There are claims emerging from the Democratic Republic of Congo that the rebel M23 movement is raping and looting. M23 vehemently deny the claims, with an unidentified colonel stating: "We are Christian. We have a big fear of God. We pray. It doesn't make sense to kill and rape and loot. We are here for the cause."

Denials aside, the fact remains that rape has been used as a weapon of war in the Congo for many, many years, with women’s bodies becoming a battleground on which to exert terror, control and compliance.

Below is an excerpt from Anneke Van Woudenberg’s chapter in The Unfinished Revolution: Voices from the Global Fight for Women's Rights, her chapter is titled ‘Confronting Rape as a Weapon of War in the Democratic Republic of Congo.’

During my twelve years of working in this war-torn country, my colleagues at Human Rights Watch and I have recorded thousands of stories of sexual violence and other brutal attacks on civilians. Scores of notebooks line the shelves of my office, their pages filled with one horrifying story after another. Sexual violence has reached extraordinary levels in Congo. There are no exact statistics since collecting data in a war zone is exceedingly difficult, but the UN estimates that at least two hundred thousand women and girls have been raped since 1998, though most UN officials say they believe the number is much higher. In April 2010, the UN 130 Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict labeled Congo “the rape capital of the world.”

A study published in the American Journal of Public Health in May 2011 found that four hundred thousand women and girls ages fifteen to forty-nine were raped in a twelve-month period in 2006 and 2007. Its authors state that their findings only “represent a conservative estimate of the true prevalence of sexual violence” since it excludes younger and older victims, and many women are reluctant to report rape. If we suppose the number of rapes were the same for the previous and subsequent years (and it is possible they are much higher since levels of conflict were more intense in other years), the total number of women raped in Congo could be well over 2 million. Conflict has been the single most important contributor to Congo’s rape epidemic. While sexual violence certainly existed before the outbreak of war, two consecutive wars—the first from 1996 to 1997 followed by a second war from 1998 to 2003—significantly altered the scale of sexual violence in Congo. Since the official end of Congo’s second war, conflict has continued in eastern parts of the country. The wars and the continued fighting drew in armies from neighboring countries and spawned dozens of Congolese armed groups. Nearly all fighting factions claimed they were defending local populations or working to install democracy and the rule of law. But in reality soldiers and combatants exploited Congo’s immense mineral wealth and preyed on civilians. An estimated 5 million people have died since 1998, the vast majority due to the lack of food or access to medical services, making Congo’s war the deadliest in the world since World War II.

Anneke Van Woudenberg is the senior researcher for the Democratic Republic of Congo in Human Rights Watch’s Africa Division.

It’s that time of year again – when advertisers and retailers clamour for your attention and urge you to BUY, BUY, BUY – NOW, NOW, NOW! Expect sale stampedes in shopping centres, garish email alerts offering discounts, sex-sells billboard mentality and rampant gender-stereotyping when it comes to toy advertising.

Last year we started what will now be a Spinifex blogging tradition – offering you sexploitation-free, fair-trade, eco-friendly and thoughtful gift ideas. And for a list of what not to buy, we turn to Collective Shout for their ‘Cross em’ off your Xmas list’ list.

You'll find that a few of the retailers listed this year also appeared in last year's blog - but we've added quite a few new names too, because we want to constantly build on this list. And we always welcome your input - so if you have suggestions for us, please feel free to leave them in the comments section below! 

And while below is a list of mostly material gift-buying options, we can’t stress enough that it’s creating memories and just spending time together that should top any wish list these holidays.

Stay Safe & Seasons Greetings

From,

The Spinifex Team

 
                                           ☼☼☼ 

WRAPPING PAPER

Evergreen Wrap: wrap gifts, carry shopping, or wear as a scarf!


CHRISTMAS CARDS

Earth Greeting Cards: for every card pack, they donate $1.65 to Trees For Life to plant a native tree. Printed carbon neutral in Australia with vegetable based ink on 100% post-consumer recycled paper

FOR A BIT OF EVERYTHING

New Internationalist ethical shop

Cancer Council 

Oxfam Australia 

Friends of the Earth 


KIDS’ CLOTHES, TOYS & OTHER GIFT IDEAS 

Every Little Girl: 10% of their profits go to projects that enable little girls in developing countries to access health care, education and protection. 

Eternal Creation

The Singing Whale 

Windmill Educational 

The Friendship Tree 

New Moon Girls: we can't stress enough how much we love this magazine! It's by girls, for girls and 100% advertising-free. This is your anti-Dolly/Girlfriend. Not a diet tip, boy drama column or modelling contest in sight!  


BEAUTY PRODUCTS 

Aesop 

Jurlique 

Mukti Botanicals

Perfect Potion


BOOKS

Readings Bookshop

Mary Ryan's Books

Avid Reader

Gleebooks

Fullers Bookshop 

IPG: for our friends in America & Canada!  

Spinifex Press: Whether you're looking to buy something for friends, family or yourself, a book is a gift from the heart. Behind the scenes a great deal of care and passion goes into choosing the books that we eventually publish. Our books have focused on and emerged from, Palestine, Africa, the Middle East, India, the Philippines, the UK and Australia. From the political to the humorous, from the heartbreaking to the fantastical, whatever your taste our 2012 list has something for everyone.

From now until Dec 21 - Spinifex is offering free freight on all Australian & International orders!

                           

CLOTHES & ACCESSORIES

Sevenly: for every purchase, they give $7 to that week’s chosen charity. Some of the represented charities have included; ‘All Girls Allowed’, revealing the injustice of China’s one-child-policy. ‘Laura’s House’, which supports women and children affected by domestic abuse. And ‘Generosity Water’, dedicated to ending the clean water crisis in developing countries. 

People Tree 

Step Up

Out of Print: very cool clothing designs using vintage book covers. For each product sold, one book is donated to a community in need through partner charity; Books For Africa.

Blue Caravan 

Seed Heritage 

A Skulk of Foxes 

Adie + George

TOMS shoes: we love this brand! For every pair of shoes you purchase, TOMS will give a pair of shoes to a child in need.

Pippa Small Jewellery:this designer is involved with the first Fair Trade gold mine in Bolivia, a mine that works to ensure that the health and safety of miners are a priority and the protection of the environment .

Bibico 

 
FOR THE HOME

Albatross

HolySheet! 

Bird Textile 

Biome 

Signed & Numbered:great art gallery with affordable prints! A wonderful collection of Australian and International artists produce small runs of limited edition prints, sold out of this little shop (also available to buy online!) 


ALTERNATIVE GIVING

Indigenous Literacy Foundation: aims to raise literacy levels and improve the lives and opportunities of Indigenous children living in remote and isolated regions.

Benjamin Andrew Footpath Library: aims to make books more accessible to the homeless and disadvantaged members of our society, change our attitudes to these people and encourage literacy.

Collective Shout: a grassroots campaigns movement mobilising and equipping individuals and groups to target corporations, advertisers, marketers and media which objectify women and sexualise girls to sell products and services.

Half the Sky Movement: cutting across platforms to ignite the change needed to put an end to the oppression of women and girls worldwide.

Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media: the only research-based organization working within the media and entertainment industry to engage, educate, and influence the need for gender balance, reducing stereotyping and creating a wide variety of female characters for entertainment targeting children 11 and under.

Camfed: the Campaign for Female Education is an international non-governmental, non-profit organization dedicated to eradicating poverty in Africa through the education of girls and the empowerment of young women

When you have buried us               told your story

ours does not end              we stream
into the unfinished           the unbegun
the possible

Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language, W.W. Norton &Co., New York, 1978

An overcast spring day in Melbourne is nothing unusual. Having a former Prime Minister attend a packed venue and address an adoring audience is, however, a little bit out of the ordinary.

I was one of those who attended the ‘Credit Where Credit Is Due’ event on 10^th November at the Melbourne Town Hall. In an event organised by the Victorian Women’s Trust (VWT), an appreciative crowd not only had the opportunity of hearing Julia Gillard speak, but also VWT CEO Mary Crooks, former independent federal MP Tony Windsor, and former Victorian Attorney-General Rob Hulls.

The majority were middle-aged women, and they found countless reasons to clap during the afternoon. The standing ovations, however, were mostly reserved for Julia herself.

This was not an uneducated crowd. It was not clapping for the sake of it or mindless fervour. What was it? Well, it was a celebration of women and a thank-you—not just for Julia’s significant achievements, like the national disability insurance scheme, but a thank-you for being the groundbreaker, the women who took the heat for all of us. To hope that the venom she was subjected to will perhaps make it easier for our daughters and grand-daughters to forge their paths with less antagonism.

Throughout his speech, Tony Windsor made a point of addressing Julia as ‘Prime Minister.’ He praised her calm demeanour while in office, saying she always had a stability of mind and purpose and never once raised her voice.  He utilised his favourite saying, ‘The world is run by those who turn up.’

Julia always turned up.

Politics can be a ruthless business and Rob Hulls stated that women are clearly judged by different criteria than men, often unfairly. The reality of political achievement can also be less lofty that we imagine: “Sometimes the most you can achieve is to stand in the way of something worse.”

Then Julia herself spoke. She was professional of course; did not indulge in any pettiness, was not tempted to utter any words of revenge or spite. No, she articulated and defended her government’s record with warmth and humour. She quavered slightly once twice. Once was when talking about Sophie, the beautiful girl with Down’s Syndrome whose photograph of Julia at the time of the introduction of the national disability insurance scheme will stand the test of time. The second was when she referred to her friend and cancer survivor Jodie who, she said, put everything in perspective.

And why were we there, I wondered, this group of largely female faces? To acknowledge Julia and say thank-you. To say sorry we weren’t vocal enough during her term to drown out the relentless hounding she received from sections of the media. A communal coming together for those of us who had been rudely shocked by the treatment of her. We listened respectfully as Julia laid out her record, but it was not just what she said but the space that she has occupied in our minds that was important.

Julia as PM not only represented achievement and success for all women, but it was a catalyst for the emergence of vile misogynistic voices that had lain quietly, simmering under the surface. These voices that I had imagined only have existed on the fringes of society and were scorned by the overwhelming majority, actually erupted from the most respectable quarters. Suddenly misogyny was everywhere and since Julia was a politician, apparently anything was fair game.

The revolution for women’s rights over the last fifty years that many of us felt had fundamentally changed our society was more tenuous than we imagined. It was, as Julia put it in her speech, just a “brittle veneer” covering a darker truth.  And as she said, there are lacerations for women when they break through the glass ceiling.

Those who had nursed misogyny silently and quietly inside of themselves, had in the last three years the example of Tony Abbott to emulate ; to allow them to vent every sexist rant that had ever occupied their minds. Yet in the midst of this misogynistic storm lay another contradiction: the faux offence taken by those who were outraged, not at misogyny per se, which became an accepted part of public discourse, but at the fact that they may be accused of being a misogynist. Forget the sexism: it is being called sexist that we hate! Suddenly, the crime was not misogyny but to accuse someone of it.

Yet despite this, Julia maintained that the ups were worth the downs; the positives greater than the negatives. It was a sentiment echoed by Mary Crooks who said, “Don’t get mad, get elected!” Yet some hesitancy remains: as Julia said, there are uncomfortable truths we haven’t found yet. One uncomfortable truth that has been determined is that our aim for women to be able to occupy positions of leadership without resentment and without the possibility of the advancement being undone is not yet achieved.

At the conclusion of the Town Hall event, I asked a companion how she felt about it. “Hope,” she said. Which was true. But as my friend Cath pointed out, hope is too passive and implies waiting around for change. It is like wishing for Santa to bring you a present but not knowing if he will. In Cath’s view, the event was about strength: finding it and keeping it. The strength to keep going. The strength to move on. The strength inside yourself.

Mary Crooks in closing said that the quest for equality and respect for women and girls is unstoppable. However, we are far less progressed along that path than we had imagined. Now that unpleasant reality has hit us square in the face, we, like Julia, must seize our moments in history and make of them what we can.

We waited over a century for the first female Prime Minister of Australia. Now it is time to celebrate the possible—and make it happen.

It sounded similar to a chant that Harvard Law School lecturer, Diane L. Rosenfeld, recounted in her Big Porn Inc chapter, ‘Who Are You Calling a ‘Ho’?: Challenging the Porn Culture on Campus’. The chant she refers to in her opening paragraph went; “NO MEANS YES! YES MEANS ANAL!”. It was being yelled by 45 men, members and pledges of the Yale chapter of the Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE) fraternity as they surrounded a female dorm. The event was captured on film and widely circulated on YouTube.

Actually, a lot of Rosenfeld’s chapter sounds familiar, and striking similarities can be made between the goings on at St. John’s College and practically every university campus across America.

Many articles concerned with the St. John’s students’ (called “Johnsmen”) unpunished behaviour have outlined their crimes; from smashed windows and faeces left everywhere to beds barricading the corridors and fires being lit. But some of the most disturbing accounts of the “Johnsmen’s” loutish behaviour include their treatment of female students; “… a crude message and a third-year female student's phone number that was graffitied onto the circular driveway in front of the college tower.” Every second Friday, the student committee has decreed that all Johnsmen not speak to any female students - who are known as ''Jets'': the term is an acronym for ''just excuse the slag''. And of course, the trigger which brought all of this behaviour to light and nearly took a young girl’s life. Eight months ago a female student collapsed and was taken to hospital after an initiation ritual, which had her on her knees and drinking an alcoholic cocktail laced with shampoo. She was being punished, you see, for walking forwards instead of backwards along the fourth-floor Polding Wing corridor known as the ''Men's Gallery''. The girl’s father stressed at the time that she was not being ‘forced’ to drink the lethal beverage, that there was a degree of conformity and trust involved. Also, he said: “She's kneeling down there and, as I'm sure you can imagine, it's an intimidating environment at that particular point.”

The behaviour of the St. John’s students is appalling in its own right – even more so when you think that that young girl nearly died eight months ago, but it was only last week that Archbishop of Sydney, George Pell, decided it’s time to step in. But what’s really, truly frightening is the ingrained misogyny of this institution, and what this ‘Lord of the Flies’ type behaviour is teaching these young men.

Diane L. Rosenfeld tries to find the root cause of this misogynistic, ritualistic behaviour that seems to breed amongst men in close-knit, collegiate communities. To some extent, Rosenfeld says, this behavior is a by-product of all-male spaces. ‘Fraternities and locker rooms, as key spaces for male bonding, are important places to examine, as attitudes towards women and gay men are often the basis of jokes and male bonding activities. The privacy men have in these spaces allows them to talk uninterrupted and without consequence, ensuring unimpeded transmission of misogynist attitudes.’ She says this exclusivity (such as that of the prestigious St. John’s College) “confers on them an elite status that is easily translated into entitlement, and because the cement of their brotherhood is intense, and intensely sexualized, bonding”

So how do we stop this behavior? More importantly, how do we stop it from escalating? The answer is clear to anyone who has been following the St. John’s headlines, and Rosenfeld concurs: “a strong incentive for schools to take a proactive role in preventing sexual violence before it happens by focusing on preventative education” Sadly, as anyone who has been following the St. John’s story will also know the school has not had a firm hand in derailing the awful behaviour of its students. Alecia Simmonds for DailyLife even asked: “why are the old boys’ networks so intent on protecting criminality?”

Rosenfeld continues, saying; “Schools play an enormous role in creating campus community, and have a great deal of power to shape norms based on sexual respect.” The only question that remains is; will the current St. John’s culture be cut off before it can do any more damage? Or will these boys be left to fall into a new routine that will dictate the rest of their privileged, male lives – one in which they never suffer the consequences of their loutish, misogynistic behaviour?