Group items tagged

This is about a recent victory in South Africa regarding hate speech and rape. It is important to our course because rape is a major problem in violence against women. By taking action against offenders, in a country where rape is very big problem, the South African government is taking a stand and helping to change the future of violence against women.

This article draws a parallel to the questions/ workshop based on femicide in class. When discussing effective ways to raise awareness and stop the violence, the government seemed a major resource in doing so. I found it very interesting and surprising that the South African government is taking hate speech and rape seriously and being proactive in making sure this violence stops and perpetrators are punished. By getting the government involved in gender equality and violence, can allow change within society among men and women. In particular men can be educated in how to support women's rights and gender equalities, and also create new standards or systems of gender roles to advance gender equality.

Amnesty International is an organization that is working to enforce human rights through various campaigns. They work across countries with the government in order to change law and help push legislation to help further equality. This page in particular focuses on their work to stop the current violence against women occurring around the world. Here you can read about the problems facing various countries, learn more about what different governments are doing, and what Amnesty International believes needs to be done. Here you can find resources to help in your own activism such as fact sheets, videos, and specific campaigns.

"although accession offered women's movements political opportunities to put pressure on their governments, the adaptation to EU regulations is characterized by top-down reforms and the unequal compliance of national governments." The European Union is unique in that it brings many different countries with different cultures together under some overarching policies. Women's organizations have been dealing with the difficulties of making all the member state's governments commit to women's issues being on their agenda. Also, they have been working towards violence against women initiatives and trying to get the different governments to support them.

I have bookmarked a specific event that takes place every year under The United Nations Population Fund. As an international development agency, UNFPA works across countries to spread awareness and to work towards equal rights and opportunities for all people. Working with the government of a specific country, the agency works on sustainable development taking into account the needs of the population now and for the future. This event specifically, the 16 Days of Activism to End Violence Against Women is done every year and speaks out across the world on issues of gender violence. Apart from the set aside 16 days, this page lays out 16 ways the UNFPA is working to end this violence. As well, the website lists various other events they are hosting as well as sites to visit that show social and multi-media space on a variety of issues that one can use to network and learn more on such issues.

This is a great website, and I love that it happens every year. By not only providing websites and other resources for people to look at, just their presentation, as a worldwide event, makes it very effective in getting the idea of how bad violence against women really is. One thing that I thought was most effective about it is that it is not just the US, and not just a country that we hear about often with regards to their violence against women, but global. This globalness is very important because if someone who knew little about violence against women were to see this, then they could possibly become aware that violence against women is not just in the US, and not just in the rest of the world, something that is very important to ending violence against women.

I'm glad that you came across this website because people want to get involved and sometimes do not k now were to start. I feel like I can send some of my friends to this website to get started. I like that the ideas also involve men; it's something that everyone can do and feel good about. One of the 16 ways that jumped out at me was "Publicizing the issue of acid burning and other unusual forms of gender violence" because it is something that it is not spoken about and given a lot of attention to.

The page preceding this states that one in three women in the military will be sexually assaulted during their tour of duty. This number is amazing to me and it makes me wonder what life is really like for women in the military. In such a male dominated institution, the women of the military have been silenced. NOW president Kim Gandy is calling for president Barack Obama to address this issue and see that it stops.

This is a great example of our society being male dominated. How are we supposed to make change when the majority of government, law, and policy makers are men? Those involved with public service are typically those in control of delegating positions and reforming laws. It is important for the few women who are involved to raise their voices and for us, the citizens, to elect more women into office.

Before joining this class, I had knowledge of such happenings within our military, but I never had any idea the numbers were so high. I am able to acknowledge that yes these things happen, but it is hard to accept how often they occur. Posttraumatic stress disorder is an issue that is raised all the time, of men coming back from war and being so traumatized that they cannot continue on with their daily lives. In a number of movies and TV shows I have watched, soldiers coming back from war have been depicted as abusing their wives, but what about their fellow female soldiers? This is an issue that surely needs to be address now not only by the media to the public but within the government. Morgan brings up a good, but scary point of how are we suppose to change anything when those in power are men and men supporting the actions in the military by not speaking out. I do not know what the answer to this problem is, but I know that acknowledging and addressing the issue is the first step.

I wanted to bookmark the recap because this latest episode of Criminal Minds involves so many elements of the articles we have read, as well as the class discussions. It's about a white male police officer at the Texas border who was killing illegal immigrants who were trying to cross into the US. The female sheriff was doing her best to end the murders but wasn't getting any cooperation from her deputies or the government. She ends up getting killed by the police officer because she was getting too close to solving the crimes. The deputies in the town kept wasting time by trying to pin the murders on a local gang instead of trying to find the actual murderer. Throughout the episode there was talk about how things like this are allowed to happen with little action taken by the government, which coincides with many of the articles that we have read. There was also an illegal immigrant woman who was separated from her family by the person who was helping them get across the border and he raped her, which is what the border rape article was all about.

"Say NO- UNiTE End Violence Against Women" is a campaign out of UNIFEM which aims to end violence against women worldwide through the activism, support, and help of people. The objective is have 100,000 "actions" performed globally by November 2010 that in some way help end violence against women, such as working in a shelter, donating money to an organizations, or taking an activist stance. There is a section where people can write in their name to stop the violence against women and tell governments to "make ending violence against women a top priority." I think we should all sign and try to take action!

This article informs us on the level of involvement that women are taking part in the demonstrations and activism in Honduras. The biggest issue that is spoken about in this article is the militarization of the National Institute of Women (INAM). This is a threat to all women in Honduras because their resources are being blocked and controlled by the government. Another issue that is discussed is the sexualized aggression against women when they are protesting for their rights.

Gaudermann, Kimberly 2003 Women's Lives in Colonia Quito: Gender, Law, and Economy in Spanish America. Texas: University of Texas Press. "Women's Lives in Colonial Quito: Gender, Law and Economy in Spanish America" by Kimberly Gaudermann provides a very important historical perspective to my paper. This book discusses how domestic violence was handled in Quito, Ecuador in the seventeenth century. Women who reported instances of domestic abuse were able to charge their husband and bring him to court. The state empowered women through giving them the ability to punish their husbands if he hit them or mishandled their money or dowry property. The state's incentive in doing this was to control the money and property involved in marriages and to ensure that no one person had more power than the state and was able to 'play' them in anyway. This book is an extremely important aspect to my paper in answering the question of why domestic violence is not created as a problem in Latin America because it shows that domestic violence was not always ignored. Rather, during the seventeenth century the state was very involved in trying to prevent domestic violence and any man who committed this crime was punished. However this is not true today where domestic abuse is created as a cultural norm and the government does not do much to enforce prevention on this matter. I think this book is important because it creates another part to my paper that is not only historic but also develops questions for why the ideas toward domestic violence have changed in Latin America and how that affects women.

This article is useful to the development of my research because of its currency and differentiation from the books I have already bookmarked. This article's highlights are: women and girls as young as four are raped on a daily basis, 100 percent of women in camps are reported as facing gender-based abuse, and the Sudanese government dismissing or denying rape as violence in Darfur. This article will help me look at the issue from a different standpoint as the books I am using come from the voice of anthropologists where this is the voice of a new reporter--something much different and more literal or scientific. Here, the reference to culture is taken out and we are able to look at the issue objectively.

Kim, Julia C., Lorna J. Martin and Lynette Denny. 2003. "Rape and HIV Post-Exposure Prophylaxis: Addressing the Dual Epidemics in South Africa." Reproductive Health Matters 11(22, HIV/AIDS, Sexual and Reproductive Health: Intimately Related):101-112. This article is very important for my paper because it looks at the way that the South African government deals with post-exposure prophylaxis. This is important for this paper because it looks at one way that rape and HIV are linked. The link between rape and HIV, especially in South Africa is key to the paper because it constitutes a major risk of rape, especially in South Africa. Additionally, it argues that there is a very strong link between sexual violence against women and the spread of HIV.

This website provides critical information for Spanish speaking women in the United States. It provides various statistics from the CDC and the HHS. It also creates a list of situations which may indicate if you are a victim of abuse or not. Although this site is in Spanish I believe that it is a useful in order to analyze what Latina women are being offered in terms of services.

I agree with Jennifer. I think the fact that this site is in Spanish is a great thing, since it is known that Latinas are high on the list as victims of violent acts. One important thing to note for the purpsoses of our class and our Diigo group is how all this information we have bookmarked reaches its audience. That is how this helps people understand the issue as well as the victims of the problem. It is important to have this information be accesible to all communities. By using spanish on this site they are reaching a whole other audience that might not have access to other resources on violence against women because of a language barrier.

This article shows how certain activist groups have pressured to restructure Guatemalan law regarding violence against women. It discusses how addressing rape is slowly changing with the support of international organizations and national groups. However, the article also highlights how Guatemala's corrupt government and gangs makes it hard to eradicate violence against women, where respect for women and for peace is not rooted.

The Spiritual Alliance to Stop Intimate Violence is an organization that advocates awareness on intimate violence as a global issue. The website provides information on family life and focuses on strengthening the partnership between parents and children.

I think this website is really important because it focuses on intimate violence which affects not only women but children as well. The majority of the other bookmarked websites primarily discuss violence against women, and although that is obviously extremely important, I think it is also very important to look at how violence against women in the home can affect children and the ways to help families cope with intimate violence and the ways we as a world can try and stop it. SAIV works to raise awareness about this issue that occurs around the globe by grassroots movements and by bringing these issues to different sectors of the government, two very important movements that help in creating change. This website and SAIV are very important to our class because they work to bring to light intimate violence as a global issue and the ways we can become active to stop the violence and help families affected by intimate violence around the globe.

This site is about domestic violence perpetrated by police officers. I thought this site was interesting because it deals with a subset of domestic violence that is not always on the top of the discussion list. It talks about the added problems that victims have when their abuser is a cop who has been trained to be the authority figure.

I agree that this site is interesting and worth noting because it does happen and when it does, there is practically nothing a civilian victim can do against a government paid law enforcement officer. It was difficult for me to read because it reminded me of a classmate I had in high school who had been physically abused by his father who was a judge. His story was particularly difficult for me to understand because he had volunteered all of this information about his horrible home life without warning. It was also interesting to me because he had decided to leave his house to live with his grandmother, which is actually how we started carpooling. He was a year older than I, but he has a younger brother in my year who stayed at home with his parents. I never knew how to act around him knowing what I did even though he hadn't told me. The boy in my year must have had a crush on one of my best friends and had a poor way of showing it, which I think was partly due to his violent family dynamic. My girlfriend still tells me about how he stalked her and still calls and sends her odd and unwelcome messages.

I also agree that this site is very interesting. Not only does it expose a flaw of prosecuting domestic violence in our legal system, but also shows how traditional "masculine" roles influence domestic violence. I like that the author shows how police culture, which conforms to many stereotypes about masculinity, works to increase rates and intensity of domestic violence, rather than only looking at problems with the individual abusers. The only thing I didn't like about this article was that I felt it down played the difficulties that women who have not been abused by officers face. The beginning of the article made it seem as if there was a wide network of support and help for victims of domestic violence within the legal system, which is not typically the case.

"The study described in this paper looked at homelessness law in the UK before the passage of the recent Housing Act (1996) in Britain. It does not bear out the supposition that homeless families, including women escaping from domestic violence and their children, were unfairly favoured under the previous legislation. The paper argues that the withdrawal in the new Act of the statutory link between homelessness and a lifeline to permanent housing is an example of the ambivalent and contradictory nature of government policy in relation to families and to the social position of women, and is a potentially disastrous development for many women experiencing domestic violence and for their children."

In conducting research for my final paper, which focuses on the correlation between domestic abuse and homelessness, I have gained an awareness of the urgent need for housing options for women in abusive relationships. Lack of housing is often the reason why a women chooses to stay with an abusive partner; the woman's safety is severely compromised due to a preventable problem. DASH's Empowerment initiative aims to provide women with safe transitional housing and support. For a scared woman who is contemplating leaving her abusive partner, the knowlege of a supportive organization, such as DASH, could be just the push she needs to escape. Though this organization is in the D.C area, I believe it is essential that such organizations are spread throughout the country.

First of all, I think this is such a great topic for a research paper and I am looking forward to see what conclusions you can reach from this correlation. I think people often overlook that empowerment cannot only come in the form of education to women, the importance of tangible empowerment like immediate housing is crucial to actually empower a woman to be able to leave an abusive situation. I especially thought the tools+trainig section of the site was an important resource since it describes how this organization goes about providing for help in housing and at the different levels (community based, government help etc.)

The Accused, 1988, Jonathan Kaplan, dir. I am using this film to illustrate the use of rape and its consequences as depicted in film. This film is unique as it shows rape in a non-normative light, differing from how rape is typically depicted within film. Rather than from the perspective majorly of men, this film shows rape through the eyes of the victim and the defender, both women. However, ultimately (as Projansky predicts), it is a man who (in all honesty unrealistically) "saves the day," and the honor of the victim (played by Jodi Foster). While this film is innovative in its brutal truth about rape and all that it entails (physical harm, emotional/mental harm, economic harm, and the difficulty of court trials), it is also in a sense, a fairy tale for raped women - certain aspects of the film, such as the conclusion, depict a more optimistic world. Still, this film has many positive qualities in exhibiting topics in relation to rape, such as the instilled patriarchic views within court and government systems, and among fraternities of men. I would not say that this film desensitizes rape, but rather that it magnifies the horrors of rape; however, this perception could differ between men and women. These are some of the topics I will explore of rape and its consequences as portrayed through this film and its relation to viewers and what they do with such images and information.