Thousands gather in Beijing for fourth women's conference

The Fourth World Conference on Women, to be held in Beijing in September 1995, is expected to issue a Platform for Action to advance the status of women, identify priority actions to be taken by the international community, and mobilize those at both the policy making and grass-roots levels to implement these goals. The draft Platform for Action addresses the following critical areas: poverty, women's education, reproductive health and sexuality, violence and armed conflict, economic disparity, power-sharing, institutions, human rights, mass media, environmental degradation, and female children. Parallel to the UN conference, a Nongovernmental Forum on Women will meet, with an emphasis on the concept of sustainable human development.     

The health dimension

Recognizing the adverse health consequences of violence against women, the World Health Organization (WHO) has emphasized the need for a public health approach to prevention as well as the need for the delivery of care to victims of abuse. The WHO is also aware of the need for intersectoral collaboration to address this complex problem. Domestic violence affects all aspects of women's lives and undermines the basis for sustainable human development while violating women's human rights. The WHO included a section on violence against women in its position paper presented to the Fourth World Conference on Women and has accelerated its activities in this area since the Conference. WHO's work on violence has included a 1996 expert consultation that focused on domestic violence and resulted in recommendations that formed the basis of the WHO's Plan of Action on Violence Against Women. The WHO's work on violence also includes efforts to eliminate female genital mutilation and violence visited upon women during situations of armed conflict. The WHO is developing population-based data, innovative research methods, an inventory and assessment of interventions, policy guidelines, and information and advocacy materials to combat domestic violence. Existing data remain scattered and anecdotal but indicate that domestic violence is a major problem.     

After Beijing: emphasis on poverty eradication

In March 1996, during its first meeting since the Fourth World Conference on Women, the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), called for a gender perspective to be integrated into policies and programs dealing with poverty, child and dependent care, and the media. Three expert panels examined each of these areas through a format which encouraged dialogue and led to the adoption of 17 resolutions, decisions, and agreed conclusions as well as a recommendation that the UN adopt a multi-year work program for the CSW to allow it to review progress in elimination of the 12 main obstacles to women's advancement identified at Beijing. Among the resolutions adopted by the CSW were calls to 1) take a broad and integrated approach to poverty eradication, 2) enhance women's empowerment and autonomy, 3) promote equity and equality in the public domain, 4) promote women's employment, 5) give women social and economic protection when they are unable to work, 6) counteract negative images of women and sex-stereotyping in the media, 7) reduce the representation of violence against women in the media, 8) strengthen the role of women in global communications, 9) encourage the participation of men in child and dependent care, and 10) recognize women's double burden of work. The CSW also agreed to pursue further discussions about drafting an optional protocol to the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Among its other actions, the CSW called for mechanisms to protect the rights of women migrant workers, to protect women and children during armed conflicts, to include gender-based human rights violations in UN activities, and to address the root factors which lead to social ills such as trafficking in women and girls. In addition, the CSW submitted a draft resolution demanding that Israel protect the rights of Palestinian women and their families.     

Fourth World Conference on Women. Seeking action for equality,development, peace

There is a strong international push to secure broader rights for women. In the 20 years since the first global conference on women's issues was held in Mexico City, governments have adopted legislation which promotes equal opportunity, treatment, and rights, and women are entering the labor market in unprecedented numbers. There is evidence that investments in women have had an enormous impact upon society overall, but millions of individual women continue to face discrimination in social, economic, political, and cultural spheres. They are disproportionately denied access to positions of leadership, undereducated, underpaid, die from complications related to childbirth and unsafe abortions, and are battered and killed by men. The Fourth World Conference on Women will be held September 4-15, 1995, in Beijing, to allow participants to assess the progress and shortfalls of the past two decades and identify action to be taken into the next century. The UN-sponsored global meeting will offer governments, nongovernmental organizations, the private sector, and individuals the opportunity to review their efforts and renew their commitment to improve the equality and conditions of women and defend their human rights. The main objectives are to adopt a plan of action against obstacles to the advancement of women worldwide, to determine priority actions to be taken by the international community over the period 1996-2001, and to mobilize men and women at the grassroots level to achieve those objectives. A parallel nongovernmental organization forum on women will be held August 30 - September 8, also in Beijing.     

FGM or FGMo? Cross‐cultural dialogue in an Italian minefield (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

On 20 December 2012 the United General Assembly unanimously passed a resolution banning the practice of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). In this article, Mara Mabilia aims to draw attention to the lives of immigrant women in Europe, and more specifically Italy, from some of the 30 or so chiefly Islamic countries of Africa, where what she prefers to call ‘female genital modification’ (FGMo) is practised. Her aim is neither to advocate the practice, nor to challenge the bans instituted in the West. Rather, her aim is, more broadly, to probe how women, having undergone these practices, live in host societies that interpret these chiefly as human rights violations through the prism of unacceptable violence. To condemn FGM should not imply condemnation also of the 100–140 million women that the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates have undergone this practice.     

Shattering the silence of violence against women

The UN Development Fund for Women has selected 23 projects in 18 developing countries to be beneficiaries of a $1.2 million trust fund dedicated to the elimination of violence against women. While the projects offer a variety of approaches to preventing and eliminating the domestic violence suffered by a third of the women in developing countries, all involve awareness-raising and advocacy, capacity-building, literacy, training, action research, and prevention/deterrence activities. A project in the Philippines will train women migrant workers who have been victimized by abuse to produce videos about their experience in order to raise consciousness about the rights of women and of workers. A South African project, which will address sexual assaults of high school students that occur in dating relationships, will involve a prevalence survey, a pilot project, an expansion of the project and curriculum development, a play on date rape, crisis intervention counseling, production of a video and manual, a national conference, and publication of essays produced by students who participated in the program. The Trust Fund was proposed by Japan in response to the urgent call for action issued by the 1995 UN Fourth World Conference on Women and is funded by donations from governments and private sources.     

"To change the world." Cairo conference reaches consensus on plan to stabilize world growth by 2015

After 6 days of debate and 200 speakers during September 5-13, 1994, participants from 180 countries at the Cairo International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) agreed on a strategy for curbing global population growth over the next 20 years. The objective was sustained economic growth and sustainable development. In his opening remarks, UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali said that the objective was to balance humanity and the environment with the means to sustain life, and that the efficacy of the world economic order depended to some extent on the ICPD. Participants were urged to use rigor, tolerance, and conscience in conference deliberations. Men and women should have the right and the means to choose their families' futures. The preamble stated that the ICPD would probably be the last opportunity in the twentieth century to address globally the issues relating to population and development. UN Population Fund Executive Director Nafis Sadik remarked that the ICPD had the potential to change the world. Egyptian President Mohamed Hosni Mubarak was elected president of the ICPD. Mubarak stated that solutions to population problems must go beyond demographic accounting and incorporate change in social, economic, and cultural conditions. Norway's Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland stated that development in many countries never reached many women. She called it a hypocritical morality that allowed women to suffer and die from unwanted pregnancies, illegal abortions, and miserable living conditions. US Vice President Albert Gore called for comprehensive and holistic solutions. The essential features of social change would involve democracy, economic reform, low rates of inflation, low levels of corruption, sound environmental management, free and open markets, and access to developed country markets. Pakistan's Prime Minister Benazir urged the empowerment of women. Many expressed the concern about unsustainable consumption in industrialized countries. Prior world population conferences had been held in Rome (1954), Belgrade (1965), Bucharest (1974), and Mexico City (1984). The first World Plan of Action was adopted in 1974 and changed at the 1984 conference.     

建国以来女性教育的成果、问题及对策

女性的教育状况是衡量女性在社会中地位高低的主要标志之一.新中国建立后制定的有关法律和法规,新的教育体制的确立以及开展的女性扫盲运动、女性基础教育、高等教育、研究生教育、留学教育和继续教育等实践,使中国女性在提高了政治和社会地位的同时,也提高了文化知识水平和科学技术的应用能力.教育是立国之本,而女性教育更关系到民族的兴亡和国家的盛衰.占中国人口一半以上的女性自身素质和文化水平曾对建国以来的社会发展产生过很大影响,并将继续对21世纪中国科技、经济、社会的走向产生巨大的影响.     

A Framework for Sustainable Heritage Management: A Study of UK Industrial Heritage Sites

In 2002, the World Heritage Committee declared heritage to be ‘an instrument for the sustainable development of all societies’. The term ‘sustainable development’, however, is inscribed with a complex economic, environmental and social agenda that challenges contemporary World Heritage management practice. This paper draws on a content analysis of six industrial UK World Heritage Site management plans. The analysis focuses on the extent that each plan integrates four key sustainability dimensions. Findings indicate that the planning frameworks and collaboration processes in operation at each site ensure conservation of the historical physical fabric but limit the development of a sustainable local cultural economy. A sustainable heritage management framework is presented based on the adoption of a long‐term strategic orientation and extensive local community participation in decision making. The framework is relevant to other complex heritage sites such as historic towns and cultural landscapes.     

濒危世界遗产威胁因素分析与中国世界遗产保护对策

研究导致世界遗产"濒危"的威胁因素能够为我国世界遗产管理与保护提供重要借鉴。对全球濒危世界遗产威胁因素定量统计发现:武装冲突、管理不力、工程建设是世界文化遗产与世界自然遗产共同面临的三大威胁;世界文化遗产的主要濒危因素还包括城市发展压力、不合适的维修/重建等;世界自然遗产濒危因素则还包括非法偷猎、捕捞,以及林业采伐、农业种植、放牧等农林生产活动等。中国世界遗产面临的首要威胁因素是旅游发展压力,管理问题、城市发展压力、水利工程建设等也较为突出。提出中国世界遗产保护建议:明确遗产旅游价值取向,加强高峰期游客管理,控制旅游设施建设规模;提升管理水平与管理能力,探索世界遗产管理的新体系、新思路;妥善处理好城市发展对世界文化遗产的保护压力,积极预防极端自然灾害的破坏;严格控制世界自然遗产地内的道路建设、水利工程建设等。     

Gains by women reversed in economic downturn

The impact of globalization on women was discussed by the Women in Development Section of the Social Development Division of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP). Feminization of work in much of the Asian region occurred in the context of overall economic growth in the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s. However, the recent economic crisis has led to a downturn in the positive aspects of this change in women's position, although gender gaps will be reduced through the worsening conditions of male workers. The current deflationary adjustment policies of reducing government expenditures will adversely affect women in the workplace and the household. Since women have been forced to earn additional income outside the home, the girl-children are expected to perform household and child care duties that would otherwise be performed by their mothers. Incidence of child labor and dropout rates among girls has increased. Many social and cultural norms also allow cuts in the food supply for women and girl-children when household per-capita access to food declines. These circumstances invite domestic violence against women. Hence, institutions such as ESCAP should assume a more active advocacy role with the governments as they confront the economic crisis and its repercussions.     

Gender and Australian Aid Policy: can women's rights be advanced within a neo-liberal framework?

The issue of gender and development has been an important part of the development discourse since the Mexico City Women Conference in 1973. This concern has been very slow to transform itself into policy. For development agencies including AusAID it has been a subsidiary policy area or an add-on, as a recipe might say'add women and stir'. The White Paper of 2007 brought gender to the centre of policy as an overarching principle. The question that arises is the extent to which these policies fit into or are driven by the neo-liberal paradigm underpinning the aid program, or if these policies can challenge it by positing a rights agenda. The 2007 Gender policy tries to sit between the two in that it focuses on the economic role that women can play in fostering growth on the one hand, and the denial of human rights that marginalisation and disempowerment represents. This paper will explore the development of gender policy in AusAID, and compare it with the development of policy of other agencies that follow the neo-liberal framework in particular the World Bank and ADB. Finally the paper will make some suggestions for the new Labor government to strengthen the Policy.     

Creating social spaces for transnational feminist advocacy: the Canadian International Development Agency, the National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women and Philippine women's NGOs

The postauthoritarian democratisation process in the Philippines saw the rise of 'state feminism', which emphasised gender mainstreaming in government development planning. Various international development agencies, particularly the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), played an important role in harnessing the social capital of women's movements and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) for gender and development (GAD) programs in the post‐Marcos era (1986–2002). This period was marked by a decline in the CIDA's direct assistance to women's NGOs in the Philippines and its shift to institutional capability‐building of government agencies, particularly the National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women (NCRFW). The article examines how local women's organisations have interpreted, engaged and negotiated transnational discursive practices on 'development', 'social capital', 'capacity‐building' and 'gender mainstreaming.' The CIDA‐funded Women NGOs Umbrella Project and Canadian aid to the Negros Occidental province are used as case studies to illustrate issues and problems in transnational linkages between Philippine women NGOs, national and local governments and Canadian development agencies. Such transnational linkages, embodied in the interesting mix of 'gender mainstreaming' and 'critical engagement' between states, donor agencies and women NGOs, show the interpenetration of the 'global' and the 'local' and the blurring of boundaries between 'state' and 'civil' societies in the course of gender advocacy. At the same time, transnational processes and demands may concurrently create better understanding, as well as conflicts and tensions between state machinery, NGOs and social movements, thus defeating the original intentions of development projects sponsored by international donor agencies.     

'I must get out': the geographies of domestic violence

The geographies of domestic violence are envisaged in this paper as a series of enlarging, though restricted spaces. Although the social construction of home is as a place of safety and support, in reality it can be a place of violence, where women are spatially restricted either to the home itself, or to its immediate environs. Women who break free and seek safety in a women's refuge, or who move to a new home in a different place, continue to live spatially restricted lives, in the fear that their former partner may trace them.     

Traveling with faith: the creation of women's immigrant aid associations in nineteenth and twentieth-century France

This article explores the efforts of French Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish women to morally, spiritually, and physically protect immigrant and migrant women and girls in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Women of faith worried about the dangers posed by the white slave trade, and they feared the loss of spiritual consciousness among women living far from their families and their places of worship. In response to these concerns, they developed numerous faith-based international organizations aimed at protecting vulnerable working-class immigrants. Upper-class women's work in immigrant aid societies allowed them to take on much greater social and religious leadership roles than they had in the past. Likewise, the intricate, international networks that these women developed contributed to the building of international cooperation throughout Europe.     

美国建国初期女性慈善社团与白人女性公民身份的初步建构——以波士顿科班社为中心的考察

19世纪初期,受国内外局势的推动,女性慈善社团在美国大量涌现。成立于1811年的波士顿科班社就是这股浪潮的产物。以科班社为代表的女性慈善社团在美国白人女性公民身份的初步建构中起到了重要作用。女性慈善社团的日常运作为白人女性提供了扮演美国公民的机会与训练。在起草与签署社团章程、向立法机构请愿并以法人身份行使法律和经济权利、通过选举和表决来解决社团事务的过程中,白人女性确立起公民意识。此外,女性慈善社团开展的活动进一步为女性成员提供了以公民身份行动的平台。通过参与慈善活动,美国白人女性能够把经济优势转化为公共影响力,关注家庭以外的公共事务,进入公共领域。公民意识的确立与公民身份的践行,为日后美国白人女性追求完整公民身份奠定了基础。     

Population,progress, and peanuts

Population and development, more specifically on matters relating to family planning, contraceptives and abortion, have always been key issues at the UN. These were the challenges faced by the Member States of the UN during the General Assembly held in New York from June 30 to July 2, 1999. The 1999 session covered a wide range of questions, which reflected universal consensus on concerns including adolescent reproduction and sexual health, as well as gender-related issues. The special meeting lasted for 3 days of visionary hopes and politics for the future of the world, and also took into account the crucial issue of resources and fundraising. The 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo was the starting point for such an international understanding and consensus. In the years following 1994, the challenge to carry out lessons learned from the Cairo Conference and ICPD has now led to a final document, which guides nations across the globe on where to concentrate key future actions.     

First Mayan Women's Congress

In October 1997, over 200 participants attended the First Mayan Women's Congress in Mexico and called for financial assistance, capacity building, and training to help Mayan women escape poverty. The Congress was initiated by the UN Development Fund for Women in collaboration with the Small Grants Program of the UN Development Program. Traditionally, Mayan women and men have played distinct roles in society, and efforts are underway to increase gender sensitivity and achieve a new balance of power. Mayan women attending the Congress reported that they face daily challenges in gaining their husbands' approval for participation in income-generating activities outside of the home. Eventually, however, some husbands also start working in these enterprises and are learning to assume their share of domestic responsibilities. Mayan women have been forced to reevaluation their role in society by a prevailing agricultural and environmental crisis as well as a high unemployment rate. Crafts that were once produced only for household consumption are now considered for export. Because the women need funds to initiate income-generating activities, the Conference linked women's groups with development practitioners, policy-makers, and donors. The women requested financial aid for more than 30 specific projects, and Congress participants agreed to pursue innovate strategies to support the enterprises with funds, training, and technical assistance. The Congress also encouraged environmental nongovernmental organizations to include Mayan women in mainstream development activities. This successful Congress will be duplicated in other Mexican states.     

Declines in fertility levels evident in Africa,notes UN Population Fund

This article reports on the UN Population Fund's (UNFPA) African regional meeting that was held in November 1997. The meeting was attended by an assortment of UNFPA representatives and program staff. This meeting followed up the 1994 Cairo International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) and 1995 regional meetings on the 1994 Plan of Action. These prior meetings emphasized the link between population and development and the urgency of meeting the needs of individual women and men in a people-centered approach to development, rather than a target oriented one. The 1997 meeting reviewed the progress made toward achieving the goals of the 1994 plan of action by the UNFPA. UNFPA aims to decentralize operations, to play a role in emergency situations, to encourage South-to-South cooperation, to advocate for reproductive rights, and to promote gender equity and women's empowerment. The meeting discussed UNFPA's role in reproductive health, population and development strategies, and advocacy in detail. Participants agreed that there were signs of fertility decline in Africa. Countries are beginning to adopt a reproductive health and rights approach and to address female genital mutilation as a human and reproductive right's issue. Population policies are being changed to include ICPD goals. 32 countries adopted new programs in 1996 and 1997, that integrated the 1994 strategies and selectively focused on issues of concern. Partnerships confirm that population issues are becoming an agenda for all. The major challenge ahead is the mobilization of resources, while dealing with civil strife and political instability.     

Feminist Mobilization,Claims Making and Policy Change: An Introduction

More than two decades after the Fourth World Conference on Women was held in Beijing, gender equality policies have not delivered in the ways envisaged. This special cluster of articles seeks to understand why. Women's mobilization and feminist activism was central to the Beijing process and the advocacy that followed, yet their influence on policy processes seems constrained in the current context of global political and economic changes. The articles in this cluster explore the negotiations between different actors, institutions and discourses — and the tensions and contradictions therein — as explanations for why certain domains of women's rights remain at the margins of political agendas and others receive more attention. Specifically, why have women's labour rights and the demands of the unpaid care economy failed to gain policy traction? The articles point to the importance of political practice, which includes the ‘framing’ of policy demands as compelling narratives, engagement with state entities and the forming and managing of alliances. There are trade‐offs inherent in each of these elements, for example, between transformative gender equality objectives and the pragmatic impulse to frame claims in less politically and socially threatening ways. Further, in a context of increasing globalization, mobilization is required at multiple levels — from the local to the transnational. The articles thus seek to deepen our understanding of how policy change for women's rights occurs.