Yearly Archives: 2019

The world is orange, starting today.

Violence manifests itself in countless forms, and its spectrum is regrettably multi-faceted. When it comes to open discussion, media and the news, the opposing ends of the spectrum seem to be very far from one another: on one hand, there is graphic, startling, brutal violence openly discussed in striking headlines; on the other hand, there is the invisible end of the spectrum, incidents, that remain unknown to all except for the victim and the offender. Whether these invisible forms of violence take place at school, work or home, they often have two things in common: Firstly, strikingly many of the incidents are never reported. Secondly, more often than not the victims are women and girls.

One of the severest human rights violations UN Women seeks to defeat is violence against women. According to WHO, one in three women and girls face some kind of violence either in an intimate relationship or by being sexually assaulted by someone else¹. The different forms of violence include for instance child marriage, sexual abuse, human trafficking, harassment either in person or anonymously online and physical or psychological abuse. The last three in particular are grave problems also in the relatively safe Nordic countries. In Finland, too, the numbers are alarming: 71 per cent of women living in Finland have experienced sexual harassment after turning fifteen. The percentage of victims of online harassment, then again, is 14.² The numbers very clearly show that there is plenty of work to do all over the world and that the rights of women and girls deserve attention also in countries that are seemingly gender equal. It cannot be denied that progress has been made both in legislation and in general atmosphere and attitudes; this shows that change is indeed possible but takes effort and dedication. Despite the many achievements, the invisible, unreported violence continues to be a dire problem here in Finland as well as in other countries. Progress can be made only after the problems are no longer underestimated and buried.

The many problems and the great danger of invisible, unspoken violence must finally be acknowledged: the fact that the violations remain hidden does not mean that they do not occur. Any place, regardless of its good reputation and allegedly stable atmosphere, can be a scene of abuse and harassment. In most cases of gender-based violence this place is, sadly, home: women are often abused or mistreated by their partners or family members. For many women home has become truly unsafe, which is often unnoticed by friends, neighbours and relatives; the saddest and most extreme incidents result in death, for approximately 58 per cent of female murder victims are killed by a partner or a family member³. Domestic violence is still largely unreported because of completely unnecessary and undeserved shame and stigma. Therefore it is also one of the hardest problems to conquer.

Today, the 25th of November, marks the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. This year’s theme is “Orange the World: Generation Equality Stands against Rape”. UN Women strives for equality in over 90 countries all over the world, resiliently aiming to create a safer, more inclusive and just planet. Of the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals established by the UN in 2015 it is Goal 5, Gender equality, that is found at the core of each and every project UN Women works for. However, as in all cases, the seventeen goals intersect, and their mutual influence cannot be ignored. For as long as inequality thrives, whether in the form of physical abuse, child marriage or harassment, for instance, the other sixteen goals are held back.

Idleness and ignorance do not avail, but neither does hopelessness. Take a stand, wear orange, speak up and engage in conversations; invite people to participate at work or at school; open discussions in social media. Our local committee group in Tampere is going to join the discussion on social media and spread the orange word, and we would love to hear your thoughts and ideas. Orange days occur between 25^th November and 10^th December, the latter marking the International Human Rights Day. However, the two weeks only matter if the idea holds strong for the remaining fifty weeks of the year, too.

Photo: UN Women / Ryan Brown

Katariina Kärkelä

UN Women Tampere

References:

[1] World Health Organization, Department of Reproductive Health and Research, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, South African Medical Research Council (2013). Global and regional estimates of violence against women: prevalence and health effects of intimate partner violence and non-partner sexual violence, p.2. For individual country information, see UN Women Global Database on Violence against Women.
[2] “Naisiin kohdistuva väkivalta.” Amnesty International. https://www.amnesty.fi/tyomme/teemat/naisiin-kohdistuva-vakivalta/ Cited: 19.11.2019
[3] “UN Women statement: Confronting femicide—the reality of intimate partner violence” https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2019/11/statement-un-women-confronting-femicide-reality-of-intimate-partner-violence. Cited: 13.11.2019

Introducing TAYK, 2250 and 2030

As most of you have probably noticed, we have a new, fancy looking webpage! Kudos Miska for working on it during the autumn 2018. As part of our master plan we’re going to revive also our blog. As the very first blog post, we felt it would be nice to talk about TAYK and our current goals and themes so you readers would be able to catch up nicely 🙂

As I’m writing this, we’re waiting for our newbies night to start and I’ve been preparing to talk about these same topics there also. What is TAYK? Why should you join us and be part of our events? And what on earth are Agenda 2030, SDG’s and 2250? To start off, let’s talk a bit about TAYK itself. We are now a 15-year-old association with deep connections to our predecessor MYKY ry (Mansen YK-yhdistys) that was put down somewhere during the mid-90’s. The reasons were, according to its last chair, the fading interest in the UN and its values with the recent ending of Cold War and the fall of Berlin Wall. In addition, Finland was suffering from the recession and without resources or people willing to join MYKY’s events, there was no need for an association like that. In 2004 however, the successor known as TAYK was founded.

The association have grown a lot during these last 15 years. It started with just a couple of people and really small budget and low effort events. Now we’re organizing events for our ~150 members; events being anywhere between grabbing a drink (‘’Have a drink with TAYK’’) to visiting other countries like we did last autumn when visiting Geneva! But this isn’t a reason to stop doing more and going even bigger. I feel it’s incredibly important to share knowledge about the UN and its values now that the international politics have gone remotely downhill with growing protectionism and isolation together with talks about a probable new Cold War. There are huge humanitarian crisis around the world, which the world cannot seem to find any definite answers. These problems aren’t something any of the countries or their citizens could solve alone, so the need for international cooperation and global awareness is more important than ever.

As part of these issues, we in TAYK hope to make people more aware of the issues at hand and make sure people don’t fall to apathy with everything they hear from the news. Thus, our current themes are the Agenda 2030 and the security council’s resolution 2250 ‘’Youth, peace and security’’.

Agenda 2030 and resolution 2250

‘’The numbers Mason, what do they mean?’’

Yeah, we hear this a lot. It’s not like most of us follow closely UNSC (United Nations Security Council) resolutions or other UN stuff. We’re probably going to add sections to our webpage about Agenda 2030 and 2250 soon(ish), but before that happens, I’ll try to open them bit in this post.

Agenda 2030

From these two number combinations, the Agenda 2030 is most likely more well known since it is the biggest thing the UN is trying to implement worldwide currently. Agenda 2030 or the SDG’s (Sustainable Development Goals) are 17 interconnected goals, which are meant to be achieved by 2030. These 17 goals are meant to be a reference to global development in different sections of societies and global dimensions; for example, goal number 1 is ‘’No poverty’’, goal number 13 is ‘’Climate Action’’ and goal number 17 is ‘’Partnership for the goals’’.

The SDG’s are a successor for the Millennium Development Goals spanning from 2000 till 2015, which were nearly achieved. For example, the number of people living on less than $1.25 (extreme poverty) a day has been reduced from 1.9 billion in 1990 to 836 million in 2015 – the goal was to halve the number. Also the global maternal mortality ratio fell by nearly half – short of the two-thirds reduction the MDGs aimed for.

The MDG’s were ambitious, but the SDG’s aim even higher. For example, Goal 1 ‘’No Poverty’’ includes the eradication of extreme poverty, meaning there would be no more people living with less than $1.25 a day. The progress is calculated, evaluated and followed with Sustainable Development Indexes, which you can look up yourself from a link I’ll provide in the end of this post. Finland has been one the first to take action on government level to acknowledge the goals as part of the state’s strategy. Just couple of days ago the state published their website for Finland’s SDI’s.

Whether or not we’ll achieve these goals or not, is up to every single person living and breathing on this planet. It is not just the governments, corporations and organizations but also you, me, your family and your friends who are responsible in trying to make our way of living sustainably on this planet.

Resolution 2250

Less known, but even so important. UNSC Resolution 2250 is better known as the resolution for ‘’Youth, peace and security’’ and it was unanimously adopted in 2015. The aim of this resolution is to call for the ‘’participation and views of youth to be considered during the negotiation and implementation of peace agreements, as their marginalization would be detrimental to building sustainable peace in such aspects as repatriation, resettlement and reconstruction’’. The resolution defined youth as persons between 18 and 29.

2250 was chosen as the annual theme by the UN Youth of Finland and TAYK, as we felt it would be a good year to participate the youth of Finland in the political processes here in Finland. In 2016 a 2250 network was founded for civil society, to take action together to make it easier to advance the resolutions aims together. As we’re currently having two elections, national parliamentary and European Parliamentary, it is necessary to get the youth of Finland involved and heard. There has never been more young people in the world and all of us will be the ones making the difference in the future. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make the difference right here, right now.

Epilogue

I could’ve written a whole lot more about these topics, but I hope this will improve your understanding even a little bit. If you’re interested in hearing and learning more about these topics or about TAYK, feel free to contact me or anyone from the current board of TAYK. You can also come to talk to us in our events whenever you like!

I tried to gather some interesting links here about 2030 and 2250, so can read more about them.

About the SDG’s https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/topics/sustainabledevelopmentgoals

The SDG index portal https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/

Finnish Index page http://www.stat.fi/tup/kestavan-kehityksen-yk-indikaattorit-agenda2030.html

S/RES/2250 (2015) (Resolution 2250) https://undocs.org/S/RES/2250(2015)

Finnish 2250-network http://www.2250.fi/fi/

Yeti Kakko

The writer is the chair of TAYK, an enthusiastic association nerd, student of international relations and currently in a hurry to the newbie’s night.