WUNRN
Congress
- World Association for Christian Communication - WACC
"Communication
is Peace"
Media & Gender Justice
07 October 2008
WOMEN'S CREED - AFFIRMATION
“We believe in the goodness and value of women; our strength and sanity, our willingness to weep, our capacity to support each other, instead of being rivals; our ability to cope with children’s demands and the burdens of life; our willingness and ability to get on with the job, our spirituality and our earthliness, flowing with life, birth and death.
We affirm the story of women as the story of humankind: food gatherers and farmers, child rearers and teachers, pioneers and policy makers, needle workers and textile makers, home makers and factory workers, parents, scientists, doctors, housekeepers and economists, givers of life and creators of art and thought unpaid, hidden workers at home and paid members of the workforce outside.
We rejoice in our diversity and versatility, out intuition and our
logic;
We confess our failures and frailities and imperfections,
including our part acceptance of violence and injustice in relationships
between women and men
We look forward to the future in faith and hope, working for the day when we and all our sisters no longer have to fit a stereotype, but are free to use all our gifts and to share in all the benefits of human life and work. We look forward to the age of peace, when violence is banished, both women and men are able to live and to be loved, and the work and wealth of our world is justly shared”
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IMAGINE MEDIA THAT PROMOTES GENDER JUSTICE
WACC CONGRESS SPEECH - Excerpts
Joanne Sandler, Deputy Executive Director of UNIFEM
Speaking to the topic, “Imagine
Media that Promotes Gender Justice” UNIFEM's Sandler clarified that it was
important to imagine gender justice, “…because, with a few exceptions, it does
not exist. This is important because gender justice is critical in its own
right, central to achievement of justice in general and interdependent with the
achievement of social and economic justice in particular.”
The road to achieving the
gender equality and women’s empowerment, said Sandler, remains a bumpy and not
too easy road to travel, and one that requires greater attention by the media:
“The media has huge and largely untapped power to promote and protect gender
justice,” she said.
However, Sandler cautioned,
around the world the distortion by media of women’s voices and women’s lives is
increasingly being recognized, and there is a greater need for women to hold
the media accountable, just as much as it is important for women and men to
call for answers for the policies, programmes and resources that powerholders
make available to promote and protect women’s rights.
When power holders are
confronted with the need for answers, they must take corrective action to
ensure redress. In the same way, in relation to gender justice and the media,
the media’s answerability and willingness to take corrective action depends to
a large extent on the push the women’s rights defenders provide, the extent to
which men and women together use their power of choice to show a preference for
media that promotes gender justice, and the generation of high quality content
for social justice media produced by women’s human rights defenders.
“One of the key assets that
women are bringing to the use of media, along with other social justice groups,
is a purposeful use of the media to achieve much broader social justice and
gender justice aims. That is, it is a media grounded in social action and thus
intentionally produced and disseminated to promote change.”
Women’s media and information
systems, said Sandler, is the way to also hold the United Nations more
accountable to the commitments to the eradication of gender based violence, as
well as commitments such as UN Security Council resolution 1325.
On 31 October 2000, the United
Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security
during its 4231st meeting. The
resolution deals with the special impact that war has on women and children and
stresses the necessity to involve women in conflict prevention, peace building
and post-conflict reconstruction.
However, the UN is yet to put in place relevant accountability
mechanisms to address reporting on violations, ensuring answerability
mechanisms or regular and formal reviews and progressive reporting systems;
neither does it have country level task forces that monitor and press for
compliance. To date the women’s resolution has an annual and voluntary
“commemoration” of the resolution and an “ad hoc” reporting basis even by UN
organisations.
Subsequently, motivated by the
lack of accountability to the ongoing use of rape as a weapon of war, an
information and media campaign was strategically used to draw attention to the
issues and concerns now reflected in UN Security Council resolution 1820, which
focuses specifically on the prevention of sexual violence in conflict: “This is
purposeful media,” said Sandler......
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Via FemLINKPACIFIC - Media Initiatives for Women
Sharon Bhagwan Rolls, Coordinator
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