A couple of people responded to my last post (either on the post or elsewhere) with direct questions about how we can stop these things from occurring or with expressions of helplessness.
I’ve decided my best response is to make a new post here for maximum visibility.
What can we do? There are a few things. I’m sure you can come up with others.
- Join an organisation like Amnesty International and use our letter-writing power to write to those in authority in countries where these practices are legal, pressuring them to change their laws or release individuals. This may seem small, but we have evidence that it has worked over the years. The most famous recent case was Amina Lawal, a Nigerian woman whose death sentence was overturned thanks to public condemnation. You can join Amnesty’s campaign to end stoning in Iran.
- If you live in a country where a fundamentalist minority is attempting to introduce Shari’a law under the guise of multiculturalism, you can oppose it and publicly campaign against it. The most famous case where this succeeded was the campaign against the Shari’a court in Canada. Despite the rhetoric, such courts are desired only by a small, non-elected minority of patriarchs who do not represent the whole Muslim community. Ask why the courts mostly want to impose the laws about women’s behaviour but aren’t interested in enforcing hand amputations for thievery, a crime committed mostly by men.
- On an international level, we can campaign for the various types of international relations tactics to be employed. While I’m obviously not in support of the classic military tactics, and while I’m aware that many of the other tactics only function due to being backed by the threat of military action, I still think these are useful.
- Economic sanctions are complicated: they are often seen to punish the populace as much as the government, but they worked to end apartheid in South Africa.
- Diplomacy is another option, so we can campaign our own governments to issue a condemnation of such behaviour and laws. We can refuse to accept diplomatic visits from such countries until they comply with international treaties on human rights that condemn such laws.
- We can campaign to alter our refugee laws so that being a woman in a country like that is classed as a category to claim refugee status and get some acknowledgement that it really is a risk to your life just to be a woman in some countries.
- Talking about international human rights, we can join international feminist efforts to change CEDAW so that it doesn’t just have an "optional protocol" for complaints but has all the force of other human rights documents with the International Criminal Court as the appropriate venue for prosection of perpetrators.
One of these days, I’m going to get an actual job doing this stuff. It really frustrates me that so many of my applications are overlooked because (I’m pretty sure) they hire from their volunteer cohort and I have a sense I’m too old for the entry positions and not experienced enough in the field for the senior positions. I’m absolutely going to keep trying and if any of you work in those areas and know of positions going, please, please let me know. I’ll be starting to apply for roles like this again in around June 2009.
In the meantime, I’ll be writing a letter to KRudd asking him to issue a condemnation of this event.
Any other ideas?