What we can do

A couple of people respon­ded to my last post (either on the post or else­where) with direct ques­tions about how we can stop these things from occur­ring or with expres­sions of helplessness.

I’ve decided my best response is to make a new post here for max­imum visibility.

What can we do? There are a few things. I’m sure you can come up with others.

• Join an organ­isa­tion like Amnesty Inter­na­tional and use our letter-writ­ing power to write to those in author­ity in coun­tries where these prac­tices are legal, pres­sur­ing them to change their laws or release indi­vidu­als. This may seem small, but we have evid­ence that it has worked over the years. The most famous recent case was Amina Lawal, a Nigerian woman whose death sen­tence was over­turned thanks to public con­dem­na­tion. You can join Amnesty’s cam­paign to end ston­ing in Iran.
• If you live in a coun­try where a fun­da­ment­al­ist minor­ity is attempt­ing to intro­duce Shar­i’a law under the guise of mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism, you can oppose it and pub­licly cam­paign against it. The most famous case where this suc­ceeded was the cam­paign against the Shar­i’a court in Canada. Des­pite the rhet­oric, such courts are desired only by a small, non-elec­ted minor­ity of pat­ri­archs who do not rep­res­ent the whole Muslim com­munity. Ask why the courts mostly want to impose the laws about women’s beha­viour but aren’t inter­ested in enfor­cing hand ampu­ta­tions for thiev­ery, a crime com­mit­ted mostly by men.
• On an inter­na­tional level, we can cam­paign for the vari­ous types of inter­na­tional rela­tions tac­tics to be employed. While I’m obvi­ously not in sup­port of the clas­sic mil­it­ary tac­tics, and while I’m aware that many of the other tac­tics only func­tion due to being backed by the threat of mil­it­ary action, I still think these are useful.
• Eco­nomic sanc­tions are com­plic­ated: they are often seen to punish the popu­lace as much as the gov­ern­ment, but they worked to end apartheid in South Africa.
• Dip­lomacy is another option, so we can cam­paign our own gov­ern­ments to issue a con­dem­na­tion of such beha­viour and laws. We can refuse to accept dip­lo­matic visits from such coun­tries until they comply with inter­na­tional treat­ies on human rights that con­demn such laws.
• We can cam­paign to alter our refugee laws so that being a woman in a coun­try like that is classed as a cat­egory to claim refugee status and get some acknow­ledge­ment that it really is a risk to your life just to be a woman in some countries.
• Talk­ing about inter­na­tional human rights, we can join inter­na­tional fem­in­ist efforts to change CEDAW so that it does­n’t just have an “optional pro­tocol” for com­plaints but has all the force of other human rights doc­u­ments with the Inter­na­tional Crim­inal Court as the appro­pri­ate venue for pro­sec­tion of perpetrators.

One of these days, I’m going to get an actual job doing this stuff. It really frus­trates me that so many of my applic­a­tions are over­looked because (I’m pretty sure) they hire from their volun­teer cohort and I have a sense I’m too old for the entry pos­i­tions and not exper­i­enced enough in the field for the senior pos­i­tions. I’m abso­lutely going to keep trying and if any of you work in those areas and know of pos­i­tions going, please, please let me know. I’ll be start­ing to apply for roles like this again in around June 2009.

In the mean­time, I’ll be writ­ing a letter to KRudd asking him to issue a con­dem­na­tion of this event.

Any other ideas?