Media

Brace yourself for a barrage of silly slogans and cutesy cupcakes. International Women’s Day is on the way and as...

Let’s get this out of the way first. The one-minute video of Australia’s new Ambassador for Gender Equality, Stephanie Copus...

Virginia Haussegger AM is an award-winning journalist and communications specialist, with over 25 years’ experience in news media. She recently transitioned to a new role at IGPA, the Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis, University of Canberra, where she is an Adjunct Professor.

In 1995, in China, 189 countries adopted the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, a comprehensive roadmap to raise the status of women.

Sometimes the thing that is stifling our progress sits right under our nose, in full view. We can sense it but don't see it for what it really is. We don't connect the dots. Anne Summers made me think about this during her speech this week marking 40 years since the publication of her landmark feminist text, Damned Whores and God's Police. She noted that when women's activists set up Australia's first women's refuge, Elsie, they didn't talk about violence against women, or domestic violence, or sexual harassment. They didn't use that terminology because it hadn't been coined. Instead, their efforts to support women fleeing violent marriages were intuitive, grassroots responses, to a systemic form of abuse against women – that hadn't yet been named.

Television journalist Jamila Mujahid will never forget the day she broke the biggest story of her life. And she did it wearing her bedroom slippers! The city of Kabul had been under heavy fire for days, and the Taliban were weakening. Finally on the 13th of November 2001 they succumbed, and before dawn truckloads of Taliban fled the capital. Later that morning a fierce gun battle with the remaining hardliners ended in a bloodbath, with Taliban bodies splayed on the street. When the shooting stopped Jamila ran out of her home and raced through the streets in her Burqa and slippers.