Thoughts on women...

Read this here too on Life Church Seaford blog. When I read the bible, my eyes and heart are always drawn to the women in the text. There is so much to be learnt from them, and at Christmas, Mary's story is no different. Her story of how she came to be the mother of Jesus is told in Matthew 1:18-25, Luke 1:26-56 and Luke 2:1-40 but this is not the last we hear of her. As you would expect, as his mother, Mary was one of Jesus greatest human advocates here on earth, tending to him his whole life, confident in who she knew him to be. In this reflection I'd like to take a closer look at the character of Mary and see what we can learn from her. Early on in our journey with Mary we get an insight to who she really was. She was probably young, perhaps around 14 years old and betrothed to Joseph, a descendent of David. She was a young woman who feared God and knew the stories of her peoples ancestry. This is evidenced by her response to the angel Gabriel who appeared in her home and t...

Well. I had every intention of continuing to blog throughout the 16 days however life overtook me. Drama with my roof, steadily escalating family busyness as we barrel towards Christmas too. I wrote a blog post for my church's blog which captured many of my feelings about the challenge of the work. You can read it in situ here , and it's captured below too. **************** 25th November marked the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against women. It triggered 16 days of worldwide activism to raise awareness of the many atrocities and oppressions suffered by women and girls globally. Organisations around the world have raised their voices to shine a light not only on the darkness shrouding violence against women and girls, but also on the good work happening to ease suffering and make real and sustainable changes. If you read the recent post about the Jubilee+ social action conference, 'Standing in the Gap' ( read again here ) you will have see some of th...

A short post today. The care of pregnant women is at the core of my role as a midwife. Therefore the fact that pregnancy is a time in a woman's life when she is more likely to be affected by domestic violence is even more heart-breaking. It is both more likely to start and more likely to increase in frequency and severity. It is mind-blowing to me that this is even possible, and I am a person who is well informed and not altogether optimistic about the actions of men toward women. The consequences of violence against pregnant women include growth restricted babies, pre-term birth, haemorrhage and spontaneous abortion (miscarriage and stillbirth). The psychological impact is far reaching to women including a multitude of mental health disorders. The impact of children caught up in domestic violence include physical harm, poor self esteem, higher incidences of adverse childhood events, drug abuse in teenage, eating disorders, depression, self harm and suicide. Womens Aid published a ...

Numerous times in the Bible we see sexual violence used as a weapon of war. Women are taken as spoils of war and it's hands down one of those most uncomfortable things to read in there. One of the passages which deals with this is Deuteronomy 22:10-14. It first reads as legalising the rape of women taken captive in war. Women taken captive were to be brought into the house of the captor, then married after a month.  As abhorrent as it is to us in this era, taken in the context of the time it was revolutionary. Women were possessions (to man, not God), pawns in war, family and estate. In this scripture, men were forced to humanise the women they encountered and treat them as wives, given time to grieve, then married honourably. If they changed their minds, they couldn't be sold as slaves, only divorced as a wife with the onus being on the man as the one who dishonoured her. As with many of these ancient directives, this was a confronting law made to curb the sexual violence that...

One of the cleverest things society has managed to do is silence women on the subject of domestic abuse and violence. It has been orchestrated that women often somehow feel complicit in and shame for the abuse they have suffered. Over and over again we hear stories of the women who feel that they are to blame for their own abuse, by either causing it to happen through their own 'behaviour', or through staying with an abusive partner. Neither of these are true. The only person to blame is the perpetrator. A woman could cheat on her husband and still not deserve to be beaten. She may deserve the end of her marriage but never the end of her life. The fault lies with the abuser and the abuser alone. Women have been demonised for millennia to justify the atrocious acts of husbands over wives. Laws have been passed to keep women subjugated, some changing only as recently as the 1990s when in 1991 marital rape was finally recognised as a crime. Until then sex was considered the 'r...

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...