The Gender Card discussed human trafficking for World Anti-trafficking Day.  While many people think slavery and human trafficking are vestiges of a long distant past, found only in movies and books, the reality is, every year thousands of men, women and children are exploited by traffickers. 

In 2018, more than 50,000 people were bought and sold in 148 countries around the world. 

Many of those are from south-east Asia, but it is by far not the only region where humans are trafficked for money. And in Australia, despite recent federal legislation aimed at curbing the practice, it’s a problem that’s not going away.

The United Nations has declared July 30 as World Anti-Trafficking Day, to shed light on this practice, and increase worldwide efforts to shut it down.

Women are the main targets, making up almost half of all victims of human trafficking, while almost a fifth of victims, are young girls. Most of them are trafficked for sexual exploitation or forced labour.

Today on The Gender Card, we speak to three experts in this field - Chantel Brown from the Australian Red Cross Support for Trafficked People Program, the Queensland lead of the Freedom Hub Keight Davis, and Deputy Head Of the Griffith Law School Kat van Doore - all of whom have worked with trafficking survivors to try and end the cycle of abuse with trauma informed recovery care. And they give tips for us, on how to spot trafficking, and what to do about it if you do.

Episode 20: World Anti-Trafficking Day 2021

As Covid-19 continues its relentless march throughout the world, so too is recognition of what is now becoming known as the Shadow Pandemic. Emerging research gathered from the front lines by the United Nations, shows that since the outbreak of Covid-19, all types of violence against women and girls, particularly domestic violence, has rapidly increased. On this year’s International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women on November 25, the UN is calling for a global collective effort, as essential services such as domestic violence shelters and helplines around the world reach capacity. In some countries, calls to helplines have increased five-fold. Griffith University researcher and phd candidate Elise Imray Papineau is investigating the importance of grassroots activism in this mix. Her research focuses on the cross-cultural experiences of activist women in Australia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. In this episode of The Gender Card, presenter Nance Haxton meets Elise at a renowned gathering place for activists in Brisbane’s West End called The Burrow, where she’s coordinated an art exhibition highlighting the subversive work of protest groups such as Needle N Bitch from Indonesia, and how art can powerfully challenge the status quo.

Episode 24: Grassroots Activism

The United Nations International Day of People with Disability has a long esteemed history, celebrating understanding and acceptance of people with a disability around the world for almost three decades. It’s a day to honour the benefits of an inclusive and accessible society for all. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is a key touchstone moment for disability rights, as it’s a historic and comprehensive legally binding international treaty that Australia was pivotal in developing. The CRPD as it’s become known, came into force in 2008. 

Today on the Gender Card, our guests examine how far we have come, and how much more there is to achieve for disability rights in Australia. Lawyer and marathon runner Henry McPhillamy brings insights from his own lived experience as a person who is blind to the panel. Eloise Hummell is a Research Fellow at The Hopkins Centre, at the Menzies Health Institute of Queensland, who is researching disability and rehabilitation, particularly how the National Disability Insurance Scheme is moving away from the key principles of the CRPD. And we are also joined today by internationally renowned researcher and Senior Policy Officer for People with Disability Australia Frances Quan Farrant.

Episode 25: Disability Rights in Australia

Today on The Gender Card, we delve into the contested territory that overlaps consent and sport. Griffith University’s Dr Indigo Willing is leading the research project called Red Flags, Banter and Blurred Lines: Exploring Consent in Sport. She’s working alongside Dr Adele Pavlidis, going where many have feared to tread, asking male sports leaders about respectful relationships, violence against women and consent. With Dr Willing’s background as a skateboarding and masculinities expert, combined with Dr Pavlidis’s expertise as a roller derby and women in sports scholar,  both sociologists hope to reveal why cultures of exclusion and harm persist in sport, despite many official programs especially designed to tackle the problem. And as they reveal in this interview, issues of power, masked by banter on the sporting field are a central aspect of this dilemma.

Episode 26: Consent in Sport

Episode 27: Like the octopus she sees herself to be, Griffith Business School’s Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Business Innovation Naomi Birdthistle has spread her tentacles worldwide in support of women entrepreneurs. Her passion for entrepreneurship started at home, supporting her family business. Now Naomi has multiple projects on the go, in the same way as the women she supports to find the confidence to go on to their next level of success. Naomi’s work with women in business has led to incredible research output, with more than a dozen book chapters and more than 50 research papers about managing and developing sustainable development goals. She does this by enabling women to overcome what she describes as “the insular narrative”, to stop holding themselves back, and instead identify when they are entrepreneurs and wear that badge proudly.  
Her main goal now is to stop the Australian government from lagging behind other countries, and instead provide more targeted support to entrepreneurial women.

Episode 27: Women and entrepreneurship

Episode 28: We delve into the complexities and wide-ranging experiences of women recovering from depression. Griffith University’s Professor Simone Fullagar and Dr Adele Pavlidis have just released a book along with their colleague Wendy O’Brien, called Feminism and a Vital Politics of Depression and Recovery. Their creative analytic writing approach uses poems and feminist memory to explore why women report much higher rates of depression than men, yet gender is often ignored in medical and therapeutic responses. As they write in their introduction, “We invite readers to engage with this book as a co-constituted process of reading-writing through visceral connections - guts, brains, hearts, skin, words, images, surfaces - to explore how gender matters…we all feel the weight of another woman’s suffering that remains invisible, unrecognised in ways that matter deeply”. Their years of research are shining a light on society’s hesitancy to talk about gender as a crucial factor shaping depression, and what implications this has for more effective prevention, treatment and recovery options.

Episode 28: Feminism and a Vital Politics of Depression and Recovery

Episode 29: Today on The Gender Card, we explore teacher activism, and how that resistance translates into the classroom. Phd candidate Carla Tapia has delved in detail into how teachers can bring about social change through resistance, despite constant scrutiny and limitations on their teaching. Using Indigenous methodologies to understand how teachers engage with their students, she showed how teachers have developed ways to give them space to resist - by giving alternative views to history in the classroom, that have traditionally been dominated by male perspectives. Senior Research Fellow Dr Debbie  Bargallie was one of Carla’s supervisors, bringing her expertise on Indigenous methodologies, and they both join us on the Gender Card today. Carla’s use of Indigenous Australian methodologies and decolonisation approaches has shone new light on the struggles that teachers face, finding their motivations to create a fairer society are often thwarted by bureaucracy, and how they overcome those challenges.

Episode 29: Exploring Teaching Activism

Episode 30: Today on The Gender Card, we explore the emerging research around critical race feminism and how that intersects with feminist practice in arts and academia. Griffith University’s Dr Nilmini Fernando’s innovative research was recently featured in the Journal of Intercultural Studies - particularly her work in a participatory theatre-based project in Ireland creating a platform for women seeking protection - to self-represent their stories of gendered race in their encounters with the asylum system. The live performance space fostered voicing of stories that connect past to present, disrupt power relations and speak back to gendered racial constructions of "African women" to remake meanings and assumptions on their own terms. As a Sri Lankan Australian interdisciplinary feminist researcher, educator and practitioner, Dr Fernando uses her lived experience and expertise in critical race theory to expand on Sara Ahmed’s seminal work, to distinguish specific forms of Black female agency and resistance in Australia. She’s also co-editing a book based on Senior Research Fellow Dr Debbie Bargallie’s groundbreaking work on Racial Literacy.

Episode 30: Critical Race Feminism

Episode 31: Violence against women is a major human rights violation and public health problem the world over, prevalent across all societies.  Today on The Gender Card, we speak to three academics who are leading the way in a landmark Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence, which will investigate the causes of this violoence. The ARC Centre of Excellence for the Elimination of Violence Against Women - or CEVAW - will become the world’s leading research program to stop violence against women. It will be interdisciplinary, focussed on the Indo-Pacific, and Indigenous-centred, to lead research that redresses power imbalances and enables new cultural understandings. Monash University’s Professor Jacqui True joins us today as Director of the Centre, along with Griffith University’s Professor Sara Davies as deputy director of the centre’s Indo-Pacific research and relationships. Professor Patrick O’Leary tells us about his role as a chief investigator in the Centre, and the hope they all have that by gathering all important data, CEVAW will bring integral breakthroughs so desperately needed, for lasting societal change.

Episode 31: Centre of Excellence for the Elimination of Violence Against Women (CEVAW)

Episode 32: Today on The Gender Card, we speak to two esteemed Griffith University researchers, Professor Leonie Rowan and Dr Dhara Shah, who are investigating how gender discrimination impacts both the personal and professional lives of academic women in Australian universities. They're leading a dynamic interdisciplinary team that will use intersectionality theory to gather the experiences of academic women, and find out why so many still experience job insecurity, teaching overload, expectations around emotional labour, reduced opportunities for research and everyday sexism.

Epidsode 32: How gender discrimination Impacts lives of academic women in Australian universities

Episode 33: Today on The Gender Card, we will speak to Griffith University phd candidate Sofia Ammassari about her research across three countries with Duncan McDonnell from Griffith University and Marco Valbruzzi from the University of Naples - looking at how gender impacts young people’s political ambitions. Studies have long and consistently shown that women tend to be less politically aspirational than men, as they are less interested in standing for election as candidates. But Sofia’s research found that women are as likely as men to want to pursue a political career within the party’s organisation. These findings are important because they help debunk well established myths around women being less politically motivated than men, when in reality, it is more the type of politlcal career that is important. These results were recently published in the European Journal of Political Research, providing new insights into the gendered nature of political ambition.

Episode 20: World Anti-Trafficking Day 2021

The Gender Card

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