Status of Pacific girls and women

Debate on raising status of Pacific girls and women at New York event

United Nations, New York, Monday March 5, 2007: The role of men and boys in championing gender equality, the need for Pacific governments to take concrete action to improve the status of women and girls, and the lives of Pacific women living in New Zealand were among the topics discussed at a special event held during the Commission on the Status of Women at the United Nations in New York.

The discussion, which took place last Thursday, aimed to raise awareness of the reality of life for Pacific girls and women. It was one of hundreds of “side events” which are being held during CSW, which started on February 26 and runs to March 9.

The one-hour session attracted an engaged and high-calibre crowd of about 30 people, who included representatives of United Nations permanent missions of Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Tonga, Tuvalu and India, staff of civil society and faith-based groups, and representatives from agencies like the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM).

The chairman of the event was Ambassador Robert Aisi, PNG’s representative to the United Nations, who outlined the realities of life for Pacific girls as being far from the paradise picture.

He passed the baton to five other speakers: the Hon Willy Telavi, Tuvalu’s Minister for Home Affairs; Julia Burns, the director of Australia’s Office for Women; Diane Mara, the president of Pacifica, a non-governmental organisation working for Pacific women living in New Zealand; Cherie Engelbrecht, senior policy analyst for New Zealand’s Ministry of Women’s Affairs, representing chief executive Shenagh Gleisner; and Linda Petersen, manager of the Human Development Programme of the Secretariat of the Pacific Community.

In open discussion, the issue of men and boys as champions for equality centred on the need to identify those who would assume the role and take effective, high-profile action in their communities.

“It is important to reiterate that sometimes the message can be delivered by those of us from the male population,” said Mr Aisi.

There was consensus that Pacific governments needed to take responsibility for advancing gender equality. Governments had to be engaged, supportive and willing to take action.

“We need the regional organisations, non-governmental organisations and national governments to work together,” said Aliioaiga F Elisaia, Ambassador to the Samoan UN mission. “Too often we work in piecemeal fashion.”

Diane Mara of Pacifica said that Pacific people had historically migrated to New Zealand in search of education and employment. The population was largely young and urban, and about half of the Pacific people now in New Zealand had been born there.

New Zealand-resident Pacific women faced particular challenges as they juggled the social norms from their homelands with a very different sense of cultural identity to their island-domiciled relatives.

Ms Petersen said that the forum offered a valuable opportunity to share information on the Pacific on an international stage, while identifying new partners for progress.

It also helped to raise Pacific issues as unique in themselves on the world stage. “No-one is raising them in a way that gets noticed,” she said. “At this level the Pacific tends to be lumped together with Asia and that means Pacific issues are overshadowed by the size and seriousness of the problems in Asia.”

Ms Petersen said she was surprised to learn to what extent participants from outside the Pacific still viewed the region as a happy haven of sun, sand and smiling, easy-going people.

“People still think of the Pacific as a paradise,” she says. “They are unaware of the very real social problems that are there - and are continuing to emerge and evolve as we deal with changing economic and social situations.”

ENDS

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