EVENT: ‘Violence against disabled women’ presentation - 7pm, Thursday, 21st February; The Albany, 44 Ashley Street, Glasgow G3 6DS
This presentation is particularly useful to services working with disabled people and people interested in issues surrounding discrimination, violence and abuse. Wise Women pro-actively address women’s fears and experiences of violence and crime by providing free workshops to women living in local communities in Glasgow. In 2010 Wise Women completed a 2 year project working with women who have physical / sensory impairments and long term health conditions. The aim of this work was to provide disabled women with full and equal access to Personal Safety Courses addressing the additional and different types of violence, abuse and crime Disabled Women specifically encounter. A full report was published in 2010 recording women’s experiences, the barriers they face when seeking support, the impact on physical, emotional and social health and accompanies a 40 minute power point presentation of these findings.
EVENT: 12th-23rd February 2013; Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL
‘I Dream of Congo: Narratives from The Great Lakes’ will be a unique exhibition combining words and images from renowned international creatives alongside a groundbreaking exhibition of photos taken by women in eastern Congo.
The exhibition and accompanying events will celebrate the hope and optimism that pervades in the region despite years of war. It will also pose hard questions around the international community’s inaction in the face of the conflict, the continuing illicit trade in minerals from Congo and the failure to stem the tide of sexual violence.
The exhibition will also feature events organised by the Frontline Club, One Billion Rising and Save the Congo.
We have contributions to the exhibition from the writers William Boyd, Tim Butcher and Adam Hochschild and photographers Lynsey Addario, Marcus Bleasdale, Jonathan Torgovnik and Ron Haviv. Each of them have responded to the phrase ‘I Dream of Congo’.
These will feature alongside photos and words from women in eastern Congo who have also responded to the phrase ‘I Dream of Congo’. This part of the project has been developed with Women for Women International.
TW: RAPE AND DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
Honestly, I always feel like white people can’t shock me anymore by the depths to which they sink in order rationalize their racism but they still always manage. Always. Without fail. Endlessly.
ROMAN POLANSKI HAS AN OSCAR
MARK WAHLBERG HAS TWO OSCAR NOMINATIONS
SEAN PENN HAS AN OSCAR
JOSH BROLIN HAS AN OSCAR NOMINATION
So no, unless you’re a black man, the academy and the rest of the entire fucking world doesn’t give a fuck if you beat or rape a woman or girl. And this is really fucking rich coming from a guy who raped Anna Faris on screen for a joke. But he’s white so it’s ok. And hilarious.
Trigger warning: Bigoted language, discussions of rape, assault, and violence.
[NOTE: This article is about — and hence contains copious examples of — violent, highly triggering, and bigoted language. When the slur isn’t something connected to my own identity, I have tried to bleep it with asterisks.]
#MenCallMeThings has taken off, in these past few days. I didn’t expect it — if I had, I would have put more work into it than a simple Rebecca Solnit rip-off and a few top-of-my-head quotes — but then, I shouldn’t have been surprised. And, since it’s taken off, there’s been lots of coverage: requests for interviews (which I’ve turned down, as I’m on too many of my own deadlines at the moment, and also don’t want to be Face-Of-The-Movementing again any time soon or, you know, ever), op-ed pieces, meditations on Men Call Me Things As Phenomenon. And, of course, plenty of those op-eds have been about precisely what we set out to protest: The idea that the Internet is “equally mean to everyone,” that putting up with name-calling was something “everyone” had to do in the same way and at the same intensity and volume, the idea that “Internet cruelty” (whatever that means) isn’t gendered.
This and other intriguing, outrage-makey facts about women in the military, in an infographic from Good.
In 2011, it’s still considered perfectly acceptable to attack women based on their supposed sluttiness.
Rachel Kramer Bussel at AlterNet tackles slut-shaming and its continued presence in modern society.
Since the vision of the suffering immigrant or Third World woman and the liberated Western one has so strong a hold on the American imagination, I attempt to demonstrate that the presumption of Western women’s liberation depends upon the notion that immigrant and Third World communities are sites of aberrant violence. … I elucidate this fact by contrasting narratives of here versus there, of us versus them. Part of the reason many believe the cultures of the Third World or immigrant communities are so much more sexist than Western ones is that incidents of sexual violence in the West are frequently thought to reflect the behavior of a few deviants rather than as part of our culture. In contrast, incidents of violence in the Third World or immigrant communities are thought to characterize the cultures of entire nations.
Culture is invoked to explain forms of violence against Third World or immigrant women while culture is not similarly invoked to explain forms of violence that affect mainstream Western women.
…
The philosopher Uma Narayen has calculated that death by domestic violence in the United States is numerically as significant a social problem as dowry murders in India. But only one is used as a signifier of cultural backwardness: “They burn their women there.” As opposed to: “We shoot our women here.” Yet domestic violence deaths are just as much a part of American culture as dowry death is a part of Indian culture.
"Have you ever walked past an accident or seen someone fall over and not stopped to help? Heard an alarm going off and not contacted the police? Or have you stopped? Asked what was going on? Most of us at some point will have been a ‘passive bystander’ and continued to walk on. Similarly, many of us know gender-based violence is wrong, but we might think that it’s not our problem or it’s not safe for us to challenge or intervene.
According to the World Bank, violence against women kills more women and girls worldwide than road accidents, cancer, malaria and war combined. A study commissioned by LGBT Youth found that 81% of respondents experienced verbal abuse and nearly a third had been sexually assaulted. Research consistently tells us that many people globally experience gender-based violence; that is they experience verbal or physical abuse on a daily basis purely because of their real or perceived gender or sexual identity.
Workers from LGBT Youth Domestic Abuse Project, Rape Crisis Scotland, Scottish Women’s Aid, White Ribbon Scotland and Zero Tolerance came together to develop the Get SAVI bystander programme for colleges and universities as we believe gender based violence is preventable.
Bystander programmes see the target audience as potential allies in preventing gender-based violence and support ‘bystanders’ to develop appropriate and safe intervention strategies.
Pioneering approaches in the US have shown that university-based bystander programmes have been extremely effective in reducing the incidence of rape and dating abuse, encouraging a sense of community, raising people’s confidence and reducing the sense of fear on campus. These approaches have been extremely effective, but US campus culture is very different to that which exists in Scotland, so we felt it was important to develop a programme that worked in the Scottish and UK context.
This approach not only works as a ‘secondary’ prevention technique, that is, to minimise harm, but in the long term, we believe this will work as a primary prevention technique. The students that will take part of this approach will go on to be teachers, hairdressers, doctors, nurses, lawyers, mechanics. They will be parents, aunties or uncles.
We’re also hoping that this approach will be supported institutionally. We know that one of the barriers to speaking up is that people often don’t live, work or study in a safe and positive environment, and it’s important that institutions take responsibility for cultures of sexism and homophobia.We’ve developed the programme so that students will be able to adapt and use the resources to fit their student communities best. We’re running the pilot this weekend (21-23 January) and hope to launch in March, after which point the resources will be available to download and used in colleges and universities by students or staff.
We believe that taking this approach to support people to think about safe and appropriate ways to challenge GBV is an important one to take. Together, we can stop it.
