On International Women’s Day: a tribute to the men who risk their lives for gender justice

Mariz Tadros

It may seem odd – almost offensive- to some to pay tribute to men on international women’s day. Ironically though, the more reactionary, the more intense the backlash against women’s rights, the greater the need to pay tribute to the men who stand up in opposition, who choose to be positive deviants and who even put their lives at risk to support a more humane society.

The so-called Arab Spring countries, Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen have been experiencing one of the worst backlashes against women’s rights in modern history. The modicum of rights vary greatly from one country to another, Tunisia for example surpassing many European countries in the rights that had been secured previously, Yemen being very far behind, and Egypt somewhat in the middle. Such rights are now jeopardized by Western supported regimes complicit in creating a culture of impunity against those who assault women in the name of religion. In Egypt and Tunisia, there have been frequent verbal and physical assaults on women who have gone out to protest to demand that their rights be protected and upheld. One month after the ousting of President Mubarak, in commemoration of International Women’s Day on 8 March 2011, women organised a protest in Tahrir Square, reminding the public of the role they played in the revolution and that the words ‘bread, freedom and social justice/human dignity’ applies to women’s rights too. They were spat upon, sexually molested and told to go home. A larger crowd appeared on Women’s Day on 8 March 2012, and again they were subjected to the same treatment, with more cases of sexual molestation being reported.

This year a large march is also planned to take part to Tahrir Square starting 1pm GMT, with the participation of women’s organisations, coalitions, youth revolutionary groups and political parties. Yet the main preoccupation of the organisers for the past few weeks has been how to protect the citizens who participate in the march from being subjected to physical and sexual violence. Memories of the sexual and physical violence which protestors experienced on 25 January 2013 are still fresh in everyone’s memory. There are at least 25 cases of women who were sexually assaulted on that day, some to the point of sexual torture with the use of knives and cutters.

Whose responsibility is it to protect Tahrir Square from such politically motivated assaults? The government won’t do it and members of the ruling Freedom and Justice party have openly blamed women for going out to protest in the first place – and they have blamed the organisers of protests for failing to secure the protection of women (as if safe streets and squares was not the responsibility of the state).

It is in this context that I would like to pay special tribute to the men who have decided to join the women’s march today. They are putting their lives at risk for the sake of showing support for gender justice. Let us recall that in previous instances when women were subjected by organised groups to politically motivated sexual assault, many men had sought to intervene to save the women from the sustained acts of stripping and molesting and raping them that had gone on for sometimes hours. Some had received blows to their heads, been stabbed with knives and beaten to the ground as they sought to save these women. Others who persisted in trying to save women have become targets of sexual violence themselves, including acts tantamount to gang rape and having their reproductive organs beaten with hard objects. The purpose of being so graphic is not to sensationalise but to bring to the fore the extent to which men have been subjected to sexual violence and their ordeals have neither been captured by the media nor recognised by advocates of women’s rights, despite the heroic role they played because of their fundamental belief in women’s rights to bodily integrity, irrespective of where they are.

Some would argue that men intervene in incidents of sexual violence against women in patriarchal societies so that they would protect their ‘honour’ as women’s bodies are sites of honour for whole families and communities. This reductionist conclusion is, in my view, highly amoral. It negates men’s suffering to see other human beings in pain. The emotional trauma afforded to men who try and fail to save women from being violated cannot be reduced to questions of honour, it is about the anguish of seeing the women they love, care for or respect subjected to inhumane treatment that you cannot do anything about. I have heard stories of men who suffered nervous breakdowns and collapsed to the ground in tears on 25 January 2013, because they had tried to save a woman from being carried away by a group of men, and had failed to save her.

The politically motivated acts of sexual assault on women and men as we have encountered in Egypt have been accompanied by campaigns to vilify women who go out to protest as sexually amoral and men who support them as lacking in manliness. It is another reason why we need to pay tribute to men who go out in solidarity with women to demand gender justice: they are not only putting their lives at risk, but their reputations as well. On previous occasions, many of the men who have accompanied women on marches, have been called names to suggest they are not real men, that they are lacking in genuine masculinity and the proof is that they are in the company of women. Many took it in, never flinched and stood strong, others got into fights and again, risked their lives in the process.

The tribute I afford to men today is not to take away from women’s own experiences of injustice, nor to suggest that because they are men, they deserve more credit. It is simply to say that men who have put their lives and reputations on line to show solidarity with women in demanding a more dignified existence deserve to be recognised. A special tribute to all the men around the world who have endured sexual and gender based violence in silence in the quest for social justice. A special tribute to the men whose identities as men have been questioned because they dared to not conform to the misogynist and political notions of what real manhood looks like.

Mariz Tadros is a Research Fellow in the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS.

Read other recent blogs by Mariz Tadros:

• Eleven predictions for Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood (if they continue to remain in power)
• Fascism: the ugly face of unruly politics
• The Egyptian Revolution and the parable of the of man who occupies your house
• We, the women who revolt

I’m (still) hungry, mum: the return of Care

Naomi Hossain

Is it just me or have we come full circle on care* in development? Back in 1994, armed with a box-fresh copy of Naila Kabeer’s Reversed Realities, I got my first job in development, in Bangladesh. There I was first set to study whether non-traditional jobs empowered women, and then to analyse rural women’s time-use diaries. My eyes were opened to the perennial contradiction of women’s empowerment: earning money is lovely and really important if you want autonomy and control. But someone still has to wipe the dirty bums.

What happened in the last 20 or so years that took our (my) eye off the care-ball? We started to glamorize women’s empowerment as always and necessarily positive-sum.** Gender equity got a makeover as ‘smart economics’; development meant high return investments in future mothers, clever low-cost micro-credit, and win-win global export industries employing poor young women to make fast fashion for rich young women. At its glossiest, gender equity was uber-modern, future-looking and positive-sum. Celebrities got in on the act (I was once in a workshop breakout session with Renee Zellweger – yes, Bridget Jones – on girls’ education). Rarely a dirty bottom in sight. And certainly no expectation that for women to do these great new jobs would mean men might have to do their share of bum-wiping.

So what has changed? As far as I can tell, the focus on care has sharpened with the financial crash and food crisis. How did all these people manage to cope, particularly with export sector jobs and micro-credit looking so shaky, we wondered? By letting unpaid care work absorb the shocks, it turned out. People, particularly women, have been working longer and harder, figuring how to stretch resources to ‘make do and mend’. A research project I’m involved with tracking the impacts of food price rises on care finds the pressures mothers feel to feed children are particularly powerful: ‘I’m hungry, Mum’ is a familiar sound for many women in developing (and indeed, developed) countries. The cumulative pressures mean more women in hard, low-paid jobs, as street vendors or sweepers, laundrywomen etc. This is all shifting what Annie Whitehead once called the ‘conjugal contract’: more hardworking and frustrated men feel they are failing as providers, even while more over-stretched and exhausted women feel they are failing as mothers and housekeepers. We find older people, particularly older women, picking up their adult daughters’ care responsibilities, in a sometimes reluctant renegotiation of the generational contract. And we also see a small but definite growth in institutional care: low-cost crèches and school meals schemes are popular and effective – and quick and easy processed foods (like the ubiquitous instant noodle).  

The smallness of these mundane concerns is out of sync with development fashion, with its high-tech evidence-based solutions to everything. It’s about the fact that a vital source of social protection is being eroded by development policies that valorise that which can be paid for over that which cannot. Talking about care is the reverse of the ‘everyone’s a winner’ glitz of the empowerment industry.

Care has done a lot of the heavy lifting in people’s ‘resilience’ to the ups and downs of the past five years, but it is still often ignored in development policy. As Rosalind Eyben points out in her blog on care today, this is a matter of power. Real gender equity means recognising care, reducing its drudgery and redistributing it to men and the state. On International Women’s Day let us bravely face the filthy facts: progress towards real gender equity is unlikely to be positive-sum; there will be losers, and they will have to wipe their share of dirty bums.

This blog draws on a forthcoming IDS working paper on care and crisis, by Naomi Hossain, Alex Kelbert and Arran MacMahon.

*There are lots of good definitions out there: try Action Aid’s new report for starters. What we now commonly call care is short for unpaid care work, and was once upon a time called social reproduction among other things.

** Google ‘women’s empowerment’ today and you have at No. 3, a fashion show, and at No. 12, a Facebook game.

Annie Whitehead’s ‘I’m hungry, mum’: the politics of domestic budgeting’ was a chapter in the 1984 feminist development classic ‘Of Marriage and the Market’ (Kate Young et al, London: Methuen).

More info about the project tracking food price impacts on care can be found at Life in a Time of Food Price Volatility. The first year research results will be published in May 2013.

The Recognise, Reduce & Redistribute Care formula is Diane Elson’s.

Naomi Hossain is a Research Fellow in the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS.

Read other recent blog posts by Naomi Hossain:

• Bangladesh is revolting, again
• Prices that bounce
• No gong for Cameron’s Hunger Summit
• Why inflation is so unpopular

Getting Care onto Development Agendas: How is IDS doing?

Rosalind Eyben

On International Women’s Day Rosalind Eyben reflects on IDS’s progress in raising the profile of care in development.

Feminist scholar-activists at IDS have been working with global and national networks as part of a collective effort to have care recognized and integrated into development policies and programmes. International Women’s Day is a good moment to take stock of how we are doing.

Care has long been a central preoccupation of feminists, including at IDS. It is in the Beijing Platform for Action  which states ‘Care of children, the sick and the elderly is a responsibility that falls disproportionately on women, owing to lack of equality and the unbalanced distribution of remunerated and unremunerated work between women and men.’ UNIFEM’s (now UN Women) first Progress of the World’s Women report (2000) emphasizes how women’s economic empowerment is constrained due to conventional conceptions of how economies operate that  leave out much of the unpaid work that women do in all economies including care. 

At IDS, our recent work on care originates in 2008 when the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development was highlighting the importance of care and the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment (Pathways) research consortium was looking at different meanings of empowerment current in development policy. We were disturbed by the dominance of advocacy for women’s economic empowerment based on arguments that it was a contributing factor to economic growth and largely focused on women as potential entrepreneurs. Policies viewing women as instrumental to other objectives cannot promote their collective empowerment because they fail to address the structures by which gender inequality is perpetuated over time. IDS members of Pathways organised a workshop with some leading feminist economists to discuss how women’s empowerment needs a people-centred economy whereby attention is given to the role of unpaid care in promoting well-being.

All well and good. But what could we do over and above publishing policy  briefings?  In development policy spaces, care’s invisibility was amazing!  When a very influential bilateral donor organised an e-forum on women’s economic empowerment, none of the gender specialists from around the world contributing to the forum mentioned care.  We urgently emailed well known feminist scholars to make a case for the importance of care, thus ensuring it got on the agenda of a conference the agency was organising as a follow up to the e-forum.  We realised that however sound the research of UNRISD and others, evidence about the importance of care would remain ignored without a conscious strategy of bringing it to people’s attention.

 We began looking more systematically for opportunities to introduce ‘care’ in conferences, workshops and donor guidelines. The global economic crisis was highlighting how unpaid care was sustaining families and the wider community and the pressure this was putting on women.  We had what political scientists describe as a window of political opportunity to challenge the ‘care-less economy’. Others, in NGOs, donor agencies and research institutes were also talking more about care, each of us encouraged by these signals that we were not alone and that the effort was worth it.  We reached out to each other.  

All this needs time – and resources!  Back to the donor agencies to persuade them this was something worth financing.  IDS policy influencing work on care is currently being funded as separate projects by Sida and DFID.  We are working in partnership with Action Aid International who have just published an excellent report Making Care Visible: Women’s Unpaid Care Work in Nepal, Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya and with the BRAC Development Institute in Bangladesh and SMERU in Indonesia.  We are also part of a wider, loose network of feminists working in international NGOs, universities and United Nations agencies seeking to get care onto development policy agendas.  

‘Care’ is beginning to appear more often in policy work on gender, both at the national and global level. Success often depends on an alliance with someone on the inside of an agency who wants care to be a central theme in development policy but needs external voices as leverage.  It doesn’t always work.  Care continues to get sidelined.  The World Bank’s 2012 World Development Report on gender equality extensively analysed care in the main text but it was excluded from the executive summary. Getting care into policy statements needs great persistence. What is it about development policy processes that are blocking these collective efforts? 

What have we learnt? 

- Analyse power to understand how care remains invisible and to identify and take advantage of cracks in the status quo.

- Be alert to exploiting opportunities and integrate work on care into the other projects we are undertaking.

- Seek out actively others equally concerned – and don’t forget people whom you haven’t seen for ages. We recently got an email from a former colleague now working for a UN agency to learn how unbeknown to us, she has been making waves there.  We should have contacted her ages ago.

- Talk about it a lot.  And blog when you can.  We need to do more. Communications could be a full time activity.  Our work on care is just one among many other things we are doing. I am the only member of our group in IDS that does not have significant care responsibilities for children or parents! My IDS colleague Naomi Hossain today also blogs on the return of the care agenda to development, particularly in the context of the recent food price volatility.

Rosalind Eyben is a Research Fellow in the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS and her Twitter account is: @rosalindeyben

Previous blog posts by Rosalind Eyben:

• Six aspects of reflexivity
• Arguing about a revolution
• The power of results and evidence artefacts
• What keeps unpaid care off development agendas?

A Class Act: interrogating privilege, development and sexual rights

Stephen Wood

Over the last quarter century, there has been a conscious shift in the manner by which researchers examine positionality within their chosen fields.  Whilst age, gender, disability, religion and sexual orientation are factors we increasingly consider when undertaking intersectional analysis, the inclusion of class has seemingly become less fashionable.  Have we, as Tony Blair once argued, become a truly classless society?

Not even close. The UK remains a heavily class-stratified society, with attendant inequalities continuing to widen and a discernable lack of representation in politics and the media of authentic working class experiences.  This diminution of working class voices in public life, coupled with the unchecked destruction of the British manufacturing industry from the heyday of Thatcherism, has herald a period in which the working class have found their identities written out of the national narrative. It has created space for the evolution of negative definitions of working class communities, such as the ‘chav’ and ‘Little Britain’ stereotypes, conspicuously the products of middle and upper class commentators and authors.

At the same time, an insidious prejudice has developed against those who attempt to make the links between class privilege and deteriorating living standards for the poorest in society, dismissing them as out of touch or purveyors of the dinosaur politics of envy. Inequality across class boundaries has become the unmentionable middle class dinner table conversation, in favour of denunciations of racial and sexual discrimination, which have become untroubled, fetishised badges of progressive modernity.

Broadening this trend out to encompass both the sexual rights and international development fields, I believe that the legitimacy of many strands of aid programming and policies find their roots in class-based ideology. For many years now, Southern academics have cogently argued that international development itself grew out of upper class dilettantism and a post-colonial white-saviour complex. Expertise within the development field has been measured and articulated through elitist language and even the respected ‘victim narratives’ of the poor (when heard) are mediated and given legitimacy through ‘objective’ Northern voices.

In many of the policies undertaken specifically around sexuality, we see prescriptive control over black and brown bodies. Take as an example the IDS working paper written by Andil Gosine, which examined how population control programmes are conduits through which the anxieties of developed countries around sexuality are rendered visible. By imposing policies to encourage women not to have too many children and instinctively prizing the traditional nuclear family as optimal, Western countries have endeavoured to control and ‘civilise’ the (seemingly) unrestrained sexuality of the Southern subject.

One of the problems the IDS Sexuality and Development Programme encounters when we convene discussion around sexuality has been the sense that it is a trivial issue compared to the core concern of poverty, but this high-minded dismissal frequently disguises conservative ideologies masquerading as evidence – and the regulation of non-normative sexualities. Paradoxically, we can be accused of concentrating upon an issue of no material relevance to development recipients, as though sexual autonomy, choice and pleasure play no part in the experience and aspirations of poorer communities.

We must not confine this tendency solely to Western countries, though. How easily can we depend upon the dominant narratives around sexual identities coming out of southern contexts as being authentic grassroots views?  Who is defining those sexual identities? Dominant elites in the Global South, such as the anti-trafficking lobby in parts of Asia, can represent the anxieties of upper class / caste communities around sex work and whose concerns dovetail with western European concern around migration, but not the lived experience of marginalised communities for whom sex work is a daily reality and for some, an informed choice. Minority sexual rights movements for whom the term LGBT has limited relevance find themselves using this Western-coined framework in order to access desperately needed resources from aid agencies and philanthropic donors.

In order to have confidence in the dialogues we undertake with individuals in the Global South, we need to interrogate our own privilege reflexively and conduct an honest evaluation of those individuals and organisations we undertake partnerships with and the decision-making process by which we decide to work with them. The risk of self-selected partnerships that reinforce our ideologies and retain old North/South power relations can go easily unnoticed, especially for veterans of the aid field. As my colleague Rosalind Eyben argued in her recent blog post around reflexivity “How does power operate to foreclose new ways of thinking and challenge our assumptions?”

In my experience, those who choose to work around sexual rights do so for a variety of motives: representing their communities, risking their physical safety to affect social change – and sometimes for legitimately economic motives, as well as political and social mobility. How can we encourage our partners to examine and share their own positionality if we fail to hold up the same mirror to ourselves?

It sometimes feels quaint or antagonistically unreconstructed to insist upon a class analysis in the way we structure and conceive our research projects, the choice of partnerships we undertake and the sites of our study, but as others within the Participation, Power and Social Change research team are the first to argue, lines of power are buried deep in everything we do, unremarked and unchallenged.

As the development industry continues to experience a crisis in democratic legitimacy, aid practitioners (and in my view, the Institute of Development Studies itself) should reflect on how to evolve and adapt to the changing global development context by undertaking a class audit of our cadre of researchers and students. We must ask ourselves whether we are truly representative of those communities we aspire to partner alongside and if not, what this might mean for us strategically moving forward. Can we truly say with confidence that the co-creation of the knowledge we undertake represents a dispassionate analysis or does class or caste continue to leave a subjective thumbprint over our research findings?

Stephen Wood is a Researcher on the Sexuality and Development Programme within the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS. He can be found on Twitter as: StephenWood_UK

Read other recent blogs by Stephen Wood:

• Julie Burchill, silo mentalities and international (trans)gender equality
• What were the PPSC blog’s Top 10 posts of 2012?
• The stark realities lying behind the Ugandan Anti-Homsexuality Bill
• Putting pleasure into safer sex interventions

Julie Burchill, silo mentalities and international (trans)gender equality

Stephen Wood

In the last week or so, the British newspaper “The Observer” has been drawn into a controversy after it published an aggressively trans-phobic opinion piece by serial-controversialist commentator Julie Burchill. The abusive nature of her rhetoric has served as a salutary slap to the complacency of many who viewed the transgender experience as neatly folded within the recent incremental progress made in the UK towards sexual equality. There have been some fascinating responses from the likes of Paris Lees, Roz Kaveney and Brooke Magnanti that have really opened this debate up to wider scrutiny.

In truth, the furore around Burchill’s incendiary comments has highlighted one of the quietly unremarked realities of work around sexual rights. For much of the time when we talk about LGBT equality, the transgender and bisexual rights agendas are viewed as marginal or quietly ignored in favour of the “broader” gay equality agenda. Even within this narrow definition of LGBT, lesbians find themselves struggling to be heard, lending credence to the argument that the onward march of the gay rights movement often leaves gender inequality untroubled in its wake.

In the international sexual rights arena, this blind spot is even more damaging to the life chances of transgender people. As the IDS Sexuality and Development Programme has argued in the past, there is a stark correlation between marginalization and poverty. The denial of sexual rights can contribute to poverty, whilst poverty can make people more vulnerable to sexual rights abuses. Pushed to the margins of society, some groups such as the ‘third gender’ hijra (South Asian communities that transcend simplistic conceptions of physiological sex, gender presentation and performance, presenting a challenge to preconceived notions of a gender continuum) have built their own community support structures, such as self-defined households led by an older feminised guru, in which they gain work as dancers or sex workers. For many however, this can lead to them being involved in risky sexual behaviours with little or no access to condoms or sexual health advice.

Reports such as the UNDP-funded “Lost in Transition: Transgender People, Rights and HIV Vulnerability in the Asia-Pacific Region” are underscoring the paucity of action research taking place with the transgender community to develop service provision tailored to their needs. The authors argue strongly that HIV and sexual health care services will only become socially equitable if a greater amount of research takes place in partnership between governments, community-based organisations and the transgender community. With the caveat that research data remains limited, there is growing anecdotal evidence that the incidence of HIV amongst transgender people in the region is now exceeding rates recorded amongst men who have sex with men and in one South-East Asian city rose from 25% to 34% from 2004-2007.

In the same way as the transgender contribution to such moments of queer equality as the Stonewall Riots (proudly trumpeted by Obama in his second inaugural this week) has been written out of history, the needs of transgender communities are subsumed in the LGBT movements response to international sexual rights campaigning. Yet in common with Northern countries during the early years of gay liberation, transgender and transsexual people remain on the front line of this global struggle, more readily visible and by their very existence problematising received wisdom about fixed gender identities.

And that’s the key point here. Julie Burchill’s article stemmed from a misguided view that the only real woman is one who was born physiologically female (in the traditional sense). Exclusion of transgender women because they are not deemed ‘sufficiently female’ runs against the founding principles that I took from second-wave feminism: that gender is fluid, socially constructed and our struggle should be to broaden our capacity to understand what it means to be both a women and a man, or to live in the space between these accepted orthodoxies of male and female.

In recent years, there has been a sense that many of those engaged in gender and sexual rights in international development have retreated into separate silos so completely that an intersectional analysis of these overlapping forms of oppression currently feels too difficult to bridge. Under the leadership of Lib Dem Lynne Featherstone MP, the UK Government has historically published it’s first transgender equality plan and here the challenge is explicit – in spite of an excellent set of objectives, none of them require a Department for International Development (DfID) response, in spite of this Ministry doing a great deal of work around gender and sexual rights. Perhaps this is one of my New Year’s resolutions – to view this unpleasant episode as a catalytic call to arms for us to problematise the now-dominant assumptions around gender and sexuality in development and find common cause once more.

Stephen Wood is a researcher on the Sexuality and Development Programme within the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS. He can be found on Twitter as: StephenWood_UK

Read other recent blogs by Stephen Wood:
• What were the PPSC blog’s Top 10 posts of 2012?
• The stark realities lying behind the Ugandan Anti-Homsexuality Bill
• Putting pleasure into safer sex interventions
• Diversifying our strategies for sexual equality

What were the PPSC blog’s Top 10 posts of 2012?

Stephen Wood

On behalf of the IDS Participation, Power and Social Change research team, I’d like to welcome back our readers to what we hope proves to be a fascinating year for our blog. Reflecting the outputs from several research projects and a number of pressing global debates and issues we are engaged in, the PPSC research team have some really interesting pieces in the pipeline in the next few months.  I hope you’ll continue to read and engage with the debates and discussion that arise from our articles.

However, in case you missed some of our blogs last year, I thought you might like to look at our Top 10 most popular pieces, as well as some of our articles that you might have missed! Please do share these with your networks, add comments if you haven’t already and as always, encourage others to subscribe to the blog!

Top 10 blog posts of 2012:

1. “Just do women’s empowerment”  by Naomi Hossain
2. “On having Voice and Being Heard: Participation in the Post-2015 Policy Process”  by Elizabeth Mills
3. “Spring uprisings calling spring academics: #bring books out to the streets” by Maria-Josep Cascant Sempere
4. “Global development: the new buzzword?” by Maria-Josep Cascant Sempere and Alex Kelbert
5. “Eleven predictions for Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood (if they continue to remain in power” by Mariz Tadros
6. “Post 2015: What do policymakers know about poverty?” by Joanna Wheeler and Danny Burns
7. “No gong for Cameron’s Hunger Summit” by Naomi Hossain
8. “Challenging attempts to silence civil society in Uganda” by Stephen Wood
9. “Are we ready for an ‘academic spring’?” by Danny Burns
10. “Digital activism in post-revolution Egypt: How relevant is online dissidence in the marathon for democracy?” by Hani Morsi

Excellent blog posts you might have missed in 2012:

• “Participatory visual processes in Nairobi’s margins” by Thea Shakrokh
• “States of Exception, A Tragedy in Unceasing Acts: Development Encounters” by Patta Scott-Villiers
• “Putting pleasure into safer sex interventions” by Stephen Wood
• “Can the North hear?” by Tessa Lewin
• “What keeps unpaid care off development agendas?” by Rosalind Eyben

Stephen Wood is a researcher on the Sexuality and Development Programme within the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS and can be found on Twitter as: StephenWood_UK

Read other recent blogs by Stephen Wood:

• The stark realities lying behind the Ugandan Anti-Homsexuality Bill
• Putting pleasure into safer sex interventions
• Diversifying our strategies for sexual equality
• Challenging attempts to silence civil society in Uganda