Thanks to them all!

H.E. Marjon Kamara, Permanent Representative of Liberia to the United Nations and Chair of the fifty-sixth session of the Commission on the Status of Women welcomes everyone to this year’s session.

Note that the volume appears to be low

On this day – who are the women who have served as advocates for whom you give thanks?

Advocacy took central stage at the Ecumenical Women‘s Orientation. The afternoon workshops focused on advocacy and with good reason.

The “agreed conclusions” will be the primary outcome of the meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women. The 45 Member States of the Commission will create a set of concrete, action-oriented  recommendations for action by governments, intergovernmental bodies,  and other relevant stakeholders. These recommendations will call for implementation at the international, national, regional and local level. They will address the primary theme for the 56th Session of the Commission: “the empowerment of rural women and their role in poverty and hunger eradication, development and current challenges.”

We come to the Commission – representatives of the Ecumenical Women member organizations and other NGOs – to advocate for concepts, themes, and language to shape those agreed conclusions. In the case of Ecumenical Women, we do so guided by faith in Jesus Christ and the policies of our respective organizations.

As we advocate, we follow in the footsteps of our sisters who have gone before – we stand beside our sisters who live the struggle.

For whom do we give thanks this day and everyday?

Was this your first time attending the Conference on the Status of Women (CSW)?

I have been here several times before.  The last one I attended was the CSW focused on the Girl Child.  I think this is the fourth time that I have attended a CSW.  This year I was requested by the archbishop to come.  They send someone yearly, but some years for personal reasons I have been unable to serve as the delegate.

What have you learned or taken away from this year’s CSW?

We cannot let the Beijing Platform for Action to be eclipsed by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), or be dropped as a tool in addressing women’s rights.  We are far from achieving our goal.  It is a struggle to keep this movement going, to achieve the empowerment of women.  The Beijing Platform is useful to us though, because it reminds us and equips us to keep this struggle going.  It helps articulate women’s issues.  We can refer to it and make sure – through the use of the right language – that others understand.

What are the pressing issues that you see in Kenya?  In the church?

Also, gender equity in the church needs to be addressed.  We are far behind the governments in terms of gender equity.  This will not do.  The church ought to be the model for society.  We also have to acknowledge the huge reach that we have.  We reach everyone: girls, women, men, and boys.  We have the ability to ensure that the message is being heard.

This can be complicated however.  There is a debate that the girl-child has been promoted so much that the boy-child has been left behind.  So now I include the boy-child, so that it is about holistic participation in change.  However, we have not forgotten that that the child-girl has been in a difficult situation.  We all have become involved, and help them become and stay students.

Another significant issue is domestic violence against women.  When there is violence, a woman is reduced to nothing.  We need to change this.  The church has not been able to address this yet.  During this conference, however, I heard a South African man talk about his work of leading men to address violence against women.  Men themselves condemning the violence.  They see that it is their issue.  This is powerful and a model that I would like to see adopted in Kenya, so that men don’t push the issue aside.

In Kenya, we are changing the constitution.  This presents a great possibility for women.  We need to finish this process.  Though we can critique the government, we cannot let this opportunity pass.  We must recognize that we all function under the government, so we need to partner with the government to get the constitution to its the best stage.

How do you feel that the church does on women’s issues?

There is good will with the church; that is why they sent me to the CSW.  Also, I have been given the opportunity to present on women’s issues in the past to provincial synod. Further, women are being given decision making opportunities.  There is now a woman serving as the provincial secretary, immediately under the bishop.  Also several women run departments, and serve as deacons.

African Consultative Council also has passed a resolution, calling for women to be in 30% of decision-making positions.  The implementation of this is going slowly, but improvements are being made.

How have you experienced being with women from around the world?

It has been a learning process, listening to them and hearing different perspectives.  Our struggles are the same, but we handle them differently.  Still it is encouraging to know that solutions have worked elsewhere and to be forming partnerships with other women leaders.  It brings a sense of unity to the Anglican Church to see that we are speaking from the same faith.

In what ways does your faith or theology inform the work that you do?

It is a part of it.  I am not separate from my faith or my God.  It is a part of me that I can’t do without.  And these issues affect human life, and therefore affect my faith.  They are not separate.  Jesus went around healing not just preaching.  His healing was the biggest part of his part of his ministry.

For ministry to be meaningful you have to touch people’s lives.  You have to work to make a difference.

What message would you like to share with the next generation?

Respect of human life, regardless of sex, status, race or any of factors.  Value them all as God’s creation.

Work to create a forum for people to be their full selves.  Emulate some of the good lessons that have been taught to you.  We will be mentors when you need us.

Achieving and living in freedom is important, but it comes with responsibility.  We have to accept this responsibility despite its hard work.  The next generation has to be able to sacrifice themselves for God.

Finally, the UN instruments have done quite a bit, but more improvement is needed to get the UN to work with the faith-based sector.  This is especially true in regards to capacity-building.  When the UN is working in communities, to be successful they must involve the faith-based sector.  We have the people to do the work and know the challenges at hand.

View the entire album on Picasa.

All photos taken by Jennifer Becker.

As organizations committed to partnering with Haitian women to ensure their effective participation in rebuilding Haiti, we call upon member governments and international humanitarian aid agencies present at the CSW to commit to actions that will ensure that all future relief, recovery and reconstruction investments declare and adhere to measurable standards of gender equality. In the current period of relief and temporary shelter, in the design and distribution of entitlements, and in the planning and rebuilding of infrastructure and development programs, we urge implementing actors to establish collaborative processes that are anchored in formal partnerships with Haitian women’s groups (particularly local grassroots groups) who are empowered and resourced to take public leadership in the protracted process of reconstruction.

As a coalition of groups and networks active in the global women’s movement we will partner with Haitian women’s groups to ensure that equitable, transparent, and socially just standards are adhered to in all phases of recovery and will regularly monitor:

Participation: Haitian women are disproportionately impacted by the crisis as well as key to their country’s recovery. Thus we expect to see a large and diverse number of Haitian women’s organizations consulted and included in needs and damage assessments, and in the design, implementation and monitoring and evaluation of post-disaster aid programs. Financing large numbers of grassroots women and their community organizations is essential to ensuring that — women’s needs and priorities are reflected in relief and recovery and that displaced women are socially legitimated as a key stakeholder group.

Leadership: The legacy of Haitian women’s leadership at home, in workplaces and across communities is a strong foundation for designing, implementing and evaluating long-term recovery as well as continuing aid. Women’s leadership and care-giving work should be recognized and supported by policy and program mandates and transparent resource commitments that enable women to play meaningful, sustained and formal roles in the long-term recovery process. And, as social and political leadership positions are restored or created Haitian women must hold a proportional share.

Non-discrimination: Given that temporary and impermanent settlements and housing arrangements are likely to persist for a long period, measures to protect women from sexual violence must be implemented in all areas of Haiti, especially the capital where security concerns are high. These include: safe access to storm-resistant temporary shelters, adequate street lighting and safe spaces where women can relax and organize around basic needs. As temporary and permanent housing plans and entitlement policies are finalized, the explicit protection of women’s land and housing rights—through enforceable tenure security– must be explicit. Across all states, reproductive health services must be guaranteed and accessible.

Capacity Development: Governments and aid agencies should provide resources and facilitate technical assistance to help grassroots and other women’s organizations build their capacity to function effectively as development and social justice promoters (short and long term). Such assistance should conform to capacity gaps identified by a wide range of women’s organizations and organized networks of grassroots women. (As often as possible, training and other technical assistance should be supplied by grassroots and other women’s organizations.)  Economic recovery programs must give priority to economically vulnerable women—especially single heads of households and informal sector workers—and offering them a full range of training, credit, and business support services.

Transparency and Accountability: Opaque bureaucracy, unfulfilled pledges and self-serving aid policies by donor countries have long plagued Haiti.  Thus Aid machinery must be reformed to strengthen democratic governance in Haiti and build the national economy to reflect the rights and priorities of Haitians, not the economic interests of donor countries.

Mindful that a donor’s conference is scheduled for the end of March 2010, we call upon member governments at this CSW, and other civil society organizations gathered at this CSW to affirm the principles outlined in this statement and to join us in calling for the inclusion of representatives of Haitian women’s organizations (including grassroots groups) at the donor meeting.  The design and affirmation of policy targets and aid commitments that institutionalize the participation and leadership of Haitian women in the rebuilding of their country must be a key element of these deliberations. (Resolution 1325 on women’s roles in post conflict reconstruction is an important precedent.) This level of inclusiveness is required if Haitian women are to believe the global community is committed to  ‘building a road’ that upholds their human rights, facilitates their citizenship, and builds new economic, political and social structures that will redress the decades of poverty and aid-dependency they have been forced to endure. Only bold action will accomplish this and allow a phoenix to emerge from the earthquake’s ashes.

Authors: A coalition statement submitted by the Huairou Commission on behalf of United Methodist Women, Caribbean Association for Feminist Research & Action (CAFRA) ,CAFRA Haiti, MADRE, Women in Cities International, CDD, Católicas por el Derecho a Decidir Mexico, Ipas Mexico, GIRE, Grupo de Información en Reproducción Elegida, GROOTS International, Huairou Commission, Gender and Disaster Network, AWID, AJWS

With great hope,
Jason Sierra & Karen Longenecker, Co-Conveners

A religious think tank has issued a manifesto about breaking the silence in religious communities about a host of sexuality issues. It hasn’t stirred much media attention, but Frederick Clarkson thinks it could be revolutionary.

(WOMENSENEWS)–The Religious Institute has just issued a 46-page report on the state of sexuality in religious communities and a manifesto that seeks to transform the status quo.

Goals include improved pastoral care of marital relationships, domestic abuse and infertility, and training for prospective clergy in sexuality-related matters.

The institute calls for religious leaders to provide lifelong age-appropriate education for youth and adults and to become more effective advocates for comprehensive sexuality education and sexual and reproductive health in society.

Clergy are often first responders in matters of domestic violence and potential (and actual) suicides by young people struggling with sexual identity. The Religious Institute points out that these first responders have usually received little to no training for the job.

A singular strength of the document is that it offers an uncompromised progressive vision that does not conform to recent fashions in seeking “common ground” with conservative
evangelicals and Catholics.

Particularly striking in this regard is its call for a society in which there is full access to reproductive health care, including abortion, marriage equality and full inclusion of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in the life of religious communities.

Since it was announced two weeks ago, the report, “Sexuality and Religion 2020: Goals for the Next Decade,” has generated little media attention beyond a few regional newspapers and online news sites.

Sometimes, this is the quiet way revolutions begin.

Manifesto Seen as Subversive

Albert Mohler, the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., immediately responded to the manifesto on his blog. He saw it as “evidence of the continued subversion of biblical authority and confessional integrity that characterizes the revolt against orthodoxy in so many churches.”

Nevertheless, he acknowledged: “Our pews are filled with people worried about their sexuality, wondering how to understand these things, struggling with same-sex attractions, tempted to stray from their marriages, enticed by Internet pornography and wondering how to bring their sexuality under submission to Christ.”

And while he thinks evangelicals “will rightly reject just about everything” in the Religious Institute’s report, he did conclude that “they should not avoid its urgency in calling pastors and Christian leaders to teach and preach about sex and sexuality.”

Indeed, he seems to be worried about the competition. “The Religious Institute wants liberal preachers to talk more about sex. My guess is that they will. But what about evangelical pastors?”

Rare Experience Spawns Effort

The Religious Institute, based in Westport, Conn., has a national network of more than 5,000 clergy and religious leaders from 50 religious traditions, from which they seek to build an activist Faithful Voices Network to take their agenda forward.

Rev. Debra Haffner, founder of the Religious Institute, brings a unique background to the effort.

After several years as executive director of SIECUS (Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States), the nation’s leading association of sex educators, she attended Union Theological Seminary in New York City, became a minister in the Unitarian Universalist Association, headquartered in Boston, and founded the Religious Institute. Her mission: to break the silences and transform the conversation about sexuality.

The report grew out of a consultation held by the Religious Institute last summer with two dozen theologians, activists, clergy and academics from Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Unitarian Universalist traditions. They sought to envision how in 10 years “all faith communities will be sexually healthy, just and prophetic.”

The report also summarizes dramatic progress in the past 10 years.

Now female clergy are taking leadership roles in major denominations. A woman is presiding bishop of The Episcopal Church. Lesbian, gay, transgendered and bisexual people are gaining acceptance. Marriage equality is recognized by the United Church of Christ, the Union for Reform Judaism, Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association and the Unitarian Universalist Association.

The Unitarian Universalist Association also recently announced that clergy will now be required to be “competent” to address matters of sexuality in the lives of their parishioners. Haffner says that several other denominations are likely to do the same in the next few years.

But the manifesto also addresses the silence surrounding sexuality.

It cites survey data that show that 75 percent of even progressive clergy had not addressed sex education and 40 percent had not preached about sexual orientation over a two year period.

Seventy percent had never preached on reproductive justice.

Desire to Turn to Clergy

“People want to be able to turn to their clergy,” Haffner said in a phone interview. “One in 4 has a history of sexual abuse. Half of marriages are going to break up. Infertility is an
issue.”

The list goes on, she said. “But people are looking for an ethic that does not currently exist.”

The consequences of avoiding matters of sexuality, she said, show up in clergy sex-abuse scandals. “Countless millions of dollars are paid out playing clean up because of this lack of training and attention. And it’s not just the Catholics,” she said.

“If these are issues that cannot be spoken in your churches,” she asks, “where can you bring them? Silence contributes to people’s alienation and aloneness. People don’t know
what to say and how to say it.”

Haffner says that mainstream religious institutions have a head start. She says she is working with five denominations on mandatory sexual competence for clergy and 15 denominations on matters that affect everyone “across the board.”

Rev. Ann Tiemeyer, who heads the Women’s Ministry at the National Council of Churches, said in a press teleconference call earlier this month that not all of the council’s 36 member Protestant and Orthodox denominations, representing 45 million Christians in 100,000 congregations, would support everything in the document.

But she said that all would benefit from clergy training and open discussion of matters of sexuality, including the teaching of young people and strategies for keeping children safe from sexual predators.

She pointed to a number of efforts already underway that fit the Religious Institute’s recommendations. For example, a number of denominations, as well as her office, have focused on issues of domestic violence. And the United Church of Christ and the Unitarian Universalist Association co-produced in 2000 a sexuality education program for children and young people, “Our Whole Lives.” She called it “an incredibly great model. Indeed, a dozen denominations have since developed various programs of their own.

Dr. Martin Marty, the eminent historian of religion at the University of Chicago, joined the Religious Institute’s press teleconference and compared sexuality to religion. “If you get it right, it’s beautiful. But if you get it wrong, it really messes you up,” he said.

The encouraging trend is that some of our major religious institutions, with the help of the Religious Institute, are working hard to get both sexuality and religion right.

Frederick Clarkson is the editor of the anthology, “Dispatches from the Religious Left: The Future of Faith and Politics in America” (Ig Publishing, 2008).

For more information:

Religious Institute:

http://www.religiousinstitute.org/

Women’s Ministry/Justice for Women Working Group:

http://www.ncccusa.org/womensministry/

Unitarian Universalist Association:

http://www.uua.org/

http://www.womensenews.org/story/commentary/100223/us-religions-quietly-launch-sexual-revolution

The Civil Society Unit of the High Commissioner for Human Rights is moderating an on-line discussion on Women and Human Rights, focusing on issues of accountability and access to justice.

The discussion started on 1 February and will end on 28 February.  Sub-themes are:

- National legal frameworks challenges, trends and best practices with respect to legal protection of women’s human rights (Week 1);

-Accountability challenges, trends and best practices with respect to ensuring accountability for violations of human rights of women, including violence against women (Week 2);

-Access to justice challenges, trends and best practices with respect to womens access to justice (Week 3);

-Summary, wrap-up and observations (Week 4).

Each week starts with a short introduction to the theme to trigger and encourage a constructive and fruitful on-line discussion, to be summarized and analyzed in order to contribute to the Beijing +15 review. The discussion is part of a series of United Nations online discussions dedicated to the fifteen-year review of the implementation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (1995) and the outcomes of the twenty-third special session of the General Assembly (2000); and is coordinated by WomenWatch, an inter-agency project of the United Nations Inter-agency Network on Women and Gender Equality.

Join the discussion!

The United Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) has launched a month-long online discussion on Women in Power and Decision-Making. Dedicated to the fifteen-year review of the implementation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (1995), as well as outcomes of the twenty-third special session of the General Assembly (2000), these discussions will be a contribution to the 54th session of the Commission on the Status of Women to take place 1-12 March 2010.