind of egalitarian relationships based on mutual respect. But they are not the majority at all. So, what about the rest of us? Where are we and what do we, the rest of the men, do?”, asks rethorically Guillermo Perez, sociologist and social psychologist, to the people gathered in front of the Barcelona town hall.
As it was happening in that precise moment of the evening of October the 21st in numerous Spanish cities, men and women assembled in a circle and with their hands joined before candle-lights listened in silence.
“Violence is possible because the rest of the men keep maintaining some kind of complicity and tolerance. Might it be for selfishness, for resentment or for a misunderstood male solidarity, what is given is that many of us are not doing enough to stop gender-based violence. What is given is that many of us simply don’t do anything. Until now the majority of us have only looked at this problem from the distance, feeling free of blame and thinking it was enough not to be the abusers. But it is not enough because silence makes us collaborators. Let us break silence”.
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October 23rd, 2010
Professor and member of the research group on Stochastic Processes at Barcelona University, Marta Sanz Solé was recently elected as president of the European Mathematical Society (EMS) for the 2011-2014 period. It is the first time both that a Spanish person and a woman holds the position.
What does it mean to you to be the first woman holding this position (if something?)
It means the challenge implicit in a position of responsabilty. I live the fact of being a woman with naturalness, maybe because even if inside the profession women are not the majority at all at the high levels, they are though well represented at middle and students levels, at least in Barcelona, where they are almost 50% of the total. I don’t focus it as much in what the position represents as a woman but in what it does as a math professional.
But I guess being the first one in doing something might give a special feeling, isn’t it so?
Well, yes, it is undoubtedly a differential element and although I don’t perceive gender discrimination in my environment (I have always gained the same salary as my male colleagues) where this is true, it might be an example that I guess can help to show things can get much better. Anyway I don’t like to put myself as a paradigm, probably because I am a discreet person, but yes, the fact that I am a woman can be useful as a counter example.
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October 16th, 2010
On 10 November 2009, an ‘ordinary’ day of almost one year ago, teams of volunteers belonging to universities, media research centers and civil society organizations in 108 countries around the world monitored 1,365 newspapers, radio and television newscasts and internet news websites with the objective to find out what was the world portrayed in the media from a gender perspective point of view. They analyzed 17,795 news stories and 38,253 people in those stories.
“The idea of the Global Media Monitoring Project was mooted at the conference ‘Women empowering communication’ the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC) organized in Bangkok in 1994 in collaboration with the International Women’s Tribune Centre (based in New York) and Isis-Manila conference”, remembers Sarah Macharia, Programme Manager for Media and Gender Justice at WACC. “Several months after the first Gender Media Monitoring Project (February 1995), coordinated by the Canadian NGO Media Watch, media monitoring was officially recognized as a tool for change towards gender equality in the Beijing Platform for Action. WACC took up the challenge to coordinate all subsequent GMMPs, which fall well within the organisation’s overall goal to promote communication rights, in particular the rights of marginalized groups”.
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