The campaign for 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence kicked off yesterday. Coordinated by the Center for Women’s Global Leadership, the campaign runs from November 25 to December 10 every year and since 1991, has helped raise awareness about gender violence and has highlighted its effects on women globally. For more, go here.

So here’s what I thought you should know about. UNFPA has a list of the five most under-reported forms of violence against women. Brace yourself. It’s not pretty. The list includes bride-napping, breast-ironing, traumatic fistula, femicide and child marriage. Bride-napping and child marriage are reasonably common terms so here are definitions of the other three.

Breast-ironing, a traditional practice in a number of West African countries that involves crushing the breasts of young girls in order to deter male attention;

The epidemic of traumatic fistula in Africa, which is caused by gang rape and often the forced insertion of foreign objects into the rape victim. This results in the tearing of the delicate tissues separating the birth canal from the bowel and/or the bladder. Seriously injured and psychologically traumatized, the victim is left incontinent, leaking faeces, urine, or both. Too often, her family and community rejects her, to live out the remainder of her life as a pariah—doubly stigmatized—both by the rape itself and its terrible consequences.

The ongoing femicide of women in the Central American country of Guatemala. Unlike the killings of young women in Ciudad Juarez, on the El Paso/Mexico border, the wholesale murder and mutilation of Guatemala’s women continues to be enacted under a cloak of media silence and official neglect.

Sometimes, one may well wonder what the point of knowing such things is. Most of us think we live fairly powerless lives with little ability to move or change anything in the wider world out there, let alone in distant Guatemala, Mexico or Kenya. Well, the 16 Days Action Kit may change your view about how much (or little) you can do. In a nutshell, you can:

I would say that’s quite a few different options and at least a few of them are easy to do even if you’re busy, a man, a “non-feminist”, apolitical, and “not the activist type”. To go a step further, it seems to me that no. 1 is a no-brainer and should be possible to do all year round and not just for these 16 days. What do you think?

Over at The Nation, there’s an article on an interesting new book called The Politics of the Veil by historian Joan Wallach Scott, which examines the French obsession with the Muslim’s woman’s headscarf or foulard islamique. Muslim girls in France often face non-admission or expulsion from school when they choose to wear a headscarf. The Politics of the Veil gives us a history of the controversy and Wallach Scott’s research is apparently “broad and exhaustive.The article is a snapshot of what one can expect from the book and gives a brief history of the controversy. It also talks about some of the different factors involved in this debate — secularism, national identity, the idea of a homogeneous European female identity, and sexual liberation. She makes an interesting point about the last.

In reality, both Islamic Sharia and strict French laïcité produced gender systems that essentially deprived women of the right to dispose of their bodies as they wished. Indeed, in Islamic tradition, women are urged to be modest and to steer clear of tabarruj. This Arabic noun has its roots in the verb baraja, which means “to display” or “to show off,” and the noun can be translated as something like “affectation.” In A Season in Mecca, his narrative book about the pilgrimage, Moroccan anthropologist Abdellah Hammoudi uses the term “ostentation” to translate tabarruj, “the invariable term for a bearing that is deemed immodest or conspicuous, a hieratic stance.” Similarly, the French law born out of strict definitions of laïcité warned schoolgirls about displaying “conspicuous” signs of religious affiliation. In short, the battle between the two modes of thinking was played out in women’s bodies.

As usual, individual freedom is forgotten in the bid to fit people into strict ideological moulds. It is disturbing how even ideologies that originally start on the premise of “freeing” a certain group of people end up being restrictive and determining, and therefore ultimately oppressive, in their own way.

The headscarf issue is complex because it is rooted in several questions. How does one negotiate the path between religious freedom and secularism? What does secularism mean? The absence of religion or the freedom to practice whatever you want. If it is the latter, where do you draw the line when it comes to regulated institutions like schools? The Sikh turban, the Muslim hijab, the sacred thread worn by Hindu Brahmins, the Christian crucifix pendant — all of these are religious symbols. Banning one while allowing others is unfair but the more ‘visible’ ones tend to come under more fire than others.

Also, how realistic is it in this age of global migration to hold on to ‘national idenity’ with steely fingers. As people move around more and there are more migrants in every place, there is bound to be upheaval and redefinition of national identity. Whole masses of people cannot be expected to drop all the habits, customs and affiliations that they have been practicing for centuries. They probably would not be able to even if they tried.

In another incident just last month, British MP Jack Straw sparked off an argument around the niqab because he said it was a “visible statement of separation and of difference” and asked women visiting his surgery to consider removing it. The niqab, unlike the hijab which covers only the head, is a veil that covers most of the face, leaving the space around the eyes open. From the BBC report.

Mr Straw was putting women “into a very awkward position by compromising the faith they believe in and that is ill-placed”, Council of Lancashire Mosques chairman Hamid Kureshi told BBC Radio Five Live.

And a political rival - Liberal Democrat constitutional affairs spokesman Simon Hughes - questioned whether it was Mr Straw’s place to question the way that members of the public dressed.

“I don’t think it’s the job for somebody who represents the whole community to say to somebody who comes through the door, ‘Do you mind if you dress differently in order to talk to me?’,” Mr Hughes said.

With time, European countries will need to loosen their construct of national identity and give up on conventional notions of people looking and behaving tidily similar. Diversity does breed some amount of chaos. And chaos is not always bad. We cannot pay lip service to concepts like racial equality and diversity without making space for what that means in real terms. All people come with baggage. People from different races, religions and sexes come with different kinds of baggage. Asking them to leave that baggage at the door is hardly in keeping with the larger goals of unity and tolerance.

It’s very hard to take a serious issue and convey it in a fun manner without losing some of the seriousness. The makers of Wallace & Gromit have done it astoundingly well. Their new campaign for Leonard Cheshire Disability called Creature Discomforts, which you can view here, manages to be sincere and cute at the same time, without slipping over into sentimentality or trivialising the issues. This is probably largely due to the fact that the voices behind the characters are people with real disabilities.

The biggest messages are about stigma and access. Like Kevin Gillespie who gives voice to Brian the Bull Terrier says:

“We went to have a look at a pub that we were considering visiting on a group day out which calls itself disabled friendly, but when we got there we found there was gravel outside which made it difficult to move our wheelchairs around, an extremely sharp right turn to get into the entrance, and then a step to get to the bar! That’s not what I’d call disabled friendly.”

“It’s things like this that make you feel excluded as there are certain places I’d like to go to but can’t because of access problems”.

These barriers, however, don’t stop Kevin getting out and about locally. “It’s really important for me to actually live in, and feel part of the community. I must admit, I have lived here for five years and I cannot recall anyone looking at me as if to say ‘What planet has he come from?’ Everyone has looked at me as they do able bodied people and forgotten about the chair”.

Here is the Guardian’s opinion on the campaign and here is a video on the making of it.

One of the things that struck me is that the campaign talks about access to bars, restaurants, places like that. In developing countries, we are so far behind on this curve that it doesn’t even bear scrutiny. To begin with, there is little data on disability. When poverty and social marginalisation are added to the cesspool, disabled people are discriminated against in many more ways.It is telling that in my social circle, I seldom meet disabled people. It is a quiet but systematic exclusion that takes place so much below the surface that most of us are not even aware of it.

A recent World Bank report found that disability seriously affects economic prospects in India and “physically challenged children are four to five times less likely to be in school than Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes children.” In my own experience, organizations will usually not hire a disabled person. In fact, India’s disabled employment rate seems to be falling. Deprived of economic opportunity (and even before that, education), disabled people seldom earn enough to gain access to more than the basic necessities. You don’t see them in bars or nightclubs, rarely at restaurants or malls. So people forget about the issues of disabled people because it’s easy to.

It’s a vicious cycle and I think schools hold a large piece of the puzzle. If schools sponsored a few classes that were disabled-friendly, it would help bring them into the mainstream besides inculcating awareness from a young age among the other kids, who in turn would hopefully grow up to be less discriminatory as adults. Parents would also possibly understand disabled people better if they were friends with their children, came home, stayed for tea. It would go a long way towards driving up our collective awareness and empathy up a notch. What do you think?

Globally, more than 40 per cent of respondents do not understand that AIDS is always fatal. In India, where rates of HIV are rising, 59% believe that HIV is a curable disease. These are the disturbing findings of this study on what people across nine countries think of AIDS.

In a collusion of opinion and fact, this first-ever perception audit also found that 86 per cent of adults in the United States, U.K., France, Russia, China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa believe stigma and shame to be a contributor to the spread of HIV. Seventy-six per cent report lack of access to treatment to be a problem as well.

Some astonishing fallacies about access to treatment seem to be in circulation as well. According to the survey, many people mistakenly believe there is currently a cure for HIV. People also believe treatment is more widely available than it is. According to the study, “nearly half of all respondents believe that most people diagnosed with HIV are receiving treatment, when in fact only one in five people who needed treatment received it in 2006.”

The TIME article on this also points out:

The survey also suggests an enduring stigma surrounding HIV. Nearly half of the people surveyed reported being uncomfortable working with those who are HIV positive, while slightly more than half of the respondents did not want to live in the same home as someone infected with HIV.

It seems that a quarter century of AIDS education, public health campaigns and a continuous “mainstreaming” of HIV-positive people in the U.S. and Europe have done little to sort out the public’s confusion. The problem may be that while advances in treatment and prevention have fueled a misguided sense of complacency about the disease, personal prejudices have kept the stigma and shame about HIV alive.

Besides public awareness campaigns, mainstreaming HIV/AIDS awareness into education is imperative. But in many countries, attitudes towards sex and sexuality make it difficult to discuss topics like safe sex. Cultural taboos forbid speaking to children or teenagers about such matters and health becomes a distant lower priority as compared to “morality”. Avert looks at how HIV/AIDS education for young people is commonly approached in some detail here. And UNICEF has some resources that you can download here.

Of course, culture is an important parameter to keep in mind while communicating. But innovation and sensitivity should not hinder honesty or plainspeak when it comes to important, potentially life-and-death impacting factors. For example, look at this MTV commercial for AIDS prevention.

It’s funny but I’m unsure of whether it conveys the seriousness of the issue. People will laugh and even remember the ad, but will they really use a condom because it tells them to? What do you think?

The image in the post is by Fraga from Mexico and was part of a UN World AIDS Day exhibit.

We’ve been repeatedly told that climate change will affect some of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people. And yet another disaster has come along as hard, cold evidence. Cyclone Sidr swooped down on Bangladesh on Thursday evening, killing around 900 people and leaving tens of thousands homeless or injured. The actual numbers are probably far greater.

“We are expecting that thousands of dead bodies may be found within a few days,” Shekhar Chandra Das, deputy head of the government’s disaster management office, told AFP.

“We have not been able to collect information about casualties in many remote and impassable places due to the disruption to communications,” he said.

The irony , of course, is that these people have very little to do with burning fossil fuels. Never have so many been harmed by so few?

Meanwhile, the United Nations’ top climate change official has warned that the world will be in “deep trouble” if it fails to agree on any solutions at next month’s UN ministerial conference in Bali. Just how bad have the effects of climate change been so far? The UNEP has a factsheet on this here, which also talks about adverse changes in the hydrological cycle:

Rising temperatures are already accelerating the hydrological cycle. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, becomes less stable and produces more precipitation, particularly in the form of heavy rain bursts. Greater heat also speeds up evaporation. The net effect of these changes in the cycling of water will be a decline in the quantity and quality of freshwater supplies in all major regions. Meanwhile, wind patterns and storm tracks are likely to change. The intensity (but not the frequency) of tropical cyclones are expected to increase, with larger peak wind speeds and heavier rains.

I also came across this article which points out that the American media has been (unsurprisingly, in my opinion) quiet about the cyclone. It goes on to talk about a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for a New American Security, which connects the dots between natural disasters, socio-economic problems and latent extremism to make a compelling case for why the US should be taking cyclones in Bangladesh very seriously.

Meanwhile aid efforts are on and according to an official from the UN World Food Programme the most urgent needs are food, water purification tablets, and medicines. Here is the emergency appeal issued by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, which is working in the area. You can also make an online donation towards the relief efforts here.

The World Toilet Summit took place here in New Delhi earlier this month. Delegates racked their brains to come up with ideas for innovative toilets. And if you can’t help a smirk at that, consider this:

Due to the absence of an organised sanitation system, 1.8 million children across the world die of diarrhoea annually, and close to half the population in developing countries suffers health problems caused by water and sanitation defects, at any given time. The World Health Organisation estimates that 200 million people are infected with schistosomiasis — a disease caused by lack of access to hygienic sanitation facilities. Experts say open defection contaminates water and helps the spread of diseases like diarrhoea, which kills at least 4,900 people everyday, worldwide….(more).

Nothing remotely funny there, unfortunately. According to this video report, self-cleaning toilets and a fourteen-year-old inventor who has come up with an idea for preventing sewage disposal from trains at railway stations were part of the annual summit.

This UN report says that lack of sanitation facilities dooms 3 billion people to a life that is primitive and devoid of basic dignity. Apart from causing disease, lack of proper sanitation facilities can have more indirect impact as well — such as on girl’s education. Girls tend to miss school when there are no sanitation facilities because it is difficult for them to go out in the open. When there are no separate facilities for boys and girls, they don’t attend school during menstruation. It’s worse when there are no latrines at home.

In many cultures, girls and women wait until after dark to defecate if they have no latrine in the household, experiencing discomfort and sometimes serious illness as a result. When girls and women have to walk to a place distant from their home for excreta disposal, particularly at night, they are vulnerable to harassment and assault.

It’s hard to imagine people living without latrines — something that so many take for granted in this era of designer bathrooms and spa treatments — but the number of
people without access to latrines and toilets increased by some 400 million over the last decade. And with increasing migration and urbanisation and burgeoning slums, it is likely to keep doing so unless solutions are provided quickly.

On a lighter note, here’s a hilarious CWS commercial via The Bathroom Diaries. Enjoy.