This year I asked some of the team to give a shout-out to a relevant project, organisation or intiative.

Image via dryicons.com

Sarah J: I’m being a bit cheeky and flagging up something that the charity I work for are doing for International Women’s Day. Womankind Worldwide is hosting a virtual march around the globe to celebrate the international women’s movement, raise awareness of the incredible work our partners do and remind feminists in the UK that we’re part of a powerful, global force for change.

We’ve added an interactive map of the world to our website, with a counter showing how far the march has travelled around the world and how many people have taken part. For everyone that signs up the marker moves 10 miles forward. We need about 2,500 people to get all the way round!

Please stop by www.womankind.org.uk/world to join the march, and show our partners working for women’s rights in Africa, Asia and Latin America that you are with them. You can also leave a message of support for the activists we work with on our Facebook page or by sending us a tweet (@woman_kind) – we will pass all of them on.

Sarah C: JOIN ME ON THE BRIDGE! On 8th March, Women for Women International are asking you to join them on the bridge. All kinds of bridges. All around the UK (there’s a list of events here). Why bridges? Well, it’s about building bridges – geddit? – and proclaiming messages of peace. They are inviting everyone to come and participate or register their own event. I love events like this that reach out across the whole world and make connections. As well as events structured around a good pun.

The key thing for me here is that S word, solidarity. I often rail against the idea that all women need to do such-and-such a thing because they are women or assigned-female-bodied, cos that’s, you know, sexist. But that people – of whatever shape or gender – could get together and show support for women around the world, for a couple of hours, at least? That’s drawing attention to inequality. And as they’ve put it on their Mission Statement: “On International Women’s Day, 8 March, thousands of people will show that they are with the women of Afghanistan, Iraq, Congo, Rwanda, South Sudan and other war-torn countries.”.

Hannah: The organisation I’d like to give a big shout-out to is Southall Black Sisters, an organisation by and for Black and Asian women which began in 1979 in the aftermath of the death of Blair Peach (an anti-facist protestor who died from police violence). Since then SBS has changed and expanded its remit to fit the needs of those around it – specifically as advocates of womens’ rights, supporting women suffering from domestic violence and campaigning against religious fundamentalism. The role of SBS as a support group especially for ethnic minority women is especially important as women of colour often face different pressures (see their forced marriages campaign) and specialised services are needed.

Southall Black Sisters first came to my attention at a London Feminist Network meeting in 2010 and they’re regulars at Fawcett Society gatherings and marches, too. Their speakers have always been bright, warm, engaging and utterly unwavering in their points, unfazed by the battles they have ahead. Working at grassroots level, the SBS have their fingers on the pulse and report to people in power – they have been invited to speak at the Home Office and the UN.

In 2007 SBS faced funding cuts from Ealing Council which would have closed all SBS’s operations. The council claimed argued that their services were no longer necessary due to ‘Social Cohesion’ – SBS fought this in the high court citing the Race Relations Act and their victory has set a legal precedent for other ethnic minority support groups facing cuts – an especially important victory as so many charities and support networks are squeezed and so many women and ethnic minorities feel the force of the cuts deeper them others.

Me (Miranda): Following on from that, I’m gonna get on my political crate for a moment here too and mention that International Women’s Day has its roots in socialism. It was founded by Clara Zetkin under the name International Working Women’s Day. It came from the labour movements at the turn of the twentieth century, and in a year when government cuts have put women at a twenty-five year high for unemployment figures, I think this is something that it pays to bear in mind. Opposing these cuts – to our NHS, to our jobs, to our libraries, to our working lives – is vital as far as I’m concerned because they enforce and underline systemic inequalities and limit our power to do something about them. Denise Marshall handed back her OBE just over a year ago on this very point.

All of which is to say: nope, Dave, SHAN’T “calm down, dear” and my recommended Thing I Am Doing is probably “yelling at Parliament about these cuts at every possible opportunity” because I believe that absolutely is a feminist issue – the NHS for example is a major employer of women, of whom I am one, aside from the obvious issue of service cuts! In terms of being more specifically-IWD, there’s also the Women’s Resource Centre, and as has been well documented, I really dig the Red Pump Project over in the USA.

• What are you doing this IWD?

What about stigma? As we tweeted yesterday, Act Aware isn’t, and should never be, about judging and othering people who are living with HIV. It should never be about erasure.

Unfortunately for all of us, the majority of mainstream media approaches to HIV issues in the UK are either woefully ill-informed, groaning under the weight of crappily pieced-together assumptions, often even kind of creepily bigoted, or just plain fifteen years out of date. Even with NAT’s helpful press guide freely available. Hooray.

But here’s a thing: if you’re reading this, you’re in luck. For lo, the internet is as full of glory as it is full of shit. And with very little effort on your part it basically becomes your own PERSONAL BULLSHIT ESCAPE TUNNEL. And we’re about to make it even easier.

So here are some World AIDS Day links you might or might not have seen before, which we’ve been reading at BadRep Towers. Beyond Acting Aware and reading myths and facts, are real people. So go and read about them. Make it so!

• The Body: this is a really, really valuable resource. It’s also a blogging platform for a large team of people living with and/or campaigning about HIV and AIDS, featuring personal stories from a wide range of backgrounds and age groups (though we have not found any trans* men’s stories on there as yet). It’s been going for years and has tons of pop culture analysis. Our picks: ‘I Agree, We Are Not A F***ing Scorpion’, ‘HIV, AIDS and Latinas: What Does Gender Have To Do With It?’, ‘The Trials of Transition’, and ‘Wanted: Feminist Warriors To Fight HIV and AIDS’,
• The Poz: like The Body, this magazine is also a giant resource with tons of interesting blogs. Our picks: ‘Game, the Down-Low and AIDS’ and ‘Wearing The Red Ribbon’.
• Twitter: @NAT_AIDS_Trust (they run HIVAware) are enthusiastic, friendly, ready to engage with and @-reply to as many people as they can and eager to arm you with facts and stories from around the UK. Through them, we found UKPositiveLad: diagnosed a few months ago at 25, he’s tweeting his experiences, and blogging them too.
• QueerTransMen: a Canada-based sexual health site for queer trans* men with research, mythbusting and Primed, a sexual health guide written by and for. Not worksafe!
• A Girl Like Me: this is a resource “where women of all ages can share their stories and promote understanding of HIV through online storytelling”. It hasn’t been very active recently, and in many ways it’s not as ‘off the ground’ as it could be… but we think it’s a great idea anyway.
• Womankind Worldwide: one of their areas of work is around supporting effective responses to HIV in women around the world. Our picks: World AIDS Day 2011 post, ‘I was so glad of how interested people were of what is happening in Ghana’, and ‘The Long Walk Home’.

So, hey. You have all this stuff at your fingertips! Connect. Discover. Find stuff out. What’s the point of being on a feminist pop culture adventure if you don’t, you know, go forth and read? Exactly.

Picture CC Terriem, 2011

So why am I writing this at all? Over the last nine months I’ve gotten interested in the interactions between violence against women, gender roles and HIV, which I confess is mostly down to my job at Womankind Worldwide.

It struck me that even though I’ve been working with different organisations tackling violence against women in the UK for years, I don’t remember HIV ever being mentioned. It’s just not something I’d ever really thought about. But then, I had also failed to really think about, you know, the rest of the world. This job has been an eye-opener, and I heartily encourage other feminists in the UK, the US, and Western Europe to look up and see what’s happening in the places you don’t see on TV.

“This epidemic unfortunately remains an epidemic of women,” Michel Sidibé, Executive Director of UNAIDS said in 2010. At the end of 2009, women accounted for just over half of all adults living with HIV worldwide. In some areas of the world the proportion is much higher, for example in sub-Saharan Africa it is 60%. High levels of HIV among women in these areas are both caused by and causes of violence against women.

Violence, HIV and Women’s Health

Violence against women (you remember, that really prevalent thing that occurs in all countries in the world) interacts with the HIV epidemic in several cheery ways. This paraphrased from a World Health Organisation briefing:

• Sexual abuse in childhood is associated with risk-taking behaviour later in life, increasing an individual’s lifetime risk of contracting HIV.
• Rape exposes women to HIV, and the chances of a woman contracting HIV via a forced sexual encounter are probably increased due to the physical trauma.
• Violence and fear of violence can stop a woman insisting on condom use or refusing unwanted sex, leaving her with no means of protecting themselves.
• Fear of violence, abandonment or stigma can dissuade women from learning their status or from sharing it with their partners, and can also effect HIV control, treatment, and programmes aiming to prevent mother to child transmission.

Women’s health has been the subject of more discussion in development circles in recent years, thanks in large part to the Millennium Development Goals, one of which (MDG5) is focused on maternal health. Women’s health doesn’t begin and end with children though, so I’ve been pleased to see greater recognition of the impact of gender-based violence appearing under MDG6, which is dedicated to ending the spread of diseases including HIV infection and the associated illnesses it can cause. Next step, an MDG which is focused on reducing levels of violence against women? Something which has a pretty damaging effect on women’s health in its own right.

Ghana

Through work recently I was lucky enough to meet some of the women and men fighting to reduce violence against women and women’s vulnerability to HIV infection in rural Ghana. Although Ghana isn’t the country worst affected by the HIV epidemic, of the 240,000 HIV+ adults living in Ghana, almost 60% are women. Women in Ghana also experience high levels of violence: 1 in 3 women has experienced some form of physical violence in their lifetime, and 20% of women report that they first experienced sex against their will. (Stats)

In addition there are a number of harmful traditional practices that contribute to the spread of HIV among women, as well as the cultural acceptability of men having several partners and the right to demand sex. Traditional practices, such as widow inheritance (where a widow is forced to marry her dead husband’s relative), or polygyny (22% of married women are in polygynous unions) increase the likelihood of contracting HIV.

Women living with HIV or AIDS in Ghana also face enormous stigma and go to extraordinary lengths to find support and keep their status secret. One reason is that belief in witchcraft is widespread, and HIV infection or death from AIDS-defining illnesses is sometimes blamed on the malign influence of a witch. Incidentally if you’re interested to know more about what happens to women accused of witchcraft in Ghana I recommend watching The Witches of Gambaga:

‘Witch’ persecution is also alarmingly common in Nepal.

Reading about all this every day at work would get a bit depressing if it wasn’t for our amazing partners – health workers, educators, lawyers and activists – who are working for change for individuals, and local and global communities. Part of that change is recognition of the complex interactions between HIV and AIDS and violence against women, and the need for targeted, local, gender-sensitive interventions and support. UK feminists can help by looking up, and recognising that HIV is a feminist issue on a global scale.

In the meantime, here’re some relevant links, some of which throw the baton to you. If you’re feeling like revolting, now’s the time…

• Block The Bridge, Block The Bill, 9th October: “On Sunday October 9th, join UK Uncut on Westminster Bridge and help block the bill. On one side of Westminster Bridge is Parliament. On 7th September, MPs in the Commons voted for the end of the NHS as we know it. On the opposite side of the bridge is St Thomas’ Hospital, one of Britain’s oldest medical institutions. If the bill passes, hospitals like St Thomas’ will be sold to private corporations, the staff put on private payrolls and beds given over to private patients. Despite the government’s lies, this bill represents the wholesale privatization of the NHS and, with it, the destruction of the dream of comprehensive healthcare provided equally to all. We will not let a coalition of millionaire politicians and private health lobbyists destroy our NHS. Be on Westminster Bridge for 1pm on October 9th and together let’s block this bill from getting to our hospitals.”

  I work at one of the hospitals UKUncut are talking about. It looks no better from the inside. We’re having our birthday party < 48 hours before (you're totally invited! see below!), but I will be hauling myself out of bed for this. Readers, join Team BadRep as we revolt against both Torygeddon and our inevitable shared hangover in one giant last stand.

• TUC March For The Alternative: 2nd October
• All Out: our new favourite campaign. “We are organizing online and on the ground to build a world where every person can live freely and be embraced for who they are. Gay, lesbian, bi, transgender or straight, we need you to go All Out to build this historic movement for equality.” The page on Alice N’Kom, Cameroonian attorney and activist, is particularly inspiring: “I’m 66, and in ten years of defending LGBT people in Cameroon, it has never been this bad.”
• WomanKind Worldwide’s Overseas Aid Mythbuster: “Print off this page, put it in your bag and next time you hear someone complain about the UK giving money overseas challenge them with the facts.”
• Say Yes to Gay YA: authors Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith on young adult fiction and sexuality: “The overwhelming white straightness of the YA sf and fantasy sections may have little to do with what authors are writing, or even with what editors accept. Perhaps solid manuscripts with LGBTQ protagonists rarely get into mainstream editors’ hands at all, because they are been rejected by agents before the editors see them. How many published novels with a straight white heroine and a lesbian or black or disabled best friend once had those roles reversed, before an agent demanded a change? This does not make for better novels. Nor does it make for a better world.”
• COME TO OUR BIRTHDAY PARTY ON OCTOBER 7! We wanna meet you! Find out more and RSVP here!