Women’s Campaigns:

Pro Choice: Since I last blogged I have been sorting out the campaign, getting materials ready and working with Abortion Rights to make sure that our campaigns are strategic and co-ordinated. It’s going to be awesome!

The National Pro-Choice Week of Action runs from 23 – 29 October! Go to the Abortion Rights website for further information about the week of action and what students will be doing… www.abortionrights.org.uk

We will also be doing the joint Abortion Rights/NUS Women’s Campaign lobby of parliament in November, at which Women’s Committee are planning some actions!

Stop Violence Against Women:

Support is building now for the Reclaim the Night March in London on 25 November.

NUS Women’s Campaign is also leading in the planning of a cross liberation Reclaim the Night March in Manchester, planned for February 07. It’ll be awesome to the max.

Women’s Campaign will be launching our petition to call on the government to come up with an integrated strategy to combat VAW. Am just sorting it out!

Women at Work:

Due to launch next term (Jan 07), I am meeting with various people at the moment….key partners in which needs to be a high profile and change making campaign.

Coming up is my meeting with the TUC Women’s Officer. Brilliant.

I am also in the researching stages of formulating our Women at Work Charter of rights, as mandated by Women’s Conference.

Dignity. Period:

THABITHA IS COMING OVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! For anyone who has seen Thabitha Khumalo speak before, you will be ecstatic that she is on her way back to the UK for the NUS Women’s Campaign speaker tour for our priority international campaign this year Dignity. Period.

Email kat.stark@nus.org.uk to book Thabitha to speak at your Union or to find out where she is speaking at a Union near you!!!

She is in the country from 16 – 21 October 2006.

Women’s Resource Centre ‘Why Women’ Campaign:

Women’s Officers across the country can expect to be receiving their Why Women? Campaign packs asap! The Why Women? Campaign is about the fact that funding for and understanding of the Women’s Voluntary Sector is in a disasterous decline.

Because people like to think that sexism is over (and for some other reasons), people are taking funding for women’s organisations less and less seriously…..something that we are familiar with as Women’s Officers!

But I’m not talking about just the groups of women who organise International Women’s Week for their City Council (although they are massively losing out too), I’m actually talking about Rape Crisis Centres (even though the state of rape and rape conviction rates in the UK has almost never been in more crisis), Women’s Refuges, organisations who campaign for change and who work on the policy and research to make change happen for us.

Anyway, I think it’s a campaign that Women’s Officers and Groups are a part of already – simply by being a women’s organisation. I hope that people can get into this campaign!

Go to www.whywomen.org.uk to find out more.

Come to ‘Backlash: the hidden war on women in the UK’ on 1 November 2006 too!

Diversity in the Women’s Campaign:

I also wanted to let you all know about some of the other things I have been getting up to as the National Women’s Officer. 2 things in particular.

The Women’s Campaign represents and campaigns for all women. We are disabled, black, LGBT, students with caring responsibilities, in FE and HE, are mature and international. I and the Women’s Committee have it as a priority this year to make sure that we take actual steps and actions to make the Women’s Campaign as representative and diverse as possible because we only win for women when we win for all women, together.

So anyway, over the last few weeks I have marched alongside our LGBT sisters at a demo outside the Ugandan Embassy in London. We demo’d because a promenant Ugandan newspaper printed a list of names of promenant people in Uganda who are gay and now those people are being fired and arrested. UNBELIEVABLE.

I also strolled/rolled alongside our disabled sisters against benefit cuts for disabled people at Labour Party Conference in Manchester. The demo was amazing and people on the demo took it in turns to speak about their own personal experiences and reasons for objecting to some of Labour’s proposed Welfare Reforms. One man spoke and there weren’t very many people listening and then he started to say “this could be any one of you. Any one of you could lose the use of your legs. Any one of you could lose the use of your arms. Any one of you could lose your sight or your hearing. Any one of you could suffer from mental health problems….” and people really started to listen. I thought it was really inspirational and I hope that we changed some people’s minds on some things.

Comment…

Right. I have a few things to comment about…..

A man locked up for a crime he didn’t commit…

There was this guy on Newsnight a few weeks ago and he had been recently released from prison and has now been totally aquitted of the charges he was locked up for. So basically he was in jail for 3 years for a crime he did not commit. Now, don’t get me wrong….THAT IS AWFUL and totally unacceptable. However he was on Newsnight talking about how rubbish it was that he was not allowed to name his accuser etc because of anonymity laws.

Now I get why he finds this frustrating but what I found more frustrating is that Paxman and the Beeb utterly failed to put across any other viewpoint or argument! The other argument is that the rape conviction rate in this country is SO LOW (between 1% and 5% in various places in the UK) and people get let off from things SO OFTEN that what would happen if every time a man was found not guilty his accuser was outed? I’ll tell you what would happen! No-body would EVER come forward and try to get a conviction for rape!

I also felt that the whole news item really fuelled that urban myth of all those thousands of dangerous women who ‘cry rape’ etc. When in fact the reality is that a few women falsely accuse men of rape but a crap load more don’t report when they’ve been raped. Or they are too young to know how to report being raped. Or they are too scared. Or they do report it and don’t get a conviction.

I’m not saying I don’t feel for this guy but I think that the Beeb didn’t do the item justice.

Violent Porn

Again a few weeks ago, it was all over the news that new sanctions are being put in place for people who watch violent pornography. Again the news coverage of this issue was UNBELIEVABLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The woman who was being interviewed on the issue (on most channels) kept getting asked…”why should people who just watch the violent porn be convicted when it’s only a tiny minority of people who act on it?”. Now I think that when 1 in 4 women in the UK experience domestic violence, and when 45% of women in the UK have experienced sexual violence, domestic violence or stalking that it counts as a TINY MINORITY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The news pisses me off sometimes.

On a lighter note…

I’ve had a haircut. Ideal.

Over and out feministas.

Kat

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