Power and Rights in the Community: Paralegals as Leaders in Women’s Legal Empowerment in Tanzania

What can an analysis of power in local communities contribute to debates on women’s legal empowerment and the role of paralegals in Africa? Drawing upon theories of power and rights, and research on legal empowerment in African plural legal systems, this article explores the challenges for paralegals in facilitating women’s access to justice in Tanzania, which gave statutory recognition to paralegals in the Legal Aid Act 2017. Land conflicts represent the single-biggest source of local legal disputes in Tanzania and are often embedded in gendered land tenure relations. This article argues that paralegals can be effective actors in women’s legal empowerment where they are able to work as leaders, negotiating power relations and resisting the forms of violence that women encounter as obstacles to justice. Paralegals’ authority will be realised when their role is situated within community leadership structures, confirming their authority while preserving their independence.     

for reproductive justice in an era of Gates and Modi: the violence of India’s population policies

This article addresses India’s contemporary population control policies and practices as a form of gender violence perpetrated by the state and transnational actors against poor, Adivasi and Dalit women. It argues that rather than meeting the needs and demands of these women for access to safe contraception that they can control, the Indian state has targeted them for coercive mass sterilisations and unsafe injectable contraceptives. This is made possible by the long-term construction of particular women’s lives as devalued and disposable, and of their bodies as excessively fertile and therefore inimical to development and progress. It further considers how population policy is currently embedded in the neoliberal framework of development being pursued by the Indian state. In particular, it argues that the violence of population policies is being deepened as a result of three central and interrelated aspects of this framework: corporate dispossession and displacement, the intensification and extension of women’s labour for global capital, and the discourses and embodied practices of far-right Hindu supremacism. At the same time, India’s population policies cannot be understood in isolation from the global population control establishment, which is increasingly corporate-led, and from broader structures of racialised global capital accumulation. The violence of India’s contemporary population policies and the practices they produce operate at several different scales, all of which involve the construction of certain bodies as unfit to reproduce and requiring intervention and control.     

Misogyny in ‘post-war’ Afghanistan: the changing frames of sexual and gender-based violence

Abstract

Although the US and NATO invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was ideologically justified under the banner of democracy and women’s rights, the latter issue has been completely forgotten within the public sphere since then. As the war has officially ended in Afghanistan, new forms of misogyny and sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) have arisen. The ‘post-war’ Afghan context presents an institutional normalization of violence, favouring a culture of rape and impunity. The changing frames of violence against women are widely related to the political situation of the country: while public attention is focused on peace agreements, women’s issues are relegated to banalities and depicted as ‘everyday’ news. Meanwhile, new frames of SGBV appear as body part mutilation within marriage, forced prostitution, and increasing domestic violence, partly due to the growing consumption of opium but also to the perpetuation of powerful warlords in state structures. This article draws on gender studies to analyse the current misogynist culture in ‘post-war’ Afghanistan, framing the new forms of violence induced by successive armed conflicts. It relies on interviews conducted in 2013 in Afghanistan; and on secondary sources, mostly taken from the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan and Human Rights Watch reports.     

Gender Justice or Gendered Justice? Female Defendants in International Criminal Tribunals

Recent scholarship has given increasing attention to studying women’s involvement in conflict and mass violence. However, there is comparatively less discussion of the experiences of women as actors and perpetrators in conflict, and limited discussion of women as defendants in international criminal tribunals. This article explores this under-researched area. By analysing legal materials from the cases of six female defendants, this article investigates the extent to which legal discourses are shaped by stereotypes regarding femininity, conflict and peace. It identifies three gender narratives—mothers, monsters and wives—used in relation to female defendants, which highlight the incompatibility of femininity with violence, and deny women’s agency in political and military contexts. Thus, this article concludes that female defendants in international criminal tribunals are viewed through gendered lenses, and discussed in accordance with gendered themes. This gendered justice is problematic, as it reinforces patriarchal gender stereotypes, and may hinder attempts to facilitate gender justice.     

Police officers’ perceptions of false allegations of rape

Abstract

The idea that women lie about rape is a long standing rape myth with little or no supporting evidence. Previous research has demonstrated a belief in high levels of false allegations among police officers, despite no evidence to suggest rape is falsely reported more than other crimes. This has implications for complainants’ willingness to report sexual violations, for the treatment of complainants within the justice system, and wider societal understandings about what constitutes rape. The data that informs this paper comes from an Economic and Social Research Council-funded study that focussed on rape attrition and the institutional response to rape. Forty in-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with serving police officers in a UK force who regularly deal with reported cases of rape, and explored perceptions, practices and processes around rape. The research found police officers’ estimate of false allegations varies widely from 5 to 90%. The paper will discuss how police officers make judgements about perceived veracity of complainants in rape cases. This will demonstrate that whilst significant progress has been made in how police officers and police forces respond to rape, gender stereotypes about women as deceitful, vengeful and ultimately regretful of sexual encounters, continue to pervade the thinking of some officers. It will show that police officers differentiate between ‘types’ of reports they consider to be false, and operate with a notional ‘hierarchy’ of presumed false allegations that ranges from vengeful/malicious to mistaken/confused, with a corresponding reducing level of culpability attributed to women for the supposedly false allegation. It concludes that this serves to reinforce a culture that both supports and reproduces gender inequality and its manifestation in the form of sexual violence, and that intervention, training and institutional and policy frameworks are not wholly successful in addressing sexual violence in this context.     

A Woman’s Work is… Unfinished Business: Justice for the Disappeared Magdalen Women of Modern Ireland

In this article I explore one core feature of contemporary campaigns for justice for Ireland’s Magdalen women concerning their deaths and disappearances, which continue to be denied by a State that has only recently started to acknowledge civilian deaths in other contexts such as armed conflict. I examine the treatment of the disappeared and deceased Magdalen women in the economic and political context of the Irish use of religious institutions and consider the significance of this regime for women’s citizenship in the postcolonial nation-building processes of the twentieth century. I aim to illustrate the connections between gender, violence and citizenship that are implicated in outcomes for justice for Magdalen survivors and victims, as well as conceptions of Irish women’s citizenship in general. In this discussion I consider the Magdalen campaigns for justice as significant for the individual women and families involved, as well as the entire nation’s conception of self as represented in history.     

Afterword: challenging women in the British professions

ABSTRACT

Places the first women lawyers in the context of the experiences of women in other professions in Britain as their access gradually grew, also within the wider history of women and women’s movements, including for the vote, in the time period covered by these articles. It examines the challenges women faced in all professions and in the wider world, especially of sexist discrimination, and how they themselves challenged them, increasingly with professional support from women lawyers. It assesses the changes they achieved and failed to achieve, and the obstacles.     

Indigenous Feminisms in Canada

Abstract

This essay explores three case studies that show how Indigenous women enact the principles of Indigenous feminism by deploying the concept of active silence to bring attention to the social justice goals of Indigenous communities in Canada. It begins by defining Indigenous feminism and its broader objectives before turning to a discussion of the Sahtu Dene’s efforts to restore land polluted through uranium mining, Heiltsuk resistance to the Northern Gateway Pipeline Project, and Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.     

same old story? children and young people’s continued normalisation of men’s violence against women

Globally, nationally and locally men’s violence against women is an endemic social problem and an enduring human rights issue within all societies and cultures. Challenging attitudes that condone violence both at the individual and community level is a key priority in its prevention. This paper brings together findings from two separate studies based on children’s and young people’s understandings of men’s violence against women. Both studies were located in Glasgow, Scotland, and used qualitative methods to explore children’s and young people’s views of men’s violence against women. The two studies, conducted nearly ten years apart, involved children aged 11 and 12 and young people aged 15 to 18. Despite the differences in age and the interval between them, there are remarkable similarities identified within both studies centring around children and young people’s normalisation of men’s violence against women. This paper presents a discussion of three of the key themes identified from these studies: the construction of men’s violence; gender roles and the naturalisation of difference; and the normalisation of men’s violence. In both studies the techniques of normalisation were employed by the participants to minimise both the seriousness of the violence and the significance of it to the victims. The findings clearly illustrate the widespread justification of gendered violence by both boys and girls. Thus, while the development and implementation of domestic violence/abuse education programmes need to take into account gender differences, targeting only boys’ attitudes fails to acknowledge an important component in reducing domestic violence/abuse: the internalisation of patriarchal norms by girls and women.     

The Transitional Justice Gap: Exploring ‘Everyday’ Gendered Harms and Customary Justice in South Kivu,DR Congo

Feminist transitional justice (TJ) has greatly contributed to the study of justice in the ruins of war, notably around prosecuting wartime rape. At the same time, scholars have observed limitations to this research agenda such as externally-driven definitions gendered harms and how to address them. This paper explores two novel areas for feminist TJ research: ‘everyday gendered harms’ and customary justice. Based on a three month field study of baraza, a customary justice mechanism in parts of South Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo, I explore three cases of ‘everyday’ harms against women: domestic violence, polygynous relationships and witchcraft. Through a substantive examination of these baraza cases, I highlight how studying the contextualised functioning of customary justice mechanisms provides new insights into different areas of feminist TJ scholarship, including women’s participation in the transition, justice for harms against women, and advancing gender equality. Additionally, this paper adds to the broader TJ literature by engaging with local TJ needs as they pertain to people’s everyday life in transition.     

immigrating into the occupation: Russian-speaking women in Palestinian societies

This article explores sex selective abortion (SSA) as a form of structural violence within the broader notion of women’s ‘protection’ in contemporary India. While SSA tends to be framed more generally within ethical and choice-based frameworks around abortion access and reproductive ‘rights’, and specifically in India around preference for sons as a discriminatory, cultural, technological misogyny, this article argues that sex selective abortion in India needs to be understood as an outcome of broader systemic economic, political and social processes. The deepening of neoliberal values through state policies has impacted significantly on social relations, shaping SSA as a manifestation of structural violence. State-driven policies in India reflect a neoliberal governmentality through state patriarchy that is implicit within the neoliberal developmental, governmental and capitalist paradigm of contemporary India. This article argues that SSA is structurally produced and therefore cannot be remedied through awareness-raising strategies such as beti bachao or financial inclusion as a means to ‘protect’ or ‘save the girl child’. Indeed, it is neoliberal economic forces that actively, though seemingly inadvertently, promote anti-women, sex selective abortion as a reproductive strategy, which is then disciplined through neoliberal governmentality. This highlights SSA as a form of gendered and structural, rather than discriminatory, violence.     

(Re)centering street harassment – an appraisal of safe cities global initiative in Delhi,India

Abstract

In 2012, New Delhi (India) was catapulted into the global limelight for the brutal gang rape of a 23-year old woman travelling in a bus. This wasn’t the first time that sexual violence had been perpetrated on the streets of Delhi and nor would it be the last. Yet this universal fact of everyday violence in public spaces particularly streets, though acknowledged by activists and feminists, has been examined minimally in academic scholarship. Further, even though the United Nations has been instrumental in foregrounding gender-based violence as a critical human rights issue, it has only recently turned its attention to street harassment through its ‘Safe Cities Global Initiative’. Therefore, in this paper, we trace how a routine but understudied form of violence becomes central to United Nations’ agenda to eliminate violence against women. By specifically, analysing the Delhi Safe Cities programme as a case study, our second contribution lies in examining the adequacy of the contemporary Safe Cities framework as a model for addressing sexual violence in public space. We conclude the paper by offering critical conceptual and methodological recommendations to further strengthen the framework.     

Structures of feeling: contemporary research in women’s film and broadcasting history

ABSTRACT

This special issue is the second volume originating from the ‘Doing Women’s Film and Television Histories III’ international conference held at the Phoenix Cinema, Leicester, England, in May 2016. It connects with concerns and questions of women’s production histories related to the constructed nature of history and how we write a ‘history from below’ to foreground the hidden, marginalised or forgotten histories of our women ancestors. This collection captures something of the dominant ‘structures of feeling’ of women’s film and broadcasting history scholarship in the contemporary period ranging from considerations of women working in both above and below-the-line roles in film, television and radio, to those whose labour fell outside of mainstream cinema production, as in the instance of the amateur film in the UK between the 1930s and 1980. Together, these case studies span from 1926 to the contemporary period, providing particular flashpoints of women’s history across the UK, North America, Italy and Australia.     

“Excuse Me,But Are You Raping Me Now?” Discourse and Experience in (the Grey Areas of) Sexual Violence

In feminist research on sexual violence and victimization, the relationship between discourse and experience has often been at the forefront of intense debates. Poststructuralist scholars have emphasized that the discourses used to name sexual violence may in fact perpetuate the very problem they set out to describe, by freezing women into powerless positions of rapability. Others have likened this sort of argument to anti-feminist trivialization of the pervasively gendered experiential reality to which such discourses refer, highlighting that women’s victimization is not a discursive problem. In this article, I seek to carve out a path that cuts through such polarization by exploring the multifaceted dialectical relationship between, on one hand, gendered discourses on sex and sexual violence and, on the other, people’s reported experiences of these phenomena and, in particular, of the “grey area” between sex and sexual violence. I do this by analysing autobiographical stories from the influential Swedish campaign #prataomdet (#talkaboutit), which emphasized the need for a new language that can do justice to people’s experiences of sexual violence and the grey area between sex and sexual violence.     

‘Belles from Bristol and Bournville in New Surroundings’: female confectionery workers as transnational agents, 1918–1928

ABSTRACT

In existing histories of the development of multinational business, women are usually absent. Yet when the British confectionery companies of Cadbury, Fry and Pascall took the bold step to build an entirely new factory in Tasmania in the early 1920s, women workers were important, and mobile, actors. This article draws on business history archives and genealogical material, from both Britain and Australia, to explore how a select group of British women became the ‘pioneers’ of the Cadbury-Fry-Pascall company. It examines why women were key to the formation of an Australian subsidiary, how they influenced, and sometimes challenged, the creation of workplace culture and practice, and the consequences of this mode of female labour migration.     

‘That splendid body of women’: nursing,professional registration,and suffragette militancy

ABSTRACT

In the decades before World War One, a group of women fought for their right to control their own futures, claiming that their governance was in the hands of men whose interests lay in keeping women subservient. Initially articulated by an educated, middle-class few, the women's demands were embraced by widening numbers of both women and men. They saw their hopes dashed on several occasions by political manoeuvring, and only after WWI did their demands begin to be met. This is not an account of the women’s suffrage movement, but rather of the fight for the registration of trained nurses. Both movements claimed the right of women to be actors in their public lives and both faced public condemnation for transgressing social boundaries. The two movements interacted, with nurses connecting their struggle to the wider call for women's rights, and with the suffrage movement foregrounding nurses as disenfranchised women professionals.     

East Timorese women,international networks,and the women’s human rights movement

ABSTRACT

This article explores the relationship between East Timorese women’s activism and the international women’s movement, within the context of East Timor’s struggle for independence from Indonesian military occupation (1975–1999). It examines the experiences and activism of several diaspora East Timorese women in international circles that converged around feminist solidarity and women’s human rights in the 1980s and 1990s. The article argues that these women played an important, yet underappreciated role in East Timor’s struggle for national self-determination.     

THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN

Abstract In this article I reveal how texts produced by Aboriginal women scholars signify a racialised and gendered body that functions discursively, as an immediacy of racism in the form of white patriarchal epistemic violence (Lloyd 1991, 74). I demonstrate how this dominant racialised and gendered form of violence is an assertion of power that involves or arises from racialised knowledge by examining Dirk Moses' analysis of ‘Indigeneity’ via the Northern Territory Intervention (Spivak 1988).     

active women and ideal refugees: dissecting gender,identity and discourse in the Sahrawi refugee camps

Since the Moroccan invasion in 1975, official reports on visits to Sahrawi refugee camps by international aid agencies and faith-based groups consistently reflect an overwhelming impression of gender equality in Sahrawi society. As a result, the space of the Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria and, by external association, Sahrawi society and Western Sahara as a nation-in-exile is constructed as ‘ideal’ (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2010, p. 67). I suggest that the ‘feminist nationalism’ of the Sahrawi nation-in-exile is one that is employed strategically by internal representatives of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Río de Oro (POLISARIO), the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) and the National Union of Sahrawi Women (NUSW), and by external actors from international aid agencies and also the colonial Moroccan state. The international attention paid to the active role of certain women in Sahrawi refugee camps makes ‘Other’ Sahrawi invisible, such as children, young women, mothers, men, people of lower socio-economic statuses, (‘liberated’) slave classes and refugees who are not of Sahrawi background. According to Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (ibid.), it also creates a discourse of ‘good’, ‘ideal’ refugees who are reluctant to complain, in contrast to ‘Other refugees’. This feminisation allows the international community not to take the Sahrawi call for independence seriously and reproduces the myth of Sahrawi refugees as naturally non-violent (read feminine) and therefore ‘ideal’. The myth of non-violence accompanied by claims of Sahrawi secularity is also used to distance Western Sahara from ‘African’, ‘Arab’ and ‘Islamic’, to reaffirm racialised and gendered discourses that associate Islam with terrorism and situate both in the Arab/Muslim East. These binaries make invisible the violence that Sahrawis experience as a result of the gendered constructions of both internal and external actors, and silence voices of dissent and frustration with the more than forty years of waiting to return home.