Contents

• Message from the RPD
• North Korean Women hit the Hong Kong Fashion Fair
• New UNIFEM Bangkok publication on gender mainstreaming
• Hotline Foundation Thailand - A new VAW hotline for men
   

Message from the RPD

Sorry, we have been so busy making things happen that we have had difficulty finding time to tell you all about it. However, I have made time to give you some "hot" news about our work that is quite fresh!

North Korean Women hit the Hong Kong Fashion Fair

We would like to share with you some exciting news from Marian Nash, our marketing consultant to a new UNIFEM-executed project funded by UNDP in Pyongyang North Korea. The project builds on the UNIFEM project DRK/92/WO1 Rationalizing Cottage Industry in Pyongyang. As a result of the success of that project (considered perhaps the only development-oriented project in the country since the focus of other UN agencies has been on emergency assistance and famine relief), the women in the small Pyongyang garment cooperative have now been authorized to trade in their own right, open a foreign currency account, and participate in the Hong Kong Fashion Fair - all rather radical developments for women in North Korea.

After much difficulty, innumerable frantic phone calls from Evelyn to our partner Kerstin Jorgensen in UNDP Pyongyang and to Marian, who is based in Manila, and great support from UNDP Pyongyang, and Kunzang and Shoko in Asia-Pacific Section New York, the SPPD was approved in time, the funds were authorized, visas obtained, and - with lots of hard work from Marian - five women from the project finally arrived in Hong Kong. They spent the first couple of days under threat that the Exhibition Centre would close their booth because the payment for registration from UNDP Bangkok was delayed during the Christmas New Year holiday period - and eating Big Macs because somehow they had not been given their full DSA and that was all they could afford. [Marian's husband John observed that this might not be the best introduction to the delights of bourgeois food!]

However, in the end (more frantic phone calls - Evelyn has almost lost her voice and Marian's mobile phone has been running hot) the money arrived, the booth survived and Evelyn and Marian devised a means of getting more money to the women so that they could explore the culinary delights of capitalism other than the Big Mac.

I have just put down the phone after an excited Marian rang - on her mobile phone from the project booth at the Fair - to give us some good news for a change. Through the static and background noise she informed us that the booth has been crowded with buyers - a total of 52 to date, most wanting to place orders. Having initiated the call to share the good news, in mid-sentence she suddenly apologized because she would have to go - the tiny booth had just been invaded by 6 buyers and only one of her two project staff on duty could speak English!

I managed to squeeze in a question as to why the booth was so popular. Marian said that it was not just because of the novelty of being from DPRK because another DPRK company attending the Fair had almost no buyers in their booth. She thought that it was because, through the UNIFEM project, the women had been trained to put up a very professional display of a broad range of well-made and well-designed products so that buyers could judge their capacity, and the contacts developed with potential buyers during the UNIFEM project were now bearing fruit. As she hung up, she wailed"Now Lorraine, I am worried that we may not be able to deliver on all these orders".

Congratulations to Evelyn, Kirsten, Marian, Kunzang and Shoko for helping to give women in North Korea access to global markets. We are now working to get the women to the Second Asia-Pacific Businesswomen's Convention in Manila in March, link them to the UNIFEM WINNER projects in Manila and Nepal, also bring representatives from the Democratic Korean Women's Union to the Convention and Exhibition and finalize a major project proposal for joint UNDP-donor funding and probable UNIFEM execution. The frustrations and time involved in executing a project in this new and difficult setting are forgotten when we realize the potential of the project to really change the lives of North Korean women.

New UNIFEM Bangkok publication on gender mainstreaming

As part of its commitment to gender mainstreaming, UNIFEM Bangkok is very pleased to introduce Transforming the Mainstream: Building a Gender-Responsive Bureaucracy in the Philippines 1975-1998. The book is the product of a rather long but happy partnership between UNIFEM Bangkok, the National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women (NCRFW), a dedicated group of previous staff of the Commission and the authors, Jurgette Honculada and Indai Ofreneo working through the NGO WAND.

We asked Jurgette and Indai to tell the story of NCRFW and the development of gender mainstreaming in the Philippines from "go to whoa" - which at the time the project started meant to the end of the Ramos Presidency. We also asked them to develop the story in a participatory way with those who had made it, the staff of NCRFW and their partners throughout the bureaucracy. We hoped that in this way the process would be of value to the participants, since it would provide them with an opportunity to review, reflect upon and analyse their experience and to identify what had worked, what hadn't and why.

In this way, we hoped that their story, although fascinating in its own right, would also be able to contribute to gender mainstreaming elsewhere in the region and indeed the world. The approach was naturally more time consuming than just asking the authors to do their individual research and then write. It involved lots of meetings - always difficult to organize with busy people - and many drafts and revisions as all the various players worked to weave their personal experience and perspective into the picture.

As the introduction notes, Jurgette and Indai have very different writing styles, so it took the skills and hard work of the editor, Rina David, a journalist who is usually on the opposite end of the editorial knife. With some clever and delicate cutting and stitching, Rina has managed to meld the contrasting styles into a satisfying whole that does not lose the exciting flavour that comes from the active participation of the story-makers. The book traces the long and complex history of the National Commission from its early days as a rather traditional women's organization to its pioneering work in envisioning gender mainstreaming and striving to put that vision into concrete practice.

In the Asia Pacific region, NCRFW has taken a lead in defining the role of national women's machineries and identifying mechanisms and strategies through which they can bring women's voices and a gender perspective to the mainstream. The story of how a small group of women with great heart, unwavering commitment and strong support from the women's constituency were able to develop a growing expertise in gender-sensitive governance, forge productive partnerships with the bureaucracy and incorporate mechanisms for gender-sensitive decision making into the mainstream is truly inspiring.

Lorraine attended a small but very enthusiastic launch in Manila on 17 November in the Sulu Hotel in Quezon City. We hope that many of you will order your copy through WomenInk in New York (at http://www.womenink.org - they have copies although it might not yet appear (at late January, 2001) on their list of publications. You can pay by credit card.) and enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed putting it together.

Hotline Foundation Thailand - A new VAW hotline for men

Khun Ornanong Intarajit, the dynamic Executive Director of Hotline has provided us with an interesting report of the Foundation's activities for 2000. UNIFEM Bangkok has been supporting Hotline's very popular weekly television call-in programme on Violence Against Women (VAW) that is reaching an audience of over 2 million. Apart from general public education on the issue, the show also provides on-line counselling to callers, some of whom subsequently become clients of the regular hotline or face-to-face counselling services provided by the Foundation. The profile of callers using the phone-in service on violence-related issues is as follows:

Realizing that men made up 40 percent of the average 100 telephone inquiries on VAW received each day, the Foundation approached UNIFEM with the idea of setting up a special VAW hotline for men callers. UNIFEM brokered funding from the Asian Foundation to cover the operation of the men's hotline for four months on an experimental basis. Khunying Chamnongsri Hanchanlash has also been a strong supporter of the Men's Hotline. As an experiment, the men's hotline has been staffed primarily by Dr Ornanong or Dr Narin Karinchai, both highly qualified and experienced practitioners in psychological and psychiatric counselling, with other senior and experienced counsellors for backup. They reported that many of the men who called seemed to particularly appreciate being able to speak to another man. This placed heavy demands on Dr Narin as the only male counsellor.

The service was able to operate from morning through to midnight from June to 30 September, during which 1,836 calls were received: 63 percent from men. Some of the men were interested or concerned members of the public who wanted to stop VAW, but others were perpetrators, former perpetrators or family members of survivors. The men fell into five major groups:

1. concerned members of the public;
2. perpetrators of physical violence against women;
3. perpetrators of emotional and pyschological abuse;
4. verbal abusers; and
5. perpetrators of sexual abuse.

The majority were in the age group 26-45, with varying levels of education from primary schooling to the tertiary educated, although they tended to be better educated than the average for Thailand and thus were drawn on average from the middle class. Their occupations also varied and included students, the unemployed, labourers, civil servants, police, military and other professionals. A number were themselves survivors of child abuse.

Staff found that the men were more frank and open in discussing their problems, although they provided fewer details than women. Once the women felt able to trust the counsellor, they tended to tell their stories in depth while the more provided only the essential outlines of their problem or situation. Counsellors felt that women callers were more sensitive so they had to be particularly careful not to hurt their feelings or upset them during the call. This seemed to be less of a problem with men callers. Whereas a number of the women clients had previously sought counselling assistance, very few of the men had done so - perhaps reflecting the lack of such facilities for men and the limited opportunities in the society that are available for men to raise emotional issues or discuss their psychological needs.

The trial operation of the Men's Hotline has shown that:
1. there is a need for such a service;
2. many men, including perpetrators, are concerned about VAW and want information and/or counselling;
3. men seeking counselling in relation to VAW have different needs from women and need a different approach;
4. in particular, there is clearly a need for more men counsellors to meet the needs of men clients.

UNIFEM Bangkok is now brokering further support for Hotline Foundation to continue the operation of the Men's Hotline, which we feel not only meets the immediate needs of men but will contribute to the elimination of violence against women and promote gender equality in Thai society.