Sheding Light on Different Realities
After over 50 years of fighting for women’s rights, feminist and human rights advocate, Gloria Steinem, has created a two-season documentary series as a way of using new technologies to make known the suffering of thousands of women all around the world.
“The human race is like a bird with two wings, and if one wing is broken, no one can fly.”
Gloria Steinem
In early 2016, the American TV channel VICELAND released a new documentary series titled “Woman,” which detailed, episode by episode, the different realities women have to face all over the world. Gloria Steinem, one of the most distinguished American feminists, works as producer and presenter of the show. “I only want to remind you — and me — , tonight, that what we are talking about is a revolution,” and “We are the women our parents warned us against” are only two among all of her strongly accurate statements, with which she opens each episode. Her documentary series has already been nominated to an Emmy Award.
“At the intersection of violence and stability, of progress and oppression, are women,” reads the series’ brief description. When creating this series, Steinem’s goal was to show that “by confronting the problems once marginalized as women’s issues, we can tackle the greatest dangers of the 21st Century.” This is the reason behind the series that, with an amazing production work, tells the stories of women from all over the world, in 22-minutes-long episodes, who are nowadays trapped by gender violence. Situations that, at the same time, are part of even bigger problems that affect thousands of people’s realities on a global scale.
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The first episode narrates the investigation carried out by the series’ production team and journalist Isobel Young within the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where several armed groups are trying to conquer national lands full of mineral wealth. To achieve this, they use sexual violence and mutilation as war weapons. Over 1,8 million women have suffered through such actions and have been left defenseless, receiving no actual help from a government that looks the other way and knowingly ignores the situation. In the Congo, women who have had premarital sex (who have been raped) and the children born of said sexual relations are excluded from society and forced to live in little villages, away from town. Therefore, the only jobs available for them are in the mines, which are controlled by rebels who sell the production to get the money they need to buy more weapons and, thus, keep the war going. It’s a never-ending circle that is highly related to the hundreds of rapes perpetrated every year. This is where Steinem’s idea comes into practice: these problems, historically treated as women’s issues, are key to solving situations that go far beyond the problems themselves.
This series explains in eight episodes different issues happening in several countries:
— In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, sexual violence as a war weapons.
— In Colombia, women within the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (in Spanish, FARC).
— In Canada, the highest number of missing persons.
— In Zambia, child brides.
— In the United States, imprisoned mothers.
— In El Salvador, femicides.
— In the United States, rapes within the Military.
— In Pakistan, border issues.
In each of these episodes, Gloria Steinem narrates an introduction, and one or two real life stories are developed through their protagonists’ testimonies. The journalists go to the heart of the problem: Alice Speri (“Women within the FARC”), lived a whole week inside one of the FARC’s campsites, after a three-day-long trip through the forest to find it. Before its release, the show had a production period of almost a year, in which they got involved in all these women’s lives, women who in most cases had lost everything, to show the world their realities. At the end of the episodes, information on different NGOs to help them is shown on-screen.
Thousands of women are currently at risk of being victims of sexist violence, in ways we cannot even imagine in our society. Sexist violence that, more often than not, goes beyond women and affects whole communities. Even when counting with today’s wider range of information and awareness on violence against women, this is an issue that is still isolated from all the other problems each country has to face. This documentary series is here to turn the tide on this.
By the last episode, Steinem’s message can be seen clearer than ever: women are also part of the solution to the difficult worldwide problems we have to tackle nowadays.
Original author: Victoria Álvarez
Translated by: Rocio Sileo
