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a1000shadesofhurt

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Monthly Archives: January 2012

Out of Afghanistan: incredible stories of the boys who walked to Europe

29 Sunday Jan 2012

Posted by a1000shadesofhurt in Refugees and Asylum Seekers, Young People

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Unaccompanied minors

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/29/out-afghanistan-boys-stories-europe

Behind the security bars of a spartan, white-tiled room, 25 youths are arranging bedrolls on the floor. The workers on the Salvation Army nightshift, who watch over these lone foreign teenagers in a shelter in a gritty corner of Paris, are distributing sheets and sleeping bags; there are a couple of boys from Mali and a contingent of Bangladeshis; the rest have travelled overland, by every conceivable method, from Afghanistan.

The youngest are 13 years old, pint-sized cousins from Kabul who arrived that morning after a journey of five months. They take off their trainers and place them at the end of their bedrolls. One of them, Morteza, gingerly peels off his socks. The undersides of his toes are completely white.

I ask what happened to his feet. “Water,” he says. Where was he walking in water? Mohammed, the boy on the next bedroll who knows more English, translates. “In the mountains,” he says. Which mountains, I ask, thinking about the range that forms the border between Turkey and Iran. “Croatia, Slovenia, Italy,” Morteza says. Mohammed intervenes. “Not water,” he clarifies. “Snow.”

Suddenly I understand. Morteza’s feet are not waterlogged or blistered. He has limped across Europe with frostbite.

The next day I run into them watching the older Afghans play football in a park. Morteza’s 13-year-old cousin Sohrab, pale and serious beyond his years, recounts, in English learned during two years of school in Afghanistan, what happened. “Slovenia big problem,” he says, explaining how he and Morteza, “my uncle’s boy”, were travelling with eight adults when they were intercepted by the Slovenian police. Two members of their group were caught and the rest made a detour into the mountains. They spent five days in the snow, navigating by handheld GPS, emerging from the Alps in Trento, in the Italian north.

Morteza acquired frostbite on the penultimate part of a 6,000km journey that detoured through the Balkans: through Macedonia, Serbia and Croatia. Their aim is to join their uncle who lives in Europe, the solution their relatives found after Morteza’s father was killed in an explosion. His mother died earlier “in the war”; Sohrab lost his own father when he was 11.

Morteza and Sohrab are among the world’s most vulnerable migrants. Like scores of Afghan teenagers in transit across Europe, they are in flight from violence or the aftershocks of violence that affect children in particularly harsh ways. Those who turn up in Paris have spent up to a year on the road, on the same clandestine routes as adults, but at far greater risk.

No one knows how many unaccompanied Afghan children have made it to Europe. Paris took in just over 300 in 2011 – the biggest nationality among the 1,700 lone foreign minors in its care. Sarah Di Giglio, a child-protection expert with Save the Children in Italy, says that last year the number of Afghan boys – there are almost never girls – passing through a day centre in Rome had doubled from the year before, to 635.

Asylum statistics are another measure, though they give only a rough indication since many children never make a claim. Still, at 4,883, Afghans were the biggest group of separated foreign children requesting asylum in 2010, the majority in Europe.

While some are sent out of Afghanistan for their own safety, others make their own decision to leave. Some are running from brutality, or the politics of their fathers, or recruitment by the Taliban. Others have been pushed onwards by the increasing precariousness of life in Pakistan and Iran, countries that host three million Afghan refugees.

Blanche Tax, who is responsible for country guidance at the United Nations refugee agency in Geneva, says security is deteriorating in Afghanistan, which Unicef described two years ago as the world’s most dangerous place to be a child. From January to September, she said, 1,600 children were reported killed or injured, 55% more than the previous year.

A report to the general assembly of the UN security council on 13 December 2011, meanwhile, said “the killing and maiming of children remains of grave concern”. “The most frequent violations continued to be recruitment and use of children, including for suicide bombing missions or for planting explosives,” the report continued. It highlighted a recent rise in “cross-border recruitment by Taliban – as well as attacks on schools”. And it added 31,385 cases of “severe acute malnutrition” among minors to a litany of child-specific damage that already includes landmines, sexual violence and forced labour.

It is from this maelstrom, and its spread to Afghanistan’s south, north and east, that Morteza, Sohrab and others have fled. I first came across adolescents like them three years ago, when I saw them squeezing between the railings of a Paris park to sleep on cardboard among the shrubberies or in the bandstand, along with adult refugees. When the police raided the park and started to patrol it with dogs, they bedded down under the swings of a playground, or on the edges of a canal.

Subsequent raids have moved them on again, but they still play football there or under a railway bridge, in teams that sometimes take on the local boys. They find the undersized Salvation Army shelter by word of mouth, or through a reception office for unaccompanied foreign minors run by a French NGO called France Terre d’Asile (FTDA). It’s the only emergency place of refuge for the children, and is oversubscribed: lately 20 or so have been turned away each evening, to sleep in a corner of a park or metro station, or walk the streets all night in order to keep warm.

In the entrance to the FTDA office for minors I stumble upon Omar, a slender 16-year-old with a ski hat pulled low over his eyes. He is leaning on the counter by himself, too tense to wait on the seats with the other boys. He is doodling with a yellow marker pen on a sheet of paper on which someone before him has pencilled the word “Tunisia”.

“All my family are very worried about my father,” Omar says. “We don’t know where he is.” This is almost the first thing he tells me. He expresses this same anxiety four times in our conversation, and I realise that what initially I took for tension was distress.

From a village in Afghanistan’s Logar province, just south of Kabul, Omar says he is the eldest of five. Enmities from the Soviet era up-ended his life. “I did school in Afghanistan for three years and I wasn’t able to go more,” he said. “My grandfather said don’t go to school, we have enemies who will kill you; stay in the house and don’t go out in the village a lot.” His father and grandfather had “done jihad with the Russians”, he said; those they had sided against came back and “gave a warning”. His grandfather sold their almond orchard and paid $11,000 to a smuggler to get him and his father out.

Travelling with Omar’s uncle, the three made it as far as Turkey before being stopped by the police. Everyone scattered. Separated in the confusion, Omar was deported to Afghanistan. He said his uncle had contacted his grandfather to let them know he was all right; from his father they have had no word.

Omar set off again, spending the next five months on the road. He moved in and out of the hands of smugglers, was held with dozens of others in “passenger houses”, then abandoned in a deserted place on the Turkish side of the border with Greece. There, he and his companions waited, night after night without shelter, for a guide. Finally they gave up and struggled back to Istanbul.

On his second attempt Omar swam a wide canal and walked for five hours in wet clothes, heading on his smuggler’s instructions towards the lights of a Greek town. There he was picked up by the police and held for three days in a room with 15 men. The next four nights he spent in a train station in the northern Greek town of Alexandroupolis, until a railway employee paid his fare to Athens. He waited 25 days in another passenger room before being crammed, with 32 others, into the back of a truck. Told to bring two packets of biscuits and no water, they spent 30 hours inside. “There was no air and it smelt very bad,” he said. The driver abandoned them in Italy.

He caught trains to Milan, and then Cannes, with three other boys. “We slept on the earth next to the sea and we were so cold,” he says. Arriving in Paris, he spent six nights on the street before asking at this office for help. “I want to live here,” he says. “People don’t hurt me in France.” And yet, they already had. A few days earlier three men had mugged him in a Paris park. They stole his bag that contained his last €30 and the slip of paper that bore his grandfather’s phone number, severing his last link to his family.

In the state of anxiety he was in, it was hard for him to think about the future. “I want to have peace,” he said. And if he were able to stay in France? “I’d like to go to school,” he said, “if they give us the opportunity to go.” For many of the kids going to school seems like an enormous privilege, but first they have to be accepted as minors. That means going before a judge, who can order bone x-ray exams – which have a two-year margin of error – if he disbelieves their age; they may have to wait months to get formal protection.

By the time they turn 18, these teenagers will have to prove they speak French and have embarked on a profession in order to have a chance of regularising their status. For Afghan boys with almost no prior schooling, the pressure is enormous. “They have no time to have their adolescent crises,” says Pauline Ferrais, head of the education service at the Maison du Jeune Réfugié (MJR), a day centre. As Pierre Henry, managing director of FTDA, puts it: “Some have spent one or two years on the roads of Asia and Europe in extreme conditions playing with the laws of survival, and we ask them to respect very strict rules in an education system that makes no allowances for them.” Yet teachers remark that those who do go to school have a dynamic effect on the class. It’s something that’s been noted by Romain Levy, the deputy mayor for Paris with special responsibility for minors. “Because of their motivation they act as an engine and pull the other kids up,” he says.

But Paris’s budget for providing for minors is stretched. And elsewhere in Europe the likelihood that these boys will get a second chance at a childhood is waning. Sweden, alarmed by the 1,693 Afghan teenagers who requested asylum there in 2011, has teamed up with Britain, Norway and the Netherlands to create the European Return Platform for Unaccompanied Minors, or Erpum, an EU-funded project that aims to send them back.

Susanne Bäckstedt, its Stockholm-based co-ordinator, denied reports that Erpum wanted to establish care centres in Kabul. She said the programme would be voluntary, and only involve minors who had exhausted asylum appeals and wanted to rejoin their families. “We are not discussing care centres,” says Bäckstedt. “We will only send them back if their family can be traced.” That, she says, meant “a welcoming family” who would come to the airport to meet them.

Erpum hopes to start repatriations of 16- and 17-year-olds this year, provided the Afghan Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation agrees; Bäckstedt confirmed Erpum has a target of deporting 100 Afghan minors by the end of 2014. The prospect has alarmed child-protection bodies, who fear such initiatives will push those in Europe underground. They want reassurances over how the minor’s best interest would be established, stress the danger to the tracers of inaccurate information, and warn that families who have spent thousands of dollars to send a son to safety will have incurred debts in which collateral can include the betrothal of a younger sister to an older man. “Family tracing is not as innocent as it sounds,” says one children’s rights researcher. The European Council on Refugees and Exiles also opposes returning minors to Afghanistan.

Governments concerned about deterring minors from embarking on hazardous journeys risk missing the point about why children flee in the first place, says Judith Dennis, policy adviser at the UK Refugee Council. “We share concerns that children’s journeys to safety are often dangerous,” she comments, “but it is inappropriate to suggest that the international response should be to discourage them from escaping the threats in their country.”

Every Afghan minor who has survived the endurance test that reaching Europe entails has a story of equal parts courage and grief. Some of them are too frightened, or too traumatised, or simply too young to be able to explain the forces that have borne them here.

I meet Jalil, a round-faced 16-year-old from Kunduz, in Afghanistan’s north, between classes at the MJR, where he is taught French. “This is my first school,” he says with pride. His only education hitherto had been from a neighbour in Afghanistan who came to his house at night to teach him English, “one word at a time”, from a book.

Jalil took his future into his own hands after being orphaned. He had lost his mother to “a heart sickness” when he was nine or 10 and was living with his father, who was killed “three years and four months ago”. “Someone said he helped the Taliban,” Jalil tells me. He didn’t witness the attack. “But my brother saw that and now he is mad,” Jalil says. “He can’t talk. It is like he is finished. He is 22 years old.”

He and his younger siblings moved to his uncle’s house, where he was often beaten. “He was cruel, cruel, cruel,” Jalil says of his uncle. His brother-in-law helped him get away, paying $4,000 to a smuggler to get him to Turkey. Barely 15, he went first to Pakistan, then Iran, and on to Turkey and Greece. He had no money so he stayed there “a long time”, living by washing windows, then crossed into Italy from the Greek port of Patras by clinging to the chassis of a truck. After a nine-month journey he reached Paris in August, and slept for a month in the street. Now he is learning the language and goes every day after class to “the library with headphones” at the Pompidou Centre. “I go there and listen to French,” he says. “The plan is I study more to be a doctor, but if I cannot do a big job I will do a little job. If I can’t be a doctor I will be an electrician.”

Pierre Henry of FTDA believes that Europe should be investing in these teenagers. “You don’t win war, democracy, hearts with occupying armies,” he says, pointing out that educating these minors would help create the diaspora that will one day rebuild their country. “It puts paid to all our values if we can’t take care of those among the world’s disinherited children who come to us.”

A week later I pass by the meeting point where the new arrivals gather to be chosen for the 25 places in the Salvation Army shelter. Forty-five boys are waiting in a ragtaggle line against a supermarket wall, and every one of them is new. Sohrab and Morteza, the boy with frostbitten feet, have left; they are back on the road. There is no sign of Omar. Jalil, who lined up here four months ago, now has a place in a hotel, though sometimes he stops by a nearby soup kitchen, where many Afghans gather, to speak his language again. The others have disappeared on their search across Europe for some place that will allow them to stay. They leave only their stories behind.

Khmer Rouge survivor’s tale helps Cambodia confront its brutal past

24 Tuesday Jan 2012

Posted by a1000shadesofhurt in War Crimes

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Cambodia, Genocide, Khmer Rouge

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/24/khmer-rouge-survivor-film-cambodia

It took her 33 years to put pen to paper and write the screenplay that would change everything. But for Khmer Rouge survivor Khauv Sotheary, producing a film about her mother’s experience of the brutal period instead of her own has allowed the 47-year-old professor to understand her family’s past even more profoundly.

Lost Loves is Cambodia‘s first feature film about the Khmer Rouge for more than 20 years, and coincides with a key hearing at the UN-backed war crimes court. This is the first time in 30 years that the regime has been discussed so much and so openly. And that, experts say, proves that Cambodia is truly on the road to reconciliation.

“We’ve grown up far from the story [of the regime] because so much time has passed, but the memory – of the pain, the starvation, the separation – is always there,” says a soft-spoken Sotheary from a cafe in her native Phnom Penh. “Even though we live in peace now and have food on the table, we have to keep this story alive. We have to communicate it.”

Lost Loves focuses on Sotheary’s mother, who lost seven members of her family – including her father, husband and four children – during the hardline communist regime of 1975-79, which killed about 2 million people. With its all-Cambodian cast and crew, including Sotheary as the protagonist, the film premiered in 2010 at the Cambodian international film festival to a riveted audience, and last week finally appeared in city cinemas. Critics have called it “groundbreaking” and “beautiful”.

Relying heavily on traditional Cambodian drama, the film depicts everyday life under the Khmer Rouge in striking but emotionally provocative ways. In one scene, Amara, stripped of her “capitalist” identity and clad in revolutionary, communist black, drags a fellow farmer to hospital as she suffers a miscarriage from overwork in the rice paddies, her blood staining the emerald grasses where they eat, sleep and toil.

“This is the only way to really bring the story to the people here,” explains director Chhay Bora, 49, who lost two brothers at the hands of the regime and says that a documentary would have had a less profound effect. “A docu-drama actually brings you to the experience by making you feel like you’re in it. You become emotionally engaged.”

Sotheary – who survived the regime despite chronic malnutrition and a permanent state of despair – says she commends her mother for her “strength and resolve to survive what she did”.

“As a mother now, I don’t know if I’d have the same strength,” she adds.

Bora and Sotheary – both university professors – chose Cambodia’s youth as the film’s target audience and have provided discounted tickets to schools and universities to encourage students to watch it. The couple aim to screen the film in provinces beyond the capital. “Children need to see history with their eyes to understand what they read,” says Bora. “A film like this helps them understand their textbooks better.”

The film-makers are aided, in part, by a recent movement to teach the history of the genocide to students and the public at Cambodia’s most famous torture prison, S-21, or Tuol Sleng (whose former director, Kaing Guek Eav, known as Comrade Duch, was convicted of war crimes in 2010and sentenced to 35 years in prison). Organised by the country’s leading Khmer Rouge research group, the Documentation Centre of Cambodia (DC-Cam), the bi-weekly lectures discuss the rise and fall of a government that considered education a disease of the elite and converted many of the country’s schools into prisons and warehouses.

While the genocide is required teaching from grades nine to 12 in Cambodia, many students doubt the extent of the atrocities committed and some teachers are loth to address the issue in class, “in part because they don’t understand the period and how to integrate it into the curriculum”, says oral historian and S-21 lecturer Farina So.

“Many parents and grandparents don’t like to discuss what happened, because it is such a painful and sensitive issue,” she says. “But if we don’t talk about it at home, and we don’t talk about it in our communities, how can kids understand the history? This is about solace, about reconciling the past with the present and future.”

DC-Cam has trained some 3,000 teachers to approach the genocide, partly through its independently funded guidebooks that encourage teachers to ask students questions such as “What would life be like today if money and free markets were abolished?” and “How has the regime affected life in Cambodia today?”.

But the organisation knows it has an uphill battle on its hands. “I believe some of what you say happened, but not everything,” says high school student Luy Srey Mech, 17, at a recent S-21 lecture. “My great-grandparents were killed during the revolution, but it was a long time ago. I guess now that I see these pictures, these videos, I start to understand it a little more.”

Youk Chhang, a leading researcher on the Khmer Rouge, says it would be easy to get discouraged by such seemingly disaffected youth – but that would be a great mistake.

“Genocide is very difficult to express in words. Forcing or expecting people to ‘believe’ it happened is unfair and perhaps too obsessed with the past,” he says, noting that the most important development to come out of this newfound dialogue is “the communication itself”.

“This dialogue that we are seeing today did not exist 15 years ago,” he says. “The tribunal has finally put the Khmer Rouge into the public sphere, creating a public debate that is nationwide. Everywhere there is shared joy, suspicion, sorrow, hope. It’s the single issue that has encouraged a culture of dialogue that has not yet existed in Cambodian society – and that means that the debate on the ground is more constructive than the debate in the court. People are finally defining and reflecting on the meaning of justice and the notion of reconciliation.”

For Sotheary and her mother, that reconciliation could not come soon enough.

‘Wannarexic’ girls yearn for eating disorders

21 Saturday Jan 2012

Posted by a1000shadesofhurt in Eating Disorders, Young People

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'Wannarexic', Eating Disorders

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2007-08-04-wannarexic_N.htm

The State Of Male Eating Disorders

21 Saturday Jan 2012

Posted by a1000shadesofhurt in Eating Disorders

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Male Eating Disorders

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/02/male-eating-disorders_n_915338.html

It took Matt Wetsel, 26, more than a month to work up the courage to try group therapy for anorexia, the eating disorder he says consumed two years of his life. A college student at the time, Matt said he would plan to attend a meeting, become overwhelmed and would shy away.

When Wetsel finally steeled himself enough to attend, a woman stopped him and asked if he needed help. Unable to explain himself, he handed her a flier promoting the group. The woman disappeared, returning a few minutes later with the news that he could not take part. The group, it seemed, was for women only.

“I have never felt so defeated,” Wetsel said in a speech on Capitol Hill last spring.

Eating disorders have long been believed to be a female issue. The National Institute of Health estimates that girls are two-and-a-half times more likely to have an eating disorder than boys, while groups like the nonprofit National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders state that women are “much more likely than men to develop an eating disorder.” Yet a growing body of evidence suggests that such numbers and statements may not truly reflect the large number of boys and men with eating disorders — be it anorexia, bulimia, binge eating or the broader category of “eating disorders not otherwise specified.”

Earlier this month, the BBC reported that hospital admissions for men with eating disorders increased by 66 percent in the last decade in the U.K. In the U.S., a recent study in the Archives of General Psychiatry found that binge eating and bulimia were indeed more prevalent among adolescent girls than boys, but that the prevalence of anorexia nervosa was exactly the same.

“The one million dollar question is what this means,” said Daniel Le Grange, Ph.D, director of the eating disorders program at The University of Chicago and an author of that study.

“We don’t know what happens to them, we don’t know if [the prevalence] has changed or increased,” he continued. “We don’t know if the fact that we tend see more girls in a clinical realm means that boys tend to recover more readily on their own; we don’t know why they don’t come in for treatment more. We don’t know.”

Sam Thomas, founder of the U.K.-based charity Men Get Eating Disorders Too, echoed the sentiment, saying that the recent findings raise questions about whether eating disorders are up in earnest or if more practitioners are simply recognizing the symptoms.

“We suspect that these new findings are only the tip of the iceberg, as we know that there is still a large majority of male sufferers who struggle to get the help they need, due to the stigma and stereotypical gender assumptions still made about eating disorders,” Thomas told The Huffington Post.

For his part, Wetsel — who has been in recovery for more than five years and has become an eating disorder activist, running the blog …Until Eating Disorders Are No More — has written that his recovery mandated he fit himself into a “culture mostly designed, tailored and intended for females.” Many of the books he read referenced women only, using the pronoun “she.”

Wetsel said he developed a thick skin about such gender issues, but imagines that other men struggle as well, particularly in light of the consternation he faced when telling people about his disorder.

“I want to say, ‘Well, what should a recovered anorexic look like? Should I be female? Should I be emaciated?'” he said. “If you saw me around town I’d probably be wearing a band shirt and some shorts cut off at the knee. You’d probably see a few tattoos. I guess no one’s expecting someone by that description to have a story about being anorexic.”

Which could be a reason why men are less likely to seek treatment: The people around them, including their practitioners, may not recognize the symptoms and encourage them to get help.

“It often doesn’t cross parents’ or doctors’ minds, because the public is so schooled to think that eating disorders are a female thing only,” said Le Grange of the University of Chicago. He estimates that generally, for every 10 cases they see in his program, one or two is a boy. Last week, however, he saw four cases alone.

What is needed next, according to Le Grange, are further studies looking at the prevalence and impact of eating disorders in boys and men to better understand any differences in treatment strategies, as well as to assess what happens to boys with eating disorders in the long term.

In the meantime, people like Wetsel — who was eventually welcomed into the group meetings at his university and said they were integral to his recovery — are speaking up.

“This is serious stuff. There isn’t any room for people to treat eating disorders as anything less than a life-threatening illness,” he said. “It’s bad enough and hard enough for women to get help and be taken seriously, and men have to deal with an additional layer of stigma that supposedly challenges the way people see their masculinity and sexuality.”

Extra Info: http://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/nedaDir/files/documents/handouts/MalesRes.pdf

Australia set to recognise Aborigines as first people of continent

20 Friday Jan 2012

Posted by a1000shadesofhurt in Indigenous Communities/Nomads

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Aborigines, Australia

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/20/australia-aborigines-race-discrimination-referendum

Australia is poised to make historic changes to its constitution, recognising Aborigines as the country’s original inhabitants and removing the last clauses of state-sanctioned racial discrimination.

The amendments could be put to the Australian people in a referendum before the next general election in 2013, after the prime minister, Julia Gillard, endorsed the unanimous findings of a panel of 19 experts.

Section 25 of the constitution recognises that states can disqualify people, such as Aborigines, from voting. Section 51 says federal parliament can make laws based upon a person’s race. Both were put in the constitution in 1901 to prevent certain races from living in areas reserved for white people or from taking up certain occupations.

The prime minister, Julia Gillard, welcomed the report. “We are big enough and it is the right time to say yes to an understanding of our past, to say yes to constitutional change, and to say yes to a future more united and more reconciled than we have ever been before,” she said.

The panel’s report followed public consultation with more than 4,500 people and more than 250 public meetings. The panel’s co-chair, Aboriginal elder Professor Patrick Dodson, urged bipartisan support for the proposals.

“This is a time when truth and respect for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples needs to be achieved through the recognition in our constitution,” he said. “Strong leadership and our national interest are critical for our nation to go forward.”

When Australia became a federation in 1901 there were only two references to Aborigines in the constitution: one denied federal parliament the power to make laws with respect to Aboriginal people in any state, while another excluded what it termed “Aboriginal natives” from the census. Both of those sections were scrapped in a 1967 referendum (by a majority of 90%), leaving a constitution that made no mention whatsoever of indigenous people.

Referendums in Australia have historically been hard to pass. Only eight out of 44 have succeeded since 1906, partly because any alteration to the constitution must be approved by a “double majority”. This demands that, as well as a majority yes vote being required nationally, a majority must also be reached in four of the six states.

The opposition leader, Tony Abbott, has said he will study the document. “We have some reservations about anything that might turn out to be a one-clause bill of rights but we accept that millions of Australians’ hopes and dreams are resting on constitutional recognition of indigenous people,” he said.

The report also called for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages to be recognised as the country’s first languages. It calls for continuing respect for these cultures, languages and heritage.

The government aims to hold the referendum at or before a general election, due in 2013.

It’s a girl: The three deadliest words in the world

16 Monday Jan 2012

Posted by a1000shadesofhurt in Uncategorized

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abortion, Children, culture, daughters, documentary, economy, education, family, femicide, film, foeticide, gender, girls, infanticide, mothers, parents, poverty, women

http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/01/16/it%E2%80%99s-a-girl-the-three-deadliest-words-in-the-world/

It’s a girl, a film being released this year, documents the practice of killing unwanted baby girls in South Asia. The trailer’s most chilling scene is one with an Indian woman who, unable to contain her laughter, confesses to having killed eight infant daughters.

The statistics are sickening. The UN reports approximately 200 million girls in the world today are ‘missing’. India and China are said to eliminate more female infants than the number of girls born in the US each year. Lianyungang in China has the worst infant gender ratio on record with 163 boys born for every 100 girls. Taiwan, South Korea and Pakistan are also countries in which unwanted female babies are aborted, killed or abandoned.

Gendercide in South Asia takes many forms: baby girls are killed or abandoned if not aborted as foetuses. Girls that are not killed often suffer malnutrition and medical neglect as sons are favoured when shelter, medicine and food are scarce. Trafficking, dowry deaths, honour killings and deaths resulting from domestic violence are all further evils perpetrated against women. This femicide has led the Geneva Centre for Democratic Control of Armed Forces to report in ‘Women in an Insecure World’ that a secret genocide is being carried out against women at a time when deaths resulting from armed conflicts have decreased.

The brutal irony of femicide is that it is an evil perpetrated against girls by women. The most insidious force is often the mother in law, the domestic matriarch, under whose authority the daughter in law lives. Policy efforts to halt infanticide have been directed at mothers, who are often victims themselves. The trailer shows tragic scenes of women having to decide between killing their daughters and their own well-being. In India women who fail to produce sons are beaten, raped or killed so that men can remarry in the hope of procuring a more productive wife.

It is an oft-made argument that parental discrimination between children would end if families across south Asia were rescued from poverty. But two factors particularly suggest that femicide is a cultural phenomenon and that development and economic policy are only a partial solution: Firstly, there is no evidence of concerted female infanticide among poverty-stricken societies in Africa or the Caribbean. Secondly, it is the affluent and urban middle classes, who are aware of prenatal screenings, who have access to clinics and who can afford abortions that commit foeticide. Activists fear 8 million female foetuses have been aborted in India in the last decade.

The Chinese cultural bias towards male children is one exacerbated by the birth control policy. India, however, poses a more complex problem where the primary cause is a cultural one.

Activists attribute a culture of valuing children by their economic potential to South Asia’s patriarchal social model in which men are the sole breadwinners. Sons both carry the family name and work from a young age. Daughters, on the other hand, impose the burden of a dowry before leaving the home upon marriage. Strict moral codes, onerous cultural expectations and demanding domestic responsibilities are all forces that further subjugate women.

Dr Saleem ur Rehman, director of health services for the Kashmiri Valley, has conceded that a healthy male to female infant ratio in Kashmir in 2001 led him and his team to become complacent. Since 2001, the ratio has dropped from 94.1 to 85.9 girls per 100 boys. The solution, however, lies beyond merely holding officials to account.

The cultural root of the problem partially explains why an effective solution has eluded authorities. Legal prohibitions have proved ineffective. In India, dowries were outlawed 1961 and in 1994 the Prenatal Determination Act outlawed gender selective abortions. Yet dowries remain a condition of marriage and action against unregistered or non-compliant clinics fail to intercept registered medical professionals performing illegal operations.

A crude supply and demand distinction can be drawn. Activists argue the demand for eliminating female fetuses is independent of the supply of illegal services. Only those that can afford to abort will do so. Others simply kill or abandon female infants after birth. This foeticide/infanticide equation will only skew towards the latter if the problem of illegal clinics and criminal doctors were solved.

In the New Statesmen, Laurie Penny explained that South Korea improved its infant gender ratio through a programme of education. But is increasing the awareness of contraception, abortion laws and women’s rights a panacea? No. Educational efforts insufficiently target the core cultural canker. Similarly, economic policed designed to encourage development are necessary but insufficient. Any improvement in living conditions is unlikely to offset the financial burden of raising a child and a dowry.

A solution therefore must be three-fold. Policy efforts combatting poverty must be supplemented by legal prohibitions. There must be an educational programme informing women of their rights. Finally and most importantly, there must be a social and religions campaign aimed at destroying ossified cultural attitudes.

The distinction between, on the one hand a programme of economics and education and on the other a cultural campaign is not qualitative but quantitative. The latter warrants a greater level of official engagement, allowing governments to actively discourage femicide rather than passively encouraging change.

A ‘secret genocide’ is a malaise in response to which government paternalism must surely be justified. In Kashmir, officials have enlisted the help of social and religious leaders. It is religious and social leaders that must reinforce legal prohibitions on dowries with campaigns attacking the social pressures of producing one. And they must supplement information of women’s rights by persuading mothers to educate their daughters and to allow their daughters to work. These cultural channels are best placed to begin to erode sexist cultural monoliths.

Facebook campaign for a bald barbie doll

12 Thursday Jan 2012

Posted by a1000shadesofhurt in Uncategorized

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Cancer

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/01/12/facebook-campaign-for-a-bald-barbie-doll_n_1201535.html

Inspired by a one-of-a-kind Barbie doll created for a four-year-old cancer sufferer, campaigners are calling for a ‘Beautiful and Bald Barbie’ to be produced on a commercial scale.

Campaign founders Jane Bingham and Beckie Sypin are hoping to put pressure on toy maker Mattel to create a range of bald Barbies to help raise awareness and acceptance of hair-loss.

A Facebook group, ‘Beautiful and Bald Barbie! Let’s see if we can get it made’ has caught the attention of cancer sufferers and supporters alike and has already gained over 37,000 ‘likes’.

“We would like to see a ‘Beautiful and Bald Barbie’ made to help young girls who suffer from hair loss due to cancer treatments, Alopecia or Trichotillomania – also, for young girls who are having trouble coping with their mother’s hair loss from chemo,” Bingham and Sypin state on their campaign page.

“Many children have some difficulty accepting their mother, sister, aunt, grandparent or friend going from a long haired to a bald.”

The social campaign is also lobbying for the doll to have a range of headscarves and hair-loss related accessories.

“Accessories such as scarves and hats could be included. This would be a great coping mechanism for young girls dealing with hair loss themselves or a loved one. We would love to see a portion of proceeds go to childhood cancer research and treatment. Let’s get Mattel’s attention.”

A petition for the doll has started on Change.org and has so far gained 1,302 signatures.

Bingham and Sypin spoke to The Huffington Post about the attention their campaign was receiving.

“We would just like to say we are very happy with all the media attention and positive feedback we have received and we hope it gets Mattel’s attention so this can become a reality.”

The campaign has support from the UK’s leading cancer charity, Cancer Research UK. Head information nurse Martin Ledwick told The Huffington Post: “Children and young people have so much to deal with when they are going through cancer treatment. So anything that helps them to feel more normal, or that can be used as a tool to help them express how they are feeling has to be a good thing.”

Mattel has not made a public statement about the campaign but a member of the UK press office said they were “aware of the campaign”.

Rwanda genocide report exonerates Paul Kagame

11 Wednesday Jan 2012

Posted by a1000shadesofhurt in War Crimes

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Genocide, Rwanda

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/11/rwanda-genocide-report-paul-kagame

A French investigation into the causes of the 1994 Rwandan genocide has exonerated the president, Paul Kagame, and his Tutsi allies after Paris had previously accused him of triggering the killings of 800,000 people in 100 days.

Diplomatic relations between Rwanda and France were broken off in 2006 when a French judge said that Kagame – the rebel leader at the time of the killings – had orchestrated the assassination of the Hutu president, Juvenal Habyarimana, to trigger the bloodshed.

After Habyarimana’s plane was shot down, Hutu extremists slaughtered Tutsis and moderate Hutus in some of the fastest mass killings ever perpetrated.

Kagame’s Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front seized power in the aftermath of the genocide.

Kagame has accused the former French president François Mitterrand’s administration of training and arming the Hutu militias responsible for the slaughter.

A team of French investigators, led by two judges, re-examined a dozen eyewitness testimonies to work out where the two missiles that brought down Habyarimana’s Dassault Falcon 50 plane were fired from in an effort to determine final responsibility. Both sides had bases near the airport.

On Tuesday, the judges presented their report to Kagame’s lawyers, who told the media they had concluded that the shots could not have come from a military base occupied by Kagame’s supporters. The findings did not specifically point the finger at the Hutus.

“Today’s findings constitute vindication for Rwanda’s long-held position on the circumstances surrounding events of April 1994”, the Rwandan foreign minister, Louise Mushikiwabo, said in a statement.

“With this scientific truth, [the judges] have slammed shut the door on the 17-year campaign to deny the genocide or blame its victims.

“It is now clear to all that the downing of the plane was a coup d’état carried by extremist Hutu elements and their advisers who controlled Kanombe barracks.”

However, Jean-Yves Dupeux, a lawyer for Habyarimana’s children, said the findings did not support the Rwandan government’s account.

“The findings cannot point the finger at the Hutu camp,” he added. “What the experts are saying is that the shots could not have been fired from Paul Kagame’s camp. That doesn’t mean it is the other side.”

An investigation by the Rwandan government in January 2010 blamed extremists within Habyarimana’s inner circle for bringing down the plane, saying the murder was designed to scuttle a planned power-sharing deal and act as a pretext for the genocide.

According to the Rwandan inquiry set up by Kagame – known as the Mutsinzi report – Rwanda armed forces stationed in the Kanombe barracks near the airport fired the surface-to-air rockets, the culmination of months of planning.

A 2006 report by the French judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere said Kagame was responsible, arranging for the plane to be shot down to trigger reprisal killings between ethnic Tutsi and Hutu and give his RPF rebels and allies grounds to take power by force.

Paris began to normalise its relations with Rwanda after Nicolas Sarkozy came to power in 2007. On a trip to Kigali in February 2010, the French president said Paris had made serious errors of judgment over the massacre and wanted to ensure that all those responsible for the slaughter were caught and punished.

On Kagame’s first state visit to France since the genocide in September, the Rwandan president emphasised that his trip was aimed at building economic and commercial ties, appearing to accept that an apology from Paris was no longer a prerequisite for restoring diplomatic ties.

Sexism and the state of Israel

10 Tuesday Jan 2012

Posted by a1000shadesofhurt in Uncategorized

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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/sexism-and-the-state-of-israel-6287448.html

As dusk falls in Mea Shearim, Jerusalem’s most pious neighbourhood, black-clad and hatted Jewish men hurry home along the narrow streets lined by medieval-style houses where lights burn dimly in darkened windows.

Less than half a mile away, young Israelis mix in bustling bars in central Jerusalem, anathema to this religious ultraorthodox community that has tried its hardest to hide itself away from the temptations of secular life, and ensure a rigorous separation between men and women.

Ironically, though, it is the ultraorthodox community’s efforts to impose its religious values on ordinary Israelis, particularly women, that many fear is undermining Israel’s democracy, and which now poses the greatest threat to this community’s survival.

When Tanya Rosenblit, a 28-year-old woman from Ashdod, boarded a Jerusalem-bound bus late last year, she caused a stir by refusing to heed the demands of a religious male passenger to move to the back of the bus. Many of the ultraorthodox – known as Haredim – believe that modesty forbids women to sit at the front of the bus with the men, and it is common to see segregated buses with women seated to the rear, often crowded in while seats remain free at the front.

Ms Rosenblit became a minor celebrity in Israel, but her stance was not without consequences, earning her death threats for daring to challenge the religious community.

“The Haredim has always received special treatment in this country and people thought it was okay,” she says. “But something has changed… in the sense that they feel they are going to control this country. That’s disturbing.”

The issue of creeping religious coercion over all aspects of Israelis’ lives has taken on huge importance in recent years as the ultraorthodox spread beyond their traditional communities in Jerusalem and outer Tel Aviv in search of cheap housing. But the situation recently reached a head in Beit Shemesh, a town near Jerusalem, when an ultraorthodox man spat at and verbally abused an eight-year-old girl, Naama Margolese, for what he considered was immodest attire.

Not for the first time, Israel’s Haredim find themselves under attack. Making up about 10 per cent of the population, this impoverished and fast-growing community has long been viewed as an economic drain on society, but now some fear that their influence is extending far beyond their ghetto-like communities.

In a potent display of their sense of persecution, an extreme Haredi sect living in Mea Shearim recently plastered yellow stars on their children in protest, a symbol of Jewish persecution from the Holocaust that resonates deeply with Israelis, and inspired widespread disgust.

Young men in Mea Shearim insist that those who inspire such hatred are an extremist minority who do not represent the Haredim as a whole. “I think modesty on the buses is okay,” says one, who works in a religious bookstore, “but to force that is not the way to behave.”

But his view on tolerance is not one readily accepted in this insular neighbourhood. Moments before, a Haredi man with sidelocks spat on the ground next to this reporter, who was modestly dressed, and muttered “pritze”, a Yiddish word meaning prostitute.

Meanwhile, the women within these communities are afraid to speak out, says Hannah Kehat, founder of Kolech, an ultraorthodox women’s group. “It’s social control. If they [the women] go against somebody, the [extremists] exclude them, tell people they are not religious enough, attack them, say bad things about their families,” says Ms Kehat, who grew up in Mea Shearim. “It’s terror,” she adds.

While segregation on buses has come to epitomise discrimination against women, it is only a small part of the story. In a conscript army where the Haredim now play an important, if small, role, women have watched with dismay as the religious soldiers boycotted events where female soldiers were to sing, insisting it was sinful.

Deputy Health Minister Yaakov Litzman, an ultraorthodox Jew, recently walked out of a hospital dedication ceremony where female vocalists were scheduled to perform, and women were barred this month from speaking or taking part in panel discussions at a fertility convention organised by a religious medical group.

Even secular companies have acquiesced to pressure to banish images of women from their advertising on Jerusalem’s billboards, fearful of a Haredi backlash against their products.

In religious elementary schools, an outspoken group of parents is fighting efforts by the ultraorthodox to limit the teaching of secular subjects, and force boys and girls as young as five to learn in separate classrooms. In the past decade, says Shmuel Shattach, executive director of liberal Orthodox group Ne’emanei Torah Ve’avoda, gender separation in state-run religious schools has gone from being the minority to the majority. He recalls how the principal of his daughter’s school asked fathers to leave a performance put on by eight and nine-year-old girls, and says that the modesty rules become stricter every year, with young girls told to wear skirts that fall below the knees and don ever longer sleeves.

“I believe in modesty… and not dressing provocatively, but to ask a child of five [to do this] is ridiculous,” he says. It is also critically important, he believes, to allow children to mix at that young age if his son is not to see girls “as a kind of demon”, and argues that religious men who refuse to sit behind a woman on a bus are driven by ignorance and fear.

To a large extent, Israel’s Education Ministry is complicit in the segregation of boys and girls, preferring to bow to ultraorthodox demands than see the children moved into the private Haredim education system, where the curriculum excludes core subjects such as mathematics and English language in favour of Torah study.

Such limited education ill-equips Haredi Jews to join the workforce, meaning that most devote their lives to state-funded religious study while women, who routinely bear up to a dozen children, can ill afford the time to hold down jobs. Ultimately, it is those who work who fund the ultraorthodox way of life, breeding resentment.

“When I look at who carries the burden, I feel like a sucker,” says Alon Vissier, 22, who helped organise recent protests against segregated buses. “The problem begins with the government … the [politicians] make compromises at our expense.”

Although Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted that “women will sit in every place”, ultraorthodox politicians, represented by two right-leaning political parties, have played the role of kingmakers within successive Israeli coalitions, and politicians tread carefully so as not to alienate the religious community.

But now the battle lines have been drawn, led by an empowered Israeli mainstream that took to the streets across the country last summer to call for social reform. These same Israelis are the ones calling for the restoration of democratic values, and the curbing of the ultraorthodox community’s disproportionate influence.

Whether they will succeed remains to be seen. Rachel Liel, director of the New Israel Fund, holds out little hope in the near term, arguing that the broadside on women has been made possible by an increasingly reactionary climate in Israel. Politicians have proposed a slew of anti-democratic legislation, including efforts to muzzle the media, control the judiciary and halt funding to NGOs critical of the state.

“We see Arabs struggling for democracy [in the Arab Spring] while Israel is going backwards,” she says. “We are stepping back from a vibrant democracy into something which is bad.”

New ultraorthodoxy: protests turn nasty

* Last year, Haredim attempted to block a central Jerusalem road every Saturday in a bid to extend the no-go zone for cars on Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest. They threw rocks at drivers, prompting criticism of the police for failing to rein them in.

* In 2009, the ultraorthodox staged weekly protests against plans to open a parking lot on Saturdays, which they feared would bring an influx of tourists. Their weapon of choice against police was soiled nappies, plentiful in their large families. The municipality suspended rubbish collection in response.

* As Israelis gather annually to celebrate Independence Day in celebration of Israel’s founding, the ultraorthodox Neturei Karta sect burn the Israeli flag in protest. This anti-Zionist group believes that the Jews can only have their own state following the coming of the Messiah.

What women see in the mirror is self-hatred

09 Monday Jan 2012

Posted by a1000shadesofhurt in Body Image

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Body Image, Self-esteem

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/mary-ann-sieghart/mary-ann-sieghart-what-women-see-in-the-mirror-is-selfhatred-6287053.html

A cute little naked baby is grinning at the camera. “Is this the happiest she’ll ever be about her appearance?” asks the slogan on the billboard. The ad was for a campaign last year to save future generations of women and girls from hating their bodies. For the explosion in cosmetic surgery – and explosion of breast implants inside women’s bodies – is just a symptom of a corrosive unhappiness that begins only a few years after birth.

Three British psychologists have studied the effect of Barbie dolls on five- to eight-year-old girls. Yet if Barbie were a real woman, her waist would be 39 per cent smaller than the average anorexic patient, and she would be far too thin to menstruate. Despite this skeletal state, she miraculously has big breasts. It is a body shape so unattainable that the chances of a woman naturally having her proportions are less than one in 100,000. And guess what? The girls in the study who played with Barbie became more dissatisfied with their own bodies and were more likely to say they wanted to be thinner than the girls who were given a normal-shaped doll to play with.

Is it surprising, then, that the average age at which girls start dieting is now eight? Or that the Barbie effect does not wear off? According to an American study, adult women who look at thin models in advertisements take just one to three minutes to feel worse about their bodies than they did at the start. A control group who were shown only the products without the models experienced no change in mood.

Women feel depressed because the ideal shape to which they are constantly exposed is almost as remote from reality as Barbie’s. For a start, even the models – who are chosen for their preternatural proportions and beauty – don’t look in real life as they appear in the ads. Their skin has been made flawless by airbrushing, their legs lengthened, waists narrowed and curves enhanced by digital manipulation.

Then, of course, there is the surgical work. Models have got thinner and thinner over the past few decades and, as all women know, if you lose weight your breasts get smaller too. It’s almost impossible to be stick-thin and have big boobs – unless you go under the knife.

So the “ideal” shape for a woman has become physically unattainable, however little she eats or however much she exercises. She can hope to achieve it only by having silicone in the shape of chicken fillets inserted surgically, and potentially dangerously, into her breasts.

This freakish ideal is everywhere we look. I took my 11-year-old niece to Topshop last week and, just as I was expounding to her the merits of curves, we caught sight of a mannequin with hideously skinny and impossibly long legs. Fashion mannequins are now six inches taller than the average British woman – in heels, they measure over six feet. Yet they are usually only a size 8 to 10. In other words, the models that gaze out of every shop window are unrealistically tall and thin. No wonder they make girls and women feel short and fat.

An international survey sponsored by Dove a few years ago found that British women were the third-most dissatisfied with their bodies, after those in Japan and Brazil. Some 68 per cent of women agreed that “the media and advertising set an unrealistic standard of beauty that most women can’t ever achieve”. At least three-quarters wished female beauty was portrayed in the media as consisting of more than just physical attractiveness and that the media did a better job of portraying women of diverse ages, shapes and sizes.

It can be done. Dove itself ran a campaign with normal-sized and older women, and the sales of its products soared. Advertisers and magazine editors are always claiming that their buyers and readers prefer this unnatural ideal shape. They usually call it “aspirational” as if it were even possible to aspire to. Yet not just Dove, but also two psychologists – Phillippa Diedrichs and Christina Lee – have now proved them wrong.

Diedrichs and Lee created a series of ads for underwear, a haircare product and a party dress. Each ad was made twice – once with a size-8 model and once with a size-12. The women who were shown the ad with the larger model not only found it as effective but felt better about their own bodies afterwards. An experiment with men had similar results.

For it’s not just women who suffer. Only last week, a survey showed that men too feel insecure about their bodies. But at least the remedy for them – going to the gym – is less unhealthy than starvation or surgery, which many women endure.

So what can be done to stem the self-hatred that leads so many women to have their bodies mutilated? For a start, we must resist the trend towards cosmetic surgery being normalised. It’s shocking that we allow television programmes showing ordinary people going under the knife in an attempt to look younger. How can we then be surprised that 40 per cent of teenage girls say they have considered plastic surgery? Cosmetic surgery is now the third-most popular reason for taking out a loan, after home improvements and buying a car.

With any luck, the implant scandal will make people think twice before undergoing such drastic procedures. And the sector certainly needs stricter regulation. But we in the media should examine ourselves too. Why does the BBC sack older female presenters in favour of thin, young ones with big tits? Why are the female judges in talent shows always younger, more pneumatic and more glamorously dressed than the men? What message does that send to viewers – that men are chosen for their authority and women for their “phwoar” factor?

When Tessa Jowell was a minister, she was ridiculed for suggesting to magazine editors that they use less grotesquely thin models. Now there is an All Party Parliamentary Group on Body Image, which will be taking evidence from the cosmetic surgery industry next Monday. Things are at last starting to move. We need a far more diverse range of role models, from gorgeously voluptuous to tomboy-thin, from young and fresh to old and distinguished. People come in all shapes, sizes and colours, and so does beauty. This obsession with one narrow ideal is doing not just our heads in but our bodies too. It is time to drop the artifice – the airbrushing, the manipulation, the surgery – and get real.

m.sieghart@independent.co.uk / twitter.com/MASieghart

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