Emilye on "Making development work for women"

Emilye — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 08:55:05 +0000

Depressingly, nothing could have more forcefully illustrated my point about the about lethal ease with which debates about equality can so quickly descend into single-minded efforts by a few men to prove their own victimhood. I was trying to make a call for greater solidarity between men and women, to advance our common concerns and progress towards a world of equality and justice for all people – men and women. I did not say, or I hope imply, that ‘all men are "violent ogres" or that women are always "innocent victims"’ – on the contrary, I feel very strongly that the resort to simplistic gender dichotomies is deeply problematic. Far from blaming men, I was praising the excellent work being done by men in many parts of the world to bring about greater equality, and exhorting the need for women and men to work together to challenge the structures of inequality and injustice that disadvantage us all.

So while I could respond by reeling off just some of the many horrific statistics from the hundreds upon hundreds of studies that point to the gender asymmetry of violence in terms of perpetrators and victims –which, by the way, is not only confined to acts of physical violence but is also structural and institutionalised – I think this would rather miss the point. Precisely what I didn’t want was to end up bogged down in a divisive ‘blame game’. As I said, merely counterposing women's and men's experience and perpetration of violence is not helpful; the challenge is rather to help illuminate the workings and functions of violence within the systems of oppression that organise our different societies. As such, my concern is not only with men’s violence against women (although I do believe that men should be held accountable for this violence where it occurs, just as women should be held accountable for any violence they commit). More fundamentally, however, my concern is with the violence that produces and is produced by a hierarchical gender order that is, itself, interwoven with other forms of inequality and oppression. So let’s try and get beyond this ‘men versus women’ stalemate we seem to be stuck in and start to bring all this back to the most important issues of social justice and social change.

Making development work for women, openDemocracy

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 17:25:26 +0000

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International development policy over the past few years has shifted back to a focus on economic growth rather than a rights-based agenda. This has closed a "window of opportunity" opened in 1995 following the Beijing world conference on women, say many working for women's empowerment and gender equality.

At a recent conference hosted by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), the discussion focused on women's economic and political empowerment, and how to reframe the argument.

Jane Gabriel spoke to Rosalind Eyben of IDS, Maitrayee Mukhopadhyay of the Royal Tropical Insititute in the Netherlands and Helen O'Connell of One World Action, about what has happened to the argument for women's human rights in international policy. All members of the Pathways of Women's Empowerment RPC, they shared their views on the latest twists in a long struggle for gender equality.

Further reporting on the conference here, by Grace Davies.

This podcast is part of a series produced through a collaboration between openDemocracy and the Pathways of Women's Empowerment research consortium. You can listen to other podcasts in the series here, plus read articles and blog posts exploring the ideas, issues and projects of the research. The latest article in the series, published alongside this podcast is by Emily Esplen of IDS; "Men and gender justice: old debate, new perspectives".

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Emilye on "Making development work for women"

Making development work for women, openDemocracy