Stacy Alcantara's blog

The biggest misconception that a lot of people have is that the end of a war means total peace. Most, if not all of the time, post-conflict can be one of the most trying times for the people of any country, particularly for women. Post-conflict means the restoration and the rebuilding of communities. It’s that time when many, especially women and children, struggle to get over the trauma wrought by widespread violence.

It’s sad however, how very few member states of the United Nations are actually supporting the National Action Plan, a resolution on heavily involving women in the peace building and peace keeping process. Now in its 9th year, the resolution has only managed to get the support of 16 member states and that’s not even half of the entire United Nations.

According to the United Nations, sexual violence is rampant in developing and emerging countries where poverty levels are at an all-time high and where social and economic inequity and inequality are widespread. In fact, in a World Health Organization report, 2002 alone saw nearly 150 million girls suffer the nightmare of sexual violence.

The way I see it, sexual violence is partly a product of a culture that sees women as the weaker sex. This kind of mentality is lethal considering that it legitimizes the act in the minds of some people—both men and women—and it perpetrates this kind of monstrosity.

I don’t quite see what took them so long to take this seriously. But it’s only now that the president of the Philippines signed the Magna Carta for Women. Thank heavens this little piece of paper will not just be some other piece of paper that’s debated upon over and over again in congress.

According to the National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women (NCRFW), “The Magna Carta of Women is a comprehensive women's human rights law that seeks to eliminate discrimination against women by recognizing, protecting, fulfilling and promoting the rights of Filipino women, especially those in the marginalized sectors.”

During the first few years of the Women’s Liberation Movement decades back, it wasn’t uncommon for men to be portrayed as the victimizers and the oppressors of women. In many patriarchal communities, men have often been singled out as the perpetrators of domestic violence and as the roadblocks to the path of women empowerment.

It is only more recently when developing countries like the Philippines have realized that men are not necessarily a hindrance to gender empowerment. Rather, they can be partners in empowerment and in development.

Two thousand fifteen is just half a decade away.  That means we only have five more years to make a tangible and visible change in the lives of millions of people especially those in the developing world. That means we have five New Years and Christmases more before we can completely fulfill our promise to the world’s poorest people.

It was a funny experience, really, but a point worth pondering. When we asked a group of children to describe a farmer, all of them immediately said that a farmer was a man who planted and harvested crops in a field or a farm. Naturally, the definition, although simplistic, did make sense. But the point of the matter is that none of the children ever pictured the farmer as a woman.

Empowering women who constitute the majority of the most marginalized sectors in South Asia goes beyond simply giving them positions to occupy in government. It means equipping them to be able to represent their sector effectively as they occupy seats in one of the most premier decision making bodies in their countries—the government.

Today’s global financial crisis is very much reminiscent of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis.  With the exports and labor-intensive industries being hit harder than Banda Aceh was with the tsunami that swept through its coasts, women were the most adversely affected.  This was because of the strong gender composition of many of the most vulnerable industries today.

In the Philippines, men and women may still not have achieved equality, but the condition of women in this Southeast Asian country is way better compared to that in Nepal. Whereas women in the Philippines can almost compete neck to neck with men for executive positions and plum jobs, in Nepal, many women have found it hard not just to break the glass ceiling but to actually join the paid labor force.

This incident of September 2007 was one of the worst and most apparent cases of discrimination one could think of: Mrs. Dhanwanti Devi Meghwal is Pradhan, or leader, of a block in India’s Jodhpur district. She had been elected as representative at the block level for Scheduled Caste Women. At an inaugural ceremony of a cattle fair, she was about to raise the flag, when a member of the local assembly, Mr. Babu Singh Rathore suddenly stepped forward to stop her from raising the flag. More details on page 22 of this UN End Poverty 2015 Report (pdf).

His reasons? She belonged to the group known as Dalits—one of the lowest castes in India—and she was a woman. What happened was not merely a simple case of discrimination against women. It was, in fact, a classic example of the challenge that Dalit women in the Rajasthan state of India have faced since the caste system was put in place. It was a double whammy—class discrimination and gender discrimination.