Category Gender

Exploitation for forced marriage, organ trafficking rife in Asia Pacific

1 Comment read Features, Gender
A trafficked survivor reunites with family in Vietnam. Photo Supplied by Blue Dragon Children's Foundation

The writer won the 2020 NSW Premier’s Multicultural Communications Best Print Report Award for this story

The writer’s interview on SBS Radio Hindi Service

By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 18 May 2020 (IPS): A single mother, Mai (name changed) had the responsibility of providing for her young son and grandparents, who had brought her up in a poor rural province in southern Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. While she was looking for employment, somebody approached her on social media with an offer of a high-paying job in China. When she arrived in China, she was sold to a man for ‘marriage’.

For two months, Mai suffered violence and beatings from her `husband’, who kept her locked in the house. When she tried to fight back, the ‘husband’ sold her to another man seeking a wife. She was forced to have sex as the family wanted a child. When she became pregnant, she was given some freedom and allowed to work in a nearby shoe factory. Desperate to escape this forced marriage and slavery, she managed to connect online with a Vietnamese man, who referred her to Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation, an Australian charity working in Vietnam.

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How Vanuatu women are responding to climate change

0 Comments read Climate Change, Environment & Development, Gender
ActionAid Vanuatu conducting COVID 19 awareness and TC Harold early warning preparedness for islanders. Photo Credit: © ActionAid Vanuatu

By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 20.04.20 (IPS): Sitting atop a banyan tree branch, Fiona Robyn had a cell phone tightly clasped in her fist raised high to get a signal. She was impatiently waiting for the SMS weather alert from the Women Wetem Weta (Women’s Weather Watch – WWW) hub in Port Vila as cyclone TC Harold raged towards the Republic of Vanuatu in the South Pacific Ocean on 5th April.

No sooner had she received the message, Robyn, a WWW leader in Eton on the eastern coast of Efate island in Vanuatu, immediately swung into action. She began mobilising other women and youth to help widows, the physically challenged and older people secure their roofs, store food and clean water, secure documents in air tight containers, and move those in unsafe houses to the local school serving as an evacuation centre.

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The Future Pacific Island Children Want

0 Comments read Education, Features, Gender
Teenager Karen Semens from the Federated States of Micronesia.

By Neena Bhandari

SYDNEY, Australia, Mar 5 2020 (IPS) – For 13-year-old Karen Semens, growing up on Pohnpei — one of the four main island states in the Federated States of Micronesia, which comprises of more than 600 islands in the western Pacific Ocean — the main challenge is being a girl.

“In our culture, girls don’t have the same rights and opportunities nor do they get credit and recognition for their achievements as boys do. This prevents us from speaking our minds. For example in family meetings, only men make the decisions. I would like all girls to be treated as equals and have a say in decision making,” the 8th grade pupil from the Ohmine Public Elementary school in Pohnpei, tells IPS.

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