We all like to think of ourselves as free – free to think, free to feel, free to speak our mind. But are we? Can we say what we want on social media? Do we have a right to offend each other?
TRIPWIRES offers a thought provoking workshop; an opportunity to engage with these incendiary issues in an enjoyable and accessible way.
Practically exploring what free speech means, three young facilitators will open the floor with a workshop before delivering an interactive show developed in collaboration with award-winning, censored Lebanese director Lucien Bourjeily.
TRIPWIRES FACILITATORS:
Emma Dennis-Edwards
Emma is an actress and workshop facilitator, writer and director.
Theatre work includes Clean (The Traverse Theatre), Upper Cut (TARA Theatre) Crash (North Wall Arts Centre/ Arcola Theatre), Talent (Soho Theatre), Millennium (The Vineyard Theatre, New York), A New World Order (Barbican/Hydrocracker Theatre) . Television and Film includes Trap for Cinderella (Forthcoming Productions) BBC Ident Over the Rainbow (Red Bee Media), The Naked Poet (Triple Threat Media).
As a workshop facilitator Emma has worked for The National Youth Theatre, Apples and Snakes and Hoxton Hall.
Emma was selected for the Oval House Theatre and English Pen writers group and her debut plays Spice and Dreams of a Scholar were produced by Oval House Theatre’s 33% Festival earlier this year.
What does freedom of expression mean to you?
Freedom of Expression is a right and not a privilege, however I believe that this right comes with great responsibility and it is important to me that I use my voice to aid the freedom of expression of others and also use my skills as an artist to tell stories of those individuals and communities who do not have the freedom to have their voices head.
Lance Kirby
After completing a Performing Arts: Acting course at Westminster Kingsway College in 2008, Lance has pursued a career as a performer, project coordinator and workshop facilitator in the UK and abroad. In 2010 Lance embarked on a 6 months leadership-training course ‘Tripwires’ combining theatre, acting, writing and movement to create an open space for young people to explore freedom of expression, censorship and offence. Since then Lance has supported and led workshops for arts organisations including: Project Phakama UK, Index on Censorship, English PEN, Apples and Snakes, Urban Development, Immediate Theatre and Al Kasaba, Yes Theatre and Karama Children’s centre (In Palestine).
What does freedom of expression mean to you?
Freedom of expression is to protect the human race from the human race.
Hussina Raja
I studied Criminology and Law while always having a keen interest in Performing Arts. I work as an actress and founded the organisation FREE2B and henceforth, decided to live the life of a struggling creative in hope of gaining invaluable life experience. I came into contact with Index on Censorship via the TRIPWIRES Arts training and leadership programme, a joint collaboration between Index and Project Phakama UK. It is an innovative programme which engaged me into the Social Arts scene through exploration and gave me a sense of direction, a platform for expression and inspiration.
What does freedom of expression mean to you?
Freedom of Expression is a concept I still find very difficult to pin down. I find it vast and inconsistent, varying according to the context. For me it’s an opportunity to freely speak and do as I please, experiment and investigate boundaries without being censored by others. Freedom to express in theory is an individual right for everyone and a responsibility, one that must be reinforced among the human race. However, practically I find it can be exhausting. As a young British woman I still find it hard to express myself without the back lash from communities and conflict with my culture and traditions, leaving me confused and living in a society that promotes Human Rights and protects your Civil Liberties and yet still leaves me struggling to find a voice and stance that won’t cause offence.
In late October blogger Dinh Nhat Uy became the first activist sentenced in Vietnam for his Facebook posts, or, more specifically “abusing democratic freedoms” via Facebook (the much-used Article 258 of the legal code). Uy received a 15 month suspended sentence and in that regard he is luckier than the legion of bloggers, writers and activists who have been sent to prison or rehabilitation centres by the government in recent years.
But it is not just bloggers and activists who fall under the government’s watchful eye. Cultural activities from web comics to concerts are also monitored, for sex as much as sedition.
On October 4 General Vo Nguyen Giap passed away at age 102. Two weeks later during the weekend of the war hero’s funeral, most television channels shut down as a mark of respect. The odd BBC report is blocked, sex – but not violence – is cut from many overseas films shown domestically and subtitles often substitute perceived offensive language with more innocuous words. That television, along with nightlife and karaoke, was essentially cancelled shows just how much the old general was revered, and how the government still controls much of the means of communication in Vietnam. Those TV stations which did keep broadcasting showed old revolutionary films.
Bloggers are regularly jailed for pointing out state failings. Journalists face myriad restrictions from the state-owned press. Protesters and those handing out leaflets or organising strikes are also jailed. Facebook, now accessible, was quietly blocked for years and there are still sites one needs a workaround to access. Transparency International, Reporters Without Borders, Human Rights Watch, even Barack Obama, all decry Vietnam’s lack of freedom of speech.
But did you know, you can’t write about blow jobs in women’s magazines? Art, music, pop stars, books, comics, web comics, blogs, foreign news, lifestyle magazines, television subtitles, newspaper articles, research, the findings of market research, unflattering film footage, photographs, song lyrics, religious events, religious books, tour guides’ scripts: all are censored and watched closely by authorities.
Sometimes it’s nothing more than the relevant ministry fining a singer a piddling amount for revealing outfits during a performance as it is “not in keeping with Vietnamese fine traditions”. This is duly reported by papers and websites on slow news days and invariably gives the singer in question more publicity.
This process is piecemeal, contradictory and opaque. Are many rules unclear and often not enforced to keep people on their toes? Or is it simply the uncoordinated and sometimes inept efforts Vietnamese bureaucrats are known for country-wide? It is hard to say.
Once, artists had to submit sketches of their proposed paintings not only before they were given paint. These days things are less draconian but more uncertain. Galleries still need approval before exhibitions are allowed to go ahead; sometimes galleries simply won’t have an official exhibition party. As one art insider said, “there is no one rule.”
September 2009’s Decision 97 doesn’t limit expression but research, to 317 pre-approved topics. One of its most immediate effects was to force the disbanding of the well-respected Institute for Development Studies, which did so of its own volition in protest. Its 16-person membership was made up of Party members and well-known intellectuals, not rabble rousers.
All books in Vietnamese must be, in theory and usually in practice, subject to vetting. Even the Quran when translated into Vietnamese and published locally had to be examined first, according to several ethnic Cham, who are adherents of Islam. There has even been the odd raid on foreign book stores, such as in 2012, to confiscate Lonely Planet Vietnam guidebooks which had maps of the South China Sea which, given the ongoing flare ups with China over disputed island territories, is very firmly referred to as the East Sea in Vietnam.
Randy Slocum runs a bookshop in a tourist town in central Vietnam. He recalled trying to import books when he first opened seven years ago. “When I imported my 3,000 books, they confiscated 450 titles for being ‘depraved and reactionary’. Mostly Harlequin romance novels if you can believe it. But they are also interested in religion, anything about the American War, things about revolution. But they refuse to give you a list of what is banned and they refuse to give reasons why certain books are taken.” It is worth noting that Slocum was at the mercy of the provincial authority, not a draconian arm of Hanoi’s Ministry of Tourism, Sport and Culture, which is largely responsible for much cultural oversight.
The only time cultural censorship reached much of an international audience was when Bob Dylan played Ho Chi Minh City in 2011. He, as he has so often, neglected to play ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’. Both Human Rights Watch and American columnist Maureen Dowd pilloried him for giving in to censorship from communist authorities. However sources close to the show’s organisers said 100 songs, including Blowin’ in the Wind, had been approved. In any case, Dylan’s allegory and circumspection might have made his meanings hard to catch for censors whose first language is not English.
One organiser said, “You have to understand, what the authorities are looking for is actually just profanity and overtly sexual lyrics. It is a moral thing rather than a political one.”
Whilst serious news journalists can face arrest for reporting on corruption, even lifestyle or expat magazines have to tread carefully.
The first issue of Cosmopolitan, which began its Vietnamese-language issue with a local publishing company a few years ago, had a handy guide of the effects of alcohol on one’s orgasm, illustrated by graphics of the ratio of wine glasses to fireworks (two or three drinks is the perfect amount; they start to sputter to nothing after that). The headline mentioned “love” (in those knowing quote marks), not sex.
More generally in this area of publishing words like “him”, “triangle” or, in English, “Mr Happy” (in an article on blow job technique) are employed. Even when the correct, medical terms are employed for the varied body parts censors still apparently refuse, saying it’s “too sensitive”.
“We try to be different many times but the government won’t let us. You cannot write this, it not go with traditional (sic),” an unnamed editor explained. She said the internet was different, plenty of people wrote about sex.
These magazines, by and large, appeal to the educated middle classes. These are the same people, it has long been supposed by optimistic liberals worldwide, who will be behind either a revolution or a gradual ease in political restrictions in any repressive regime. A rising and educated middle class is also a hope of the government as Vietnam tries to move into a middle income country status. Yet they’re not allowed to see a tattoo or a wine bottle in a magazine. The exception is SOME men’s magazines with barely dressed models, which are not uncommon.
Even magazines in English are wary. Vietnamese censors may miss the nuance in a bar review noting the number of friendly young women eager for your company, but a feature on issues sex workers face is problematic enough for editors to avoid.
Content which “abuses democratic freedoms” (Article 258) is never clearly defined but in practice can be anything that criticises the government. Content which “sabotages national fine custom and tradition” or is “not in keeping with Vietnamese tradition” can be anything from a pop star’s stupid hairstyle to art that is covertly critical of the government or ruling elites, but given more leeway here people often actually end up more confused and sometimes even more conservative as a result.
I am delighted to be at Lilian Baylis Technology School – I went to school in North London, but my first flat was just down the road from here – I know how hard everyone at this school has worked for it become the first in Lambeth to get an outstanding in its Ofsted and now stands out as ‘outstanding in all aspects’ in the top 10% in the country. Being named for a pioneering woman who nurtured some amazing talent in the theatre, opera and ballet worlds leaving her mark across London gives the school a lot to live up to, but clearly nurturing some amazing talent here of its own these days.
Index on Censorship’s magazine that we are launching here tonight also serves to highlight some talented voices, and some very courageous ones too. Like all of the magazine editions which came before it, it is distinguished by both the quality of its writing and the bravery of its stance. But this one is particularly important to me for the priority it has placed on the voices of women. From pioneering feminists writing about women’s safety in India to the stories of female resistance and of hope from the Arab Spring, this magazine is giving a megaphone to the people whose contribution is so often marginalised, ignored, or eliminated altogether.
In the spirit of Index on Censorship’s core values, the power of our voice is the theme of my remarks tonight. And I want to start by updating a feminist slogan that lots of women who have done pioneering work on role models have been using for years now. Their view is ‘if she can see it, she can be it’. In other words, if you have a visible role model you are much more likely to keep fighting to get past all of the hurdles that are still too often put in the way of girls and women, just as they are for people who are disabled, or LGBT or BAME, or hold a forbidden political viewpoint in the harshest of regimes around the world.
‘If you can see it, you can be it’ – I very much think that’s true – the importance of strong visible women role models. Even my own sense of what is possible for me has certainly been determined by watching women – whether my own mother learning and leading throughout her life, from running an infant’s school in the 70’s in the middle of Africa, completing her PhD a few years go in her seventies and even now I am struggling to keep up her as she launches a new project leading the research on a study of quilt-makers (mostly women) and the stories they tell. Other role models from me have ranged from the icons of my teenage years from poet and rock artist Patti Smith to writer Jill Tweedie to American feminist Gloria Steinum. Today my work leads me to meet such a range of inspirational women leaders from Graca Machel to Aung San Suu KyI to President Joyce Banda of MalawI to young women like AshwinI Angadi, born blind in a poor rural community in India she fought for her education, graduated from Bangalore university with outstanding grades, gave up her job in IT to campaign for the rights of people with disabilities, and I find myself alongside at the UN last month.
So I agree that visibility counts, but if I think of my role models they are all women who never give up raising their voices – who make a career literally of speaking up. And I want to update that old slogan with a rather more disturbing thought and suggest tonight that if you can hear her, you will fear her.
Let me explain what I mean.
From Nigeria to Egypt to Yemen and Afghanistan to the richest countries of the West, we are seeing the rise of targeted attacks focused on women who use their voice to speak out for other women. Sometimes these attacks are physical, and I will talk about them more in a moment. But here in the UK there has been a spate of attacks which are verbal and online, and which are perpetrated by men who fear women’s power.
From the disgusting rape threats directed at Caroline Criado-Perez for daring to suggest a woman should remain on British bank notes to the horrendous and sexualised verbal violence meted out to Mary Beard after she appeared on question time to model Katie Piper finding her online voice speaking up for the stigma of disfiguration in a defiant response to the acid attack on her, and the creation of her defiant new beauty at the hands of her NHS surgeon. And of course, the all too prevalent victims of domestic violence who get a collective voice through women’s aid and the main refuges around the UK – who speak up more when they see it can even happen to a goddess like Nigella.
It is clear that the public square – and too often the private home – simply doesn’t provide a safe environment for Britain’s women.
If anybody doubts how bad things have got, I’d encourage you to go and take a look at Laura Bates’ work with the Everyday Sexism Project, an online directory of harassment, discrimination and abuse submitted by over 50,000 women who are shouting back. It paints a picture of a Britain in which violence and the threat of violence against women is so routine, women had almost ceased to notice it as a crime and an outrage, until a platform came along that gave their problem visibility and, with it, importance.
So I want to suggest that a public square which is so hostile to women that they do not feel they can participate in it without inviting overwhelming abuse is, itself, a form of censorship. It might not be the same process as smashing up a newspaper office or burning a book or even shooting teenage girls on a school bus, but the effect is the same: that of silencing a voice which has a right to be heard.
And if you want further evidence of how hearing how women’s voices can terrify those who risk losing their power, just consider how the worst misogynists in the world were afraid of just three words.
The words I’m talking about weren’t said by somebody famous. They weren’t said by somebody powerful. They hadn’t even been planned before they were uttered. But they awoke the world.
Malala YousafzaI as a schoolgirl from rural Pakistan published her youthful diary detailing how life had changed for girls after the Taliban took over her mountain town. She and her friends Shazia and Kainat spent the next few years campaigning for girls to be allowed to return to school, although they knew how dangerous speaking out against the Taliban could be. Malala even talked in interviews about how they might try to kill her for it.
Just over a year ago, this worst imagining happened and Malala was targeted by a Taliban assassin. He boarded the school bus, identified Malala and shot her in the head, and injured Shazia and Kainat sitting either side of her. As the footage of Malala’s airlift to safety was broadcast young women used just three words to claim their solidarity and support with her “I am Malala’. She and her two friends are all now safely in the UK continuing their education, and as the worlds’ gaze has given them some safety the campaign continues with a growing movement of young people all of whom are role models for every child around the world, whether in school or waiting for the dream to come true and the opportunity to learn coming to them too.
It was such a powerful reminder of a question I first asked myself some time ago:
Why is the most terrifying thing for the Taliban a girl with a book? Or for that matter the terrifying group in Nigeria – Boko Haram – who are firebombing schools and dormitories while students sleep. Boko Haram – the name literally means – western education is evil.
These terrorists know, better than we do, that a girl with an education is the most formidable force for freedom in the world. A girl who can read and write and argue can be brutalised and oppressed, she can be bought and sold, discriminated against and denied her rights. But she cannot, in the end, be stopped.
Girls like Malala, Kainat, Shazia and others in the end, will prevail.
And that is why they hate them so.
And so it seems to me if a girl like Malala, on her own, can inspire so much fear, then imagine what she could do if backed by a movement of hundreds of millions. That is why I believe that the efforts to achieve global education are at the heart of how we unlock the potential of every young citizen. As children learn, they achieve understanding, tolerance, opportunity and the chance to contribute to a better world. Reaching girls is at the heart of this – we need to do so much better for girls.
Right now, there are 57 million children missing from school. That’s 57 million of our younger selves missing out on the education which could transform not just their lives, but the world. 31 million are girls, and of those at school, many many millions are not learning, and girls are just not getting the same number of school years as their own brothers – to the detriment of everyone.
New research has shown that providing universal education in developing countries could lift their economic growth rates by up to 2% a year and the results are starkest of all when it comes to educating girls.
All the evidence shows that for every extra year of education you give a girl, you raise her children’s chances of living past five years old, because educated mums are more likely to immunise their kids and get them the health care they need. Educated girls are more likely to stay AIDS-free and are less vulnerable to sexual exploitation by adults. They marry later, have fewer children and are more likely to educate their children in turn. Perhaps most importantly of all, education increases a girl’s chance of well-paid employment in later life and the evidence suggests that female earners are more likely to spend their wages to the benefit of their children and community than traditional male heads of the household.
And the benefits, of course, don’t always stay just on a local community level, but can sometimes have national and even global implications too. Because if you look at women who have been in leading positions in every continent around the world – from Sonia GandhI to Graca Machel to Dilma Rousseff to Joyce Banda, they all have one thing in common. They all have an above average level of education. And that’s why one of my new mantras is women who lead, read.
If we want better politics, a politics of pluralism and freedom of expression around the world, then it begins with empowering women – and that begins with educating them.
So there are plenty of good reasons to invest in education and learning for every child – but the best bit is that we’ve already promised to. We are not advocating for a new pledge, simply for the fulfilment of one already made. In the year 2000 world leaders committed to getting every child in school by 2015 as part of a series of ambitious targets called the millennium development goals. World leaders have already signed the contract, now they just need to deliver the goods.
So for me the argument about whether we should invest in education to get the 57 children missing from school into the classroom is a bit of a no brainer – and for me there is no question that closing the gender gap in education should be the priority. As soon as people hear the facts, they tend to stop asking whether we should do it and start to focus on whether we can.
That’s a fair question and people will always want to probe whether we can make a difference to decisions taken hundreds of thousands of miles away. It’s a question I ask myself a lot too. But I take heart from two things. Firstly, we know that progress is possible even on seemingly very big problems because we have made it before. You can look at the big changes in the last century or so – from the end of slavery, achieving the vote for women, the end of apartheid – all started as impossible calls for change, but change came. Enough voices gathered together calling for the same thing – even a politician can’t fail to hear the call then, or if minded to change anyway can do so with a strong mandate behind him or her. Even campaigns I have contributed- that we may all have contribute to – from drop the debt to make poverty history to the maternal mortality campaign brought big changes – but I have heard first-hand what happens at the start – “it is too big an ask, it can’t be done in the time, it is too costly” – well enough free voices calling for action and – give it a little bit of time and a whole lot of noise – change comes. Less than ten years ago over 500,000 women were dying in pregnancy and childbirth unwitnessed, unacknowledged unnoticed by political leaders who held the power to save these lives. Today thanks to the collective voices of those who cared enough – through the white ribbon alliance and others, that number is a whopping 47% lower, and the work to reduce it further continues at the highest levels, and out in the more remote rural areas where the message needs to be carried far and wide to reach every woman at risk.
A 47% drop in the number of mothers dying. That’s not just a number – that means there are thousands of dads living with the love of their lives when they would otherwise have a broken heart nobody else could possibly mend. Thousands of big brothers and sisters who didn’t need to fear that in gaining a new member of the family they risked losing an old one. And thousands of babies being nursed to sleep tonight by the person who loves them most in the world and who has survived to love them as they grow. So this stuff works: campaigning is the key for all of us lucky enough to use our voices.
And on education, I am hopeful we can get even further than we have with the maternal mortality campaign, and achieve all of our goals by 2015. I know that sounds incredibly ambitious – because it means getting 57 million children into school in less than two years. Gordon and I have decided to devote the next years of our lives to this and we intend to be judged by our results. Increasing awareness is great – but if the numbers of children getting a high quality education does not increase in leaps and bounds in the years to come then we collectively will have failed.
Thankfully, we have a lot of help. When Gordon was appointed the United Nations’ Secretary General’s Special Envoy on education, the weight of the UN system was added to our cause. Business leaders have come on board to the Global Business Coalition for Education that I am fortunate to chair, and I am pleased that religious leaders have agreed to form a faith coalition to mobilise the faith communities as has happened so powerfully for debt relief and make poverty history in the past. Most significantly, younger people are lining up at as ambassadors, spokespersons, online champions and community mobilisers – the 600 strong youth leaders from the digital platform A World at School who assembled at the un on Malala Day in July, are all now engaging with their networks, supported by NGOs from around the world. The digital platform is growing rapidly, and the consistent messages, the constant call for action and the rising volume are starting to make a difference. From Syrian refugee children needing a place at school this autumn to young girls wanting to study before they marry in Yemen, Nigeria, Bangladesh to child workers who have never been inside a classroom, the momentum for them is growing.
This grand confluence of forces is powered by the single most important driver of change – every individual who cares enough to take up an action – whether just a tweet or post, or more. It includes you.
Because if we can’t mobilise millions of so-called ordinary people to do hundreds of extraordinary things, the governments of the world will conclude that the pledge they made to get every child into school can be allowed to quietly slip away, the pledge for gender equality ignored, the pledge that every child can be safe from violence, from trafficking and from finding their own voice just disappears. That would be a tragedy not just for the millions of children whose lives continue to be destroyed, but for the notion of progress itself.
If we can’t even rely on our leaders to do that which they have promised to do, can we rely on them to do all that we need them to do? I don’t want my children to grow up in a generation of cynics, a whole group of people who think that promises don’t get kept and politics doesn’t really work. I want them to see and to know that if we make a promise – particularly a promise to a child – we keep it. That when we see an injustice, we right it. That when we are presented with an opportunity we seize it. And that when we have the chance to change the world there is nothing we won’t do to see that potential fulfilled.
That, for me, is the ambitious spirit of activism which Index on Censorship embodies, and the one which we must now bring to bear in ensuring that the girls and women of the world learn first how to read, and then how to lead. This is the chance of our generation and I hope you, like me, think it is one we must grasp with both hands.
World leaders need to deliver on their pledges to institute universal primary education — especially for girls — if the world wants to empower the next generation, campaigner Sarah Brown said in a speech at the launch of the autumn issue of Index on Censorship magazine on Tuesday.
“The women who lead, read,” Brown said. “A girl with an education is the most terrifying force in the world.”
The campaigner argued passionately for education being a key, vital factor in advancement of women and girls around the world. Brown cited statistics that underlined her point: Educated girls grow into women who are more likely to educate their own children, have them vaccinated and have jobs that support a better financial life for their families.
“Why is the most terrifying thing for the Taliban a girl with a book?” she asked when talking about the role of Malala Yousafzai, the teenager who was targeted for campaigning for girls’ education. Brown is co-founder of A World At School, the campaigning education organisation that helped convene Malala Day at the United Nations this summer.
Speaking at the Lilian Baylis Technology School in London, where she also met with students, Brown followed up the speech with a question and answer session, chaired by Helen Lewis, deputy editor of New Statesman magazine.
“I don’t understand why there is so much anger at women who speak out,” Brown said when Lewis asked about Twitter trolls.
But she also spoke on the positive sides of online speech, saying Twitter can be a “space to describe yourself as you want to be described.”
Brown conceded there is still a lot of work to be done to reach universal education. With two years left to reach the Millennium Development Goal of universal primary education, millions of children around the world still don’t have access to it.
Brown said it was appropriate for her to speak at the launch of the latest issue of Index on Censorship magazine, which includes a special report on ignored, suppressed and censored voices.
Emma is an actress and workshop facilitator, writer and director.
