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This post is by Regina Yau, Founder and President of the Pixel Project. Please find the original post in its entirety below, and check out the Pixel Project’s website to learn more about this organization that works to end violence against women.

Aisha was sentenced to brutal disfigurement after fleeing her abusive in-laws. Image credit: Jodi Bieber-Institute for TIME

Time magazine’s most recent cover picture is possibly the most eloquent piece of journalism of 2010 and it is fitting that this portrait is one of the clearest illustrations of the global pandemic of violence against women.

As Richard Stengel, Managing Editor of Time magazine writes:

Our cover image this week is powerful, shocking and disturbing. It is a portrait of Aisha, a shy 18-year-old Afghan woman who was sentenced by a Taliban commander to have her nose and ears cut off for fleeing her abusive in-laws. Aisha posed for the picture and says she wants the world to see the effect a Taliban resurgence would have on the women of Afghanistan, many of whom have flourished in the past few years.

While Mr Stengel explains his decision to run Aisha’s portrait within the context of Time’s commitment to providing a truthful window into the war in Afghanistan, we can also extrapolate a different and more urgent set of messages from Aisha’s portrait:

Aisha’s courage and determination in the face of dangerous odds to share her face with the world highlights the urgency and importance of addressing and ending cultures that perpetuate violence against women, not just in Afghanistan, but around the world in all its forms.

Aisha’s face also offers irrefutable proof that violence against women has very real and damaging consequences for women’s health. It should be seen not just as a socio-economic issue, but also as a preventable global healthcare issue. As Mr Stengel reports, Aisha is currently in an undisclosed location undergoing facial reconstruction courtesy of the Grossman Burn Foundation. This extreme surgical operation is something that she would never have had to undergo had she not been subjected to the horror of having her nose and ears chopped off as punishment for being a woman who fled her abusive in-laws.

Read the rest of this entry →

This post is part of a series leading up to the Women Deliver conference (www.womendeliver.org), a global meeting on maternal and reproductive health and the advancement of women and girls.

In advance of the Women Deliver conference (which kicks off tomorrow in Washington, D.C., and GAB will be covering it!) one of the topics most on my mind has been girls’ access to education, largely because of last month’s spate of attacks on girls’ schools in Afghanistan. Now, more stories about these attacks and about the current state of Afghan politics reveal the complex factors that prevent many girls in the country from receiving an education.

After the recent poison gas attacks on girls’ schools that sent dozens of students and teachers to the hospital, discussion has centered on Taliban members or sympathizers as suspects. The Taliban famously banned education for girls while they ruled Afghanistan from 1996-2001. They aren’t the only ones in Afghanistan who would like to keep girls out of school—many members of the staunchly traditional Pashtun ethnic group see no need for girls’ education, reports Afghan women’s rights organization Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. However, conservative views about gender roles aren’t only thing keeping Afghan girls out of the classroom. Read the rest of this entry →

This post is part of a series leading up to the Women Deliver conference (www.womendeliver.org), a global meeting on maternal and reproductive health and the advancement of women and girls. Women Deliver 2010 will push for an additional $12 billion in increased investment from G8 for programs to improve maternal health.

Last month, a new study in The Lancet found that the global maternal death rate had dropped 35 percent in the past 30 years. The overall number of deaths has declined, from 536,300 in 1980 to 342,900 in 2008, but the shift in statistics is still troubling. Maternal deaths are highly concentrated, almost 80 percent, in 21 countries, and 6 countries account for more than half of all maternal deaths (India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, and the DRC). The global MMR (maternal mortality ratio, or number of women dying for every 100,000 live births) has also dropped from 422 in 1980 to 251 in 2008, however maternal death rates are actually up in certain countries, including the United States. Even within the United States, the MMR differs drastically among races; the maternal death rate for black women is eight times higher than that of white women in New York City, for example.

Any reduction in maternal deaths is considered progress, however most countries remain far behind the Millenium Development Goal 5- a 75 percent reduction in maternal deaths by 2015. Advocates welcome the overall decline, and although hundreds of thousands of maternal deaths continue each year, the small glimmer of hope is motivation for those who have been working to reduce these numbers for years.

“The overall message, for the first time in a generation, is one of persistent and welcome progress,” -Lancet Journal Editor Dr. Richard Horton

Advocates are also worried by the findings of this report, however. Why? It may make the cause seem less urgent. Although the reduction of maternal deaths is an Millennium Development Goal and has been made a priority at the world’s G8/G20 Summits in Canada, talk alone will not solve the problem. Women with less risk of death during pregnancy and childbirth are bringing attention to this cause in many ways. According to Save the Children’s annual State of the World’s Mothers Report, the biggest difference between life and death for a mother is a knowledgeable female health worker present at the birth. (Not all women are allowed to be seen by a male other than their husbands; if there is only a male doctor, their birth can go unattended.) The SOTWM Report found that the best and worst countries in which to be a mother were Norway and Afghanistan respectively.

This post is part of a series leading up to the Women Deliver conference (www.womendeliver.org), a global meeting on maternal and reproductive health and the advancement of women and girls.

Over the past two months, over 100 Afghan girls have fallen ill after suspected gas attacks in at least five girls’ schools. The victims suffered headaches, vomiting, and fainting, but luckily all recovered. These attacks are sadly not new or surprising—100 girls were hospitalized after an incident in one school last year. I was quite taken aback though by this April 25 report from the Associated Press:

Dozens of Afghan schoolgirls have fallen ill in recent days after reporting a strange odor in their classrooms in northern Afghanistan, prompting an investigation into whether they were targeted by militants who oppose education for girls or victims of mass hysteria.

“Mass hysteria” set off my ‘sexist BS’ alarm. REALLY? I thought. Didn’t the notion of female hysteria go out of fashion with Freud? Are people really trying to explain away these incidents as a purely psychological phenomenon?

Once my brain recovered from its initial shock, I knew I needed to investigate whether there is any scientific validity to the idea of mass hysteria—and I discovered that there is. However, despite the apparent lack of physical evidence tying a perpetrator to these incidents, there are a lot of reasons to believe the activists and officials who are saying the incidents are gas poisonings carried out by the Taliban or other extremists. Read the rest of this entry →

At first I hesitated to write this review. I am a non-Muslim, Western woman writing a review of a book written by a (presumably) non-Muslim, Western woman about Muslim women in the Middle East. As I read the book, however, I became much more comfortable with the idea. Ms. Coleman’s book is a result of nearly ten years of research and personal interviews with women from Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. The book reads more like a report of women’s activities in these countries with only the occasional judgment from the author, (“Linking feminism with the ‘heresy’ of the West is good politics, and helps turn patriarchy into patriotism,”) instead of one woman’s opinion on an incredibly complex and historical struggle of which she is not technically a part. (Most of the judgments, save the previous quote, are of other Westerners who offer ignorant assessments of Muslim/Islamic feminism.)

Considering the subject matter, the book is an incredibly enjoyable read, which I hope will encourage more people to consider perusing this seemingly dense account. It passed the red-eye test; I read it on a red-eye flight to California after 3 hours of sleep and couldn’t put it down.

Read the rest of this entry →

Welcome to GAB’s first monthly book club! Feel free to use this post as an open thread for discussion of the novel and to post any comments or questions you have about it here, but if you’re not sure where to start, here are some ideas to get the discussion going:

• What did you think of the characters?

Hiroko Tanaka is of course the most clearly drawn; I found her at once remarkable and remarkably average. Her greatest strength seemed to come from her ability simply to keep moving, while the extraordinary nature of her experiences is what makes that movement extraordinary. Then again, the seemingly extraordinary things she experiences happened to many people: that is what makes them historical events. This tension between the ordinary and the remarkable not only makes for a compelling protagonist but also suggests a more thematic issue related to the question of what happens when history becomes personal. Read the rest of this entry →

Katherine Steeter - New York Times

Women, do you want a paycheck during the recession? You better use a gentle tone; your job is on the line. Want your rights? Speak softly (and give the big stick to the man sitting next to you).

Between last weekend’s Jobs section of the New York Times and a mid-week discussion over lunch with Suraya Pakzad, a strident women’s rights activist in Afghanistan, I got the message loud and clear: if women want to be heard, we need to watch our words. Our lives (and livelihood) depend on it. Read the rest of this entry →

As mentioned yesterday, we’re starting a global feminist book club here at Gender Across Borders. Every month, we will choose a new book to read and discuss. The book for April will be Kamila Shamsie‘s Burnt Shadows. This sweeping book tells the story of the postmodern age, beginning with the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and ending after 9/11, through the remarkable and at times agonizing life of a Japanese woman. Hiroko Tanaka fits none of the stereotypes Westerners often hold about Japanese women. She is, like all of us, at times helpless against the brutal forces of history and the decisions of the powerful but she faces the world recreated by those forces with determination and daring. Her bravery at first may come from a certain naivete. By the end, however, after surviving calamity after calamity, her ability to move on in life and to new countries, comes from another kind of calmness and self-possession.

What makes this book so powerful is that the tension comes not from wondering what is going to happen but from knowing and being unable to stop it. In this way, Shamsie personalises the experience of reading history.

Please join us on April 1 when we will open up a thread for discussion of this striking work of contemporary fiction.

If women are responsible for preventing rape…

then why is the advice given to us always to lock ourselves in our homes after dark unless escorted or to let people we trust guard our drinks and monitor whether we are too intoxicated to protect ourselves?

Why are we not, rather, told to keep company with other women: to watch them, their drinks, their bodies? Why are we told to depend on others instead of to look out for each other? If women are responsible for preventing rape…

then why is the emphasis so often on being wary of strangers and not of those men with whom we are most intimate? For women who do not live in war zones or other places where the social order has shattered, stranger rape is much less likely than rape by someone known and trusted.

Why are we not told to stop trusting men? If women are responsible for ending rape… Read the rest of this entry →

When US President Barack Obama spoke on Tuesday night about “The Way Forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan” he used the word “women” five times:

1. To the United States Corps of Cadets, to the men and women of our armed services, and to my fellow Americans: I want to speak to you tonight about our effort in Afghanistan.
2. West Point – where so many men and women have prepared to stand up for our security
3. They [the 9/11 hijackers] took the lives of innocent men, women, and children without regard to their faith or race or station.
4. the character of our men and women in uniform
5. the men and women in uniform who are part of an unbroken line of sacrifice that has made government of the people, by the people, and for the people a reality on this Earth

In each case, the women referred to were American women, in all but one soldiers. The women of Afghanistan, the nation where Obama is planning to send an even greater number of troops, were not mentioned. They were invisible.

There is one positive aspect to this: it means that, at least in this speech, women’s rights are not being used as an excuse for war. On the other hand, it also suggests that these women are being ignored in the plans for war and after. Will anything be done, as part of the escalation, to provide assistance to women who, in the midst of war, suffer also from domestic violence? Last year, the US State Department honored Suraya Pakzad with its International Women of Courage Award, but what will be done now as more US soldiers enter Afghanistan, to support her work running shelters for abused women and girls? Read the rest of this entry →