Twenty-five Years After Beijing, Women’s Struggles Continue

3/29/2020

Platform for Action Focused on 12 Key Areas

Rosemary Ganley
The Peterborough Examiner
February 13, 2020

Benedita Da Silva (Brazil), Vuyiswa Bongile Keyi (Canada) and Silvia Salley (USA) cheer at the conclusion of the "Women of Color" press briefing during the Fourth UN World Conference on Women in Beijing 09/13/1995. Racism issues have not been addressed strongly enough in the Platform for Action. GREG BAKER/ASSOC PRESS

I'm back. Thanks, Examiner editor, for the leave of absence. I went to Jamaica on what I planned as a farewell visit, these being the years of farewells before the final one, and I came in to contact with a dengue-bearing mosquito.

One in 20 mosquitoes is carrying the virus these days, says Kingston, Jamaica Public Health. My luck to run in to this minority population, or he to me.

Jamaicans, among my favourite people, are nonetheless obstreperous and fiercely skeptical, so when health authorities came in to spray neighbourhoods, ("fogging" to use the correct term), they were chased out with brooms, since they might be introducing even more poisonous materials.

However it happened, dengue, which I had had when living there 40 years ago, is called locally and accurately, "break bone" fever. The joke going around is that the doctor says: "The good news is that you have dengue fever and you aren't going to die; the bad news is that you have dengue fever and you aren't going to die."

This setback means that we are already two months into 2020 by the time I reflect on this important year for women.

It is the 25th anniversary year of the great United Nations conference on women held in Beijing, China and in a nearby village of Huairou. That conference drew 1,000 official delegates from 183 countries who met over 10 days and drafted and approved a final statement, which has never been bettered. It described women's status under 12 headings and called for action, state by state.

It was called the Platform for Action, 153 pages in length, available from UN Publications online for a fee. But I have a treasured hard copy. Call me a Luddite, but I prefer hard copy to any other means of reading. For absorption, that is.

The 12 areas of focus are women and poverty, education and training, women and health, violence against women, women in armed conflict, women and the economy, women in power and decision-making, institutional mechanisms for the advancement of women, women's human rights, women and the media, women and the environment, and the girl child.
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