An aphorism that made Dr B laugh as we left Geneva in the train

As we were waiting for the train yesterday morning in Geneva I turned to Stephen and said:

They say behind every successful man is a woman. Perhaps they should also say, behind every unsuccessful woman is a man.

I think this had been triggered to listening toa Radio 4 programme about Churchill the previous evening as we were packing and learning just how reliant he was on his wife and on a huge host of secretaries to take dictation - even sometimes from the bath! Not sure that would be seen as appropriate today!

Drink a toast to yourself and to all the other women surrounding you

International Women's Day was busy and fun around the ecumenical centre. Elaine Neuenfeldt led morning prayers and told us the story of the women from a village in Mauritania, several of them grandmothers, who trained to become solar engineers. It is a wonderful story of education and empowerment. Why train women rather than men? Because the women will remain in the communities and train others, meaning that the knowledge and transformation are shared and passed on from one generation to the next. To change the village educate a girl or a grandmother. Men would be more likely to leave the village and try to earn money with the new found knowledge.

Then at midday a great impromptu library lunch was held with Father Daniel Groody from Notre Dame University, his theme was migration as a theological method - I'll come back to some of the reflections and discussion around the observations he shared in a later post. For now suffice us to say that it made for a really invigorating lunchbreak with good theological and intellectual stimulation.

In the late afternoon and early evening the World YWCA hosted a wonderful laid back and welcoming reception to celebrate the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day. It was the first time this year that I went out in the afternoon without my coat on, the sun was shining, the spring flowers covered the grass in front of the World YWCA building in a profusion of pink and it was quite simply a glorious sunny time. Here was an opportunity to network, to chat, to laugh, all presided over with enormous grace, good humour and aplomb by Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda the YW's general secretary. At one stage she got us to go around the room and simply say our names and one word which describes us - the words were many and the one chosen most often (by myself and by Nyaradzayi as well!) was "passion". A good word with which to enter Lent!
Nyaradzayi also got us to toast ourselves, to affirm ourselves as unique women and to toast the women on either side of us. It was time out, time to celebrate women's achievements over the past 100 years, time to look forward to what still needs to be done. It was also time to share stories of our work and lives- from the recent UN Status of Women meeting, to receive gentle greetings from around the world "this is my first international women's day outside my own country", to affirm inter-generational learning, to smile and share news and gossip. It was WONDERFUL!
And then I spent the evening with three very beautiful, very intelligent, very lovely female friends and got home not too long after midnight ...

In praise of Mariella Frostrup freshening up the feminist agenda

Sometimes I get bored with calling myself a feminist. It seems sort of tired and old fashioned, yet it is very much part of who I am and what makes me tick. I admit I have sort of given up smiling every time I get comments such as "when are we going to have an international men's day". It is not in fashion to be seen to be championing women's issues or rights. It is interesting that people are quick to moan about what is termed "political correctness"and slow to be challeneged by the clear inequality so many women have to live with day in day out, year in year out, generation in generation out.
So today I felt energised and encouraged when reading Mariella Frostrup's excellent essay in the Observer.
Encouraged because this is a woman who puts the case erruditely and passionately:

In the western world the greatest triumph of spin in the last century is reflected in attitudes to feminism. Our struggle for emancipation and equality has been surreptitiously rewritten as a harpy bra-burning contest while elsewhere, in less affluent parts of the world, the response is altogether different. From Mozambique to Chad, South Africa and Liberia, Sierra Leone to Burkina Faso, feminism is the buzzword for a generation of women determined to change the course of the future for themselves and their families. At female gatherings all over sub-Saharan Africa you'll find enthusiasm and eager signatories to the cause.

...

I visited Internally Displaced Peoples camps in Chad where women refugees from Darfur were being raped daily when they ventured out to gather firewood so they could cook for their children. In Mozambique I cried frustrated tears as the 12 women farmers gathered around me raised their hands in shame and in unison to indicate that every one of them was a victim of domestic violence, a crime they were campaigning to have outlawed. And yes, this was only last year.

Frostup has also transformed her anger and sense of helplessness by founding GREAT the Gender Rights and Equality Action Trust

this is not a women's issue any longer; this is a human issue. There's a new wave of support sweeping from the developed to the developing world through women joining forces and rolling up their sleeves to lend a hand. Weareequals.org is a coalition of NGOs large and small, which have joined forces to pursue gender equality as a tool for economic empowerment. Countries where girls are educated and women play their part in government are places where peace reigns and economies begin to flourish, and women are more interested in ending wars than starting them – there are endless statistics that prove this to be the reality.

Some of the statistics in Frostrup's article about the reality of women's lives globally even shocked me. Frostrup was born in Norway but has spent much of her life in the UK and what I like abotu her essay is the way she links the global statistics to local statistics in the UK and other affluent countries:

Two-thirds of children denied school are girls, 64% of the world's illiterate adults are women, 41m girls are still denied a primary education, 75% of civilians killed in war are women and children, causing Major-General Patrick Cammaert, the former UN peacekeeping commander in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to declare in 2008: "It is now more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in modern conflict."
These are staggering statistics, and yet not powerful enough to make arguing for women's rights a respectable pursuit, rather than the aggressive histrionics of popular perception. International Women's Day, the one day a year when we're encouraged to celebrate what we've achieved and highlight what still needs to be done, conjures less bile than the F word, but also more apathy. When women are allowed to vote, work, choose when to have babies and dress in whatever fashion pleases them, what on earth do they need their own day for as well?
The fact that 700,000 people will experience domestic violence in the UK, and 90% of them are white British females, that there are sex slaves imported daily to this country who live lives of abject terror, that equal pay is still not a reality nearly four decades after the act enshrining it was passed, that the conviction rate in rape cases still hovers around 6.5%, that only 12% of the UK's boardroom seats (as compared to Norway's 32%) are occupied by women, are just a small smattering of reasons why women's rights should remain a priority

So on March 8 this year, which will mark the 100th anniversary of international women's day, how will you be celebrating women's achievements? How will you be contributing to helping women and men lift themselves out of violence, poverty and powerlessness? Time to feel encouraged to feel that we can make a difference. Thank you Mariella for finding words, passion and commitment. Thank you for making me feel less tired and old fashioned when I say I'm a feminist and for renewing my energy, just what I needed to start this week which I shall enjoy celebrating with my sisters.

La rebelle - a bottle of wine in the feminist tradition

I said it would take at least 10 posts to begin to do justice to our feminist theology evening last night and I sense that I am probably going to run out of energy before I get to the end of what I want to say - unlike our brilliant 89 year old speaker Jacqueline Berenstein Wavre.

We always give our speakers a present to say thank you for their time and last night Ria carefully included a bottle of local pinot noir wine from this vinyard which celebrates local Genevan and Swiss personalities for it various "cuvées".

La rebelle is the female rebel and as soon as Jacqueline received it she started to talk to us about Emilie Gourd in whose memory it is named. I did not know that Gourd had founded an early feminist journal called "le mouvement féministe" in 1912. It will celebrate its 100 anniversary in just under two years. The journal has gone through problems in recent years as has much print media but is continuing with a web presence which I think I may have manged to track down here.

As is often the case when you remember one person from the past you also recall others and speaking about Emilie Gourd prompted Jacqueline to talk to us also about her friend Jeanne Hersch, who had been a close friend of her husband's and a passionate defender of human rights.
So much to learn about about women's history, so much to read, so much to be enlivened by ... just like good rebellious wine!

"La Rebelle" rend hommage à Emilie Gourd, Genevoise qui se battra toute sa vie pour la condition féminine. Ce n’est qu’en 1960, quatorze ans après sa mort, que son rêve se réalise enfin : le droit de vote est accordé aux citoyennes genevoises.

What is "strong" leadership, "strong" government - reflecting on the day the election is announced in my home country

It's not really surprising that I think about a quote from Heinrich Grüber's memoirs as I wander around Berlin this week. Grüber describes in his memoirs how he voted for Hitler - as did many others of his class and background - because he wanted "strong" government and the experience of Weimar democracy had been of weak ever-changing government.
Today the election will be called in Britain to take place in just one month's time. It's quite interesting chatting with our family about their voting intentions - our oldest nephew is (shock horror) probably going to vote Tory - but we've also been having discussions about voting systems, whether it's better for democracies to have change after a decade and the place for conviction in politics. It's fascinating to see how approaches to democracy and voting systems are very culturally determined. Do I want strong government or good government?
At a personal level I've also been thinking about "strong" leadership and our need to embue these words which tend to be seen as male virtues with value. Is the only way of describing leadership positively to be seen in macho language? Of course women are also strong and it is very much a female virtue as well. But surely goodness, integrity, mid-wifery, artistry, brick-laying, sculpting and many other things may offer us more useful images for the sort of government and society we want rather than this steroid obsession with strength.
Grüber learnt the strength of saying he was wrong to vote for Hitler and took up resistance to teh regime he had voted in very quickly. There is strength in recognising when we have been wrong, it's called humility and it's not a bad virtue for politicians and leaders to learn.

Widowhood ... pain, laughter, sharing - from the story of Tamar to our stories and our mother's and grandmother's stories

Fulata Mbano Moyo led prayers this moring on the theme of widowhood - returning to the theme of her sermon on Monday but with a rather different emphasis. Today we had the rather extraordinary experience of reading the whole of the story of Tamar from Genesis 38. Fulata just shared out the reading paragraph by paragraph with those who happened to be sitting in the row nearest to her- It was strong stuff listening to us in our various accents struggling with lots of strange names and pretty embarrassing subject matter. The story details how the men of one family marry, don't marry but have sex with Tamar, how she has to prostitute herself with great resourcefulness to the most powerful remaining man in her story and how she humbles Judah into saying "She is more in the right than I" once she finally falls pregnant. Her intelligent reading of and acting in the situation finally saves her. However the act of this widow is neverthelss one of desperation, selling her body to her deceased husband's father under the cloak of anonymity.
Fulata once again shared some of her own story of being a widow - how her sons had tried to push her to find them a new father. She encouraged all of us to think about and share stories about widows we knew, to think about who are widows in our societies today ...
During the few moments of our prayers this morning I thought about my extraordianry mother in law who brought up two children on her own; aloud I wondered about the women abandonned by men, left with children - are they in a similar state to biblical widows?
After prayers were over I shared the story of my own mother's widowhood with Fulata, making her laugh. At the end of the day I wrote it down in and shared it via email with those who had been at prayers:

To those of you at morning prayer today, this is the story of a widow I only shared with Fulata at the end - one of the reasons we were laughing - the widow I know best is my mother.

40 days after my father's death she arrived home in the bright red convertible sports car she had just bought ... they had been looking at it together before his death and decided his wheelchair would not have fitted into it ... waiting for her at home when she came back with the car was a package from the undertakers containing my father's ashes.

She decided "he should enjoy the new car too" and placed his ashes in the boot ... and drove with him for quite a while ...

I'm not sure this is a liturgical practice I would recommend (ecumenically or confessionally) but it seemed to help her!

Two other colleagues also shared stories of widowed mothers and grandmothers who had shouldered large family responsibilities alone and done so with great resilience and dignity. Symbols of the strength of widows. Despite desperation the story encourages us to resourcefulness and not to be victims.

Is it feminism or sexism that is alive and well?

As soon as I saw this over on the ever splendid ASBO Jesus I knew I wouldn't be able to resist posting it. It's been interesting to go back to it a few days after seeing it originally and read the discussion about feminism in the comments.
There are so many pre-conceieved ideas around what feminism is. Part of me is sad that feminism has such a bad press, but in the end it's about getting the message across about equality and dignity for women. For the vast majority of poor women across the world it is not about discussions about who does the housework, but about access to education, healthcare and a decent life. These poorest women are growing much of the world's food, working hard at home and beyond the home, they often live in situations of extreme vulnerability and are not seen as equal citizens. In the end for me feminism is about passionately believing that women deserve as much dignity as men. Of course women are not better than men. Of course men are not better than women.
A cartoon like this one reminds me that I am hugely privileged - to have access to work, to live with a man who values me as an equally flawed human being (of course we do sometimes disagree as to who is more flawed but that's just married life!), to have leisure to reflect on the meaning of life rather than to worry where the next meal will come from or whether the next bullet, bomb or rape will be for me. In the end feminism for me is about saying my (perhaps seemingly petty) struggles are not unrelated to greater and more important struggles by women in many places. How societies view, judge or value women has a direct impact on ordinary women's lives. I'm trying to play my own small part to make sure that feminism stays alive and remains fun as well as feisty.
Meanwhile if anyone seriously believes that sexism is dead I would encourage you to watch some of the videos on the Lenten campaign to overcome violence against women.

"Sexual and gender-based violence shreds the very fabric of society" said Dr Manoj Kurian, WCC programme executive for Health and Healing. "While it undermines the physical and psychological health of people, it also questions the integrity of our life and faith. We have no illusions that these problems will be easily solved. Our aim with the study is to encourage our churches and communities to examine these often unspoken and unrecognized acts of violence, so as to address the root causes. We also encourage churches and communities not to use theology selectively nor hide behind cultural tenets to defend such violence. It is only by acknowledging the pain and the ongoing hurt that we can begin to seek justice, truth and ultimately the healing and reconciliation of individuals and communities." More here.

Dog eat dog and can men really look after children?

One of the pleasures of being on holiday is listening to the radio, however there were bits of this morning's woman's hour that rather made my hackles rise. One of the men interviewed said that men were much better suited to "bringing home the bacon and dealing with the dog eat dog workplace environment" than to looking after children. So we heard that men were good at playing with children and introducing them to risks while women we better at worrying about them. Total tosh, based on phoney, spurious research and bare-faced prejudice. Meanwhile of course there are many ordinary men who spend alot of time caring for their children - and far more women doing the same of course. Relegating women to the "drudgery" aspects of childcare, nappies, laundry, broken nights actually doesn't speak to most modern parents' experience of bringing up children. It also deems "caring" work to be lesser work - according to the speaker men get "bored" by it - the idea being of course that women can cope better with such boredom because of our "hard-wiring". The work of caring is highly skilled, complex and often lonely. Perhaps the dog eat dog men who can't cope with those sorts of demands prefer to escape to the adrenaline of the workplace.
More seriously though the workplace itself is these days often much more about developing cooperation skills and team work than about dog eat dog. Women and men need liberation from the dictatorship of set gender roles in the workplace and in the home. Hard wiring for caring, for thinking, for ambition, or other qualities and vitues, is not dependent on gender.

Those who resist do not speak the same language

A lazy Saturday morning gave me time to go to Ferney's wonderful book shop and to indulge ...
Now I have begun reading Suzanne Césaire's Le grand camouflage and I am fascinated by her feisty and tragic life story and the extraordinary power of her language.
During the second world war she edited the literary journal Tropiques in Martinique with her husband Aimé Césaire. Tropiques was a politico-poetic journal, the formal abstract poetry often needing to be read between the lines and certainly up to the end to get the message. It was finally banned by the Pétainist censors in May 1943 by a censor who had at least read the work. Suzanne Césaire penned their response:
Monsieur,
Nous avons reçu votre réquisitionnaire contre Tropiques.
"Racistes, sectaires, révolutionnaires, ingrats et traîtres à la Patrie, empoissoneurs d'âmes" aucune de ces épithètes ne nous répugnent essentiellement.
"Empoissoneurs d'âmes" comme Racine au dire des Messieurs de Port Royal.
"Ingrats et traitres à notre si bonne Patrie", comme Zola au dire de la presse réactionnaire.
"Révolutionnaires", comme l'Hugo des châtiments.
"Sectaires", passionnément comme Rimbaud et Lautréamont.
"Racistes", oui. du racisme de Toussaint Louverture, de Claude Mac Kay and et Langston Hughes, contre celui de Drumont et d'Hitler.
Pour ce qui est du reste, n'attendez de nous ni plaidoyer, ni vaines récriminations, ni discussion même.
Nous ne parlons pas le même langage.

Reading this made me smile and admire the wonderful defiant spirit of the letter. It also made me pause and reflect on my ongoing theme of resistance and a spirituality of resistance. Do those who resist not speak the same language as those they seek to resist? How far do you have to give ground in order to get some of what you want? The situation varies according to the context of resistance - do you compromise to save a life, your job, family, livelihood? One thing I do understand by learning a bit more about Tropiques is the vital rôle of poetry, song, language, the arts and creativity in keeping resistance alive. I would also add prayer to that list, though I am sure Suzanne Césaire would not have. Her daughter Ina writes this of her at the end of the book:

"ma mère militante avide de liberté,
sensible à toutes les douleurs des opprimés,
rebelle à toutes les injustices,
éprise de littérature et férue d'histoire ...
ma mère active féministe avant la lettre ...
ma mère qui croyait plus aux luttes qu'aux larmes ...
à la santé fragile, mais à l'infatigable ténacité .

I should add that although Tropiques included two women on the editorial board it is only recently that Suzanne's own rôle has been more widely recognised - many interviews about Tropiques only ever refer to the more famous men!

Repeating Islands has some interesting background in English to the Césaires and on these writings in particular. Here's an extract:

The essays collected in the volume have a single place of origin-a memorable spring day in April 1942, which the Césaires spent walking on the Absalon forest near the Mont Pelée volcano in northern Martinique with a set of new friends: René Ménil, André Breton, his wife Jacqueline Lamba and their daughter Aube, André Masson, Cuban painter Wifredo Lam and his wife Helena-all of whom later acknowledged that their lives had been changed during that day spent in the moist and luxuriantly tropical forest.

Expand the common good

Listening to Nicola Bullard and Vandana Shiva in conversation at the final thematic session of the Global Network Congress was fascinating. Both insisted that transformation isn't about the big idea, the era of the meta project is over. Bullard said that one of the most important things she had learned was that being involved in the process was important. Getting involved in those processes often means that many small changes begin to take place. Part of the work of critical involvement is then about patience and trusting the process. It is much more important to get workable local projects going, to use horizontal networks as a way of encouraging people to reconnect with reality again, this is also where our creative action and creative thinking can be worked through.
Shiva spoke movingly about the importance of local identity and the need to revalue the local after all of the delocalisation that has been taking place. Both insisted that the addicts of the current economic model have no new ideas and that this is a good time to to start promoting news ideas.
They ended with the idea of trying to expand the common good. The only way to counter the fragmentation of life is to reclaim the commons, those things such as air, water, land, seeds, healthcare, which belong to all of us together. This is a bit like the creative commons form of copyright but more about a creative way of resisting patenting and commercialising the whole of the basis for life by using our common creativity and energy, by identifying and affirming what it is we hold in common.

Gardening is the way forwards ...

Volltaire is the one who said "il faut cultiver son jardin" - he meant it of course as much philosophically as practically, though he did drain the marches and plant vineyards and gardens around the château in Ferney. The philosophical finding expression in the practical.
Asked where she saw hope for transformation underway today Vandana Shiva replied that she found great hope for transformation in biodiveristy itself. "Things will emerge even if you do not have a meta pr ject. Even five years ago who would have predicted how many people throughout the world would be turning to gardening. Everyone used to say Oh I don't have time to garden. It's a key way of reconnecting ourselves spiritually with the earth, of grounding ourselves. We also learn to grow our own food."
I like gardening as a model for transformation - mind you my own is in a rather slow process of being transformed. Not quite sure what that says about finding new economic models. When I get back to Ferney i shall have to listen to Voltaire a bit more and cultivate my inner and outer garden a bit more.

An inspiring evening with Vandana Shiva - "you don't find hope by sitting in a chair"

For the third time the Kirchentag is holding a Global Network Congress bringing together some of the German speakers and specialists with many of the speakers from elsewhere in the world. It's a privileged time for networking and also for going into some issues in greater depth. This year's meeting is a little smaller than the two previous meetings, but still very diverse. Because there are slightly fewer of us we've been able to use less formal methodoligies and have a good question and answer session with our main speaker.

Vandana Shiva is a passionate and engaged speaker - not always easy to interpret as she assumes we have the same level of knowledge she has of the abuses of the free market in world trade. I do not always find it easy to remember much of what I've interpreted - you can't listen, take notes and speak in another language at the same time, well I can't anyway. Vandana Shiva is an eco feminist and I was very struck by the lack of mightiness in the alternative models she tried to offer us this evening. She used organic and nurturing images, encouraging drawing on inner creative strength as a source of hope in the same way that a mother will nearly always make sure that their child has something to eat. Much of her campaigning has been against the obscenity of multi-nationals buying the patents to seeds - one example she gave was how cotton seed used to cost about 7 rupees a kilo before the seed patent was bought by Monsanto and went up to 1700 rupees a kilo. In less than a generation cotton farmers went from being rich to being poor. She spoke of the finding creative commons ways of owning patents to seeds, so that local communities can continue to be sustainable. She actually called this kind of local community building being itself a seed that can give others hope. She ended by quoting Gandhi's model of oceanic circles

But it will be an oceanic circle whose centre will be the individual always ready to perish for the village, the latter ready to perish for the circle of villages, till at last the whole becomes one life composed of individuals, never aggressive in their arrogance, but ever humble, sharing the majesty of the oceanic circle of which they are integral units.

This way of thinking about things very much chimed with the "natal theology" by Grace Jantzen that I am reading at the moment, it was helpful for me to hear these more practical and less philosphical applications of the same underlying idea.
Read more about Soil not Oil.

Women's leadership in the church

Janet Lees has written some more about women's leadership in the church. I've written a bit about this yesterday too on the Women in Ministries blog. Janet's reacting in part to official figures published in the Guardian about women clergy in the C of E and how they have been promoted:
I also wondered about the story behind the story. For women clergy to lead committees is one story but why do we need ordained clergy to lead committees? All denominations do this: clog up the church bureaucracy with ordained clergy. Why? Particularly when most mainstream churches also struggle with the availability of ordained leadership at local pastoral level. Why do we need priests or ministers, women or men, to chair committees? Of course you are hearing from a totally meetings-phobic person here. I can understand that knowledge and skills in theology and ecclessiology etc. may be required of a committee chair, depending on the remit of the committee. But to struggle for all those years for ordination of women to the priesthood and then celebrate by chairing a committee, however prestigious, well I just don't get it. Please someone, tell me the story of that.

I am not as "meetings phobic" as Janet I'm one of those sad people who sometimes quite enjoy a well run meeting. I am concerned though that just as women begin to get some positions of leadership and influence within a few churches in Europe those churches are changing massively. Will that small proportion of women leaders be able to make a difference or find the energy to do things differently? And let's be clear the number of women in these positions is still pretty low despite the supposed feminisation of the clergy.

Meanwhile, given bleating from a small minority of male C of E clergy with "hurt feelings", I feel driven to ask when the talented C of E women who trained more than 20 years ago will begin to ask for compensation for the lack of advancement they receive? Many of them will be retired before they even get a chance to be called to be even suffragen bishops.

In the end, feminist that I may be, the way the debate about women bishops is going takes us away from the reality that ministry and leadership in the churches, whether exercised by men or women, requires vision, humility and commitment to telling the story of the gospel. It's a hard but joyful job. Let's get on with it as a community of women and men.

Breaking news - I'm gender neutral!

We guess http://stranzblog.blogspot.com is written by a woman (50%), however it's quite gender neutral.

Is this correct? Yes No Don't know

View results

Well thanks to the irrepressible David Ker I now know that the Stranzblog is apparently gender neutral - according to the remit of this scientific test. Not sure what this makes me but I do wonder about the word "quite" - is 0% "very" gender neutral if 50% is "quite"? Yes you've guessed, I never did study statistics - je n'y comprends rien.
Anyway this stuff at least gives we bloggers something to write about in our aimless way. Let me know what your blog comes out as. The women in ministries blog comes out at 61% female according to the test - only 1% more than the wonderful Kurk Gayle.
What's actually interesting of course is that some men are a little offended to be thought of as women by this data driven device. Whereas of course being gender neutral is an accolade for a woman perhaps!

Where were you ...?

Where were you?
Where were you when I sold myself into slavery to follow a dream of a better life?
Where were you every night when my father beat me?
Where were you when I paid a year's wages for an illegal ticket as a stowaway?
Where were you when the foreman locked me in at night and the house burned down?
Where were you when my first eight clients raped me of my virginity?
Where were you when my sister escaped and fell off the seventh floor balcony?
Where were you when my 16 hour day in the fields ended with being bedded down in a barn?
Where were you when my wages never came?
Where were you when I needed a doctor?
Where were you when the pimps hunted me down?
Where were you when I returned home and my family threw me out?
Where were you when the gang master said "it's quite safe" and the tide came in and drowned so many?
Where were you when I couldn't bear it any longer?

This morning at a joint session of the assembly of the Churches' Commission on Migrants in Europe (CCME) and the central committee of the Conference of European Churches (CEC), we heard about the churches' work to combat human trafficking from various contexts across Europe.
The presentations were powerful, erudite and heartfelt and I learnt alot. However, as I listened it struck me that inherent sexism in our societies does both men and women a huge disservice when it comes to campaigning against trafficking. Women become the sexualised "victims" of this trade. Much of CCME's work is in trying to move the focus away from victimhood to victims' rights but I realised how difficult this is when it is somehow more attractive, dare one say "sexier", to talk about the suffering of women trafficked into the sex industry than to look at some of the other victims of trafficking - namely men many of whom are working in conditions of near and actual slavery in their attempts to seek out a better life.
Women and children still represent the majority of those trafficked but all of our societies need to be aware of struggling against the economic, patriarchal and unjust structures which can often make people more vulnerable to trafficking. It's important that we focus not only on the plight of women who are trafficked but also on the terrible situation of forced labour which many trafficked men find themselves in.
God created us male and female to be in God's image.

Where we you when I was sold into bondage?
Where were you when I travelled by night in a crate?
Where were you when I was worked to the bone, worked to the limit of my psychological and physical limits?