Justine Roberts, co-founder and CEO of Mumsnet

When asked about Mumsnet’s mission statement I invariably respond, without missing a beat, that Mumsnet exists “to make parents’ lives easier”.

This is both true and necessarily broad; some parents’ lives are eased by practical advice about ways to wean a baby, while others find solace in vigorous debate about welfare policy or jokes about pelvic floors. But since the site’s inception over 13 years ago, I’ve strongly believed that the “mission” is most likely to be achieved if users are able to express themselves as freely as possible.

This commitment to free speech has produced some fascinating outcomes; to a large extent the site has been and continues to be shaped by its users, and re-tooled by them to serve purposes that were certainly not what I envisaged when I conceived a website to tap into other parents’ wisdom on anything from childbirth to sleep to mother-in-laws.

Most obviously, Mumsnet is a noisy mass of user-generated comment (UGC). Our forums receive around 35,000 posts every day, and our Bloggers Network comprises around 3000 bloggers writing about the issues of the day. New visitors to Mumsnet’s forums frequently express surprise at sheer scale of the place, as well as a certain relief at the unusual latitude afforded to posters.

The posting guidelines are as hands-off as possible, aiming to keep intervention to the minimum required to facilitate constructive conversation. The talkboard is post-moderated (our users often refer to it as ‘self-moderated’), meaning that mods only intervene if a post is reported. In other words, the community decides what behaviours it will tolerate.

Unlike some UGC behemoths, though, we do not believe that a total absence of rules necessarily produces an optimum level of freedom for all posters. Over the years multiple groups have collected on Mumsnet, often made up of those who find themselves marginalised and condescended to in “real life”; our incredibly busy and informative Special Needs forum is one example.

It’s unlikely these posters would feel as safe as they do on Mumsnet if we didn’t respond to their expressed desire for a relatively safe online space. Put simply, Mumsnetters are free to swear, but not to express disablist sentiments. Our few rules can roughly be distilled down to “no personal attacks and no hate speech”.

Over the years we have frequently found ourselves having to bat away attacks on our users’ freedom of expression from those keen to use England’s outdated defamation laws to suppress criticism; this has come worryingly close to home at times, threatening the existence of the website itself in the early days, and Mumsnet has been an active supporter of the Libel Reform Campaign for some years.

We also believe strongly that anonymous online posting offers enormous benefits, particularly to vulnerable people, and we try to make this point as loudly as we can whenever confronted by politicians who believe that anonymity is of use only to trolls.

The post ‘Giving women a voice may be our most significant achievement’ appeared first on Index on Censorship.

The conference declaration said: “All human rights are universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated. The international community must treat human rights globally in a fair and equal manner, on the same footing, and with the same emphasis.” It went into considerable detail about what this means for women.

However the Vienna Declaration said very little about free expression. Nor was this omission rectified in the Beijing Declaration on Women’s Rights in 1995. The year before, after serving as founding chair of the International PEN Women Writers Committee, I had become President of a new organisation, Women’s WORLD (Women’s World Organisation for Rights, Literature and Development).

Women hold a banner to ‘Save the Girl Child’ during a 2012 International Women’s Day rally in Agartala

Women’s WORLD was set up to investigate and advocate against gender-based censorship, both formal and informal, and to defend feminist writers. We prepared a document for Beijing called The Power of the Word: Culture, Censorship and Voice, emphasising the importance of voice and thus of women writers to the struggle for women’s equality:

“The subordination of women is basic to all social systems based on dominance; for this reason, conservatives hate and fear the voices of women. That is why so many religions have made rules against women preaching or even speaking in the house of worship. That is why governments keep telling women to keep quiet: ‘You’re in the Constitution,’ they will say, ‘you have the vote, so you have no right to complain.’ But having a voice is as important, perhaps more important, than having a vote. When censors attack women writers, they do so in order to intimidate all women and keep them from using their right to free expression. Gender-based censorship is therefore a problem not only for women writers, but for everyone concerned with the emancipation of women.

“Women writers are a threat to systems built on gender hierarchy because they open doors for other women. By expressing the painful contradictions between men and women in their society, by exposing the discrepancy between what society requires of women and what they need to be fulfilled, woman writers challenge the status quo…[and] make a breach in the wall of silence. They say things no one has ever said before and say them in print, where anyone can read and repeat them.”

As President of Women’s WORLD, I produced an analysis of the Declaration and Platform for Action that came out of the Beijing Conference. While recognising the Platform of Action was a huge step forward in translating women’s issues into the language of human rights, I concluded that it fell short in the area of free expression, for these reasons:

•  The Platform of Action did not consider the centrality of voice to female emancipation. It did not mention censorship nor recognise that women’s right to free expression is jeopardised in many parts of the world, and that the silencing of women is a barrier to both development and democracy.
• With the exception of indigenous women, who were seen to have a culture and the right to develop it, the Platform of Action framed culture in negative terms, as something that limited women’s rights rather than as something women make, transmit, and shape.
• The Platform of Action’s main concern with media was in terms of harmful portrayals of women, with some slight emphasis on the need for women to have access to the new electronic media. Nowhere did it mention that free expression is not only a right but the means to protect other rights, nor the social contributions women could make if their voices were not continually suppressed.

Our paper for Beijing said, “While there is no question that indigenous and colonised peoples are under particular cultural assault, all women need cultural rights. We need the time and space and access to means of cultural expression to be able to articulate our own social values. Without attention to culture, sustainable development and real democracy are not possible, because profound changes must necessarily be culture-related. Women’s silence is thus as serious a problem as poverty itself, and is both a cause of poverty and its effect.”

In the years after 1995, Women’s WORLD struggled to raise issues of voice but kept running up against a narrowing of women’s human rights to the issue of violence against women, while we were striving for a more inclusive vision that would connect this violence to culture, religion, economics, power politics, censorship and war. Our work was also affected by a separation within the human rights movement between groups that deal mainly with free expression and the big mainstream multi-issue groups.

This same separation was reflected in the global movement for women’s human rights. For instance, when the Women’s Human Rights Defenders International Coalition released a global report in 2012 on dangers facing feminists in various regions, it did not even think of drawing on the many years of experience of groups that defend writers and journalists, many of whom are women.

In the last few years, the global women’s movement has found itself stonewalled by the rise of religious fundamentalism to the degree that many activists now oppose moves for another UN conference on women, fearing that the gains of the 90s will be undermined.

The UN Council on Human Rights has been a battleground over issues of culture, with a newly religious Russia forming a bloc with many African and Muslim-majority countries, to support a resolution calling for the application of the “traditional values of humankind” to human rights norms. Such “traditional values” are, of course, invoked whenever women, sexual minorities, or religious minorities want equal rights, including the right to free expression.

In the darkness of this backlash against women’s human rights, the UN’s 2009 appointment of Pakistani feminist Farida Shaheed, first as an independent expert and now as the special rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, was one of the few rays of light. In her 2012 report, Shaheed flagged ways in which fundamentalism impinges on women’s exercise of their cultural rights, as when “solo female singing has been banned and restrictions have been placed on female musicians performing in public concerts.”

She linked culture to violence against women, pointing out that when women try to deviate from the dominant culture of their communities or interpret and reshape them, “they often confront disproportionate opposition, including different forms of violence, for acts as apparently simple as choosing who to marry, how to dress, or where to go.”

She has taken a proactive approach to women’s cultural production, shifting the perspective from seeing culture as an obstacle to women’s human rights to ensuring that women have equal cultural rights. Hopefully her work as special rapporteur will help turn back the proponants of the “traditional values of mankind,” and encourage a wider recognition that freedom of expression is critical to equality for women.

MMeredith Tax, an American writer and activist, is Chair of the Board of the Centre for Secular Space, a new thinktank based in Londonhttp://www.meredithtax.org/

The post Why free speech is a feminist issue appeared first on Index on Censorship.

This grim reading is made worse when one looks at the facts. According to official statistics, women in Belarus have higher levels of education (49 per cent of Belarusian females graduated from universities — in comparison to 42 per cent of men) and are better at foreign languages (59 per cent of Belarusians who speak English are women, whilst 63 per cent of German-speaking Belarusians are female). At the same time, men are much better represented at top managerial positions.

Alexander Lukashenko is often seen in public with his son, but Nikolay’s mother or the President’s own wife never make an appearance

According to Iryna Sidorskaya, Head of the journalism institute’s department of communication technologies at Institute at the Belarusian State University, men don’t like losing to women; men are afraid of looking weak against strong and intelligent women.

“Men are unlikely to hear out women. There is a strong stereotype in our society about women being talkative and just capable of blabbing; and talking is not ‘real work’, but just a waste of time. One can notice during any working meeting in a company or an organisation that men often don’t listen to women talking; even if the latter make the right point, the former perceive their interventions as ‘too much talking’,” says Sidorskaya.

Such attitudes are present in many fields of activity; thus it works as a “natural” acceptance of a restriction of women’s freedom of expression on many levels.

“Women are just not regarded as equal to men, even if they have the same job positions; they are regarded to be inferior to male colleagues. One can see the same trend in business as well as in politics,” Sidorskaya admits.

No change without gender education

Belarus has gender-neutral laws; there are no designated state programmes or strategies aimed at enhancing women’s participation in decision making processes at any levels.

“Women in Belarus face discrimination; not only do they have less access to high managerial levels of decision-making, their freedom of expression is restricted in comparison with men,” says Elena Eskova, former leader of the Belarusian Women’s party Nadzeya (Hope), which was liquidated by the authorities in 2007.

According to Eskova, the issue goes back to the leader of the country itself. Authoritarian politicians and diffident managers tend to surround themselves with dull people in order to stand out against their “grey” background:

“The Belarusian president does not like talented and bright people with striking personalities, especially women. That is exactly why there are almost no women in government or other bodies of power, as they just don’t fit into his authoritarian and masculine style of management. There are 29 female MPs (out of total of 110 in the lower chamber of the national parliament), but none of them are really influential or well-known,” says Eskova.

The role of women is underestimated — and not just by the authorities; women are misrepresented among the opposition leaders, too. It can be explained by long-lasting patriarchal history that suggested men are in charge. Nothing is going to change unless gender education is introduced starting from entry school level.

Borscht vs politics

The hallmark of an “official” attitude to women’s participation in political life was a comment by Lidziya Yarmoshyna, the Chair of the Central Election Commission, made on 20 December 2010, after a brutal dispersal of protests against fraudulent presidential elections. During a press conference she replied to a remark from a journalist about police using force against peaceful demonstrators, including women:

“You know, such ‘women’ have nothing else to do. They’d better stay home and cook borscht instead of hanging around at squares… It is a shame for a woman to participate in such actions… If a grown woman joins protests, it just shows there is something wrong with her intellect.”

People who have access to the top governmental bodies in Belarus say there are just two official receptions or celebrations where officials are invited together with their wives; those for New Year’s Eve, and for Defender of the Fatherland Day on 23 February, which is essentially “Men’s Day”.

Other parties and receptions exclude wives from celebrations. Lukashenko himself has never been seen in public with his wife. He tries to position himself as a strong politician, who is a good father for both his nation (often being referred to as “batska”, which means “a father” in Belarusian) — and his youngest son Nikolay.

“The fact that he takes his younger son everywhere with him, but has never been accompanied by the boy’s mother or any other ‘first lady’ rouses the indignation of every woman I know, regardless of their political views. It appears that the president’s women are the most discriminated in the whole country. Halina Lukashenko, the president’s wife, in fact lives under house arrest; and Nikolay’s mother has never even been named at all (she most likely to be Iryna Abelskaya, Lukashenko’s former doctor). What kind of a country do we live in, if we don’t have a first lady, but have a president with a child?” Elena Eskova asks.

Is there a new trend?

The attitude towards women may partly come from the leader of the country, but it is also well-built in the culture of the society.

“This statement can be proved by the results of our opinion polls,” says Dr. Aleh Manaeu, Head of the Independent Institute of Social, Political and Economic Studies (IISEPS).

According to IISEPS, 45.5 per cent of Belarusians consider men to be better political leaders than women; 44.6 per cent think they are equal, and only about 8 per cent of the country say women can lead in politics better than men do.

Sixty per cent of Belarusians also believe men have more possibilities in politics, business and other areas of activities.

“It goes back to our history and culture. And still, we can see some positive dynamics in these responses in comparison to what we used to have 15 or 20 years ago, when the public opinion was even more ‘masculine-centred’,” Dr. Manaev says.

Interestingly, women occupy more and more senior roles in independent media. The question is whether the rest of the Belarusian society will follow this trend.

Maryna Koktysh is an award-winning Belarusian journalist

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