Women's Rights: Small Guides to Big Issues - Hardcover

Terry, Geraldine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0745323499 ISBN 13: 9780745323497

Publisher: Pluto Press, 2007

Synopsis

What are the global challenges of the twenty-first century? All over the world, women and girls are being denied their social, economic, political and civil rights, Geraldine Terry, seeks to expose this structural discrimination across a range of areas where it occurs.

Denial of women's equality occurs in education, access to public services, in reaping benefits from trade and in domestic violence. Increasingly too, the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa has become linked to the denial of rights to women. By looking at positive examples of women acting to transform inequalities and oppression by asserting their rights, Terry argues that sponsoring women's rights is not only a moral issue but also an efficient way to pursue poverty reduction.

The Small Guides to Big Issues series de-bunks myths and raises questions about the global economic and political system and how it works. They are designed for campaigners and activists, students and researchers, and anyone interested in looking behind the headlines. Produced in partnership with Oxfam, each book provides an informative and thought-provoking guide to current trends and debates, and what needs to happen in order to end poverty and injustice.

About this title

About the Author

Geraldine Terry is based at the University of East Anglia, Norwich conducting post-graduate research, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, on gendered perceptions of, and responses to, climate risk in Uganda. She is the author of Women's Rights (Pluto, 2007).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Women's Rights

By Geraldine Terry

Pluto Press

Copyright © 2007 Geraldine Terry
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7453-2349-7

Contents

Series preface, vi, 
Acknowledgements, viii, 
List of boxes, ix, 
List of abbreviations, xii, 
1. Interconnections, 1, 
2. Women's human rights: a closer look, 24, 
3. The threat of cultural relativism, 41, 
4. 'Not a fax from heaven', 51, 
5. The podium and the polling booth, 64, 
6. Women's economic rights in a globalising world, 81, 
7. 'Sowing a seed': the right to education, 101, 
8. The violence against women pandemic, 121, 
9. Women's rights abuses help to spread HIV/AIDS, 137, 
10. The future is already happening, 152, 
Resources, 163, 
Notes, 176, 
Bibliography, 190, 
Index, 192, 

CHAPTER 1

Interconnections

This book is about the interlocked issues of women's human rights, world poverty and international development. There are different ways of looking at poverty but, however it is defined, it is generally accepted that the majority of poor people across the world are women. Discrimination against women drastically limits their life-chances, and is a brake on development in the global South. Changing this status quo should be at the heart of the development process, and this means helping women to exercise their rights.

There is a connection between the facts and figures in Box 1.1 and the story of Seema and Sukarmani in Box 1.2; women's human rights. Every one of the statistics in Box 1.1 represents denials and violations of women's human rights on a massive scale. This is because women have rights in all these areas, written down in the form of international human rights agreements and, in many countries, domestic legislation. When I first came across the story of these two young women, it struck me that their defiance illustrates what development should be about: poor, marginalised women feeling strong enough, despite multiple disadvantages, to use their rights as a weapon to defeat social injustice together.

Women's rights: a key to development

Discrimination against women, whether direct or indirect, is one of the most destructive forces in the world today. It causes vast poverty and suffering and is a major brake on development. In this short book, I will try to show how the scandal of mass poverty and many of today's most pressing issues, such as the HIV/AIDS pandemic, are bound up with the denial and abuse of women's human rights. The focus will be on the global South rather than the world's high and middle-income countries; by global South I mean the world's low-income countries. This does not mean to imply that women in affluent parts of the world, which I refer to as the global North, are free from discrimination, but that is not what this book is about. Neither do I want to lump together all women in the global South and imply they are all poor. All women encounter discrimination on the grounds of their sex, but there are a lot of other factors, such as their class, race, ethnic group, age, caste, sexual orientation and so on, that combine to shape their particular experience, and they may be privileged in other ways. So the focus is specifically on poor women in the global South.

In this chapter, I will outline how thinking on poverty and development has changed over the last few decades. The most progressive development-aid organisations now support poor women's empowerment, rather than just addressing the material dimensions of their poverty. At the same time, organisations like Oxfam now focus on poor people's rights when they work on eliminating poverty. Chapter 2 briefly charts the development of women's human rights, in the shape of international treaties and agreements. It also gives some examples of how feminist activists in the global South have been able to use this international legislation, and the ideas that inspire it, as tools in their work for justice. Chapters 3 and 4 look at two explicit challenges to the foundational principle that human rights are universal and apply to all women alike: so-called 'cultural relativism', and the rise of fundamentalisms. Chapters 5-9 cover different areas of women's human rights and how their rights are being denied or abused. Chapter 5 is about women's right to take part in politics, Chapter 6 looks at women's economic rights in relation to today's trade system, Chapter 7 is about girls' and women's right to a meaningful and empowering education, Chapter 8 looks at the pandemic of violence against women, and Chapter 9 outlines how this is helping HIV/AIDS to proliferate, with particular reference to sub-Saharan Africa. In Chapter 10, I talk to specialists about two phenomena that are likely to have a huge impact on women's human rights in the coming decades: the development of new technologies that, among other things, are redefining how human beings are created, and climate change, which is already a clear and present danger for many poor women in the global South. Apart from Chapter 10, all the chapters end with one or more examples of interesting, often cutting-edge, development work or activism that in some way supports women exercising their rights in relation to the chapter theme.

Women's poverty: a marginal issue?

What do official pronouncements on world poverty have to say about discrimination against women in the global South? Let's look at the British government. Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor Gordon Brown have both publicly declared their commitment to ending world poverty, and have led some very good initiatives. Gordon Brown launched a crusade to end world poverty in 2005, with a powerful speech in which he called for increased development aid, fairer trade policies and debt relief; it signalled a welcome attack on the hypocrisy of many Northern governments and institutions. But he made only one glancing reference to the overwhelming discrimination against which women struggle in the global South, as in many other parts of the world. There was also a complete absence of any such reference in the communiqué on 'Africa, Climate Change, Energy and Sustainable Development' that issued from the G8 summit at Gleneagles later that year, while another important official document, the first report of Prime Minister Tony Blair's Commission for Africa, paid the perfunctory lip service that is all too common in official statements about world poverty (Box 1.3).

At the global level, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are the latest development policy initiative from the United Nations (UN) (see Box 1.4). They have been cautiously welcomed by many anti-poverty campaigners, who see them as concrete commitments that can easily be monitored. Others, like Caribbean activist Peggy Antrobus, are more sceptical; she says MDGs should really stand for 'Most Distracting Gimmick'. So, what do the goals have to say about discrimination against women? Two of them, MDGs 3 and 5, specifically concern women.

MDG3 is to 'promote gender equality and empower women', which sounds very promising. But because it is so wide and ambitious, the UN decided to aim for a narrower 'target' within MDG3: 'Eliminating gender disparity in primary and secondary education preferably by 2005 and in all levels of education no later than 2015'. The choice of this particular target has been questioned by many activists. While the huge educational gender gap in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South Asia is indeed a critical issue, there is a lot more to women's poverty and subordination than not going to school. Cynics claimed that, by concentrating on education, the donor community was trying to keep more challenging aspects of women's rights, such as the right to choose how many children to have and the right to be free from violence, off the MDG3 agenda. Since I began writing this book, it has become clear that 94 countries have missed the MDG3 target in any case. Ominously, this failure was not even mentioned in the document issued at the end of the 2005 World Summit, when world leaders reviewed progress against the MDGs.

The other MDG that refers specifically to women is MDG5: 'Improve maternal health'. Here, the target is to reduce the maternal mortality rate - in other words, the proportion of women who die each year from complications of pregnancy and childbirth - by three-quarters between 1990 and 2015. According to Oxfam, 'deaths during pregnancy and childbirth represent a widespread and systematic violation of basic rights.' This is because the vast majority of these deaths, which total half a million a year, could be avoided if enough money were put into health services in Africa and Asia, where most of them occur. In fact, it would cost the industrialised nations only an extra $4 billion in annual aid to achieve MDG5, the equivalent of two days' military spending by the G7 group of rich nations. Yet the UN reports continuing high maternal mortality in these two regions. In particular, there is no sign of improvement in the region with the worst maternal mortality rates of all, sub-Saharan Africa.

The massive denial of basic human rights, including the right to life, to millions of the world's women does not seem to figure highly on governments' agendas. Neither, sadly, will you see much about it in the press releases and statements of mainstream anti-poverty organisations such as the Make Poverty History campaign, although that movement has done a great job mobilising people behind calls for policy change on trade, aid and debt relief. Women's human rights, and the suffering caused by their denial, are just not a priority according to either of these perspectives on development.

They ought to be, because development, in any real sense, will only come when poor women in the global South can exercise their rights and start to bring about positive change for themselves, their families, their communities and their societies. Not paying attention to this basic truth is self-defeating for anyone who wants to end global poverty. Before we go any further, though, I want to reflect on what the terms 'development' and 'poverty' actually mean, so as to make their connections with women's human rights clearer. This involves tracing how the development aid sector's thinking about poverty has changed over the last two or three decades.

From 'a dollar a day' to 'human development'

Probably the best-known definition of poverty is the World Bank's. Being an institution concerned with economics, the Bank takes a correspondingly economistic approach to poverty, and defines it as living on less than a dollar a day. In keeping with this, it sees development primarily in terms of economic growth. The dollar a day rule is memorable and handy, but it is very narrow and comes nowhere near capturing what poverty really means for people, both on a day-to-day basis and in terms of their overall life chances. Conversations with poor men and women show that, for them, poverty means ill health and premature death, lack of access to education and other basic services, social exclusion, having no say in major decisions that affect them, and vulnerability to harassment, injury and violence. There are also debilitating and distressing psycho-social dimensions, such as a chronic sense of low self-esteem, and social humiliation. Recognising all this, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has pioneered a broader approach to development than the purely economic one that dominated development thinking during the 1980s; at its centre is the idea of 'human development' (Box 1.5).

The human development approach is based on the work of Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. It is multi-dimensional, concentrates on ends (what people want from their lives) rather than means (such as money), and recognises that there is no automatic link between economic growth and human well-being. It helps us to analyse how poor women in the global South are particularly disadvantaged in relation even to poor men in their own societies. They face the same restrictions and adversities, caused by unjust international trade policies, global warming, poor natural resources, ethnic discrimination, armed conflict and so on. But on top of all that, they also have to contend with systematic discrimination against them as women. That discrimination means they experience all these phenomena in different ways from men, and it limits their options even further.

For instance, millions of poor women throughout Africa and South Asia are prevented by traditional custom and law from owning land, however hard they work on it to grow food for their families. This deprives them of choices such as how to use the land, whether to branch out into new business ventures, apply for a loan using the land as collateral and so on. It makes it harder for them to climb out of the poverty trap than it is for men in their communities, for whom such options are available. Poor women's 'achievements', to use the UNDP's term, are also restricted, for instance by the denial of a decent education, or because they are subject to routine domestic violence that saps their health, confidence, self-esteem and energy. One of the most important factors of all is the unequal sexual division of labour (Box 1.6). Many cultures put the entire burden of bringing up children, looking after sick relatives, fetching water, cooking and cleaning on women and girls, leaving them very little time for what the UNDP calls 'satisfying leisure hours'; in other words, they are 'time-poor' as well as poor in material terms. Seeing development in terms of well-being, choices and what people can do with their lives, rather than a purely economic process, helps to show why women should be at the heart of development aid initiatives.

The unequal division of labour starts at childhood. In many countries in the global South, it is common to see groups of young boys playing in the street, while girls are nowhere to be seen; they are indoors, helping their mothers to cook, clean and look after younger siblings. In June 2005, I spoke to groups of teenage boys and girls in schools in a rural area of The Gambia in West Africa. They told me that the girls' days start two hours earlier than the boys'. They have to get up earlier than everyone else so they can fetch water and start cooking breakfast for the rest of the family. When they get to school things are not much different, because most of the school housekeeping tasks, such as cleaning the classrooms, fall to girls, while the boys 'sit under a tree and watch'. After school, the boys play football while the girls wash dishes and sweep floors. Exhausted, girls go to bed two hours earlier than the boys, so they can get up early and start all over again the next day.

Focusing on women's empowerment

Although the human development approach is very helpful in analysing how poor women are more disadvantaged than poor men in the global South, it stops short of explaining why this is so. Essentially it is a 'technical' way of analysing poverty and well-being, not a political one. This is where power and empow erment come in. Inequalities in power help to create and perpetuate poverty. This is true for inequalities between men and women, as well as between rich and poor people, or different ethnic groups. Because, while poor men in the global South lack power in many ways, in general they can still wield it over women and children in their households and communities. I am not arguing here that all poor men are domestic tyrants, or that all poor women are 'victims' of men, only that many societies in the global South are characterised by severe power imbalances between the sexes. This means that increased wealth does not necessarily bring more choices and achievements for women; just think about oil-rich Saudi Arabia, where even women from wealthy families are not allowed to drive. Figures compiled by the NGO Social Watch bear this point out; they show that there is no automatic relationship between a country's wealth and gender equity, although it is true that most of the countries where women's status is good are also among the richest nations. Where power is overwhelmingly in men's hands rather than women's, greater affluence can actually cause harm to women and girls. This seems to be happening in India, where commentators see links between increasing consumerism, dowry violence and the widespread practice of aborting female foetuses (see Box 1.7). There is an important lesson here: women in the global South need more than economic growth and increased wealth.

If poor women's deprivation is a matter of grossly unequal power relations, then it follows that the process of 'empowerment' should be integral to development efforts. As with many other terms in development aid, not everyone means the same thing when they use the word, but it is generally accepted that it has something to do with a person's ability to take some control over her or his own life. There are different types of power. As well as the nakedly visible power exercised by large

companies, governments and some individuals, there are subtler forms, such as widely-held cultural assumptions about women's inferiority compared to men. For instance, a World Bank report on Zambia notes how some traditional sayings there, such as 'Is a woman a human being?', express the commonly-held idea that women are worth less than men.

Many women unconsciously accept such ideas; this is not surprising, as they have been drummed into them since childhood. For instance, when CARE-Malawi staff spoke to village women about their rights, they noticed that none of the women mentioned the domestic violence that is rife in their communities. The researchers commented: 'women may have internalised feeling of blame and/or not feel free to speak out.' Helping such women to realise they have 'a right to have rights', such as the right not to be physically abused by their partners, is an important step towards them feeling empowered. There are also collective, as well as individual, dimensions to empowerment, as feminist academic Naila Kabeer describes (see Box 1.8).

Many small NGOs in the global South are supporting poor women's empowerment through their projects. In Latin America, there is a strong tradition of working alongside poor men and women in consciousness-raising activities, based on the seminal work of Paulo Freire in the 1960s and 1970s. In India, there is a different, but very vibrant, tradition of grassroots activism, which the story in Box 1.2 illustrates. Many of Oxfam's partner organisations combine practical activities for women, like skills-training, micro-credit and literacy, with raising awareness about rights and discussing important issues such as domestic violence. The idea is that women involved in these activities will become agents for positive change, rather than passive recipients of top-down 'development'; see Box 1.9, on the work of the Women's Skill Creation Centre in Nepal.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Women's Rights by Geraldine Terry. Copyright © 2007 Geraldine Terry. Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0745323499
• ISBN 13: 9780745323497
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 216