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World YWCA's Podcast
World YWCA's Podcast
Episode 7: Conflict
In this episode of RiseUp! we take a deep dive into all the different forms of conflict that women experience - military, political, environmental, and domestic.
To get started, listen to Maggie Lulu, from the African Leadership Centre in South Sudan, in conversation with host, Chhavi Sachdev. Next from Yangon, our second guest, Naw Dohkalal is a World WYCA RiseUp! programme leader sharing her experiences of working under military conflict. Chhavi wraps up the discussion with Olivia Barrow, who works at the Pacific Conference of Churches, in Fiji. What are the ways that women specifically experience conflict, and how do those experiences need to be accounted for? Listen to find out …
This podcast is brought to you by the Australian Government under the RiseUp! Young Women’s Leadership and Advocacy initiative in Asia-Pacific region.
Guests: Maggie Lulu, Naw Dohkalal and Olivia Barrow
Host: Chhavi Sachdev
Team: Dr. Suchi Gaur and Nirmala Gurung at World YWCA
Podcast production: Chhavi Sachdev and the team at Sonologue: Sharad Joshi & Deepa D.
The world is on fire, but young women across the globe are busy putting out the flames and working towards peace. I am Chavisach Dev, and this is the seventh episode of Rise Up, the latest podcast from the World Wide WCA, in which I talk to women and young women leaders from many different nations about the concept and philosophies that help them choose the paths of community building that they do. We believe the stories these leaders share will provide you resources for advocacy and training, because we believe that growing feminist transformative leadership is one of the most powerful ways to effect change for this planet. In this episode, we look into what is often seen as one of the most frightening challenges that a leader faces conflict, whether it is an interpersonal disagreement or domestic abuse or militarized violence. In the face of these conflicts, how do we keep working together to build a better world?
Speaker 3:While we are working towards peaceful outcomes, there must also be some measures taken to ensure that justice prevails.
Speaker 2:That's Maggie Lulu from South Sudan. She works as a program associate at the African Leadership Centre and has worked with the World Wide WCA on the Bullet and Dove concept of peace and justice. The Bullet and Dove campaign highlights the stories of how women and young women around the world are bringing peace in communities, advocating for peaceful policies and action on ground.
Speaker 3:So that is recognizing that during peace building and peace processes that there are elements of justice that must be taken into consideration, especially for those who are in conflict affected areas.
Speaker 2:One of the forms of justice that peace processes have to account for is gender justice, and that means looking at how conflict and violence is a gendered experience, both in personal and in political situations.
Speaker 3:And I don't want to put it just within the binary of men and women, because gender is more than just that binary. Our gendered identities influence how we are violated. For women and young women and girls, and they're in these contexts of conflict. They suffer in terms of being targeted for sexual violence. They suffer in terms of sometimes being forced into early and child marriages. They suffer in terms of not being able to access health facilities or health services, you know, even structurally in terms of not being able to access, for example, water and food. You know women are mothers and they must think about how they're going to feed their children, can talk about sanitation and hygiene and how that's different for men and women.
Speaker 2:As a witness to many peace processes, Maggie has seen that when women and girls are not brought into the conversations, many needs and responses get left out. Community organizations seem to be responding to violence, but when they don't take into consideration the unique challenges that women face, they also fail to respond to those specific problems.
Speaker 3:I think when you start to think of them as vulnerable and needing protection, then you take away their agency, then you take away their ability to navigate these spaces, then you take away, kind of you know, their power and their ability to contribute meaningfully. So I think first it is addressing that idea that they don't belong in the room because that they do.
Speaker 2:Maggie holds organizations who work on peace processes responsible for making those spaces accessible to women.
Speaker 3:I often say that you have to meet them where they are. How can we go? And, instead of imposing our ideas or our ways of doing things, how can we go and find what they're doing so that, when we engage in peace building, it is more sustainable and it is responsive to the needs of all the people in the community, not just the few who make it into the room?
Speaker 2:A powerful example of what happens when women are at the table is the South Sudan Revitalized Peace Agreement signed in 2018.
Speaker 3:And through, you know, coalition building and movement building, women came together and created this coalition called South Sudan Women's Coalition.
Speaker 3:That was diverse in its makeup and diverse in terms of regional representation, but also diverse in terms of, you know, having women and young women working together, having women at the grassroots level and just ensuring that there was a lot of, you know, cohesion and reporting back in terms of what the demands women wanted, and at that time, they really just wanted, you know, to go back to a peaceful nation. But they also called, you know, for justice for the women and young women who had, who had suffered conflict related sexual violence. So what had happened within this coalition is that there was a group that went to Addis in Ethiopia for the peace talks, but they also had a technical support team that worked in the background to ensure that the women in the room had the support of, you know, the technical support team in case there were any questions or anything that they needed to refer to. There was a very important feedback loop as well, where this information was being shared and disseminated within South Sudan and, you know, within the capital, juba, but also to women within the grassroots.
Speaker 2:And this coalition of women was able to ensure there were more gender experts taking part in the diplomatic negotiations. They were able to demand that accountability for the victims of gender based violence was a goal written into the agreement.
Speaker 3:We also included chapter on transitional justice to ensure that there was, you know, there was a reflection on what had happened, but there were processes that are going to be put in place to ensure, you know, healing of the communities. We also one of the achievements of that process was that the representation the women representation in government was raised from 25% to 35%.
Speaker 2:The inclusion of women in peace processes isn't just a tokenistic demand for representation. It's the reality of feminist values being a quality worth embedding into every conflict resolution method. As Maggie points out, feminist values include solidarity, care and seeing each other's humanity.
Speaker 3:When you look at peace processes without that concept, without those sort of principles, then it becomes, you know it's I think it's more about how do we just stop the violence which you know brings us to the concept more of of negative peace, and sometimes also it becomes power sharing between armed groups, which really doesn't speak to the root causes of what the conflict was about and it does not acknowledge the pain and the hurt that was caused.
Speaker 2:As we've seen in many discussions around truth and reconciliation, when we don't acknowledge all of the damage done, then the root causes remain within society. This often leads to a resumption of conflict, a relapse into a cycle of violence.
Speaker 3:The value of bringing in women or applying some of these feminist principles into conflict resolution and into peace processes is that there's a lot of elements of care, of healing as we go through processes of trying to get to peace. When we include these concepts and these principles within peace processes, then we can have more sustainable peace because people feel seen, people can own the process of peace and work towards ensuring that the peaceful state of the society stays that way.
Speaker 2:Maggie, is very clear that feminist peace building isn't something that just happens at high-profile international discussions. It's a grassroots process that happens in countless daily negotiations.
Speaker 3:But because we live in a society with these superstructures that kind of tell us what to do, how to do it, what is knowledge, what is not knowledge, what is peace, how to do peace, then we tend to ignore or not give value to some of the things that are being done at the lower levels of community. I think a lot of people within the communities are doing what works for them and to explore new ways of doing things that are relevant to various contexts, that we're not just adopting ways of doing that have been given to us, but that we are owning our own ways of doing and our own ways of peace building that allow for more inclusion and more voices and more participation.
Speaker 2:Speaking to us from Yangon. Our second guest, Noh Duhle, is a World Wide WCA Rise Up Program Leader. She is very familiar with working under situations of conflict, given the political situation in Myanmar.
Speaker 4:Yes, we have a lot of conflicts in our community, a lot of. I mean, there are so many types of conflicts we have been experiencing for decades. But, kali, as you know, we are facing and experiencing the conflicts.
Speaker 2:The World Wide WCA in Myanmar works a lot with young women who are displaced and refugees. They face a number of challenges when they reach out to them. The language barrier is one of them, and another is building up a sense of trust.
Speaker 4:So if we want to engage with them, we need to connect or link with the leaders of the community first, so that they can guide us, they can cope with marginalized women. It took time to reach out to them. We don't know their language and they also don't know that, yeah, they are marginalized so they are afraid to talk, they are afraid to show themselves.
Speaker 2:Women who come from a background of conflict and abuse are often understandably wary of opening up to strange and new situations, so building up trust and confidence takes time and patience.
Speaker 4:Most of marginalized women are not sure of you know. They say quiet, they are not allowed to be involved in activity and there are many challenges because they don't want to be involved in our programs, or maybe they don't want to talk in public. We need to explain, then, that we are keeping it private like this.
Speaker 2:Even before conversations can begin, Duclay observes that providing a physical safe space and meeting basic needs becomes the priority From food and water to shelter and sanitation, people who have been displaced by conflict have lost access to everything they need to survive. She underscores how even these needs are gendered, with organizations sometimes not being permitted to distribute essential menstruation care supplies.
Speaker 4:Because here we can transport such things into the displayment area or into conflict area. The military doesn't allow, so they are currently urgently needs such kind of supply. They are living in the forest, so there is no clean water.
Speaker 2:When Dukle looks back to their yearly activity, she notes that what the women they work with ask for is support to heal from the trauma they have experienced.
Speaker 4:At the time we have heard about women's really need mental health training because they are mentally and physically broken and the request is like to share with them about the economics and power and peace and justice like this. And so, yeah, psycho-social support training. Also the request that they want to speak out their voice to the world and we need to listen to their voice.
Speaker 2:Violence and abuse isn't only limited to military and political conflicts. For women, it is often intimate and every day embedded in homes and families. As part of listening to women's stories, dukle has heard several stories of trauma.
Speaker 4:One of our lucky young woman. She shared the stories of her sister. The young woman is married and has three children already, and her husband is a strength all day and a very bad man. She has been beat by her husband every night. So one day she can, like she can, tolerate with it. So she killed her husband and suicide herself. Yeah, so the three children left and they are unkilled. Look after them.
Speaker 2:It's important that women who are taking leadership and organizing community support and interventions have the skills and training to be able to deal with this kind of victim support. Additionally, they too need to heal from the effect of secondhand trauma.
Speaker 4:Because we have seen a lot. We have had a lot of trauma very terrible than this one. This is common case in such kind of looking community because most of young women in the community are discriminated against by men.
Speaker 2:Sexual violence is unfortunately all too common, but empowering young women has been proven to build resilience and resistance to it in communities everywhere. As Dukle says, raising awareness about sexual and reproductive health and rights gives more people the ability to make choices that are best for them.
Speaker 4:In our community there are many young women who has been married in only 15 or 18 years, so we wanted to share with them about the marriage and the ASAESHA and SGBP also as well. We should raise awareness, training with the young woman and peer-to-peer education to reach out to every woman in the locate community, because if we don't speak awareness, we raise awareness. According to that, we can see more kids in a violence woman in our community.
Speaker 2:Moving from the intimate to the global, we next take a look at conflict that affects women on an international scale. Our third guest, Olivia Barrow, who works at the Pacific Conference of Churches, is from Fiji, an island at the forefront of the climate catastrophe. Fiji faces a legacy of nuclear testing and mining, as well as the current rise in sea levels and intensification of cyclones and earthquakes. All of this leads to displacement, relocation and migration.
Speaker 1:Our land and our ocean. As specific people is who we are. It represents our identity, our cultures and our tradition and losing our lands and our home. You know our source of livelihood is what we depend on. It's subject to conflict within our homes and as a community. It affected even homes in their well-being and even psychologically. That resulted in violence in our homes, violence in our communities and finding ways to adapt or provide for their families.
Speaker 2:But even in the global context of climate change, when women are not made central to the resistance, their perspectives tend to get lost.
Speaker 1:In our context, women and young people and children are always at the tail and on the thinking process, where women, who not only are vulnerable to the impact of decisions, but who are also, who are, backbone of family well-being, making sure there is enough on the table, there is a children, look after the homes well-set or organized, and all that you know, and when conflicts arises, it affects and it disrupts the I mean the ways that women do things or it also disrupts, you know, their safety and their well-being in their community or in their own homes.
Speaker 2:Conflict and violence can be the source of intergenerational trauma in families and in cultures, and young people and children are especially vulnerable to it.
Speaker 1:Listening to you know what they have to say in any form, because even in violence in our homes, children are most affected and they leave the trauma of you know of that or violence in our homes, conflicts within communities or even in our homes, and that leaves with them. And you know it takes processes, or it takes a time for a person to relive or I wouldn't say forget, but to forgive or to come in, you know, to do things differently from the trauma that they go through, to be able to act differently from what they've seen.
Speaker 2:It isn't just because women are uniquely affected by conflict that they need to be equally included in resolution processes, though, and also bring unique conflict resolution tactics to the table.
Speaker 1:I think I was reading through the development studies network. It shows very graphically that women and children are the major victims of Pacific Island conflict and that women are the major but largely unseen and acknowledged or instigators of peace. And through the Pacific Women's Shaping development. You know they highlighted there's a need for greater focus on critical importance of peace building and recognizing women's vital role. And also, you know, allowing peace building which is gender responsive requires a prevention of violence against women and the recognition of violence against women as a security issue.
Speaker 2:Surviving conflict and violence can also turn women into rather extraordinary leaders.
Speaker 1:In the Pacific. We have experienced colonization, climate change, even the COVID experiences. We have far too many stories of women and young women who are resolving and healing from conflict and because of their experiences, had made them strong activists, advocates and very influential in different spaces. And we can see many climate action work, you know, safe community mobilization on gender-based violence, even in negotiation spaces, political spaces, women at the front line, changing the narrative of women's roles and you know, and responsibilities, and what we've seen is that you know when we can, we listen more to the communities and we, you know we act upon their request, on what they need. We see changes happen, rather than we coming in and bulldozing what we need to do, rather than, you know, providing a space to listen and allow that.
Speaker 2:Young women, especially, are at risk to their futures being disrupted by the conflict of climate change.
Speaker 1:Something in this field we've seen. You know young people have to take on, you know something, or fight for something that you know they didn't make decisions on whether it be around development, whether it be around you know, some political agreements that leave the brand for young people today to live in the reality of what's happening now, most of them, you know, losing their homes, losing their livelihoods. Some of them have to be relocated and they couldn't live to live where their parents grew up, from wanting to live in freedom or, you know, accomplishing things, but they have to live in the fear of the reality of losing their home and losing who they are as Pacific Island people, because of rising sea levels and because of climate change.
Speaker 2:Even though the weight of the climate conflict seems immense, Olivia has a lot of hope in the young women at the forefront of demanding change.
Speaker 1:And for me, seeing young people taking on different spaces to speak up to call on our leaders, that is an assurance that you know our young people are fighting for our children and the survival of our community.
Speaker 2:At a time when the global conflicts seem insurmountable, the World Wide WCA supports young women across the world who are learning how to build a constructive, equitable peace. From climate change to domestic violence, from military war to sexual harassment, these young women are meeting the challenges that violence throws at them and leading others towards a better way. The World Wide WCA is a global women's rights organization engaging millions of women, young women and girls around the world each year, across cultures and beliefs, to transform lives and the world for the better. With a presence in over a hundred countries, our work is grassroots driven, grounded in local communities and rooted in the transformational power of women. We provide support and opportunities for women, young women and girls to become leaders and change makers who not only protect their rights and impact their communities, but inspire their peers to do the same.
Speaker 2:We are focused on building a strong intergenerational network of women and young women leaders, with programs led by and for women and young women in response to the unique needs they see in their communities. Our goal is that, by 2035, 100 million young women and girls transform power structures to create justice, gender equality, human dignity, freedom, a sustainable environment and a world free from violence and war leading a vital YWCA movement. Inclusive of all this podcast series has been funded by the Australian government under the Rise Up Young Women's Leadership and Advocacy Initiative in the Asia Pacific region. You can find out more about our work on our website. Our handle is worldwide YWCA on all social media.