(March 8, 2011) On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day, here’s a look at what some of the Faculty of Law’s graduate students are researching to advance the cause in Canada and around the world.
Stories by Karen Gross
Lifelong champion of women’s rights: Mary Eberts
Mary Eberts is a brilliant and bold human rights lawyer, known nationally and around the world for her tireless and groundbreaking work on behalf of women's equality, Aboriginal rights, and the Charter.
"I had the good fortune when I was growing up to be treated like a person by my family," she recalls. But Eberts soon learned that her own good fortune was a rarity. "As I went through life," she remembers, "I discovered that the systems and structures around me were often established on the basis that females were not full persons."
That harsh realization made her angry, but it also motivated her, and set her on a tireless life path that has served the cause of "full personhood" fulltime. That cause has impacted countless lives and laws in Canada, and her doctoral research aims to add yet another contribution to a very long list.
Long a proponent of Native women's rights, Eberts is taking it several steps further in her doctoral research, by seeking to have the Canadian legal system fully recognize traditional Indigenous lawmaking. A precedent already exists in Quebec, she says, with long-entrenched recognition of the Civil Code. "Why," she asks, "is the same recognition not extended to First Nations legal systems?"
Central to Eberts' quest is the official acknowledgement by Canadian courts that Native women have a rightful and key role as traditional leaders and lawmakers in First Nations societies. Without the acceptance of women as the legal tradition-keepers, Eberts believes there is no possibility of truly recognizing and respecting Indigenous legal customs.
Eberts says championing these causes has brought meaning to her own life. "I find it very satisfying to work with Native women. I honour them a great deal. I've learned a lot from them."
Criminalizing marital rape in Kenya: Christine Kung’u
Christine Kung'u chuckles fondly when she speaks about her mother, a nurse in the U.S. Not just her mother, but her aunt, late grandmother, and her sister, too.
"The women in my family motivated my passion," she says. "They made it come alive."
That passion is women's and children's rights, seeded from a childhood that witnessed widespread domestic violence in her community and its aftereffects firsthand. After finishing law school in Kenya, Kung'u worked as a legal officer and project coordinator at WRAP, the Women's Rights Awareness Programme. Now, she is writing her thesis on marital rape, which is not a sexual offense under current Kenyan law.
"Some statistics show that women are being raped by their husbands. We need to criminalize marital rape." But Kung'u says that alone would not be enough, in a society where traditional attitudes towards women are solidly entrenched. "We don’t just need to change the law," she insists, “we need to change the institutions and the perceptions of the people."
Her experience in Toronto has been instructive in many ways, Kung'u says. Canada has made great strides in promoting women’s rights, yet Canadians continue to advocate for the rights of women. She points out that spousal rape was only recently criminalized, in 1983.
That's clearly what Kung'u herself hopes to accomplish back in Kenya, after she wraps up her graduate work and acquires some additional experience in North America.
"I just want to be part of the change in my country," she says, "both at the legal and institutional levels."
A voice for the rural women of Kyrgyzstan: Gulnaz Naamatova
As a child growing up in Kyrgyzstan, Gulnaz Naamatova remembers attending bride-kidnapping celebrations, where a man and his new wife--literally snatched off the street--would be feted as genuinely happy newlyweds. This common yet illegal Kyrgyz tradition, domestic violence within her own large extended family, and other discouraging events, all served to inspire Naamatova to commit her career to empowering women.
"I'm writing about maternal mortality of rural women in Kyrgyzstan," says the recipient of a graduate scholarship in Reproductive and Sexual Health Law. With almost one third of women living in neglect and poverty in the country's rural areas, Naamatova has dedicated her LLM research to their tragic plight.
Too many, she says, die unnecessarily during pregnancy or childbirth because the government doesn't ensure access to the health services they require. This despite the fact that Kyrgyzstan has ratified numerous international treaties, including CEDAW, the Convention on Elimination of all forms of Discriminations against Women.
"I would like to bring the government to be accountable under CEDAW," she says. In August, Naamatova plans to return home, and continue working with the NGO she established with other lawyers and colleagues in 2007.
Her short list of goals includes field research into the reproductive and sexual health rights of rural women, particularly young ones. She hopes to help them to find their voice, and force the government to act on their behalf.
Naamatova credits extraordinary university professors - women and men - with playing a key role in her commitment to social activism, and her own mother, whom she says managed to find her own voice in the patriarchal Kyrgyz society.
"She is a very exceptional and powerful woman."
Advocating for victims of compound discrimination: Beth Spratt
Beth Spratt worked briefly as a refugee lawyer in Toronto, before beginning her graduate work and turning her lens on a subgroup of suffering women—those who are victims of compound discrimination and are especially vulnerable, in Spratt's view.
"They sometimes fall through the cracks because of the formalities of our system," she says, which recognizes discrimination on the basis of gender or race, for example, but rarely both.
As part of her research, Spratt is looking critically at the inter-American system, and how it deals with violence against women who may be twice targeted. They're of a lower socioeconomic status, migrants, illegal immigrants, alone in a new place, or otherwise susceptible.
Her main case study involves three migrant Mexican women who were murdered in the border city of Juarez. The case went to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, but ultimately, Spratt says, the remedy fell short because it only addressed the fact that they were women, and largely ignored other circumstances surrounding their deaths.
"Women like this are even more vulnerable," she says, "and yet they tend to fall through the cracks more than anyone else." Spratt is focusing her work on Latin America, although she believes that any change south of the border will ultimately make its way into national legal systems. "Lawyers can bring an international law judgment and say 'look, the inter-American system is talking about compound discrimination, let's talk about it in the national context.'"
In that sense, Spratt is hopeful that her research will play an important role, improving the lives of women at the inter-American and national levels. And it's work she hopes to continue professionally once her LLM is completed.
