Issue 10

Ask anyone about censorship and whether there's any in India, and they'll say, no, not really. We're not like Bangladesh or Pakistan, we have freedom of speech, it's a fundamental right guaranteed by the Constitution. If you remind them about Fire and Water or M.F. Husain and the Gufa in Ahmedabad, or the attack on Ajeet Cour's Academy in Delhi or on Sahmat in Ayodhya or even, long ago, on Mushirul Hasan, they'll say: those are exceptions, it was the work of hoodlums. And anyway, all these people went too far; they should have been more careful.

Until three years ago Fijians had little choice over what they watched on television. Apart from 15 minutes of local news every day, the rest of the available television programmes came from New Zealand Television. Designed for New Zealand audiences, these programmes had little relevance to the daily reality of most Fijian lives. On 5th January 1999, all that changed with the commencement of broadcasting by Community Television (CTV).

The shift in focus from ‘women’ to ‘gender’ over the last decade has for some been
little more than a change in terminology. For others, like Women’s Media Watch (WMW) in Jamaica, it has meant a change in their activities to include men as well as women as part of a process which seeks to change the social relations of gender. ‘Youth, Gender-Based Violence and Communication’, a WMW project recently supported by WACC, included a series of workshops and seminars with male adolescents. 

The 1990s witnessed a worldwide trend towards the delegation of power and authority over media standards to self-regulatory organisations, alongside growing corporate mergers and a globalising marketplace. This shift has had a significant impact on citizens and civil society organisations, yet it has largely been a silent one, attracting little policy analysis. In 2001, MediaWatch Canada, one of WACC’s partner organisations and the organisers of the Global Media Monitoring Project 1995, sought to rectify this situation. Their report, ‘Watching the Watchers: Gender Justice and Co-regulation in the New Media Market Place’ maps the recent devolution of responsibility for media standards in Canada to determine how organisations like MediaWatch can address gender and other human rights issues in this new context. Since its publication, the report has proved an invaluable tool in the work of MediaWatch and other civil sociey organisations. The results of the report have been presented at a number of academic and industry conferences and used in policy hearings in the federal government. Data from the report is also being used by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council. As  Melanie Cishecki, Executive Director of MediaWatch explained, ‘This study gives Canadian civil society organisations the information that  we need to really push for change im our self-regulatory system. At last we have an opportunity to collectively put our views forward to advocate for positive change. Watching the Watchers provides the building blocks for creating a more democratic regulatory system that will help NGOs respond to the challenges of the 21st century’.

Women have been involved within religious institutions for thousands of years in many and varied ways. Yet it is distorted and simplistic stereotypes that dominate much of the coverage of women of faith in mainstream media. These stereotypes which associate religion with fundamentalism, rather than fostering a greater recognition of the positive and negative connections between religion and the social, economic and political issues that affect women, serve only to inflame prejudice. But it is not only the media who are guilty of such misrepresentation.  Parts of the world-wide feminist movement have also subscribed to a simplistic view of women of faith in which women are seen as nothing more than victims of an oppressive religious culture. In the wake of September 11th, as women of faith have once again entered the media’s consciousness, the Monitor Forum explores these issues through the voices of five women, each from a different major world religion.

In the early 1990s Asian women broke almost five decades of painful silence to demand apology and compensation for the atrocities they and others suffered under Japanese military sexual slavery during the Second World War. The voices of these women, speaking out about their enslavement as 'comfort women', reached a crescendo at the end of 2000 when they gathered together to demand justice at the Women's International War Crimes Tribunal in Tokyo, Japan. Organised by the Violence Against Women in War Network (VAWW-Net), the tribunal took place from 8th-12th December 2000 and was attended by 1300 people, including 390 survivors from the seven victimised countries of North and South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, China, the Philippines and Indonesia. With WACC support, a video documentary and publication on the struggle of these women have recently been produced

Why does gender discrimination occur? What could be my role as a woman and a teacher in eradicating gender discrimination? What is the link between gender discrimination and the media? These were just some of the questions raised during a one-day workshop on ‘Gender Discrimination and Mass Media’, held on 28th July 2001 at the Rosa Mystica Teacher Training Institute, near Mangalore, India. Supported by the WACC Women's Programme, the workshop was organised by the Asian Network for Women in Communication, (ANWIC) and attended by around 60 young women training to be primary school teachers.