International Women’s Day in the Global Community

Taking a look at a Necessary Celebration Around the World

On Thursday, March 8, women from Iqaluit to Jakarta will be celebrating International Women’s Day. Beginning in 1911 and held annually ever since, International Women’s Day celebrates women’s achievements while simultaneously advocating and mobilizing for change and movement away from gender-based discrimination. Every year on March 8, governments, businesses, women’s organizations and other entities join forces in order to honour the day with speeches, celebrations, rallies, and other events.     

This year’s theme is called #PressforProgress, developed as a response to the Weinstein Scandal, #metoo and #TimesUp movements, and a growing public discussion of the gender wage gap. The World Economic Forum Gender Gap Report found that it will take 217 years to close the gender gap around the world, a number we will not and cannot accept. Therefore, #PressforProgress urges not only women, but entire communities, to unite in action against gender disparity, making this not only a women’s issue, but a human one as well.

The United Nation’s Headquarters will be holding an observation of International Women’s Day at their headquarters in New York City. Speakers to discuss women’s issues include the UN Secretary-General, UN Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Reese Witherspoon, and Danai Gurira. The UN has chosen to focus on the activism of rural women around the world, and what they do to transform and improve the lives of women in their communities.

Canada’s theme for International Women’s Day is #MyFeminism, where Canadian women are encouraged to state what feminism means to them. Celebrations include marches across the country in major cities such as Toronto, Ottawa, and Vancouver. Calgary is also holding a UNITE! benefit concert to celebrate women who have paved the way for equality.

London, England is hosting a variety of women-centric events including talks, workshops, and film screenings. There is also a Women of the World Festival taking place from March 7-11, where female speakers will be working to tackle the question of why gender equality is taking so long . An organization known as Kitrinos Healthcare is also hosting an event discussing how their sewing and knitting club in refugee camps helps to inspire women living there. The products these refugee women have made will also be for sale, helping to prepare refugee women for life beyond the camps.

India’s focus for this year’s International Women’s Day is sexual harassment in the work place. In order to target this, many large corporations are hosting workshops to discuss and learn how to prevent sexual harassment. Last year, thousands of women protested in many cities across the country as a response to the nation’s rampant sexual assault problem. Protests of a similar nature are expected to occur again. Meanwhile, a company in Nigeria, known as The Enterprise Development Centre, is focusing on small and medium businesses and their female entrepreneurs by setting up networking events for women. In many countries such as Russia, Armenia, Cambodia and Cuba, International Women’s Day is a national holiday and it is tradition for women to both give and receive yellow flowers. In China, women are given a half day off work to honour the holiday. In Italy, mimosa blossoms are given to women as a part of the celebration.

In previous years, the most common celebration of this holiday was a protest for something that has been identified as a priority to address. Women in Georgia have advocated against the glass ceiling in the workplace; women in Bangladesh rallied to demand for safety, while women in the Philippines protested the lack of food. Protests and rallies, though not always advertised in advance, are expected to dominate the celebratory activities on March 8. as there is still more work to be done. It is important to note that the experiences and struggles of women around the world are not homogenous. While some women are focused on equal pay, some are focused on the right to safe and adequate health care. However, the overarching factor that unites women on this day, and is the reason for this holiday, is the fact that all women experience inequality, and all women will no longer be complacent.

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Making it visible: why we made our sexualized violence issue

This issue focuses entirely on sexualized violence and the ways in which it pervades our campus, our community, and our culture. Timed to align with International Women’s Week, this issue’s publication has proven even timelier in light of last week’s acquittal of Halifax taxi driver Bassam Al-Rawi. Judge Gregory Lenehan’s ruling is yet another reminder of how far society is from taking sexualized violence seriously.

These sixteen pages feature testimonies, analyses, statistics, and news stories all pertaining to the prevalence and normalization of sexualized violence. We didn’t have to look far for these stories: even among our thirty-person news team, this theme hit close to home for many.

Society at large has seemed to accept sexualized violence as part and parcel of reality, and accordingly such behaviours remain invisible. Abuses of power, acts of harassment and violence, manipulation and silencing are normalized to the extent that it can be difficult to even label them as problematic. Experiences of violence are minimized (“are you sure you didn’t lead them on?”), and many who speak out are humiliated, repudiated, and silenced.

“We cannot afford to shy away from this conversation, no matter how uncomfortable it may be.”

Our tendency to conceive of sexualized violence as a clearly defined set of criminal charges further distorts our relationship with its underlying cultural causes. Sexual assault is a physical manifestation of a series of beliefs that have been culturally and socially constructed and accepted. Addressing cases of sexual assault and harassment is certainly challenging enough, but limiting the scope to these extreme demonstrations of entitlement is ultimately a disservice. We need to move beyond the ‘convenient’ lens of a stranger in the bushes and come to terms with the full complexity of the only violent crime in Canada that is not declining.

We cannot afford to shy away from this conversation, no matter how uncomfortable it may be. In assembling this issue, there have certainly been moments where we felt uncomfortable, whether by sharing personal experiences, learning something new, or by trying to deconstruct concepts such as hook-up culture, revictimization, “tradition” – the list goes on. These are hard questions to ask, and even harder questions to answer.

But rather than dismissing these matters due to a lack of clarity, we need to make a concerted effort to unpack the plurality of ways in which sexualized violence is reinforced in our society - through our legal systems, socialization, gender binaries, pop culture, heteronormativity, etc. – and address them directly.

When sexualized violence is so often made to be invisible, the first task at hand is to bring these elements to the fore, call them what they are, and make them visible. This is the central focus of our issue. We do not have all the answers, but we are intimately aware of the need to have these hard conversations.

We acknowledge the important work the university has done this year in establishing StFX’s first sexual violence policy, as well as the developments made by the Bringing in the Bystander program. Yet as the administration has done well to admit, the policy is only a first step. We still have a long way to go in shifting the narrative from one that normalizes and silences experiences of sexualized violence to one that does not tolerate the exploitation or violation of another person’s bodily integrity.

Our world is one where being sexually assaulted is either widely ignored or is considered shameful, where the victim/survivor is made to feel as though they did something wrong in being violated. How victim/survivors are made to feel is the foundation of the culture surrounding sexualized violence, and it is only once we fully address this fundamentally twisted stigma that we can start dismantling the remaining toxic mentalities that pervade our society.

The response to acts of sexualized violence must transition from shame and indifference to outrage, and this outrage must in turn be harnessed into action. While broad social change over time is ultimately required, it starts with speaking truth to power and being vigilant in rendering sexualized violence truly unacceptable through action as well as words.

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