Blog

Zambian human rights and environmental journalist Mike Mwenda suggests we all get involved to end violence against women and children.  Weekly blog.

FEMALE genital mutilation (FGM) is one of the most gruesome horrors that millions of women carry with them every day. It involves changing or cutting female genitals and there is no medical reason to justify it. Governments, traditional leaders, the church and civil society organisations must constantly work together to end this barbaric practice that mutilates women’s bodies.

Almost every day in my work as a human rights journalist, I hear of thousands of young girls and women across the world forced to undergo the ‘cut’ against their will. At least 200 million girls and women alive today have undergone a form of FGM. If current trends continue, 15 million additional girls between ages 15 and 19 will be subjected to it by 2030.

Tragically, none will ever forget the tremendous physical pain and psychological terror. Their experience will forever remain raw and fresh.

I strongly believe that FGM should never be treated as ‘women’s issue’. It is a violation against human rights, and human rights issues are also men’s issues. We need to encourage men to protect their daughters. We must go on raising awareness of this injustice. If we can end such archaic practices, it will bring us to a peaceful world and closer to a stage of human societal development in which the rights of every person are protected.

Can you imagine what a wonderful world it would be if women had the chance to thrive, be empowered, and given the opportunity to own their bodies and their destiny?

There is also the issue of child sexual abuse.  With schools closed during the COVID-19 health crisis, this has been an increased risk - in some cases because children have spent more time on the Internet. This crisis is more likely to erode the tremendous progress many countries have made in curtailing such abuse. But determining the scale of child sexual abuse is complicated. Not only is it difficult to define abuse cross culturally, but also because of its hidden nature in many societies. 

A victim’s dependent relationship to the culprit makes it much more difficult for abuse to be reported. Even if children are able to articulate their experience and to recognise that they have been sexually abused, they fear that reporting the abuse could result in rejection by parents or guardians. In many instances, protection of the family’s reputation tends to come before protecting the rights, welfare and wellbeing of the victim.

It’s a global problem that cuts across class, religion, traditions and boundaries. I strongly believe that to address this epidemic of child sexual abuse requires a coordinated response from all societies to recognise and accept the burden rather than drafting policies that aim to minimise its impact on victims. Otherwise, like FGM, it will remain a silent scourge for generations to come.

It horrifies me that in FGM and child sexual abuse, human rights are violated every day with impunity. I look forward to a world free from injustice; a world full of love, care, protection and support for every human being. These acts of violence against women and children must concern every one of us. Together we can end them. Come on - we can do this. 

Grace Buckley, Justice & Peace Scotland’s European Rep, reflects on the many difficulties facing asylum seekers in the UK.

In the recent Conversation on Migration hosted by Justice & Peace Scotland, one of the speakers, Alex Holmes, said he had posed this question to asylum seekers he had met in Calais. 

If we were to ask the question of asylum seekers in the UK recently, the answer would be – whatever and wherever the Home Office and its accommodation providers say it is.

Asylum seekers are sent to a number of cities under the Home Office dispersal scheme. They are not given a choice about where they go, unless they can show medical grounds for wanting to be in a particular area. Scotland has 8.6%, who are mostly in Glasgow. 

Current Home Office contracts for accommodation will run until 2029 and are worth £9bn, no small amount. In Scotland the provider is Mears. Hotel/hostel accommodation is used as initial accommodation, for a maximum of 35 days, until homes can be made available. However, with the advent of lockdown under COVID, over 340 asylum seekers in Glasgow were moved out of their homes into hotels.

The reasons for the move were not clear – Mears and Home Office claimed it was for reasons of health and safety but there is a view that it was about cost.

The asylum seekers then lost the minimal financial support they had been receiving, so they couldn’t buy phone top-ups or small snacks, access public transport or save to buy clothes. They lost the small freedoms they had to live normal lives - to cook their own food, choose when to eat, do their own cleaning. New asylum seekers who have been put straight into hotels could not register with GPs from this temporary accommodation.

It is not clear what form of vulnerability assessments were made before the move, and mental health issues are rife. One man was so scared that he felt he couldn’t go into public areas of the hotel or go outside. He has now been moved to a flat in Easterhouse and thinks he is in heaven by comparison. 

Tragically there has been one suicide and also the well-publicised incident in the centre of Glasgow in which six people were stabbed and an asylum seeker shot dead. Asylum seeker support charities have reported difficulties in being allowed contact with asylum seekers in the hotels and have to phone them to come out and get food or other items.

One asylum seeker has described the current arrangements as detention in all but name. Now those coming into the UK via the English Channel are put into redundant barracks in Kent and there are concerns that this is making it difficult for supporting charities to offer advice and assistance, as well as giving anti-migrant groups a focal point for their actions.

Where we go next is not clear. 

Will costs decide when/if asylum seekers get back to dispersed accommodation or continue in hotels/hostels? Is it the government’s intention to keep new asylum seekers in detention-like conditions and away from any chance of integrating in local communities? In light of the recent denigrating and inflammatory comments of both the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister about “do-gooders” and “lefty human rights lawyers”, I for one do not feel optimistic about the future of our asylum system.

Marian Pallister, Justice & Peace vice chair and chair of Pax Christi Scotland, reflects on the ratification of the Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty.

Late on October 24, the news broke that a 50th nation had ratified the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). Those of us involved with organisations such as Justice and Peace Scotland and Pax Christi Scotland were poised to disseminate the news about this significant step in the campaign to create a nuclear free world - because with the 50th ratification, nuclear weapons became illegal. 

According to the UN, the prohibitions triggered by this 50th ratification mean nations cannot ‘develop, test, produce, acquire, possess, stockpile, use or threaten to use nuclear weapons’. 

There’s more, but I want to concentrate on this section of the Treaty, which obliges states ‘to provide adequate assistance to individuals affected by the use or testing of nuclear weapons, as well as to take necessary and appropriate measure of environmental remediation in areas under its jurisdiction or control contaminated as a result of activities related to the testing or use of nuclear weapons’.

There is an awareness of the devastation caused by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 75 years ago - the lives lost, the subsequent illnesses caused radiation fall out. We are less conscious of the nuclear testing that took place in the South Pacific in the years after world War II, destroying lives and the environment. 

But that’s why so many South Pacific countries have ratified the Treaty. 

Gerry MacPherson was stationed on Christmas Island during his National Service. I knew Gerry towards the premature end of his life. He was a fascinating man who had campaigned since his Christmas Island experience for compensation for those affected by radiation from nuclear testing.

Those tests took place on Kirimati, or Christmas Island, in the late 1950s. Gerry was there shortly afterwards. Some of the lads enjoyed a beach party with locals, who’d caught fish for the occasion. Messing about, they ran a Geiger counter over someone who’d enjoyed the fish. The reading was alarmingly high. They learned that the whole environment was affected by radiation fall out.

Gerry came home with a badly damaged pituitary gland (which controls several other hormone glands, including the thyroid and adrenals, ovaries and testicles). He couldn’t prove the damage was caused by the radiation fall out that lingered (and still lingers) on the island, but he knew too many others who developed a range of cancers and other illnesses after their postings to the South Pacific. He joined a group seeking support from a government that denied knowledge of the possible after effects of exposure to radiation. 

Mary, Gerry’s widow, says they always thought themselves lucky because unlike so many whose fertility was affected, they had a family. She says Gerry vowed he would give any compensation he received to the South Pacific islanders who had suffered so much - their health and economies shattered by those nuclear tests.

Of course, there was no compensation. But now, this treaty asks for ‘adequate assistance’ and ‘environmental remediation’.

For Gerry, for the peoples of the South Pacific, we must persuade the nine nuclear states to come on board, and all those companies making billions from manufacturing weapons of mass destruction must turn their nuclear swords into ploughshares.