Leading  Issues Journal  

An Alternative to War 

By Former U.S. President, Jimmy Carter

"Peace is more than the absence of conflict. It encompasses democratic ideals and protection of human rights. Not only does the lack of peace often lead to poverty, it is as well one of poverty's many symptoms. Building peace and cultivating democracy prevents conflict and instability, improves governance, and strengthens the rule of law. When citizens are empowered, they use their voices to influence policy, protect human rights, and hold their governments accountable. 

Located in a 35-acre park approximately two miles east of downtown Atlanta, USA, The Carter Center's neutrality and reputation gives the Peace Programs the credibility needed to work nationally, regionally, and globally.  As a nonpartisan, nongovernmental organization with access to world leaders and expertise in mediation, negotiation, and peacebuilding, the Center helps warring parties when traditional dispute resolution methods are not effective. Governments follow "track one," or official diplomacy, while nongovernmental organizations typically pursue "track two," or unofficial diplomatic activities that directly impact the people most affected by the conflict. The Carter Center can be termed a "track 1.5" organization because it occupies a special place, a nongovernmental organization with unique access to track one levels. It can also operate in a more classical track two role, engaging in longer-term peace-building activities." (The Carter Center)

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, 39th president of the United States, is chair of The Carter Center. On 31 January Jimmy Carter released a statement entitled: An Alternative To War where he argued:

"...our government has not made a case for a preemptive military strike against Iraq, either at home or in Europe."

"We have just postponed again the promulgation of the long-awaited "road map" that the U.S. and other international leaders have drafted for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This is a festering cancer and the root cause of much of the anti-American sentiment that has evolved throughout the world."

How can the United States regain its leadership in combating the real threat of international terrorism? To view Carter's Response see: An Alternative To War By Jimmy Carter

Sponsor a Peace Statement 

An invitation to join a statement for Peace through an Australian website:  One Voice for Peace

Australian actors and directors Kerry Armstrong, Hugh Jackman, Deborra-Lee Furness, Rebecca Gibney, Vince Colosimo, Jane Hall, Fred Schepisi and Corrine Grant have been joined by many others from the arts, entertainment and media industry in a call to all Australians to join in a community call for peace. They are asking other Australians to join them in speaking out against the looming war on Iraq. The resolution reads: "We are raising our voices on New Years Day to say no to war. We are resolving to oppose the war and work for peace because we want a secure future for our families and children."

You can add your voice in support of the resolution by going to: http://www.onevoiceforpeace.org

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Pity the poor recipients of Regime Change

By Adele Horin
February 8 2003

As the United States and its willing allies move closer to an invasion of Iraq, consider the fate of Afghanistan, the last country the posse liberated from a hateful ruler. Afghanistan has slipped from the headlines in the excitement over the new adventure. But most of its 28 million people are still waiting to feel the benefits of "regime change". And they wait still for $US300 million ($507 million) of the $US1.8 billion the rich nations had promised to send by last December for reconstruction. (SMH online 8 February 03)

To read this article see: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/02/07/1044579931896.html

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PEACE NOT WAR

A Poem by Diann Rodgers-Healey

(published online SMH 18 Feb 03)

 

I hear the drums of war beating

WAR  WAR  WAR

I hear the voices of people pleading

PEACE  PEACE  PEACE

 

They say we have a democracy

And yes, we are the lucky country

So don’t ask why, unheard they remain

Our rights-filled fearful shrills for peace

 

We fear the loss of blood, so young

We fear the swell of death, so near

The loss of peace, the strength of rage

A future of divide, inequality more alive

 

But yet we teach our children

Peace. Don’t war.

Compromise negotiate mediate, never hate

Compassion understanding, never retaliate

 

So which path are we to create?

Armed with lessons from our past

Filled with respect and intellect

With relentlessness we must find

 

A bridge of peace to overcome war

A respect for humanity

An understanding of inequality

And the will power to change the roots of hatred  

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Older Women Speak Up - Violence in the Home 

Two new reports by Margaret Sargent and Jane Mears entitled " More Than Survival: Project Report One for Older Women, 2002"  and, " Survival Is Not Enough: Project Report Two for Professionals 2002" were published in October 2002.  

Both reports describe their work with older women who experience violence in the home. 

"We examine this topic of violence against older women in the home in a different way through the voices and personal experience of older women. These writings are our way of reporting back to all those who have told us their stories or have participated or helped in our work in various ways or have a special interest in this area. This is an interactive project and we look forward to hearing your opinions on our work and ideas. Please ring or write to us, and perhaps we can together achieve greater understanding and action to reduce violence against older women." Sargent, M.

Project Report one includes first-hand experiences of older women to violence within the home and is presented in a non-academic fashion, with older women being the target group. The project aimed to alter how violence against older women was understood and responded to: as a shared social problem rather than one confronting individuals. That violence against women of all ages is hidden and invisible, as well as the lack of understanding by experts and their traditional neglect of social variables in analysing violence are also examined, from a gender power relations perspective. The themes emerging from the womens stories include: the charming-outside-devil-inside husband; recognising violence; how self-esteem is undermined; living in fear; surviving and getting help; deprived of money and home; effects of drinking; violent parents; violence against children lasting effects; leaving the violence; violence through the generations; carers abused and abusing; the silence of women protects the perpetrator; changing the violent situation; and independence and empowerment. The story sessions themselves engendered a sense of empowerment for some women. 

There is no charge, but donations are  appreciated, large or small, to enable them to continue their work. The Reports can be obtained from: Older Women Speak Up, 1A Liverpool St, Bundeena, NSW 2230 Ph: Margaret 02-9523-9558, Email : msarge@zip.com.au, j.mears@ uws.edu.au and is also available online at:: More than Survival

The website which features the Reports is the Australian Domestic and Family Violence Clearinghouse. This is a national resource on issues of domestic violence and family violence. It provides a central point for the collection and dissemination of Australian domestic and family violence policy, practice and research. It aims to meet the information needs of government agencies, generalist and specialist service providers, researchers and interested members of the public. The Clearinghouse is at http://www.austdvclearinghouse.unsw.edu.au/

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National Rural Womens Secretariat (NRWS) 

The National Rural Womens Coalition (NRWC) has established the National Rural Womens Secretariat (NRWS) to encourage and support input from rural women into Federal Government policy with particular emphasis on the following themes relating to women: economic position and financial security; status and position; elimination of violence; health and well-being. 

The NRWS is funded by the Commonwealth Office of the Status of Women (OSW) and joins three other national bodies representing business women, young women and older women. The National Rural Womens Coalition includes: - Country Women's Association of Australia - Australian Local Government Women's Association - Australian Women in Agriculture - Foundation for Australian Agricultural Women - Isolated Children 's Parents Association - National Rural Health Alliance - Women's Industry Network Seafood Community - A rural Indigenous woman. 

NRWS is seeking input from a wide range of rural women on what issues are of concern to them or their organisations. It is in the process now of establishing the initial rural women's policy priorities for the Secretariat and comments received at any time will continue to inform and shape future priorities. You can provide comment as you wish or use the pro forma on the web at: http://www.faaw.org.au/nrwc/ 

Val Lang, President of  Foundation for Australian Agricultural Women is the contact for the NRWS. She can be contacted at National Rural Womens Coalition GPO Box 1634M, Melbourne Vic 3001 Toll free Ph. 1800 111 021, Ph, (ah) 03 55 962014 Fax 03 98902353 or Email admin@faaw.org.au

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New Appointment for the High Court

The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the Government's decision to appoint a fourth east coast male to the High Court came under fire on 19 December 02  from academics, jurists and Labor as being undemocratic. The Australian reported that although no one questions the awesome legal mind of new High Court judge Dyson Heydon, the Government's failure to appoint a woman to the bench drew wide criticism.  

In this article by Kim Rubenstein that was published in The Age on 20 December 02. Ms Rubenstein is a senior Lecturer in law at the University of Melbourne and currently a Senior Fulbright Scholar at Georgetown University Law Centre, Washington.  Her article highlights some key issues pertaining to the selection process for the High Court.

 To view this article see: In High Court selection, like promotes like

 

The Social Audit Cookbook

Recipes for auditing the way we connect 

By Eva Cox

Are you trying to influence social change? This cookbook is for community activists and provides a practical guide to the 'what' and 'how' of social auditing and measuring social capital.  

This cookbook aims to give you a variety of recipes for social research. It contains a broad selection of ingredients that can be used to create a research design that suits your particular needs for measuring how people are connecting in your community.

Source: communitybuildersNSW

To download the Cookbook, see:  The Social Audit Cookbook

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U.N. Election Raises Questions about Women's Health

The World Health Organization's Executive Board, meeting in Geneva, on 21 January 2003 narrowed the field of candidates for the post of WHO Director-General.

The short list of five candidates reads as follows (in alphabetical order):

• Dr Julio Frenk, Mexico's secretary of Health
• Dr Jong Wook Lee, Republic of Korea and director of WHO's Stop TB program
• Dr Pascoal Manuel Mocumbi, Mozambique's Prime Minister, a Gynecologist who puts women's health high on his agenda,
• Dr Peter Piot, of Belgium, who acts as Under Secretary-General of the U.N. and leads WHO's UNAIDS program.
• Professor Ismail Sallam, former Minister of Health and Population from Egypt

One of these five candidates will be nominated by the Board to head the Organization from July 2003 to July 2008. The nomination will take place early next week, at some time before the closure of the Board's 111th session scheduled for the end of the day on 28 January. The vote that will determine the nominee will be preceded by presentations to the Board by the candidates and time for questions and answers.

During her tenure as the first woman director-general of WHO, the United Nations agency responsible for improving the world's health, Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland re-established the organization's credibility and direction by coordinating health initiatives between developing and industrial countries. 

Alleviating poverty through improvements in people's health has been the organization's focus.  How and whether that focus--one that acknowledged that the disproportionate burden of poverty is shouldered by women--will change under new leadership is the subject of concern of women's health advocates.

"I do not believe that gender and women's health issues can be addressed in isolation from the current challenges of global health and poverty," Brundtland said in an e-mail interview. "It is a stark reality that 70 percent of the world's 1.2 billion poorest people are women. We cannot advance women's standing in society without improving their health. In other words, tackling global poverty means tackling women's issues--starting with women's health."

Think of Noura, an Egyptian girl who at 12 years old quit school to work in a rice field, says Dr. Shelley Ross, president of the Medical Women's International Association. Noura, who was interviewed by the association, married at 16, and soon became pregnant. Her husband's family couldn't afford a midwife, and because chronic schistosomiasis infection left her anaemic and small, she had a premature delivery and postpartum haemorrhaging.  Her family couldn't afford a blood transfusion, and she returned home weak yet needing to work.

The Norwegian-born Brundtland is a medical doctor and has addressed difficulties like Noura's through the Making Pregnancy Safer initiative, the goal of which is to reduce by three quarters the maternal mortality ratio by 2015. 

Brundtland's political activism began in Norway's ministry of health. She was named minister of environment in 1974 and is renowned for her seminal work on sustainable economic development. Brundtland went on to become the youngest and first female prime minister of Norway, an office she held for three terms.

Brundtland has spent nearly 40 years in public service and steps down from her position after a successful five-year term to tend to the personal rather than the political. Brundtland put women's health on the global agenda, maintaining that it must be a priority not only for "medical, nursing, and midwifery schools, but for research and funding bodies, industry, government and political leaders."

Brundtland's combination of public health vision and political savvy would serve an incoming director-general well. The candidate must work closely with developing countries and wealthy donors to implement effective health programs, especially in poor countries where need is great but resources are often slim, and shuttled elsewhere.

"Brundtland brought a whole new kind of energy and vitality to WHO, and that has implications for women's health," says Carol Bellamy, executive director of UNICEF, adding that international health workers must redouble their efforts to address grave and persistent maternal mortality. "The other key area is expanding prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission to extending the life of the mother. Vulnerability, exploitation and violence against women are giving AIDS a female face," she says. 

Workplace exploitation in factories or environmental risks such as the use of smoky, asthma-inducing cooking materials are two social determinants that may greatly impact women's health, says Michelle Hindin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Important areas for both policy and research include "women's mental health, which is not well studied in the developing world and domestic violence, which has been the focus of increasing research. Service provision for women in both these areas is really lacking," she says.

"Brundtland has been extremely brave on tobacco control," says a U.S. professional who held a senior position in the UN for many years. She addressed the high-risk group of adolescent girls, this official added, an issue that a "number of industrialized countries, including the U.S., have avoided because it's not in their economic export interests." However, this official believes that Brundtland could have done more for women. "I hoped Brundtland would have cut political caution and made more programmatic and clear women's health strategies," says this former UN official. "We need leadership that will talk courageously about women's right to health and provide programmatic guidelines rather than saying the right thing politically."

The election provides an opportunity for advocates to call for fresh priority setting on gender and health. Disaggregating data by gender will point the way to sex differences in health that need addressing, says Elaine Wolfson, president of the Global Alliance for Women's Health. "I'd like to see women's morbidity looked at as much as women's mortality, because women suffer a disparity in heart disease, osteoarthritis, and autoimmune diseases, among others," she says.

Dr. Shelley Ross, the president of Medical Women's International Association, agrees that "women's health can include diseases that are more prevalent or serious in women and that often women's health suffers from narrowness of focus, meaning that it is equated with reproduction." Health care for women should include social, emotional and cultural well-being along with biology, she says.

"Rates of HIV infection among women have surpassed rates of infection among men in sub-Saharan Africa," says sociologist Hinden, "leaving women unable to support or care for themselves and creating an orphan problem that's going to increase exponentially."

Inside the organization, Brundtland's goal was a workforce comprised equally of men and women, but such staff policies came towards the end of her tenure, and women are not equally represented among new recruits or in current leadership. WHO's new leader must address these disparities, as well as shaky employee morale.

Ross adds that a male director-general "must make a special effort to promote women's health and to appoint women to key positions in the organization," maintaining, "too much work has been done in promoting gender equality to allow the world's most important health body not to have female influence."

Source: Kathleen Nelson - WEnews correspondent New York City & WHO Media Centre

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International Year for Freshwater

2003 is the International Year for Freshwater. 

The aim of the year is to raise awareness of the importance of protecting and managing freshwater.  

"The UN General Assembly resolution proclaiming the Year was initiated by the Government of Tajikistan and supported by 148 other countries. In a message issued at the ceremony, UNESCO Director-General Koiro Matsuura said that water can be an agent of peace, rather than conflicts, and UNESCO is looking at ways that will allow this century to be one of water peace rather than water wars. By developing principles and methods to manage this resource efficiently and ethically, while respecting related ecosystems, we move a step closer to the goal of sustainable development.

One of the main events of the International Year of Freshwater (IYFW) will be the 3rd World Water Forum, to take place in Kyoto (Japan), March 16-23. The Forum is timed to coincide with World Water Day, held on March 22 each year. At the Kyoto meeting, the World Water Assessment Programme (WWAP), a collaboration between 23 UN agencies involved in freshwater and hosted by UNESCO, will present its World Water Development Report. This is the first of a planned series of reports on the state of water stress in the world, due to be published every three years. The Report identifies critical issues and problems as illustrated by in-depth case studies of selected, representative river basins. One of the aims of the Year is to reassert the UNs Millennium Declaration Goal on Water, which pledged to halve, by the year 2015, the proportion of the worlds people unable to reach, or to afford, safe drinking water and to stop the unsustainable exploitation of water resources."

Source: wateryear2003.org

You can read more about it on the UNESCO web site: http://www.unesco.org/water/iyfw2/ Environment Australia is the lead agency in Australia. There is information on the EA web site at: http://www.ea.gov.au/water/freshwater/iyf/index.html or contact Gayle Stewart on ph: 02 6274 1420 or by email gayle.stewart@ea.gov.au for information

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Nominate someone you admire!!

The EDNA awards were inaugurated in 1998 and have two aims; to provide the opportunity to nominate those women who we feel should be acknowledged, as well as an occasion to come together to celebrate what we do. The Awards honour Edna Ryan's life and work by recognising the contributions other women make in the areas she cared about. Women's Electoral Lobby NSW gives you the opportunity to honour those women who make a feminist difference.

The EDNAs are not just awards for long service (young women are certainly eligible for nomination) or only for those who are well-known. Nor are they simply a recognition of women who are successful in their field. The EDNAs are particularly for those women who have made a FEMINIST difference, ie whose activity advances the status of women: the troublemakers, the stirrers, the battlers who show extraordinary commitment and determination. 

In considering the nominations, the panel seeks specific evidence of the nominee's achievements or actions which have (1) fostered or offered opportunities for women to clarify and / or fulfill their goals, or (2) raised or discussed in the public arena issues and perspectives of particular interest to women often otherwise marginalised or denigrated.

The categories are:

• Workforce .. for improving conditions for women workers
• Government .. for feminist activity in the political sphere
• Community Activism .. for feminist activity in the community
• Media .. for consistent promotion of women's interests in the media
• Humour .. for using wit to promote women's interests
• Arts .. for creative feminism
• Mentoring .. for sharing knowledge and ideas generously with other women
• Battling .. for making it against the odds
• Education .. for a special contribution to the education of women and girls
• The Grand Stirrer .. for inciting others to challenge the status quo.

A panel of Edna's friends will review the nominations. Nominees must be comfortable with being called feminist, and must live and work in NSW or the ACT. These are the places where Edna lived and worked, and the geographic limits help to avoid potential difficulties in managing the review process. As well, we hope it will allow many women to join us on the night. The EDNAs are a way of publicising some of our achievements, and to encourage all of us (as Edna did) to keeep contributing, to keep on making a feminist difference. Details of all women awarded an EDNA will be deposited with the Jessie Street National Women's Library, and made available to the public.

Please contact the WEL office telephone (02) 9212.4374 fax (02) 9281.7492 or email welnsw@comcen.com.au for a nomination form.     

The EDNAs will be presented on Friday May 2 at the NSW Transport Club, Regent Street, Sydney (near Central Railway)

Anne Barber, Women's Electoral Lobby

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Curriculum Leadership

Curriculum Corporation have initiated a new free online journal, Curriculum Leadership, which aims to provide comprehensive coverage of issues concerning education leaders in Australia, New Zealand and the Asia-Pacific region, while also aiming for a broad international perspective. 

Curriculum Leadership aims to serve a wide audience including principals, school curriculum coordinators, system officers, curriculum developers, professional association staff, consultants, journalists, researchers and academics. The journal takes up issues, trends and debates relating to primary and secondary education. Core subject areas are curriculum policy, leadership and management, technology, the teaching profession, assessment, and the relation of education to work and to society generally. Curriculum  Leadership is published every Friday except during the Christmas and January period. Access is by registration, which is free of charge. Registered users receive an email alert each Friday to alert them as each edition is published. The site is best viewed in Internet Explorer. Volume 1 Number 1 is online now.

To access the Journal, see: http://cms.curriculum.edu.au/leader/newcms/leader_view_issue.asp 

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