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February 8th, 2011

Gender inequality, a HIV social driver

Worldwide fewer people are becoming infected from HIV and fewer are dying from AIDS. Deaths among children younger than 15 years of age are also declining. What remains is discrimination and lack of universal access to HIV prevention, treatment, care and support. Two thirds of the 15 million people who would need treatment do not receive it. 

According to the UNAIDS (UN programme on HIV/AIDS) 2010 report 22.5 out of around 33.3 million people globally living with HIV live in sub-Saharan Africa, where young women between 15 and 24 years old are 8 times more likely than men to be HIV positive. 80% of the women living with HIV worldwide live in the region.

Gender inequality remains one of the main HIV social drivers. According to the UNAIDS report the HIV epidemics and sex and reproductive health are intertwined. HIV related causes contribute to at least 20% of maternal deaths and countries with high HIV rates also have high teenage pregnancy and unsafe abortion rates while very few countries involve men in reproductive health programmes. Violence and HIV rates are also often associated.

Eastern Europe and Central Asia are the only regions where the number of people living with HIV has almost tripled since 2000. The proportion of women living with HIV is also growing. Female sex workers, people who inject drugs and men who have sex with men, whom remain often underserved in HIV prevention, treatment, care and support, account for most of the new infections both in these regions and worldwide.

Nafis Sadik is Special Adviser to the UN Secretary General and UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Asia and the Pacific. As former head of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) she became the first woman, in the history of the United Nations, to lead one of its major voluntarily funded programmes. She is an expert on international maternal and child health, reproductive and sexual health, including family planning, on population and development and gender and development. She was born in Pakistan and lives in the United States.

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CategoryGender issues | Comment7 Comments »

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February 2nd, 2011

The invisible barriers

At the end of 2010 the European Union officially ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, becoming the first intergovernmental group to sign on to an international human rights treaty. According to the Convention, which entered into force on January 22, 2011 persons with disabilities include those who have long-term physical, mental, intellectual or sensory impairments “which in interaction with various barriers may hinder their full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others”. In the European Union they represent 15% of the residents from the 27 countries (more than 80 million people). One in six has a disability that ranges from mild to severe while over one third of people aged over 75 have disabilities that restrict them to some extent and the number is set to rise as the EU population grows progressively older. Eighty per cent of the 650 million persons with disabilities worldwide live in developing countries.

The convention has been signed by 147 states worldwide including all 27 EU Member States and ratified by 97 states (16 of them in the EU).  Ratifying countries should take action in access to education, employment, transport, infrastructures and buildings open to the public, granting the right to vote, improving political participation and ensuring full legal capacity of all people with disabilities. A Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities will monitor all the measures taken to give effect to the obligations under the Convention and  follow up the progress made in that regard.

Equality between men and women stands out as one of the conventions’ general principles while one of its articles is dedicated to ‘women with disabilities’. The same text recognizes in fact that “women and girls with disabilities are subject to multiple discrimination and in this regard States Members shall take measures to ensure the full and equal enjoyment by them of all human rights and fundamental freedoms”.

The first thing that comes to my mind while reading the Convention text is the theatre play of Dones no Estàndards (non-standard women) I have recently seen in Barcelona. “La discapacitat, discrimina o sedueix?” (Does disability discriminates or does it seduce?), a fierce criticism towards the lack of respect of the health, sexual and reproductive rights of women with disabilities and a claim to the unspoken gender-violence they receive. The moment to know more about it has come.

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CategoryGender issues | CommentNo Comments »

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January 25th, 2011

“Gender-based violence is systematically being questioned throughout a fallacy”

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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CategoryGender issues, Interviews | Comment11 Comments »

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November 25th, 2010

November 25 reflections

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 2nd, 2010

pre-November 25 reflections

“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 16th, 2010

The gender of the news

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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CategoryGender issues | Comment10 Comments »

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July 4th, 2010

Meet Raewyn Connell

Raewyn Connell (1944), born Robert William Connell, is the most influential Australian sociologist. Her research fields go from large-scale class dynamics, poverty and education, sociology of knowledge, sexuality and AIDS prevention to social change and gender relations. Her book “Masculinities” (1995) was one of the founders of this research field. She is currently university professor at the University of Sydney.

In the ILGA Trans Secretariat’s web page it’s written that it’s a paradox that the most important intellectual of masculinity is now a woman. First of all do you feel you are a woman?

No, I don’t feel I’m a woman.  I know it.  I don’t think that’s very different from the kind of knowledge other women have (and men too, about being men).  For transsexual women, of course, the knowledge has definite complexities; yet there are gender complexities at some level in almost everyone’s life.

Do you feel you are a man?

For large parts of my life I tried to live as a man, but always with the underlying contradiction. That is the situation many transsexual women find themselves in. There is no simple resolution of that contradiction, and no outcome without serious costs – including costs to other people in our lives.  It’s not a glamorous situation and should not be romanticised.

Do you think it is necessary to belong either to one gender or the other?

No, it is not necessary for everyone to be subjectively either a man or a woman.  There are some people who try consistently to live without gender commitments.  For instance, they live in de-gendered households, have emotional or sexual relations not determined by gender, present themselves with a mixture of gender symbolism, and demand that the state not classify them in gender terms.  This is a brave project and these people have my admiration.  But their project is incredibly difficult, because gender is a massive social reality, embedded in institutions as well as personal life.   For the great majority of people, having a definite place in the gender order is a routine condition of life, a ground of everyday action.

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CategoryInterviews | Comment36 Comments »

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