On Europe, insularity and the UK's identity crisis

This is an extended version of an article written for the British Council....before Brexit.

I’m currently away from home. Every morning I log on and read the news headlines, opinion pieces and arts pages in the British papers. From a distance, the UK looks like a tiny little island riven with inequality and lack of opportunity and tormented by suffering, poverty and precarity. On the international or pan-European rankings for social mobility, gender equality, quality of life, political representativeness of the population and a host of other social and political indices it comes up shockingly low.

It is human nature that people who are suffering look for someone to blame, a scapegoat for their pain – preferably a stranger who cannot answer back. The current government, the tabloid media and noisy attention-grabbing outliers like UKIP have taken that urge and focused it, as ever, on whoever is ‘other’, foreign, alien, different. They have managed to conflate unrelated factors to produce a false image of threat and imminent crisis, a phantom danger looming from outside in, making the leap from the 9/11 and 7/7 terror attacks to encouraging Islamophobic ignorance to threatening that Al-Qaeda, ISIS and Daesh are just this moment planning on coming to England to radicalise everyone, along with the millions of refugees who are actually fleeing them and wanting to leech off the state with their nasty greedy foreign ways, along with unscrupulous economic immigrants from beyond and within the EU all coming to steal English jobs and dare to be everything from doctors to waitresses to students to parents, which is why there aren’t enough schools, jobs, homes and hospital beds, because the foreigners have taken them and nasty faraway ‘Brussels’ (the stand-in word for the EU) has said it’s okay, led by mean Ms Merkel who secretly runs the whole show for some evil Germanic reason of her own.

It’s a lie. A toxic, widespread, all-encompassing, all-connecting conspiracy theory that has obscured the facts and poisoned the debate as we approach the referendum like a runaway train heading towards a brick wall. I don’t like getting party political – after all, yuppie New Labour were just as craven in their courting of the rich and famous as any Tory and Jeremy Corbyn is such a male-cronyist bro that he deserves honorary Bullingdon membership. But the present government has a lot to answer for and the present opposition have failed in countering the rhetoric with the facts. Under Cameron’s government, resources have been moved away from education, healthcare, housing and essential social services, kicking those who were already down, robbing at least two generations of a decent future, punishing the poor and disadvantaged, putting the abused at risk and hobbling anyone who isn’t privileged and financially well-supported. It is the same government that has granted asylum to shockingly low numbers of refugees during the biggest humanitarian crisis since the second world war, while allowing the false idea that millions are on their way to the UK to destroy society to flourish. 

It’s as though Britain has faced and failed a challenge to its identity which has played out over recent decades. Following its century-odd of benefitting from its colonial exploitation of 84% of the world, including carving up the Middle East after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, it was painfully made to see the arrogance, greed and racism of its ways. Then came the slowly dawning realisation that England was no longer a great Imperial power and that people everywhere speak English now not because of England but because of America; and that England itself is not important in the political scheme of things despite its cultural prestige which includes Harry Potter, Downton Abbey, Dr Who, Sherlock and the BBC and despite its desperation to pal up with George W Bush and enjoy a random killing spree in Iraq which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and dozens of British soldiers. And despite its past riches including Shakespeare, Milton, King Arthur, the Bloomsbury set, medieval architecture, the plague, The Tudors, Oxbridge, the Elizabethans, The Victorians and all the rest of it. And despite Cool Britannia which Tony Blair so loved. Because the world is a large and varied place, there are more than 7 billion people on Earth, times move on, colonialism wasn’t a great adventure for the colonised and contemporary India, China, Latin America and the protests and demonstrations, civil wars, fragile states, terrorist threats, breakdown in civic life, forced conscription, collapse of law and order and unliveable consequences of climate change in Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea, Mali, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Egypt, Yemen and elsewhere just seem more interesting and important at the moment. 

Britain has had to accept that despite its past wealth and power, and despite ongoing cultural prestige, it is no longer a major political player it used to be. Following that, it had a choice. 

One: humbly accept its change in status, recognise that it’s part of a world community and become an involved member of that community, willing to learn and make friendships across nationalities and languages and surface differences, taking a seat at the table in EU summits, contributing wholly and equally as one of a number of participants, being guided by a vision of what is best and fairest for those most in need, gaining in some instances, conceding in others, taking a humanitarian, open, internationalist and collective approach rather than a competitive one. 

Two: throw all the toys out of the pram, keep a vision of white male aristocratic Englishness front and centre (because it was chaps like that who once led Britain to colonial greatness, oh happy days), close the doors against foreigners, close the shutters against dissenting voices, pull up the ladder, pull up the drawbridge, go deep inside and hunker in the aristo-bunker against outsiders, heathens, invaders, meddling foreign dignitaries, homegrown rebels and dirty diseased grasping peasants. Because if you can’t rule the sandpit you don’t want to play.

It made the wrong choice. Now it looks as though Britain will no longer be a European nation but instead an unimportant, unhappy, unhelpful island floating on the north-west edge of the continent. Britain gains nothing from shrinking away from the rest of the world except the likelihood of shrivelling away, eating itself up with inequality and deprivation, starved of the enriching influence of the wider world and the interest and variety it brings, hypnotised by visions from the past. It will develop a worldwide reputation, not of strength and sovereignty, but of xenophobia, jingoism and hostility to those who are in need of sanctuary. It is already gaining that reputation. 

One could argue that Cameron was compelled to hold a referendum into EU membership following pressure from a significant minority of MPs in his own party. Or one could say that the referendum came out of nowhere, cooked up to derail political, activist and media critics of the government’s attitude to refugees and immigrants alike by stirring up the far louder invective of all those Britons who are full of rage, uncertainty and frustration and are looking to pin it on some mythical threat, and the whole thing has now got out of hand. One could add that even if Cameron was challenged on Europe by some of his own ministers, as Prime Minister his role is to handle such challenges within the party and show firm leadership without panicking and throwing the country’s future over to the public on a whim. 

As I said to my mother, “It’s as though David Cameron randomly lobbed a parcel of shit into the middle of his own dinner party and now he’s got to clean it up, only to find that it’s gone everywhere. Now he’s having to get every single one of his high-profile friends from bankers to artists to business leaders to go on the record saying what a disaster it’s going to be if we leave.”

It’s true that the EU is bureaucratic, that some decisions satisfy the biggest power players and (no doubt) various vested interests. That is true of every single major institution and organisation in the world. That’s also what it means to be part of a world community: you don't always get your way, but you do always get to have your say. The oft-repeated complaint that 'Brussels makes all the decisions' is misleading: yes, EU meetings are held in Brussels... and the UK is supposed to play its part, show up and contribute at those meetings as a member of the EU. That's what being in a community means. You have a place at the table and you can say what you need to, in front of everyone else, and they listen to you respectfully and you listen to them respectfully, because you are pulling together with a common purpose which is bigger than your individual desires. Political decisions can be made with a long view, a wide lens and a collective vision; individual states’ leaders are not compelled to make the sudden wild promises or baseless claims that emerge when they’re tied into their own short election cycles and have to campaign amongst an indecisive public for votes. Collective EU membership overrides the pettiness of national process politics. 

This referendum should never have come about and the question of leaving the EU should never have arisen. It signals something dangerous and depressing: England's increasing conservatism, inequality, isolationism, cynicism about multiculturalism and unwillingness to be part of any world community. It's as if, having rightfully been turfed off its colonial victory track and then its warpath, England is now sulking. 

But you can’t stand by and let a great vision die. You have to fight for it, or else those who are the most angry, who can shout the loudest and perform the pernicious psychological trick of tapping into the worst people’s worst fears will win. 

To throw away EU membership is to squander an opportunity to be a part of the wider world of varied languages, co-operation, cultural exchange, mutual opportunity, recognition of common humanity, symbolic sorority and fraternity. Leaving the EU sends a strong message that "we" are better than everyone else and are exempt from the challenges and inspirations of diversity, collaboration and change. Instead of doing to right thing by stepping out, standing alongside our neighbours, acknowledging our responsibilities in a troubled world and making things better by offering sanctuary and humanitarian assistance, we are slamming the door shut, blocking our ears and shouting insults to drown out the cries for help. Leaving the EU will not turn Britain into a strong fortress but into a decrepit prison whose inhabitants will first turn on each other and then waste away.

China Flash: Film-maker Jenny Man Wu on contemporary Chinese women’s wit, pain and ambivalence

This is a greatly expanded version of an article which first appeared in Time Out Beijing, where I am currently doing a stint as Deputy Editor.

Jenny Man Wu is a film-making powerhouse, describing her work as “soul led, not fantastical or abstract” and “inspired by a European arthouse sensibility in terms of the acceptance of the director as an auteur, rather than the Hollywood sensibility where a producer is the most important person and decides on the cast, the setting, the marketing and the distribution. It’s not important to me to make a million dollar movie. I want to continue to make low-budget movies where I have the right to do what I want, to show to and influence a certain small number of people. When I consider the price and sacrifice a director needs to pay to have a high budget cinema-style movie, I can say no to that. And if you’re making movies that you want to be screened in China you have to submit to censorship from the government.”

Over the course of four punchy short films, Man Wu has garnered international attention within just a few years of graduating from her studies in screenwriting and literature at Beijing Film Academy. Some Sort of Loneliness, A Choice (Maybe Not), Crime Scene and Last Words, all produced between 2012 and 2013, feature women in the throes of tragicomic contemporary despair. “It all starts with very little things, small daily situations,” says Man Wu. “Then I start to describe them, to look at them from a different angle.” In A Choice (Maybe Not), two young women are in a coffee shop, “and one of the girls is a little bit OCD about the choices she makes. She doesn’t want coffee. She doesn’t want lemonade. The beer is overpriced. The wine’s been open for two days. It's a comedy but it’s really about the pressure on women to choose. Women in the olden days almost never walked out of the house alone – and now we have all these choices, it seems. But there are so many choices it's hard to tell if you've made the right one or not. And sometimes when you're forced to make a big decision it's easy to put it down to fate, to the inevitable or the subconscious.”

Last Words, a monologue which Man Wu acted in herself, examines the notion of choice in a far darker way. “It’s a stream of consciousness, a woman talking about suicide and presenting her last words. She’s thinking about something [abusive] that happened in her childhood. The core of the film is not about how she develops her obsession with suicide but her recent experience of domestic violence, her struggle with her parents and the restraint she’s experienced from her father. It’s about how a female wants to have a different kind of life, about her struggle against patriarchy and disappointment and her desperation about her future. She feels that suicide is the only thing that she can do because she’s a perfectionist and an idealist – and these beliefs make her suffer all the more. At the end, she looks into the camera and asks, If I kill myself, does it mean I’ve surrendered to the world?”

Man Wu is committed to focusing on the issue of gender in China. “I have a political view about gender in general and that comes through in my work. Gender issues are political issues. I have a responsibility: I understand how it is overseas and how it is in Beijing and feel I must connect the two, to show that women could be living in so many different ways. We had a women’s revolution in China in the 1920s but all this did was release free female labour into the market.” In giving voice to the ambivalence, pain and wit of her women characters, Man Wu points out that she is going against society’s assumption that “women’s feelings and emotions are small and not political.”

When it comes to gender, Man Wu “can’t say it’s going backwards. It’s very complicated, how [society] sees single women. It’s related to capital and economics. It’s also that under the one child policy, girls do feel cherished within their family, they are insulated and protected from the frustrations of gender inequality at a personal level, so many don’t understand why they should fight for their rights. But it’s important to recognise that a lot of the problems in daily life are actually related to gender. For example I know of a young woman at school who wasn’t a virgin. But she was with a new boyfriend and to pretend to be a virgin, she put some [red] colour in herself – and the colour wouldn’t wash off the guy! And this was presented as a big joke by the guy’s friends. But there’s a double standard: girls really are expected to be virgins.”

Man Wu was selected to show at the 2013 Beijing Independent Film Festival, has just got back from the high profile Elles Tournent Film Festival in Brussels and is currently directing the Beijing Queer Film Festival, which will be running at various venues across town until December. However, both the Beijing Independent Film Festival and the Beijing Queer Film festival have both been shut down by the authorities on their launch dates in the past. One typically clever strategy for circumventing this possibility has been to screen films on special buses driving around the city; yet another example of the ingenuity which has developed in China as a response to the caprices and controls of those in power.

“I can’t leave Beijing,” vows Man Wu. “A lot of things are happening here. I see the changes and they’re not always good. It’s sad to see old buildings being demolished, places becoming more commercial. It’s always good and bad – but that’s what makes the world interesting. As Dickens wrote in A Tale of Two Cities, ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’”

To read my China Flash series of articles about contemporary China, please click here or explore some of the links below:

• Lean In Beijing on the new sexism, corporate ambition, marital choices and awesome girls in China
• Beijing Night
• Film-maker Jenny Man Wu on contemporary Chinese women’s wit, pain and ambivalence
• Benedicte Bro-Cassard, Beijing fashion photographer, on luxury, sugar daddies and sugar daughters
• Kong Lingnan, Beijing painter, on natural beauty and human ugliness
• Writer Kerry Brown on the seven elite men who rule a country with Communist roots and capitalist shoots
• Writer Zhang Chao on media misogyny, social changes and the pressures facing young Chinese women
• ABS Crew: Beijing graffiti artists on legal, semi legal and illegal Chinese street art
• My friend writes me a delicate poem to explain the intense Beijing seasons
• Even afternoon tea says something about modern, monetised China
• Porcelain dolls, bad Samaritans and the law
• Beijing storms, turtles and dogs
• Two Chinese characters
• Hair envy

The Cut: daughters, elders and local health workers speak out about female genital mutilation in Western Kenya

If you’re interested in the issue of female genital mutilation you might also want to read Cutting Us Down To Size: Working To End Female Genital Mutilation

An excellent film called The Cut by Beryl Magoko – not to be confused with the equally impressive recent British documentary The Cruel Cut – received its UK premiere at the 2013 London Feminist Film Festival and was awarded the Best Feature prize there a couple of weeks ago. Filmed in Uganda and Kenya, The Cut is a careful and intelligent documentary which enables diverse members of the featured small, rural communities where FGM is practised to speak about its meaning and history, while maintaining a clear but unpressing authorial sympathy towards the girls who undergo it. Despite comprising interviews and talking heads as well as some close documentary observation, ultimately the body language and silent reactions of the young women speak the loudest. The Cut has already won Best East African Film at the Kenya International Film Festival as well as many other plaudits.

The Cut establishes female genital mutilation as a social practice with a history so longstanding that even its apologists cannot explain it adequately. Both those who oppose and those who defend it mention the pressure girls are under to have it done.

Watching some of the older male apologists for FGM is a chilling experience. They display an odd, chippy defensiveness at being challenged and their comments are shot through with contempt for the (as they insinuate) wilfulness and irrational bloody-mindedness of women. One man says, “If a girl wants she will be circumcised. She runs away and goes for circumcision.” What we see in the film, instead, is the establishment of a haven for countless girls who have gone there to avoid being cut. Despite the existence of this refuge some parents, of both sexes, take the girls away against their will to be cut.

“They make a small mark on the knee,” says one man dismissively. I do not think he is lying outright, although he is speaking with heavy euphemism; I think he genuinely does not quite know exactly what is involved. As the film goes on to show, FGM is a female-perpetrated community act in the moment, although as a cultural practice it is endorsed by both sexes and it is ultimately approved, instigated and organised by men with social power. As one woman warns, “the sons of council elders inherit the right to organise circumcision.” Despite FGM being presented by detractors and apologists alike as something done to women by other women, often those women who are closest to them, its survival as a tradition can only be ended officially by council sons of council fathers, not mothers, wives or daughters.

Another man in the early minutes of the film insists,  “We don’t force them, nobody forces them.” But force is not always physical and momentary. Peer pressure, the weight of long tradition, the heat of expectation, the actions of the majority and the social cost of resisting the practice constitute different types force in themselves – forces which are sometimes harder to resist than the application of physical power. One adult woman explains how an uncircumcised girl will be ostracised and describes being shouted at, verbally abused, mistreated and cold-shouldered at her school, where 98% of the girls had been circumcised. The girls are caught between forces which are at once oppressive of their own instincts and free will and yet socially inclusive, communally approved, deemed to bring order and harmony to all. Another woman says carefully, “a good child has to obey the parents.” Her personal pain and regret are subsumed into a wider vision of what would please the people beyond herself.

One of the many subtle arguments The Cut makes is that female genital mutilation is related to poverty and education. One man says that when a girl has been cut “she can get married, give birth and handle a family,” even though it is obvious that the girls in the film are still virtually children. The under-education (in terms of both social values and academic status) of the parents creates a cycle in which the under-education, physical brutalisation, sexual and labour exploitation and social disempowerment of girls is perpetuated. The cutting of a girl is presented as a sign of her initiation into womanhood and therefore her readiness to marry and procreate. Anti-FGM speakers in the film rail against “illiterate parents” who do not see the value of education for a girl; they circumcise and marry off daughters who might have wanted to continue with their studies.  

However, The Cut also conveys how strong the anti-FGM movement is, with leadership coming from both sexes. Indeed the defensiveness and vehemence of the apologists, virtually all of whom are of an older generation, shows that the drive to end the practice is gaining ground. We see groups of very little girls chanting and holding up signs reading, “Don’t circumcise me! Don’t hurt me!” and “When you circumcise a girl, you destroy her life.” Male preachers urge, “Leave this outdated cultural practice.” Handsome men of marrying age have a pretty persuasive line that makes me smile: they say that FGM excises “the sweetest and most delightful part of a woman.” I always thought that my most delightful parts were my brain and my heart, but there you go. Another man says he doesn’t want to marry a woman who has undergone  FGM because “I want her to be sexually satisfied.” Another man tells a crowd, “You can tell the difference between [happy] wives who have not had it done, and [unhappy] wives who have.” 

The Cut is expertly structured, with a sense of foreboding that increases with every testimony. The women who have been cut, some of them looking barely ten years old, seem bashful, not angry, when expressing their pain and disgust.  “It was very painful. I will never forget,” says one, her eyes sliding as she remembers. Another represses a shudder as she describes the way she was mutilated: “They would use [the razor] to cut everything [around the genital area].”

The Cut’s masterstroke – to use exactly the wrong word – is the access Beryl Magoko has gained to the circumcision rituals themselves. These happen for both sexes. The boys are circumcised in one area and we see them surrounded by countless male friends, neighbours and relatives, whooping, hopping, singing and celebrating. Then we see them standing with their willies hanging out, all looking like skinny kids. Each one clenches his jaw and keeps his chin up, lips firm, eyeing the boys on either side, full of determination not to show any pain. Despite that, quite clearly, it hurts a hell of a lot. When the circumcision is done the boys look dazed and miserable, oblivious to the partying around them. They’re escorted back home by all their friends, bleary eyed and unsteady, silent, as though all they want to do is lie down in a darkened room.

The girls are in a different area. Just like the boys, they are surrounded by their same-sex relatives and supporters. The atmosphere is wonderful, full of celebration, connection and encouragement. I can well understand the sense of rejection and chagrin, even confusion and blame, that a community would feel and then bring vengefully to bear on a girl who refused to undergo FGM. And I could well understand the conflicted feelings of any girl who does not want to be cut yet who is naturally drawn – as anyone would be – to a celebratory event in which everyone participates and supports each other. This is not about girls being too weak to say no, but about the strength of a culture in persuading, muffling, denying or overriding that no. Additionally, The Cut makes it painfully clear that the girls who submit to FGM do not do so because they are passive but because they are innocent. The reality of what exactly will be done to them is concealed from them until it’s too late. 

At the FGM ceremony there is an atmosphere of frenzy, an undercurrent of brisk determination to see it through despite anyone's hesitation or aversion and a core of dark zeal, as at any rite where blood is to be shed. Amidst the celebrations of the brightly dressed older women around them – a celebration in whose rhythms and music I can’t help but hear the refrain cycle-of-abuse, cycle-of-abuse – the girls themselves are subdued. They become increasingly and instinctively nervous as they are jostled to stand in a line and then pushed down to sit on the ground, then lie back when their time comes. We see money changing hands as women buy pairs of surgical gloves from a vendor.

The innocence of the girls is such that one casually helps her mother get a fresh surgical blade out of its sterile packet. The girls are forced back and told to relax with their legs bent and naturally apart. Fear spreads from girl to girl to girl. The older women grow carping, bossy and a little physically rough, relishing their one moment of power. They bully the girls and egg each other on. One of them holds the razor and cuts a girl. It’s unwatchable.

Afterwards, there is silence. The girls look sick, queasy with pain. Their faces are rubbery with shock and, for some, tears pour thickly down their cheeks. Their eyes are dead. The girls are unable to sit up. They are clearly, obviously, visibly traumatised, in shock. A sizzle of glee passes through the older women who throng, dance, gather. They look triumphant, like bullies who’ve gained a point.

A health worker filmed in her clinic says, “after FGM you can have death from bleeding out. You can catch an infection. There can be a cross-infection.”

A male apologist insists, “girls don’t bleed and are not cut painfully.” His comment is not just motivated by an arrogant dismissal of female pain but - as echoed by many of the speakers - a suspicion of health workers. Multiple commentators hint that “the negative effects come from doctors” who they say are misleading people about the risks of FGM despite having to deal with the consequences when things go wrong. There is, overall, a resistance to the kind of change that the clinic symbolises: a national, standardised and networked healthcare system relying on medicalised, non-naturopathic treatments. Something very simple lies at the heart of all this: resistance to change and fear of the loss of defining and unifying rites. “It may end gradually. We can’t stop abruptly. We say it’s an initiation and we believe it’s good for us,” says one man. Another person repeats fervently, “It will not end” because “culture doesn’t end. Ever.”

The girls are escorted home. Their faces have been daubed in talcum powder to mark them as ‘initiated’. With colourful hats and parasols held over their heads they look like little ghost emperors. The pressure of the bodies around them and the willpower of the crowd seem to be the only things holding them up. The people are singing, dancing and jogging alongside the girls.

A still from The Cut by Beryl Magoko

It’s a terrible journey back. The girls pass in and out of consciousness, crying, staggering, fainting, sweating and collapsing, barely able to walk. Their eyeballs roll, their necks go floppy. Blood runs down their legs. They are shaken firmly, scolded and harangued. There is no tenderness whatsoever. Never before has it been so clear that FGM – the entire day, not just the moment of cutting – is not about celebrating the start of womanhood but about forcing female obedience, beginning a trauma which makes girls mentally vulnerable and therefore susceptible to further control and abuse, women bullying girls and the deliberate debilitation and weakening of strong, healthy female flesh. FGM is a socially sanctioned brutalisation process justified as a rite so ancient that nobody can remember its purpose, thereby leaving it usefully open to conventional patriarchal justifications.

A woman describes the “excruciating pain” of female genital mutilation.

Another woman says, “I regretted having gone there – but it was too late.” It was done.

We see the girls being taken home, glassy eyed. They are so traumatised physically and mentally that they’re unable to speak. They are encouraged to lie down. They can barely manoeuvre themselves. We see one mother trying to get her daughter to eat a biscuit. The daughter is unresponsive. She is too weak to chew.

In the aftermath there are countless physical problems, in addition to the mental trauma. It is difficult to urinate and it can take up to three weeks to walk properly. One woman says she “can’t even bathe alone. You need to be held.” Much older women describe how they “staggered” and “couldn’t sleep or walk for ten days with the pain.”

The wound must be left to heal in a certain way. If a girl sleeps with her legs closed the wound is forcibly re-opened.

“It’s so painful that I can’t even explain,” says a woman.

“It is like taking a hot nail and putting it on the wound,” says another woman.

A health worker explains the biologically necessity of the clitoris, which helps the vagina to stretch during childbirth. But FGM can remove the clitoris, leaving scar tissue: “Scar tissue doesn’t expand, which leads to tears, which obstruct labour. This leads to tears upwards and also down to the anus in childbirth. So a woman can develop a third degree tear – vagina to anus.” It’s not the word ‘tear’ that gets me about that quote, it’s the phrase ‘third degree’. Because I’m guessing there aren’t a whole load of degrees to get though and third is pretty much the worst. From this, a woman can develop a fistula, which means that she passes faeces through the vagina, the barrier separating the vagina and anus having been ripped. 

Another health worker adds, “I feel [FGM] should stop. It’s just humiliating. If they want to do it let them do it on adults who can sign their own consent form.” For the villagers shown in The Cut, the power to end FGM officially and decisively is in the hands of the new generation of men, the sons of the council elders.

A woman who underwent female genital mutilation says, “If I could stop it, it would have ended.”

Further reading:

·           An interview with Beryl Magoko about The Cut and the issue of female genital mutilation.

·           The official press pack for The Cut, giving full credits and further details of the film’s history and making, can be accessed here.

·           Read Beryl Magoko’s directors’ notes about the challenges she faced when filming.

·           Listen to award-winning reporter Juliet Spare’s feature on female genital mutilation for Voice of Russia

Bidisha is a 2013 Fellow of the International Reporting Project, covering global health and development.

Taking action on the global health worker crisis

A couple of weeks ago I covered the importance of a well-trained, well-paid and well-respected human resources system in providing free universal healthcare globally. I analysed the challenges of doing so and examined some of the factors which can enable or inhibit good practice. Since then I’ve become aware of a new drive, flagged up by Health Poverty Action, which highlights the UK’s responsibility when it comes to global human resources in the field of health. It emphasises a developmental imbalance - with serious consequences for developing countries - created by the Western exploitation of global health worker labour.

Health Poverty Action has identified more than fifty countries, mainly in Africa and South Asia, which suffer from a “critical shortage of health personnel” while simultaneously carrying “a large part of the global burden of disease.” At the same time the increased necessity of long term care for ageing populations in European countries is creating strong demand for health workers, fuelling the migration of health workers to Europe from developing countries in today’s heavily globalised labour market.

Image of health worker in clinic in Tsumkwe in Namibia (c) Health Poverty Action

Health Poverty Action has been calling for the UK to “compensate developing countries for its role in the global health worker crisis.” There is a cached copy of the call here; I'm not sure what has happened to the plan to get supporters to write to UK MPs. The charity points to the shortage of health workers in developing countries and the UK's strong record of employing health workers who are originally from developing countries and migrate to the UK to work. HPA is not challenging people’s entitlement to move for work, to earn, to study and to create better lives, but instead seek simply to raise awareness of the consequences of the health worker shortage in developing countries. The responsibility for this must be on world governments engaged in large scale health infrastructure and planning. The shortage of health workers in developing countries results not only in poorer treatment there but in a variety of deficits which weaken the entire health system in the long term, from the under-staffing and under-maintenance of hospitals, clinics and rural health stations to poorer quality and less up to date training and education, the under-provision of medical equipment, the reduced chance of future investment when a future workforce cannot be relied upon and much more.

The charity adds,

It is estimated that 1 billion people [virtually all in developing countries] will never see a health worker, putting them at risk of dying from easily preventable diseases, from childbirth and basic health conditions.

The report Aid in Reverse challenges the UK government to play a conscientious and responsible role in ending the global health worker crisis, which Health Poverty Action labels a developing world “brain drain.” They suggest that in the UK the Departments of Health and International Development could work together on two complementary issues: first, treating the roots of the UK’s own shortage of health workers through better planning, training and education; second, giving something back to the developing countries whose health infrastructures are being weakened through lack – with severe ramifications for those nations’ own long term development – while they contribute so much to developed nations’ healthcare systems.

The challenge to developed nations who use the labour of talented health workers from developing countries to ensure their own citizens’ wellbeing is part of a pan-European initiative aiming to create a sustainable global health workforce. One of the main directives of the project is the implementation of a World Health Organisation Global Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel. The project’s tagline runs,

‘Healthworkers for all and all for health workers.’

Bidisha is a Fellow of the 2013 International Reporting Project, covering global health and development.

"Every woman has basic human rights" The Circles empowering women for health, development, education and freedom from violence

Earlier this year I chaired a panel with Joan Smith, Baroness Helena Kennedy and the novelist Kishwar Desai. We were discussing male sexual violence in India, following the worldwide protests about the rape, torture and murder of a young woman in Delhi. The event, at The Nehru Centre in London, was held to launch Desai's latest novel Sea of Innocence, which tackles the same issue and also provides shocking details of the Delhi case which hadn't previously been revealed in the media. In its ability to combine a strong heroine with a thrilling plot and urgent contemporary issues, Sea of Innocence follows on from Desai's previous novel The Origins of Love, which looked at the Indian international surrogacy trade.

The conversation during the Sea of Innocence launch event was wideranging. We looked at all aspects of global rape culture, which transcends colour, religion, class, language, country, culture and hemisphere: the blaming of victims, the excusal of perpetrators, the prejudice against survivors of sexual violence, the silencing and abusing of survivors who speak out, extreme and perverse leniency towards perpetrators even when they are convicted. Male sexual violence, which is endemic, reflects, partially creates and also reinforces women's inequality, disempowerment and subjugation. This disempowerment is obvious in every area: in the discrimination against us in the workplace; in the exploitation of our labour, which is unpaid, under-paid, under-valued and over-consumed; in the denial of our rights over our own bodies; in the casual and constant judging, slandering, undermining and defamation which constitutes the majority of all comments made to and about women; in the way we are represented in mainstream culture, images, advertising and the media as silent pieces of nice-looking meat, pathetic and useless idiots or bitter, petty, malicious schemers; and in the strong resistance against female education, landholding, powerful visibility, money-making, public involvement, mobility in public spaces (which is delimited by harassment and threat), enfranchisement, leadership, influence, direction and presence. Writing specifically on rape culture, structural misogyny and gender inequality in India, there is a brilliant analysis by Tehelka Media which I urge everyone to read.

As UNIFEM states, "One woman in three will be raped, beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime." Male violence against women is so common that it has been described by the World Health Organisation as being "of epidemic proportions." Read the major, multi-national WHO study into domestic violence and see why they identify it as "a major public health and human rights problem throughout the world."

After the Sea of Innocence panel discussion I was approached by an impressive woman, Santosh Bhanot, who told me that she was involved in a project called The Circle, in affiliation with Oxfam. The Circle aims to address some of the fundamental issues and abuses which keep women worldwide in a state of disempowerment and inhibit our equality and our access to justice, rights and autonomy. Another underlying goal is to lift women out of poverty through gender empowerment.

The issue of poverty, often spoken of in general terms, is starkly gendered. According to Oxfam,

Of the 1.3 billion people living in extreme poverty worldwide, more than two thirds are women and girls.

Women and girls are the most disadvantaged of the disadvantaged, the most abused of the abused and the most exploited of the exploited. This has not arisen by some kind of unfortunate, fated magic but directly through the actions of patriarchal systems and many individual but misogynistically and patriarchally like-minded perpetrators, users and exploiters. When we defy all silencing and stigma to speak about what we have undergone we suffer the further grotesque abuse of being blamed for men's abuse of us, told that we deserve it, told that we brought it on ourselves by our own behaviour or told that we are lying out of malice to hurt men. We are then punished further by being slandered, marginalised or ostracised.

As Everjoice Win from ActionAid International, South Africa, states in a report about how helping women and girls is the key to ending poverty,

We believe that women are vulnerable and more impoverished compared to men because they have been systematically made vulnerable by years of violence, patriarchal power and control, as well as decades of inequitable laws and policies deliberately designed to put them in this position.

The Circle was founded in 2008 by Annie Lennox with the aim of connecting high profile, culturally influential women of expertise in various areas. A network of Circles will raise consciousness and money (here's the catch: money for Oxfam) to spend on a range of grassroots projects tackling everything from poverty to education to maternal health. They will also work "to reduce all forms of violence towards women, by helping to change attitudes."

The idea is that the various Circles support specific projects of interest but are all part of the wider Circle ethos of women helping women to change the world for everyone. A group called The Lawyers' Circle supports women's legal rights in Africa; The Music Circle raises money to protect women in the Democratic Republic of Congo; The Oxford Circle is looking at improving health and education in Niger and hopes to engage Oxford University and local city businesses in supporting this aim.

So far, significant money has been raised for a broad range of change-making initiatives. In Zambia the Circle project, working with Oxfam, is helping community schools. These are volunteer-run initiatives which provide vital education for one million Zambian children. However, those involved require more training and resources; the Circle's work in this area benefits 18,000 students in 25 schools and strongly supports the education of girls.

In Pakistan the We Can project is a grassroots initiative aiming to reach 800,000 people in combating "endemic" male violence against women, advocating for it to be reported and investigated and for a social shift which recognises male violence against women as abuse rather than normalising it and blaming victims rather than perpetrators.

The Circle has been working on improving maternal healthcare in Ghana, where 75 women a week die due to complications in pregnancy and childbirth. The focus here is on the provision of free healthcare to reduce maternal mortality. This is an achievable goal: other, non-Oxfam projects worldwide have shown the marked success of dedicated maternal mortality, pre- and ante-natal and newborn health projects. Please see my reports on Sierra Leone and Burundi and India for more details.

Two women's co-ops in Liberia have been helped to provide women with tools and training and empower them to bargain for better terms in a country in which, says Oxfam, "80% of ...women are unemployed." One little note to make here to correct that subtle patriarchal diss: these women, I can bet you, are employed. They are totally employed, to the point of exhaustion. They are employed in the never-ending, repetitive, back-breaking, all-consuming drudge labour of looking after the children, serving the men, running a household, cooking, cleaning and everything else - and these are all separate jobs - and their work is used and taken and exploited for free. They are paid nothing for their 24-hours, 7-day-a-week employment and it is callous and disrespectful to say that these same women are "unemployed." It is more accurate to say that they are exploited in an unjust situation. Despite the work they do, they are economically dependent on men and marginalised by them from economic power, political status, public influence and social clout. This exploitation and depletion of energy, financial and legal marginalisation and political discrimination mean that it is difficult for women to fight together for equality, rights and freedom from violence.

The latest addition to the Circle network is The Asian Circle, which works alongside Oxfam in helping South Asian women. It was founded and is chaired by Santosh Bhanot, the woman I met at the Kishwar Desai event. The focus is wide: The Asian Circle will be pulling together high profile women to support projects in agriculture, education, disaster relief and management, poverty reduction and sustainable development.

The Asian Circle was launched at the Houses of Parliament on 7th November 2013 in an event chaired by BBC reporter Ayshea Buksh and featuring speeches by Southall Black Sisters activist and journalist Rahila Gupta (read some of her human rights focused pieces here) and Kishwar Desai.

Santosh Bhanot spoke at the launch of The Asian Circle:




This week she told me,

Our focus is to work towards change with the skills and talents of ...[the] women who are part of the Asian Circle, a group of passionate and highly influential women from all walks of life. I wanted to help women who have an unfair chance in life and I particularly have passion and energy to work with women in South Asia because of my roots [as a South Asian woman]. Every woman has basic human rights.

On my recent visit to India I saw the positive impact of programs by Oxfam working with vulnerable women. For instance, building support centres for women subject to domestic violence and providing mediation and legal support. More programs are needed, especially in the poorer states.

The first programme The Asian Circle is supporting is called "Promoting Violence Free Lives." According to the Indian National Family Health Survey Round III report of 2005-2006 and the Oxfam India 2010 Baseline Survey, the statistics are damning, as are the social values which have been revealed:

• 35% of women suffer sexual or non-sexual violence in India
• 72% of men believe male violence against women is justified
• 68% of women believe that husbands are justified in beating wives

Rahila Gupta welcomes the connection between the feminism, profile and zeal of The Asian Circle and the structural support Oxfam can provide:

This is the launch of a very important initiative. If my last 24 years with Southall Black Sisters has taught me anything, it is this: funding, funding, funding. The time that we would like to spend delivering frontline services is spent instead on raising funds without which we'd have no money to deliver anything. So it's great that the Asian Circle aims to help Violence Against Women projects in India escape that vicious cycle.

The Asian Circle is focusing on the poorest states with a multi-tiered, thorough strategy: to build support centres in police stations for women who have suffered gendered violence; to engage community elders, young men and boys through educational initiatives to change their attitudes and their behaviour; and to develop networks of women working at a state level to make sure that domestic violence laws are implemented rather than ignored.

Kishwar Desai told me,

As someone who has been trying to raise awareness about some very disturbing gender issues in India for a while now, I am sincerely grateful to see the formation of The Asian Circle. My personal hope? That they will be the catalyst, eventually, for providing an international platform for Asian women, perhaps leading to a women's liberation movement in Asia.

Bidisha is a 2013 International Reporting Project fellow, covering global health and development.  

He thinks you’re scum but he fancies you, you’re humiliated but you fancy him: the Darcy dilemma in Pride and Prejudice

Mr Darcy is the ultimate punisher. Icily condescending or outright brusque, he is eloquent only when putting others down. Noticed immediately as “fine, tall... handsome… noble,”  at a dance, it becomes obvious that he is not just lean but mean too. Within the elegantly proportioned space of one Austenian sentence after his arrival, “his manners gave a disgust which turned the tide of his popularity.”

For all his apparent loftiness Darcy has been perfectly happy in the company of his class peers but mental inferiors: Bingley the nice but dim best friend, braying Mr Hurst and the mean, shallow Bingley sisters.

When he meets his intellectual equal, Elizabeth Bennet, the cruel machinery of the novel means that it is she who is constantly humbled and humiliated, not him. Darcy’s scathing presumptions about the Bennets are almost completely correct. His one mistake is to underestimate Jane’s feelings for Bingley. But his assessment of Mrs Bennet’s vulgarity and avarice, his lack of surprise at not one but two sisters’ susceptibility to Wickham’s wiles and his assumption of Mr Bennet’s uselessness are proven right. Lizzy must face the wretched truth of all this; the worst Darcy must do is admit that he fancies someone whose family are inferior in both class and etiquette, apologise to Bingley for not mentioning that Jane was in town and wonder whether he should have told people about Wickham’s true nature.

Darcy’s manner changes somewhat after he is told off by Lizzy following his proposal. But his wealth and power protect him from any greater catharsis and weight the narrative entirely in his favour. That is not to say, however, that any reader with a drop of lifeblood in her would fail to be moved by one of the sexiest and most perfect moments in literature, when the two bump into each other at Pemberley: “Their eyes instantly met, and the cheeks of each were overspread with the deepest blush. He absolutely started, and for a moment seemed immovable from surprise.”

But we know what happens immediately after that: Lydia’s ridiculous and perilous Wickham fling, which embarrasses everyone but herself and her mother in its crudeness. Darcy is the one who makes everything right; Lizzy gets no heroic moment. At the end of the book the Bennets are even less worthy of Darcy than they were at the start, for now he has the moral advantage as well as the monetary one. Nothing Lizzy can do in private will ever repay what he has done in rescuing the family from public humiliation.

The message of Pride and Prejudice is not that love conquers all but that a rich man can buy his way out of any pickle, that tricksters like Wickham always land on their feet and that women are nothing more than collateral in the dealings of worldly men. Such is the genius of Austen that long after the novel is over, one wonders whether Lizzy goes on to teach Darcy the power of laughter or whether he spends his life freezing her out over the breakfast table.

This article was originally commissioned by Intelligent Life magazine to celebrate the upcoming  200th publication anniversary of Pride and Prejudice in 2013.