Globa Media Monitoring Project

Women in bikinis and tangas posing on a beach, heart attacks and snoring. To most there would seem to be no obvious connection between these disparate items, but in one Turkish television news report in February 2001 it was deemed appropriate to illustrate a serious story on research into the link between heart attacks and snoring in women with video footage of scantily-clad women posing on a beach. What message does this deliver about women in the news?

Bombs reign down, shots are fired nearby and the camera closes in on a woman huddled in a doorway, crying and cradling her injured child. At home, the viewers feel sympathy for these victims of war, just as they have for countless other women and children many times before. This woman and her child could be from anywhere; the violence raging around them about anything, for this is the standard fare of conflict reporting.

On November 25th 1960 in the Dominican Republic, three sisters, Patricia, Minerva and Maria Teresa were brutally beaten and strangled to death. The Mirabel sisters were political activists and a symbol of resistance towards the dictatorship of the day. It was on their way to visit their husbands, imprisoned for their participation in the resistance movement, that their violent murders occurred. Every year, their death, and violence against women worldwide, is remembered on this day, now marked as the UN International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. Since 1991, the 25th of November has also marked the beginning of the international campaign ‘16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence’. The campaign lasts until 10th December, International Human Rights Day, as a sign of the fact that violence against women is a violation of human rights and also includes World AIDS Day on 1st December and December 6th which marks the anniversary of the Montreal Massacre when a man gunned down 14 engineering students for ‘being feminists’.

Turning on the television to any Egyptian channel, the viewer is immediately confronted with high levels of violence against women. Just as disturbing as the portrayal of violence against women on state television, is the lack of public reaction to it. Not only does Egyptian society not condemn such violence, it views it as a commonplace and acceptable occurrence. Every day, state-owned television underlines that beating women is normal. Worse still, many women themselves have internalised these oppressive conditions to the extent that statistics published in the Egyptian Demographic and Health Survey in 1995 show that more than 86% of Egyptian women agree that there are reasons that justify a husband beating his wife. The only real area of debate amongst these women is the behaviour for which their husbands are entitled to beat them.
With the aim of changing the attitudes of people in the Middle East on the issue of violence against women, MediaHouse, Egypt has undertaken a media monitoring project. Here, Maggie Morgan of MediaHouse discusses the WACC supported project ‘Monitoring Violence Against Women on Egyptian Television’.

In recent years, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have come to be seen as a universal remedy to the problems of underdevelopment. The international community is increasingly promoting the use of ICTs by marginalized groups as a sure-fire way to ensure their inclusion in the evolving information society and thus in the development of their communities and country. Yet, this unconditional support for ICTs has been accompanied by only sparse analysis of the conditions necessary for such marginalised groups to truly harness the power of ICTs for their own empowerment.
ICTs have only recently emerged on the African continent and especially in the Francophone African region. Women are currently marginal users of ICTs and have had very little participation in formulating the policies, strategies, regulations and norms that are guiding the development of ICT infrastructure in the region. As such, there is a risk that ICTs will ultimately reinforce gender inequalities, rather than become the magic solution that has been touted.

The 20th century will go down in history as a century of paradigms. During this short period in the long history of humanity, two revolutions took place, both of which profoundly changed relations between men and women. The effects of this double revolution are evident in the every day lives of millions: in their relationships; in motherhood; in the world of work; in approaches to sexuality; in people’s emotions; in love; and in the construction of personal identity.

Communication Rights in the Information Society (CRIS) is a campaign to ensure that communication rights are central to the information society and to the upcoming World Summit of the Information Society (WSIS). The campaign is sponsored and supported by the Platform for Communication Rights, a group of NGOs involved in media and communication projects around the world, of which WACC is a part. As part of the campaign, CRIS members are producing a series of papers for the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) as input to the WSIS. This is an abstract of one of the papers by Dafne Plou, a WACC member from Argentina.
For further information on the CRIS campaign, go to www.crisinfo.org