Peace and Gender is a podcast where we meet the people who dedicate their lives to help others, through action and research, in the field of gender, peace and security. 


Dr Sara Niner is an expert in the field of gender and development and has spent her life working on issues in the post-conflict environment of Timor-Leste, and has provided specialist in-country advice on gender issues, for international agencies. 


Dr Sara Niner will tell us about how she became interested in Timor-Leste as she travelled through the country as a backpacker, she tells us about the tragic massacre that took place without her even knowing, and about her work, trying to help the women who were rendered invisible during the conflict. 


Edited and Produced by Andrea Thiis-Evensen
Pictures: Sara NinerGraphic Design: Shayla Rance

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Peace and Gender is a podcast where we meet the people who dedicate their lives to help others, through action and research, in the field of gender, peace and security.&nbsp; Dr Sara Niner is an expert in the field of gender and development and has spent her life working on issues in the post-conflict environment of Timor-Leste, and has provided specialist in-country advice on gender issues, for international agencies.&nbsp; Dr Sara Niner will tell us about how she became interested in Timor-Leste as she travelled through the country as a backpacker, she tells us about the tragic massacre that took place without her even knowing, and about her work, trying to help the women who were rendered invisible during the conflict.&nbsp; Edited and Produced by Andrea Thiis-Evensen Pictures: Sara NinerGraphic Design: Shayla RanceSee <a href="https://omnystudio.com/listener">omnystudio.com/listener</a> for privacy information.

Peace and Gender - The invisible women of Timor-Leste

The podcast Peace and Gender is back for another semester. In this week's episode we are joined by Historian of gender, sexuality and empire, Jessica Hinchy, who will be talking about her book Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, C. 1850-1900. Jessica takes us on a journey in discovering the stories behind these eunuch and transgender people who played a significant role in their communities and we look at how they went from surviving complete eradication to speaking into the global transgender debates today. 

Produced and researched by: Andrea Thiis-Evensen and David Bonaddio 

Edited by: David Bonaddio

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The podcast&nbsp;Peace and Gender&nbsp;is back for another semester. In this week's episode we are joined by&nbsp;Historian of gender, sexuality and empire, Jessica Hinchy, who will be talking about her book&nbsp;Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, C. 1850-1900. Jessica takes us on a journey in discovering the stories behind these eunuch and transgender people who played a significant role in their communities and we look at how they&nbsp;went from&nbsp;surviving&nbsp;complete eradication to speaking into the global transgender debates today.&nbsp; Produced and researched by: Andrea Thiis-Evensen and David Bonaddio&nbsp; Edited by: David BonaddioSee <a href="https://omnystudio.com/listener">omnystudio.com/listener</a> for privacy information.

Peace and Gender - Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra

The Peace and Gender podcast is back, kicking off the new season with Miki Jacevic. Miki is a veteran peacebuilder and activist for women's inclusion in peace and security, who has worked with governments all around the world.  In this weeks episode, Miki tells us about why women should be included in the peace process in post-war countries and conflict areas, through some first-hand experiences he has had with women changing the course of their countries.  Produced by: Andrea Thiis-EvensenEdited by: David BonaddioResearch by: Hien Trang Lee

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

<div>The Peace and Gender podcast is back, kicking off the new season with Miki Jacevic. Miki is a veteran peacebuilder and activist for women's inclusion in peace and security, who has worked with governments all around the world.&nbsp;</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>In this weeks episode, Miki tells us about why women should be included in the peace process in post-war countries and conflict areas, through some first-hand experiences he has had with women changing the course of their countries.&nbsp;</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Produced by: Andrea Thiis-Evensen</div> <div>Edited by: David Bonaddio</div> <div>Research by: Hien Trang Lee</div>See <a href="https://omnystudio.com/listener">omnystudio.com/listener</a> for privacy information.

Inclusive peace-building and the women who fought back

In this episode of Peace and Gender, Andrea Thiis-Evensen meets up with PhD student Sarah Hewitt, who is working on a project looking at what actually happens to women, after peace provisions are put in place, in post-conflict areas. How do women experience the gender provisions, and do they actually work? 

TRANSCRIPT

[Opening theme]

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Hey. My name is Andrea Thiis-Evensen and welcome back to Peace and Gender. In this podcast, I'm trying to look at different gendered inequalities, meeting the people who are actually seeking solutions and making change, and getting to know both their research and their personal story.

Sarah Hewitt: We've got women's participation in peace processes. We've got these gender provisions being really important to be included in peace agreements. What happens afterwards? What actually happens to women's participation? How are these provisions being implemented?

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: That is Sarah Hewitt. Sarah is a PhD student at Monash University. She focuses on how women's participation in peace processes influences the incorporation of gender provisions in peace agreements.

Sarah Hewitt: You know, if women in the peace process did participate, what happens to their participation after an agreement has been signed? What happens to the networking or the civil society organisations that are included or that are mobilised, informally, around these peace processes?

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: What does really happen after gender provisions are implemented?

Sarah Hewitt: It's important to say, okay, there's been all this attention on why women need to be present and why women need to participate in these forums that are creating these documents. It's also important to say, okay, these documents have been created but what happens to them? How are women interacting with them? How are they deploying these rights? How are they using them? How are they utilising to advance women's rights, to advance their own participation, to advance their own bodily autonomy?

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Sarah is part of a long-term project, which is mapping gender provisions of peace agreements. Sarah is in charge of two countries: Kenya and Nepal. There is a reason why she made this choice.

Sarah Hewitt: The reasons I look at these two countries was because they had a peace process after 2000. They both had peace processes that resulted in really gender-sensitive constitutions. They had these agreements and then they had this constitutional process. Gender provisions, within these constitutions, it brought about increases in women's parliamentary representation, for instance. It kind of made it constitutional that women have equal access to inheritance and equal access to property, which is so important for their economic autonomy, right? For them to be able to decide over their livelihoods. For Nepal, it's the first country in Asia and the Pacific to have a constitutional gender provision protecting sexual minorities.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Before learning more about her project, I wanted to know more about why Sarah started getting involved with international relations and why she's so interested in peace and women's experiences of peace.

Sarah Hewitt: I was born in South Africa and my mum was a journalist in South Africa during the Apartheid era. When she had my older brother, she had to quit her job, because my dad was training to be a surgeon. She had to be - go into that caring role of motherhood. She never got back into journalism, because we moved around a lot for my father's job and we ended up in Tasmania. I think, because of my mum, right? She had been there during that time, where she saw racial and sexual marginalisation at a huge and horrific scale. She would talk about it and they'd have great dinner parties where they'd discuss politics and things like race and gender. From an early age, I was exposed to those kind of social justice ideas, which led me to leave Tasmania and go to university and do a bachelor of arts, majoring in International Relations and Political Science.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: It was kind of because of your mum.

Sarah Hewitt: It was kind of because of my mum. Yeah, for sure.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: The project that Sarah is a part of, which is called Towards Inclusive Peace: Mapping Gender Provisions of Peace Agreements, is looking at 20 countries.

Although gender provisions are put in place in post-conflict areas, what actually happens to the women after this? The project Sarah is a part of focuses on hearing the stories of these women, hearing their voices - how they experience the gender provisions.

Sarah Hewitt: There's not much documentation of people's stories - how they organise, how a woman's rights activist got to where she is, right? Someone who works in women's civil society - what is their story? It's an extreme privilege to be able to listen to that and to be able to ask questions about that and try and create research that is beneficial to them at the same time.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Through working on this project and through her field work, Sarah has heard numerous stories from women about their experiences.

Sarah Hewitt: We were in quite this small space and we were looking out at this Acacia tree. It was a very African setting, right? It was really hot and sweaty and we were on these uncomfortable chairs after just driving for two and a half hours and eight hours the day before. We're sitting there with these women and so early and child marriage comes up. When I asked these women, well, how do we - what do you see as a strategy for keeping your young girls - your young daughters - out of early and child marriage? They were like, education, but there's really no option. We don't have an option. There is no strategy for us. I got really, really emotional, because you could see these invisible prison bars that were surrounding these women. They had no way of getting out, bar through education.

It's those kind of stories, I think, that really highlight the lived experiences of women in some spaces where they can't often get out of their predicaments. I don't really get much emotional in interviews or focus groups, because it's not my space, but all these lovely, lovely women were like, oh, are you okay? I had tears in my eyes. I was like, yeah, I'm sorry for crying. I just - I mean, there's no strategy. There's no problem solving here to get these women out of the situation of seeing their daughters being married off, at the age - probably to a man, an older man, who may have one or two wives already - getting married off at 13 or 14 or even 12. It's just tough. You hear those kinds of stories all the time.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: However, Sarah says that it's not all doom and gloom.

Sarah Hewitt:  These women are incredible. What was really interesting in Kenya, for instance, was how these constitutional gender provisions, they provided a stepping stone for women to say, no, I have a right to space. I have a right to speak my mind. I have a right to be here and claim these rights. They're not passive in this. These gender provisions have provided a space for them to kind of claim stakes in the fight that's being enacted onto their bodies.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: After conflict occurs, gender relations within households change.

Sarah Hewitt: During conflict, for instance, there's a lot of feminist literature that discusses how changing gender relations during conflict, where women's seclusion within a household is no longer affordable. A lot of men go off to war, or go off to fight, or get killed. Women have to come out of the household. What this has shown is that these changing gender relations - women have come out in the public sphere, but are they going to go back into the private sphere once so-called peace comes? How can we utilise these changing gender relations at this critical opportunity or this critical moment of peace-making or peace processes, to kind of solidify this transformation of gender relations, where women are in the public? They're not relegated back to the private sphere. How can we use that to make sure that women's rights are in these provisions, so they do have a basis for women to claim their rights? A lot of the times, this doesn't happen.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Both the term post-conflict or just conflict in general, and the word peace has different gendered meanings.

Sarah Hewitt:  Conflicts aren't just these big things with guns. It's also within a household, negotiation between men and women, husbands and wives, between daughters and fathers, fathers and sons. All of these gender dynamics - how are they being affected? Let's define peace, right? That's really problematic. That's something that I've kind of been struggling with my research, because we're looking at the post-conflict. I mean, the research has shown us that post-conflict for women is not post-conflict. Often, there is a rise of violence against women in post-conflict times. You have peacekeeping economies that emerge, where you have these peacekeeping forces that come into these communities and there's a rise of the sex trade, for instance. Post-conflict, ooh. It's also something that needs to be interrogated, in regards to these documents. So much of the time, it's not post-conflict for women.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Peace is very different for men and women.

Sarah Hewitt: Even outside of feminist circles or even critical theorists, there is no discussion of how peace that is created currently is created by men who have been extremely privileged due to patriarchal privilege, right? Where peace and militarism and patriarchy and militarism is so tied in with each other, that how can you expect a peace that actually affords women peace, right? The peace that only looks at peace within the public sphere, how can that benefit women? It can't, because their priorities are not heard. Their needs are not considered. Their wants and their safety is only scarcely looked at.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: The project has contributed to how Sarah has structured her PhD, with some of her theses looking at violence against women in politics.

Sarah Hewitt: What came out of my Kenya research was just the amount of harassment and intimidation that women experience. Because there are these gender provisions that say women have to participate in such-and-such ways, women have to do it, right? There's no structures within those provisions that provides safety for women in carrying these provisions out. There was one instance that I heard about, in Kenya, where a woman who was vying for a governor position - there'd never been a female governor before - a women who was vying for the governor position, her opponent organised a bunch of women to throw pig's blood on her. The reason for this was so her opponent could say, she can't even take care of her own period. How do you expect her to take care of a county?

It's drawing these connections between women's sexuality, women's morality, and attitudes towards leadership that is indicative - and these manifestations of violence and harassment. They're so indicative of why the patriarchal underpinnings of how Kenyan society, anyway, functions. There was this other woman in this regional town that I met and she was telling me her story. She was young and to be young in Kenya - age is seen as something that is to be respected. This woman, she was going for a local constituency for the local government. She had a relatively successful business and she decided that, no, there's this new constitution in place. I'm going to go vie for - to be a politician. Her constituency really liked her and she invested all of her money and all of her business. Her husband ended up leaving her because he didn't want a publicly active life. She won, which is fantastic, right?

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: This woman was in the party nomination phase, which you need to win to get into the official election. She had to travel to Nairobi, to get her nomination slip.

Sarah Hewitt: She got to Nairobi and when she went to go get her nomination slip, they'd given it to her male opponent. It was an actual theft of her candidacy, because she was a woman. She was a young woman. It was just like, she has no recourse to justice. There's no way for her to go and for her to say, look, this guy stole my candidacy. He's now in parliament - well, the local parliament. It's just, I think, so indicative of just the wider problems of intimidation that women face when they are in public spaces and when they're strong women.

There's such a move towards getting meek women into these spaces. There's this fascinating phenomena that has occurred in Kenya, where at local-level governments, nominated women - so they're not elected. They're nominated to fill a gender quota. They get way less resources, way less influence, way less decision-making power. They don't get any staff, I don't think, depending on county to county but they get hardly any staff to support them. They're just called flower girls. They'll be called into a meeting. Decisions will already be made, but they'll have to have a tick box to say a woman was included in this meeting. The decision was made. Come in and, yep. This is all good.

This has all satisfied the gender requirements that are imposed upon us. On one level, there's such a lack of implementation of a lot of these provisions and a lot of these agreements and stuff. Just as there are laws, so policies and legislation that is passed, which is really great because it sets up the legal framework but the reality is very, very different.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: That was Sarah Hewitt. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Peace and Gender. My name is Andrea Thiis-Evensen and this podcast was produced for Monash Gender, Peace, and Security and Mojo News.

Music: "Solitude" by Broke for free –  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License

Artwork: Shayla Rance

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode of Peace and Gender, Andrea Thiis-Evensen meets up with PhD student <a href="http://www.monashgps.org/sarah-hewitt">Sarah Hewitt</a>, who is working on a project looking at what actually happens to women, after peace provisions are put in place, in post-conflict areas. How do women experience the gender provisions, and do they actually work?&nbsp; TRANSCRIPT [Opening theme] Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Hey. My name is Andrea Thiis-Evensen and welcome back to Peace and Gender. In this podcast, I'm trying to look at different gendered inequalities, meeting the people who are actually seeking solutions and making change, and getting to know both their research and their personal story. Sarah Hewitt: We've got women's participation in peace processes. We've got these gender provisions being really important to be included in peace agreements. What happens afterwards? What actually happens to women's participation? How are these provisions being implemented? Andrea Thiis-Evensen: That is Sarah Hewitt. Sarah is a PhD student at Monash University. She focuses on how women's participation in peace processes influences the incorporation of gender provisions in peace agreements. Sarah Hewitt: You know, if women in the peace process did participate, what happens to their participation after an agreement has been signed? What happens to the networking or the civil society organisations that are included or that are mobilised, informally, around these peace processes? Andrea Thiis-Evensen: What does really happen after gender provisions are implemented? Sarah Hewitt: It's important to say, okay, there's been all this attention on why women need to be present and why women need to participate in these forums that are creating these documents. It's also important to say, okay, these documents have been created but what happens to them? How are women interacting with them? How are they deploying these rights? How are they using them? How are they utilising to advance women's rights, to advance their own participation, to advance their own bodily autonomy? Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Sarah is part of a long-term project, which is mapping gender provisions of peace agreements. Sarah is in charge of two countries: Kenya and Nepal. There is a reason why she made this choice. Sarah Hewitt: The reasons I look at these two countries was because they had a peace process after 2000. They both had peace processes that resulted in really gender-sensitive constitutions. They had these agreements and then they had this constitutional process. Gender provisions, within these constitutions, it brought about increases in women's parliamentary representation, for instance. It kind of made it constitutional that women have equal access to inheritance and equal access to property, which is so important for their economic autonomy, right? For them to be able to decide over their livelihoods. For Nepal, it's the first country in Asia and the Pacific to have a constitutional gender provision protecting sexual minorities. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Before learning more about her project, I wanted to know more about why Sarah started getting involved with international relations and why she's so interested in peace and women's experiences of peace. Sarah Hewitt: I was born in South Africa and my mum was a journalist in South Africa during the Apartheid era. When she had my older brother, she had to quit her job, because my dad was training to be a surgeon. She had to be - go into that caring role of motherhood. She never got back into journalism, because we moved around a lot for my father's job and we ended up in Tasmania. I think, because of my mum, right? She had been there during that time, where she saw racial and sexual marginalisation at a huge and horrific scale. She would talk about it and they'd have great dinner parties where they'd discuss politics and things like race and gender. From an early age, I was exposed to those kind of social justice ideas, which led me to leave Tasmania and go to university and do a bachelor of arts, majoring in International Relations and Political Science. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: It was kind of because of your mum. Sarah Hewitt: It was kind of because of my mum. Yeah, for sure. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: The project that Sarah is a part of, which is called Towards Inclusive Peace: Mapping Gender Provisions of Peace Agreements, is looking at 20 countries. Although gender provisions are put in place in post-conflict areas, what actually happens to the women after this? The project Sarah is a part of focuses on hearing the stories of these women, hearing their voices - how they experience the gender provisions. Sarah Hewitt: There's not much documentation of people's stories - how they organise, how a woman's rights activist got to where she is, right? Someone who works in women's civil society - what is their story? It's an extreme privilege to be able to listen to that and to be able to ask questions about that and try and create research that is beneficial to them at the same time. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Through working on this project and through her field work, Sarah has heard numerous stories from women about their experiences. Sarah Hewitt: We were in quite this small space and we were looking out at this Acacia tree. It was a very African setting, right? It was really hot and sweaty and we were on these uncomfortable chairs after just driving for two and a half hours and eight hours the day before. We're sitting there with these women and so early and child marriage comes up. When I asked these women, well, how do we - what do you see as a strategy for keeping your young girls - your young daughters - out of early and child marriage? They were like, education, but there's really no option. We don't have an option. There is no strategy for us. I got really, really emotional, because you could see these invisible prison bars that were surrounding these women. They had no way of getting out, bar through education. It's those kind of stories, I think, that really highlight the lived experiences of women in some spaces where they can't often get out of their predicaments. I don't really get much emotional in interviews or focus groups, because it's not my space, but all these lovely, lovely women were like, oh, are you okay? I had tears in my eyes. I was like, yeah, I'm sorry for crying. I just - I mean, there's no strategy. There's no problem solving here to get these women out of the situation of seeing their daughters being married off, at the age - probably to a man, an older man, who may have one or two wives already - getting married off at 13 or 14 or even 12. It's just tough. You hear those kinds of stories all the time. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: However, Sarah says that it's not all doom and gloom. Sarah Hewitt: &nbsp;These women are incredible. What was really interesting in Kenya, for instance, was how these constitutional gender provisions, they provided a stepping stone for women to say, no, I have a right to space. I have a right to speak my mind. I have a right to be here and claim these rights. They're not passive in this. These gender provisions have provided a space for them to kind of claim stakes in the fight that's being enacted onto their bodies. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: After conflict occurs, gender relations within households change. Sarah Hewitt: During conflict, for instance, there's a lot of feminist literature that discusses how changing gender relations during conflict, where women's seclusion within a household is no longer affordable. A lot of men go off to war, or go off to fight, or get killed. Women have to come out of the household. What this has shown is that these changing gender relations - women have come out in the public sphere, but are they going to go back into the private sphere once so-called peace comes? How can we utilise these changing gender relations at this critical opportunity or this critical moment of peace-making or peace processes, to kind of solidify this transformation of gender relations, where women are in the public? They're not relegated back to the private sphere. How can we use that to make sure that women's rights are in these provisions, so they do have a basis for women to claim their rights? A lot of the times, this doesn't happen. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Both the term post-conflict or just conflict in general, and the word peace has different gendered meanings. Sarah Hewitt: &nbsp;Conflicts aren't just these big things with guns. It's also within a household, negotiation between men and women, husbands and wives, between daughters and fathers, fathers and sons. All of these gender dynamics - how are they being affected? Let's define peace, right? That's really problematic. That's something that I've kind of been struggling with my research, because we're looking at the post-conflict. I mean, the research has shown us that post-conflict for women is not post-conflict. Often, there is a rise of violence against women in post-conflict times. You have peacekeeping economies that emerge, where you have these peacekeeping forces that come into these communities and there's a rise of the sex trade, for instance. Post-conflict, ooh. It's also something that needs to be interrogated, in regards to these documents. So much of the time, it's not post-conflict for women. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Peace is very different for men and women. Sarah Hewitt: Even outside of feminist circles or even critical theorists, there is no discussion of how peace that is created currently is created by men who have been extremely privileged due to patriarchal privilege, right? Where peace and militarism and patriarchy and militarism is so tied in with each other, that how can you expect a peace that actually affords women peace, right? The peace that only looks at peace within the public sphere, how can that benefit women? It can't, because their priorities are not heard. Their needs are not considered. Their wants and their safety is only scarcely looked at. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: The project has contributed to how Sarah has structured her PhD, with some of her theses looking at violence against women in politics. Sarah Hewitt: What came out of my Kenya research was just the amount of harassment and intimidation that women experience. Because there are these gender provisions that say women have to participate in such-and-such ways, women have to do it, right? There's no structures within those provisions that provides safety for women in carrying these provisions out. There was one instance that I heard about, in Kenya, where a woman who was vying for a governor position - there'd never been a female governor before - a women who was vying for the governor position, her opponent organised a bunch of women to throw pig's blood on her. The reason for this was so her opponent could say, she can't even take care of her own period. How do you expect her to take care of a county? It's drawing these connections between women's sexuality, women's morality, and attitudes towards leadership that is indicative - and these manifestations of violence and harassment. They're so indicative of why the patriarchal underpinnings of how Kenyan society, anyway, functions. There was this other woman in this regional town that I met and she was telling me her story. She was young and to be young in Kenya - age is seen as something that is to be respected. This woman, she was going for a local constituency for the local government. She had a relatively successful business and she decided that, no, there's this new constitution in place. I'm going to go vie for - to be a politician. Her constituency really liked her and she invested all of her money and all of her business. Her husband ended up leaving her because he didn't want a publicly active life. She won, which is fantastic, right? Andrea Thiis-Evensen: This woman was in the party nomination phase, which you need to win to get into the official election. She had to travel to Nairobi, to get her nomination slip. Sarah Hewitt: She got to Nairobi and when she went to go get her nomination slip, they'd given it to her male opponent. It was an actual theft of her candidacy, because she was a woman. She was a young woman. It was just like, she has no recourse to justice. There's no way for her to go and for her to say, look, this guy stole my candidacy. He's now in parliament - well, the local parliament. It's just, I think, so indicative of just the wider problems of intimidation that women face when they are in public spaces and when they're strong women. There's such a move towards getting meek women into these spaces. There's this fascinating phenomena that has occurred in Kenya, where at local-level governments, nominated women - so they're not elected. They're nominated to fill a gender quota. They get way less resources, way less influence, way less decision-making power. They don't get any staff, I don't think, depending on county to county but they get hardly any staff to support them. They're just called flower girls. They'll be called into a meeting. Decisions will already be made, but they'll have to have a tick box to say a woman was included in this meeting. The decision was made. Come in and, yep. This is all good. This has all satisfied the gender requirements that are imposed upon us. On one level, there's such a lack of implementation of a lot of these provisions and a lot of these agreements and stuff. Just as there are laws, so policies and legislation that is passed, which is really great because it sets up the legal framework but the reality is very, very different. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: That was Sarah Hewitt. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Peace and Gender. My name is Andrea Thiis-Evensen and this podcast was produced for Monash Gender, Peace, and Security and Mojo News. Music: "Solitude" by Broke for free &ndash; &nbsp;<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1541726370743000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHibsS7voAmCEgh7tZyM68bsG1jhg">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License</a> Artwork: Shayla RanceSee <a href="https://omnystudio.com/listener">omnystudio.com/listener</a> for privacy information.

What happens to women when conflict comes to an end?

In this episode, Andrea Thiis-Evensen talks with Betty Barkha, a PhD student at Monash who grew up in Fiji, with cyclones raging outside her window, watching whole villages disappear under the water. Betty has now worked with development for eight years, focusing on the effect climate change has on women.  

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Hey. My name is Andrea Thiis-Evensen and welcome back to Peace and Gender. In this podcast, I'm trying to highlight the issues around gendered inequalities, by meeting the people who are actually seeking solutions, getting to know both the research and their personal story.

Betty Barkha: I think, just the constant fear every single time we have a cyclone warning and the fear of not knowing how devastating it will be is scary.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: That is Betty Barkha. Betty is a PhD student at Monash. She grew up in Fiji. She has a pretty clear area of interest, an issue that she has decided to dedicate her life to try and improve.

Betty Barkha: Essentially - and not just because I'm from the Pacific - it's climate change. It's because it's not a reality just for the Pacific Islanders or people facing typhoons or hurricanes. It's a reality for all of us. Things are changing. The environment is changing and we need to get onto it. We need all hands on deck, taking action. That's exactly why I'm studying climate change and its risks and how we can fast-track this process and make sure that we do no harm in the process and that voices are heard. Nothing gets left behind.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: What started Betty's burning interest in climate change?

Betty Barkha: During my first year in university, there was a bunch of young leaders across the Pacific who had come into Fiji for a Pacific climate leadership workshop organised by 350.org. Towards the conclusion of that, there was this incredible man, Ben, from the Marshall Islands. He stood up in front of us with tears in his eyes and said, when I stand in the middle of the largest island, and I throw a stone this side, it reaches the ocean. When I throw a stone that side, it reaches the ocean. He stood there in a room full of about 80 people and begged for us to send him sand to save his island home and we couldn't. We just couldn't send him sand to save his island home.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: That was the start of Betty's journey to advocate for climate change. This was a decade ago, when she was first-year undergrad in Fiji. What she experienced that day had a ripple effect.

Betty Barkha: It definitely led to a movement in the Pacific for young leaders. There's been a few pockets of movements. There's Pacific Island Represent, there's Pacific Climate Warriors, there's National Climate Warriors that do a lot of climate action within their countries. Essentially, what it led to was the rise of a youth climate movement in the Pacific. That climate movement has been brilliant. It's been on the frontlines of advocating for divestment in Australia - in Australian banks. It's also been taking into UN spaces and taken space and spoken on what's definitely impacting them, why they're on the frontline, why things need to change. It led to the rise of a movement in the Pacific that definitely connects to the larger movement, Globally.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Betty has worked with development for over eight years for various organisations in the Asia Pacific. She is the youngest member on the board of directors of the Association of Women in Development. She's also an advisor with FRIDA Young Feminist Fund and a member of the Women Deliver Young Leaders Program. Betty advocates strongly for climate change and, being from Fiji, climate change is something that Betty has grown up with.

Betty Barkha: It's scary, every single time you hear tin rattling, because our roofs are made of tin. That's scary. I think our fear would always be if it would be our tin or our home. I think it's just scary, being able to visualise that sort of thing.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Betty went back home to Fiji in the beginning of 2018. What she was hearing, outside her window, was the massive cyclone Josie, which would be followed by the even more damaging cyclone, Kenny. This was not new to Betty and her family.

Betty Barkha: As a kid, we were living in a village and our home used to be the concrete home in the village. We would have about 25 people living with us during cyclones. That would probably be the best times ever as an adult, now, the last cyclones in early 2018 saw me being petrified. I would never want that to happen to anyone again, but I know that it was still a reality for so many. Water seeps out of nowhere. You just don't know and you don't know what to do at that point, when you're in a state of shock. You're just left in a state of trauma. You're just like, it's going to blow up. Something's going to fall. Even for us, it was always - my mum would just be super-scared because we have a huge pine tree behind our home. She would be like, this cyclone it's going to fall. This cyclone it's going to fall. If it falls our home is entirely damaged and that would just mean destruction, essentially. I think, just the constant fear every single time we have a cyclone warning and the fear of not knowing how devastating it will be is scary.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: The two cyclones in early 2018 resulted in heavy rainfall, flash flooding, and destructive winds. Thousands of people were displaced and lost their homes. In the aftermath of the destruction, Beth and her family did all they could to help.

Betty Barkha: When mum realised where the water levels had gone to and she realised it was a community that she grew up with, we cooked meals for about 50 people at home and took it out there. All their stuff was lost and they wouldn't be able to cook meals. Then, when we went there, this is pretty high ground, far away from sea level or a river but three quarters of their homes were underwater. Then, the women there were - the men would come and take their food and it was okay, because maybe something else was on their mind. The women would be like, there's no water. There's no water. We can't do it. There's no water to drink. There's no water to clean. There was just no water, so all they could do was sit and wait. That was pretty sad.

One of the best parts about being from a small island country is you sort of know friends here and there. I had a friend in the water authority, who could very quickly mobilise water trucks into that area. I just gave him a call and within the next 24 hours, there were water trucks going into that area.

In terms of clothes and beddings and sanitary pads, I got in touch with this incredible group that I'm an alumni of, which is called Emerging Leaders Forum. We're a bunch of 80 girls who have graduated from a year-long project, which is focusing on women and their issues in Fiji. We instantly got in touch and were like, okay, we're going to get a sanitary pad drive. If you've got things, we're just going to transfer them into this localities, where we can identify people need them. We got them down within a matter of two days.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: In addition to the destruction and problems that people were facing, in the aftermath of the cyclones, sanitary pads were running out of stock. Betty and her family had to get their friends from nearby places, such as Suva, to transport sanitary pads to them. Even this was tricky, because the roads had been damaged.

Betty Barkha: Obviously, when you have a larger team working on it, the impact is higher. It was just me and my family. There were just four of us doing this. If the four of us could have that sort of mobilisation result, imagine what the results would be if all of us got things done.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Betty experienced how women were extra-vulnerable to climate change effects, such as cyclones.

Betty Barkha: Every single time a disaster strikes, the reports would always show that there's no safe space for women. There would always be a time that we'd have to run a sanitary pad drive, because they were never included in the kits that go into these disaster centres that are where people are seeking refuge after a disaster. I think that was just a clear indication of where there was a gap and what needed more attention. We have a lot of amazing groups doing this sort of sanitary drives and I think, knowing that women are heavily impacted in terms of a lot of things - in terms of security, hygiene, wellbeing, when a disaster strikes. I think I just want to be able to be a source for women's voices to be amplified. What role do they play? Do their voices ever get counted? Why are their voices not being counted, you know? Something like that.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: This is what Betty is writing her PhD on now.

Betty Barkha: My PhD's broadly going to be focused around climate displacement of people. In this process, I hope to be able to connect with women on the ground, who've been relocated, or have chosen to move from one place to another, or have been forced to move from one place to another - just being able to understand what their role has been in the process and how they have been impacted. For what it's worth, it could have various forms. I think it's important.

I'd like to highlight a story from Fiji, actually, where we have a village in the Northern island of Vanua Levu. We've relocated a village of about 300 villagers, because they were a coastal village. Now they've been moved to higher ground, but within the village boundaries. It turns out that the women think that this relocation has done them really good. Now they've got electricity, water supply, their homes are better-constructed to handle cyclones. That was really exciting for me to know.

Then, there was this other community on the side of this story. In January, I was in Kiribati for a work visit. I would sit, in the afternoons, with these village women who would run the guesthouse I was staying at. They would be telling us that we want our young women to get married and get out of the island, because climate change is going to kill us. We won't leave but we want our young women to leave the island. That just surprised me, because that was their way of coping. That was what they were doing.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Why did it surprise you?

Betty Barkha: I think it was just surprising, how they thought that their young women wanted to be moving away from the island while they were not okay - they didn't want to leave the island. They thought that, in order to save their young women, it was okay for them to be moved to another island and marriage was the only way that they could see. That surprised me.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Betty tells me how the attitude around climate change has shifted.

Betty Barkha: There has been a great rise in the moral consciousness of people recognising that, yes, it's an actual threat. There needs to be something done. We know there are a few things that's within our reach that we can change and we're onto it, but there are a few things that are not within our reach and we need everybody on board to be able to do it. We need our leaders, we need our community leaders, we need our communities to be part of this process. We can't leave anybody behind, when we're trying to change that sort of framework. I think that's been really exciting

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: What is within her reach when it comes to making change?

Betty Barkha: I think it's very easy to advocate for changes, say, in terms of getting people to be aware that, okay, climate change is happening. In the case for Fiji, say, for instance, which is a very relevant example that I noticed, is that, in the last year, there were two cyclones that hit Fiji within a week. Previously, while I was growing up as a kid, there'd be warnings around cyclones and nobody would take it seriously. You would still see people on the streets, people going out swimming. Now, in that instant - this was probably early 2018 - when the government and the offices let out particular warnings that a cyclone's coming, people were prepared. Cyclone packs were prepared. People were ready. People were not leaving their homes. People had locked down their homes. People had prepared cyclone kits. People had moved to upper ground before a cyclone came. That, I think, was a brilliant show of exactly how things have translated on-ground. This definitely wasn't the result of one particular organisation or community. It was engaging with the government, with private sector partners, with NGOs, making sure that communities were actually involved in this whole process and be like, no. This is real. Let's move.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Betty has seen climate change outside her window. She's heard the roof shaking over her head. She's witnessed people begging for sand to save their island homes and she has seen whole villages underwater.

Betty Barkha:  We really just need to speak up now. Time's now. We're literally fighting for livelihoods and security. As the Pacific Climate Warriors like to say, we are not drowning. We are fighting. We are. We're constantly fighting for our livelihoods and our lives and our homes. We're not giving up. We just want the world to not give up on us too.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: That was Betty Barkha. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Peace and Gender. My name is Andrea Thiis-Evensen, and this podcast was produced for Monash Gender Peace and Security and Mojo News.

Music: "Solitude" by Broke for free –  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License

Artwork: Shayla Rance

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode, Andrea Thiis-Evensen talks with <a href="http://www.monashgps.org/betty-barkha">Betty Barkha</a>, a PhD student at Monash who grew up in Fiji, with cyclones raging outside her window, watching whole&nbsp;villages disappear under the water. Betty has now worked with development for eight years, focusing on the effect climate change has on women. &nbsp; EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Hey. My name is Andrea Thiis-Evensen and welcome back to Peace and Gender. In this podcast, I'm trying to highlight the issues around gendered inequalities, by meeting the people who are actually seeking solutions, getting to know both the research and their personal story. Betty Barkha: I think, just the constant fear every single time we have a cyclone warning and the fear of not knowing how devastating it will be is scary. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: That is Betty Barkha. Betty is a PhD student at Monash. She grew up in Fiji. She has a pretty clear area of interest, an issue that she has decided to dedicate her life to try and improve. Betty Barkha: Essentially - and not just because I'm from the Pacific - it's climate change. It's because it's not a reality just for the Pacific Islanders or people facing typhoons or hurricanes. It's a reality for all of us. Things are changing. The environment is changing and we need to get onto it. We need all hands on deck, taking action. That's exactly why I'm studying climate change and its risks and how we can fast-track this process and make sure that we do no harm in the process and that voices are heard. Nothing gets left behind. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: What started Betty's burning interest in climate change? Betty Barkha: During my first year in university, there was a bunch of young leaders across the Pacific who had come into Fiji for a Pacific climate leadership workshop organised by 350.org. Towards the conclusion of that, there was this incredible man, Ben, from the Marshall Islands. He stood up in front of us with tears in his eyes and said, when I stand in the middle of the largest island, and I throw a stone this side, it reaches the ocean. When I throw a stone that side, it reaches the ocean. He stood there in a room full of about 80 people and begged for us to send him sand to save his island home and we couldn't. We just couldn't send him sand to save his island home. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: That was the start of Betty's journey to advocate for climate change. This was a decade ago, when she was first-year undergrad in Fiji. What she experienced that day had a ripple effect. Betty Barkha: It definitely led to a movement in the Pacific for young leaders. There's been a few pockets of movements. There's Pacific Island Represent, there's Pacific Climate Warriors, there's National Climate Warriors that do a lot of climate action within their countries. Essentially, what it led to was the rise of a youth climate movement in the Pacific. That climate movement has been brilliant. It's been on the frontlines of advocating for divestment in Australia - in Australian banks. It's also been taking into UN spaces and taken space and spoken on what's definitely impacting them, why they're on the frontline, why things need to change. It led to the rise of a movement in the Pacific that definitely connects to the larger movement, Globally. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Betty has worked with development for over eight years for various organisations in the Asia Pacific. She is the youngest member on the board of directors of the Association of Women in Development. She's also an advisor with FRIDA Young Feminist Fund and a member of the Women Deliver Young Leaders Program. Betty advocates strongly for climate change and, being from Fiji, climate change is something that Betty has grown up with. Betty Barkha: It's scary, every single time you hear tin rattling, because our roofs are made of tin. That's scary. I think our fear would always be if it would be our tin or our home. I think it's just scary, being able to visualise that sort of thing. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Betty went back home to Fiji in the beginning of 2018. What she was hearing, outside her window, was the massive cyclone Josie, which would be followed by the even more damaging cyclone, Kenny. This was not new to Betty and her family. Betty Barkha: As a kid, we were living in a village and our home used to be the concrete home in the village. We would have about 25 people living with us during cyclones. That would probably be the best times ever as an adult, now, the last cyclones in early 2018 saw me being petrified. I would never want that to happen to anyone again, but I know that it was still a reality for so many. Water seeps out of nowhere. You just don't know and you don't know what to do at that point, when you're in a state of shock. You're just left in a state of trauma. You're just like, it's going to blow up. Something's going to fall. Even for us, it was always - my mum would just be super-scared because we have a huge pine tree behind our home. She would be like, this cyclone it's going to fall. This cyclone it's going to fall. If it falls our home is entirely damaged and that would just mean destruction, essentially. I think, just the constant fear every single time we have a cyclone warning and the fear of not knowing how devastating it will be is scary. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: The two cyclones in early 2018 resulted in heavy rainfall, flash flooding, and destructive winds. Thousands of people were displaced and lost their homes. In the aftermath of the destruction, Beth and her family did all they could to help. Betty Barkha: When mum realised where the water levels had gone to and she realised it was a community that she grew up with, we cooked meals for about 50 people at home and took it out there. All their stuff was lost and they wouldn't be able to cook meals. Then, when we went there, this is pretty high ground, far away from sea level or a river but three quarters of their homes were underwater. Then, the women there were - the men would come and take their food and it was okay, because maybe something else was on their mind. The women would be like, there's no water. There's no water. We can't do it. There's no water to drink. There's no water to clean. There was just no water, so all they could do was sit and wait. That was pretty sad. One of the best parts about being from a small island country is you sort of know friends here and there. I had a friend in the water authority, who could very quickly mobilise water trucks into that area. I just gave him a call and within the next 24 hours, there were water trucks going into that area. In terms of clothes and beddings and sanitary pads, I got in touch with this incredible group that I'm an alumni of, which is called Emerging Leaders Forum. We're a bunch of 80 girls who have graduated from a year-long project, which is focusing on women and their issues in Fiji. We instantly got in touch and were like, okay, we're going to get a sanitary pad drive. If you've got things, we're just going to transfer them into this localities, where we can identify people need them. We got them down within a matter of two days. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: In addition to the destruction and problems that people were facing, in the aftermath of the cyclones, sanitary pads were running out of stock. Betty and her family had to get their friends from nearby places, such as Suva, to transport sanitary pads to them. Even this was tricky, because the roads had been damaged. Betty Barkha: Obviously, when you have a larger team working on it, the impact is higher. It was just me and my family. There were just four of us doing this. If the four of us could have that sort of mobilisation result, imagine what the results would be if all of us got things done. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Betty experienced how women were extra-vulnerable to climate change effects, such as cyclones. Betty Barkha: Every single time a disaster strikes, the reports would always show that there's no safe space for women. There would always be a time that we'd have to run a sanitary pad drive, because they were never included in the kits that go into these disaster centres that are where people are seeking refuge after a disaster. I think that was just a clear indication of where there was a gap and what needed more attention. We have a lot of amazing groups doing this sort of sanitary drives and I think, knowing that women are heavily impacted in terms of a lot of things - in terms of security, hygiene, wellbeing, when a disaster strikes. I think I just want to be able to be a source for women's voices to be amplified. What role do they play? Do their voices ever get counted? Why are their voices not being counted, you know? Something like that. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: This is what Betty is writing her PhD on now. Betty Barkha: My PhD's broadly going to be focused around climate displacement of people. In this process, I hope to be able to connect with women on the ground, who've been relocated, or have chosen to move from one place to another, or have been forced to move from one place to another - just being able to understand what their role has been in the process and how they have been impacted. For what it's worth, it could have various forms. I think it's important. I'd like to highlight a story from Fiji, actually, where we have a village in the Northern island of Vanua Levu. We've relocated a village of about 300 villagers, because they were a coastal village. Now they've been moved to higher ground, but within the village boundaries. It turns out that the women think that this relocation has done them really good. Now they've got electricity, water supply, their homes are better-constructed to handle cyclones. That was really exciting for me to know. Then, there was this other community on the side of this story. In January, I was in Kiribati for a work visit. I would sit, in the afternoons, with these village women who would run the guesthouse I was staying at. They would be telling us that we want our young women to get married and get out of the island, because climate change is going to kill us. We won't leave but we want our young women to leave the island. That just surprised me, because that was their way of coping. That was what they were doing. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Why did it surprise you? Betty Barkha: I think it was just surprising, how they thought that their young women wanted to be moving away from the island while they were not okay - they didn't want to leave the island. They thought that, in order to save their young women, it was okay for them to be moved to another island and marriage was the only way that they could see. That surprised me. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Betty tells me how the attitude around climate change has shifted. Betty Barkha: There has been a great rise in the moral consciousness of people recognising that, yes, it's an actual threat. There needs to be something done. We know there are a few things that's within our reach that we can change and we're onto it, but there are a few things that are not within our reach and we need everybody on board to be able to do it. We need our leaders, we need our community leaders, we need our communities to be part of this process. We can't leave anybody behind, when we're trying to change that sort of framework. I think that's been really exciting Andrea Thiis-Evensen: What is within her reach when it comes to making change? Betty Barkha: I think it's very easy to advocate for changes, say, in terms of getting people to be aware that, okay, climate change is happening. In the case for Fiji, say, for instance, which is a very relevant example that I noticed, is that, in the last year, there were two cyclones that hit Fiji within a week. Previously, while I was growing up as a kid, there'd be warnings around cyclones and nobody would take it seriously. You would still see people on the streets, people going out swimming. Now, in that instant - this was probably early 2018 - when the government and the offices let out particular warnings that a cyclone's coming, people were prepared. Cyclone packs were prepared. People were ready. People were not leaving their homes. People had locked down their homes. People had prepared cyclone kits. People had moved to upper ground before a cyclone came. That, I think, was a brilliant show of exactly how things have translated on-ground. This definitely wasn't the result of one particular organisation or community. It was engaging with the government, with private sector partners, with NGOs, making sure that communities were actually involved in this whole process and be like, no. This is real. Let's move. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Betty has seen climate change outside her window. She's heard the roof shaking over her head. She's witnessed people begging for sand to save their island homes and she has seen whole villages underwater. Betty Barkha: &nbsp;We really just need to speak up now. Time's now. We're literally fighting for livelihoods and security. As the Pacific Climate Warriors like to say, we are not drowning. We are fighting. We are. We're constantly fighting for our livelihoods and our lives and our homes. We're not giving up. We just want the world to not give up on us too. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: That was Betty Barkha. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Peace and Gender.&nbsp;My name is Andrea Thiis-Evensen, and this podcast was produced for <a href="http://www.monashgps.org/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">Monash Gender Peace and Security</a> and <a href="http://mojonews.com.au/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">Mojo News</a>. Music: "Solitude" by Broke for free &ndash; &nbsp;<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1541726370743000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHibsS7voAmCEgh7tZyM68bsG1jhg">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License</a> Artwork: Shayla RanceSee <a href="https://omnystudio.com/listener">omnystudio.com/listener</a> for privacy information.

Women, climate change and disasters in the Pacific

Gender equality in peacebuilding

Andrea Thiis-Evensen meets Dr Maria Tanyag, who specialises in the neglect of women’s sexual health in crisis areas, and examines the major consequences this neglect can have on society. 

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Hey, my name is Andrea Thiis-Evensen and welcome back to Peace and Gender. In this podcast I am trying to highlight the issues surrounding gendered inequalities.

I’m doing this by meeting the people who are actually seeking solutions, trying to get to know both their research and their personal story.

These topics may not meet the mainstream media agenda, but they are issues that really deserve attention.

Maria Tanyag: You have women who could have lived had they had access to health.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Today I’m going to talk to Dr Maria Tanyag about the issues around women’s sexual health. Maria is a feminist researcher and she has a PhD in politics and international relations.

But first, why did Maria start looking into this issue?

Maria Tanyag: Growing up in the Philippines I was specifically motivated to do further research because of the - what I was then observing as gender-specific barriers to women’s health. We have among the strictest laws around abortion, access to contraception.

For me, growing up - especially as I was also developing as a person and as a woman, I was seeing these and noticing these inequalities more because it’s very personal and as most feminists would say, the personal is political.

When I was starting to observe all these inequalities that women distinctly faced, I was prompted to understand, what are the reasons why these barriers are there in place?

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Despite how far she thought we’d come when it came to gender inequality, Maria started seeing all these inequalities when it came to women and equality.

Maria Tanyag: While there is a global push to promote gender equality, and we’ve made significant progress already, we are still yet to understand why many women, and girls, die from pregnancy related complications.

Why, despite a broad support and understanding that gender equality matters, we are still seeing the prevalence of, for most parts, preventable maternal deaths in many societies. That to me is a fundamental inequality and it’s a paradox, that we can see a lot of women in many societies, sometimes within the same society, progressing.

Yet you have women who could have lived had they access to health care, reliable health information around their own bodies. That is, for me, a global problem that needs urgent attention.

Because if we have - if we do not bridge that health gap we are seeing a lot of progress being built on the invisible deaths and sacrifices of women, especially those in crisis settings, who are enduring a lot of this specific violence because of all these broader politics and inequalities that prevent them from accessing health.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: This is what Maria started researching.

Maria Tanyag: There’s a lot of talk about inclusive post-disaster recovery, inclusive peace building, and all of these things are important and they matter, but for me the question is why, in all of these things, the hierarchy always put women’s health at the bottom?

There seems to be a deliberate neglect, or forgetting that women for women to be able to fully participate in political and economic decision making, they must also, in the first place, be able to have control and decision making over their own bodies.

So my research has really shown that women and girls, through dominant peace and security development agendas are being made responsible as well in post-disaster and post-conflict recovery and rehabilitation. But it is being built on their invisible sacrifices because we are not recognising the contributions that they are making.

One evidence of that lack of recognition is the lack of support towards sexual and reproductive health, which is so fundamental.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Even in Australia, if you have gotten an abortion in New South Wales or Queensland, you may actually risk criminal charges.

Maria Tanyag: Why is there, up until now and Australia has got a feminist foreign policy or is moving towards being known for having a feminist foreign policy too. But internally, domestically, there are a lot of ongoing debates around abortion rights in Australia.

Again there’s a disconnect between - okay we want women to pursue and rise up to the challenge of governance, political governance. But in everyday life, many women face restrictions to reproductive decision making.

That’s something that I’m very interested in, understanding why there is a disconnect and what does that mean for how we are progressing for gender equality more broadly.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: So although we’ve come a long way today when it comes to gender equality some inequalities have been overlooked or forgotten, especially in crisis areas.

Maria Tanyag: In the Philippines again it’s a very interesting case because we have got a lot of very good gender equality laws. In fact we have been a regional leader in terms of promoting gender equality in security and development agendas.

We have got a lot of very strong prominent women in politics as well, but we need to make sure that that is equalised. Especially for those in situations of crisis, in times of disasters and conflicts, that we are not forgetting that there are gender specific inequalities that women and girls face and it’s rooted to [inequal] [sic] access to health.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Maria has been looking at women in areas of conflict and in areas of crisis, and she says that these two are interconnected.

Maria: In the Philippines, violence is seasonal and disasters are violent. So there’s an interesting overlap that showed me some surprising findings, that conflicts are shaped by weather patterns. They are influenced by resource shortages, they are influenced - conflicts erupt intermittently depending on when an election is supposed to occur because it’s about control over power and resources.

So people know the likelihood of when a conflict will erupt and when it won’t. It’s kind of like an early warning system, which normally we understand for weather patterns, but they were understanding it in the context of conflicts.

Similarly, in the case of disasters, people, especially in - again the Philippines is a very disaster-prone country - in a disaster-prone region, they were saying that disasters are increasingly violent.

Many forms of violence, whether physical or structural violence are experienced in times of disasters. So for them disasters are equally violent and there are specific conflicts that are triggered by disasters.

For instance, when there are shortages in the distribution of relief assistance communities tend to have infighting among themselves because of jealously and rivalry and status hierarchies, depending on who has access to what resources as part of disaster relief.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: When Maria did her PhD in the Philippines she heard all these stories from women experiencing inequality in post-disaster and conflict areas.

Maria Tanyag: For me what really struck me were stories of women giving birth in internal displacement camp. One anecdote of a woman who described herself as - it’s very gruesome, but she described herself as a pig or cattle where she was giving birth, and because it was in a cramped space, other people were watching her give birth, like a show, like an exhibit.

For her that made it more traumatic than the conflict itself that displaced her. Because it dehumanised her. Pregnancy for most people is a special moment, and giving birth is a special moment. Maybe between spouses or couples and celebrated by families.

But in conditions where it’s inhumane and unsafe, giving birth contributes to a loss of dignity and can actually heighten the risk of death. These are deaths that can occur long after a conflict has erupted, or even after a disaster has happened.

For me what was really, in a way heartbreaking but motivates the kind of work we do, is understanding these women and communities have survived disaster and have survived conflict, but they end up dying because of protracted displacement. Isn’t that something that is really unjust? Especially if it could have been prevented if we can be better at doing humanitarian or security responses.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: There are many feminist movements happening, but some of these movements can actually be counterproductive to gender equality.

Maria Tanyag: We need to be able to create distinctions between women’s movements that are feminist, meaning that they are interested in promoting women’s rights and women’s groups, or women’s movements that might be expressing their mobilisation, their rhetoric and their campaign in the language of women’s rights.

 But are actually counterproductive to feminist’s goals. I’m talking specifically about conservative elite women who are interested in maintaining, or tying, women’s identities to motherhood for instance.

That a woman’s worth and function in society is to be the ideal mother. These same groups of conservative women also perpetuate violence against sexual minorities, by virtue of their influence on policy.

When we try to understand the global politics of sexual and reproductive health, we must be conscious that there are also women themselves who do not support broader rights for certain groups of women.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Maria is one of those people out there who has seen an injustice, seen an issue, and now she is seeking a solution. She has put her words and her research into action.

Maria Tanyag: In 2016 I presented evidence from my research to the Commission on Human Rights in the Philippines to emphasise the kind of experiences and human rights violations occurring in internal displacement when the state, or the government, fails to progressively ensure sexual and reproductive health in internal displacements.

That is now an ongoing process that’s a Human Rights Committee enquiry on the Philippines to ensure that what is happening in crisis situations, the barriers that are in place there, are understood as a broader structural problem around an inequal [sic] access to health in the Philippines. In fact the neglect of that feeds into the invisibility of sexual and gender-based violence that are occurring in times of crises.

Then when you neglect the - or render invisible the violence that women distinctly experience in times of crises, you also indirectly prevent broader groups of women from participating and equally benefiting from what happens after conflict and after disasters.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen:  That was Maria Tanyag, thank you so much for listening to this episode of Peace and Gender. My name is Andrea Thiis-Evensen, and this podcast was produced for Monash Gender Peace and Security and Mojo News.

Music: "Solitude" by Broke for free –  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License

Artwork: Shayla Rance

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen meets <a href="http://www.monashgps.org/maria-tanyag">Dr Maria Tanyag</a>, who specialises in the neglect of women&rsquo;s&nbsp;sexual health in crisis areas, and examines the major consequences this neglect can have on society.&nbsp; EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Hey, my name is Andrea Thiis-Evensen and welcome back to Peace and Gender. In this podcast I am trying to highlight the issues surrounding gendered inequalities. I&rsquo;m doing this by meeting the people who are actually seeking solutions, trying to get to know both their research and their personal story. These topics may not meet the mainstream media agenda, but they are issues that really deserve attention. Maria Tanyag: You have women who could have lived had they had access to health. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Today I&rsquo;m going to talk to Dr Maria Tanyag about the issues around women&rsquo;s sexual health. Maria is a feminist researcher and she has a PhD in politics and international relations. But first, why did Maria start looking into this issue? Maria Tanyag: Growing up in the Philippines I was specifically motivated to do further research because of the - what I was then observing as gender-specific barriers to women&rsquo;s health. We have among the strictest laws around abortion, access to contraception. For me, growing up - especially as I was also developing as a person and as a woman, I was seeing these and noticing these inequalities more because it&rsquo;s very personal and as most feminists would say, the personal is political. When I was starting to observe all these inequalities that women distinctly faced, I was prompted to understand, what are the reasons why these barriers are there in place? Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Despite how far she thought we&rsquo;d come when it came to gender inequality, Maria started seeing all these inequalities when it came to women and equality. Maria Tanyag: While there is a global push to promote gender equality, and we&rsquo;ve made significant progress already, we are still yet to understand why many women, and girls, die from pregnancy related complications. Why, despite a broad support and understanding that gender equality matters, we are still seeing the prevalence of, for most parts, preventable maternal deaths in many societies. That to me is a fundamental inequality and it&rsquo;s a paradox, that we can see a lot of women in many societies, sometimes within the same society, progressing. Yet you have women who could have lived had they access to health care, reliable health information around their own bodies. That is, for me, a global problem that needs urgent attention. Because if we have - if we do not bridge that health gap we are seeing a lot of progress being built on the invisible deaths and sacrifices of women, especially those in crisis settings, who are enduring a lot of this specific violence because of all these broader politics and inequalities that prevent them from accessing health. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: This is what Maria started researching. Maria Tanyag: There&rsquo;s a lot of talk about inclusive post-disaster recovery, inclusive peace building, and all of these things are important and they matter, but for me the question is why, in all of these things, the hierarchy always put women&rsquo;s health at the bottom? There seems to be a deliberate neglect, or forgetting that women for women to be able to fully participate in political and economic decision making, they must also, in the first place, be able to have control and decision making over their own bodies. So my research has really shown that women and girls, through dominant peace and security development agendas are being made responsible as well in post-disaster and post-conflict recovery and rehabilitation. But it is being built on their invisible sacrifices because we are not recognising the contributions that they are making. One evidence of that lack of recognition is the lack of support towards sexual and reproductive health, which is so fundamental. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Even in Australia, if you have gotten an abortion in New South Wales or Queensland, you may actually risk criminal charges. Maria Tanyag: Why is there, up until now and Australia has got a feminist foreign policy or is moving towards being known for having a feminist foreign policy too. But internally, domestically, there are a lot of ongoing debates around abortion rights in Australia. Again there&rsquo;s a disconnect between - okay we want women to pursue and rise up to the challenge of governance, political governance. But in everyday life, many women face restrictions to reproductive decision making. That&rsquo;s something that I&rsquo;m very interested in, understanding why there is a disconnect and what does that mean for how we are progressing for gender equality more broadly. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: So although we&rsquo;ve come a long way today when it comes to gender equality some inequalities have been overlooked or forgotten, especially in crisis areas. Maria Tanyag: In the Philippines again it&rsquo;s a very interesting case because we have got a lot of very good gender equality laws. In fact we have been a regional leader in terms of promoting gender equality in security and development agendas. We have got a lot of very strong prominent women in politics as well, but we need to make sure that that is equalised. Especially for those in situations of crisis, in times of disasters and conflicts, that we are not forgetting that there are gender specific inequalities that women and girls face and it&rsquo;s rooted to [inequal] [sic] access to health. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Maria has been looking at women in areas of conflict and in areas of crisis, and she says that these two are interconnected. Maria: In the Philippines, violence is seasonal and disasters are violent. So there&rsquo;s an interesting overlap that showed me some surprising findings, that conflicts are shaped by weather patterns. They are influenced by resource shortages, they are influenced - conflicts erupt intermittently depending on when an election is supposed to occur because it&rsquo;s about control over power and resources. So people know the likelihood of when a conflict will erupt and when it won&rsquo;t. It&rsquo;s kind of like an early warning system, which normally we understand for weather patterns, but they were understanding it in the context of conflicts. Similarly, in the case of disasters, people, especially in - again the Philippines is a very disaster-prone country - in a disaster-prone region, they were saying that disasters are increasingly violent. Many forms of violence, whether physical or structural violence are experienced in times of disasters. So for them disasters are equally violent and there are specific conflicts that are triggered by disasters. For instance, when there are shortages in the distribution of relief assistance communities tend to have infighting among themselves because of jealously and rivalry and status hierarchies, depending on who has access to what resources as part of disaster relief. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: When Maria did her PhD in the Philippines she heard all these stories from women experiencing inequality in post-disaster and conflict areas. Maria Tanyag: For me what really struck me were stories of women giving birth in internal displacement camp. One anecdote of a woman who described herself as - it&rsquo;s very gruesome, but she described herself as a pig or cattle where she was giving birth, and because it was in a cramped space, other people were watching her give birth, like a show, like an exhibit. For her that made it more traumatic than the conflict itself that displaced her. Because it dehumanised her. Pregnancy for most people is a special moment, and giving birth is a special moment. Maybe between spouses or couples and celebrated by families. But in conditions where it&rsquo;s inhumane and unsafe, giving birth contributes to a loss of dignity and can actually heighten the risk of death. These are deaths that can occur long after a conflict has erupted, or even after a disaster has happened. For me what was really, in a way heartbreaking but motivates the kind of work we do, is understanding these women and communities have survived disaster and have survived conflict, but they end up dying because of protracted displacement. Isn&rsquo;t that something that is really unjust? Especially if it could have been prevented if we can be better at doing humanitarian or security responses. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: There are many feminist movements happening, but some of these movements can actually be counterproductive to gender equality. Maria Tanyag: We need to be able to create distinctions between women&rsquo;s movements that are feminist, meaning that they are interested in promoting women&rsquo;s rights and women&rsquo;s groups, or women&rsquo;s movements that might be expressing their mobilisation, their rhetoric and their campaign in the language of women&rsquo;s rights. &nbsp;But are actually counterproductive to feminist&rsquo;s goals. I&rsquo;m talking specifically about conservative elite women who are interested in maintaining, or tying, women&rsquo;s identities to motherhood for instance. That a woman&rsquo;s worth and function in society is to be the ideal mother. These same groups of conservative women also perpetuate violence against sexual minorities, by virtue of their influence on policy. When we try to understand the global politics of sexual and reproductive health, we must be conscious that there are also women themselves who do not support broader rights for certain groups of women. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Maria is one of those people out there who has seen an injustice, seen an issue, and now she is seeking a solution. She has put her words and her research into action. Maria Tanyag: In 2016 I presented evidence from my research to the Commission on Human Rights in the Philippines to emphasise the kind of experiences and human rights violations occurring in internal displacement when the state, or the government, fails to progressively ensure sexual and reproductive health in internal displacements. That is now an ongoing process that&rsquo;s a Human Rights Committee enquiry on the Philippines to ensure that what is happening in crisis situations, the barriers that are in place there, are understood as a broader structural problem around an inequal [sic] access to health in the Philippines. In fact the neglect of that feeds into the invisibility of sexual and gender-based violence that are occurring in times of crises. Then when you neglect the - or render invisible the violence that women distinctly experience in times of crises, you also indirectly prevent broader groups of women from participating and equally benefiting from what happens after conflict and after disasters. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: &nbsp;That was Maria Tanyag, thank you so much for listening to this episode of Peace and Gender. My name is Andrea Thiis-Evensen, and this podcast was produced for <a href="http://www.monashgps.org">Monash Gender Peace and Security</a> and <a href="http://mojonews.com.au">Mojo News</a>. Music: "Solitude" by Broke for free &ndash; &nbsp;<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1541726370743000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHibsS7voAmCEgh7tZyM68bsG1jhg">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License</a> Artwork: Shayla RanceSee <a href="https://omnystudio.com/listener">omnystudio.com/listener</a> for privacy information.

Women's sexual health in areas of crisis

In this episode of Peace and Gender, Andrea Thiis-Evensen meets up with Dr. Lesley Pruitt and Dr. Helen Berents to discuss why it is important to look at youth when talking about conflict, and how important it is to see past young people's gender when discussing migrants.

TRANSCRIPT

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Hey, my name is Andrea Thiis-Evensen. Welcome back to Peace and Gender; a podcast for the people who are interested in learning a bit more about gender, peace and conflict.

 A topic that’s come up a lot in this podcast is how they’re so many stereotypes regarding men and women, such as in militaries or in diplomacy. Today we will be looking at the gender stereotypes around young migrants.

 Why are young migrant men seen as inherently dangerous, while young women are seen as victims? Why are so many young men fleeing their countries? Lesley Pruitt and Helen Berents have studied this and in today’s episode, they will discuss the importance of looking at young people when talking about conflict. Also how important it is to try and change the dialog - this gender stereotype dialogue around young migrants. Lesley is a senior lecturer at Monash University and Helen is a lecturer in the school of justice at Queensland University of Technology, but why did Lesley and Helen start studying youth conflict and peace building? Here is Helen.

Helen Berents: In some ways, to answer the question, I have to note that I lived overseas when I was a kid, with my family. We lived in Latin America; obviously in a very privileged position as ex-pats and I went to an international school. I think it was the first time that I kind of encountered very visibly these questions of inequality and confront ideas of poverty. I was quite young and thinking about all that meant. Being young and encountering people who were my age and in such different situations. How young people coped in those environments - I think kind of sat in the back of my head. As I got to do my honours and post-grad work, that was where my interests took me; because I couldn’t help but ask, why we weren’t talking about young people when we were talking about questions of inequality and questions of peace building and responding to violence. They’re always there when you look, and yet we don’t talk about them.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Here is Lesley.

Lesley Pruitt: I was a first generation high school graduate; neither of my parents finished school. Now being a PhD graduate is like a thing that I couldn’t have envisioned probably as a little child; I didn’t know anybody that had a PhD, maybe my school teachers I knew that had college degrees. What I did know and what I learned through that time with many amazing young people around me was that young people are interested; they’re engaged; they’re knowledgeable; and not just the young people who come from a background that expects them to excel academically or to engage in politics. All young people have various capacities for that and deserve to be listened to. That’s always been a passion of mine, is supporting young people in the next generation and thinking about how we can think together and how we can have intergenerational leadership to make the change that we need to affect society that’s more inclusive for everyone.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Why is it important to look at young people when it comes to conflict and peace?

Lesley Pruitt: Oh, we could be here all day Andrea.

[Laughter]

Lesley Pruitt: We are the people to ask about this; we are a very passionate about convincing people; especially in our fields and international relations, which often completely overlooks young people. Often pays no attention to them whatsoever or when it does, talks about them only under these tropes; these stereotypes; [unclear]; young people as perpetrators; and young people as victims. That - this idea that young people fall into one or the other of those and that’s where they stay. We and other scholars that are working on young people in peace and conflict studies and international relations are really invested in trying to work to change those views.

To recognise the [thorality] - the diversity of stories that come with young peoples’ lives. This is crucial and we can’t build a more peaceful world with better outcomes for everybody if we’re leaving out a huge proportion of the population. Simply, young people are people and they have a right to be heard and to participate. That’s really important to recognise and to support.

Helen Berents: I’m nodding furiously and realised that we’re recording a podcast so...

[Laughter]

Helen Berents: ...that’s not very helpful.

Lesley Pruitt: We do that to each other all the time.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: That’s okay.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Both Helen and Lesley have studied youth in conflict. In 2010, Helen went back to Latin America.

Helen Berents: So I - as part of my PhD work, I spent four months in Colombia in 2010. I lived in Bogotá and I worked in a informal, illegal community that was on the outskirts of the city - actually in the neighbouring city but those communities blend into one another. This is a community of predominately internally displaced people who are very poor; who came to this community over the last few generations. So it’s a legal community originally; they’re slowly gaining rights to their land. I worked there through a foundation that supported a school in that site. I’d spend about four days a week on average for those four months basically hanging out in the community; talking to young people; helping out at the school; hanging out with families; and just spending time with them to understand what goes on in their life.

This is - I mean I say it’s not truly ethnographic in the anthropological sense perhaps, but drawing on that training and that knowledge to really try and understand their lives and the context of their life. Rather than just dropping in and interviewing them, and disappearing to really understand what’s going on around them when they’re talking to me about things. So I understand the context.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Both Lesley and Helen believe it’s important to look at young people when talking about displacements and when talking about the European migration crisis.

Lesley Pruitt: What we’re seeing today - in the past several years is the largest displacement of people from conflicts since World War II. That gets bandied about, but it bears repeating. It is an anomaly in that sense even though this is an issue that’s going on all the time. Maybe in that sense, what people might only see as a crisis now has been a crisis for many people in their lives for decades or for their lifetime. I guess it’s just to take the opportunity with the attention that is available to this to say hey, yeah as we’ve been saying [laughs] this is important so how can we think about what experiences young people are having.

In this particular situation of conflict related migration, we’re looking specifically at the European context where there’s been a great deal of attention to the fact that the majority of people migrating and seeking asylum in this context are overwhelmingly young and disproportionately male in this case. That’s really brought about a lot of interest from policy makers who have particular views on that and leverage that in the way they talk about it to particular political ends.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Lesley and Helen recently wrote an article about this with their colleague Gayle Munro called Gender and Age in the Construction of Male Youth in the European Migration Crisis.

Helen Berents: I think what the co-called European refugee crisis - and I’m using air quotes even though we’re on the radio.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: [Laughs].

Helen Berents: Is the fact that they, as you say, are young men and the kind of coverage that has come about, about this and the attention that’s been given to it, draws upon these long held stereotypes that Lesley and I both looked at in various work right there. Young men - particularly young men in places that are affected by conflict are inherently violent; they’re pre-disposed to joining gangs; they are going to cause problems. I think often bandied about and not fully understood flawed proposition of the youth bold trait; that when there’s more young people, particularly young men, the country is more likely going to end up in conflict despite repeatedly proving that that’s not the case. These become really dominant narratives in policy making and in public discourse about this kind of events.

I think what the European refugee crisis - so-called - really brought home is that when we see these people arriving in, quote unquote, global north countries and the problem arrives quote on our shores. Suddenly then how we talk about and engage with these populations that are coming.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: The discourse around peace and conflict is very often gendered, in the way that young men are seen as threats while young women are seen as victims. This is what Helen and Lesley looks at in their article.

Lesley Pruitt: I guess firstly, there’s a lot of different kinds of feminism; so this is not to speak for all feminists. I would think its part of our shared feminist project is partly denaturalising assumptions about gender. So what were critiquing here is especially about these ideas that young men are inherently naturally like this; these sort of biologically determinist arguments. Of course we think young men and young women and people who might not identify as others, have a whole lot of different options or ways that they might feel or experience and do. At the same time as acknowledging - as I’ve found in my research and field work with young people in a variety of conflict affect context that there is a lot of pressure on young men in these settings.

In other settings, to participate in violence; and a lot of danger sometimes if they refuse to participate in that. That’s one of the key points that we keep reiterating is that often why they’re being seen in a threat in this case is actually why they’re under threat somewhere else. They’re trying to flee from being forced into that in many context and then being treated as a threat on arrival which has implications.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen:Helen has also seen this gender discourse around young migrant men at the US Boarder.

Helen Berents: In some work that I’d been doing with a colleague looking at the US Boarder and young migrants coming up through Central America. As Lesley pointed out before, this is a classic example. The reason that they are overwhelming young men coming in is because in their home countries they are the most vulnerable to recruitment by the gangs; by the [maras]; by whatever’s going on in their home country. When they arrive at the boarder they are the most threatening category of migrant who arrive.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: So young migrant men are seen as a threat, while they are the ones in many ways are extremely vulnerable in their home country. When they arrive in a new country they are seen as inherently dangerous while they are actually fleeing from something dangerous back home. This happens just because of their gender; because they’re men. I asked Lesley if there’s any specific examples of this.

Lesley Pruitt: Well one of the examples that we used in our paper and that you see common in foreign policy - going back to this youth bulge idea which we’re critical of. We’ve got colleagues who have written about how, quote unquote, military age males; young men are routinely excluded from civilian death counts for example, by the US. You’ve seen this phrase used in the news in recent years; we use an example in our paper from a military guy who in Fox News was using this phrase saying no military age males should be allowed in; he said that’s a Trojan horse. It was like, we have to protect our country and to do that we cannot let any young men in.

It sort of equated that if you were a young man and you’re in this age, you’re inherently a danger and threat. We have to keep that - and we see that discourse being really common in popular eyes. It’s sort of drawing on this demographic difference in this migration about how it is disproportionately young and male; that people are leveraging that to these political ends. It’s coming up loads and loads of times in the media. I think really different to some previous reports and different contexts where refugees were often referred to as women and children, which was used to shorthand innocent. In this way is being used to shorthand dangerous. Both of those are oversimplifications and need to be rethought.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: The news is important to look at when it comes to this stereotype gender discourse as well. Helen and Lesley start their article with looking at what happened when the image of Syrian boy Alan Kurdi went viral in the news.

Lesley Pruitt: You may remember Alan Kurdi was this small child - a toddler - a Syrian who was fleeing and his family hoped to be able to migrate to Canada. Which at the time, policy wise was very unlikely that that would be possible but they had family there. That was their hope and their intention. This child drowned at sea and washed up onto shore. The picture was taken and that picture went viral. First there was the reaction where there was this global sense of somebody has to do something. There are actually policies changes around that. I think that’s been credited in a variety of ways of changing the Canadian government at the time, which was the perceived or the intended host country I guess for this family, did change policy to make it more open and did intake more Syrian refugees.

You had the opening of the boarders in Germany; you had these various reactions. Then also within this very short period of time that you had these outlets putting these things like these cartoons saying - using this child’s image to say, well eventually he would have done this, so we have to keep these men out. That for us was this sort of problematic - was like, how does that sentiment in the press; or how does that sentiment in the public shift so quickly from, oh this is a huge problem we have to do something about it to this is a huge problem and we have to keep everybody out. We’re interested in what is the language; what are the narratives. For us we saw there was this real common dynamic that the way that that worked was through saying - focusing on these demographics around this being young men and referring back again and again to how young men must be dangerous.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: That was Lesley Pruitt and Helen Berents. Thank you so much for listening to this episode to Peace and Gender. My name is Andrea Thiis-Evensen and this podcast was produced for Monash Gender, Peace and Security and Mojo News.

Music: "Solitude" by Broke for free –  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License

Artwork: Shayla Rance

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode of Peace and Gender, Andrea Thiis-Evensen meets up with <a href="http://profiles.arts.monash.edu.au/lesley-pruitt/">Dr. Lesley Pruitt</a> and <a href="https://staff.qut.edu.au/staff/berents/">Dr. Helen Berents</a> to discuss why it is important to look at youth when talking about conflict, and how important it is to see past young people's gender when discussing migrants. TRANSCRIPT Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Hey, my name is Andrea Thiis-Evensen. Welcome back to Peace and Gender; a podcast for the people who are interested in learning a bit more about gender, peace and conflict. &nbsp;A topic that&rsquo;s come up a lot in this podcast is how they&rsquo;re so many stereotypes regarding men and women, such as in militaries or in diplomacy. Today we will be looking at the gender stereotypes around young migrants. &nbsp;Why are young migrant men seen as inherently dangerous, while young women are seen as victims? Why are so many young men fleeing their countries? Lesley Pruitt and Helen Berents have studied this and in today&rsquo;s episode, they will discuss the importance of looking at young people when talking about conflict. Also how important it is to try and change the dialog - this gender stereotype dialogue around young migrants. Lesley is a senior lecturer at Monash University and Helen is a lecturer in the school of justice at Queensland University of Technology, but why did Lesley and Helen start studying youth conflict and peace building? Here is Helen. Helen Berents: In some ways, to answer the question, I have to note that I lived overseas when I was a kid, with my family. We lived in Latin America; obviously in a very privileged position as ex-pats and I went to an international school. I think it was the first time that I kind of encountered very visibly these questions of inequality and confront ideas of poverty. I was quite young and thinking about all that meant. Being young and encountering people who were my age and in such different situations. How young people coped in those environments - I think kind of sat in the back of my head. As I got to do my honours and post-grad work, that was where my interests took me; because I couldn&rsquo;t help but ask, why we weren&rsquo;t talking about young people when we were talking about questions of inequality and questions of peace building and responding to violence. They&rsquo;re always there when you look, and yet we don&rsquo;t talk about them. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Here is Lesley. Lesley Pruitt: I was a first generation high school graduate; neither of my parents finished school. Now being a PhD graduate is like a thing that I couldn&rsquo;t have envisioned probably as a little child; I didn&rsquo;t know anybody that had a PhD, maybe my school teachers I knew that had college degrees. What I did know and what I learned through that time with many amazing young people around me was that young people are interested; they&rsquo;re engaged; they&rsquo;re knowledgeable; and not just the young people who come from a background that expects them to excel academically or to engage in politics. All young people have various capacities for that and deserve to be listened to. That&rsquo;s always been a passion of mine, is supporting young people in the next generation and thinking about how we can think together and how we can have intergenerational leadership to make the change that we need to affect society that&rsquo;s more inclusive for everyone. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Why is it important to look at young people when it comes to conflict and peace? Lesley Pruitt: Oh, we could be here all day Andrea. [Laughter] Lesley Pruitt: We are the people to ask about this; we are a very passionate about convincing people; especially in our fields and international relations, which often completely overlooks young people. Often pays no attention to them whatsoever or when it does, talks about them only under these tropes; these stereotypes; [unclear]; young people as perpetrators; and young people as victims. That - this idea that young people fall into one or the other of those and that&rsquo;s where they stay. We and other scholars that are working on young people in peace and conflict studies and international relations are really invested in trying to work to change those views. To recognise the [thorality] - the diversity of stories that come with young peoples&rsquo; lives. This is crucial and we can&rsquo;t build a more peaceful world with better outcomes for everybody if we&rsquo;re leaving out a huge proportion of the population. Simply, young people are people and they have a right to be heard and to participate. That&rsquo;s really important to recognise and to support. Helen Berents: I&rsquo;m nodding furiously and realised that we&rsquo;re recording a podcast so... [Laughter] Helen Berents: ...that&rsquo;s not very helpful. Lesley Pruitt: We do that to each other all the time. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: That&rsquo;s okay. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Both Helen and Lesley have studied youth in conflict. In 2010, Helen went back to Latin America. Helen Berents: So I - as part of my PhD work, I spent four months in Colombia in 2010. I lived in Bogot&aacute; and I worked in a informal, illegal community that was on the outskirts of the city - actually in the neighbouring city but those communities blend into one another. This is a community of predominately internally displaced people who are very poor; who came to this community over the last few generations. So it&rsquo;s a legal community originally; they&rsquo;re slowly gaining rights to their land. I worked there through a foundation that supported a school in that site. I&rsquo;d spend about four days a week on average for those four months basically hanging out in the community; talking to young people; helping out at the school; hanging out with families; and just spending time with them to understand what goes on in their life. This is - I mean I say it&rsquo;s not truly ethnographic in the anthropological sense perhaps, but drawing on that training and that knowledge to really try and understand their lives and the context of their life. Rather than just dropping in and interviewing them, and disappearing to really understand what&rsquo;s going on around them when they&rsquo;re talking to me about things. So I understand the context. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Both Lesley and Helen believe it&rsquo;s important to look at young people when talking about displacements and when talking about the European migration crisis. Lesley Pruitt: What we&rsquo;re seeing today - in the past several years is the largest displacement of people from conflicts since World War II. That gets bandied about, but it bears repeating. It is an anomaly in that sense even though this is an issue that&rsquo;s going on all the time. Maybe in that sense, what people might only see as a crisis now has been a crisis for many people in their lives for decades or for their lifetime. I guess it&rsquo;s just to take the opportunity with the attention that is available to this to say hey, yeah as we&rsquo;ve been saying [laughs] this is important so how can we think about what experiences young people are having. In this particular situation of conflict related migration, we&rsquo;re looking specifically at the European context where there&rsquo;s been a great deal of attention to the fact that the majority of people migrating and seeking asylum in this context are overwhelmingly young and disproportionately male in this case. That&rsquo;s really brought about a lot of interest from policy makers who have particular views on that and leverage that in the way they talk about it to particular political ends. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Lesley and Helen recently wrote an article about this with their colleague Gayle Munro called Gender and Age in the Construction of Male Youth in the European Migration Crisis. Helen Berents: I think what the co-called European refugee crisis - and I&rsquo;m using air quotes even though we&rsquo;re on the radio. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: [Laughs]. Helen Berents: Is the fact that they, as you say, are young men and the kind of coverage that has come about, about this and the attention that&rsquo;s been given to it, draws upon these long held stereotypes that Lesley and I both looked at in various work right there. Young men - particularly young men in places that are affected by conflict are inherently violent; they&rsquo;re pre-disposed to joining gangs; they are going to cause problems. I think often bandied about and not fully understood flawed proposition of the youth bold trait; that when there&rsquo;s more young people, particularly young men, the country is more likely going to end up in conflict despite repeatedly proving that that&rsquo;s not the case. These become really dominant narratives in policy making and in public discourse about this kind of events. I think what the European refugee crisis - so-called - really brought home is that when we see these people arriving in, quote unquote, global north countries and the problem arrives quote on our shores. Suddenly then how we talk about and engage with these populations that are coming. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: The discourse around peace and conflict is very often gendered, in the way that young men are seen as threats while young women are seen as victims. This is what Helen and Lesley looks at in their article. Lesley Pruitt: I guess firstly, there&rsquo;s a lot of different kinds of feminism; so this is not to speak for all feminists. I would think its part of our shared feminist project is partly denaturalising assumptions about gender. So what were critiquing here is especially about these ideas that young men are inherently naturally like this; these sort of biologically determinist arguments. Of course we think young men and young women and people who might not identify as others, have a whole lot of different options or ways that they might feel or experience and do. At the same time as acknowledging - as I&rsquo;ve found in my research and field work with young people in a variety of conflict affect context that there is a lot of pressure on young men in these settings. In other settings, to participate in violence; and a lot of danger sometimes if they refuse to participate in that. That&rsquo;s one of the key points that we keep reiterating is that often why they&rsquo;re being seen in a threat in this case is actually why they&rsquo;re under threat somewhere else. They&rsquo;re trying to flee from being forced into that in many context and then being treated as a threat on arrival which has implications. Andrea Thiis-Evensen:Helen has also seen this gender discourse around young migrant men at the US Boarder. Helen Berents: In some work that I&rsquo;d been doing with a colleague looking at the US Boarder and young migrants coming up through Central America. As Lesley pointed out before, this is a classic example. The reason that they are overwhelming young men coming in is because in their home countries they are the most vulnerable to recruitment by the gangs; by the [maras]; by whatever&rsquo;s going on in their home country. When they arrive at the boarder they are the most threatening category of migrant who arrive. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: So young migrant men are seen as a threat, while they are the ones in many ways are extremely vulnerable in their home country. When they arrive in a new country they are seen as inherently dangerous while they are actually fleeing from something dangerous back home. This happens just because of their gender; because they&rsquo;re men. I asked Lesley if there&rsquo;s any specific examples of this. Lesley Pruitt: Well one of the examples that we used in our paper and that you see common in foreign policy - going back to this youth bulge idea which we&rsquo;re critical of. We&rsquo;ve got colleagues who have written about how, quote unquote, military age males; young men are routinely excluded from civilian death counts for example, by the US. You&rsquo;ve seen this phrase used in the news in recent years; we use an example in our paper from a military guy who in Fox News was using this phrase saying no military age males should be allowed in; he said that&rsquo;s a Trojan horse. It was like, we have to protect our country and to do that we cannot let any young men in. It sort of equated that if you were a young man and you&rsquo;re in this age, you&rsquo;re inherently a danger and threat. We have to keep that - and we see that discourse being really common in popular eyes. It&rsquo;s sort of drawing on this demographic difference in this migration about how it is disproportionately young and male; that people are leveraging that to these political ends. It&rsquo;s coming up loads and loads of times in the media. I think really different to some previous reports and different contexts where refugees were often referred to as women and children, which was used to shorthand innocent. In this way is being used to shorthand dangerous. Both of those are oversimplifications and need to be rethought. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: The news is important to look at when it comes to this stereotype gender discourse as well. Helen and Lesley start their article with looking at what happened when the image of Syrian boy Alan Kurdi went viral in the news. Lesley Pruitt: You may remember Alan Kurdi was this small child - a toddler - a Syrian who was fleeing and his family hoped to be able to migrate to Canada. Which at the time, policy wise was very unlikely that that would be possible but they had family there. That was their hope and their intention. This child drowned at sea and washed up onto shore. The picture was taken and that picture went viral. First there was the reaction where there was this global sense of somebody has to do something. There are actually policies changes around that. I think that&rsquo;s been credited in a variety of ways of changing the Canadian government at the time, which was the perceived or the intended host country I guess for this family, did change policy to make it more open and did intake more Syrian refugees. You had the opening of the boarders in Germany; you had these various reactions. Then also within this very short period of time that you had these outlets putting these things like these cartoons saying - using this child&rsquo;s image to say, well eventually he would have done this, so we have to keep these men out. That for us was this sort of problematic - was like, how does that sentiment in the press; or how does that sentiment in the public shift so quickly from, oh this is a huge problem we have to do something about it to this is a huge problem and we have to keep everybody out. We&rsquo;re interested in what is the language; what are the narratives. For us we saw there was this real common dynamic that the way that that worked was through saying - focusing on these demographics around this being young men and referring back again and again to how young men must be dangerous. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: That was Lesley Pruitt and Helen Berents. Thank you so much for listening to this episode to Peace and Gender. My name is Andrea Thiis-Evensen and this podcast was produced for Monash Gender, Peace and Security and Mojo News. Music: "Solitude" by Broke for free &ndash; &nbsp;<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1541726370743000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHibsS7voAmCEgh7tZyM68bsG1jhg">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License</a> Artwork: Shayla RanceSee <a href="https://omnystudio.com/listener">omnystudio.com/listener</a> for privacy information.

Behind the stereotypes of young migrants

Andrea Thiis-Evensen meets Dr Claire Duncanson, a senior lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh, who talks about her studies of military masculinities, and the importance of looking at the political economy of building peace. 

TRANSCRIPT

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Hey, my name is Andrea Thiis-Evensen, and welcome to Peace and Gender, a podcast about the people behind the research on gender, peace, and security. Who are they and why do they research these issues?

Claire Duncanson: You know, there is a real temptation to talk about women as being an alternative to men. The kind of idea, oh, well if women were in charge then we wouldn't have so many wars.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: In this episode, you will meet Claire Duncanson.

Claire Duncanson:  I'm visiting here from the University of Edinburgh. I am a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Today, Claire will be talking about her studies on masculinities in British militaries and her focus on women and the political economy of building peace. In this episode, I am trying to figure out if there is a link between peace and gender.

[Music playing]

Claire started with a degree in Politics, Philosophy, and History. Then she did a Master in Peace Studies. After this, she started thinking about her PhD.

Claire Duncanson: I knew I wanted to combine my interests in gender and feminism with international development, human rights and international politics. I suppose initially I was thinking I would do something about the impact of international interventions, war, humanitarian intervention on women. But at the same time, I was aware that the world didn't necessarily need another white middle-class feminist going into war zones to try and tell that story. There were lots.

So, at the time - this was early-2000s - there were lots of the so-called new wars from the 1990s, lots of researching coming out of them about the gendered aspects but written by feminists from those parts of the world, which made more sense to me. So, I thought rather than do that, I would try and focus on the masculinities of those who were doing the intervention. You know, the masculinities of the interveners.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Claire decided to study changing masculinities in the British military.

Claire Duncanson: So, I was particularly interested in the question of whether militarised masculinities change when militaries and their operational environment changes. So, as militaries turn to focus, as many have, onto peace operations, peace support, humanitarian intervention, then what kind of impact does that have on militarised masculinities? Because for a long time the archetypal military masculinity has been associated with combat and force, the idea that war makes men and men make war. That has been thought to be one of the factors that have enabled recruitment of men to the military. You know, it's a chance to prove your toughness and your manhood.

So, I was really - yeah, in my work on the British military, in particular, it was really interesting, I think, that when you - so I did some interviews, some focus groups, but also spent a lot of time reading the autobiographies of British soldiers and military doctrine and training material. It seemed to me that when militaries are focused more on peace support in some ways soldiers find that very frustrating and emasculating. It's like this isn't why we joined up. We wanted to be the tough guys and yet we're tasked with doing this peace support stuff. Quite a lot of explicit reflection on how this was emasculating.

At the same time, that wasn't the only discourse you can see. You could also see a discourse where soldiers and the British military, in general, were constructing peacekeeping or peacebuilding as manly activity in the sense that anyone could be the tough guy but actually, it takes a real superior masculinity to be good at this peace support stuff. You need to be touch but also show restraint. You need to also have the kind of intelligence and communication skills, so it involves a bigger range of skills. I think in those defences of the peacekeeping role you saw this attempt to carve out maybe a superior military masculinity.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Claire argued that military masculinities have changed over the years and a new form of hegemonic masculinity has been created called the peace-builder masculinity. But this new emerging peace-builder masculinity that may sound very progressive brought with it some problems.

Claire Duncanson: Sometimes in the construction of this peacekeeper masculinity or peace-builder masculinity there are other problems because what tends - what you tend to notice is that those masculinities are constructed by subordinating the masculinities of other men. So, the western peacekeeping masculinity is advanced and civilised and humanitarian, the bearer of these civilizational goods because the Iraqi or Afghan or Balkan warlord is a - resembles the traditional masculinity of the kind of barbaric hoards that don't know how to control their emotions. They only know how to fight.

So, although there is - so, there is this tension. Although in some ways it seemed like this is quite progressive, this peace-builder masculinity, on the other hand, it's constructed through a kind of neo-colonial, racist discourse that really is problematic.

So, that was my main finding in the research on military masculinity. Yeah, complicated.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: So, why is it important to study militaries and masculinities?

Claire Duncanson: The traditional military masculinities - I think lots of feminists have been correct to point out that this has been one of the underpinning dynamics that makes war more likely. So, the perpetuation of the war system is caused by this mutually reinforcing dynamic between militarism and masculinity. So, it's really crucial that feminists pay attention to gender, the gender order that underpins war and militarism. So, that's why initially I was excited by evidence that, yeah, we are seeing a change in military masculinities. You know, that's, as you say, what you might think would be progressive.

Yet the situation is a lot more complex than that. Like so much with feminism, it's a case of with every step forward, potentially there is backlash and there is complexity and it's very - you know, progress doesn't happen in that linear way. But that doesn't mean we need to always be sceptical or pessimistic because I think as well as the - finding that, yes, often a peace-builder masculinity would be constructed in relation to a subordinate hypermasculine, belligerent, backward other, I think there are also cases where you see masculinities being constructed in ways that maybe are more progressive.

I guess the general answer is that you need to pay attention to shifts in the gender order, shifts in the constructions of masculinity and femininity, because traditionally they have been so important in perpetuating militarism and violence and war.

[Music playing]

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Listening to Claire talk about her studies on gender and militaries, I started thinking about my own experience as a woman trying out for the military myself when I was 18. I was met with a lot of stereotypical comments such as why would you try out for the military, you're a girl. Or do you think you are strong enough to be in the military? So, although we have come a long way, there are still a lot of stereotypes surrounding genders and militaries. But is there a link between peace and gender?

Claire Duncanson: So, I don't think there is a natural connection between women and peace. There is nothing inherent or innate to women that makes them more peaceful. You know, there is a real temptation to talk about women as being an alternative to men. The kind of idea, oh, well if women were in charge then we wouldn't have so many wars. But it's actually probably not that helpful because it reinforces those stereotypes that women are innately more peaceful, that women are inherently more likely to compromise, and so on and so forth, that it actually can undermine women's ability to be taken seriously in public life.

So, that's one problem. But even, I suppose, phrasing it as there is a connection between gender equality and peace can be problematic because, I guess, there are lots of different definitions of gender equality and we see a fair bit of research that tries to prove this kind of causal connection between - if a society is more gender equal then it will be more peaceful. But it's quite hard to prove these causal connections because what is the measure you're going to use for gender equality and what is the definition you are going to use for peace?

You know, those - the research that draws those conclusions, I think, is useful but I don’t think it's all that feminists should be focused on because we can't always reduce gender equality and peace to the kind of hard and fast definitions that make it possible to prove causal connections.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen:  Claire argued that there have been changes in the diversity of militaries over the last years when it comes to women and LGBTQI people. But once again, with positive progressive changes, new problems come to light.

Claire Duncanson: I can say some things, I suppose, about the question and the debate of whether, with the increase of more women in the military and with changing policies around diversity, around equal opportunity, around inclusion - not just of women but of LGBT personnel - that there are definitely changes. But, as I was saying before in the context of something else, those changes are not linear. You know, you are not seeing an uncomplicated tale of progress.

Certainly, in militaries like the US and the UK, where you've seen the lifting of the combat exclusion and you have seen a whole bunch of policies around recruitment, retention - so efforts to make lives better for military women - that the results of that are hugely complex because we don't tend to see a drop in rates of sexual harassment and violence. So, that indicates either that the climate is changing such that women are able to report those things, so that might be one explanation, or - and I think probably both these things are true - you are also seeing a backlash.

As you see things get better for women in the military in some ways, you are also then getting the reaction of those who are having their privilege disrupted. So, you're seeing a violent backlash as well.

There is definitely change happening, but whether one could say we're seeing real progress towards militaries being a happy and fulfilling career option for women and LGBT personnel, it's not as simple as that. Yeah.

Andrea: Claire's focus has shifted from masculinities to a different issue regarding gender and war, which is women's economic empowerment.

Claire Duncanson: I think, as I mentioned, the Women, Peace and Security Agenda is hugely inspiring and there has been so much positive about it, but the focus has very much been on the protection of women and girls in armed conflict from egregious crimes, particularly sexual violence. There has been secondary attention to trying to increase the participation of women in peace processes. These two things are massively important, but it seemed to me that that meant there were huge questions that were being ignored or marginalised in the agenda because, obviously, sexual violence isn't the only harm that can be done to women in war.

Sometimes, when people have spoken to women in war zones they might talk about the fact that they have lost their livelihood, that they have lost their shelter, that their children have been taken from them, that they have lost their husband - there are so many gendered harms in war.

I am particularly interested in the material dimension. In the way that it's often women's economic security that has been jeopardised and undermined. How it's that poverty and exclusion that can be just so devastating. Because that's so mundane, in some ways, it's not so exciting an issue to focus on. It's not as dramatic to talk about lack of access to food, lack of access to water, but these are the really gruelling things that make life impossible.

So, I am really interested in how we can construct, in the post-war context, economies that would make life - that would work for women and for all, instead of an economic model that really just increases the wealth and power of the one per cent at the expense of the 99.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: As I have mentioned in previous episodes, many people have a life project in their academic world, and so does Claire.

Claire Duncanson: My academic life project would be to try and relink the feminists who focus on international security with feminists that focus on political economy because I think it was one of the inspiring things about feminist international relations, when the first scholars started carving out this field of feminist international relations, was seeing them as being interconnected. Seeing security as having to involve economic security as well as physical security.

So, to me, it's a shame that those fields have become somewhat separated. I don't want to exaggerate that, but somewhat separated, such that feminists interested in the Women, Peace and Security Agenda don't often pay attention to economics, and feminists who are interested in, for example, the global financial crisis, don't always pay attention to conflict-affected areas. So, trying to bring those back together, I think, is really important if we're to see social justice and improvement in the prosperity and security of women.

[Music playing]

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: That was Claire Duncanson. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Peace and Gender. My name is Andrea Thiis-Evenson and this podcast was produced for Monash Gender, Peace and Security and Mojo News.

Music: "Solitude" by Broke for free –  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License

Artwork: Shayla Rance

 

 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen meets <a href="http://www.monashgps.org/claire-duncanson">Dr Claire Duncanson</a>, a senior lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh, who talks about her studies of military masculinities, and the importance of looking at the political economy of building peace.&nbsp; TRANSCRIPT Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Hey, my name is Andrea Thiis-Evensen, and welcome to Peace and Gender, a podcast about the people behind the research on gender, peace, and security. Who are they and why do they research these issues? Claire Duncanson: You know, there is a real temptation to talk about women as being an alternative to men. The kind of idea, oh, well if women were in charge then we wouldn't have so many wars. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: In this episode, you will meet Claire Duncanson. Claire Duncanson: &nbsp;I'm visiting here from the University of Edinburgh. I am a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Today, Claire will be talking about her studies on masculinities in British militaries and her focus on women and the political economy of building peace. In this episode, I am trying to figure out if there is a link between peace and gender. [Music playing] Claire started with a degree in Politics, Philosophy, and History. Then she did a Master in Peace Studies. After this, she started thinking about her PhD. Claire Duncanson: I knew I wanted to combine my interests in gender and feminism with international development, human rights and international politics. I suppose initially I was thinking I would do something about the impact of international interventions, war, humanitarian intervention on women. But at the same time, I was aware that the world didn't necessarily need another white middle-class feminist going into war zones to try and tell that story. There were lots. So, at the time - this was early-2000s - there were lots of the so-called new wars from the 1990s, lots of researching coming out of them about the gendered aspects but written by feminists from those parts of the world, which made more sense to me. So, I thought rather than do that, I would try and focus on the masculinities of those who were doing the intervention. You know, the masculinities of the interveners. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Claire decided to study changing masculinities in the British military. Claire Duncanson: So, I was particularly interested in the question of whether militarised masculinities change when militaries and their operational environment changes. So, as militaries turn to focus, as many have, onto peace operations, peace support, humanitarian intervention, then what kind of impact does that have on militarised masculinities? Because for a long time the archetypal military masculinity has been associated with combat and force, the idea that war makes men and men make war. That has been thought to be one of the factors that have enabled recruitment of men to the military. You know, it's a chance to prove your toughness and your manhood. So, I was really - yeah, in my work on the British military, in particular, it was really interesting, I think, that when you - so I did some interviews, some focus groups, but also spent a lot of time reading the autobiographies of British soldiers and military doctrine and training material. It seemed to me that when militaries are focused more on peace support in some ways soldiers find that very frustrating and emasculating. It's like this isn't why we joined up. We wanted to be the tough guys and yet we're tasked with doing this peace support stuff. Quite a lot of explicit reflection on how this was emasculating. At the same time, that wasn't the only discourse you can see. You could also see a discourse where soldiers and the British military, in general, were constructing peacekeeping or peacebuilding as manly activity in the sense that anyone could be the tough guy but actually, it takes a real superior masculinity to be good at this peace support stuff. You need to be touch but also show restraint. You need to also have the kind of intelligence and communication skills, so it involves a bigger range of skills. I think in those defences of the peacekeeping role you saw this attempt to carve out maybe a superior military masculinity. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Claire argued that military masculinities have changed over the years and a new form of hegemonic masculinity has been created called the peace-builder masculinity. But this new emerging peace-builder masculinity that may sound very progressive brought with it some problems. Claire Duncanson: Sometimes in the construction of this peacekeeper masculinity or peace-builder masculinity there are other problems because what tends - what you tend to notice is that those masculinities are constructed by subordinating the masculinities of other men. So, the western peacekeeping masculinity is advanced and civilised and humanitarian, the bearer of these civilizational goods because the Iraqi or Afghan or Balkan warlord is a - resembles the traditional masculinity of the kind of barbaric hoards that don't know how to control their emotions. They only know how to fight. So, although there is - so, there is this tension. Although in some ways it seemed like this is quite progressive, this peace-builder masculinity, on the other hand, it's constructed through a kind of neo-colonial, racist discourse that really is problematic. So, that was my main finding in the research on military masculinity. Yeah, complicated. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: So, why is it important to study militaries and masculinities? Claire Duncanson: The traditional military masculinities - I think lots of feminists have been correct to point out that this has been one of the underpinning dynamics that makes war more likely. So, the perpetuation of the war system is caused by this mutually reinforcing dynamic between militarism and masculinity. So, it's really crucial that feminists pay attention to gender, the gender order that underpins war and militarism. So, that's why initially I was excited by evidence that, yeah, we are seeing a change in military masculinities. You know, that's, as you say, what you might think would be progressive. Yet the situation is a lot more complex than that. Like so much with feminism, it's a case of with every step forward, potentially there is backlash and there is complexity and it's very - you know, progress doesn't happen in that linear way. But that doesn't mean we need to always be sceptical or pessimistic because I think as well as the - finding that, yes, often a peace-builder masculinity would be constructed in relation to a subordinate hypermasculine, belligerent, backward other, I think there are also cases where you see masculinities being constructed in ways that maybe are more progressive. I guess the general answer is that you need to pay attention to shifts in the gender order, shifts in the constructions of masculinity and femininity, because traditionally they have been so important in perpetuating militarism and violence and war. [Music playing] Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Listening to Claire talk about her studies on gender and militaries, I started thinking about my own experience as a woman trying out for the military myself when I was 18. I was met with a lot of stereotypical comments such as why would you try out for the military, you're a girl. Or do you think you are strong enough to be in the military? So, although we have come a long way, there are still a lot of stereotypes surrounding genders and militaries. But is there a link between peace and gender? Claire Duncanson: So, I don't think there is a natural connection between women and peace. There is nothing inherent or innate to women that makes them more peaceful. You know, there is a real temptation to talk about women as being an alternative to men. The kind of idea, oh, well if women were in charge then we wouldn't have so many wars. But it's actually probably not that helpful because it reinforces those stereotypes that women are innately more peaceful, that women are inherently more likely to compromise, and so on and so forth, that it actually can undermine women's ability to be taken seriously in public life. So, that's one problem. But even, I suppose, phrasing it as there is a connection between gender equality and peace can be problematic because, I guess, there are lots of different definitions of gender equality and we see a fair bit of research that tries to prove this kind of causal connection between - if a society is more gender equal then it will be more peaceful. But it's quite hard to prove these causal connections because what is the measure you're going to use for gender equality and what is the definition you are going to use for peace? You know, those - the research that draws those conclusions, I think, is useful but I don&rsquo;t think it's all that feminists should be focused on because we can't always reduce gender equality and peace to the kind of hard and fast definitions that make it possible to prove causal connections. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: &nbsp;Claire argued that there have been changes in the diversity of militaries over the last years when it comes to women and LGBTQI people. But once again, with positive progressive changes, new problems come to light. Claire Duncanson: I can say some things, I suppose, about the question and the debate of whether, with the increase of more women in the military and with changing policies around diversity, around equal opportunity, around inclusion - not just of women but of LGBT personnel - that there are definitely changes. But, as I was saying before in the context of something else, those changes are not linear. You know, you are not seeing an uncomplicated tale of progress. Certainly, in militaries like the US and the UK, where you've seen the lifting of the combat exclusion and you have seen a whole bunch of policies around recruitment, retention - so efforts to make lives better for military women - that the results of that are hugely complex because we don't tend to see a drop in rates of sexual harassment and violence. So, that indicates either that the climate is changing such that women are able to report those things, so that might be one explanation, or - and I think probably both these things are true - you are also seeing a backlash. As you see things get better for women in the military in some ways, you are also then getting the reaction of those who are having their privilege disrupted. So, you're seeing a violent backlash as well. There is definitely change happening, but whether one could say we're seeing real progress towards militaries being a happy and fulfilling career option for women and LGBT personnel, it's not as simple as that. Yeah. Andrea: Claire's focus has shifted from masculinities to a different issue regarding gender and war, which is women's economic empowerment. Claire Duncanson: I think, as I mentioned, the Women, Peace and Security Agenda is hugely inspiring and there has been so much positive about it, but the focus has very much been on the protection of women and girls in armed conflict from egregious crimes, particularly sexual violence. There has been secondary attention to trying to increase the participation of women in peace processes. These two things are massively important, but it seemed to me that that meant there were huge questions that were being ignored or marginalised in the agenda because, obviously, sexual violence isn't the only harm that can be done to women in war. Sometimes, when people have spoken to women in war zones they might talk about the fact that they have lost their livelihood, that they have lost their shelter, that their children have been taken from them, that they have lost their husband - there are so many gendered harms in war. I am particularly interested in the material dimension. In the way that it's often women's economic security that has been jeopardised and undermined. How it's that poverty and exclusion that can be just so devastating. Because that's so mundane, in some ways, it's not so exciting an issue to focus on. It's not as dramatic to talk about lack of access to food, lack of access to water, but these are the really gruelling things that make life impossible. So, I am really interested in how we can construct, in the post-war context, economies that would make life - that would work for women and for all, instead of an economic model that really just increases the wealth and power of the one per cent at the expense of the 99. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: As I have mentioned in previous episodes, many people have a life project in their academic world, and so does Claire. Claire Duncanson: My academic life project would be to try and relink the feminists who focus on international security with feminists that focus on political economy because I think it was one of the inspiring things about feminist international relations, when the first scholars started carving out this field of feminist international relations, was seeing them as being interconnected. Seeing security as having to involve economic security as well as physical security. So, to me, it's a shame that those fields have become somewhat separated. I don't want to exaggerate that, but somewhat separated, such that feminists interested in the Women, Peace and Security Agenda don't often pay attention to economics, and feminists who are interested in, for example, the global financial crisis, don't always pay attention to conflict-affected areas. So, trying to bring those back together, I think, is really important if we're to see social justice and improvement in the prosperity and security of women. [Music playing] Andrea Thiis-Evensen: That was Claire Duncanson. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Peace and Gender. My name is Andrea Thiis-Evenson and this podcast was produced for Monash Gender, Peace and Security and Mojo News. Music: "Solitude" by Broke for free &ndash; &nbsp;<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1541726370743000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHibsS7voAmCEgh7tZyM68bsG1jhg">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License</a> Artwork: Shayla Rance &nbsp; &nbsp;See <a href="https://omnystudio.com/listener">omnystudio.com/listener</a> for privacy information.

Military masculinities

In this episode, Andrea Thiis-Evensen meets April Robinson and Tatjana Bosevska, who  talk about their research project looking at prejudice-motivated crimes towards Muslim women in Australia today. 

TRANSCRIPT

Andrea Thiis-Evensen:  Hey my name is Andrea Thiis-Evensen and welcome to Peace and Gender, the podcast about the people behind the research on gender, peace, and security. In each episode, I will meet up with new people coming from all around the world, who specialise in gender, peace and security. In this podcast, I'm trying to not only get a better understanding of the studies, but also the people behind the papers and research and projects. Who are they? Why do they research these issues?

April Robinson: My name is April Robinson.

Tatjana Bosevska:  My name is Tatjana Bosevska. Talking is not my strong point.

[Laughter]

Andrea Thiis-Evensen:  That's okay.

Tatjana Bosevska: I've been put on the spot.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen:  April Robinson and Tatjana Bosevska met while studying international community development. April is an interfaith research and network developer at the Uniting Church and Tatjana recently completed her Masters in Gender and Development. In this episode, they will be talking about their research project that looks at prejudice-motivated crimes towards Muslim women in Australia today. First, I wanted to know, when did April and Tatjana start studying these issues? Here is April's story.

April Robinson: I started studying when I was mature-aged student. I'd had my second child and I'd had an epiphany that I actually had a brain and wanted to use it. It was an incredible moment. I never thought I was academically inclined until I'd had my second child. I really wanted to do something more. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I'd started off in Politics and Psychology, because I really was interested in those two areas. I did a winter subject in Indigenous Studies and some of my classmates were doing something called Community Development. I'd never heard of it before. I was a complete novice, so I switched to it and I have never looked back. It's been an incredible degree and I've met the most amazing people. My peers taught me just as much as my teachers did.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: What about Tatjana?

Tatjana Bosevska:  I initially started studying International Community Development. It wasn't until I was given the opportunity to do my first internship in a woman's rights organisation in Thailand that I realised that what I wanted to do was gender and development, more specifically. Being around grassroots women's organisations and various social movements, I knew that once I came back and once I finished my International Community Development degree that I just wanted to specialise in gender. I just progressed and did my Master's in gender, specifically.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: When April did her honours degree on the Australian identity, she realised something that led her to the project she's working on today.

April Robinson: I've never really felt like I've fitted in and I'm saying that as a white Australian, who is a few generations Australian. I've never had overt - I've never had any racism. I've never been in any racist situations myself, but I've seen it a lot. I thought that if I didn't feel like I fit in, into a very white Australia, how does it feel for other people who have overt racist situations occurring to them every single day? I wanted to explore that area and what it means to have a national identity and a sense of belonging within your country.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Their project, Resilient Women Against Prejudice-Motivated Crimes, focus on Muslim women in Australia today.

April Robinson: The reason we focus on Muslim women is because Muslim women can be - if they're wearing a hijab, or a scarf, or a veil - they can be explicit in their religiosity. There's a lot of fear around Islam at the moment. There wasn't a lot of empirical evidence around the violence that happened to women. I would continuously hear these stories, being in the role - in my job. Every time I would speak to someone, I would hear these stories, and I heard them in a way that it was normalised for people.

The project began to raise awareness of these issues. The project is coming from a church. We're a Christian church organisation, but it's shaped by Muslim women. Muslim women are on the steering committee. I just want to be very upfront about that. I'm very aware of my own positionality, being a non-Muslim woman and not colonising this space but having it shaped and led by the people are affected by the issue. 

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: The project started four years ago, looking at the violence towards Muslim women in the public sphere. The focus has changed over the last year.

April Robinson: In the last few years, we've narrowed this down to the problems around reporting such violence - the issues within the police that exist and the issues within the community that exist. For example, there's a lot of ambiguity around what is a reportable crime - the terminology, prejudice-motivated crime. What the heck is prejudice-motivated crime? It's a very ambiguous term. This is the issue that we've narrowed it down to focus on in the last year of this project.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Tatjana joined the project in October 2017. She works on putting together all the data that April has collected from Muslim women over the last four years.

Tatjana Bosevska: Using the data and the stories to facilitate referral and reporting tool that we're hoping to put together. That will enable victims of prejudice motivated crime to be able to have more information, know where to report, know where they can seek services if they need support. We're undertaking semi-interviews at the moment - in-depth interviews, drawing more stories and more in-depth stories, particularly around issues of resilience, looking at how Muslim women in the community are responding to the violence that's being targeted toward them.

April Robinson: Sorry, I just have to add how amazing Tatjana is. Her job was huge. I had years and years of people's stories and data that I'd collected in the forums that we had done. They were just sitting on the shelf. I hadn't been able to do much with it, just being the only person working consistently on the project. Tat has come together and she's analysed this data. She's put it into a cohesive narrative. On top of that, she is also looking at the legal ramifications and the policing ramifications around prejudice-motivated crimes. She's been amazing. She sells herself short…      

Tatjana Bosevska: [Laughs]

April Robinson:  …and she shouldn't.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Why is the issue of prejudice crimes important to look at today?

April Robinson:  I'm in this bubble for so much of my time that I forget that other people don't realise that racism actually happens. Until I go out and I speak about my work, and I get hit with questions like, does it really happen that often? I ride the trains. I don't see anything happening. Why don't women just take off their headscarf and then they won't have a problem? Stuff like that.

 The fact that I get those questions very often when I'm speaking to people really goes to show that this research and this project is incredibly important to shine a light on what's actually happening - what's happening with these people, the incidents that they go through but also the structures that exist that enable this type of violence to be perpetuated.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: April and Tatjana both feel that the issue of prejudice crimes is important to talk about for many reasons.

April Robinson: Physical attacks on Muslim women are often not recognised because they tend to be invisible. It can be everything from just micro-aggression behaviour of other people - so, micro-aggressive behaviour of other people - to outright discrimination and criminal behaviour.

 What I've found when listening to women who are telling their stories, not only does no one seem to see it around, when it’s happening in the public, but they're also with their children as well, a lot of the times. There's not a lot of women who are going to face up to an aggressor when they've got their children there. Their first thought is to protect their children and to just get away from this aggressor. Another problem is that it does happen, like I said, on a micro-level. It can be anything from being ignored in a shop to not being able to get a job because you have a Muslim-sounding name or you wear the hijab.

I was just speaking to someone today who spoke of a friend who is a hairdresser and wears a hijab and couldn't get a job. She took it off and surprise, surprise, she got a job. These stories are just across the board but they're also invisible. There's not a lot of people who are speaking about it. There are people who are speaking about it but there's not a lot of people who are listening to these stories and taking them into account as something that actually affects people and needs to be addressed.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: After I moved to Australia, I've met many people who have multicultural backgrounds. A thing that often comes up in conversations is the feeling of otherness. My friends were born in Australia and, like many other people, they sometimes feel like they're seen as different just because of where their families are from. Tatjana herself knows this feeling.

Tatjana Bosevska: I think many migrants have a similar story. They experience similar narratives. They feel in a similar way about knowing that they're different in this country. We're reminded of it. Whether or not you're Muslim, whether you're from an Asian background, Chinese, or from India or from - I'm from Macedonia. Growing up, I was called a wog. It was just what we were called. It was normalised. I was told to go back to where you came from. I think, hearing those narratives, for me, 20 years on, just cements why it’s so important that we shine a light wherever we can, to say that this is still going on. It's no longer acceptable.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: April and Tatjana are working on a tool that will make it easier to report prejudice-motivated crimes. A part of this project has been to look at how the police force deals with prejudice-motivated crimes, as Tatjana goes on to explain.

Tatjana Bosevska: Story after story, we heard repeatedly. Comments we heard repeatedly was, what was the point in actually reporting to the police? A very - I think - interesting aspect that also came up was prejudice within the police force, as well. Women would feel re-victimised, going in to actually make a report. A lot of the stories and the literature - I mean, even when you hear police speak - a lot of the onus of the responsibility to actually do something about this is placed on victims. I think what this project has taught us is that offering people a space, actually, to share their stories casts a light back onto the structures that enable this violence to happen in the first place. It's forced us to look at the media. It's forced us to look at Victoria Police. It's forced us to look at our government policies and narratives. It's not just Muslim women that are affected. You can expand it to broader context, where you're involving other racial ethnic minorities. It's enabled us to actually look at a broader picture and I think that's what we're hoping, with the tool, that we can actually provide people with a resource. There's a place for someone who's subjected to prejudice-motivated violence to go.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen:  April tells me more about the stories that she's heard over the last four years.

April Robinson:  Over the last three to four year, I would have spoken to hundreds of women. I've heard so many stories. I can tell you a few of them. One woman told me about someone trying to set her hijab on fire from the back, when she was walking down the street. I've heard multiple stories of items being thrown into car windows, when women are driving with their children in there and abusive racist taunts being also delivered with that object thrown in the window.

I've heard so many stories of women being spat on, their children being spat on. There are so many different elements to this and to racism and to prejudice that exist. I, as - not even as an Australian, but I, as a human being, will not stand for this type of behaviour, whether it be racism or sexism or ableism or anything, in the place where I live. If I'm in a position, which I am lucky enough to be in a position for the place that I work in. If I'm in a position to try and mitigate or try and help this in any way, then that's what I'll be doing.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: That was April Robinson and Tatjana Bosevska. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Peace and Gender. My name is Andrea Thiis-Evensen and this podcast was produced for Monash Gender, Peace, and Security, and Mojo News.

Music: "Solitude" by Broke for free –  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License

Artwork: Shayla Rance

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode, Andrea Thiis-Evensen meets April Robinson and Tatjana Bosevska, who &nbsp;talk about their research project looking at prejudice-motivated crimes towards Muslim women in Australia today. TRANSCRIPT Andrea Thiis-Evensen: &nbsp;Hey my name is Andrea Thiis-Evensen and welcome to Peace and Gender, the podcast about the people behind the research on gender, peace, and security. In each episode, I will meet up with new people coming from all around the world, who specialise in gender, peace and security. In this podcast, I'm trying to not only get a better understanding of the studies, but also the people behind the papers and research and projects. Who are they? Why do they research these issues? April Robinson: My name is April Robinson. Tatjana Bosevska: &nbsp;My name is Tatjana Bosevska. Talking is not my strong point. [Laughter] Andrea Thiis-Evensen: &nbsp;That's okay. Tatjana Bosevska: I've been put on the spot. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: &nbsp;April Robinson and Tatjana Bosevska met while studying international community development. April is an interfaith research and network developer at the Uniting Church and Tatjana recently completed her Masters in Gender and Development. In this episode, they will be talking about their research project that looks at prejudice-motivated crimes towards Muslim women in Australia today. First, I wanted to know, when did April and Tatjana start studying these issues? Here is April's story. April Robinson: I started studying when I was mature-aged student. I'd had my second child and I'd had an epiphany that I actually had a brain and wanted to use it. It was an incredible moment. I never thought I was academically inclined until I'd had my second child. I really wanted to do something more. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I'd started off in Politics and Psychology, because I really was interested in those two areas. I did a winter subject in Indigenous Studies and some of my classmates were doing something called Community Development. I'd never heard of it before. I was a complete novice, so I switched to it and I have never looked back. It's been an incredible degree and I've met the most amazing people. My peers taught me just as much as my teachers did. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: What about Tatjana? Tatjana Bosevska: &nbsp;I initially started studying International Community Development. It wasn't until I was given the opportunity to do my first internship in a woman's rights organisation in Thailand that I realised that what I wanted to do was gender and development, more specifically. Being around grassroots women's organisations and various social movements, I knew that once I came back and once I finished my International Community Development degree that I just wanted to specialise in gender. I just progressed and did my Master's in gender, specifically. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: When April did her honours degree on the Australian identity, she realised something that led her to the project she's working on today. April Robinson: I've never really felt like I've fitted in and I'm saying that as a white Australian, who is a few generations Australian. I've never had overt - I've never had any racism. I've never been in any racist situations myself, but I've seen it a lot. I thought that if I didn't feel like I fit in, into a very white Australia, how does it feel for other people who have overt racist situations occurring to them every single day? I wanted to explore that area and what it means to have a national identity and a sense of belonging within your country. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Their project, Resilient Women Against Prejudice-Motivated Crimes, focus on Muslim women in Australia today. April Robinson: The reason we focus on Muslim women is because Muslim women can be - if they're wearing a hijab, or a scarf, or a veil - they can be explicit in their religiosity. There's a lot of fear around Islam at the moment. There wasn't a lot of empirical evidence around the violence that happened to women. I would continuously hear these stories, being in the role - in my job. Every time I would speak to someone, I would hear these stories, and I heard them in a way that it was normalised for people. The project began to raise awareness of these issues. The project is coming from a church. We're a Christian church organisation, but it's shaped by Muslim women. Muslim women are on the steering committee. I just want to be very upfront about that. I'm very aware of my own positionality, being a non-Muslim woman and not colonising this space but having it shaped and led by the people are affected by the issue.&nbsp; Andrea Thiis-Evensen: The project started four years ago, looking at the violence towards Muslim women in the public sphere. The focus has changed over the last year. April Robinson: In the last few years, we've narrowed this down to the problems around reporting such violence - the issues within the police that exist and the issues within the community that exist. For example, there's a lot of ambiguity around what is a reportable crime - the terminology, prejudice-motivated crime. What the heck is prejudice-motivated crime? It's a very ambiguous term. This is the issue that we've narrowed it down to focus on in the last year of this project. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Tatjana joined the project in October 2017. She works on putting together all the data that April has collected from Muslim women over the last four years. Tatjana Bosevska: Using the data and the stories to facilitate referral and reporting tool that we're hoping to put together. That will enable victims of prejudice motivated crime to be able to have more information, know where to report, know where they can seek services if they need support. We're undertaking semi-interviews at the moment - in-depth interviews, drawing more stories and more in-depth stories, particularly around issues of resilience, looking at how Muslim women in the community are responding to the violence that's being targeted toward them. April Robinson: Sorry, I just have to add how amazing Tatjana is. Her job was huge. I had years and years of people's stories and data that I'd collected in the forums that we had done. They were just sitting on the shelf. I hadn't been able to do much with it, just being the only person working consistently on the project. Tat has come together and she's analysed this data. She's put it into a cohesive narrative. On top of that, she is also looking at the legal ramifications and the policing ramifications around prejudice-motivated crimes. She's been amazing. She sells herself short&hellip;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Tatjana Bosevska: [Laughs] April Robinson: &nbsp;&hellip;and she shouldn't. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Why is the issue of prejudice crimes important to look at today? April Robinson: &nbsp;I'm in this bubble for so much of my time that I forget that other people don't realise that racism actually happens. Until I go out and I speak about my work, and I get hit with questions like, does it really happen that often? I ride the trains. I don't see anything happening. Why don't women just take off their headscarf and then they won't have a problem? Stuff like that. &nbsp;The fact that I get those questions very often when I'm speaking to people really goes to show that this research and this project is incredibly important to shine a light on what's actually happening - what's happening with these people, the incidents that they go through but also the structures that exist that enable this type of violence to be perpetuated. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: April and Tatjana both feel that the issue of prejudice crimes is important to talk about for many reasons. April Robinson: Physical attacks on Muslim women are often not recognised because they tend to be invisible. It can be everything from just micro-aggression behaviour of other people - so, micro-aggressive behaviour of other people - to outright discrimination and criminal behaviour. &nbsp;What I've found when listening to women who are telling their stories, not only does no one seem to see it around, when it&rsquo;s happening in the public, but they're also with their children as well, a lot of the times. There's not a lot of women who are going to face up to an aggressor when they've got their children there. Their first thought is to protect their children and to just get away from this aggressor. Another problem is that it does happen, like I said, on a micro-level. It can be anything from being ignored in a shop to not being able to get a job because you have a Muslim-sounding name or you wear the hijab. I was just speaking to someone today who spoke of a friend who is a hairdresser and wears a hijab and couldn't get a job. She took it off and surprise, surprise, she got a job. These stories are just across the board but they're also invisible. There's not a lot of people who are speaking about it. There are people who are speaking about it but there's not a lot of people who are listening to these stories and taking them into account as something that actually affects people and needs to be addressed. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: After I moved to Australia, I've met many people who have multicultural backgrounds. A thing that often comes up in conversations is the feeling of otherness. My friends were born in Australia and, like many other people, they sometimes feel like they're seen as different just because of where their families are from. Tatjana herself knows this feeling. Tatjana Bosevska: I think many migrants have a similar story. They experience similar narratives. They feel in a similar way about knowing that they're different in this country. We're reminded of it. Whether or not you're Muslim, whether you're from an Asian background, Chinese, or from India or from - I'm from Macedonia. Growing up, I was called a wog. It was just what we were called. It was normalised. I was told to go back to where you came from. I think, hearing those narratives, for me, 20 years on, just cements why it&rsquo;s so important that we shine a light wherever we can, to say that this is still going on. It's no longer acceptable. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: April and Tatjana are working on a tool that will make it easier to report prejudice-motivated crimes. A part of this project has been to look at how the police force deals with prejudice-motivated crimes, as Tatjana goes on to explain. Tatjana Bosevska: Story after story, we heard repeatedly. Comments we heard repeatedly was, what was the point in actually reporting to the police? A very - I think - interesting aspect that also came up was prejudice within the police force, as well. Women would feel re-victimised, going in to actually make a report. A lot of the stories and the literature - I mean, even when you hear police speak - a lot of the onus of the responsibility to actually do something about this is placed on victims. I think what this project has taught us is that offering people a space, actually, to share their stories casts a light back onto the structures that enable this violence to happen in the first place. It's forced us to look at the media. It's forced us to look at Victoria Police. It's forced us to look at our government policies and narratives. It's not just Muslim women that are affected. You can expand it to broader context, where you're involving other racial ethnic minorities. It's enabled us to actually look at a broader picture and I think that's what we're hoping, with the tool, that we can actually provide people with a resource. There's a place for someone who's subjected to prejudice-motivated violence to go. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: &nbsp;April tells me more about the stories that she's heard over the last four years. April Robinson: &nbsp;Over the last three to four year, I would have spoken to hundreds of women. I've heard so many stories. I can tell you a few of them. One woman told me about someone trying to set her hijab on fire from the back, when she was walking down the street. I've heard multiple stories of items being thrown into car windows, when women are driving with their children in there and abusive racist taunts being also delivered with that object thrown in the window. I've heard so many stories of women being spat on, their children being spat on. There are so many different elements to this and to racism and to prejudice that exist. I, as - not even as an Australian, but I, as a human being, will not stand for this type of behaviour, whether it be racism or sexism or ableism or anything, in the place where I live. If I'm in a position, which I am lucky enough to be in a position for the place that I work in. If I'm in a position to try and mitigate or try and help this in any way, then that's what I'll be doing. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: That was April Robinson and Tatjana Bosevska. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Peace and Gender. My name is Andrea Thiis-Evensen and this podcast was produced for Monash Gender, Peace, and Security, and Mojo News. Music: "Solitude" by Broke for free &ndash; &nbsp;<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/" target="_blank" rel="license noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1541726370743000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHibsS7voAmCEgh7tZyM68bsG1jhg">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License</a> Artwork: Shayla RanceSee <a href="https://omnystudio.com/listener">omnystudio.com/listener</a> for privacy information.

Crimes against Muslim women in Australia

Peace and Gender is a podcast about the people behind research and action on gender, peace and security.  It is produced and presented by Monash journalism student Andrea Thiis-Evenson, and is a collaboration between Mojo News at Monash University's School of Media Film and Journalism and Monash Gender, Peace and Security (GPS) a group of policy and community engaged scholars whose research is focused in this area. The podcast is recorded and produced in the Monash Media Lab.

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