A Tool for Change: Global Media Monitoring Project

From 7th – 10th May, in Cape Town, fourteen men and women from around the world came together to discuss the launch of a project which has been described as ‘one of the most extraordinary collective enterprises yet organised within the global women’s movement’ – the Global Media Monitoring Project, or GMMP as it has come to be known.

In November 2001, representatives of the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) and Media Women's Associations from the Southern African Development Corporation (SADC) region, met in Windhoek at a MISA Gender Policy workshop that was facilitated by Gender Links. The meeting noted that gender equality was implicit in the notions of a “pluralistic press", "reflecting the widest possible range of opinion within the community", "the fulfillment of human aspirations", "freedom of the press" and "freedom of association" as espoused in the 1991 Windhoek Declaration on Promoting an Independent and Pluralistic African press. However, the failure to state this explicitly led to inadequate attention being paid to the gross gender disparities in the media. Coupled with this a number of gaps such as the lack of research on gender in the media content were identified at this meeting.

Since the mid-1980s, a steady chorus of media reports and a rising number of scholars have insisted that we live in a ‘post-feminist’ era. The term ‘post-feminism’ is now frequently employed in both academic and popular discourse and yet there is little consensus as to what the term means.

Can women’s leadership make a difference in the current global environment? A resounding ‘YES!’ was the response of the one thousand women from around the world who met in Brisbane, Australia for the World Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) World Council from 5th – 10th July 2003. Women from more than 100 countries and 50 partner organizations, including WACC, attended the meeting “Leading Change: The Power to Act”. As part of this event the World YWCA convened a two-day International Women’s Summit to review the status of women within the framework of the women’s global agenda adopted at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing 1995.  To do this the World YWCA brought women leaders, women activists and women from grassroots areas to tell their stories from their perspective. Testimonies from women experiencing economic injustices, violence, the effects of HIV/AIDS, and women living in conflict situations formed the central part of the Summit. To give these issues a global perspective there were plenary keynote speeches from prominent women leaders.

From February 1999 – April 2001, Women’s WORLD and Asmita Resource Centre for Women conducted a series of 10 workshops, over half of which were funded by the WACC Women’s Programme, with women writers in 10 Indian languages on the subject of gender-based censorship. The workshops were attended by approximately 175 writers writing in Urdu, Telugu, Marathi, Malayalam, Hindi, Gujarati, Kannada, Bengali, English and Tamil. The 10 regional language workshops culminated in a national colloquium in Hyderabad in July 2001 with approximately 70 writers from the 10 languages participating. This major project - the discussion, findings and substance of which are contained in the publication, The Guarded Tongue: Women’s Writing and Censorship in India and The Tongue Set Free: Women Writers Speak About Censorship - marked the first time ever that so many writers from so many languages came together to discuss the critical issue of censorship.

Building on this work, Women’s WORLD is now conducting a series of regional workshops that cut across contiguous language areas within India and across borders on gender censorship. Here Ritu Menon and Vasanth Kannabiran of Women’s WORLD/Asmita report on the first workshop in the series.

“Last Thursday, the Supreme Court gave a verdict for a legal amendment to be instituted in order to recognise that forced sexual relations between a husband with his wife should also be considered as rape (marital rape) and punished. The court also ordered that rape of a commercial sex worker should be punished in the same way as the rape of any other women. These aspects of the Supreme Court verdict are both revolutionary and controversial in the socio-cultural context of our country. Let's have a discussion with the renowned advocate Ms. Mira Dhungana on this topic. She is also the advocate who initially registered the writ complaint to put this decision before the Supreme Court. Welcome Mira to our program”

On October 15th 1990, with less than one week to quit notice announced over the radio, government bulldozers backed by military armoured vehicles, armed soldiers and police personnel demolished Maroko, Nigeria’s largest single slum community, leaving an estimated 300,000 without shelter. Homes, schools, hospitals and businesses were destroyed and over twenty cases of rape were recorded during the evictions while hundreds of others were beaten, tortured, shot or detained by the security forces. The government ruled out any prospect for compensation or resettlement of the displaced families.