Thoughts on women...

Exploitation: "the action or fact of treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work" The exploitation of women and girls represents the ultimate outcome of multiple layers of inequality. Women and girls are more likely to be in poverty, less likely to have an education, more likely to have suffered abuse at the hands of family members. Girls who have no access to school but need to work end up with no autonomy over workplace so are more vulnerable to being exploited by 'recruiters'. They are therefore disproportionately represented in modern slavery - 99% of victims of sexual exploitation are women and girls. One of the reasons modern slavery continues to proliferate is the gendered power imbalance which is upheld by patriarchal structures globally. Culture, some religious beliefs, laws, societal norms and gender roles all contribute to this power imbalance and this is clearly demonstrated in human trafficking where women are dehumanised to the extent t...

This week I heard about the Red Chair project. The idea is that you place a red chair somewhere public and put a sign above it. It is intended to represent the women who are now missing from the world because they were murdered victims of domestic violence. Read more about the project here and download the resources you need to join in. This got me thinking about how many women and girls are not alive due to gender based violence and honestly looking at those numbers and related information is even more chilling than you'd imagine. Did you know that men's violence against women is one of the leading causes of premature death globally? In 2022, just under 89,000 women and girls were murdered due to their sex. The number of gender based murders is actually UP when the overall global murder rate is DOWN.  The Femicide Census is the only project independently collating this data. By looking at the data they can identify patterns and risk factors and this targeted information is abl...