Feminists from 35 countries gather in Glasgow this weekend to celebrate sisterhood and solidarity at #FiLiA2023

The article was first published in the Scotsman on Saturday 7 October #BuyAPaper

Screenshot from the Scotsman, 7 October 2023

A remarkable event will take place in Glasgow next weekend. More than 1,500 women will converge on the city. They will come from as far away as Afghanistan, and just down the road in Rutherglen. They will be all ages, from all backgrounds, and as diverse as humanity can be.

There will be dancing, there will be gin and cups of tea, there will be gossip and laughter, a few tears and some voices raised in righteous anger. But above all else, there will be sisterhood and solidarity.

The 2023 FiLiA conference is Europe’s largest annual grassroots feminist conference. Organised by the charity FiLiA –established only a decade ago – the event is run by volunteers. The word ‘filia’ means daughter in Latin – chosen because the organisation is for “the daughters of the women who came before us and fight so that our daughters may be free.”

Speakers at this year’s event, which promises to be the biggest one yet, are as diverse as the audience, and include feminist writer and campaigner Julie Bindel, Fiona Higgins, a Glasgow city councillor and Justin Maskia Bihamba, a Congolese Human Rights activist.

But they all have one thing in common. They are women, and will have encountered discrimination throughout their life, simply on the basis of their sex.

As award winning feminist writer Claire Heuchan, who is also a FiLiA trustee explained to me, next weekend’s conference offers women to an opportunity to hear a diverse range of  women discuss the most pressing issues women face today. And she is very clear that male violence against women and girls is the most urgent.

She said, “Around the world men use violence to take our dignity, joy, and freedom. Our bodily autonomy and our lives. FiLiA is committed to ending sex-based injustices, enabling women to imagine and build a world in which we live full lives free from male violence”.

According to UN Women, the availability of data on violence against women has improved considerably in recent years. The prevalence of ‘intimate partner’ violence is now available for 161 countries. The story it tells is depressingly familiar to every women, from the east coast of Scotland to the distant shores of south-east Africa.

UN Women estimates that, globally, almost one in three women have been subjected to physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence at least once in their life. And the evidence shows that depression, unplanned pregnancies,  sexually transmitted infections, and HIV are higher in women who have experienced violence compared to women who have not. A woman’s scars remain long after the beating has ended.

Here in Scotland, despite the policy interventions of the last three decades, violence against women remains at “epidemic levels”, according to Engender, a national women’s policy and advocacy organisation.

The figures back up that stark assertion. The latest figures from the Scottish Government show that between 2020-21 and 2021-22 sexual crimes jumped by 15 per cent, to 15,049 reported incidents, the highest level since 1971.

Domestic abuse on the rise, with 65,251 incidents recorded in 2020-21 a rise of 4 per cent on the previous year. And while a debate rages about the benefits of jury-less trials for rape, government statistics show rape and attempted rape have had the lowest conviction rate of all crimes each year for the last decade. In 2021-22, only half of rape and attempted rape trials resulted in conviction, compared to a 91% overall conviction rate 78 in 2020-21.

It is against this backdrop that one of the most eagerly awaited events at the FiLia conference will take place on Friday morning.

Joanna Cherry MP, the SNP MSP for Edinburgh South West, King’s Counsel and feminist is in conversation with Reem Asalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls. Both women, at the height of their professional powers are unafraid to speak their mind. As Joanna Cherry reminded me earlier this week, Reem is best known in Scotland for her “important interventions in the debate on gender identity ideology”.

In November last year, when Nicola Sturgeon was still in charge of Scotland, Asalem wrote, in her official capacity, to the UK government warning it that the SNP’s gender reform bill could pose a danger to women and girls. She described the bill as “unfair, rushed, vague and contradictory” and pointed out that its core element - self-identification, could be 'abused by sexual predators and other perpetrators of violence'. Her intervention was contemptuously ignored by Sturgeon and her ministers.

A few months later, Sturgeon languishes on the backbenches and her gender reform bill is stuck in the courts, blocked by the UK government because of its possible impact on UK wide equalities legislation. Meanwhile, Reem Alsalem remains in her job and Joanna Cherry is chair of Westminster’s influential Human Rights committee. Their conversation in Glasgow will be an important moment, and not just for women in Scotland, but across the world.

“It will explore her international work and discuss the global trends she has identified, “ explains Cherry. “Discrimination and violence against women continues to plague Scotland and the wider world. With a general election approaching I hope politicians will pay heed to the need to tackle such violence and discrimination from whatever source it comes.”

I had planned to go to Glasgow next weekend. To drink red wine with old friends new sisters. To learn about other women’s lives. To debate – even argue – about the best way to amplify women’s voices, defend our human rights and free the world – men included – from the shackles of the patriarchy. Instead I will be five thousand miles away in Malawi, listening to women and girls talk about their lives. But wherever we are, women are united by their sisterhood, by our common struggles, and above all else by our sex.