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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2370510363137369222014-09-02T11:51:47.483+01:00BidishaInternational human rights journalist, arts critic, BBC broadcaster, Booker Prize Foundation trustee. Do outreach work with asylum seekers and refugees, in prisons and in detention centres. Fourth book, Beyond the Wall: Writing a Path Through Palestine, out now. Fifth book, Asylum and Exile: Hidden Voices of London, out December 15th 2014. firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-237051036313736922.post-85191242455798102632014-08-18T00:30:00.000+01:002014-08-21T00:06:09.574+01:00Asylum and Exile: Hidden Voices of London, out December 15th 2014 ...and some fractions of fiction

Asylum and Exile, my 5th book,
out December 15th 2014

I am delighted to trail ahead to the 15th December release of my fifth book, Asylum and Exile: Hidden Voices of London (Seagull Books/Chicago University Press). The book's based on my outreach work with asylum seekers, refugees and undocumented people and features their testimonies alongside my own account. More details can be found by clicking here and a full press release will be available on this site on 15th December. The Amazon page for the book is here and pre-orders are open. Asylum and Exile: Hidden Voices of London follows the publication, in 2012, of my previous book Beyond the Wall: Writing a Path Through Palestine.

In order to spread the word about the reality of life for asylum seekers and refugees I will be touring this book heavily, internationally, throughout 2015 and 2016. For press, speaking and events enquiries I am always contactable via email.

In the meantime, I've released two fractions - new fragmented fiction. They are called Moment of Curfew and Those Castles.

email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-237051036313736922.post-15621595301403968022014-08-18T00:14:00.002+01:002014-08-26T06:57:40.166+01:00Those Castles
One of my fractions: new fragmented fiction.

Those castles were only beautiful from a distance. To a warden tailing above or a courier steering their slicer bike on the ochre track, the blood-veined stone gleamed treacle black, so lustrous it looked wet, and the outlying fields were as combed gold surrounding jet. But close by, the façade was touched all over with cobweb crackles. The fields were dry hay, bled by the sun, so fragile that when I walked through them, the strands disintegrated like a dissolving mirage, like a shredded veil.

There was nothing behind the façade, only the rubble of that place, the fallen marble worked and engraved, gems long thieved from their settings, murals bleached by the centuries, crushed by time, mosaic and thistle intertwined. Miriadh was so large that it encompassed what had once been a dozen countries, five dozen languages, five hundred races, five thousand gods and five infinities of stories mapping and meshing, a lacework of echo-tales. Along the old countries' borders were forts and temples, castles and keeps once chained together by defensive walls; the amphitheatres and senates, pits and altars, towers and catacombs of great cities once risen, now gone. And so we lived, as all Mirians did, the past crumbling into the present, the transformed and the ordinary woven together like thorns and vines, buds and leaves.

It was the longest day of the summer and we were playing in the debris, recreating the epics that showed all night on State TV and on the garish posters pasted across our village walls. We pretended to be legends and heroes, declaiming barefoot in high language, a stick for a sword, a maize sack for a cloak, ripped open hard at the seam. In the scalding heat we were noontime adventurers, we nobodies, children from the street

email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-237051036313736922.post-29632104379737785942014-08-18T00:14:00.001+01:002014-08-18T00:14:38.645+01:00Moment of Curfew
One of my fractions: new fragmented fiction.

At eleven the night city would tense and hush, would flinch silently for a moment. Then the low groan of the curfew siren looped wide, lassoing the skyline. The siren could be heard, like a drunk's moaning complaint, from end to far end of the city. The power flagged briefly and the high line train screeched and slowed, pinching tight on its electric rail, then picked up again, nosing between skyscrapers. The buildings' mirrored facets reflected the siren sound, breaking and scattering hard pieces of it, chopped edits. All the TV, video game, phone, cinema and ad screens cut out and the word CURFEW emerged in stocky black from the jittering peppercorn pixels. There was a stiffly braced clang, an industrial shudder. Then corrugated metal shutters descended over each house window and shopfront and ground to the bottom, where they locked with a blunt tchickk. Office buildings were armoured in rusty scales, the lower metres wearing bright graffiti hems, a technicolour lacework of names and expletives.

At the same time, the globe lights in the good neighbourhoods and the stuttering bulbs in the bad, the strings of red chilli-shaped fairy lights in the markets and the fluorescent strips in the nail bars, betting shops and chicken shops snapped on. The city didn't empty out so much as atomise, split into concentrated pieces: the curfewed streets, haunted by watchmen, crossed warily by odd parties of permit holders; the taxis, trains and buses, the light in them the colour of weak whisky, each commuter gripping their bag tightly; the metal-sealed buildings and the hot, noisy privacy within.

firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-237051036313736922.post-51162683045271662212014-08-16T00:00:00.000+01:002014-08-15T21:47:39.370+01:00Inside: the power of books in prisons

This is in response to justice secretary Chris Grayling's ban on books and other items being sent to prisoners. This article has also been picked up, here, by the human rights and civil liberties organisation Liberty. For more details on Grayling's measures click here and also here and to sign a petition protesting them please click here. The writer Leah Thorn, who has a decade's experience doing close outreach work in prisons, has granted me an incredibly informative, moving and trenchant interview about prison reform, inequality, incarceration and prison culture here.

I do outreach work in prisons and also in detention centres and I have seen first hand how powerful and important books are to prisoners. Book are vital, not only in providing enrichment for inmates but as a way of connecting with others to talk through, challenge, inspire and provoke debate in a rewarding and constructive way. In all the institutions I have visited, book groups, reading groups and writing groups exert a strong pull on prisoners, who show themselves again and again to be dedicated, committed, passionate and insightful in their work and in their dealings with me and with each other.

A literary culture creates the space for civilised, meaningful relating, for social development, for questioning and self-questioning, learning, self-improvement: all the things a truly constructive prison system should represent. I have seen virtually silent prisoners linger around the edges of a group and then, through a few comments and some close reading, gain confidence, develop their skills and showcase their talent. The books are not just a source of education but also of entertainment of the most enriching and deepening kind. They are, in fact, an essential tool in tackling the poor levels of literacy and the accompanying frustration, low self-expectation, daily obstacles, narrowed opportunities and the intractable economic and social deprivation and desperately limited horizons which contribute to an environment in which petty but repetitively (almost compulsively) committed crimes are almost an inevitability. I am not talking about 'being soft' on rapists, child abusers, batterers, thug murderers, predators and woman-killers but about lifting up and liberating that great miserable body of the prison population: neighbourhood burglars, car thieves, petty hustlers, smalltime crooks, scrappers and scufflers, drug pushers who are addicts, teenage or early twenties wannabe gangsters, holders or passers-off of stolen goods. For these types, prison can be an opportunity either to become grossly influenced by malign individuals even further down the road to moral and economic corruption - or to gain some skills, judgement, backbone (as opposed to bravado) and promise, which can be taken out into the world upon release. Reading skills can contribute to ensuring that, in time, released prisoners might build a stronger and better life for themselves than they had before their sentence, not because of an increase in something nebulous and romantic like dignity but because literacy skills are vital to worldly progress.

As with all teaching, through the collective experience of reading and talking about reading, the prisoners I have worked with have taught me much more than I could teach them or they could teach themselves without the structure and focus of a book to anchor them. Certainly, we all learned a thousand times more in a couple of hours spent together daily than we would have during whole afternoons spent on the landings [where the cells are] watching daytime TV.

Furthermore I have been told directly by women prisoners with initially low literacy skills how fundamental reading has been to them. One woman told me, "My mum didn't know how to read or write, I didn't know how to read or write, that was just the way it was. So I taught myself in prison."

There is a further point, and it is gendered. I am extremely alarmed by the cruelty and punitive malice of Grayling's proposals for women prisoners with children and the suggestion that children cannot send their mothers parcels.

The overwhelming majority of women prisoners are 'inside' for non-violent crimes. The process of incarceration is mentally traumatising in itself and additionally has grave real-world consequences. In virtually all the cases that I have seen, women prisoners had been their children's primary carers and guardians, with secondary care provided by grandmothers and other female relatives. With the central source of stability and care removed and in many cases moved far from families' home towns, if female relatives cannot take on the childcare responsibilities then families are broken up, young children are put in care and a new cycle of deprivation, vulnerability, exploitation, damaging instability, lack of opportunity and circumstantial predisposition to offending begins.

We can see from all this that it is often the supposed cure, not the crime, which creates deep and long term trauma and is a key factor in the pressing issue of women prisoners' mental health and self harm. Incarceration for crimes which are more often than not the result of economic deprivation, abuse, inequality and lack of support inflicts mental wounds, drags an entire family even further down socially and creates the ground for yet more crimes to be committed - out of survival, out of necessity and out of pain.

The sense of isolation in a prison is extreme and is made perversely worse by the sheer numbers of other prisoners, guards and civilian staff. The entire non-prison world is referred to by prisoners as Outside, and the prison described numbly as Inside. Incarcerating people in a way that is mentally violent as a means of punishing non-violent crimes does not work and destroys everything, inside and out, mental and physical. There is little stimulation in a prison except for basic skills learning, a few hours of classes per day, helping out as an orderly, working in various prison areas such as the 'servery' [kitchen and canteen] or packing boxes of goods to go between prisons, sitting in front of daytime TV, idle chat and destructive scheming which is usually the result of boredom and depression. In such a context books are a humane necessity, vital for the intellect, for processing and sublimating the emotions, for socialisation, for education and for development - not a form of empty entertainment to be handed out like sweets to those who behave well. It is a fallacy that prison life is cushy, although the routine and the utter predictability and slow demarcation and regimentation of time may be comforting for those whose outside lives feel insecure, emotionally raw or unsafe. Treats, in the form of everything from letters to books to clothes and sachets of perfume or a nice top, are rare and treasured.

Receiving gifts and messages from their children and having something to talk to them about on visits - something like a story from a book - is many women prisoners' lifeline, their only source of sustained warmth and hope from the outside world. A chat about a book, gifted to a prisoner by her child, may be the only thing which makes a prison visit less frightening for that child. The prisoners pay this token of love and kindness back at Christmas time when they record stories on CDs for their children to listen to.

I will end with that fragile image of reciprocated love, communication and storytelling. I hope that Grayling changes his mind and seeks more effective, more humane, less petty and less malicious ways of reforming the prison system.

For more on my prison work see this report by the Prisoners' Education Trust, this from English PEN, this also from English PEN and Rape, Refusal, Destitution, Denial on my outreach work with asylum seekers and refugees, many of whom had experienced detention and imprisonment.
firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-237051036313736922.post-8651028515699101232014-05-17T11:30:00.000+01:002014-05-20T12:29:48.593+01:00Leah Thorn, the poet and activist facing and transforming the lives of women in prison

Further reading: Inside: the power of books in prison, written by me for human rights organisation Liberty and based on my own prison work.

I wanted to highlight the work of a heroine of mine, the poet, activist, performer and prison worker Leah Thorn, who has granted me an exclusive and in-depth interview, below. Given the UK government's latest measures to restrict parcels, including those containing books, going into prisons, we desperately need the action and advocacy of individuals like her to convey and address the reality of life in prison, especially for women. Some of her work with women in prison has been captured by the film-maker Suzanne Cohen in the highly acclaimed documentary Beautiful Sentences, which can be viewed here:

Leah also gave a TEDxWomen talk on incarcerated women and the transformational power of poetry, which can be viewed here:

She is currently making a film of her poem Shhh! which, she tells me, "is about sexism and the continued need for a feminist revolution" and will be submitted to poetry and film festivals upon completion. The film is being made by Second Shot, a production company at the men's prison HMP Doncaster, where Leah spent time filming and talking with the men about issues the poem raises. As I write this, on 4th April 2014, Leah is giving a performance and talk about women in prison and the power of poetry as part of the Wise Words Festival in Canterbury. Later in the year she will be teaching a six week summer course at Canterbury Christchurch University, entitled What Does The F-Word Mean To You?

Leah Thorn photographed by Suzanne Cohen
Image taken from Leah Thorn's site

Following the government's extremely unpopular new measures regarding the prison system - please click here to read the official response to protests against these measures - I asked Leah more about her experience of working in prisons:

 How long have you been working with women in prison and how did you get into it?

I've been working in prisons with the Anne Frank Trust for about eight years. My commitment to women's liberation means I focus a lot, but not exclusively, on the incarceration of women

Do you see the issue of women in prisons as a feminist one?

Completely. Women make up a small, and consequently ignored, minority of the overall prison population: 4.8% in England and Wales. The starkness of women's imprisonment keeps me rooted and alive to the rawness of sexism, male domination and misogyny and more aware of the lived experiences of working-class Black and white women.

I am uneasy about quoting statistics that are freely used to designate incarcerated women as 'the most damaged women in society'. Diminishing a woman to a number denies her resilience and ability to survive and serves to distance her from women outside of the Criminal Justice System. However, the figures clearly show how incarcerated women have been targeted and controlled:

53% of incarcerated women have reported emotional, physical or sexual abuse as a child, with a similar proportion of women having been victims of domestic violence

31% of women prisoners have spent time in care as children

40% of women in prison left school before they were 16

46% say they have attempted suicide at some time in their life

30% of women entering prison require drug detoxification.

Certain populations of women are more vulnerable than others to being criminalised. For example, Black women are four times more likely than white women to be incarcerated and frequently receive longer sentences for similar crimes.

One in five women in prison in England and Wales are Foreign Nationals, technically those who do not have a UK passport. A significant number have been coerced or trafficked into offending. I have worked with women whose only experience of England has been a Customs hall in an airport, a court and a prison. I have witnessed the bewilderment, loneliness and fear of women unable to speak a word of English, who have no-one on their prison wing who can speak their mother tongue. It can take days to find another woman who can interpret and explain what is happening.

Two thirds of women in prison are mothers of young children and many of the women I work with spend their sentence desperately concerned about their children's care and whether they will lose parental rights. In any one year in England and Wales, 17,000 children are separated from their mothers by incarceration. Only 5% will stay in their own home. The others will be cared for by family members or put into foster care.

Despite public outcry, pregnant women are still put into prison and four babies a week are born to women in prison. It is hard to see a woman locked in her cell hours from giving birth, alone and exhausted. Sometimes a prison officer is designated as a woman's birth partner but it often happens that the woman gives birth when that officer is not on shift. Women do not give birth inside jail except in medical emergencies and women are no longer restrained with handcuffs when giving birth, although some women still fear this. However, the women is usually on an open maternity ward with constant bed watch, which means having two officers either side of them for their whole stay. At present there are seven specialised mother and baby units in England - there may well be fewer by end of the year - and newborn babies can stay with their mothers for between 9 and 18 months.

Older women are the fastest growing age group to be imprisoned. Last year in England and Wales, 368 women aged 50 or over (including 55 pensioners) were jailed, an increase of 139% in that age group. Many are primary carers for disabled or elderly dependants.

Dishonesty is the biggest reason for women's incarceration. More than two thirds serve time for non-violent offences such as shoplifting, welfare benefit fraud, employer fraud and receiving stolen goods. Research on mothers in custody found that over a third said they offended because of 'a need to support their children', with single mothers being more likely to identify a lack of money than those who were married.

There is also a strong likelihood that women's offending is prompted by their relationships with men. Coercion by men can form a route into criminal activity for many women.

Women entering prison are likely to be serving short sentences. In 2012, more than 4,500 women entered prison to serve sentences of 6 months or less. More than half were given sentences of 3 months or less, whilst more than 1 in 10 were sentenced to 4 weeks or less.

Of course there are some women in prison who have committed violent crimes against adults and children and I never dismiss what their early experiences and resultant undealt-with distress have led them to do. Many have committed violence under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol and many perceive their offence as retaliation on a society that has not protected or valued them. However, their treatment in the Criminal Justice System is unlikely to help them face what they have done and move on.

What kind of work do you do with women in prisons?

I am a white older woman, who goes into women's prisons as a spoken-word poet and as a women's liberation activist. For two years I was writer-in-residence in a women's prison and I now run poetry-for-empowerment projects across the prison estate, most recently with women who self-harm and with older women. I also speak out as a poet/performer on issues of women's liberation and incarceration.

In my workshops I support women to express their thoughts and experiences through discussion, individual and group writing activities and listening and performance exercises. I encourage the women to share their writing, not for literary critique but for the sense of connection they get from the recognition and appreciation of others.

During my prison residency, we devised poetry performances to mark events such as International Women's Day, Black History Month and Holocaust Memorial Day. Poetry performances were also taken into workplaces like The Cleaning Academy or the crafts workshop or to the Education Department. It was inspiring to see women flourish into powerful performers, whilst their audiences changed from being reluctant and suspicious to being engaged and moved. It was affirming for the poets to experience their work being so well-received and applauded.

Poetry anthologies were compiled and edited to validate the women's creativity and thinking, including the book 'release' which was written by, and for, women in prison who self harm. 'release' contains poetry, women's stories and a feminist exploration of self harm and the book has been circulated by the Ministry of Justice to all women's prisons. One prison returned the books saying they did not have a problem with self-harm and several prisons expressed the view that the women's stories were 'too graphic and potentially upsetting'. This is ironic, given how graphic and upsetting self-harm is for the women who do harm themselves, as well as for the women around them and for the staff who have to deal with the consequences.

Do you feel that this work is effective and why?

The workshop space provides one of the very few safe places in the prison for women to express themselves truthfully and with emotion. The nature of creativity enables women to remember who they are as individuals, not as 'offenders'. And, unsurprisingly, having warm human connection helps raise self-esteem and self-confidence and build trust and openness between the women.

What are some of the personal stories of women you've encountered that stay with you and provide either hope & inspiration or a cautionary tale?

Here are a few things that are firmly in my memory:

A few women who have committed violent crimes will be held in isolation, locked up for 23 hours a day, with the remaining hour spent alone in a high walled courtyard. The isolation can obviously exacerbate feelings, and acts, of rage. So one woman I worked with had been in these conditions for six years, because the prison (with the best will in the world) could find no alternatives. She could only be unlocked if six officers were present and this treatment increased her rage, which in turn 'necessitated' further restrictions of freedom. It was clearly a self-perpetuating cycle. I am not saying that poetry was the answer, but I do know that for the two years we worked together, her levels of self-harm reduced. And as she began to open up about her childhood and teenage years, she began think afresh about herself.

I spent quite a lot of time on Healthcare, connecting with women through locked doors and that is a very strong memory for me. I witnessed a woman being put onto the Healthcare Wing, as she was shaking and crying hard and it was deemed that her mental health was 'deteriorating'. Here was a woman who was responding in a rational way to incarceration. Yet instead of being offered more human connection, she was restrained and forcibly taken by officers to a bare cell and locked in by herself for 23 hours a day. She could be heard throughout the prison screaming 'Is there anybody there?' and 'Can you help me?'. This of course brought up painful feelings for other women and for staff, as well as being devastating for the woman herself. I do not know how I would cope were that to happen to me.

As a safeguard against accusations of sexual abuse, I was taught in training never to get physically close to a woman and never to touch her. There are times, though, when I decide to put my hand on an arm or even hold a woman and because the outcomes have been positive, [ie she has not harmed herself or she has not need heavy medication], I have never been stopped by officers. In fact, there are some officers who will give physical comfort when it is clearly needed.

Lastly, in order to have access to all areas of the prison without an escort, I carried keys as a writer-in-residence. This meant wearing a heavy black belt at all times, with a pouch attached that contained the keys on a thick metal chain. I was worried initially about the difference this would make to the relationships I could make with the women. I did not want to be identified with the authoritarian aspects of the prison and locking up and unlocking women from their cells or Wings was a hard experience for me, especially when they thanked me for locking them up. However, I soon realised that listening and encouraging and respecting them overruled the strangeness of one of us having the power to incarcerate the other. The women were so ready, and eager, to give and receive warmth.

Why did you choose this issue on which to base your TED talk?

I chose to focus my talk on incarcerated women, feminism and the transformational power of poetry, mostly because issues of sexism and male domination are so starkly apparent within the setting of women's prisons. And also because TED talks can advocate individualistic solutions, rather than putting forward a wider political perspective on issues. I wanted to make sure there was some good old Second Wave non-liberal analysis on the day!

I explained how the Criminal Justice System plays a key role in framing and sustaining the oppression of women. It is important to acknowledge this form of social control and view it as an issue for women's liberation for several reasons:

The Criminal Justice System provides a lens through which to view the many ways women are punished for the impact on them of sexism. Working class women, and particularly Black working class women, are disproportionately represented in the system. The Criminal Justice System is wider than imprisonment, but I focus particularly on the incarceration of women as issues of sexism, male domination, racism and classism are so starkly apparent within the setting of women's prisons.

The social conditions that fuel women's routes into prison, such as poverty, isolation, harassment, substance dependency and abuse (along with the emotions and mental health challenges that arise from these conditions) are often intensified by the experience of incarceration. On leaving prison, most women go back to the same conditions as when they entered but with the additional distress of their experience of imprisonment.

Ultimately, the threat of containment and restraint gives ALL women the message 'This is what happens to you if you speak out or act out'.

Community solutions are more effective than incarceration in helping women turn their lives around and in diverting women, and particularly young women, away from criminal activity before they start offending.

You have now worked in the US and the UK women's prison systems. What are the main differences between them?

I write from the perspective of living in England, the 'lock up capital' of Europe, where 45 out of every 100,000 people are in prison. Thanks to a Winston Churchill Travel Fellowship, I have had the opportunity to see first-hand the female System of Corrections in the United States, the carceral nation of the world with 724 per 100,000 of the general population imprisoned, although these statistics may need revising later in 2014.

Sexism is sexism and there is a universality to women's narratives. Once a safe creative space is made, women tell hard stories, eager to share with each other, often for the first time. The stories and poems I heard from incarcerated women in the States were interchangeable in the similarity of their detail and emotion with those of women in England. In both countries I have listened to poignant poems and monologues on themes of domestic violence, sexual abuse, drug and alcohol addiction and involvement in prostitution.

However, there are differences between the US and the UK in the treatment of incarcerated women. In the UK, there is a groundswell of alliances to end the incarceration of women. One example is the Corston Report (PDF), commissioned by the then Labour government in the wake of a series of deaths of women in custody in Styal Prison. The remit of Baroness Corston's investigation was to address the need for 'a distinct, radically different, strategic, proportionate, holistic, woman-centred, integrated approach'.

The report makes a powerful case for diverting women before they get into prison and providing them with support and resources to help them deal with the results of sexism, poverty and racism. It costs £38,000 a year to keep a person in prison in England & Wales. When women are imprisoned, there are the additional costs of ensuring their children's well being and maintaining family life. For a woman to attend a women's community centre for one year costs £1,900 a year per woman. These projects will support her to look at her 'offending behaviour' in the light of the hurts she has experienced as a woman and give her practical support to deal with financial, legal, relationship, addiction and emotional challenges.

One of the first successes of the Corston Report was to stop the regular strip searching of women - 'Regular repetitive unnecessary overuse of strip searching in women's prisons is humiliating, degrading, undignified and a dreadful invasion of privacy. For women who have suffered past abuse, particularly sexual abuse, it is an appalling introduction to prison life and an unwelcome reminder of previous victimisation.' However, strip searching of women prisoners is still common practice in most North American states.

Unlike the United States, there is no regular shackling of women in the UK, nor blanket use of uniform. There are also routine schemes in UK prisons that, although very limited, do go some way to supporting women - eg Storybook Mums, where women write, illustrate and record stories for their children; Toe By Toe, a peer literacy scheme; Listeners, offering emotional peer support; and programmes to support women who have experienced domestic violence or prostitution.

Of course this exploration of issues needs to expand to include experiences in countries other than the UK and the US, including those that have a different perspective on incarceration. For example, Scandinavian countries and some indigenous communities in New Zealand and Australia focus increasingly on the social and economic causes of offending rather than on the punishment of the individual. Prisons are being closed and support provided in the community.

Within prisons there is a real need for gender-appropriate training for staff with a particular emphasis on respecting women, understanding abuse and developing awareness of responses to trauma. Well-supported accommodation is needed on release, to break the cycle of repeat offending and custody and through-the-gate services are key. Women may leave the prison clean of drugs after detoxing inside but they come out onto the streets often unmet by anybody, with £40 that the government gives them and a see-through sack with all the possessions that they brought into the prison. Many will have lost their accommodation and many of them will be over 50 miles away from family and friends. They come out and either want to take drugs immediately or despite their best wishes they go back to their previous 'haunts' and acquaintances. Many are very vulnerable to men's distress. It was not unusual to say goodbye to a women and hear her say 'This is the last time I'm coming to prison'. Within a month, she would be back in my poetry group, feeling like a failure.

I have read and witnessed you speaking very passionately and knowledgeably about this issue. How did you professional history lead you to this point?

I came to Women's Liberation through my job in anti-sexist youth work in the early '70s. Feminism informs the way I see the world, the way I live, but if I'm honest I did become discouraged seeing the gains of the Second Wave dismantled and appropriated. Working in women's prisons has completely brought me back to myself, re-fuelled my passion for a feminist revolution.

And of course there is always a personal story behind the action. Everywhere I go, I go with an awareness of being a Jewish woman and with the strengths (and challenges) that arise from my identity as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. In my early twenties, I began to understand the role of by-standing in the death of my German grandparents and I decided I would never willingly be a bystander. My prison work is part of that commitment. In prison, I employ useful skills I learned from being my mother's daughter - like, how to stay calm (or appear calm) in the midst of chaos and panic or how to use humour to lighten potentially dangerous situations. Working in prison means coming face to face with all that is wrong in the world and I want to 'fix things', [tikkun olam], with all that is rational about that, as well as all that comes from the urgency and unbearable-ness of seeing suffering up close, stark, stripped bare.

Leah Thorn can be contacted by emailing firstname.lastname@example.com

firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-237051036313736922.post-7004025977781788002014-05-04T12:39:00.000+01:002014-07-31T15:22:15.173+01:00Patriarchy, we need to talk about vulval itching
Inspired by Jeanette Winterson's Guardian article, Can You Stop The Menopause?

I am writing this while pissing Samurai swords. When not pissing swords I'm managing to piss shards of broken mirror, whole arrows complete with tips and ends, crumbled chunks of pebbledash and the occasional streak of razor wire. When not doing that I'm taking as many cranberry tablets as I can fit in my mouth and drinking pints of nettle tea, dandelion tea or cold water with bicarbonate of soda mixed in.

I have cystitis, obviously. Very common, very discomfiting. It occurs, or threatens to, whenever I'm dehydrated. The last serious attack before now was at the end of 2012 when I had a glass of vinegary red wine in a restaurant and went to bed without needing the bathroom. By the next morning my bladder had filled with crunched glass.

The 2012 cystitis attack and the health issues that followed have made me think about the connection between external events and internal manifestations, mental pain causing physical pain, the mirroring of psychology and physiology. It also shone a light on some GPs' apparent ignorance of this connection. I had never got cystitis just from one glass of wine and a missed bathroom visit before, but certain events I experienced had clearly weakened me, worsening my susceptibility to illness, the frequency of illness and the severity of illness. They left behind a trace of vulnerability operating at a very deep level.

I went to the GP to get some antibiotics for the cystitis. She gave me a five day course of something so strong that it gave me thrush. I'd never had thrush before and assumed that the antibiotics hadn't worked and that my cystitis had worsened. I went back to the clinic and was assigned a (very nice) man I'd never seen before.

"I was wondering if it might be thrush?" I said in passing.
"Do you have any discharge 'down there'?" he asked, looking embarrassed.
"No." There was just an extreme discomfort, tenderness, soreness and swelling and a sense of tingling, weeping, sizzling allergy, as though the skin had suddenly become live.
"Then you don't," he said with relief and gave me a further three day course of cystitis antibiotics despite there being "no blood, no proteins," in my urine.

Secret hint to gentleman GPs: if you're calling it "down there" while exuding very strong aversion vibes to actually looking "down there", you may be in the wrong profession. The antibiotics sent the thrush over the edge and led to extreme discomfort and feverishness for six weeks. It was so bad that in the middle of a voiceover recording a colleague said to me in concern, "I can tell that something's not right."

Like so many women facing dismissal of our instincts, derision for our opinions, contempt for our knowledge and aversion for our bodies, I got the correct advice from other women. Discharge doesn't always happen with thrush, which has a range of symptoms. A colleague who'd been hospitalised for long stretches was told privately by her nurse that antibiotics often caused thrush through their brutal destruction of the good bacteria in the gut alongside the bad. She recommended taking probiotics and probiotic yoghurt. Various women's health forums suggested topical and natural remedies – natural yoghurt again, a heavily diluted tea tree oil solution, garlic or swallowed garlic capsules – all of which worked to ease symptoms. Then there's the anti-thrush diet which many women said had permanently cured them. Zero sugar, zero carbs, no booze, no caffeine. Booze and caffeine to be reintroduced in small amounts a couple of months later.

I tried it. It stopped the thrush dead within three hours.

How can GPs not know about these simple, natural solutions? I'm not talking about flower remedies, homeopathic pills, exotic herb concoctions or casting spells at the full moon, just basic changes to diet and the topical application of ingredients with known antifungal and antibacterial properties. How can GPs not know the full range of symptoms of something as common as thrush? How can they be so cavalier about prescribing antiobitics which have such a strong effect?

The next time I went to the doctors was for a routine smear test and met lovely Dr Newman.

"They really need to redesign these things," I commented dryly, in so many ways, when it was all going on with the duck (my term for a speculum).
"And it'll be a woman that does it, I'll tell you that," she said.

Love a flash of feminism in a medical professional. I told her about the thrush and instead of throwing pills at me she told me not to take antibiotics as it would just make me resistant and instead to drink as much water as possible to flush it out. Although she did make a little racial error when recommending a follow-up health check to my mother. My mother was about to go to India and suggested that Dr Newman give her a letter to take to a doctor there.
"It does need to be someone who speaks English," said Dr Newman.

Dr Newman, some tiny tips. India's doctors all speak fluent English and usually at least two other languages besides; India's medical expertise is so great that Indian doctors and surgeons are employed globally and are indeed famous for their skill; and India's best hospitals and specialist research units are world class. You seem to be under the impression that we are about to go to a village health station under a palm thatch in the middle of nowhere to talk to a shaman holding a feather and a rusty shaving blade. We are not.

Incidentally the worst/best place I was ever recognised was in the middle of a smear test, by yet another doctor at my local health centre where morale is obviously so low that they change their entire workforce about twice a week.
"Haven't I seen you on TV?" said the woman.
*Insert duck.*
*Open duck*
"Yup. Maybe," I stiffly conceded.

Anyway, I sorted it out. But in the long run I've found it disturbing that my usually equine constitution has become so sensitised. The thrush flared up again last Christmas after a few mince pies too many. This was exceptional: I don't usually eat sugar or major carbs but certainly never worried when faced with the odd plate of pasta, a dessert or a cup of coffee.

I am struck by the years of crumbling physical damage caused to me by an injury that was emotional and psychological: the thinning hair (which I write about, with handy remedies, here); the nagging stress acne which never quite goes; the way a simple cold now becomes five days of bed-ridden temperature; the loss of muscle mass; the terrible triggering, which I describe here. I am literally weaker than I was before, unable to run as far, lift as much, build as much bulk or work out as intensely as I used to.

Before, I had never understood people who claimed that non-physical issues like unemployment, over-work, being in the wrong job or experiencing a family dispute had 'destroyed their health'. I thought the phrase was melodramatic, Western-privileged and narcissistic; people worldwide who survive natural disasters, famine, pandemics and wars do not go on about it ruining their health. They don't have the luxury.

Having survived the last five years, I see now how it is possible. Instead of following GPs' concentration on treating symptoms rather than causes, we must embrace an idea of total health, which does not make a stark distinction between the soul and the body and accepts that one affects the other. Emotional pain becomes physical pain while emotional strength boosts physical strength. Happiness, caused by social factors, supports numerous health factors.

I didn't make the connection between the events and the effects until I went to get a verruca sorted out at the chiropodist.
"I got it from a shared hotel bathroom in New York. You see. Never travel cheap," I said. I nodded down at my toe. "There's loads of them. It's like a mushroom forest."
"It's to do with your immune, you know," said the woman.

That explained it in a flash. The colds, the hives, the zits, the thrush, the fatigue, the muscle turning to flab, the feeling of being dogged by weakness and ill health. It is sad that events from five years ago should have such deep effects as to disrupt and sicken the very fibres of my being so that bacteria, infection, disease and germs can drag me down. I feel defiled by what happened and this feeling is vindicated at an observable, cellular level.

When I think about what happened one image comes to mind: that of being struck at the core with an iron bar, straight through with one strike, of a strong and elegant column being broken into pieces by a stranger who came out of nowhere. And then being torn open, gutted, eviscerated, thrown away and left to die.

You cannot put a shattered column back together. You must accept its destruction, accept your own annihilation and the success of the destroyer. You must walk away from the debris and start again. It is sad that the rebuilding process is not just professional, not just emotional, not just social but must also be physical and carried out in the most gratingly basic way. And it bothers me that a person is able to do this to other human beings and thrive in success, social regard and happiness while his victims are demolished publicly, privately, psychologically and physically.

email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-237051036313736922.post-88870257281896560882014-04-09T16:06:00.000+01:002014-08-12T20:09:17.673+01:00"Never forgive. Never forget." 80+ homespun mottos for a wholesome existence.
Lucrezia Borgia meets Mother Teresa? Gandhi meets Machiavelli? A Chinese restaurant fortune cookie automated fortune printing machine meets the Ten Commandments? Here are my guides to life, inspired by Regina Brett, Oprah and Harper's Bazaar magazine's Words of Wisdom page.

Listen to what your body's telling you. It'll save your life.

Judge people by what they do, not what they say.

Natural justice always prevails in the end. It takes a long time but it's evisceratingly, disembowellingly thorough. Don't bother with revenge if anyone's deliberately hurt you. Never forgive. Never forget. Mentally, take out a contract on their life. Then forget about it. Concentrate on healing and being happy. When the karma happens, you'll know. It will be permanent. It will be annihilating. And yea verily, you will be satisfied.

Never judge by appearances. You can't tell a single thing about a person's character, background, mood, values, opinions or history from their appearance. Not a thing.

If it feels good, in a calm and happy and at-peace way, it is good.

If it feels bad, or intense, or charged, or extreme, or agonising, or ambiguous, or so exhilarating that you're on the brink of total insanity, that's because it's wrong.

Be friendly to everyone once. How they react after that will give you the measure of them.

Do what you love. You don't have to turn it into your main career, but keep it in your life whatever else happens. Try to get a career which is roughly in the same area as what you love: either a different job in the same industry, or a different industry but using the same skills, or a different role with the same outlook, or something totally contrasting but attracting the same general type of person. Then, one side of your life with stimulate and inspire the other.

Never lie, never play games, never pretend, never deceive. Deception tears something fundamental in the fabric of the universe.

Being picky about food as a grown-up is a sign of ego, not healthiness.

Never knock the pleasures of a regular pay cheque.

If your life's reached an impasse, learn something new and substantial. I mean like mastering a new language or getting a motorcycle licence. Not learning fantasy 1950s housewife cupcake crafting skills.

You will never regret doing a job that makes things better for people in general rather than making money for your bosses.

Don't be a martyr. Remember that 90% of all charity volunteers are women of all colours and backgrounds working themselves to the bone for free and 90% of all charity bosses are white men paying themselves a businessman's salary. Labour should be paid. Don't act like some drivelling female masochist and say it's fine. There's doing good, then there's good old fashioned sexist labour exploitation.

If you can, save half of everything you earn. Divide these savings into three. One third is for long term life savings. One third is for paying tax if you're self-employed. The other third is a travel treat fund for you to see the world in style and comfort.

Everything in life is dominated by vested interests so maintain a healthy scepticism about your bosses, authorities, heads, management and other ruler types. Be polite whenever they address you, but don't believe anything they say.

The corporation's always bigger than the individual. If you try to take on a corporation by yourself, it'll crush you. Even if you win a moral victory at a tribunal stage, you will lose your career. Line up a Plan B that doesn't feel like a consolation prize, then try to change the system to make things better for everyone else.

Exercise a little bit every day, doing something you enjoy. It feels great and you'll sleep really well.

Support groups are very nice but directly exposing, fighting and challenging inequality are fantastic.

Your pet cat is nowhere near as interesting as you think. I don't care what it did/ate/caught/sicked up today. The shifty way it slinks about makes my skin crawl.

Don't surf the Net, it'll dissolve your brain. Log on twice a day, at noon and four, for half an hour each time, to check your emails, look up specific things and go over the headlines of whatever newspaper you prefer to read. If you need to be email-responsive for work, set up your iPad or iPhone in a far corner of your study or your desk and glance at it once an hour.

Graphic novels are not the Messiah.

If there's a story you're burning to write or any other creative project you're desperate to pursue, do it. In the evenings. Don't give up your day job to do it.

Don't self-publish your junk or put your crap iPhone film on the free Net for everyone (ie. no-one) to see. That's for losers, freaks and desperados and the people who've made it that way are a tiny proportion of all the ones that tried. If you want to be a book writer with a longstanding career you need a proper agent, a proper publisher/crew/distributor, proper deals and proper marketing.

You can use Amazon. You can complain about Amazon. But you can't do both.

Just surviving long term in the arts, culture or media is an achievement in itself.

It's great to be freelance but it's also good to be in part-time regular professional alliance with major institutions whether they be companies, universities or the BBC. So if you can get yourself a regular gig, do so.

In work and life and love and creativity, don't be influenced by passing trends or swayed by what other people are doing. By the time you've worked up a passable imitation the moment will have passed.

Don't talk about yourself all the time. It's not interesting. Ask other people about themselves.

Trust the universe generally. But more specifically, especially if you work in my field: don't trust anyone.

It's not gossip. It's passing on important news.

It's hard to be instinctive or predictive about situations, but trust your instincts about people you're dealing with in the medium term. If something strikes you as odd, it's because it is. Listen to alarm bells and heed your red flags.

Don't give attitude to B because you're upset about A. If you're upset about A, do what any decent normal person does and cry in the toilet. You'll feel better.

Don't flirtybanter with people whose job is to serve you in shops, restaurants or bars. At best it's tacky, objectifying, patronising, arrogant and exploitative. At worst it's sexual harassment. And it's something they have to put up with all day, every day, in addition to their work duties.

Don't sext or go back and forth on the text with people you're 'dating.' It's not sexy. It's cheap, it's tacky and if they're doing it with you they're doing it with a dozen others. Show a little bit of class and self-respect if you can.

Bullies aren't cowards, they're deliberate, simultaneous and serial abusers who are brave, confident, entitled, experienced and have massive egos. Don't turn yourself inside out trying to explain away or come to terms with the actions of bad people you've encountered. They're just arseholes.

Accept that in every year you'll waste £1,000 on something or other, usually a non-refundable booking, a lost deposit or a big-ticket item you're not allowed to return. I call it my Annual Idiot Tax.

If you think you're being paid less than your peers, ask them straight-up what they earn. It's very hard to not answer a direct question. Even if they don't really want to tell you, they will. You'll lose friends but you'll gain the bitter knowledge that you're being paid less than everyone else because you have a filthy taint in your pants. Call it the Woman Tax.

Never argue back and forth with chippy strangers on the street, in shops, in queues or in businesses. It's a waste of time. Take the high and humorous road instead, it's a truly snooty mindgame that'll leave you feeling fantastic.

When sexually harassed, always look delighted, immediately go right up close to the perpetrator, invade their personal space, put your arm around them, stroke their face and engage them in bright and intimate conversation at the very top of your voice, asking them if they want to be your friend, where do they live, what's their name, where they work, how old they are and any question you can think of. Draw in anyone else who may be nearby. Then tell them all about yourself, your hobbies and your family. Invite yourself to Sunday lunch at theirs, perhaps. It's always hilarious when you finally break it to them: "You know why I'm talking to you so much? It's so that when I call the police I can give them a really, really good description of you. And I now have your DNA on me, from where I patted you on the head, so I can give them that too, and they can keep it on record. Although I have to say, you see up there? You've been standing in front of a CCTV camera all this time and I'm sure it's got a lock on you by now. And now if it's all right I'm going to take a photograph of you because you're so lovely and friendly and I'm going to remember you for a long time and show it to the police and put it up on the Internet." Turns out they never wanted to be friends in the first place, at all!

When I gave up make-up and alcohol I suddenly noticeably had a load more money in my wallet to be spent on food and travel and fashion magazine subscriptions. Just saying.

Skincare products give you acne. Acne treatments give you acne. Face flannels and exfoliating brushes give you acne. I had total red onion, chilli beef and pepperoni pizza sore purple acne all over my face and got rid of it by splashing it twice a day with warm water and taking a good multivitamin. No scrubbing with the towel either. It calmed down within a month and I had glowing, perfect, balanced skin within two months.

Once you start wearing designer clothes you'll never go back.

Rich people, of either sex, never have cheap shoes or cheap luggage, ever.

If you're going to whistle-blow, tell the hidden truth about something or expose a network, be ready to leave it permanently and say goodbye to that phase of your life or career and everyone in it. Even if people agree with you privately, they're not going to stand up and take the bullet with you.

Even so, never protect wrongdoers. The silence of witnesses actively supports perpetrators and enables abuse. When someone breaks the silence, eventually all the toxic matter comes out. Always out the abusers you know.

If you notice something as a passer-by in daily life that strikes you as unjust or unequal, always make a complaint, write about it or flag it up in some way. At the bottom of the complaint, write, "I am going to publicise this even in the case of non-response." You'll feel better, and eventually complaints do add up and shift things.

Never do anything when you're angry. Don't confront anyone, don't fire off an email.

That said, if you're not the panicking type, sometimes when you're angry, you say exactly the right thing.

If you can't decide what to do about something, go for a long walk and the answer'll come to you.

If someone at work says something a bit insulting or 'off' and you immediately want to answer back, instead say and do nothing. Absolutely nothing. Just look at them gently. Perhaps raise an eyebrow. Merely wait. The situation will magically reverse itself in your favour. Then, if you can, gather your things and leave in silence. This will become a cherished memory.

Don't grovel, apologise for yourself, downplay your work or behave submissively, it's nauseating.

Don't be a man-worshipper or -enabler, it's pathetic. It's toxic. And it's not mutual.

If any girlfriend tells you they suffered abuse, believe them. Survivors don't lie. In fact they usually downplay what happened.

After your two years of work experience, shadowing, body-of-work building or interning, don't do routine everyday or regular work for free. If you do, you're telling the world you think you're worthless. Sometimes however, unpaid one-off appearances at public events are worthwhile. Be strategic in choosing which ones.

Study what fascinates and challenges you, not the subject you're easily good at.

Be friendly, it makes life interesting and joyful.

Bad people are brilliant actors and fantastic liars. But they always drop hints about themselves. If something strikes you as odd, ask a direct question.

Never get involved in interpersonal bickering, petty politics or in-fighting. Especially not online. It's a waste of time.

Don't mess people around by making appointments and then cancelling or continually changing them. Not at work. Not in your personal life. It'll mark you out as a skeevy, unreliable two-face.

Don't go on about how stressed or how busy you are. You're not.

Carbs, sugar and caffeine give you thrush. Antibiotics also give you thrush. Alcohol, sugar and caffeine give you cystitis. And then there are those times when it's clearly God's punishment for having sex.

Cranberry tablets, gallons of water and nettle, lemon and ginger, dandelion or fennel tea are all miracle cures for cystitis. At the same time, a standard brand painkiller takes the edge off while you sort it out.

One and a half glasses of rosé. Or two glasses of champagne. Or one Martini. All with food. That's enough for a lovely buzz and not so much that you'll end up with your head down a toilet, your stomach in your mouth, your lipstick on your chin and a little bit of squirted out pee on your skirt.

If you're hosting a party and you want to take it to another level just go around with a tray of tequila shots, salt and cut limes.

When you learn a new language you wake up your brain, unlock a new part of the world and discover a new culture, history, landscape and an entire population of potential friends.

Enjoy, learn, grow, earn, survive and be practical, but forget about bogus concepts like career and success. Life isn't a game that you can win. Nobody's following or cares about your individual career trajectory, which is an illusion.

Power relationships are obvious. Look at who's doing the drudge work and who's having long lunches and casual meetings, who looks tired and who looks breezy, who's being paid more and who's being paid less, who's taking the credit, who has room to manoeuvre, who gets the perks and who doesn't, who's being promoted and who isn't. It'll all be clear as day, right in front of your face. Analyse any situation by interpreting what you witness.

Celibacy feels completely and utterly fantastic.

Romance, sexuality and sexual love are not that important or interesting. Friendships, colleagues, artistic collaboration and parental love are richer.

Do what you enjoy, pay attention to what's around you and relax in the moment.

You can become friends with colleagues but you can't become colleagues with your friends.

Give money if you want. But never lend money. You won't get it back. Asking for it back'll leave a bad taste in your mouth, perversely.

You're never going to be rich and famous. 0.00000001% of people on the planet are rich and famous. They may not be nice. They may not be good. They may well not be happy. So don't torment yourself about 'making it' in your industry.

Liars and cheats don't change. They're nasty people of bad character. Everything they say is a lie, everything they do is part of a game.

Know that your sin will find you out. Luckily that goes for everyone else too.

Change with the times. You can't live at 35 as you did at 25. There comes a point when you have to stop hanging out, shape up and get your life together, whatever that means for you. For some people it's settling down, for others it's travelling the world, commencing the big project, getting the PhD or making a career change. But you have to change because nobody wants to be the oldest swinger in town.

There are those people who, like me, don't particularly want children or mind the prospect of never having children. Then there are those people who are absolutely hotly 100% adamant that they will not have children and who actually hate and, weirdly, fear children. These people had miserable childhoods, hate and feel anger towards their parents and are terrified of replicating their own history. Don't let them put you off if you're undecided.

Agonising relationship drama is a sign of toxicity, not passion, whatever the relationship.

Marriage is a nasty trap and the nuclear family was the world's shortest lived social experiment.

Don't splurge out huge amounts of career or general life information to people you've just met. It's cheap and unwittingly backfiringly revealing, and you don't know what they're going to do with the info you just gabbled out of your mouth in a desperate bid to please.

It's true that your real friends reveal themselves in a crisis and fair-weather friends disappear. But fair-weather friends are great to take to parties. Think of them as party pals. Not everyone has to be gathered around your bedside when you discover you're dying of herpes or whatever.

Self-hatred is a boring, destructive, curiously narcissistic waste of time. Do something for or with others instead of constantly thinking about yourself.

Home is the place you heal, replenish, create and feel completely safe, completely yourself, joyful, permanent and replete with promise. Even if you never had that or don't have it now, you can create it.

firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-237051036313736922.post-45904041605168739652014-04-09T12:30:00.002+01:002014-07-06T18:57:10.493+01:00A feminist guide to beauty and aesthetics

Last year I cured my stress related female baldness using castor oil and a shampoo designed for horses. It's called Mane N Tail. As I smoothed out the gummy strands it struck me like an acidic splash of perming solution that I should return to my roots – cultural roots, not follicular ones – in the style press and flash my beauty expertise.

Every style icon from Coco "Elegance is refusal" Chanel to Diana "What was I going to do – retire? I was only seventy!" Vreeland to Isabella "totally tradge" Blow has a line, a story, a strong personal brand. They don't just pronounce on aesthetics, they embody them. My own line is this: I am an unemployed, celibate, 35 year old spinster who never grew up, never got her life together and who lives with her mother. Beauty-wise I want to be the best unemployed celibate nearly 40 year old spinster I can possibly be. And I probably I want my mum to watch me.

Actual beauty has never been my goal as it makes no difference to anything apart from a little bit of surface tingling when you first meet someone. If beauty counted for anything all the world's leaders, the UN security council, FTSE 100 company bosses, Davos delegates and all industry high-ups in technology, every branch of entertainment from novels to films, science, politics, charities, the media, academia and sport would be beautiful women. So would the most revered cultural figures. They are not. They are plain men. Their uniform appearance rightly conveys the message that their words, experience and decisions matter and their beauty does not.

Men actually police their own and other men's appearance very carefully: they rarely stray from the same few shapes, fabrics, silhouettes, colours; to keep their hair short and neat, men must visit a hairdresser far more frequently than women do. They regard the possibility of cosmetics use not with neutrality but with defensiveness and abhorrence. Even young actors who first became famous for their looks later work hard to shed the 'pretty boy' tag which they correctly find to be patronising, superficial, limiting and demeaning. They do not want to be seen as pretty, or boys, but as talented men. Meanwhile women are routinely referred to as girls and being both youthful-looking and pretty is meant to be our one and only goal, so much so that women visit untold nastiness, punishment, labour and judgement on themselves and on other women. It is shallow and irrelevant to call a little boy pretty but calling a little girl pretty is seen as the best compliment you can give.

It is easy to point to modelling, advertising, the backgrounds of music videos and acting and say that beautiful women are 'everywhere' and are 'making a lot of money from their looks'. Beautiful women in these industries are used as ornamental objects to make money for other people who are working behind the scenes in companies ultimately controlled by majority-male boards. This goes just as much for fashion conglomerates as it does for other areas of business from concrete road resurfacing to new technology. The presentational women are exploited for the physical labour and sexualised tinge they provide but have no say in anything concerning the process, their representation or the products they are being used to sell. They are constantly sexually harassed as objects in work and beyond work. They are patronised, intimidated, bullied, ignored, demeaned and degraded by their colleagues during the work process and also within the narrative or message of the images, scripts, songs, advertising copy or products they are used for. They are thrown away after a few years. The industry men who degrade them, from the men behind Lululemon and American Apparel (and here) to photographer Terry Richardson (also see here for latest testimonies) are rewarded and aided by their industries, which also contain a high proportion of colluding female misogynists. An infinitesimal proportion of the beautiful women in modelling and acting make a lot of money by being used, before being thrown away and replaced. The overwhelming majority are used up and thrown away too quickly to establish any longstanding career identity or financial power while the companies and individuals around them continue to draw income, gain a strong name and develop their careers in the long term.

I was stunningly beautiful for about two months in my teens – everyone has their moment – and it was constant in-work and on-street sexual harassment all the way, coupled with deep career patronage and a disturbing personal sense that who I appeared to be on the outside in no way matched who I was. My appearance felt like a thick shell, not fragile but bluntly confining, the surface powdery like plaster of Paris, in which I was trapped. I had long hair for a very brief period in my teens, cut it off when I was 19 and breathed an enormous sigh of relief.

That was a while after I tried to bleach it at home, a month before my 18th birthday (dinner at the River Café, very nice), using two full boxes of shop-bought peroxide. It was naturally a very dark red, black in shadow, ruby in light, the exact shade many dark-haired women try to dye their hair. It was straight and swingy and hung down past my shoulder blades. After my bleachy intervention it went white at the roots, neon yellow further down, ginger for a few inches, then gerbil coloured, then a stretch of sandalwoody tint, darkening to mahogany, while the ends remained black but acquired a singed, fried seaweed quality. Its texture went from silk to parched hessian, with a massed, fibrous, netted appearance. It lay in weedlike lumps along my back. I covered it over with two more boxes of solid black dye. Every time I washed it I needed half a bottle of cheap Asda conditioner to make it look okay. Eventually I couldn't stand it any more and went for a total crop, just as I'd had until I was thirteen, and it felt great. You don't need a brush or comb. You rub it with a towel and it's dry. It always looks cool.

Until the thinning happened and, just before my 35th birthday, I had to take action. Now I've turned into an evangelical hair hippy: don't dye it, don't put chemicals on it, don't put heat including hairdryers near it, if it's long put it in a plait when you go to bed or it'll be rubbed to jute. Use organic shampoo from Neal's Yard or, if you can stand the sugary stench of the shops and the patronisingly chipper dolly-fembot staff, Lush. Shampoo it as little as possible, easily 50% less than you usually do. If you want a conditioner use three drops of rosemary oil rubbed into the ends when wet. If you want a leave-in wash-off conditioning treatment, dilute castor oil with rosemary, jasmine and lavender oils and leave on for as long as possible before washing out. Don't sleep in it or it'll give you zits. After all this I don't know if it'll look good but trust me, it'll be good, like, good within itself, in accordance with Gaia.

Even growing my hair one inch beyond its usual has triggered a gender identity crisis so huge that it completely swamps the factual reality of what's going on. I'm realising just how culturally encoded hair is. Why does everyone now call me Madam? Why do people keep asking where my husband (as if! no thanks) and kids (rapidly missing the boat on that one) are? Why do people talk to me like I'm some kind of responsible, civilised lady they can trust? What are all those guys looking at when they walk past, giving my face and tits and legs a quick scope and then turning back when they've passed, to scope the arse? Let me make it clear: these men hate women. They think that we are objects and not human beings. If they didn't hate us, they would not see us and treat us as things to be looked over and assessed on the street for their own enjoyment. They would see us as people. They would not cause us discomfort by their deliberate and repeated actions. They would not make going for a walk a trial of objectification and repulsive, sexualised assessment rather than the pleasure it should be.

So I'm walking a tricky line in reinventing myself as a style maven. In the dramatic psychological and physical journeyfrom having slightly less hair than usual to having just about the normal amount, give or take a few thousand strands, I've learned a lot. Not about myself. Not about the world. But about the thin layer separating one from the other: my epidermis. It's best to do as little with it as possible: I wash it with warm water; use no products except Boots Soltan sunblock when I go out; almost never wear make-up (maybe 3 days a year) out of a contradictory combination of laziness, cheapness, militant feminism and outright vanity. I look…fine. OK. Wearing make-up makes me feel like a liar, like a dolly, like someone who is trying a bit too hard to win some kind of pageant where the prize is nothing. I can feel it on my face and I can smell it too.

It also bothers me when I wear make-up and get compliments off people. No wonder some women who wear it habitually feel reliant on it, feel ashen and plain and invisible without it, feel like they can't go out without 'putting on their face.' The idea of calling a time-consuming and probably bacteria laden collection of paints in jars made by brands 'my face' shows just how falsified, damaged and weak women's sense of identity is. They think that paint is them and they are nothing without paint.

I am also suspicious of mincing little doll apologists who insist that 'a tiny bit' of highlighter or under-eye concealer makes 'an enormous difference'. The chances are that the amount of paint to be applied is tiny because the perceived problem is tiny in the first place and therefore invisible to others.

You may need concealer to cover your spots but it's make-up that gives you spots. If you gave up all make-up and all products and only used warm water you would have glowing, perfect skin within six weeks. I know because I tried it. From drag queen dolly to blah in just six weeks! I may be plain but I feel liberated and when you feel liberated you don't fuss about plainness or not-plainness and other boring junk like that.

Funnily enough it was actually racist Western patriarchy that originally made me allergic to makeup: Lancome's Geisha collection of red and black lacquered eye makeup, when I was 19 or 20. Lancome, do you think that being a young girl groomed into servitude and compliance in the brutal, ancient Japanese sex exploitation industry was really cool and fun? Do the fans, wigs, silks, powdered cheeks, tea cups and tiny little steps taken on wood block shoes make you think that it's not an aspect of violence against women, because the aesthetics are so cute and un-violent? Did you want to take these Orientalist, racist, sexist cliches and flog centuries of women's sexual abuse for your profit? Well I fell for it, put on the lacquer and the goddess of rightful vengeance, Feminista Karma Maxima, punished me for it. My face swelled up until it looked like a pink, oozing rugby ball. My eyes looked like lizards' eyes, inflamed, weeping and red rimmed, and I could barely see out of them. My skin's been allergic to everything, except one brand of sun block, ever since.

I got cellulite recently – it's like being hit on the arse with a very soft, wobbly thunderbolt – and it has nothing to do with how much exercise I do (a lot, every day), or how much body fat I've got (not a lot). I asked Quack Doctor Google for solutions but nothing useful came up that I'm not already doing. Cosmetic, surgical and superficial devices/creams/procedures are a boring waste of money. I already eat no sugar, processed food, starchy carbs or junk.

For non celibate ladies who might be worried about cellulite in the bedroom, I must say I have a feeling that it's rather nice to squeeze amorously as it's very soft. Definitely softer than a blow-up doll or, say, your partner's own wanking hand. So I wouldn't worry about it.

Next, caffeine. I don't drink caffeinated coffee but I did have about four cups of proper loose leaf Darjeeling every day, brewed for exactly five minutes – we use a timer – we're Indian, tea's our thing – and gave that up, just to see what would happen. Worst headaches ever for ten days. If only they could invent a bike helmet that fitted as tightly and reached as far around as a caffeine withdrawal headache, road deaths would be halved within days. I cut down on the caffeine because I read that it inhibits vitamin absorption in the bloodstream, thereby negating three and a half decades of healthy eating.

Within hours of giving up caffeine my cellulite disappeared. But I'd rather have caffeine and cellulite than no caffeine and no cellulite. My ultimate view is that there's a reason cellulite is behind you: you're not supposed to think about it. There's only one real cure for cellulite, it's free and it's called denial.

I think what I really aim for on my beauty journey is to be recognised as a bipedal humanoid; to have skin which doesn't itch, weep, crust over or come up in pus-filled lumps; and not to smell too bad. If you follow my advice you will wind up (a) with hair that looks like hair, (b) skin that looks like skin and (c) a bottom that looks like a bottom. It's the best I can offer. You will also have a lot more money in your pocket while the fitness, beauty and diet industries will lose billions of pounds in profit.

These industries create, foster and use female guilt, shame and self-hatred to make money. They spark up and simmer these emotions gently, reduce them into a gunk serum, a pot of paint or powder that cost 60p to make and sells for £6, a new fitness fad to burn fat and improve circulation and oxygenation (which is what all effective exercise does, fad or no fad) or a new way of limiting over-eating and improving nutrition, which they repackage as a thrilling new approach to food. Then they sell them back to us, wrapped in inspirational and expansive sloganeering. They survive by constantly moving. First, it was important to be thin. Then bigger and sportier, yet somehow still thin. It was once elegant to have thin brows, then blows got stronger and more blocked out. If you have straight hair you're meant to tong it into Barbie waves; if you have wavy hair you're supposed to iron it straight. If you're dark skinned you're meant to lighten your skin; if you're pale you need a fake tan. And all for absolutely nothing.

And you're not meant to have any pubic hair because porn says so. How pathetic. A large and toxic industry run by men splaying and trading female flesh for other men to jerk off their dicks to in front of a screen, telling women how to look. And women comply, quickly, unquestioning. What do these women think will happen if they don't shave everything? Men won't like us? They don't like us anyway. They'll reveal their repulsion for our bodies? They already have, through their globally endemic harassment, stalking and following, bullying, marginalisation, objectification, assault, groping, rape, labour exploitation, beating and murder of us.

Nobody told women outright to remove all their pubic hair (you realise how weird and random that sounds?) or threatened them if they didn't do it. But they got the message anyway, and they complied. I was going to say that women who submit in this manner, passively and repeatedly, are slaves. But women and men in slavery have always resisted, fought, despised their masters and known utterly the nastiness, objectification, exploitation, violation and brutal dehumanisation of slavery.

Female beauty slaves are completely different. They are participatory, colluding, obedient, fervent when following, passive when urged to resist. They hate themselves, not their oppressors. It's so clever: get a woman's energy used up in self-hatred, narcissism and other self-focused, self-conscious, self-absorbed attentions. Get her to fight herself and other women. Then she won't have any energy left over to fight misogyny.

Women have internalised patriarchal oppression so deeply and corrosively that they judge, police and punish themselves, and other women, according to patriarchal norms. They are so well trained, so intensely brainwashed from birth, that they do it automatically and without noticing. These women react so negatively towards emancipation movements like feminism because feminism would cause them to question every single thing about themselves, their lives, their values and their beliefs. Emancipation would cause the total examination and destruction of everything they are; the brutal stripping away of everything they have believed; and a critical look at the men they worship, the family they are in and the society that underpins, defines, decides and contextualises their existence. They would have to face the reality and depth of their own oppression and perhaps even recognise that some of the men they love hate them and that the respect and deference they feel for men-in-general is not mutual but quite the opposite. This prospect, the complete breaking down of the self, is naturally terrifying.

At the end of the day, cosmetics are just cheap chemicals in little pots, carrying an inordinate amount of symbolic cultural weight. The beauty industries' power is shored up by mystique: modelised marketing images, all of which are airbrushed, set in Paris, or New York, or a nightclub; using models who are teenagers to sell to women in their thirties and above; resorting to meaningless, faux scientific jargon which implies that products do much more than is possible; and concealment of what really goes into them. Most skincare and cosmetics products are full of chemicals which are so numerous, so unfamiliar by name and whose properties and risks are so unwillingly disclosed that we do not really know what we are putting into our system. The power of the industries and companies behind the products is so immense that their advertising keeps women's magazines and other media outlets afloat. Without L'Oreal's (and everyone else's) ads, the mags would fold. But such a stake gives them great power over the magazines' editorial pages. Beauty journalists are not really free to investigate ingredients, where they come from, whether they are allergenic or outright carcinogenic, even if they want to.

I recently met a woman who conducts clinical trials for the beauty industry. She told me that when there's a line in a major skincare advert saying "78 out of 90 women agree that…", usually "there's not much in it. You phone them up five weeks after the trial and say, 'Would you use this product again?' and they say 'Nyeah, sure, might as well' and you put that down as a yes." I said, "So it's all crap?" and she assented. When I asked her what her colleagues and the people who actually work for the companies she researches for use, her response was immediate: "E45 cream. It's got everything." They are also all agreed on the basics of beauty: sunblock, daily exercise, healthy food, low booze, no smoking, low caffeine, probably no crystal meth.

Further reading:

Pubic hair: the naked truth (Guardian)

Chumps on the block: women and plastic surgery (Guardian)

Plagued by female troubles in adland (Guardian)

Doing it for ourselves: women discovering their inner misogynist (New Statesman)

Is that all you think we are - breasts, belly, bottom and hair? (this site)

Dr Dukan shows us exactly what he thinks of women (this site)

firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-237051036313736922.post-63103520955424002942014-03-04T19:00:00.000Z2014-04-19T17:21:18.195+01:00Beyond the Wall: Writing a Path Through Palestine

"An unflinching portrait of life in the West Bank in the 21st Century."

Andrew Kelly, The Observer

I am delighted to celebrate the publication of my fourth book, Beyond the Wall: Writing A Path Through Palestine (Seagull Books/Chicago University Press),which I discuss in a long interview with For Books' Sake. Read Part One here, read Part Two here and Part Three here. There's also a long interview on TYCI and another, by Julie Tomlin, on Digital Women, and another which I did for Time Out Beijing. Further press mentions, hat-tips and interviews have included The New Statesman, World Literature Today, The Mancunion, The List, Platform 51, La Carpa del Feo, Book Elf, The Boar, Time Out Bejing, film-maker and writer Simon Guerrier's site, New Humanist, an interview in Ideas Tap, a long interview in The Asian Writer, Variety, a long interview in The Student Journals, Spiked, Newsclick India, Women's Views on News and The Observer.

Beyond the Wall was launched with a panel event at The Mosaic Rooms, entitled Writing A Path Through International Affairs. Journalist Susannah Tarbush has written an excellent report on the event, here. I was joined by Anna Blundy, former Times Moscow correspondent and author of a series of novels about war correspondent Faith Zanetti, inspired by Marie Colvin; poet, economist and novelist Nitasha Kaul, whose debut novel 'Residue' was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize and who has written extensively about global economics, Kashmir, India and Bhutan; and Rosie Garthwaite, who began her reporting career straight out of university and the army in Basra, Iraq, and has worked as a reporter and producer for the BBC, Reuters and Al-Jazeera. Her book How to Avoid Being Killed in a Warzone is a survivors' guide to staying alive in combat territory.

Beyond the Wall: Writing A Path Through Palestine is a sharp, immediate reportage published by Seagull Books/Chicago University Press on 15th May 2012. It is the latest release in Seagull's series of short Manifestos for the Twenty-First Century, which tackle current issues in international political affairs. The publisher's page can be found here and the Amazon UK page, which has a little bit more blurb, is here.

Beyond the Wall: Writing A Path Through Palestine is "an unflinching portrait of life in the West Bank in the 21st Century" (The Observer), seen through the eyes of its activists, its ordinary citizens, its children, its population of international aid workers, reporters and foreign visitors. From my first experience of the caprices and cruelties of checkpoint culture upon entering the West Bank to a final confrontation with the army in Silwan I report, reflect upon and analyse multiple aspects of life in an occupied territory. Covering Bethlehem, Hebron, Jerusalem, Ramallah, Nablus and Nazareth, speaking to children in the refugee camps at Balata and degree students in the lecture halls of Birzeit University, I share observations of Palestinians from all walks of life. I was both shocked by the behaviour of the military and circumspect about many aspects of Palestinian culture. My final vision balances faith in the vigour of the country's young activists, shock at the perverse effects of military occupation on the mentality of the occupied and the occupiers alike and sorrow at seeing the frustration and anger of the country's youngest citizens.

email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-237051036313736922.post-65519630022723521082014-02-27T00:30:00.000Z2014-04-02T01:02:27.689+01:00"This is an issue at every level of publishing." The S I Leeds Literary Prize tackles race, sex, diversity and literary fiction.

Topnote: The S I Leeds Literary Prize is now accepting entries for 2014. Submissions are accepted online - click here - and will be accepted until the deadline of 14th April 2014.

In April 2011 I was a panellist at a London Book Fair event on racial diversity in publishing, chaired by Shreela Ghosh, the former director of the Free Word Centre and current Director of Arts in South Asia for the British Council. The audience was very international, as befits a major publishing event (though not as major as Frankfurt in October), but 99% white. Still, by their presence in the large hall, they had shown their interest and concern about this issue. The panel was all non-white and made up of literary scouts, journalists, novelists, arts leaders, literary magazine editors and commentators. All of us described that moment when, feeling successful in our individual careers and thinking that things must be taking a turn for the better, we looked around a high profile event we were participating in and realised that we were the only non-white people in the room.

What emerged from the discussion was not a catalogue of outright racist incidents, insults or openly discriminatory and prejudicial events. It was more a question of types and stereotypes, of individual industry success stories like those of the major US publisher Sonny Mehta against a general backdrop of homogeneity in terms of race, class and educational background. At the same time, however, there has been a rise in acclaim for truly global authorial voices from Arundhati Roy to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Kerry Young to Chibundu Onuzo, Ruth Ozeki to Xialuo Guo, Nadifa Mohamed to Chika Unigwe, Yiyun Li to NoViolet Bulawayo. The 2013 Man Booker Prize shortlist was hailed for its diversity and variety and said to be the best in the prize's history. From this year forward, the rules of this defining English-language prize have been widened in order to be as inclusive as possible. I am a trustee of the Booker Prize Foundation and have written in full support of this widening here.

Resistance against this inclusiveness and globalisation has come from some unexpected quarters, and has been amazingly transparent. I was shocked when, after the announcement of the 2013 Man Booker Prize shortlist and the new eligibility guidelines, Philip Hensher wrote a Guardian article isolating the three non-white women on the list, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ruth Ozeki and NoViolet Bulawayo, and systematically, casually and gratuitously trashed them. He later picked another non-white woman, Xialuo Guo, who commented at the Jaipur festival this year that the worshipping of the English language (and, specifically, American literature) should not dominate the world literary scene. Hensher wrote, personally, nastily and incorrectly, "by the conventional standards of the English-language novel, Xiaolu Guo's work in English is poor" and that "it would take some nerve... if she were implying that what is needed is an entire change of critical standards in order to recognise her own work as a masterpiece." He added, creepily and threateningly, "I saw Guo in the green room, looking jolly pleased with herself."

At the same time there is a much broader cultural trend happening not only across literature but also theatre, television and film, of non-white talent achieving a certain level of success before colliding with the racial bar, hitting the glass ceiling, sliding off it and leaving the UK to seek opportunities elsewhere, often in America. This has been most obviously apparent if we look at the careers of TV and film performers like Idris Elba, Archie Panjabi, Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Chiwetel Ejiofor.

Yet it's also happening behind the scenes. The internationally acclaimed film-maker Pratibha Parmar, whose latest work, the documentary Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth, has been winning awards at film festivals all over the world, has also relocated to America, where her career has exploded. Several weeks ago the British playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah, now the artistic director of Baltimore's Centre Stage theatre, gave an excellent interview in the Guardian, in which he spelled out the process of steady loss of faith and pointed out how much talent the UK had let go of because of it. I Tweeted him that day, "I too am contemplating leaving the UK permanently. #glassceiling." I added, "This is not about failing but about flatlining, despite all one's talent, shrewdness, strength and application."

I stand by those words and by the article I wrote a few years ago about hitting the glass ceiling. I am excellent at my job. Either I am offered a regular post, with a title, with a role, in an institution, with a contract, with a salary, commensurate with my expertise and experience, within the next 18 months, or I am permanently leaving the UK to join any society that is looking forward and outwards, not inwards and backwards.

After 21 years of an enjoyable and diverse freelance career, many small opportunities, a lot of working for free and a lot of running around town being delighted and delightful, there comes a time when you have to sit down, do the maths and do some counting. Who is getting the big jobs, the permanent jobs, and what are they being paid? Am I running as hard as I can, just to stay in the same place? Why am I the only woman/non-white person/both on the panel? Why did Mumsnet ask me so warmly and kindly to join their bloggers network, then produce Blogfest events in 2012 and 2013, each of which featured more than 50 writers, journalists, presenters, commentators, critics, experts and bloggers, of both sexes, which were 100% white both years? Do they think non-white people can't write, speak or think? Look at the recent lineup - it just beggars belief.

It is easy to enjoy your daily life so much, and be swayed by people being nice to your face, that you lose sight of the reality of who is being given the opportunities, respect, representation, remuneration, payment, platform and permanence, and who is used casually, tokenistically, without tenure, without assurances, paid a token amount, kept at the margins and strung along insincerely without gaining any traction.

It bothered all of us on the publishing panel that the globalisation among creators and audiences, voices and debates, was not reflected within British publishing itself. We advocated the mainstreaming of real diversity within publishing as an industry, so that the future body of professionals from agents and editors to publishers and PRs would look a lot more varied than the large audience we saw before us and comprise individuals of promise and passion from all backgrounds, not just those who attended elite universities, had the family funds to sustain unpaid internships or the social connections to gain casual appointments to the industry.

When we returned to the question of non-white authors' narratives, a story emerged of fixed set-ups, stereotypes, expectations and assumptions. We all knew what the cliché narratives were: forbidden love among the lotus blossoms at monsoon time; how I became a terrorist; how I almost became a terrorist but not quite; my arranged marriage wasn't all that bad; seduced and betrayed in a veil; I'm British and my parents don't understand me; people of different classes fall in love; I was a geisha/concubine in the Forbidden City/floating world/jade palace and it wasn't that bad at all; I was a geisha and it was very bad; I want to do this but my parents want me to do that; people of different religions fall in love; British multiculturalism is a tricky thing but still really interesting; look at all the different kinds of people you can get in London; I'm British and I don't quite feel at home here, there or anywhere; I'm British and I'm really learning to appreciate my parents' heritage; moving across hemispheres is hard and weird; non-white people take drugs too; brown cities are just as exciting as white cities; I was kidnapped as a child and forced to see a foreign city from the bottom up; foreign food is a metaphor for family, heritage, life, love and everything.

The panel also discussed the issue of tokenism, of the maintenance of the appearance of diversity by having a stock amount of 'international' writers producing established and clichéd narratives for essentially bigoted audiences who wanted their prejudices, ignorance and stereotypes confirmed rather than destroyed. "I was working as a literary scout and I found an amazing novelist who happened to be from Antigua," said one panellist. "I mentioned them to an editor at a publishing house, who said, 'Oh, sorry, we already have one of those.'" I remember having brunch in 2011 with a highly impressive, vivacious, cool editor at a major publishing house. We were getting on like a house of fire and suddenly she burst out, "I love you! You tick so many boxes!"

In a must-read article about whether the Western publishing industry is institutionally racist, PP Wong, editor in chief of Banana Writers, describes a South Pacific Asian writer being rejected by a major publishing house despite impressing the editors there, because "the novel does not seem to fit into the genre of our current Asian authors", as if race is a genre in itself and all writers of that race/genre must obey its racial/generic rules. The gaucheness, stereotyping and casual, unthinking racism of the editor's comment makes me cringe. PP Wong adds in her report,

According to Creative Skillset ... just 4% of people in the publishing industry in England and Wales are Black/Asian/Minority/Ethnic.

Some commentators are also wary of the triumphalist celebration of British authorial diversity as being insincere, trend led and transient. The Guardian recently featured a nuanced essay by novelist Bernardine Evaristo, one of Britain's finest and most distinctive voices, whose most recent novel Mr Loverman was one of the strongest fiction publications of 2013. The title of the essay was Why Is It Still Rare To See A Black British Woman With Literary Influence?Evaristo pointed out that while a few years ago there was a strong move towards a celebration of politicised, race-aware work by Zadie Smith, Diane Evans, Andrea Levy, Monica Ali and others, this had now been replaced by "polite acceptance", despite exceptional and successful women like children's laureate Malorie Blackman, author of the stunning speculative series Noughts and Crosses. And – as an aside – while every other Young Adult literary hit from The Hunger Games to Twilight to I Am Number Four to The Spiderwick Chronicles to The Dark is Rising to Divergent to Ender's Game to the Inkspell books to Beautiful Creatures to Mortal Instruments to the Bone Season series has been put into development with major film studios, the completely mixed cast of Noughts and Crosses still awaits its screen life. Meanwhile, even a cursory look at the books pages of The Guardian, The Independent, The Telegraph, The Financial Times and the London Men's Review of Men's Books shows that despite one or two respectful mentions, the general demographic of representation is still extremely homogeneous. This is in addition to the extreme misogynistic discrimination perpetrated against women writers by the editors of major books pages, many of whom are themselves women.

I marvel at the countless insults which have been used over the years to justify the trashing, ignoring, undermining, exclusion and marginalisation of our work not only as authors in all genres, disciplines, styles and approaches but also as critics, reviewers and contributors. <o:p></o:p>

The insults used to justify cultural discrimination against us often contradict each other. We are slandered as shy, unambitious, narrow, nebulous, generic, unoriginal, too mainstream to be exciting or too niche to be broadly interesting. If we excel at romance, it is because we are pathetically limited by masochistic and unoriginal gender cliches. If we excel at history, it is because we are daftly sentimental. If we excel at science, it is only because we are exceptional, unlike the majority of women. If we excel at fiction, it is because fiction is easier to magic up at the kitchen table in our pretty little heads than the hard, confronting truths of non-fiction. If we sell a lot of copies it's because we flog undemanding trash to other women just as stupid as us. If we don't sell much it's because we don't have what it takes. If we excel at non-fiction it is because we lack the imagination, genius and creative spark necessary for fiction.<o:p></o:p>

Obviously that's all bunk. Where women are undermined and excluded, misogyny and man-worshipping are the reasons. All the slanders thrown into women writers' faces are lies propelled by malice. To ignore us is to ignore half the population, the half that sees beyond surface appearances, experiences the truth and dares to speak it. And it is women writers of colour who are able to cut through, describe and express the intricacies of the world we live in, because we exist at the intersection of the sexism and racism which have (in part) produced the power structures that dominate and destroy that world. We suffer it and are subject to it, even as we observe it. These things are the source both of our pain and our insight. <o:p></o:p>

Despite flashpoints like the 2013 Man Booker shortlist and the trendiness of the multi-culti moment, overall trends still work against us: prospective works will be subject to narrow and stereotyped judgements; the people championing our work within the industry if it does get taken on will be operating in a virtually all-white environment; when it enters the market the Western cultural tendency will be to favour familiar Orientalist, exoticised, sexist narratives about suffering, oppression and dislocation; and as women (let alone women of colour) we have far less chance than male writers of receiving reviews, interviews, coverage or invitations to major book festivals to discuss our work. Although one book of ours might be published, the chance to create a career, build a lifelong body of work which is acknowledged, made part of the canon, taken seriously by the broader culture and incorporated into established literary history is far less than male and white peers.<o:p></o:p>

It is for all these reasons that Bernardine Evaristo and I, along with Bonnie Greer, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and others patronise the S I Leeds Literary Prize for unpublished fiction by black and Asian women writers in the UK.

The S I Leeds Literary Prize is now accepting entries for 2014. Submissions are accepted online - click here - and will be accepted until the deadline of 31st March 2014.

The prize is awarded every two years. The first award was made in October 2012 to Minoli Salgado for A Little Dust on the Eyes, and presented the Ilkley Literature Festival. Every year, three prize winners receive £2,000, £750 and £250 for 1st, 2nd and 3rd place, as well as support through Peepal Tree Press's Inscribe programme for writer development. The first prize entry receives serious consideration for publication by Peepal Tree Press.

I was lucky to be granted an exclusive interview by writer and arts project co-ordinator Irenosen Okojie, the S I Leeds Literary Prize advocate, who told me more.

What inspired the formation of the prize?

There's a big disparity between what we see reflected on the shelves and the wonderful diverse voices that are out there. The prize aims to address that imbalance somewhat and to provide a platform for marginalized voices that are largely ignored. Walk into your local bookshop and it's glaring. It's as if female writers of colour are invisible bar a few exceptions. As for the amount of black and Asian male writers published these days, the situation is even more dire. This is an issue at every level in publishing. There are also very few black and Asian professionals working within the industry which has an impact in terms of who the gatekeepers are. Who gets to decide what voices should be heard and which stories are worth publishing? I know of only two black literary agents, Elise Dillsworth and Susan Yearwood and five independent publishers that publish inclusively; Peepal Tree Press, Valerie Brandes of Jacaranda Books, Bobby Nayyar (Equip and Limehouse), Rosemarie Hudson (HopeRoad Publishing) and Smash & Grab. If we have more diversity within the infrastructure, that might filter through to work that gets commissioned. A national prize like the SI Leeds Literary Prize is about celebrating the voices of black and Asian women.

 Do you feel the current publishing scene lags behind what is really happening in terms of what writers are doing?

Yes I do. Publishing is often slow to change. I remember when the digital explosion first happened. Publishers seemed sceptical at first but slowly came round, now you have a few of the bigger houses with digital imprints such as Bloomsbury's global digital imprint Spark and Little Brown's digital imprint Blackfriars. Also, self publishing no longer has the stigma it once did; many writers are finding ways to get their voices out there with several being picked up after finding self publishing success. There are more independent publishing houses cropping up, taking risks mainstream houses won't and publishing daring, innovative writing like the brilliant And Other Stories and Galley Beggar Press. Many writers are taking ownership of their careers and not just leaving everything to the publishing houses. They're on twitter, facebook, making book trailers and maximising digital opportunities. They're connecting with other writers internationally and tapping into opportunities. Equally, publishers could create more accessible pathways for aspiring authors. The industry seems to mostly care about authors who are brands. They're used to doing things in a traditional way. Nobody's saying they should get rid of traditional methods entirely but why not explore other ways of sourcing new writing? Like partnering with any of the writing development agencies and running a programme or Editors getting out to literary nights such as the Brixton BookJam which does a great job showcasing a wealth of talent. Writers are getting out there; they're at festivals, spoken word nights, setting up online hubs, finding creative ways of reaching audiences.

Why are prizes important? Aren't there too many prizes?

Prizes are important because they profile books that may otherwise struggle to reach a bigger audience. For example, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize highlights some of the brilliant translated works of fiction many book lovers may be unaware of, unless you're somebody who actively seeks translated foreign works. There are several prizes but I don't think there are too many and there certainly isn't one like the SI Leeds Literary Prize. It's uniquely positioned and the only one of it's kind. I'm sure there'll be some grumblings that it's a prize which favours writers of colour. The reality is, it's absolutely necessary. If publishing were a level playing field, there wouldn't be a need for it. We're thrilled to be able create opportunities for writers we engage with through the prize. It's not just about giving cash awards but the developmental support they receive.

What are the barriers to women of black and Asian origin in beginning and maintaining their writing careers?

It's a complex issue on several levels. Some editors will say they don't receive many submissions from black and Asian women which may or may not be true. From a writer's perspective, not only is publishing very difficult to break into but throw in race and it feels like an even steeper climb. It doesn't seem like the industry is very receptive bar some exceptions. Also, there is the risk factor. Certain editors may not necessarily think about commissioning diversely, they just commission writing to their taste. Others might do, but they limit the amount of black and Asian writers because they may see it as a risk. We're all human beings and good stories transcend so I think there needs to be some myth busting done at both ends of the spectrum. There are editors who have commissioned black and Asian female writers in the past and now. The issue is that it doesn't happen often enough and there are authors of colour whose books have sold very well. There's also an element of things aligning at the right time; getting the right agent, the right editor and a publishing house invested in the career of the writer.

 How many years has the prize been going and who were the women winners?

It's a biannual prize which has been running since 2012. The first winner was Minoli Salgado for her novel A Little Dust on the Eyes. It's due out later this year so people should keep an eye out for it. The prize has stayed connected to previous short listed writers and is passionate about creating opportunities for them. We're also open for submissions for this year's prize so I'd really encourage people to submit!

 What does the prize aim to achieve for individual writers?

To build their confidence, to let them know there's a space out there for their work, encourage them to keep working on their craft, to produce opportunities connecting them with audiences, to create pathways and support networks that take them through the tricky transitions of realising their publishing dream.

Finally, how would you like the prize to develop?

I'd like it to continue to grow in terms of profile and what it does for writers. Maybe have a short story prize as well and to keep forming strong, strategic partnerships with organizations and sponsors who are on the same page and keen to see more diversity in publishing.

The S I Leeds Literary Prize is now accepting entries for 2014. Submissions are accepted online - click here please - and will be accepted until the deadline of 31st March 2014. <o:p></o:p>

firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-237051036313736922.post-13877416764323278222014-02-24T00:30:00.000Z2014-02-26T22:24:19.588ZOn lies, liberation and Liberty

Today, leading human rights group Liberty celebrates its 80th birthday. It has invited over a hundred Writers at Liberty to each contribute a piece of new writing reflecting on the aims, values and actions of the organisation. This was mine. Visit the Liberty80 site to learn more.

"Renaissance Florence was an excellent place for collecting documents. Mainly because they didn't trust each other."

I am writing this essay while watching a documentary on Machiavelli. A historian's walking us through the Florentine state archives, showing the presenter a Medici's Most Wanted persecution list and pointing out that the individuals on it need not have done anything in particular to have attracted suspicion. The presenter visits the police station where Machiavelli was tortured despite there being no evidence of him being involved in the conspiracy he was accused of.

How wonderful that five hundred years on we live in such different times. These days it would be unthinkable that suspicious and secretive governments might follow, seize and physically brutalise innocent civilians based on little more than mere suspicion. What a relief that we now enjoy enlightened and mutually trustful societies in which authorities have integrity; leaders are honest and accountable; judges provide justice with moral consistency and without cultural bias; the heads of the media, police, politics and big business are not all friends with each other; public bodies are representative of the populace they serve; institutions of power have been washed clean of vested interests; and, as humble but proud citizens, we can truly say that what we see is what we get. How comforting to know that the written and spoken word are enjoined in the furtherance of freedom, truth, justice and progressive harmony instead of being deployed in subterfuge, falsified to justify abuse, misappropriated to bend meaning, exaggerated to support a warlike and crusading atmosphere, worked up to derail arguments or simply logged and aggregated to create a secret archive that can be trawled for incriminating details and useful trivia at any time without our knowledge or consent.

Oh. Aha. I see. And I hear the distant, mocking laughter of Machiavelli as he swigs spectral wine and schmoozes his fellow deceased in the afterlife.

To be fair if not approving, the exercise of power and the methods of that exercise have been employed by those at all points on the political scale for centuries. The <st1:country-region>Vatican</st1:country-region>, the Elizabethan court, trafficking rings, the CIA, drugs cartels, the current US Senate, the ancient Roman senate, Interpol, <st1:place>Hollywood</st1:place>studios, the music industry and the mafia all behave in exactly the same way. Their actions are justified by research, which is gained by information-gathering, which includes surveillance, spycraft, infiltration, entrapment, the truth obtained by deceitful means. Those who have power, whether it is legitimate or not, elected or not, formal or not, have always justified their deceitfulness by pointing to the ends, the consequences. Look, they say, we have prevented attacks you never knew about; we have stopped individuals before they committed crimes; we can pre-empt the future because of what we know. They argue that when it comes to the subtlety of government, equivocal definitions of what is right or wrong break down. They argue that it is naïve to talk about what is good and what is bad, which are academic concepts that would disintegrate when the strong light of reality hits them.

They would laugh in my face if I tried to assert that certain actions are simply wrong. Perhaps I should couch the argument in language that wrongdoers would understand: some actions result in no tangible gain, no increase in meaningful intelligence, no advance in strategic position and no overall improvement to justify massive costs in terms of logistics, economics, international standing and public trust. Torture is wrong and does not yield reliable or useful information. Detention without justification, without giving detainees any reason, without charge, without trial, without legal representation, without set duration, is wrong and creates trauma, instability and resentment. Following someone and keeping a record of everything they do, say, write or read is wrong and creates paranoia, alienation and hatred of government.

It is not naive to fight for human rights and civil liberties, it is imperative. Otherwise the future will be one of absolute and mutual mistrust in all directions, between and amongst citizens, countries and world communities. It is obscene that anyone who is a grassroots activist or a cultural advocate in defence of human rights should be monitored, as many of us are, as though we are perpetrators, abusers or lawbreakers. It is contemptible that petty laws should be invented in order to deter us, vilify us or criminalise us. When accused of flouting human rights, powerful organisations behave in a way that demonstrates that they do indeed routinely and systematically flout the human rights of others while aggressively defending their own interests. Having authority does not mean that you can do anything you want, then close ranks when caught.

The authorities will say that life's complicated and that we should simply go about our daily business being watched and followed and not bother our little heads about it. If we haven't done anything wrong, like Google something, go on holiday, go on a march or demonstration, speak at a panel event, sign a petition or have a chat with someone, we won't have anything to worry about.

Everyone knows that governing is complex and involves subtle negotiation between multiple parties with widely differing views. But when it comes to the fundamentals, some principles are inviolable. I would even go one further and say that there is no difference between the rights and freedoms I expect personally and within personal relationships and those I expect politically and within a public, cultural, legal and social context. They are one and the same. Every human being has the right to live free of physical violation, mental torture, domination, abuse, stalking, surveillance and control. Every human being has the right to live free of fear, acting from their own will and physical and mental self-determination, not because they have been threatened, coerced or blackmailed. Every human being's sense of dignity is intimately connected with their sense of privacy and their positive assumption of freedom of thought, freedom of movement, freedom of association and freedom of expression. These are not political values, subject to change according to who is in power. They are human values.

It is tempting to be blasé and say that the ruled have always been spied on by rulers, that it was ever thus and will always be thus. But it is not true that the present is exactly like the past only with different clothes, or that history is cyclical, or that you can't stop Them and shouldn't try to stand up to Them because They always get Their way in the end.

We have arrived at a unique time culturally and technologically. The authorities' combination of deceit, control, watchfulness, duplicity and cruelty, masked with outward civility and outright lies, is now played out on a global scale, abetted by ever more efficient means of gathering, storing and sorting information. Many international governments' covert political alliances and commercial deals for information sharing, the transportation and torture of suspected individuals, the sale of armaments, the levying of wars and exploitation of natural resources and emerging markets run counter to their publicly stated interests, values and allegiances.

This goes far beyond language, although I like a good political euphemism as much as anyone. Rendition means torture and extraordinary rendition means a lot of torture. Waterboarding – which sounds like a delightful low-impact sport that one might enjoy on <st1:place>Brighton</st1:place>'s seafront – is a euphemism for drowning someone. A resistance safe-zone is a rebel stronghold. A defence of privacy for privacy's sake can be an admission of guilt inviting further investigation. The axis of evil is a mythical land where the <st1:country-region>US</st1:country-region>sacrificed soldiers for oil. Security means control. Arming in self defence is incitement to attack. A demonstration can be disorder, resistance can be rebellion, organising resistance means planning insurgency. Companies axing thousands of jobs say they are rationalising, harmonising or recalibrating. Swingeing cuts which put families below the poverty line are rebranded as thrifty, vintage-chic austerity measures. In the Big Society you do everything as before only for free and without state assistance. A 'terrorist' can be anything from a civil disrupter to a threat to national security and being accused of being one, even without a shred of proof, can justify any mistreatment whatsoever.

As the world becomes smaller, it is becoming more divided. Just when communication becomes more convenient, it is polluted by wariness and suspicion. Just when we have an opportunity to globalise in thought and intention as well as business, we take up a defensive stance and cling to divisive rhetoric, ignorant stereotypes and mistrustful attitudes.

What I seek is not just liberty but liberation. Liberation from a mindset of mistrust and demonisation, the vilification of otherness and the paternalistic condoning of all surveillance, detention and physical abuse on the grounds of security. Liberation from the fear that someone is always following us or watching us. Liberation from our entrenchment in a cruel, self-justifying system of control which can be brought down on us at any moment, for any reason. And liberation from the aggressive, combative, violating machismo which argues disingenuously that violence is sometimes okay.

The only weapons ordinary citizens have against these trends are our actions and our words, although journalists are in a trickier position than ever. We are either violating the human rights of celebrities and relatives of murder victims or campaigning for truth and justice or accidentally leaving state secrets on the bus and being hauled up in front of political investigations committees or ethics boards or national security tribunals or international courts, depending on how our actions are interpreted and by whom. We are either peddling damaging lies or damaging truths. We are influential and dangerous, mistrusted because our behaviour is risky and independent. When we try to whistleblow we are accused of jeopardising structures that we could never possibly understand. When we try to investigate those structures and hit upon sensitive material we are scapegoated publicly as troublemakers.

Either way, the ferocity of the reaction to journalists' endeavours indicates something about the impact of the word. <st1:country-region>UK</st1:country-region>and US governments are just as frightened of journalists as governments in <st1:country-region>Iran</st1:country-region>, <st1:country-region>Afghanistan</st1:country-region>, <st1:country-region>Russia</st1:country-region>and <st1:country-region>Mexico</st1:country-region> are. They fear the word because it's powerful. Indeed they use that wordpower themselves, negatively, to stir up tactically useful prejudices, plant slanderous lies, maintain myths which work in their favour and gloss their own violence. Those of us on the other side use our position to create space for a truth denied, a suffering voiced, a protest lodged, a testimony revealed, a campaign launched. This is why I am a part of Writers at <st1:city>Liberty</st1:city>.

NOTES:

Read more about the genesis of the project in this brief write-up in Five Dials magazine.

If you would like to join Liberty and speak up for civil liberties and in defence of human rights, click here now.

To find out more about the many events and initiatives surrounding Liberty's 80th anniversary, please click here.

Some of the other writers involved in Writers at Liberty include Naomi Alderman, Yasmin Alhibai-Brown, Tariq Ali, Anthony Anaxagorou, Hephzibah Anderson, Lisa Appighanesi, Chloe Aridjis, Tash Aw, Damian Barr, Alex Bellos, John Berger, Eleanor Birne, Terence Blacker, Malorie Blackman, Rosie Boycott, William Boyd, Margaret Busby, Antonia Byatt, Georgia Byng, Shami Chakrabarti, Tracy Chevalier, Ian Cobain, Edmund De Waal, Jenny Diski, Anne Donovan, Tishani Doshi, Stella Duffy, Ian Dunt, Joe Dunthorne, Geoff Dyer, Fernanda Eberstadt, Lauren Elkin, Bernadine Evaristo, Michel Faber, Jenni Fagan, William Fiennes, Judith Flanders, Ken Follett, Hadley Freeman, Patrick French, Esther Freud, Janice Galloway, Misha Glenny, Niven Govinden, Lavinia Greenlaw, Jay Griffiths, Niall Griffiths, Mark Haddon, Sarah Hall, Mohsin Hamid, Peter Hobbs, Tom Hodgkinson, Marina Hyde, M. J Hyland, Rhian Jones, Sadie Jones, Jackie Kay, Emily King, Nick Laird, Nikita Lalwani, Darian Leader, Ann Leslie, Kathy Lette, Deborah Levy, Richard Mabey, AlisonMacLeod, Sabrina Mahfouz, Hisham Matar, Lise Mayer, Sophie Mayer, Hollie McNish, Michael Morpurgo, Blake Morrison, Tiffany Murray, Daljit Nagra, Patrick Ness, Lawrence Norfolk, Rachel North, Richard Norton-Taylor, Maggie O'Farrell, Catherine O'Flynn, Ben Okri, Don Paterson, Shyama Perera, Adam Phillips, Hannah Pool, Philip Pullman, Ross Raisin, Alice Rawsthorn, Philip Ridley, James Robertson, Michael Rosen, Hannah Rothschild, Elif Şafak, Taiye Selasi, Kamila Shamsie, Jo Shapcott, Nikesh Shukla, Ali Smith, Daniel Soar, Ahdaf Soueif, Craig Taylor, Barbara Taylor, Kate Tempest, Colin Thubron, Salley Vickers, Erica Wagner, Helen Walsh, Marina Warner and Sarah Waters.

email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-237051036313736922.post-54939365300122861542014-02-21T13:59:00.000Z2014-02-21T13:59:14.010ZSecond chance to catch some Speed: a sharp new play about sex, sexuality, race, class and - scariest of all - contemporary dating
I first met Iman Qureshi when she compered a night of lesbian and gay literature at the Vauxhall Tavern, where I was speaking at a panel event, alongside Paul Burston, founder of the Polari Prize. Charismatic and witty, Iman not only talked on and talked off all the acts, she also wrote the evening up for Diva magazine (warning: contains an ancient, sunbleached image of me looking like an eight year old alien who was brought up by wolves in a forest). The previous day she'd been at Wormwood Scrubs prison, "talking to the offenders about being gay." As someone who does prison work let me just say: that's a tough gig.

Having worked around the media since moving to London after her postgrad a few years ago, Qureshi has now turned playwright. She premiered her first play, Speed, at the Tristan Bates Theatre in Covent Garden from 3rd - 7th December 2013. It had a sold out run and is now back on again for two weeks, from Tuesday 25th February until Saturday 8th March 2014.

A scene from Speed, the new play be Iman Qureshi

Produced by Kali Theatre, who develop thrilling new plays by women writers of a South Asian background - National Theatre, are you listening? Women's work is to be showcased, not aggressively ignored - Speed was originally part of the 2013 Talkback Festival,. No surprise to discover that Speed combines the topicality, wit and political freshness of its author.

Another scene from Speed

As Iman Qureshi describes it herself,

It's a bittersweet comedy set at a speed dating event, and deals with deeper issues of race, sexuality, class and gender. Speed was born of my experience of leaving the safe, artificial confines of university and moving out into the real world. Suddenly all the theories I read about – class privilege, male privilege, white privilege, heterosexual privilege – became actual, lived struggles.

My naive bubble of belief that women can do anything men can do, deflated with every cat call, every tired cliche about lifting the veil and every statistic and experience which indicated the existence of a glass ceiling. It slowly became quite apparent that who you knew meant everything. What you knew meant very little. My hope that racial equality had been achieved was promptly destroyed when it was once suggested that my name was too unusual to sign off with when sending out emails to strangers.

Speed is a play of people railing against the cages that society constructs for them. Whether it's an intelligent woman exhausted by a world which reduces her to an object, or a person who rejects the gender role they are assigned at birth, or someone whose heritage leaves deep scars upon their sense of self worth, the characters in Speed are united by the common struggle of identity in a world which loves to box people in.

Speed dating seemed to be the perfect mechanism to tell these stories. What is less reductive that five minutes to sell yourself to a prospective partner? Five minutes to decide whether to invest in the stranger sitting across from you when all you have is essentially a CV - age, job, hobbies, religion. Speed dating is also a microcosm of a world where love is just another commodity. Where finding a partner becomes yet another box to tick on our 'To Do' list of life. Where real human connections often lose out to the pursuit of contrived fairy tale endings.

I was also eager to give brown people the dignity of being represented without tired cliches or cultural stereotypes. Speed, I hope, is light years apart from narratives of extremism or arranged marriage. It is a play about Asians not thinking of themselves as Asian and of their place in modern Britain, but rather thinking of themselves as people.

Speed will be on at the Tristan Bates Theatre in Covent Garden from Tuesday 25th February until Saturday 8th March 2014 . Click here to book.

firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-237051036313736922.post-25688964169279665002014-02-05T14:30:00.000Z2014-02-10T13:35:13.733Z"Women have gone from being considered inferior to men and viewed as property, to being considered inferior and viewed as objects." Persephone Speaks director Ivana Ivkovic Kelley on justice for survivors of rape in war.

A few months ago I covered the Kickstarter fundraising campaign for the documentary Persephone Speaks: The Forgotten Women of Bosnia, directed by filmmaker Ivana Ivkovic Kelley. Kelley and her team followed one woman, Bakira, through Bosnia to expose the systematic rape of countless thousands of women during the war and try to bring the men who authorised, organised and perpetrated these rapes to justice. A survivor of the mass rapes herself, Bakira has become a campaigner for other victims, despite receiving death threats and being subject to harassment and intimidation by those who wish to silence her and sabotage her work.

The first campaign for Persephone Speaks: The Forgotten Women of Bosnia was successful. Filming has been completed. Kelley has now launched a second campaign, to finish post production on the film, and there are only four days left to support this. Update, on 10th Feb 2014: you did it! The campaign is succeeding, meeting and exceeding its target.

At the heart of Bakira's work and Ivana Ivkovic Kelley's film is a challenge to the international community to open its eyes, acknowledge and address the use of rape as a concerted strategy in war; the particular sickness, destructiveness and cruelty of rape as a type of violence; the support of rapists' actions by a wider macho, misogynist rape culture which operates in all societies globally even in peacetime; the devastating years-long psychological, physical, cultural and social effects of rape on survivors; and the stigmatisation, punishing, abuse, denial and silencing of survivors, often by their own societies and even their own families.

As Kelley stated in the original fundraising campaign,

Females are nonstop targets during wartime, as demonstrated by the mass rapes implemented as a policy of genocide during the Bosnian war. Because this atrocity is grossly ignored by the international community and international tribunals, this film revisits one survivor who continues to fight for justice on behalf of others all over the world. ... The continued treatment of women around the world, especially during times of conflict, needs to be heard through as many channels as possible. Unfortunately, war rape survivors are often seen as a problem, a by-product of war that needs to be swept under the rug.

However, the fight for justice is a hard won, waged by those who carry not just psychological and physical trauma but who have the least in terms of power, money, mobility and status. Both individually and at a mass scale, within families and within governments, within cultures and within whole societies, the trend is to punish victims and protect perpetrators, to silence victims and give perpetrators a platform, to abuse the abused and assist the abusers, to expose the victims and cover for perpetrators, to expose and question the behaviour and words of victims and condone and gloss those of the perpetrators. It is the victims who must do all the hard work, in addition to recovering personally, to gain justice – or even to be heard – while the perpetrators sit back, enjoying the victims' torment and their own impunity. This is the case in all instances of male sexual violence, in wartime and peacetime alike.

The perpetrators and those who authorised them are fully entrenched in and enfranchised by established networks of patriarchal force. They are well-connected, well-resourced and mutually supportive. They are interested in power, not justice, and cannot be shamed morally because they are proud of what they did. If rapists did not love raping, they wouldn't do it. If their apologists did not love rape, they would not assist and cover for rapists. Perpetrators and their apologists alike are enraged which victims of male violence speak up. However, despite their sadism and lack of shame – indeed, the shame and guilt which perpetrators should feel is transferred onto the victims – they can and must be brought publicly to justice through established international legal channels.

Persephone Speaks follows Bakira as she collects other survivors' testimonies are seeks to have them heard in the courts in Sarajevo or the Hague. She also tracks down where some of the perpetrators live and presents this information to the courts. Commenting on the rewarding of perpetrators, Kelley wrote in the original fundraising campaign:

In many cases, the perpetrators are either awaiting trial or have been rewarded by the Serbian government for successfully running a "camp", often in the form of a promotion within the local police force. We have witnessed incidents of this same "reward" behavior in similar conflicts around the world. In situations such as these, many survivors have expressed anger, fear, and shock, especially when they see their attacker, years later, in high level positions or vacationing beside them on the Adriatic coast, which numerous victims have witnessed.

The first campaign for Persephone Speaks:The Forgotten Women of Bosnia was successful. Filming has been completed. Ivana Kelly has now launched a second campaign, to finish post production on the film.

The context has obviously not changed. It beggars belief that the world community and people in general live not just in denial of this but are actively antagonistic and punitive towards survivors. One of many shocking moments during Kelley's research has been the conversion of a rape camp into a luxury spa and hotel, whose manager dismisses survivors' testimonies as "lies, lies, all lies."

This is a film which must be completed and shown to the world. In the new campaign for post production funding, Kelley states,

We saw the same thing occur in Rwanda, the Congo, Liberia, Uganda, Bangladesh, Haiti, Cambodia, Cyprus, Darfur, and now in Syria... all in devastating numbers. How survivors are treated post-conflict in one region of the world, regardless of whether it is in the heart of Europe, or the heart of Africa, and whether perpetrators continue to be brought to justice, has a huge impact on how survivors will be treated going forward, regardless of geographical location. The sexual violation of women erodes the fabric of a community in a way that few weapons can. Rape's damage can be devastating because of the strong communal reaction to the violation and the pain stamped on entire families.

The campaign for post-production seeks to raise $16,000, but ideally $22,000 and is partway there. Every time I and my colleagues cover the issue of rape in war the kickback is so interesting: in amongst the perpetrator excusal, hate mail ("You wouldn't write about rape so much if it didn't make your cunt tingle" is one choice line from the messages I receive) and victim-blaming there is a strong seam of positive passion and support, of other victims and survivors worldwide who are determined that this story be made loud instead of being silenced. Each film or article is a door opening onto millions of untold testimonies. Whenever I write about male violence against women and girls I uncover the immense trauma and pain of survivors, and their rage. These are a form of energy in themselves, which far outshout the bleating of apologists. We do not have the hatred, violating malice and anger of perpetrators and their friends but pain, determination, truthfulness and the desire for justice are far worthier substitutes.

To support this second and final phase of the Persephone Speaks: The Forgotten Women of Bosnia campaign, I contacted Ivana Ivkovic Kelley. She very kindly gave her time to answer my questions.

Why is it so important to make Persephone Speaks: The Forgotten Women of Bosnia?<o:p></o:p>

I have been haunted by the reality women and girls seem to be increasingly facing during wartime. Women and girls have transitioned from being "the spoils" of war, to part of an operational military doctrine to ruin a community, a culture, a country: they have gone from being spoils to being used as actual weapons with which to conduct genocide in some cases. This is how we know we continue to live in an extremely unjust, unfair global society in which women have gone from being considered inferior to men and viewed as property, to being considered inferior and viewed as objects.

We really should not be measuring how much things have changed for women by the number of successful women that exist in our world today, but rather by how little has changed when there are parts of our world where it is legal to commit femicide if a woman simply looks at another man, rides a bicycle, leaves an abusive husband, gives birth to a girl child; or in wartime is used as the cheapest, most destructive weapon around. It is the most destructive because raping a woman or girl is not just an attempt to kill her spirit, it is the attempt to kill the spirit of her loved ones. In turn, multiplied, this has the ability to destroy entire communities at their core. The woman, after all, is the heart of a community.<o:p></o:p>

What is your particular reason for wanting to make Persephone Speaks?

I have been haunted by the stories and testimonies I translated during the last years of the war in Bosnia. I was in college in the US at the time but knew I had to be "in it" to help in some way, so I wrote my thesis on systematic rape used as a tool of genocide, that it was the first time in history that it's been documented as part of a plan to wipe out a people. I travelled there while the war was still going on and connected with a group in Zagreb that was assisting the [mostly] Bosnian Muslim survivors of the rape camps, travelling to refugee camps often across enemy lines, providing them with food, clothes and medical aid as well collecting testimonies for eventual use in the Hague and local criminal courts. I knew that one day I would return to document where these women are now, and what has changed, both judicially and whether those who were vocal before have given up their fight for justice. <o:p></o:p>

Has it been risky to make Persephone Speaks?

Yes. From the onset we have been receiving hateful, oftentimes degrading, comments on our Facebook page as well as individual emails through our project page on Kickstarter…sometimes an individual will send me a tweet saying they would like to interview me for a story they're doing, only to end up shouting on the other end of the phone that I better watch myself because I don't know what I'm talking about, that it was only Serbian women who were in the camps and that they were raped by Bosnian Muslim soldiers wearing Serb uniforms…or if I knew better, I'd keep my mouth shut or the same thing will happen to me.

It hasn't happened as often as I would expect, but I feel that it's pretty horrible for even one person to come forward and completely deny the reality of that war, the reality of photographs by such courageous photojournalists as Andree Kaiser and Ron Haviv, the reality of testimonies and the reality of what you feel when you look into a survivor's eyes. There's absolutely no denying the blanket atrocities that were done by a distinct, very clear perpetrator, especially when there is documentation and there are testimonies by individual perpetrators who have been brought to justice at the Hague that yes, this is what happened.

It is so important, I feel, for a particular government to confront its past, acknowledge and apologise to the victims, survivors, their families and communities, in order for healing to work. This is what human rights champions and survivors such as Bakira will publicly state when she holds forth, risking her life, in front of a memorial at a mass grave, as the local Serb officials in what is now an ethnically cleansed town attempt to erase the word "genocide" from said memorial.

This is a pretty big problem. As certain countries attempt to enter the EU, there needs to be outside pressure from Belgium to first recognise genocide happened and for the said government to formally acknowledge and apologise. Instead, those Serb politicians in the minority who have spoken out and have acknowledged genocide and mass rape are not only the least favourite but they are, oftentimes, placed on a death list. When we were shooting footage in the ethnically cleansed town of Visegrad (now part of Republika Srpska), we were met with our own share of passive hostility: asked to shut our camera off and leave the premises as soon as we entered the lobby of Vilina Vlas (a former rape camp now spa hotel); confronted on a tour bus led by a Serbian Orthodox priest denying the genocide; even in talking to local Serbs saying that they've always lived here and no, there was never any massacre of hundreds on the bridge and no, there was never any rape camp here. It all ended with me having my picture taken by a local Serbian man sitting on a bench with his friends, holding up his cell phone and menacingly telling me "now we have your picture too."

Back in the States, I've received hate mail from Serbian Americans, some who are successful, running such things as a publishing company. I keep stressing that this film is about what happens to women throughout the world, during times of conflict, yet it is very hard to ignore the geopolitical reality of what happened in Bosnia. When discussing what happened to the women and girls there, there is simply no escaping the military doctrine put in place by one country to ethnically cleanse the other. There are risks that simply come with the territory and I'm certainly not the first documentary filmmaker to encounter it, nor will I be the last.

What exact work remains to be done on Persephone Speaks?

We completed production in October 2013 and are now in post-production. We are having the material transcribed, then any dialogue in Bosnian translated, then we get to the heavy duty editing. We have about 40-50 hours of footage from time spent in Bosnia in 2010 and 2011 and our first meeting with Bakira, to our time there this past summer and autumn.

We are in dire need of assistance to help us cover our costly post production costs. During the editing process, we will cover archived footage, music composition, sound and eventually the transition from a rough cut to a polished cut that we will be submitting to film festivals. Our hope is for this film to have its premiere at the Sarajevo International Film Festival this coming August, 2014, as we couldn't think of a more appropriate venue.<o:p></o:p>

Is there anything like else like Persephone Speaks: Forgotten Women of Bosnia?

There are similar documentary films that have come out, such as Calling the Ghosts (1996) by Mandy Jacobson and Karmen Jelincic Ross and the brilliant documentary series Women, War & Peace (2013) produced by Abigail Disney. Part One of that, I Came To Testify, is about war rape in Bosnia.

What sets mine apart is seeing the day to day struggles that a survivor and activist encounters both on a professional and personal front. Showing a woman like Bakira not just fighting the good fight but reminding an audience that these are women who love to play with their grandchildren and find a meditative, healing solace getting their hands dirty in a garden. That regardless of ethnicity, culture, language, these women are our sisters, mothers, grandmothers, and friends. When an atrocity on such a grand scale happens to women anywhere in the world, we need to help spread their call for justice. Hopefully one day, women will not be viewed as property to be killed legally or sexually trafficked en masse, we won't be viewed as weapons of war. Until that happens, in some ways, the work will never be done.

Contribute to the final campaign, to fund post-production on Persephone Speaks: Forgotten Women of Bosnia, here.

Further articles:

Syrian Exodus: health, help, hypocrisy (Huffington Post)

Women, war and peace: what we can all learn from the Zimbabwean women fighting violence as elections approach (Huffington Post)

Busting a rape myth for Mumsnet's We Believe You campaign (Mumsnet)

Women's rights: have things really improved for women in the last 50 years? (Daily Mail)

Disclosure: I was one of the many funders in the first campaign, donating $1000 to support it. Ivana Ivkovic Kelley is a stranger to me. She is not a friend of mine. I had never heard of her before I became aware of the campaign and I have never met or spoken with her, except to ask her via email for some comments for this feature. I have no role in the making of the film and am not invested in any way in its outcome, except as a human rights journalist who cares about the issues.

firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-237051036313736922.post-39894231415108801952014-02-01T00:30:00.000Z2014-02-01T00:30:00.288ZIndia: is it safe? A question answered

This is a guest post by academic and writer Mamata Nanda. Previous articles by the same author include the following:

International Commercial Surrogacy in India: Exploitation, Poverty, Alternatives and Survival

Gender, class, race, rape: a sexual assault trial

British jobs for British people: a migratory perspective

Calcutta, 2013. Image (c) Bidisha

I was born in Calcutta (now known as Kolkata) in India. I grew up there, went to university there, spent many charming evenings with friends there and worked there until I emigrated to the UK 40 years ago. Despite the dust and the chaos, being myself among people who are generally open, genuine, courteous and uncomplicated is something I long to go back to year after year.

Not long before I made my most recent trip back, two of my longstanding friends in England - both academics who, like me, have worked in the field of technology all their lives - were at my house having lunch. I was telling them about a previous trip and how impressed my daughter and I were by the progress the younger generation of Indian women have made. This was the same time that the news of the gang rape, torture and murder of a woman on a bus in Delhi was spreading worldwide. To this, one of my friends kept asking, "But is India safe?" I told her that for a long time Delhi had had a bad reputation for sexual violence, but those were isolated incidents, occurring late at night, in certain areas, committed by a certain type of people. Then I added, "Let's face it, sexual abuse of women happens everywhere in the world, doesn't it? And, in any case, Calcutta is much safer."

Having thought it over, I have a better answer to my friend's question.

Indian women have made enormous leaps. They are ambitious, proud, independent, uncaring of prejudicial criticisms and forward looking. They care less about what men think of their looks and behaviour and are more focussed on their own aspirations and achievements. This is true of women of all social and economic classes - within their own contexts.

In the past, educated and ambitious women went into careers such as teaching, academic research and medicine. They very rarely made the top ranks but, within a certain confinement, they earned respect and authority as long as they maintained the code of conduct expected of their gender and class. Poorer women worked all day, at home, in the fields and in rich peoples' houses to feed their children and do their best to give them a better life. Middle class men had always been ambitious and high achieving. They took jobs wherever they got the best opportunity, within India or abroad. Poorer men had little or no money but they were hard working, God fearing and simple minded. At the risk of sounding patronising, they were happy and busy trying to feed their families.

With India's economic progress, things have changed a great deal. Men are enjoying even more privilege and opportunities than before. Women are getting into careers monopolised by men in the past and they are progressing much further up their career ladders. Those people now have better spending power than non-resident Indians like me who, in the past, used to enjoy the privilege of spending foreign money in a land with a low cost of living. However, although there has been a significant trickledown effect towards the poorer classes, the difference between the rich and the poor is now enormous because of the phenomenal rise of the middle classes.

The daily papers in India are littered with reports of rapes and murders of women. We have all read about the Danish woman who has recently been gang raped in Delhi. As in every country in the world, sexual abuse and rape always existed but were not reported because of the stigma attached for the women survivors. Today, Indian women are ready to report such crimes. Most of those are committed by the lower economic and social classes. It goes without saying that middle class men commit sexual crimes also, but that happens in India the same way it does in every country in the world and the perpetrators get away with it the same way everywhere.

Having thought about the rise in sexual violence in India, I have come to the conclusion that this is one of the side effects of the country's growth in economic power and, more significantly, the progress women have made. Since everyone has more, people - both rich and poor - have become greedy. Men who have not made much progress but whose greed has increased with the increasing aspirations in the country have lost all sense of reality, fear, civility and self-respect. These are not starving or destitute people; they have access to TV and mobile phones, they walk around the shopping malls and can see how much they still cannot afford. They grow increasingly jealous and desperate, full of vengeance for those who are moving ahead and they want what is not theirs. They are angry with the women who they could command before and can't anymore and they want those women too. So they grab by force what they cannot get legitimately - they steal, rape and rob. The rape of foreigners is a bigger achievement: the more unavailable the target, the better the fulfilment.

The answer to my friend's question is No, India is not so safe anymore. Calcutta was once safer than Delhi but, since the rape case last year, there has been a rapid increase in rape in my home city too - almost like a war. It's the same old story: men using physical violence against women as a weapon to gain an upper hand.
email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-237051036313736922.post-33641009176263380702013-12-30T22:44:00.000Z2014-01-13T00:37:22.507ZThe Story Ritual

The end of 2013 saw the launch of Flight Press, a new publisher of short fiction. Its first collection, Edgeways, collated the winning and shortlisted entries in the 2013 Spread the Word short story prize which I judged alongside Courttia Newland and Tania Hershman. The Edgeways anthology also featured a new short story by me, entitled The Comforting of Children, and this essay on the ritual of reading short fiction.

Everyone knows the story ritual. It begins with 'Once upon a time' and it ends, in childhood at least, with 'And they all lived happily ever after.'

As we get older the stories become more complex, more shadowy and circumspect. Perhaps yearning for some comfort and familiarity we turn back to the fairytales, fables and adventure stories we knew from childhood, only to realise that even they contain striking ambiguities and subversions. Bluebeard: wife killer. The wolf in Little Red Riding Hood: murderer preying on the elderly, human eater, sartorial necrophiliac and cross-dresser, child groomer. The prince in Cinderella: foot fetishist. The prince in Rapunzel: hair fetishist. The prince in Sleeping Beauty: rapist. Snow White: female masochist who finds happiness as seven men's domestic drudge.

Even these stories, with their generic, Disney-colonised contemporary names, arise from rituals of recounting adventures, creation myths and folklore which long predate written culture and are strongly echoed by countless narratives all over the world. They are full of death, betrayal, selfishness, desire, heroism, ambition, bloody-mindedness, defiance, friendship, sadness, enmity: the stuff of life. The stories embody near-universal hopes and fears, provide escape, give warning, reprove or reward certain desires. They reflect both the time of their telling (and retelling) and the universality of our own impulses.

The story ritual isn't about whether the narrative is committed to paper or to the air and the ears. It's not even about literature, as such. Journalists and news crews pursue emerging stories, fashion spreads in high-end magazines are referred to as stories, private investigators try to get to the bottom of a story and witnesses of crimes give their stories to the police. Con artists have their stories too, often very elaborate ones. Part of the ritual is that you follow a story, if it's a good one, all the way to the end. The mark of a rich tale, whether it's epigrammatic or epic, is that you want to know what happens next. And if that ending is weak, the reader feels not irritated but actually betrayed. We are galled and disappointed, as if we were set up in good faith and then sold a dud.

I'm always intrigued by nurseries and prep schools that have a soft-furnished, quiet, special story corner, as if stories deserve their own place as well as their own time in which to flourish. Similarly, the ritual of parents reading their kids to sleep, which always struck me as incredibly narcissistic on the part of the adults, is a memory apparently cherished by many. My own childhood story ritual was listening to a tape of The Snow Queen every night as I attempted to drift off. The sound of the queen flying up to the children's attic window, tapping on the glass and keening their names in a ghostly voice is one of my most harrowing, vivid recollections. It was only fiction, but fictions provoke real reactions.

Later, I was given a wonderful hardback book of hundreds of stories, each exactly a page long. One was about a young woman with waist length blonde hair. She was so tired of being teased (or as we say these days, sexually harassed) about it that she tried to dye it black in the kitchen sink. It turned green and she was mocked even more badly when she went to school the next day. I never quite worked out the moral of the story. Either it was 'just be yourself' or 'just be sexy'.

Readers have rituals: they read before bed or on a long afternoon, in the chair they always use, or on the commute to work. They do or don't fold pages, break spines, underline things or read the last paragraph first. Writers also have rituals, some more OCD than others. I know some who kiss their copies of Pablo Neruda or George Eliot when beginning a new book, put a lucky charm on their desk or, getting to the trickier end of common behavioural disorders, make sure they've washed their hands three times before they touch the computer keys. Others go to their study with just the right cup of tea and just the right biscuit.

We are hoping that if we get the ritual right, it'll repay us in words, in inspiration, in insight and good judgement. All of us are striving to write that one, perfect, satisfying thing. Every word has to count, every shift has to happen at the right moment. It goes deep yet seems light; it's a structure of iron hung with silk. I once met a writer whose story had won a competition I co-judged. She hadn't expected to win. 'I just wrote it in a week,' she said, exhilarated and disbelieving. I reeled back. It takes me months.

The story ritual is so powerful that we carry its psychological imprint with us for the rest of our lives, even to the point of naivety. We assume that our lives will have a coherent narrative balance, moral shape, emotional form. We go into our thirties and forties believing that things will always work out in the end, with a natural karmic equilibrium; that we will fall in love, perhaps even at first sight like so many fictional characters; that we deserve or are justified in pursuing adventure; that any event or act can be explained and therefore understood; that any pathology or feeling can somehow be decoded. We assume that this mysterious thing called karma will eventually repay the balance of evil and good. We believe that every story we live through must have an appropriate end, which we call 'closure', and that we can bring this about as though we are protagonists. It is from stories, nothing more, nothing less, that we believe that everything that has begun will be ended, and will end somehow fittingly. This does not happen often in reality, yet still we keep the faith.

I had to come to faith sooner or later. Underlying all world religions is an indissoluble trinity of faith, story and ritual. The great books of nearly all the world's major religious belief systems are really just short story collections presented either as emblematic myths or as faithful accounts of true events. And all the rituals of the world's religions are built on those stories, and everything we believe is built not on the evidence of our own eyes but on stories. Angels and other supernatural harbingers do not exist. The Garden of Eden did not exist. A man cannot walk on water. A god can't have ten arms or four arms or a monkey's head or an elephant's head. The part-animal sentinels and judges of the Egyptian underworld do not exist. But it doesn't matter. We read the stories, we heed them and we invest them with meaning, regardless of whether they are true or possible. We extrapolate their conclusions, build them into morals and use them to structure the laws, beliefs, values and customs of societies of billions of people. We use the stories to justify both our violence and our generosity, our exploitation and our humanity, our abusiveness and our self-sacrifice. We perform various rituals we invented, inspired by the stories, and have done so for thousands of years. That is the power of the story ritual: to underpin, explain and motivate human society for as long as we have existed.

Further reading:

All Bone and Muscle, an essay on the art and craft of short fiction which I wrote for the University of Chichester's short story module.

firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-237051036313736922.post-27860056077421081432013-12-10T01:28:00.000Z2014-01-04T22:48:06.958ZSpread the Word about a gorgeous new anthology called Edgeways

Carol Ann Duffy and Warsan Shire
Photo (c) Spread the Word

I've worked with and admired the London based literary organisation Spread the Word for as long as I can remember. Spread the Word support the city's most exciting writing talent, seek out new voices, organise public panel discussions about topical issues in literature and publishing, launch writing competitions, support the development of new work and generally inspire creativity and energy in anyone who encounters them. This autumn, their great achievement was to bring to public notice one of the most thrilling, searing and original writers I've ever read - the poet Warsan Shire, who is the inaugural poet laureate for London. Read the BBC's coverage of her appointment here. As The Bookseller and The Evening Standard report, her appointment was announced by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy. I believe that Shire, along with Malika Booker, are the two most exciting poets and riveting performers creating in the UK today.

Totally fab image of Malika Booker taken by Naomi Woddis for Femficatio.
Visit the source site by clicking here.

After many years of hosting panel discussions with critics and authors, mapping the changes in the industry and encouraging fresh work from hundreds of writers, both emerging and established, Spread the Word are stepping up and becoming publishers in their own right. Introducing.... Flight Press:

I love that inky, indelible looking black block-printed star and punky grassroots Soviet template font. Initially producing sleekly formatted e-books, Flight Press plans to create limited edition, lovely-to-have-and-hold publications like the gorgeous volumes made by Pereine Press and & Other Stories, who published the 2012 Booker-shortlisted breakaway hit, Swimming Home by Deborah Levy, which I discuss here in an essay entitled Even The Rich Suffer.

The debut release by Flight Press is an anthology called Edgeways. Initially an e-book, the anthology brings together the winning and shortlisted writers of the 2013 Spread the Word writing competition for short fiction, which I judged alongside the writers Courttia Newland and Tania Hershman. In judging fiction I am always reminded that talent is not scarce but common. It's waiting to be discovered and is richly deserving of a platform, publication, critical attention, readerly celebration and support from the wider industry.

Courttia Newland's fiction is passionate, topical, fierce; he writes with urgency, great observation and grit. Tania Hershman's short fiction combines cerebral intensity, bullseye imagery and technical precision. And I'm super company at lunch. The winning story in the competition was Living It Edgeways by Claire Sita Fisher. We loved it for its upfront, fresh, mobile voice and impeccable creation of character. The story's narrated by a young guy whose humour and streety restlessness hide perceptiveness and vulnerability. Fisher's story was cut through with witty observations about city life, street slang and the effects of one incident on an entire family.

Edgeways the anthology has been edited by Courttia Newland, who's written an introduction about the competition's shortlisted entries, explaining what we were looking for, where we agreed and where we politely diverged. Tania Hershman has also contributed a piece of her unutterably perfect short fiction. The competition entrants whose pieces made the shortlist are Claire Sita Fisher with her winning story, Nick Black, KJ Orr, Toby Litt, Deirdre Shanahan and Saradha Soobrayen.

I have contributed an essay called The Story Ritual, about the art and craft of the short story. I've also written a new story entitled The Comforting of Children. It's my first work of original fiction since Dust, in November 2011. The success of that story, which can be read here, reprinted by the University of Chichester, gave me the faith to write The Comforting of Children. I can't think of a better way to explore the craft of short fiction than by being a small part of new anthologies whose originality make such a strong case for the power of literature and the excellence, diversity and prevalence of new voices.

Further reading:

All Bone and Muscle: an essay on short fiction written for the University of Chichester short story syllabus.

Edgeways is available now as an ebook, published by Flight Press and edited by Courttia Newland.

email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-237051036313736922.post-85255923739620393352013-12-05T11:30:00.000Z2013-12-09T11:57:56.141ZThe Cut: daughters, elders and local health workers speak out about female genital mutilation in Western Kenya

If you're interested in the issue of female genital mutilation you might also want to read Cutting Us Down To Size: Working To End Female Genital Mutilation

An excellent film called The Cut by Beryl Magoko – not to be confused with the equally impressive recent British documentary The Cruel Cut – received its UK premiere at the 2013 London Feminist Film Festival and was awarded the Best Feature prize there a couple of weeks ago. Filmed in <st1:country-region>Uganda</st1:country-region> and <st1:country-region>Kenya</st1:country-region>, The Cut is a careful and intelligent documentary which enables diverse members of the featured small, rural communities where FGM is practised to speak about its meaning and history, while maintaining a clear but unpressing authorial sympathy towards the girls who undergo it. Despite comprising interviews and talking heads as well as some close documentary observation, ultimately the body language and silent reactions of the young women speak the loudest. The Cut has already won Best East African Film at the Kenya International Film Festival as well as many other plaudits.

The Cut establishes female genital mutilation as a social practice with a history so longstanding that even its apologists cannot explain it adequately. Both those who oppose and those who defend it mention the pressure girls are under to have it done.

Watching some of the older male apologists for FGM is a chilling experience. They display an odd, chippy defensiveness at being challenged and their comments are shot through with contempt for the (as they insinuate) wilfulness and irrational bloody-mindedness of women. One man says, "If a girl wants she will be circumcised. She runs away and goes for circumcision." What we see in the film, instead, is the establishment of a haven for countless girls who have gone there to avoid being cut. Despite the existence of this refuge some parents, of both sexes, take the girls away against their will to be cut.

"They make a small mark on the knee," says one man dismissively. I do not think he is lying outright, although he is speaking with heavy euphemism; I think he genuinely does not quite know exactly what is involved. As the film goes on to show, FGM is a female-perpetrated community act in the moment, although as a cultural practice it is endorsed by both sexes and it is ultimately approved, instigated and organised by men with social power. As one woman warns, "the sons of council elders inherit the right to organise circumcision." Despite FGM being presented by detractors and apologists alike as something done to women by other women, often those women who are closest to them, its survival as a tradition can only be ended officially by council sons of council fathers, not mothers, wives or daughters.

Another man in the early minutes of the film insists, "We don't force them, nobody forces them." But force is not always physical and momentary. Peer pressure, the weight of long tradition, the heat of expectation, the actions of the majority and the social cost of resisting the practice constitute different types force in themselves – forces which are sometimes harder to resist than the application of physical power. One adult woman explains how an uncircumcised girl will be ostracised and describes being shouted at, verbally abused, mistreated and cold-shouldered at her school, where 98% of the girls had been circumcised. The girls are caught between forces which are at once oppressive of their own instincts and free will and yet socially inclusive, communally approved, deemed to bring order and harmony to all. Another woman says carefully, "a good child has to obey the parents." Her personal pain and regret are subsumed into a wider vision of what would please the people beyond herself.

One of the many subtle arguments The Cut makes is that female genital mutilation is related to poverty and education. One man says that when a girl has been cut "she can get married, give birth and handle a family," even though it is obvious that the girls in the film are still virtually children. The under-education (in terms of both social values and academic status) of the parents creates a cycle in which the under-education, physical brutalisation, sexual and labour exploitation and social disempowerment of girls is perpetuated. The cutting of a girl is presented as a sign of her initiation into womanhood and therefore her readiness to marry and procreate. Anti-FGM speakers in the film rail against "illiterate parents" who do not see the value of education for a girl; they circumcise and marry off daughters who might have wanted to continue with their studies.

However, The Cut also conveys how strong the anti-FGM movement is, with leadership coming from both sexes. Indeed the defensiveness and vehemence of the apologists, virtually all of whom are of an older generation, shows that the drive to end the practice is gaining ground. We see groups of very little girls chanting and holding up signs reading, "Don't circumcise me! Don't hurt me!" and "When you circumcise a girl, you destroy her life." Male preachers urge, "Leave this outdated cultural practice." Handsome men of marrying age have a pretty persuasive line that makes me smile: they say that FGM excises "the sweetest and most delightful part of a woman." I always thought that my most delightful parts were my brain and my heart, but there you go. Another man says he doesn't want to marry a woman who has undergone FGM because "I want her to be sexually satisfied." Another man tells a crowd, "You can tell the difference between [happy] wives who have not had it done, and [unhappy] wives who have."

The Cut is expertly structured, with a sense of foreboding that increases with every testimony. The women who have been cut, some of them looking barely ten years old, seem bashful, not angry, when expressing their pain and disgust. "It was very painful. I will never forget," says one, her eyes sliding as she remembers. Another represses a shudder as she describes the way she was mutilated: "They would use [the razor] to cut everything [around the genital area]."

The Cut's masterstroke – to use exactly the wrong word – is the access Beryl Magoko has gained to the circumcision rituals themselves. These happen for both sexes. The boys are circumcised in one area and we see them surrounded by countless male friends, neighbours and relatives, whooping, hopping, singing and celebrating. Then we see them standing with their willies hanging out, all looking like skinny kids. Each one clenches his jaw and keeps his chin up, lips firm, eyeing the boys on either side, full of determination not to show any pain. Despite that, quite clearly, it hurts a hell of a lot. When the circumcision is done the boys look dazed and miserable, oblivious to the partying around them. They're escorted back home by all their friends, bleary eyed and unsteady, silent, as though all they want to do is lie down in a darkened room.

The girls are in a different area. Just like the boys, they are surrounded by their same-sex relatives and supporters. The atmosphere is wonderful, full of celebration, connection and encouragement. I can well understand the sense of rejection and chagrin, even confusion and blame, that a community would feel and then bring vengefully to bear on a girl who refused to undergo FGM. And I could well understand the conflicted feelings of any girl who does not want to be cut yet who is naturally drawn – as anyone would be – to a celebratory event in which everyone participates and supports each other. This is not about girls being too weak to say no, but about the strength of a culture in persuading, muffling, denying or overriding that no. Additionally, The Cut makes it painfully clear that the girls who submit to FGM do not do so because they are passive but because they are innocent. The reality of what exactly will be done to them is concealed from them until it's too late.

At the FGM ceremony there is an atmosphere of frenzy, an undercurrent of brisk determination to see it through despite anyone's hesitation or aversion and a core of dark zeal, as at any rite where blood is to be shed. Amidst the celebrations of the brightly dressed older women around them – a celebration in whose rhythms and music I can't help but hear the refrain cycle-of-abuse, cycle-of-abuse – the girls themselves are subdued. They become increasingly and instinctively nervous as they are jostled to stand in a line and then pushed down to sit on the ground, then lie back when their time comes. We see money changing hands as women buy pairs of surgical gloves from a vendor.

The innocence of the girls is such that one casually helps her mother get a fresh surgical blade out of its sterile packet. The girls are forced back and told to relax with their legs bent and naturally apart. Fear spreads from girl to girl to girl. The older women grow carping, bossy and a little physically rough, relishing their one moment of power. They bully the girls and egg each other on. One of them holds the razor and cuts a girl. It's unwatchable.

Afterwards, there is silence. The girls look sick, queasy with pain. Their faces are rubbery with shock and, for some, tears pour thickly down their cheeks. Their eyes are dead. The girls are unable to sit up. They are clearly, obviously, visibly traumatised, in shock. A sizzle of glee passes through the older women who throng, dance, gather. They look triumphant, like bullies who've gained a point.

A health worker filmed in her clinic says, "after FGM you can have death from bleeding out. You can catch an infection. There can be a cross-infection."

A male apologist insists, "girls don't bleed and are not cut painfully." His comment is not just motivated by an arrogant dismissal of female pain but - as echoed by many of the speakers - a suspicion of health workers. Multiple commentators hint that "the negative effects come from doctors" who they say are misleading people about the risks of FGM despite having to deal with the consequences when things go wrong. There is, overall, a resistance to the kind of change that the clinic symbolises: a national, standardised and networked healthcare system relying on medicalised, non-naturopathic treatments. Something very simple lies at the heart of all this: resistance to change and fear of the loss of defining and unifying rites. "It may end gradually. We can't stop abruptly. We say it's an initiation and we believe it's good for us," says one man. Another person repeats fervently, "It will not end" because "culture doesn't end. Ever."

The girls are escorted home. Their faces have been daubed in talcum powder to mark them as 'initiated'. With colourful hats and parasols held over their heads they look like little ghost emperors. The pressure of the bodies around them and the willpower of the crowd seem to be the only things holding them up. The people are singing, dancing and jogging alongside the girls.

A still from The Cut by Beryl Magoko

It's a terrible journey back. The girls pass in and out of consciousness, crying, staggering, fainting, sweating and collapsing, barely able to walk. Their eyeballs roll, their necks go floppy. Blood runs down their legs. They are shaken firmly, scolded and harangued. There is no tenderness whatsoever. Never before has it been so clear that FGM – the entire day, not just the moment of cutting – is not about celebrating the start of womanhood but about forcing female obedience, beginning a trauma which makes girls mentally vulnerable and therefore susceptible to further control and abuse, women bullying girls and the deliberate debilitation and weakening of strong, healthy female flesh. FGM is a socially sanctioned brutalisation process justified as a rite so ancient that nobody can remember its purpose, thereby leaving it usefully open to conventional patriarchal justifications.

A woman describes the "excruciating pain" of female genital mutilation.

Another woman says, "I regretted having gone there – but it was too late." It was done.

We see the girls being taken home, glassy eyed. They are so traumatised physically and mentally that they're unable to speak. They are encouraged to lie down. They can barely manoeuvre themselves. We see one mother trying to get her daughter to eat a biscuit. The daughter is unresponsive. She is too weak to chew.

In the aftermath there are countless physical problems, in addition to the mental trauma. It is difficult to urinate and it can take up to three weeks to walk properly. One woman says she "can't even bathe alone. You need to be held." Much older women describe how they "staggered" and "couldn't sleep or walk for ten days with the pain."

The wound must be left to heal in a certain way. If a girl sleeps with her legs closed the wound is forcibly re-opened.

"It's so painful that I can't even explain," says a woman.

"It is like taking a hot nail and putting it on the wound," says another woman.

A health worker explains the biologically necessity of the clitoris, which helps the vagina to stretch during childbirth. But FGM can remove the clitoris, leaving scar tissue: "Scar tissue doesn't expand, which leads to tears, which obstruct labour. This leads to tears upwards and also down to the anus in childbirth. So a woman can develop a third degree tear – vagina to anus." It's not the word 'tear' that gets me about that quote, it's the phrase 'third degree'. Because I'm guessing there aren't a whole load of degrees to get though and third is pretty much the worst. From this, a woman can develop a fistula, which means that she passes faeces through the vagina, the barrier separating the vagina and anus having been ripped.

Another health worker adds, "I feel [FGM] should stop. It's just humiliating. If they want to do it let them do it on adults who can sign their own consent form." For the villagers shown in The Cut, the power to end FGM officially and decisively is in the hands of the new generation of men, the sons of the council elders.

A woman who underwent female genital mutilation says, "If I could stop it, it would have ended."

Further reading:

· An interview with Beryl Magoko about The Cut and the issue of female genital mutilation.

· The official press pack for The Cut, giving full credits and further details of the film's history and making, can be accessed here.

· Read Beryl Magoko's directors' notes about the challenges she faced when filming.

· Listen to award-winning reporter Juliet Spare's feature on female genital mutilation for Voice of Russia

Bidisha is a 2013 Fellow of the International Reporting Project, covering global health and development.

firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-237051036313736922.post-5357587208601889952013-12-05T02:21:00.000Z2013-12-05T02:42:59.133ZThe night I callously defrauded a penniless Burmese child

The eyes of the world are on <st1:country-region>Burma</st1:country-region>as the fight continues to move towards democracy and away from militarism, division and violence. The incarceration and liberation of democracy and human rights leader Aung San Suu Kyi followed a longstanding and powerfully mythic template of gendered superstition, symbolic objectification and beatified mortification: female strength, female isolation, female suffering, female stoicism, female beauty, female purity, female fortitude, female spiritual endurance despite being stripped of everything, female forgiveness towards persecutors and a victory gained through surviving the longest under unjust mental and physical duress, not fighting the hardest in open and equal mutually granted combat. In the years that follow the unglamorous, quotidian labour of working towards democracy, development, integration and sustainability must be undergone and there are many problems to solve.

As one strand of their global activities Health Poverty Action have launched a campaign reaching out to thousands of struggling people living in rural, remote areas of Burma. They write,

In this forgotten area of Burma, conflict has forced 100,000 people - mostly women, children and the elderly - to flee their homes and live in displacement camps. They have no access to running water. There is not enough food. The freezing conditions and lack of toilets make them vulnerable to disease.

<o:p></o:p>

Nearly 50% of children under the age of 5 in the region will die, usually from easily treatable conditions including malaria or diarrhoea. Medical teams are working there to assist children and their families in providing vital basics: HPA has been helping feed 9,500 people, immunising 2,000 children, assisting over 500 women to give birth safely in the camp clinics and installing 350 toilets to improve sanitation. 36,000 people are currently living in the worst affected areas and money is needed to provide basic support there. Health Poverty Action stress that a £20 donation could immunise four children, provide two months' food for a child living in a displacement camp, provide three quilts for families in mountainous areas which get very cold or provide two days' training for camp volunteers looking after the whole community. <o:p></o:p>

The charity ActionAid are also advocating and campaigning on behalf of Burma, which they are terming <st1:country-region>Myanmar</st1:country-region>. I call it <st1:country-region>Burma</st1:country-region>because Aung San Suu Kyi does. Although <st1:country-region>Burma</st1:country-region>has more international links and exchanges than it did before, there are still very few outreach, aid and charity programs serving its poorest communities. ActionAid's vision takes in the country as a whole and its focus is on broad-scale development and the establishment of basic services and infrastructures. In particular, they highlight the necessity of access to clean water, to education and to healthcare. They also point out, shockingly, that in <st1:country-region>Burma</st1:country-region> "one child in every 10 dies before the age of five." A basal 10% infant mortality rate, rising to nearly 50% in displacement camps in remote regions, is extremely alarming.

Conditions were worsened by Cyclone Nargis in 2008, in response to which ActionAid mobilised to assist 200,000 people in Burma and established a national system providing staple food supplies, educational facilities and health stations to those most in need.

ActionAid also offer international supporters the chance to sponsor a child in <st1:country-region>Burma</st1:country-region>, in a scheme which first launched in 2012. They cite a Fellowship Programme which trains young Burmese volunteers (er – if they're unpaid volunteers then where does the sponsorship money go? Labour should be paid – white ActionAid staffers in the <st1:country-region>UK</st1:country-region>get paid a salary after all) to work with remote communities, tackling the complex challenges that arise when trying to lift societies out of poverty. The work needed varies from establishing infrastructure like well-maintained road networks, agricultural training for sustainable farming practices and microfinance to empower people in starting up small scale enterprises.

ActionAid state,

We have worked with over 390 communities, supporting more than 150,000 of the most vulnerable and marginalised people [worldwide].

Although I know their intentions are good, I am very wary of child sponsorship after I once half completed an ActionAid Burmese child sponsorship application in a not-drunken-but-humanitarian stupor in the middle of the night.

As I filled out the first part of the form I felt increasingly self-critical about sponsoring another human being, like hiring some sort of pity pet, an individual I would never meet or speak to, just to make myself feel good. This person would never be positioned as any kind of equal but instead would be a distant and exotic source of self-congratulation, a faraway star lighting up my own ego, a collection of clichés about poverty and development, an object onto which various fantasies could be projected. Here are some subtextual justifications, arrogant self-compliments and snobby secret thoughts which underpin the actions of a child sponsorer (it's just like being a horse whisperer except that you don't even need to get close to the recipient to establish that special connection):

I am a good rich person of conscience helping a poor grateful person with no house/education/food/family/shoes with my few pounds a month.

Even if I'm not rich I feel rich because I'm so much richer than someone who's got nothing that I can afford to give them a tiny little amount every single month and not even miss it.

I would like to pay them a few pounds but I wouldn't want them living in my house or saying they want to visit. But I might want to go there and have a look one day out of curiosity.

I am happy to correspond by letter to maintain the romance of the thing but not by phone because that would be a massive imposition.

I am happy to pay my money but would not like to be troubled by any further demands as that would really be pushing it.

I will pay ten pounds a month but not twenty even though I spend sixty pounds a month on giant lattes at Costa and I just happily bought a £200 Zara winter coat made by exploited brown child labourers not unlike the kid I'm sponsoring. Yet somehow I'm sure it all balances out.

I have never been to the country and know absolutely nothing about the location where the child I'm sponsoring lives but I know the conditions are dreadful.

I didn't care before but now I've received an endorsement from a likeable, sensible and unaggressive white person like Emma Thompson I'm willing to get on board. After all, she played Eleanor Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility so she's got a combination of feminine sensitivity and English brains I'm willing to listen to.

I can't remember the exact name of the child I'm sponsoring as it's very long and foreign but I'm sure she or he is just absolutely lovely. They'd better be.

It's just like sponsoring a panda/goat/donkey/snake except that pandas etc don't give you the extra satisfaction of writing you a letter to show you how grateful they are.

So, I had some ideological oppositions to it. I would much rather donate directly to projects for everyone and, let me make this pledge to ActionAid now, I would be very happy to travel to Burma to volunteer in the long term doing anything you want, from manual labour to teaching, and also report back and raise consciousness.

I junked the application midway, before I'd given the Internet my credit card details. A few days later I received a piece of paper from ActionAid. It was green and on the front was written in jaunty white lettering, 'Child Message from Myanmar', above a cartoon of a big-eyed, happily smiling yet barefoot kid in traditional Burmese dress, with, yup, a flower in her hair, holding a brightly coloured parasol and with not one but two extra parasols lying on the ground next to her. Part beanie baby, part Disney Princess, part prostituted child in brothel window forced to eye the punters beguilingly.

At the bottom of the leaflet it said, "The illustration above depicts a girl wearing traditional <st1:country-region>Myanmar</st1:country-region>costume and carrying a traditional umbrella made in Pathein. Pathein umbrellas are a popular souvenir from <st1:country-region>Myanmar</st1:country-region>." I love it when sexism and racism come together: it's like acquisitive colonial nuclear fission. An infantilised female, used as an object to unthreateningly boil down and sell an exoticised region to a cultural tourist. The message is loud and clear: this is what you've bought. <st1:country-region>Burma</st1:country-region>: she's cute, she's not pushy, she's definitely not angry, she's innocent, she's traditional (note the word being repeated twice in the leaflet sentence) and she's designed to please. You don't get an actual photograph of an actual human being because, North or West, South or East, whatever the language or culture or country, the objectified, sexualised, depersonalised, minimised, infantilised all-purpose female cartoon image is easier to use and provokes more sympathy than a real human female.

Coming next in the series:

Sponsor an Indian child and get a cartoon of a barefoot Indian girl in pastel kurta pyjamas or full-on wedding sari, bindi, khol, jewellery, red bangles, jasmine garland and ankle bells, next to a sacred cartoon cow.

Sponsor a Japanese child …okay, Japan really doesn't need your money… and get an impeccably realised Manga geisha with detachable wig, whiteface panstick makeup, stiffly alluring smile and fully rigged sushi-printed kimono, standing either barefoot as mandatory or on wooden soled platform sandals.

Sponsor an Arab child and hit the jackpot: child in a veil, everyone, child in a veil, yet still somehow conventionally pretty around the eye area. Camels, pyramids, deserts and palm trees in the background. Angry brown male hordes (rebels, breakaway militia, idealistic students, army or government – or choose an assortment) to be Photoshopped out, or in, depending on your preferences.

Sponsor a Chinese child. Much like the Japanese child option but with a kiddy cheongsam and chopsticks in hair. Lit alluringly by paper lanterns hanging from a pagoda/noodle restaurant in the middle of a rice paddy in which Pokemon creatures and Moshi Monsters cavort. Or maybe that's the Japanese option. Whatever, right?

Sponsor an African child (any southern African country will do) and get a very colourful cartoon! This time your child comes swathed in richly patterned kente cloth in the form of a head wrap, blouse and skirt, stretched-lobe beaded earrings, tribal lip plate, multi-stranded beaded neckpiece, rough hewn walking staff with feathers attached, ceremonial facial tattooing and extensive decorative scarring. Mud hut and red earth in background optional.

I opened the leaflet and there was a hand drawn picture inside:

<o:p>
</o:p>

<o:p>
</o:p>

On the back was a message from Mar Ku, the field worker looking after ActionAid's project in the village of Yae Twin Kone. It was handwritten in careful English capitals.

Dear Supporter,

Warm greetings from <st1:country-region>Myanmar</st1:country-region>!

How are you? I hope you and your family are in good health. Now, I am writing about the update of your child Moo Keh Blute and his family.

He has drawn a picture for you. There are flag, ship, fish, tree, school, vase and flower. There are six family members. He has two brothers and one sister. He is the second one in his siblings. His father works in making bricks. He lives with his parents. His mom is a housewife.

Thank you for your kind and generous support to this child and his community. We will update more about your child in the next child message card.

And then, obviously, I felt dreadful.

"You mean," said my mother, "you're sponsoring a child, without paying anything?"

It seemed so, mum. It certainly seemed so.

What does this signify on the part of ActionAid? That when you think you are sponsoring an individual, you are not really doing so but instead having your money pooled and used generally for everyone? I am not against that. That when you provide your name and address via a web site, it will immediately be sent to a Burmese community project that has various already-done kids' drawings on file to send to you to make you feel like they're responding directly, when really no individual child has any idea who you are? That a field worker like Mar Ku, who no doubt has plenty of much more worthwhile work to do, has to go through the charade and labour of hand-writing updates to each supporter so that they feel they're getting their interpersonal money's worth? That when you think you'll strike up a relationship of patronage with one kid - or, to put it less cynically, you will have the feeling of supporting one child's path in life - you will actually receive standard communications from a field worker writing automatically on their behalf? I am not against that, either. In fact I approve of what is really going on. I am critical, instead, of the illusion: that patronising, ignorant westerners think they are reaching out to one grateful Burmese child in a million and that a charity would encourage this problematic illusion when the reality of its work is much more credible and worthy of respect.

If any established charity is doing medium to long term outreach work in <st1:country-region>Burma</st1:country-region>, I would love to be involved and can be contacted at email@example.com

Bidisha is a 2013 Fellow of the International Reporting Project, covering global health and development.

firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-237051036313736922.post-21665079023958404672013-12-04T15:09:00.000Z2013-12-04T15:09:00.585ZTaking action on the global health worker crisis

A couple of weeks ago I covered the importance of a well-trained, well-paid and well-respected human resources system in providing free universal healthcare globally. I analysed the challenges of doing so and examined some of the factors which can enable or inhibit good practice. Since then I've become aware of a new drive, flagged up by Health Poverty Action, which highlights the UK's responsibility when it comes to global human resources in the field of health. It emphasises a developmental imbalance - with serious consequences for developing countries - created by the Western exploitation of global health worker labour.

Health Poverty Action has identified more than fifty countries, mainly in Africa and South Asia, which suffer from a "critical shortage of health personnel" while simultaneously carrying "a large part of the global burden of disease." At the same time the increased necessity of long term care for ageing populations in European countries is creating strong demand for health workers, fuelling the migration of health workers to Europe from developing countries in today's heavily globalised labour market.

Image of health worker in clinic in Tsumkwe in Namibia (c) Health Poverty Action

Health Poverty Action has been calling for the UK to "compensate developing countries for its role in the global health worker crisis." There is a cached copy of the call here; I'm not sure what has happened to the plan to get supporters to write to UK MPs. The charity points to the shortage of health workers in developing countries and the UK's strong record of employing health workers who are originally from developing countries and migrate to the UK to work. HPA is not challenging people's entitlement to move for work, to earn, to study and to create better lives, but instead seek simply to raise awareness of the consequences of the health worker shortage in developing countries. The responsibility for this must be on world governments engaged in large scale health infrastructure and planning. The shortage of health workers in developing countries results not only in poorer treatment there but in a variety of deficits which weaken the entire health system in the long term, from the under-staffing and under-maintenance of hospitals, clinics and rural health stations to poorer quality and less up to date training and education, the under-provision of medical equipment, the reduced chance of future investment when a future workforce cannot be relied upon and much more.

The charity adds,

It is estimated that 1 billion people [virtually all in developing countries] will never see a health worker, putting them at risk of dying from easily preventable diseases, from childbirth and basic health conditions.

The report Aid in Reverse challenges the UK government to play a conscientious and responsible role in ending the global health worker crisis, which Health Poverty Action labels a developing world "brain drain." They suggest that in the UK the Departments of Health and International Development could work together on two complementary issues: first, treating the roots of the UK's own shortage of health workers through better planning, training and education; second, giving something back to the developing countries whose health infrastructures are being weakened through lack – with severe ramifications for those nations' own long term development – while they contribute so much to developed nations' healthcare systems.

The challenge to developed nations who use the labour of talented health workers from developing countries to ensure their own citizens' wellbeing is part of a pan-European initiative aiming to create a sustainable global health workforce. One of the main directives of the project is the implementation of a World Health Organisation Global Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel. The project's tagline runs,

'Healthworkers for all and all for health workers.'

<o:p></o:p>

Bidisha is a Fellow of the 2013 International Reporting Project, covering global health and development.<o:p></o:p>

email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-237051036313736922.post-74512496436128521792013-12-03T01:48:00.000Z2013-12-21T12:40:45.922ZAre you a woman who respects, supports, promotes and wants to hear expertise and analysis from the Red Cross? The feeling's not mutual.

On August 30th 2013 I receive the following very promising email:

From: email@example.com

Dear Bidisha,

Hope you are very well. Just to introduce myself, I work as part of the media and external relations team here at the British Red Cross and am currently managing various projects and activities that will mark the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Red Cross Movement.

We are hosting an event on the evening of the 29th of October entitled:

From Solferino to Syria - 150 years of Humanitarian Action

An event to mark the 150th anniversary of the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement

It is taking place on Tuesday the 29th of October 2013 at BAFTA, 195 Piccadilly, London, W1J 9LN. The event is due to start at 18.30, with a drinks reception and exhibition to follow a panel style debate and discussion. We will be framing the panel discussion and debate around the importance of neutrality and our emblems,using the current situation in Syria as a context for the discussion.

We would be delighted if you would consider appearing as part of the panel at the event, having written about the situation in Syria and having a great understanding of the humanitarian consequences of the crisis.

As well as the panel, we will also have a photography exhibition from Ibrahim Malla, a Syrian now working for the Red Cross, featuring shots he has taken within Syria and the surrounding areas. We are also hoping to get a Syrian Arab Red Crescent volunteer to speak as part of the event, to tell us about first hand the challenges they face on the ground.

Attached is a more in depth summary of the event for you to read through.

If you have any questions at all, please don't hesitate to drop me a line.

Best Wishes,
Very NiceWoman.

Very NiceWoman
PR Manager
Media and External Relations
British Red Cross
[Personal email address and phone number edited out]
44 Moorfields, London , EC2Y 9AL8:
Blogs | Twitter | YouTube | Facebook | Flickr

The document which is attached to that email reads as follows, stressed words made bold by me:

British Red Cross event marking 150 years of the Red Cross movement

Date: 29th October, evening.
Venue: 195 Piccadilly, the BAFTA building

Introduction

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement and we want to use this occasion as an opportunity here in the UK to engage with key stakeholders and the general public on issues that define both who we are and the work we do.

A high profile event allows us to recognise 150 years of the Red Cross Movement and is a great moment in time to celebrate and demonstrate pride and confidence in our work. It is also an opportunity to tell our story, develop greater awareness of who we are and position ourselves as unique within the aid sector through our guiding fundamental principles.

The Approach

Looking to the past year and the current news agenda, Syria has dominated. Often questions around the Movement's neutrality in this crisis have been posed and we would like to use this event as a means of engaging key stakeholders on this issue. We hope through our panel debate to discuss the importance of neutrality and the emblem, what it means to us and how we can ensure that neutral access is granted so that we can continue to help those in Syria most in need.

This discussion will be framed by the backdrop of the date the event is being held on – the 29th of October, which marks when the first national societies were recognised and the Red Cross was adopted as the emblem.

Audiences/ Invitees

Numbers of approx 150 – 175.

Other national societies and partner national societies

IFRC and ICRC.

Relevant media and journalists

Think tanks, partner organisations and relevant external stakeholders.

Major and high value giving donors.

Prospective donors.

Corporate partners, current and prospective.

MPs and relevant government

We are keen to invite our colleagues in Geneva as well as other national societies to share the event with them, as this is a movement wide anniversary and a theme that involves the whole of the Movement's discussion and input.

In terms of external stakeholders such as think tanks, MPs and Government ministers – we are inviting them to develop a greater understanding of our work and the challenges that we face, with the aim that they can support our need for neutral access and put pressure on those that aren't granting us this in current and future crisis.

The event provides an opportunity for corporate partners and major donors to engage with us on what we see as key issues and hear more about the work we are doing in Syria.

Format

• It will take place in the evening from 6pm onwards.
• The event will be opened by Sir Nick Young to set the context for the evening and introduce the thematic discussion, emphasising its relevance to the Movement, our history and our current work and challenges.
• The main event will comprise of an on stage panel debate and discussion
• The panel will consist of 4-5 knowledgable, well known and reputable guests.
• Questions from the audience to the panel guests and Sir Nick or other relevant BRC or Movement spokespeople, will be taken at the end of the discussion.
• This will be followed by a drinks reception for guests where the work of the photographer Ibrahim Malla, who has worked with us in Syria, will be showcased.
• There are also private rooms available, should any media interviews need to take place in a quiet space.

I respond on the same day, August 30th 2013, two months before the event:

Dear Very,

Hello - I would love to be a part of this panel. Thank you so much for the invite and count me in!

I will await further orders but am very happy to be asked,

Best

Bidisha

On September 2nd 2013 I receive a reply:

Hi Bidisha,

That's fantastic - we'd be delighted to have you as part of the panel, thanks so much!

If you can pencil the evening of the 29th October and I'll send through further briefings in the coming weeks.

Many thanks and any questions just let me know,

Very.

On October 9th 2013, 20 days before the event and more than five weeks after first being contacted, I receive an email featuring the following advert:

Hi Bidisha,

Hope you are well. Please see attached the most up to date invite for the event - in case you want to invite anyone as a guest yourself.

The final panel will consist of Terry Waite, Robert Mardini head of Ops in the Middle East for the ICRC, Simon Jenkins and yourself.

Dr Hugo Slim will be chairing. I'll send through the panel briefing in the next few days.

Do also let me know if you need me to book you a car to get you to the event?

Many thanks!

Very.

The attached, official invite is below:

There is an introduction from Sir Nick Young at 6.45pm. The panel is made up of me and Simon Jenkins, Robert Mardini, Hugo Slim and Terry Waite. Photographic work exhibited as part of the event is by Ibrahim Maila.

Men named on invite: 6
Men present at event: 5, all white
Women: 1 (that's me, brown, double points)

I reply the same day, October 9th:

Dear Very,

Hello and many thanks for your email. My main job is actually not with the Huffington Post, it's [I explain my International Reporting Project Fellowship].

The panel looks interesting. One query - if you include Nick Young then in the entire evening the speakers are 5 white men and 1 woman (me). Surely this is not quite right? In your last email to me the banner shows an image of two women looking aggrieved, with the tagline, 'A crisis can happen to anyone'; and your motto is 'Refusing to ignore people in crisis.' We all know, from the work we do, that women and children often bear the brunt of natural disasters, social breakdown, responsibility for all childcare, subjection to judgement and control, militarised violence (and the vast brunt of sexual violence and subsequent stigmatisation) and so on; and we also know that women are the majority of all charity workers, volunteers, fundraisers and aid workers; and indeed this panel event is organised by women.

Your event implies that women can be victims; women can work for free to help 'the cause'; and women can work hard behind the scenes. And we know that the Red Cross does incredible work all over the world, much of it in places where the majority skin colour is not white. Why do you have 5 white men and just 1 woman and 1 person of colour (combined in the same person - me) on this very high profile panel?

You are implying that women are not worth listening to and that the correct make-up of a celebration of global aid work should be that 5 out of 6 authoritative speakers are white men. I'm sure you know, too, from experience, that the audience will be dominated by brilliant, humanitarian, engaged, experienced and amazing women.

I am not enjoying writing this email as I so admire the work of the Red Cross and have been both keen on and honoured by this invitation from the very beginning. I have already covered this issue in The Guardian and as regards Amnesty International's television projects and comedy projects - I am shocked are [sic- and] surprised to see the Red Cross, which surely stands for humanity and for seeing all people as equal, is doing this.

Bidisha

On 11th October, after a thoughtful pause which I can sense across London, I receive the following:

Dear Bidisha,

Thank you for your email.

I am sorry to read the below [sic] - I hope you understand there was no intention in anyway to exclude women or have a male bias for this panel, nor was the panel intended to give out any wider messages or implications about inequality of women. Quite the opposite - we have been very much trying to achieve a balanced panel and guests in attendance.

Sir Nick Young is our Chief Exec - and so for an event like this it is appropriate for him to open. He is not sitting or chairing the panel - merely just welcoming everyone to the event.

In terms of the panel - we have made every effort to ensure that women from the sector and media were represented. Lyse Doucet from the BBC was very keen to chair the panel - but could not commit in case she had to go overseas for a report. Though if she is able to attend - we will have her as part of the panel, that is something we will only know in the days running up to the event. The same goes for Sarah Montague from the Today Programme.

We had also been speaking with Kristalina Georgieva, from ECHO to attend and although she very much wanted to - other commitments now means she is unable to join us and so is sending a deputy instead to attend as an audience member.

We are also liaising with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent to hopefully get volunteers over to speak of their experiences.

I'm sure you understand that the nature of these event often means that guests are confirmed last minute - and we do hope to have a wider ethnic and female representation on the day.

However, if you feel that you would rather not participate, then please let me know.

Many thanks,
Very.

I reply the same day:

Dear Very NiceWoman [whose name I'm now using in full],

Hello and many thanks for your email. The thing is, I have written many emails like my last, to my enormous regret and disappointment, and the result is always the same: the perpetrator mentions a few amazing women who might almost have been involved but by the caprices of the gods just somehow couldn't make it, or you haven't heard back, or it didn't work out with that one woman, and so on.

The upshot of all your efforts is that you have put together a formal invite headlining 5 white men and 1 woman.

As I mentioned above, the use of female Red Cross volunteers does not change the power dynamic of the event: women's hard labour has always been used up for free, while the authority - the introducing, the panel speaking, the definitive declaiming, the star spot on the bill/invite - is reserved for men.

I am cancelling my attendance at the Red Cross event, I will be publicising my reasons why, and your explanation, and I am enclosing a list of more than thirty-five relevant and brilliant women who would be exactly right for your panel.

This list took me no more than fifteen minutes to make. All the women combine a strong journalistic and speaking pedigree with knowledge and experience of international issues and passion for humanitarian work. If you want 3 speakers to make your panel equal, that would be less than 10% of my list.

Bidisha
London, 11th October 2013, 10.55am

The list of 37 women I sent to the woman from the Red Cross reads as follows:

Chitra Nagarajan, Homa Khaleeli, Alicia Izrahuddin, Soraya Chemaly, Kristin Aune, Lola Okolosie, Hannah Pool, <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Selma</st1:place></st1:city> Dabbagh, Rachel Shabi, Michela Wrong, Frances Harrison, Victoria Brittain, Gareth Peirce, Zarghuna Kargar, Shereen El-Feki, Rahila Gupta, Heather McRobie, Rita Chakrabarti, Razia Iqbal, Rana Jawad, Catherine Mayer, Yvonne Roberts, Natasha Walter, Joan Smith, Joy Francis, Farah Nayeri, Caroline Moorehead, Petinah Gappah, Sonya Thomas, Susanna Tarbush, Rosie Garthwaite, Anna Blundy, Dina Matar, Bridget Kendall, Lindsey Hilsum, Helena Kennedy, Gillian Slovo

In the five minutes following me sending that last email to the Red Cross I think of 11 further names:

Helen Bamber, Karma Nabulsi, Mako Fitts Ward, Tazeen Ahmed, Joyce Adjekum, Kiri Kankhwende, Samira Sawlani, Monisha Rajesh, Asiya Islam, Anita Anand, Vera Baird

This brings the total up to 48 brilliant, worldly, humanitarian and knowledgeable women. I do hope that the next time the Red Cross puts on an event discussing its global humanitarian work, much of which is necessitated by the damage wrought by militarised, macho, misogynistic behaviour, it will not do so by headlining five white men and one non-white woman.

email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-237051036313736922.post-5472204826574508052013-11-26T21:14:00.000Z2013-12-18T16:13:12.773ZTwice Upon A Time by film-maker Niam Itani: for the refugee children of Syria and Lebanon

Lebanese film-maker Niam Itani - read a wonderful interview with her here - is working on a new documentary project about Syrian and Lebanese children, called Twice Upon A Time, which, as she tells me, "seeks to raise hope amongst refugees and parents of today." Itani has started a campaign page to raise post production funds for Twice Upon A Time and produced a trailer introducing viewers to Khalil, the charismatic and bright boy at the heart of the film:

There are only five days of the fundraising campaign left, and nearly $20,000 still to be raised for this important, humane and uplifting film project.

Niam Itani was born and raised in Beirut and Ghazzeh in Lebanon. The Lebanese Civil War lasted 15 years, consuming 9 years of her childhood. "I witnessed several periods of unrest and violence in Lebanon throughout my childhood and adult life," she tells me. "I've had to abandon my city and home with my family several times due to these conflicts; the longest of which lasted five years in the Bekaa Valley - a rural area of Lebanon - in a village called Ghazzeh."

Twice Upon A Time is a film drawing together themes with both political and personal resonance, highlighting the universal impact of war on children and on entire communities. In the campaign briefing Niam Itani writes the following:

"In 1989, my parents left Beirut for a small village in the Bekaa Valley called Ghazzeh. I was eight years old.

"In 2012, Khalil's mother left Syria and took refuge at our house in Ghazzeh. Khalil was ten years old.

"This film tells the story of my friendship with Khalil, and our efforts to find hope and joy in the midst of madness and despair. It is also a personal reflection on childhood, nostalgia, home, belonging, memory and war."

Khalil & Niam assemble kites together, Spring 2013

"The Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) left behind an estimated 120,000 fatalities. A study conducted in 1992 under the title 'Assessing War Trauma in Children: A Case Study of Lebanese Children' showed that 'on average a Lebanese child has experienced five to six different types of traumatic events during his or her lifetime; some events were experienced several times.' (Journal of Refugee Studies, 1992, Macksoud)

"Twenty-three years later, in what I'd like to think of as a civilized and sophisticated world that we live in, another armed conflict took the same trajectory as the Lebanese one, with more horrifying outcomes. By September 2013, less than three years after its beginning, the Syrian Crisis had left more than 120,000 fatalities and 2 million refugees. The numbers grow on a daily basis. [Read my own coverage of the Syrian humanitarian crisis here.]

"Seeing these two conflicts happen in such a short period of time in history and in two neighboring countries is heart wrenching for me. The most devastating part is that I am forced to watch more children grow in the same damaging conditions that my generation grew up with.

This is not another film about children who are orphaned, hungry or homeless seeking food and shelter during war. This is a film about children with caring and loving parents, coming from middle class families like most of us, but finding themselves in the cruellest human condition of all: war."

Khalil & his siblings pose for a photo before school, Spring 2013

"By telling this story, I hope to bring more understanding and awareness about this issue and to mobilize additional psychological and material support for children refugees around the globe.

"On July 31st, 2012, Khalil's family crossed the Syrian Border into Lebanon to flee the armed conflict in their country. My mother gave them refuge at our summer property in Ghazzeh, in the Lebanese countryside. That is where I met Khalil (12 years) who would later change the course of this project, and therefore, my life.

"But the journey of this film started much before the arrival of Khalil's family to Lebanon, and before the Syrian Crisis altogether.

"It began in 2010 as an attempt to fill memory blanks pertaining to my childhood during the civil war in Beirut. I was searching for "nice memories" during the period between 1980 and 1989, which seem to have vanished from my memory."

This photo of Niam was taken on May 4, 1984, one month before her sister

Heba (mentioned in the video) passed away at the age of 9

"During our regular visits to Ghazzeh every weekend in 2012, I started to help my mother in providing food and shelter to refugee families. It didn't take long to notice that the plight of refugees in the village was too identical to our own strife in the exact same place, two decades earlier.

"Since Khalil's family technically lives with us, an unorthodox but very special friendship grew between me and him. My witnessing of his daily struggle in the beautiful locale of my childhood served as a wake up call for me. I felt that Khalil was re-living my past right in front of my eyes. And this time I could document it, not only for myself but for the whole world.

"Something was urging me to bring my camera and film the bond that was developing between me and Khalil. A bond built on sharing the war related traumas and many common personality traits. As in many other documentary projects, when I first started to film I didn't know what I was specifically after, but the pieces quickly started to fall in place."

Aya (3.5 years old) is a one of the Syrian refugees in Ghazzeh

All principal filming on Twice Upon a Time is now complete. To arrive at this point, Niam has used her own resources and those of her family, friends and friends of friends. The "urgency, intuitiveness and unfolding of the story on a day-to-day basis", she says, obliged her to focus on shooting the film rather than file applications for production support and/or waiting for financial backing from film funds or institutions (which is the classic route). The film team now need your support to raise a minimum of 35,000 USD for this project. These funds will cover part of the post production process and allow them to hire an editor, a sound designer and other artists and technicians to create a fine cut of the film. Once they have that fine cut, they can use it to apply for post production funds from regional and international film bodies.

Niam Itani has been campaigning and advocating for Twice Upon a Time, speaking on Al Jazeera about both her own history, Khalil's experiences and the project:

When I became aware of the project, via an introduction from film-maker Marian Evans, I had to find out more about this skilled and impassioned artist, who studied for her BA in Communication Arts and a Masters Degree in Education from the Lebanese American University in Beirut, then pursued an MFA in Screenwriting from Hollins University in Virginia, USA. She made her first professional documentary in 2001 for a conference at university when she was an undergraduate. It was a short film entitled Ghareeb (Stranger). In 2005 Itani completed a second short documentary, Zakira Mubsira (A Foretold Memory). Between 2005 and 2010, she got the chance to expand her documentary skills while working at Al Jazeera Channel in Qatar as a Programs Producer. At Al Jazeera Itani worked as assistant producer on the critically acclaimed series Al Nakba and went on to make her first feature documentary, Rokam Al-Bared (Ruins of Al-Bared), a documentary about the destruction of a Palestinian refugee camp in North Lebanon. Her last short film, Super.Full. (2010), played at several film festivals including two Academy Award Qualifying festivals and the Venice Film Festival. Itani's feature narrative project entitled Shadow of a Man, is currently in pre-production and has been selected at multiple regional and international film venues. In January 2013 she co-founded placeless films, a film production company in Beirut, Lebanon. As part of placeless films, Itani also recently launched ScriptExperts, a specialised story & script service catering primarily to writers and filmmakers in the Middle East.

Niam Itani told me more about her intentions as the creator of Twice Upon A Time. Below are selected quotes from her exclusive, honest and powerful interview:

"The original idea was a personal documentary project, that I started to work on in 2010 – a journey to document my own memories as a child, some of which were very vivid and some missing. I was going to interview family members mainly and try to fill in the memory blanks. This idea took a major turn; however, when Syrian Refugees started coming into Lebanon in 2012. The uncanny similarity of circumstances forced me to shift my focus to the "story" unfolding right in front of me in the present. A present that will be embedded in the memories of this new generation of children refugees. Twice Upon a Time was born."

"[As explained above,] the film is the story of my friendship with Khalil, a Syrian boy who had to leave Syria with his family in 2012, and took refuge in Ghazzeh (the village where we took refuge in 1989) as well. On a second level, it is the story of Khalil's family and their recent experience of refuge and the story of my family's experience of refuge 23 years ago and how similar are the challenges that we used to go through as children. On a third level, this is a film about hope, memories, childhood, nostalgia, and the notion of home."

"The film seeks to bring many issues to the fore. Some of them are everyday issues of refugee life like finding shelter, food, health-care, schools and a good environment to live in whether on the level of infrastructure or on a social/interpersonal level, and potential work and education opportunities for family members. Important issues that I want the film to call attention to is the children mental and psychological health during refuge, protecting them from witnessing additional trauma, and encouraging them to have hope, to give them opportunities to play and to pursue their education and bring their dreams closer to reality. Another major issue is the lack of compassion for the incoming refugees among host societies – Lebanon in particular. We won't be delivering any of these messages to our audience but want them to see for themselves."

"The sources of hope for the Syrian children today lie within us, those who were children during times marked by war, hatred and destruction; and yet we made it to become successful and active individuals in our society today. I'd like to think that I give hope to Khalil when he appreciates what I do today and realizes that I lived most of my childhood years in conditions similar to what he is living through now. Hope lies in sharing the lessons that we learned from our own war, and stressing the importance of education, understanding others and working towards a better future."

"The film is a very personal and intimate story. In the film, the main people who speak are Khalil (he talks to me), myself (through narration and through talking to him), his mother, and my mother. We are exploring ways of partnering with International NGOs to carry this message through a concerted campaign, to raise awareness among both host societies and refugees, particularly across Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Syria. While this is the grand plan, we need more players and commitment to make this happen. On a more granular level, my sincere hope is that this film will touch people, irrespective of where they are, by sharing the message of understanding and compassion on a more individual human level."

"Mahatma Gandhi once said, 'If we are to teach real peace in this world, and if we are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have to begin with the children.' I have witnessed war as a child. Once it marks you, it will be very difficult to erase that mark. So the best thing to do is to utilize that effect and make it a tool for peace, love and understanding."

"I would like for viewers to put themselves into the shoes of the refugees, even if it is only for one day or one hour, and take into account the life that they must've been forced to leave behind. Their arrival as refugees in a new town or a new country is marked mostly by more hardship and challenges at the very basic level. I want this film to break many stereotypes, to spur people in societies that have refugees to accept them as fellows in humanity, to smile at them – if not for anything else. Ideally, I want people to help refugees wherever they are, to encourage them and support them in any way possible. We were there yesterday, they are here today, nobody knows who it could be tomorrow."

"I would like to bring a future of stability and safety to the children of Lebanon and Syria. One where bombs and bullets are considered dangerous accidents, not everyday life happenings. I want them to have the luxury to play and study without being forced to grow up so fast and carry more responsibilities and burdens than they are forced to do now."

Niam Itani with Khalil

The fundraising campaign for Twice Upon a Time is here. There are just five days left. If you like what you've read here, please support this vital project, which speaks to all those across innumerable countries, generations and cultures who have suffered displacement, conflict, societal breakdown and the fallout of violence and find themselves having to forge new lives as strangers - often traumatised, often mistrusted - in new places.

With gratitude to Niam Itani for granting me her time and wisdom. Quoted campaign text (c) Twice Upon A Time. Bidisha is a 2013 International Reporting Project Fellow reporting on global health and development.

email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-237051036313736922.post-57318810915855188622013-11-22T19:59:00.002Z2013-11-22T20:31:47.404ZMonday 25th November is International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women
Trigger warning. From Karen Ingala Smith and all text (c) her:

Monday 25th November it is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. I'll be highlighting the UK's shocking record of women killed through male violence in 2013.

Starting at 6.00am, on the twitter account @countdeadwomen, I'll be going through the UK's diary of women killed by men. I'll be starting with the 2nd January when Janelle Duncan Bailey was strangled by ex-boyfriend Jerome McDonald, moving on to 3rd January at 6.10, when Akua Agyuman died, two months after being stabbed in the chest and abdomen by her husband Minta Adiddo. Every 10 minutes, I'll move through the year to commemorate all the women who I have found who were killed though men's violence. So far I know of 112 women killed this year, so I'll still be tweeting at midnight.

Thank you all for your support. We've reached 2,500 signatures now but I'm still the one doing the counting. As I've said all along, I'll keep doing it, until I'm convinced the government is doing enough!

Images of some of the women killed by male violence in the UK at a rate of 2 per week

The text on the campaign page lobbying the UK government to Stop Ignoring Dead Women [please click and sign in solidarity] reads as follows:

On New Year's Day, 2012, 20-year-old Kirsty Treloar got a text from her boyfriend Myles Williams:

Okay wer all gud now and my new yrs ressy is that I aint going to hit u again and I won't hit u 4 this yr next yr the yr after that the next yr after that.
The next day he broke into her family's home, stabbed her brother and sister as they tried to help, then he dragged Kirsty into the back of his mother's car and drove her away. She was found dead 2 miles away, dumped behind a wheelie bin. Kirsty had been stabbed 29 times.

Michael Atherton, 42, also sent a New Year text. Shortly before midnight, he sent a text to his partner, Susan McGoldrick, saying he was going out and would spend the night away because he didn't like her sister Alison Turnbull, 44, with whom she was spending the evening. But Susan and Alison came home before he had left. Atherton, who held a gun licence despite a history of arrests for domestic violence dating back 10 years, shot Susan, Alison and Alison's 24 year old daughter Tanya, before killing himself.

On New Year's Day, Aaron Mann, 31 repeatedly hit Claire O'Connor, 38, with a blunt object before smothering her with a pillow. Her badly beaten body was found wrapped in her son's sleeping bag and covered in a sheet in the boot of her car on January 2.

On 3rd of January John McGrory used a dog lead to strangle 39-year-old Marie McGrory. Garry Kane, 41, killed his 87-year-old grandmother Kathleen Milward, though 15 blunt force trauma injuries on her head and neck.

So, by the end of the third day of January 2012, seven women in the UK had been murdered by men, three were shot, one was strangled, one was stabbed, one was beaten then smothered and one was killed through fifteen blunt force trauma injuries. Perhaps because it was the beginning of the year, I just started counting, and once I'd started, I couldn't stop. Since then, I've counted 199 women killed through suspected male violence. I urge you to read Karen Ingala Smith's site for more information.

At first I counted women killed through domestic violence. Then, on March 9th 2012, Ahmad Otak stabbed and killed Samantha Sykes, 18 and Kimberley Frank, 17. Otak wasn't the boyfriend of either of them, but of Elisa Frank, Kimberley's sister. After killing Kimberly and Samantha in from of Eliza, he abducted Eliza and drove to Dover in an attempt to escape to France. The murders of Samantha and Kimberley don't fit the definition of domestic violence, but they're absolutely about a man trying to exert power, control and coercion in his relationship. Their deaths made it clear to me that concentrating on what we see as domestic violence isn't enough. It's wider than that. The murders of Kimberley and Samantha  by were no less about male violence against women that they would have been if he had been the boyfriend of one of them.

Then there's Andrew Flood, a taxi-driver who strangled and robbed Margaret Biddolph, 78 and Annie Leyland, 88. When I learned he'd also robbed a third woman it was clear to me that there was a pattern to his actions. In fact, last year, five older women, aged between 75 and 88 were killed by much younger men, aged between 15 and 43 as they were robbed or mugged, including Irene Lawless, 68 who was raped, beaten and strangled by 26 year old Darren martin. The murders of Margaret, Annie andIrene were not any less about misogyny, than those of women killed by someone they were related to. So my list doesn't just include women killed though domestic violence. We have to stop seeing the killings of women by men as isolated incidents. We have to put them together. We have to stop ignoring the connections and patterns.

The Home Office currently records and published data on homicide victims and the relationship of the victim to the principal suspect and sex of the victim. This does not do enough to tell us about fatal male violence against women:

1. It doesn't tell us about the sex of the killer

2. It doesn't connect the different forms of male violence against women

3. It dehumanises women.

The statistic 'on average two women a week are killed through domestic violence in England and Wales' is well known but we don't seem to feel horror in our response to this. The murders of some women barely cause a murmur; lots don't make it into the national media. And so the connections, the horror, the patterns, the deaths continue in silence. Unnoticed. Ignored.

Ultimately, I want to see men stop killing women.

I have launched this campaign, Counting Dead Women because I want to see a fit-for-purpose record of fatal male violence against women. I want to see the connections between the different forms of fatal male violence against women. I want Domestic Homicide Review reports to be accessible from a single central source. I want to see a homicide review for every sexist murder. I want the government to fund an independently run Femicide Observatory , where relationships between victim and perpetrator and social, cultural and psychological issues are analysed. I want to believe that the government is doing everything it can to end male violence against women and girls. And I think the government should be recording and commemorating women killed through male violence – not me, a lone woman in a bedroom in east London

Let's start counting dead women, not ignoring them. If you want us as a society, the press and the government to stop ignoring dead women, if you want us to find ways to stop women being killed, please join me, add your voice and sign this petition.

All text (c) Karen Ingala Smith

firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-237051036313736922.post-77127718854822863942013-11-20T15:16:00.000Z2013-11-20T16:03:58.277Z"Every woman has basic human rights" The Circles empowering women for health, development, education and freedom from violence

Earlier this year I chaired a panel with Joan Smith, Baroness Helena Kennedy and the novelist Kishwar Desai. We were discussing male sexual violence in India, following the worldwide protests about the rape, torture and murder of a young woman in Delhi. The event, at The Nehru Centre in London, was held to launch Desai's latest novel Sea of Innocence, which tackles the same issue and also provides shocking details of the Delhi case which hadn't previously been revealed in the media. In its ability to combine a strong heroine with a thrilling plot and urgent contemporary issues, Sea of Innocence follows on from Desai's previous novel The Origins of Love, which looked at the Indian international surrogacy trade.

The conversation during the Sea of Innocence launch event was wideranging. We looked at all aspects of global rape culture, which transcends colour, religion, class, language, country, culture and hemisphere: the blaming of victims, the excusal of perpetrators, the prejudice against survivors of sexual violence, the silencing and abusing of survivors who speak out, extreme and perverse leniency towards perpetrators even when they are convicted. Male sexual violence, which is endemic, reflects, partially creates and also reinforces women's inequality, disempowerment and subjugation. This disempowerment is obvious in every area: in the discrimination against us in the workplace; in the exploitation of our labour, which is unpaid, under-paid, under-valued and over-consumed; in the denial of our rights over our own bodies; in the casual and constant judging, slandering, undermining and defamation which constitutes the majority of all comments made to and about women; in the way we are represented in mainstream culture, images, advertising and the media as silent pieces of nice-looking meat, pathetic and useless idiots or bitter, petty, malicious schemers; and in the strong resistance against female education, landholding, powerful visibility, money-making, public involvement, mobility in public spaces (which is delimited by harassment and threat), enfranchisement, leadership, influence, direction and presence. Writing specifically on rape culture, structural misogyny and gender inequality in India, there is a brilliant analysis by Tehelka Media which I urge everyone to read.

As UNIFEM states, "One woman in three will be raped, beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime." Male violence against women is so common that it has been described by the World Health Organisation as being "of epidemic proportions." Read the major, multi-national WHO study into domestic violence and see why they identify it as "a major public health and human rights problem throughout the world."

After the Sea of Innocence panel discussion I was approached by an impressive woman, Santosh Bhanot, who told me that she was involved in a project called The Circle, in affiliation with Oxfam. The Circle aims to address some of the fundamental issues and abuses which keep women worldwide in a state of disempowerment and inhibit our equality and our access to justice, rights and autonomy. Another underlying goal is to lift women out of poverty through gender empowerment.

The issue of poverty, often spoken of in general terms, is starkly gendered. According to Oxfam,

Of the 1.3 billion people living in extreme poverty worldwide, more than two thirds are women and girls.

Women and girls are the most disadvantaged of the disadvantaged, the most abused of the abused and the most exploited of the exploited. This has not arisen by some kind of unfortunate, fated magic but directly through the actions of patriarchal systems and many individual but misogynistically and patriarchally like-minded perpetrators, users and exploiters. When we defy all silencing and stigma to speak about what we have undergone we suffer the further grotesque abuse of being blamed for men's abuse of us, told that we deserve it, told that we brought it on ourselves by our own behaviour or told that we are lying out of malice to hurt men. We are then punished further by being slandered, marginalised or ostracised.

As Everjoice Win from ActionAid International, South Africa, states in a report about how helping women and girls is the key to ending poverty,

We believe that women are vulnerable and more impoverished compared to men because they have been systematically made vulnerable by years of violence, patriarchal power and control, as well as decades of inequitable laws and policies deliberately designed to put them in this position.

The Circle was founded in 2008 by Annie Lennox with the aim of connecting high profile, culturally influential women of expertise in various areas. A network of Circles will raise consciousness and money (here's the catch: money for Oxfam) to spend on a range of grassroots projects tackling everything from poverty to education to maternal health. They will also work "to reduce all forms of violence towards women, by helping to change attitudes."

The idea is that the various Circles support specific projects of interest but are all part of the wider Circle ethos of women helping women to change the world for everyone. A group called The Lawyers' Circle supports women's legal rights in Africa; The Music Circle raises money to protect women in the Democratic Republic of Congo; The Oxford Circle is looking at improving health and education in Niger and hopes to engage Oxford University and local city businesses in supporting this aim.

So far, significant money has been raised for a broad range of change-making initiatives. In Zambia the Circle project, working with Oxfam, is helping community schools. These are volunteer-run initiatives which provide vital education for one million Zambian children. However, those involved require more training and resources; the Circle's work in this area benefits 18,000 students in 25 schools and strongly supports the education of girls.

In Pakistan the We Can project is a grassroots initiative aiming to reach 800,000 people in combating "endemic" male violence against women, advocating for it to be reported and investigated and for a social shift which recognises male violence against women as abuse rather than normalising it and blaming victims rather than perpetrators.

The Circle has been working on improving maternal healthcare in Ghana, where 75 women a week die due to complications in pregnancy and childbirth. The focus here is on the provision of free healthcare to reduce maternal mortality. This is an achievable goal: other, non-Oxfam projects worldwide have shown the marked success of dedicated maternal mortality, pre- and ante-natal and newborn health projects. Please see my reports on Sierra Leone and Burundi and India for more details.

Two women's co-ops in Liberia have been helped to provide women with tools and training and empower them to bargain for better terms in a country in which, says Oxfam, "80% of ...women are unemployed." One little note to make here to correct that subtle patriarchal diss: these women, I can bet you, are employed. They are totally employed, to the point of exhaustion. They are employed in the never-ending, repetitive, back-breaking, all-consuming drudge labour of looking after the children, serving the men, running a household, cooking, cleaning and everything else - and these are all separate jobs - and their work is used and taken and exploited for free. They are paid nothing for their 24-hours, 7-day-a-week employment and it is callous and disrespectful to say that these same women are "unemployed." It is more accurate to say that they are exploited in an unjust situation. Despite the work they do, they are economically dependent on men and marginalised by them from economic power, political status, public influence and social clout. This exploitation and depletion of energy, financial and legal marginalisation and political discrimination mean that it is difficult for women to fight together for equality, rights and freedom from violence.

The latest addition to the Circle network is The Asian Circle, which works alongside Oxfam in helping South Asian women. It was founded and is chaired by Santosh Bhanot, the woman I met at the Kishwar Desai event. The focus is wide: The Asian Circle will be pulling together high profile women to support projects in agriculture, education, disaster relief and management, poverty reduction and sustainable development.

The Asian Circle was launched at the Houses of Parliament on 7th November 2013 in an event chaired by BBC reporter Ayshea Buksh and featuring speeches by Southall Black Sisters activist and journalist Rahila Gupta (read some of her human rights focused pieces here) and Kishwar Desai.

Santosh Bhanot spoke at the launch of The Asian Circle:

This week she told me,

Our focus is to work towards change with the skills and talents of ...[the] women who are part of the Asian Circle, a group of passionate and highly influential women from all walks of life. I wanted to help women who have an unfair chance in life and I particularly have passion and energy to work with women in South Asia because of my roots [as a South Asian woman]. Every woman has basic human rights.

On my recent visit to India I saw the positive impact of programs by Oxfam working with vulnerable women. For instance, building support centres for women subject to domestic violence and providing mediation and legal support. More programs are needed, especially in the poorer states.
The first programme The Asian Circle is supporting is called "Promoting Violence Free Lives." According to the Indian National Family Health Survey Round III report of 2005-2006 and the Oxfam India 2010 Baseline Survey, the statistics are damning, as are the social values which have been revealed:

35% of women suffer sexual or non-sexual violence in India

72% of men believe male violence against women is justified

68% of women believe that husbands are justified in beating wives

Rahila Gupta welcomes the connection between the feminism, profile and zeal of The Asian Circle and the structural support Oxfam can provide:

This is the launch of a very important initiative. If my last 24 years with Southall Black Sisters has taught me anything, it is this: funding, funding, funding. The time that we would like to spend delivering frontline services is spent instead on raising funds without which we'd have no money to deliver anything. So it's great that the Asian Circle aims to help Violence Against Women projects in India escape that vicious cycle.

The Asian Circle is focusing on the poorest states with a multi-tiered, thorough strategy: to build support centres in police stations for women who have suffered gendered violence; to engage community elders, young men and boys through educational initiatives to change their attitudes and their behaviour; and to develop networks of women working at a state level to make sure that domestic violence laws are implemented rather than ignored.

Kishwar Desai told me,

As someone who has been trying to raise awareness about some very disturbing gender issues in India for a while now, I am sincerely grateful to see the formation of The Asian Circle. My personal hope? That they will be the catalyst, eventually, for providing an international platform for Asian women, perhaps leading to a women's liberation movement in Asia.

Bidisha is a 2013 International Reporting Project fellow, covering global health and development.
email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-237051036313736922.post-41736888597696537772013-11-01T23:34:00.000Z2013-11-01T23:49:44.386ZNutrition and maternal, newborn and child health: joining the dots and looking beyond the Millennium Development Goals

A news bulletin sent around earlier this year by Dr Carole Presern, Executive Director of The Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health, threw down the gauntlet for the world community. At the time of the G8 summit – which I covered here in relation to the Enough Food For Everyone IF… campaign – the PMNCH highlighted the importance of nutrition. Since then I have found the work and the general approach of the PMNCH to be invaluable in joining the dots between various global health and development issues now that world leaders and development workers are considering a framework for initiatives extending beyond 2015.

The result of this summer's discussions and presentations was the signing, by numerous international players, of the Global Nutrition forGrowth Compact, with up to $4.15 billion committed on this initiative up to 2020. Those who contributed to this strong pledge for a reduction in under-nutrition included the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, World Vision and Save the Children.

As Dr Presern writes,

Leaders should be especially motivated to see pledges result in measurable action. Bringing commitments to invest in nutrition under the umbrella of the Every Woman Every Child movement led by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon would provide a useful framework for tracking their progress. We look forward to supporting efforts in this direction.

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All of these issues are already very high on the international agenda. At the 66th meeting of the World Health Assembly in Geneva in May this year, global delegates passed a resolution to implement the recommendations of the United Nations Commission on Life-Saving Commodities for Women and Children and also discussed a first-ever action plan pertaining to newborn health to end preventable deaths, which will be realised at the 2014 World Health Assembly.

At the Nutrition for Growth event in June, Justine Greening MP from the Department for International Development spoke about the importance of nutrition as a major development issue. She also outlined the financial pledges made by the international community of leaders in politics, social enterprise and business. She added,

Under-nutrition is stopping children and countries from reaching their full potential, accounting for the loss of billions of dollars in productivity. A strong and healthy workforce is vital if a country's economy is to prosper. This means business and science taking a lead in fighting for good nutrition because we understand that better nutrition is the smart way to tackle extreme poverty, child mortality and economic underachievement.

What has to happen next is an integration of understanding between the issues – and, I would argue, an analysis of how gender inequality and sexist social values underpin many of the disadvantages, risks and problems covered.

The PMNCH's own research provides a nuanced analysis of the relationship between nutrition, sustainable development and women's and children's health. Their findings were developed for the Open Working Group of the UN General Assembly in preparation for the formation of post-2015 development plans. They make a strong case for the importance of investment in nutrition for women and children as a major factor in ensuring sustainable development and its four pillars of economic development, environmental sustainability, social inclusion and peace and security; these criteria having been delineated by the UN System Taskforce on Sustainable Development.

This is about more than being hungry or not getting the right vitamins or minerals. Malnutrition and under-nutrition, rooted in long term poverty, inequality and disadvantage, have wideranging and interconnected health, social and economic consequences which do not affect just individuals but entire families, communities and generations. Their finding – spelled out in greater detail here, with references to specific studies – demonstrate myriad risks of malnutrition.

The report states,

Malnutrition contributes to disease and early deaths, especially for women and children. Malnourished women have lower birth weight babies resulting in children born into unhealthy, poorer families… and a lifetime of nutrition-related morbidity and mortality, which affects a woman's own health and productivity and that of her offspring.

What is particularly interesting about the report is that it doesn't just chronicle a problem, it also points to the benefits of action, stating that improved nutrition and greater health result in higher productivity. The findings are that women who are healthy, fed and working participate in the economy from a stronger position, both saving and investing. Healthy, well-nourished children have better mental development and learning skills and are more likely to stay in education and therefore to have a greater chance of earning more. The report points out that those who did not receive adequate nutrition in utero and in their earliest years "has been associated with reduced labor supply" and consequently lower adult incomes and therefore lower productivity at a mass level, across countries, where under-nutrition is widespread.

Whether or not you agree with this approach – that we should nourish human beings because they'll then nourish capitalism more heartily instead of lying there like non labour producing duds - rather than seeing this as a human rights issue – it's an interesting insight into the dramatic difference something as basic as nutrition can make.

There is also the cost of treating malnutrition:

In some low-income countries, the direct costs of iron deficiency (disease and death) are as high as 0.57% of GDP, while indirect costs (related to physical and cognitive losses) can reach 4% of GDP.8

As a final thing to think about, the PMNCH also considers the risks and consequences to the health and the economy of too much food (and of the wrong time), not just too little food. In environments where the issue is not lack of food but over-consumption of food which is not nutritional and involves many risky factors (processed and refined food, food containing many additives and few nutrients, food high in salt, sugar and trans fats) there is an ever-rising figure, currently up to 8% of healthcare spending, associated with obesity. In <st1:country-region>China, right now,</st1:country-region> the cost of dealing with obesity is actually more than the economic costs associated with under-nutrition.

Related articles:

The power of simplicity: reducing maternal mortality in Sierra Leone and Burundi

Help the mother, help the child, secure the future: maternal and child health in India

World hunger: time is running out

 Bidisha is a 2013 International Reporting Project Fellow reporting on global health and development.

firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-237051036313736922.post-62573292025472972512013-10-27T19:21:00.000Z2013-10-29T02:01:16.609ZHealth, work, dignity, livelihood: 52 Weeks project by Gulf Labor group protests the working conditions of migrant labourers in Abu Dhabi
Gulf Labor is a coalition of artists and activists who have been working since 2011 to highlight the coercive recruitment, and unjust living and working conditions of migrant laborers in Abu Dhabi's Saadiyat Island - translated as the Island of Happiness. Their 52 Weeks campaign focuses on the workers who are building the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Louvre Abu Dhabi, and the Sheikh Zayed National Museum (in collaboration with the British Museum).

Image of Gulf workers (c) Human Rights Watch

52 Weeks is a one year campaign which has just launched. Artists, writers and activists from different cities and countries are invited to contribute a work, text or action each week that relates to or highlights the coercive recruitment and deplorable living and working conditions of migrant labourers in Abu Dhabi. In the first weeks there have been contributions by Doug Ashford, Doris Bittar, Sam Durant, Matthew Greco, Gulf Labor, Hans Haacke, Thomas Hirschhorn, Lynn Love, Guy Mannes-Abbott, Naeem Mohaiemen, Walid Raad, Oliver Ressler, Andrew Ross, Jayce Salloum, Ann Sappenfield and Gregory Sholette. The coming weeks will see contributions by Haig Aivazian, Shaina Anand, Ayreen Anastas, Yto Berrada, Noel Doublas, Rana Jaleel, Rene Gabri, Mariam Ghani, Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, Josh MacPhee, Marina Naprushkina, Shirin Neshat, Ashok Sukumaran, WBYA (Who Builds Your Architecture) and many others.

Walid Raad, a member of Gulf Labor stated:

If the Guggenheim, Louvre and TDIC [Tourism, Development & Investment Company. Abu Dhabi] were willing to invest as much energy and resources into safeguarding the rights of workers buildings museums on Saadiyat Island, as they are on hiring "starchitects," building engineering marvels, and buying challenging artworks, then their claims of building the best infrastructure for the arts in the world would be more than words in the wind. Abu Dhabi, its residents and workers, deserve more than the "edgy" buildings and collections proposed by the best museum-brands in the world. Abu Dhabi also deserves the development, implementation and enforcement of the most progressive labor laws for their emerging institutions. If the museums can't see this, then I can only hope that the ruling Sheikhs and Sheikhas will, and soon.

Doris Bittar, a member of Gulf Labor stated:

Appearances are deceiving. The workers building the museums in Abu Dhabi look neat in their blue uniforms and hard hats. Their cared for appearance belie the facts that many are working 15-hour shifts, have had their passports confiscated and cannot leave or quit, they cannot congregate or collectively make demands regarding their lack of pay and their poor living conditions, and they have no recourse if they are physically abused because of unenforced labour laws. Sometimes, the only way they can leave and be sent home is in caskets.

Naeem Mohaiemen, a member of Gulf Labor stated:

We note efforts to always push blame down the human-labour supply chain: corrupt middlemen, "illiterate" workers, or recruitment agencies in the origin countries. This avoids acknowledgement of the overwhelming power, and responsibility, in the hands of institutions in Abu Dhabi and within the Euro-American art axis.

Guy Mannes-Abbott, a member of Gulf Labor stated to me in an extended commentary:

The migrant community in the UAE makes up some 80% of the population, most of whom have very few rights as such and those [that they have] are very poorly monitored, or easily got around - with the help of [sometimes] vulnerable non-Emiratis. However while there are movements for political reform in all Gulf countries including the UAE this permanent population-in-flux is not included in those fights for citizenship and potential constitutional rights as political subjects. One aim here is to help make such a migrant subject thinkable on a global scale.

This is the point at which individuals, who are often working in "conditions of forced labour" according to Human Rights Watch, because of coercive and illicit recruitment fees equivalent to some two years of earnings [and which incur extortionate and hugely inflated interest rates] for construction workers, link to broader locations, narratives and collectives in a globalised economy. In November 2012 PriceWaterhouseCooper, appointed by Abu Dhabi's TDIC despite compromising links in the Gulf and Gulf Labor's alternative suggestions, reported that 75% of construction workers on Saadiyat had paid recruitment fees and other costs. The response from TDIC has been to demand receipts (!) and to sack even PriceWaterhouseCooper at the end of that year…

The average income in Abu Dhabi is about $30,000 while the average income for migrant construction workers is less than 10% of that. In Qatar, the average income is over $70,000.

The Louvre Abu Dhabi has gotten underway with workers trapped by these recruitment fees, many of them - 40% according to PriceWaterhouseCooper, despite an "obligation" on contractors to house employees there - not living in the official accommodation provided on Saadiyat. The official accommodation is a metal-walled camp for up to 40,000 men, almost all of whom originate from South Asia. The Louvre Abu Dhabi is happy to pay these labouring men about $2500-3000 a year and watch others being deported for pleading for a few hundred dollars more per year to eat properly, while itself receiving $17,500,000 a year for 30 years from Abu Dhabi for the use of the 'Louvre' brand alone. The total package is worth well over a billion dollars and includes various sweeteners built in and around Paris for the French government too.

UAE is a signatory to International Labour Organisation conventions but has not implemented laws on the right to organise and collectively bargain or form a union. There is a minimum wage on the books but it has not come in to law. Both of these would enable these often basely exploited people to address their situation fairly and with dignity as well as to transform their experience into one of meaningful sacrifice. Meanwhile, if a worker on Saadiyat wants to lodge a complaint, which is a legal right, he has to get it in writing and hand-deliver it either to Dubai or another spot in Abu Dhabi notably distant from the camp which even in Abu Dhabi is officially classified as "remote". He can only do that on a day off and on that day off, Friday, these ministry buildings are closed…

Poster launching Gulf Labor 52 Weeks...
at 2013 Venice Biennale

Gulf Labor is intent on raising standards and extending aspirations. Richard Armstrong, Director of the Guggenheim Foundation has described the Gehry-designed Museum he wants to build on these foundations as a "beacon" of cultural exchange: brightly-lit meaninglessness. Instead, Gulf Labor is intent on turning that light into the dark corners of this enterprise to remind the world and the UAE of the hopes, dreams and legitimate expectations of the human beings whose lives are being defined by their experience today.

The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, like the Louvre Abu Dhabi, is presently on course to memorialise "conditions of forced labour". There is time, occasion and opportunity to change that. The UAE is trying to achieve something very remarkable, very fast but doing it like this undermines otherwise laudable ambitions and legitimate aspirations.

With thanks to Gulf Labor and in particular Guy Mannes-Abbott. Bidisha is a 2013 International Reporting Project Fellow reporting on global health and development issues.

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