Vote 'Henrietta is Better' for Women's Officer!!

I’m running for Women’s Officer at University of Birmingham!! So here’s a quick blog post to let you know what I’m all about and what I plan on doing if I win.

As you UofB’ers may have noticed the Women’s Rights movement within the University of Birmingham is pretty dead. No one at all ran for Women’s Officer in the first round of elections last academic year and even now in the by-elections there are only two candidates standing for it.

 I want to change all this.

I first found out that we don’t currently have a Women’s Officer by accident. I’ve been working on organising a week of events surrounding International Women’s Day in March for a couple of months now and I figured the best way to get it off the ground with the guild would be to get the Women’s Officer on board. At which point I was told there wasn’t one.

To begin with I was pretty shocked but then I realised, if it hadn’t been for unfortunate events in my own life (see the post below) I wouldn’t particularly care about women’s rights either. It’s hardly a well-publicised area of concern and the crazy feminist stereotype (unfairly in my opinion) associated with campaigning for Women’s Rights is pretty off putting for most people. So I decided ‘you know what, this is something I care about and I really believe I can make a difference’ and I’m running for it.

In the UK recently released statistics show that female managers are paid an average of £10,000 less a year then male colleagues doing exactly the same job. This is technically illegal and recent legislation now means that all employees have the right to ask what their colleagues are being paid. If I win the election I will organise some workshops on ‘How to Be Assertive in the Workplace’ teaching women how to find out if they are being treated unfairly and what to do about it.

The second most frequently reported crime in the UK is domestic violence. An average of one in four women will experience domestic abuse in their life time. If I win the election I will promote domestic abuse charities around campus with the aim that, if a woman in this establishment encounters abuse they know where to go to get help. I will also raise awareness of organisations working with men who are afraid of becoming abusers. Often abusers don’t set out to be violent to their partners and if I can help make them aware of where to get help before it is too late I think it’d be in the best interests of the whole university community.

Around the world there are many issues affecting women; from forced marriage to gendercide in China and India to FGM and sex trafficking. In the week surrounding International Women’s Day (8^th March) I will organise a week of events, working with both external charities and university societies, to raise awareness of a different gender inequality issue each day and fundraise for selected charities. I've already started contacting university societies and have found a selection of charities and brummie business women and journalists who are interested in supporting this idea and working together to make this event a reality. It was through starting to organise this that I first found out that there wasn't a Women’s Officer so, even if I don’t win the election, I will still try and run this event…though of course being Women’s Officer would definitely make the paperwork a lot easier!

So that’s what I want to do and I hope you agree that ‘Henrietta is Better’ for Women’s Rights and Vote Henrietta between October 24^th and 28^th!!

H.B.

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The Accidental Feminist

I never wanted to be a feminist.

In fact at school I’d occasionally get called a ‘feminist’ during debates in my politics classes as an insult. And I’d take it as such, furiously denying that I was anything of the sort.

Like a depressingly high proportion of my generation I believed that Women’s Rights and Feminism were dead issues. The Women’s Rights revolution had already happened. We live in an equal world, and anyone still kicking about that old chestnut was either of the misguided opinion that women deserve superiority over men or was just plain odd.

It wasn’t until something bad happened that I began to take gender equality and feminism seriously.

In my first year at uni I was contacted by a friend I hadn’t spoken to in a couple of years. After meeting up with her it became apparent that the reason I hadn’t heard from her was because she’d been involved in an abusive relationship.

It was the usual story: her former boyfriend had started off incredibly charming, won her over and showered her with all sorts of affection. Until they started living together at which point he began to change, became more and more demanding, selfish, controlling and angry, changed the affection for insults and psychological games, he’d go out with his friends when he pleased but bully her out of seeing hers and into staying in the house, and even starting to abusively threaten her.

It was after the first time that he physically hurt her that she made the decision to leave him. But visible damage had already been done. The first time I met up with her after that relatively short space of time the outgoing, confident girl I knew was uncomfortable just being out in public.

This got me thinking about two things:

1) How shockingly easy it is for intelligent outgoing women to be sucked into abusive relationships through no fault of their own

And

2) Said friend is very wealthy and she was only able to build up the courage to leave her ex whilst he was out of the country. What happens to women who don’t have separate incomes or this kind of absence to allow escape?

Then I started researching domestic abuse charities and my journey into becoming a feminist snowballed from there. Here are some fun facts for you:

-          Domestic abuse is the second most frequently reported crime in the UK

-          Domestic abuse charities receive less per annum in donations than donkey sanctuaries

We live in a country where the population value abused donkeys over abused women.

Something’s not quite right here.

From there I looked into issues in the UK like the wage gap, the fact that when applying for graduate jobs most employers will see the likelihood that I will probably one day have children as a reason not to employ me, the massive discrepancy between the women in certain industries (like PR) and the number of women managers and a whole host of international issues from gendercide to human trafficking and bride abduction, to the stoning of women for being raped in parts of Africa and the Middle East.

And I realised that I have a problem with this. Therefore I am a feminist.

Women in the UK are letting themselves down. The Women’s Rights Revolution only happened in the last few generations. Where my grandmother dreamt of being a secretary and marrying a rich man my mother is a doctor with her own pretty decent independent income.

The change is recent. As a result many culturally entrenched views on women, what they can and can’t do, how competent they are in the workplace and what they are good for are still pervasive.

You only have to look at the city and see that the stereotypical ‘business man’s night out’ of taking clients to a lap dancing club is still very much a common place or look at the composition of the Houses of Parliament to note the preponderance of men compared to women.

There’s also the case that now women have all the rights of men, but are still expected to fulfil the traditional ‘duties’ of a woman. In many families both parents have to work in order to create a comfortable lifestyle, or, in low income families, just to pay the bills. Who then has to do all the additional work of cooking, cleaning and childrearing? In most cases it’s the woman. I’m not saying that we should create a generation of house husbands but we do need to work towards making it more culturally acceptable for men to take on a more equal part in these domestic roles.

This is not me saying that ‘men’ are to blame. Of course they aren’t. Yes a small minority hold misogynistic views but there are almost certainly an equal number of women with extreme views on men, or even women with misogynistic views on women. Both genders are as bad (and good) as each other.

The problem now is changing cultural perceptions that are held by both men and women in our society. We need people to recognise that yes there have been mighty leaps forward in tackling gender inequality over the past century, but we’re not finished yet.

Where homosexual and ethnic minority groups are still pushing to end the discrimination against them which should by law be non-existent, women have, for the greater part, stopped trying.

The modern feminist movement isn’t about burning bras and shouting slogans. It’s about promoting the idea that it is ok for women to complain if they are treated unfairly just for being women, without having all the negative stereotypes of ‘the crazy feminist’ thrust upon them.

So I implore you, leave behind any qualms you might have about boot wearing, hairy faced, man hating nutters and bear in mind this modern view of what a feminist is: someone who has a problem with the statistics and thinks things need to change.

And with this far more realistic definition in mind; there are plenty of men and women I know who’d probably be horrified to learn that they are feminists too.

H.B.

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A Very British Kind of Justice

Something is rotten in the British Justice system.

Like most ordinary law abiding citizens I’d always assumed that the British Justice system was here for me, to keep me safe from false accusations and punish the guilty criminals. That is until I actually experienced it.

Last summer my then sixteen year old brother was badly beaten up at a party by a gang of ten guys. He’d been walking down a corridor, a lad pushed into him and started shouting at him, he shouted back, the guy started to threaten him so he walked away. Ten minutes later, not wanting to ruin the party for his friends he decided to go back in and say sorry.

He was immediately hit in the face, heard saying by a room full of witnesses ‘what are you doing I’m trying to apologise’ before being thrown to the ground and receiving kicks to the head and face. His jaw was broken in three places and his ribs and back were badly bruised. If his friends hadn’t intervened and pulled him out of there they would have carried on kicking. It would have been a lot worse.

What followed was the irksomely slow process of interviews and statement taking. An identity parade didn’t take place until a month later by which time, given that he’d never seen his assailants before that night, his memory was already not the sharpest and he was only able to identify one of his attackers, the boy who had first shoved in to him, first hit him in the face and first started kicking.

Over a year later we were finally told that a trial had been scheduled and he’d need to come in and give evidence, I went with him to offer my support.

Naturally, given the weight of evidence and the room full of witnesses my family and I were expecting a quick, simple trial followed by a conviction. Wrong.

From the moment we got there I knew something was off. The only two witnesses testifying were girls who hardly knew my brother and the third, an actual good friend of his, hadn’t shown up and the court were forced to issue a summons.

It quickly became apparent that they had been being threatened by the defendant and his friends. One girl had even received a text showing a photo of her statement, illegally taken by the defendant after he’d been shown it in a meeting with his solicitor, showing her name and address and the words ‘if you come to court you’re dead’.

The police response? As he'd sent it to a friend, who had then sent it to her there was nothing they could do, despite the fact that only he could have taken the photo.

It emerged that this ‘boy’ was already well known to the police, although never convicted of any priors, for his involvement in drug dealing, petty crime and violence, including against former girlfriends.

The witnesses were so terrified they asked to be given screens so he couldn’t see their faces during the trial, but that didn’t stop the crown court telling us all to go for lunch at the same time, resulting in them having to walk past the defendant while he was smoking outside.

And this is just the beginning. The first five hours of court were devoted to talking about such important issues as ‘what order to call the witnesses in now one hasn’t shown up’ and whether a policeman had a door open or shut behind him as he’d asked a witness a question (fun fact, court sessions cost the country £2000 per hour).

Then, after 6 hours of waiting, my brother was called as a witness. We got all the way upstairs to the court door before being told, actually the prosecution had changed the order without telling anyone, completely going against the order that had been debated over for hours that morning, and had actually asked for a different witness.

A present policeman commented that the barrister that my brother had been assigned (in crown prosecutions you don’t get a choice over who prosecutes your case) is known for funny turns, ambiguous questions and unfathomable behaviour.

In the end we were sent home and told to come back the next day. My brother was called as a witness the next morning.

Still, despite the incompetence of the court we were still thinking ‘It’s an air tight case, good witnesses, evidence of intimidation, what can go wrong?’ a lot apparently.

In the end the far more capable defence made it appear that each of the witnesses had placed the defendant in slightly different places in the room, making it unclear whether he was actually responsible for my brother’s really quite serious injuries. No one bothered to mention that the event had taken place over a year ago, all of the witnesses agreed he was responsible and a chief attacker and no one’s memory is film footage perfect, especially after that length of time.

The end result was a hung jury. In about a year my brother and the girls who’ve been so terrified by this process will have to go through it all over again. And for one of them this gang know where she lives.

As the policeman who was talking us through the process stated; ‘justice isn’t a balance, it’s entirely in favour of the defendant, no one talks about the rights of the witnesses’.

Soon after I heard about an acquaintance of mine whose mum had been badly beaten by his stepfather. His stepfather had walked free from court. Why? Because the only witnesses were the acquaintance and his mother, and he was known to have a problem with his stepfather so his testimony was discounted (ignoring the fact that this ‘problem’ stemmed from his stepfather regularly beating up his mother). She has now had to move to another town after receiving physical threats.

The current Crown Court system treats victims abysmally. It makes already emotionally distressed people sit in small, airless rooms for hours and hours whilst the court wastes time and money on pedantic issues before throwing them to the mercy of the defence who we were warned employ psychological tricks and go out of their way to make you appear confused. It allows scared victims to come face to face with their attackers outside the court and then allows brutal aggressors to walk free without consequence whilst victims and witnesses are left vulnerable to their retribution.

I understand the need to ensure that innocent people aren't convicted but there is no denying that something is rotten in the British Justice system. And it’s innocent people who are suffering for it.

Exploration Article Archive: Gendercide

Here's the latest article I've written for Exploration Online Magazine (as you can probably tell I've got women's right's issues on the brain at the mo!). For those who have stumbled across this page looking up the International Women's Week project 'All Girls Allowed' is one of the charities I'm going to propose fundraising for.

Please also bear in mind that I've tried to keep this article as short as possible and I haven't touched on other issues such as the fact that suicide is now the most common form of death amongst women aged 15-34 in rural China. Many studies link this to their inability to cope with knowing their daughters have been aborted or murdered. So err as you can see it's a lot more serious then my previous Exploration Asia offerings but, as I'm sure you'll agree, it's an incredibly serious issue.

In this article I’m not going to write about an amusing travelling anecdote, review a travel book or recommend a youth hostel. Instead I am going to talk about a disturbing cultural trend that is visible throughout much of China, India, Korea and Singapore as well as parts of Eastern Europe. The dramatic rise in the number of baby boys compared to girls as a result of the selective destruction of female foetuses and the shocking commonality of the murder or new born baby girls. This trend is more commonly known as ‘gendercide’.

As most of us are probably aware, it is a fair bit tougher being a woman in much of Asia than it is in the UK. I first heard of the ‘gendercide’ and the associated issues a couple of years ago from a South Korean lady called Wisteria.

Wisteria never wanted to get married. In South Korea women are still, generally speaking, expected to fulfil all of the stereotypical gender roles that we in the UK associate more with the first half of the 20^th century then the second decade of the 21^st. She wanted a career. And combining that with the over 40 hours of cooking, cleaning, tidying, caring for family members and attending to her husband and children’s needs the average Korean wife is expected to do a week would be impossible.

In this modern era of readily available ultra-sound scans these strongly held gender stereotypes have had some quite brutally shocking and unexpected consequences on the composition of many Asian communities, particularly with regard to male to female ratios.

The Asian country with the male to female children ratio most above what is statistically natural is China. To many this at first appears to be an unprecedented side effect of the one child policy – it is more profitable for couples to have a boy than a girl. Inheritance is passed through the male line and far more traditional approaches to gender roles see men being culturally valued and considered more lucrative to their families than women.

Where couples can only have one child, as in many provinces in China, those who can afford it will often take gender tests to try and ensure that child is male by aborting female foetuses. In poorer regions of rural China where gender tests aren’t so readily available or affordable there are many truly horrendous reports about just how wide spread the murder of new born baby girls, and the blind eye the authorities turn to it, is.

To put into perspective how wide spread this phenomena is recent estimates show that over the next decade there will be an estimated 30-40 million more men aged 19 or below than women in China. These men, unable to find brides and see the increase in social standing that being well married affords them are known as ‘bare branches’.

Rather than simply being an unwanted side effect of the one child policy ‘bare branches’ are an increasing feature in other countries with similar cultural views on women that don’t operate a one child policy. In India, for instance, women are generally expected to leave their parents family upon marriage and join their husbands. Parents wanting to increase the family wealth and be taken care of in their old age want sons.

As a result ‘gendercide’ is a feature there just as it is in China. In recent surveys one Bombay clinic reported that out of the last 8000 abortions they had performed 7999 where on female foetuses.

The ‘bare branches’, the unmarried young men this cultural preference produces bear hazards of their own. Over the past 20 years the crime rate in China has doubled. In all affected countries tales of bride abduction, trafficking women and widespread rape are common place. Many studies state that a correlation between this and the unnatural male to female ratio are most likely linked. It’s a serious situation.

Based on the unnatural male to female ration in these parts of the world as many as a staggering 163million baby girls have been aborted, murdered, left to die or are simply ‘missing’. Charities such as Save the Children and UNICEF are doing some work to put a stop to this devastating practice, but specific programmes are few, far between and hard to locate. One which is doing some amazing work in the area is the relatively unknown ‘All Girls Allowed’ (check out http://www.allgirlsallowed.org/ending-gendercide to find out more).

This is not to say that Asia isn’t an amazing, incredible and beautiful place to visit. In fact you are probably wondering why I am writing about such a serious matter on a light-hearted travel website. I think that if you are going to travel to a region and you really want to get to know it, its culture and history, it is important to know what issues exist below the surface. It is easy to be a tourist and just focus on the nice, attractive holiday hotspots but it is only through seeing what is really going on beneath the gloss, the negative as well as the good, that you can truly say you have experienced Asia.

If you are at all interested in finding out more about the ‘gendercide’, its causes and consequences or the Eastern European side of the story take a look at a now old but still incredible informative article from the Economist last year http://www.economist.com/node/15636231?story_id=15636231 and the many articles the same magazine has run on the subject since.

Or Chinese journalist Xinran’s book Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother which features a compilation of real life stories from those who have given up, aborted or abandoned their daughters.

H.B.

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