Knowledge is Power

Posted on October 9, 2012 by Sophie Bridger

Malala Yousafzai, activist

Today, in the Swat region of Pakistan, a 14 year old girl was shot. Her name is Malala Yousafzai, and she was walking home from school with her friend when she was shot in the side of the head. The Taliban have claimed responsibility for the shooting.

The question on all our minds is ‘Why would anyone try and kill a 14 year old girl?’.

Because Malala Yousafzai stood up for something that scares and horrifies the Taliban – she dared to speak out for girls’ right to an education.

Malala was 11 years old when she started writing about life under the Taliban – two years after they closed her school. They have since been ejected from the region, but Malala has continued to speak out, and has been nominated for a peace award for her activism.

This isn’t the first time the Taliban has stooped so low as to attack children. They have been linked to arson attacks on schools across Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as being linked to poisonings in girl’s schools. Thousands of students have been forced to stay at home.

For the Taliban, educating women is un-Islamic and immodest. Girls over the age of eight were denied an education under Taliban rule in Afghanistan. The women’s university was quickly shut down shortly after they came to power. A network of secret schools for girls was set up, but the risks if they were discovered were severe. Even after being removed from power, their influence is still visible.

It’s easy to see why the Taliban would want to restrict education. They do so in the name of Islam, but a brand of Islam unrecognisable to the majority of Muslims worldwide. Banning women’s education has more to do with power and control than religion.

When we are educated, we are given the potential to shape our own world. Literacy and numeracy are critical for employment, self-sufficiency and independence. It allows us to live our own lives, to think for ourselves, to develop our full potential. But without education, we have no future, no way of choosing our own direction. Without knowledge to base our own decisions on, what choice is there but to blindly follow the path that others set out for us. The uneducated population is easily controlled.

This isn’t just an issue in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Worldwide, 75 million girls are missing out on an education. That’s one in three girls who are being denied control over their own futures – denied the ability to escape poverty, to fulfil their potential.

Thursday is the first International Day of the Girl, and Plan are speaking out about the need for women’s education. If you believe, like Malala does, like I do, that everyone deserves an education, sign Plan’s petition, and Raise Your Hand.

What do women do when men riot?

Posted on August 16, 2011 by Katy Gordon

I’ve been down in Manchester over the weekend, staying with friends in their city centre flat. I’ve been thinking a lot about the riots this week – hard not to when its been all over the news and I can see the consequences out of my friends’ windows.

I can dimly remember the Brixton and Toxteth riots in the 1980s. This doesn’t feel like that at all. That was such a huge outpouring of rage over years of injustice. This feels much more like consumerism gone mad.

It has challenged my pre-conceptions over who riots too. I guess I tend to assume it is usually men who riot and women who pick up the pieces but is that in fact the case? I found it really shocking to hear young girls laughing as they described how much fun it had been. Shocking too to hear of the woman trying on shoes before deciding whether to loot them (although you might think this confirms as well as challenges prejudices!).

I read about the would-be social worker crying in her bedroom over her ruined career plans now she has a conviction for rioting and I found it hard to feel much sympathy. But the woman facing eviction in Wandsworth because her son rioted is more tricky. My liberal instinct is to find this unjust. But then I heard she’d said she wasn’t responsible for her son’s actions and what about her human rights? If parents aren’t responsible, then who is?!

While not wanting to judge when I don’t know the circumstances, it seems to me that if you sign a contract agreeing to behave in a certain way, you have limited recourse to crying foul if you break that contract. Listening to Wandsworth’s council leader explaining that if we as a society don’t follow through with consequences for anti-social behaviour, I found myself thinking of Jo Frost, the nanny with a Channel 4 series teaching children about consequences by using the naughty step.

There does seem to be a connection between MPs who fiddle expenses, bankers who trash the economy and rioters who loot because they don’t think there will be consequences. At all levels, we seem to have forgotten the responsibility we owe to others, to our community, to society. There has to be more meaning to life than just being out for what we can get.

What is unusual about these riots is how they are challenging prejudices on all sides, both for liberals whose instinct is to understand rather than condemn and for conservatives who tend to want to use the full force of the law as the answer.

But if disengagement from society is at the heart of it, then there are no easy answers. We need to teach consequences but we also need to give people, and especially our young people, hope that they too can share in society, reasons why they would want to be part of society and the tools to engage in society.

Reforms to Obama’s healthcare bill could hold back an entire sex

Posted on August 10, 2011 by Sophie Bridger

America has finally woken up to the importance of accessibility to healthcare, including contraception. Unfortunately, Obama’s efforts to make contraception available to everyone are being hindered by religious groups.

In Scotland there are no prescription charges, and in the rest of the UK, prescriptions for contraception are exempt of charges. From schoolgirls, to married women, we have the means to control our fertility and our sex lives. We don’t have to worry about not being able to afford contraception – most modern clinics nowadays give condoms away for free anyway.

Americans can pay up to $50 per month for contraceptive pills

In America, the situation is very different. Healthcare is paid for through insurance – either privately or by co-paying into a work scheme. The cost of contraception can be prohibitive – birth control pills can cost up to $50 per month in co-payment. Many women struggle to pay for this consistently, and unsurprisingly, this often results in unplanned pregnancy.

Fortunately, as of 2012, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will call for health insurance providers to provide birth control without out-of-pocket cost, ie for free. and therefore consistently available. This would mean that by 2014 (when health insurance is fully reformed) contraception would be free and accessible to everyone.

Except people who work for ‘religious employers’. There is a conscience clause within the reforms, which exempts religious employers, such as schools and hospitals from having to provide contraception if it goes against their religion.

Freedom of religion is an important right, and we should protect people’s right to express their religious beliefs. But that can’t be a barrier to a woman’s right to control her fertility. Religious freedom should allow you to live your life within the boundaries of your faith. It shouldn’t allow you to impede the rights of others. The whole point of these reforms is that they mean everyone should have access to healthcare, including contraception, regardless of income, age, or employer. There can be no room for conscience clauses here.

Half of pregnancies in America are unplanned, with young women the most likely to have one. Frequently, it brings disruption and distress. It can change women’s lives, and often it can hold them back. It is difficult to plan a career, to plan the life that you want without being able to control your fertility. Availability to contraception is crucial to women’s advancement, and these reforms in their current wording hold back an entire sex from reaching their full potential.

America is finally getting its sorry act together by helping all women have access to contraception. It must not allow the religious right to undermine those efforts.

Stop patronising me and give me a beer

Posted on August 4, 2011 by Sophie Bridger

Last week, yet another beer company released a beer marketed specifically at women. This is not the first excercise of it’s kind. Carlsberg, and others before them have branded products as ‘women’s beer’. But Coor’s have gone one further – and coloured it pink.

Women are still the minority of beer drinkers. According to Molson Coors, 79% of women ‘rarely or never drink beer’. You can’t blame them for wanting to exploit an massive, untapped section of the market. But surely this isn’t the way to do it. There is a massive macho culture surrounding beer drinking. Many adult women have spent decades being isolated from beer drinking by companies themselves, by targeting their products exclusively at men – is it that suprising that most women have been totally alienated?

Advertising beer with ladies in swimsuits is not a very subtle way to get through to your target audience

Personally, I like beer. I like German beer, Belgian beer, real ale, and a decent lager. The whole reason I started drinking it in the first place was because it was not expected of me. As a teenage girl, I was expected to drink alcopops at parties, and cheap cider. I was not expected to like, or to handle, a pint. This struck me as an excellent reason to start drinking it. Years later, I still drink ale, and it still raises eyebrows occasionally.

Women don’t want a ‘special beer’. We’d rather you stopped isolating us from ‘proper beer’. Fortunately, beer-loving women may have found a friend in smaller, independent breweries. Not only do they not have the resources to launch a beer specifically aimed at women, they seem prepared to treat us like any other beer drinker. On Twitter, the Black Isle Beer company commented

“A new beer aimed at women folk? All our beers are aimed at women and we haven’t had to patronise anyone to make them that way”

I don’t need large beer companies to tell me that they’ve made a special beer ‘just for me’. I find it patronising, and it’s certainly not going to make me drink Coors. Please. I have better taste in beer than that.

We all live in a gender-balanced submarine

Posted on August 3, 2011 by Sophie Bridger

On both sides of the Atlantic, women are finally being permitted to have a job that has always been off limits to them. The Royal Navy and the US Navy have both announced this month that they are lifting the ban on women serving in submarines. The ban was supposedly to protect pregnant women from harmful radiation inside nuclear submarines.

It’s great to see that our Navy is opening doors for 3,400 female Navy personnel. Unfortunately, they’re not the last bastion of male-only roles in the armed forces.

In 2002, Captain Philippa Tattersall became the first woman to earn a prestigious Green Beret from the Royal Marines. But because she is Philippa, and not Philip, she may not serve as a Commando. She is limited to 3 Commando Brigade, where she may work in a supportive role.

This exemption from discrimination legislation applies to roles within the forces where the main aim is “to close with and kill the enemy”, and was reviewed by the MOD only last year. The Navy’s website attempts to justify this by claiming that the inclusion of women is not permitted on “grounds of medical or combat effectiveness/team cohesion”. “Medical or combat effectiveness” is a wonderful euphemism, and covers all manner of sins. I will resist the temptation to vigorously defend Captain Tattersall evident ‘combat effectiveness’.

The MOD also express a concern that allowing women into small teams for close combat will endanger troops by undermining the cohesion of the group. I fail to see why the presence of women in a team needs to be disruptive. If it were the potential for romantic feelings, that presumably these teams would also exclude gay men. They don’t, thankfully. There are plenty of examples of men and women working together in high stress situations – both within and outwith the armed forces. Surgeons work together within an operating room, police officers respond to emergencies. These are a world away, but the theme – men and women working together under pressure – remains.

In the words of the MOD themselves, “The contribution of Servicewomen to the combat effectiveness of the Armed Forces is essential.” That doesn’t just go for the Logistics Corps, or the Intelligence Corps – it should go for every part of the armed forces. Women have proved themselves to be capable of being everything the armed forces has allowed them to do – despite ‘being girls’. And now, we’d like the opportunity to prove that we can be part of an effective close-combat team. This ban only stands because of an inconclusive review. Surely it’s time to give our soldiers – men and women – the opportunity to rise to the challenge.