I have been monitoring the Unifem End Violence mailings for over 6 months but I ignored the video conference stuff because I thought it would be just another feel good exercise which would not change anything. The following article certainly challenges that view. Looks as if I could be wrong. Denise Tzumli ++++++++++++++++++++++++ Michele Landsberg on world context (UNIFEM Videoconference) By Michele Landsberg Toronto Star, March 20, 1999 We think we're wallowing in news, drowning in it, all news all the time --- yack radio, 24-hour TV, newspapers piling up, Internet information dividing and multiplying like cells. The verbiage is endless. But the share we get of the world's real news is equivalent to a single note of an entire Beethoven symphony, one tune-up squeak of the global orchestra. Every day, events take place that barely rate a paragraph in the paper, and yet will go on sounding and reverberating in millions of humans lives for decades to come. Just such a world-shaping event took place in the General Assembly of the United Nations on March 8, this century's last International Women's Day. UNIFEM and other U.N. agencies staged a dramatic and unprecedented live videoconference entitled "A World Free of Violence Against Women". It was a huge success, yet was barely acknowledged by North American media. For the first time in modern history, the attention of world leaders and international civil servants was seized and focused on what the conference speakers called "the pandemic" of sexual, physical and emotional violence against girls and women. That, my friends, is consciousness-raising on a global scale. Ambassadors from most of the United Nations member countries filled the vast and beautiful chamber of the General Assembly. Nelson Mandela and Jean Chretien both sent videotaped statements. The heads of all the major U.N. agencies jostled to get in line to send a message of support. Nearly 2000 audience members, including U.N. workers and New Yorkers, crowded the hall. The audience sat hushed and riveted as live video statements beamed in from every continent. A Rwandan woman spoke of the months of sexual torture she and her daughters endured; an Irish woman described her brave struggle to escape domestic violence; a shy young woman in New Delhi told how she fought back legally against the husband and in-laws who brutalized her (from the very moment she arrived in her wedding robes) because her dowry didn't include a car. As videotape rolled, and the spectators gazed into the sad eyes of little African girls who had been sexually mutilated, "traditional" practices like female genital mutilation (FGM) that might have seemed mere words on paper until that moment suddenly took on the air of intolerably cruel criminality. It's really impossible to over-estimate the significance of the videoconference. For the first time ever, women of the majority world (Asia, Africa, Latin America) spoke directly to the white minority of the industrialized north and described not just their own suffering but their own increasingly militant, organized and successful activism. It's only a blink of time --- scarcely more than a decade --- since the subject of wife-battering caused Tory MPs in our own House of Commons to erupt with crude jokes and sneering laughter. So it shouldn't be hard to understand that most of the world's cultures simply expect girls and women to endure, silently, a fate that may include being sold into sexual slavery, being beaten and burned, traded as beasts of burden or treated as household slaves or spoils of war. Now, their male compatriots are paying attention. I like to imagine just how startled some of them might have been as women like Dr. Nahid Toubia, the first woman surgeon in the Sudan and a tough- talking campaigner against female genital mutilation, strode to the podium and talked boldly of women's sexual rights. In cultural and social terms, this event was a stunning innovation. Imagine the audiences around the world for the satellite broadcast. At 40 sites across the former Soviet Union --- Yerevan, Baku, Tiblisi --- they gathered. At the Hong Kong Convention Centre, at Spain's University of Alicante, at the auditorium near the dental clinic in Zimbabwe's Parirenyatwa Hospital, at the Trinidad and Tobago Chamber of Commerce, on TV in Angola, Germany, France and Uganda, at hundreds of locations across North America --- they gathered and watched. For those women who feel battered and bruised by the right-wing media backlash against feminism, the videoconference offers a healing perspective. From the global vantage point, where figures like Secretary General Kofi Anan or World Bank chief James Wolfenson attended to the conference with great seriousness, the shrill and capering little backlash figures in Canada --- the criminal lawyers who defend rapists by attacking women, the Howard Stern-style fathers' rights extremists --- look small, silly and irrelevant. World change for women is increasingly in women's own hands; it will go on. ***The videoconference can still be seen via the World Wide Web at <http://webevents.broadcast.com/unifem/women>. There will be a TV broadcast of UNIFEM's video conference - International Women's Day tonight in Canada. 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