Researched and written. Originally published November 2007 for the Alliance for Public Technology.
The full report can be viewed here.
Monday, June 1, 2009
The Withering of the Net
Originally published June 16, 2006 for the Center for American Progress
Discriminatory changes proposed in the way the underlying network of the Internet is managed could substantially limit the valuable innovation that has defined the Web’s existence. Lawrence Lessig, law professor at Stanford University and chair of the Creative Commons project, delivered this message at the Center for American Progress on Friday afternoon.
The recent debate over “net neutrality,” according to Lessig, is grounded in three legal principles developed over 22 years ago. These three core ideas at the foundation of the Internet are now threatened.
The first core idea came out of the break up of AT&T in the 1980s. During the process, the government made the physical infrastructure that enabled phone service “neutral.” Service providers could compete and innovate without suffering the competitive disadvantage of building a massive network. “Such infrastructure,” Lessig said, “should be regulated to be neutral and competitive.” The Internet operates under a similar model. Because access to the infrastructure of the Internet is open and non-discriminatory, an individual can publish a Web site as easily as a large corporation. However, major media companies are threatening open innovation by using copyrights to stunt the Betamax principle of minimal technological regulation, thereby raising the cost of innovation.
The second legal principle is government-designated open spectrum, which was developed in 1984. Rather than auctioning off all available spectrums for telecommunications, the government set aside a free access commons that anybody with the technological know-how could access. “This commons,” Lessig said, “built a neutral competitive platform on top of which innovation could occur.” That innovation lead to the wireless technology that is so important today. Unfortunately, the current administration has reversed the flow of open spectrum, shrinking the spectrum available for innovation by auctioning it off.
The third important principle in developing the function of the Internet came from the introduction of Sony’s Betamax technology. At issue was whether the developers of a technology, in this case a video recording machine, could be held responsible for illegal activities committed with the technology. The government settled on minimal regulation, deciding that as long as technology was capable of non-illegal uses, producers could not be held responsible. This encouraged technological innovation by removing the threat of liability. Yet currently there is a push from companies that own the Internet’s infrastructure to allow discrimination in access—charging different users different amounts for the same services. This will end net neutrality and introduce significant hurdles to innovation.
The harms of the movement to end net neutrality, according to Lessig, are significant. We might lose the competitive innovation that has been the overwhelming force behind the Internet. Describing the effects of a network where the owner cannot regulate content, Lessig says, “The right to innovate is held as common in this architecture.” These special conditions create a paradox where “less control over the right to innovate over this platform actually creates more innovation.” But the important political, social, and economic benefits provided by the Internet are threatened by restricted access.
One of the defining characteristic of the Internet as we know it is the “democratization of capacity,” said Lessig. Users of the Internet are not just passive consumers of content; they are active producers as well. He calls that effect “Read/Write” culture, as compared to a “Read Only” culture, where the production of content is concentrated in a few large companies. The threat to the Internet is the imposition of a “Read Only” environment, diminishing the core characteristic that has made the Internet so valuable in the first place. If preserved, Lessig said, “Read/Write will be massively bigger and more valuable to economic growth.”
Creating the conditions for competitive innovation is a difficult process, but in the development of the Internet it has been exceptionally successful. Now large companies are seeking to centralize control of the Internet, potentially fundamentally changing what has become an integral social institution. Progressive government involvement with appropriate minimal regulation, according to Lessig, will help to “minimize the power of the dead hand of the past to control the innovation of today.”
Experts: The Internet Will Be Tamed
Originally published December 18, 2008 for SpliceToday
If there were a list of the 10 most important books written about the Internet’s social and political impact over the last decade, Larry Lessig and Cass Sunstein would be responsible for half. The two law professors and friends have been visionary in extending the logical implications of radically diffuse communications technologies into traditional social structures, although from two slightly different perspectives. Lessig’s work is closely aligned with Silicon Valley, focusing on deep technical specifics of the Internet and the processes of cultural production. Sunstein (also an editor at The New Republic) is oriented towards the Washington policy world with work that speaks more to accountability, communication, and knowledge-making in a democracy.
When these two thinkers pool their collective intellectual heft and name-recognition together for a common cause we should assume that they’re onto something significant. When they also enlist noted feminist philosopher Martha Nussbaum as an ethical center of gravity, we can be sure of it. Such a joint-force operation recently occurred at a University of Chicago-sponsored conference on speech, privacy, and the Internet.* Working against the liberationist theology espoused by many technophiles, the conference sought to ground specific problems created by the Internet in much older problems of ethics and law. The conclusions reached suggest that, like so many frontiers in human history, the Internet too will be civilized.
As a communications technology the Internet unquestionably distributes the tools of speech to more individuals than ever before. It also—unquestionably—has led to more anonymous speech than ever before. These are two fairly straightforward observations, but they are often taken to mean more than what they actually are. Like so many technological revolutions and fads, empirical facts about the Internet are too quickly assumed to reveal something normatively inherent about the Internet (if it has any inherent character at all) that portends some significant change in human nature. It is, after all, far easier to argue for revolution than to engage in the challenging and complicated work of re-stating our eternal questions in the latest jargon.
While acknowledging the many obvious benefits of the Internet, the participants at this conference held that the wide distribution of anonymous speech had significant harms that cannot justify the continued libertarian utopia of free identity now known on the Internet. The example of AutoEmit, a discussion forum for law students, came up frequently. A few years ago anonymous posters repeatedly and viciously attacked two female students in this public space. It was vile, with threats of rape, sodomy, and violence during pregnancy. Clearly, to the extent that restricting expression through threats and intimidation is a crime—and both civil rights law and sexual harassment law provide numerous precedents for this claim—a case can be made that these anonymous posters broke the law. Gangs of hackers that assault and shut down female-written blogs are another example.
According to Nussbaum, these kinds of anonymous attacks also do something even more significant. Objectification, simply defined, is the stripping down of a complicated human identity to a few salient characteristics. These two law students’ public identities were reduced to the worst slander a few deranged minds could imagine. They literally existed in no other way than as sluts and harpies to an overwhelming number of their peers, and they had almost no recourse to recover lost reputations. Putting aside whether such anonymous speech should be illegal, it seems clear that it is deeply unethical.
These conclusions are obvious, but what follows is the whole crux of the argument of the conference. In any other context slanderous objectification, threats of rape, and the like, have an established system of law for the victims to appeal to. Such a body of law does not currently exist on the Internet. Other law is occasionally awkwardly applied, but in the case of these two law students the technology of the Internet prevented the very first step in prosecuting the law: identifying the offender. The students brought a suit against their provocateurs, but AutoEmit did not keep the IP addresses associated with the offending comments.
Identity is the first step towards responsibility. Without a consistent system of identity on the Internet, crimes like this will go unpunished. Identity, however, can be construed in different ways. The conclusion of these lawyers is that anonymity is inherently unsustainable. As more and more people integrate the Internet into their social lives, the more harmful the speech crimes will be, particularly as we look forward to a future generation coming of age with artifacts from their entire lives preserved in digital form. (As Facebook and cameraphone users grow into positions of responsibility, it might be good to know who is publishing the compromising photo from college so that you can ask them to stop.) A regime of pseudonymity offers a possible compromise.
The most successful websites operate under a pseudonymous regime. Wikipedia, Ebay, Amazon.com, the Huffington Post: all insist upon a user’s identity being held, in some way, responsible and accountable to the real world. While Wikipedia, for example, can’t necessarily trace their editors to a specific real-world person, they do insist on a stable identity if one wants to rise to a position of responsibility. This pseudonym is crucial for building reputation and trust over time.
Returning to the two observations about the Internet—its diffusion and anonymity—the Internet facilitated the unethical and potentially criminal activity by the AutoEmit posters. Of course there are other social contexts where one can anonymously threaten rape—the bathroom wall was brought to mind. But there is a body of law that applies to bathroom wall speech. If caught, the writer can be prosecuted for vandalism and held responsible for defamation. The owner of the wall can be held responsible for taking down the offending comment. But putting all that aside, the most obvious difference is the scale in audience. Comparatively few people will ever read a scribble in a stall, yet there is a body of law that applies to speech acts in that medium. On the Internet, one can potentially reach millions with one’s speech, and yet there is no consistent body of law to protect victims. Think about Juicy Campus for an example.
The Internet, the conference participants argued, changes nothing substantive about anonymous speech. It merely changes the degree to which anonymous speech is possible, and questions of degree are precisely the questions where lawyers excel. A few possible solutions were thrown out, including a consistent and portable online identity similar to a driver’s license (Identity 2.0 explains this technological solution). Another idea is to have all web site owners opt in to a tiered liability structure, to hold sites responsible for what they publish and allow users a verified way to gauge the reliability of a site’s information.
The most important conclusion of the conference is that some kind of process is needed for linking speech and responsibility on the Internet. This need not be a direct real-world identity, as most can obviously see how that would take away many of the benefits the Internet provides. Properly construed, we actually see very little anonymous speech in the world except on the Internet, because anonymous speech is typically linked with a responsible intermediary like a bathroom wall’s owner, or a book publisher, or a journalist. By taking on responsibility in the case of libel, defamation, and slander, these mediators allow for a kind of pseudonymity by the speakers themselves.
Any attentive observer will worry that the imposition of an identity regime on the Internet will inhibit speech. But we might ask whether it’s really such a burden to have responsible mediators. Sites like this one take responsibility for the comments on it, as do the most successful and useful websites. Anonymity has an obvious value, but there is no reason to think that anonymous political speech must necessarily be held to an unsavory alliance with juvenile hate speech. Pseudonymity might offer a productive compromise.
Ever since its rise to popular consciousness during the 1990s the Internet has often been referred to metaphorically as a kind of Wild West. The predominant interpretation of the metaphor to date has focused on its positive and aspirational aspects. But respectable people are staking their own claim to the Internet, and just as churches and schools worked their way across the North American west 150 years ago, it appears that laws and institutions are coming to civilize the web.
If there were a list of the 10 most important books written about the Internet’s social and political impact over the last decade, Larry Lessig and Cass Sunstein would be responsible for half. The two law professors and friends have been visionary in extending the logical implications of radically diffuse communications technologies into traditional social structures, although from two slightly different perspectives. Lessig’s work is closely aligned with Silicon Valley, focusing on deep technical specifics of the Internet and the processes of cultural production. Sunstein (also an editor at The New Republic) is oriented towards the Washington policy world with work that speaks more to accountability, communication, and knowledge-making in a democracy.
When these two thinkers pool their collective intellectual heft and name-recognition together for a common cause we should assume that they’re onto something significant. When they also enlist noted feminist philosopher Martha Nussbaum as an ethical center of gravity, we can be sure of it. Such a joint-force operation recently occurred at a University of Chicago-sponsored conference on speech, privacy, and the Internet.* Working against the liberationist theology espoused by many technophiles, the conference sought to ground specific problems created by the Internet in much older problems of ethics and law. The conclusions reached suggest that, like so many frontiers in human history, the Internet too will be civilized.
As a communications technology the Internet unquestionably distributes the tools of speech to more individuals than ever before. It also—unquestionably—has led to more anonymous speech than ever before. These are two fairly straightforward observations, but they are often taken to mean more than what they actually are. Like so many technological revolutions and fads, empirical facts about the Internet are too quickly assumed to reveal something normatively inherent about the Internet (if it has any inherent character at all) that portends some significant change in human nature. It is, after all, far easier to argue for revolution than to engage in the challenging and complicated work of re-stating our eternal questions in the latest jargon.
While acknowledging the many obvious benefits of the Internet, the participants at this conference held that the wide distribution of anonymous speech had significant harms that cannot justify the continued libertarian utopia of free identity now known on the Internet. The example of AutoEmit, a discussion forum for law students, came up frequently. A few years ago anonymous posters repeatedly and viciously attacked two female students in this public space. It was vile, with threats of rape, sodomy, and violence during pregnancy. Clearly, to the extent that restricting expression through threats and intimidation is a crime—and both civil rights law and sexual harassment law provide numerous precedents for this claim—a case can be made that these anonymous posters broke the law. Gangs of hackers that assault and shut down female-written blogs are another example.
According to Nussbaum, these kinds of anonymous attacks also do something even more significant. Objectification, simply defined, is the stripping down of a complicated human identity to a few salient characteristics. These two law students’ public identities were reduced to the worst slander a few deranged minds could imagine. They literally existed in no other way than as sluts and harpies to an overwhelming number of their peers, and they had almost no recourse to recover lost reputations. Putting aside whether such anonymous speech should be illegal, it seems clear that it is deeply unethical.
These conclusions are obvious, but what follows is the whole crux of the argument of the conference. In any other context slanderous objectification, threats of rape, and the like, have an established system of law for the victims to appeal to. Such a body of law does not currently exist on the Internet. Other law is occasionally awkwardly applied, but in the case of these two law students the technology of the Internet prevented the very first step in prosecuting the law: identifying the offender. The students brought a suit against their provocateurs, but AutoEmit did not keep the IP addresses associated with the offending comments.
Identity is the first step towards responsibility. Without a consistent system of identity on the Internet, crimes like this will go unpunished. Identity, however, can be construed in different ways. The conclusion of these lawyers is that anonymity is inherently unsustainable. As more and more people integrate the Internet into their social lives, the more harmful the speech crimes will be, particularly as we look forward to a future generation coming of age with artifacts from their entire lives preserved in digital form. (As Facebook and cameraphone users grow into positions of responsibility, it might be good to know who is publishing the compromising photo from college so that you can ask them to stop.) A regime of pseudonymity offers a possible compromise.
The most successful websites operate under a pseudonymous regime. Wikipedia, Ebay, Amazon.com, the Huffington Post: all insist upon a user’s identity being held, in some way, responsible and accountable to the real world. While Wikipedia, for example, can’t necessarily trace their editors to a specific real-world person, they do insist on a stable identity if one wants to rise to a position of responsibility. This pseudonym is crucial for building reputation and trust over time.
Returning to the two observations about the Internet—its diffusion and anonymity—the Internet facilitated the unethical and potentially criminal activity by the AutoEmit posters. Of course there are other social contexts where one can anonymously threaten rape—the bathroom wall was brought to mind. But there is a body of law that applies to bathroom wall speech. If caught, the writer can be prosecuted for vandalism and held responsible for defamation. The owner of the wall can be held responsible for taking down the offending comment. But putting all that aside, the most obvious difference is the scale in audience. Comparatively few people will ever read a scribble in a stall, yet there is a body of law that applies to speech acts in that medium. On the Internet, one can potentially reach millions with one’s speech, and yet there is no consistent body of law to protect victims. Think about Juicy Campus for an example.
The Internet, the conference participants argued, changes nothing substantive about anonymous speech. It merely changes the degree to which anonymous speech is possible, and questions of degree are precisely the questions where lawyers excel. A few possible solutions were thrown out, including a consistent and portable online identity similar to a driver’s license (Identity 2.0 explains this technological solution). Another idea is to have all web site owners opt in to a tiered liability structure, to hold sites responsible for what they publish and allow users a verified way to gauge the reliability of a site’s information.
The most important conclusion of the conference is that some kind of process is needed for linking speech and responsibility on the Internet. This need not be a direct real-world identity, as most can obviously see how that would take away many of the benefits the Internet provides. Properly construed, we actually see very little anonymous speech in the world except on the Internet, because anonymous speech is typically linked with a responsible intermediary like a bathroom wall’s owner, or a book publisher, or a journalist. By taking on responsibility in the case of libel, defamation, and slander, these mediators allow for a kind of pseudonymity by the speakers themselves.
Any attentive observer will worry that the imposition of an identity regime on the Internet will inhibit speech. But we might ask whether it’s really such a burden to have responsible mediators. Sites like this one take responsibility for the comments on it, as do the most successful and useful websites. Anonymity has an obvious value, but there is no reason to think that anonymous political speech must necessarily be held to an unsavory alliance with juvenile hate speech. Pseudonymity might offer a productive compromise.
Ever since its rise to popular consciousness during the 1990s the Internet has often been referred to metaphorically as a kind of Wild West. The predominant interpretation of the metaphor to date has focused on its positive and aspirational aspects. But respectable people are staking their own claim to the Internet, and just as churches and schools worked their way across the North American west 150 years ago, it appears that laws and institutions are coming to civilize the web.
Non-Evasive, For a Change
Originally published on March 25, 2008 for SpliceToday
Barack Obama’s got a problem with his preacher, in case you haven’t heard. The man who presided over his marriage, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, has made some astonishing statements, the content of which poses problems for a leading presidential candidate. Highlights include a) the government created HIV to keep the black population down, b) the U.S. got what it deserved on 9/11, and c) God himself should damn this country for its long history of racism.
A major campaign controversy, Obama’s worst to date, surrounding these statements flared up two weeks ago when national media organizations uncovered video clips of Rev. Wright spouting that nonsense. But it was hardly fresh news. These sermons had been in the public record for years, even available for sale on DVD, and Obama has been slowly distancing himself from Wright ever since he announced his candidacy. Newspaper stories from last year documented Wright’s inflammatory nature and Obama’s concerns about how closely he was associated with him. Yet only this month has Wright become a problem that’s hurting Obama in any number of polls.
Something obviously changed recently to spark this cycle of negative coverage. Two things immediately come to mind. One, the medium is the message. An enterprising reporter or rival campaign operative thought that this was an opportune moment to release neatly edited video of Wright’s worst moments. In today’s media environment a 10 second clip of Rev. Wright saying “God damn America” in his angry preacher cadence is going to get far more eyeballs than an article in the middle pages of a newspaper. It plays well because it’s easy to digest.
Two, race and racial difference has metastasized into an effective, if nasty, campaign issue. Hillary Clinton’s campaign has, none too subtly, engaged in race baiting ever since Obama became a serious challenger. She wants race to be an issue because it attracts Hispanics and non-college educated whites, boxes in Obama’s expansive identity claims, and undermines his call for historic change. It plants the campaign firmly in the mud of the past, the only space where she’s still got a fighting chance. Race also feeds the insatiable appetite of the media during this extended layoff between major primaries.
A week ago Obama gave his best counterpunch. He delivered an informed and eloquent speech in which he clearly disowned Rev. Wright’s comments, while also placing them within the historical context of race relations and racial identity in America. (Read it here.) Reactions to the speech have been mixed and he hasn’t been able to slow a slight slide in the polls. It may not have been enough to get momentum back on his side, but it did reveal something important about his character as a leader, something that’s been buried in the rush of reporters and columnists looking to stake their own claim on the sexy issue of Race in America.
Obama showed us that he’s the kind of person who’s willing to publicly confront serious problems in an intelligent way, a rare characteristic for a presidential contender. Predicting presidential behavior based on the bleating and constant tactical shifting of a campaign is a difficult task, but not as worthless as you might think. True, candidates routinely fudge on promises when faced with the realities of actual governing. It’s foolish to read anything more than a general philosophical outlook into policy bullets printed on pamphlets months before a person becomes president. But while the specifics of what a candidate will do as president have proven to be beyond the scope of most crystal balls, insights into the how of a candidate’s presidency are easier to come by.
George W. Bush’s special combination of smarmy smirks and awkward stammering in 2000 foreshadowed an administration that set historical lows for deftness and intellectual nuance. Bill Clinton’s lawyerly equivocating on his extra-marital adventures first graced the national stage during his 1992 run, when the public was given cloudy evasions about Gennifer Flowers that he would stick with for six years, until forced to testify under oath during the Lewinsky scandal. Clear evidence of their character as leaders was visible during both the Bush and Clinton campaigns, evidence revealed during extended exposure to the glare of public scrutiny.
In 2008 that glare has only gotten more intense. A campaign as long and as media saturated as this one is going to result in bad moments for every leading candidate. (Just last week John McCain, flaunting his foreign policy platform on a jaunt to the Mideast, mixed up the Sunni and Shiite groups in Iraq.) The media, as well as opposing campaigns, eagerly distort and devour incriminating sound bites like Rev. Wright’s sermons to suit their own purposes.
Under that kind of constant inspection the way candidates respond to inconsistencies and missteps might not reveal their souls, but it can give us some idea of how they’ll treat the public as President. They might treat us with the befuddled condescension of a trust fund frat boy, or they might debase their own obvious intelligence by asking us what the definition of is is before admitting to lying about a blow job.
Barack Obama confronted his problem, straight up. When a serious issue evolved that threatened his campaign, he carefully thought about it for a few days and delivered a powerful speech that caused the editorial pages of the country to erupt for a week in spirited debate about the meaning of race and the legacy of slavery. Step back for a moment and think about how exceptional this really is. A leading politician decided not to distract us with whatever media spin his consultants cooked up. Instead he expanded the boundaries of the public dialogue and didn't treat us like complete idiots. Yet he’s the one taking a hit in the media.
Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, treats the American people like children and has, at least temporarily, regained some momentum. The skeletons in her closet are too numerous to mention, but one that attracted a middling amount of attention—at least until the Rev. Wright controversy blew up—is the release of her tax returns. Leading candidates for president release their tax returns to the general public. It seems pretty basic: let us see where your income comes from before we decide to trust you with the veto pen. It shouldn’t be a big deal if you’ve got nothing to hide. Obama’s already done it.
Clinton, though, has not released her taxes (nor has McCain). This is vitally important considering that she loaned her own campaign $5 million, and that Bill has made loads of shady money since leaving office as the least affluent former president in modern times. Tim “Gotcha” Russert asked her about this in very clear terms during a debate. Her response? “I will release my tax returns. I have consistently said I will do that once I become the nominee, or even earlier…I have been as open as I can be…I’m a little busy right now…I will certainly work towards releasing.” (See the full video here.)
This is crisis management 101 in classic modern politicking. Step 1: Knowing nod and plastic smile while dialing up a prepared response. Step 2: A distracting positive statement that’s tangentially related (in this case information about how many donations are coming in). Step 3: Present an answer as a moving target while using the terminology of the question to make it seem like you’re engaging the issue directly.
The end result is that, while she embarrasses herself to anyone paying attention, she doesn’t provide enough fodder for an easily digestible story. She doesn’t let commentators pontificate over cool topics like race. And she doesn’t let any easy headlines get written about her or let any 10-second video clips fly around the Internet. It’s manipulative, sure, but when the campaign is reduced to an exchange of flashy accusations, as it is now, she’s effective.
Clinton muddles and dodges and always looks composed. Obama, God forbid, sometimes actually looks uncomfortable talking about a sticky subject. He doesn’t have a ready answer to everything on hand, but with some time he will come back with a thoughtful response that doesn’t duck away from an issue. You may want Obama to completely reject Rev. Wright. You may understand his arguments about context and history. You may, like me, think it doesn’t really matter. But he deserves respect for not responding with a bunch of dismissive half-truths.
Conference Explores Widow Abuse in Cameroon
Originally published April 3, 2006 in The Herald
The Gender Mainstreaming and Networking Organisation (GEMANO) a woman's equality non-governmental organisation, completed a three-day conference on widowhood rights and domestic violence last Friday. The conference was attended by several high ranking officials in a variety of fields, reflecting the multi-faceted nature of the problems facing widows in Cameroon.
Sally Weriwoh, president of the Yaounde-based GEMANO, said that widows in Cameroon are consistently denied their basic human rights when they are forced to endure cruel traditional practices. Examples of widow mistreatment include forced drinking of water used to cleanse the husband's corpse, not being allowed to bathe for the duration of the mourning period, the levirate rights which force the widows into marrying a relative of the husband, loss of property, and forced separation of children. The worst cases can result in death, torture, and permanent psychological trauma.
Gathering to fight this problem was a group of 25 professionals. They included magistrates, lawyers, psychologists, councillors, doctors, members of the gendarmie, police comissioners, social workers, and educationalists. Justice Mbale Goethe of the supreme court opened the conference as a representative of the National Commission for Human Rights and Freedoms.
The primary aim of the conference was to identify the causes of widow abuse and develop a plan of action for combating the problem. The conference members concluded that the abuses were a result of inhuman traditional practices and ignorance of human rights on the part of widows. Most often these practices are enforced by women who have themselves undergone the process of traditional widowhood. Weriwoh said that these practices should stop because they violate human rights, which are enshrined in Cameroonian and international law.
Efforts at correcting the problem are going to be directed at raising awareness among women of their rights and what to do when their rights are violated. According to Weriwoh, women have the right to say no to inhuman practices. They are entitled to mourn their husband however they want and should not be forced into anything by family or community members. Furthermore, they are entitled to the husband's property in a monogamous marriage and cannot be forced to remarry.
Educating women on these rights is the first step in the campaign. GEMANO plans to use all available means of communication including CRTV, primary and secondary school visits, and direct education in all ten provinces. Weriwoh wanted to further emphasise that there are institutions available to help women who feel that their rights are being violated. She listed the ministry of women's empowerment, the police, NGOs like GEMANO, the courts, and the national commission on human rights. She emphasised that women should not suffer because they are protected by the law.
The conference members acknowledged that ending widow abuse will not happen overnight, but they are optimistic that with improved education and awareness women will be empowered to insist on their human rights. It is their hope that in time Cameroon will become a country where every person, widows included, are treated fairly and equally.
The Gender Mainstreaming and Networking Organisation (GEMANO) a woman's equality non-governmental organisation, completed a three-day conference on widowhood rights and domestic violence last Friday. The conference was attended by several high ranking officials in a variety of fields, reflecting the multi-faceted nature of the problems facing widows in Cameroon.
Sally Weriwoh, president of the Yaounde-based GEMANO, said that widows in Cameroon are consistently denied their basic human rights when they are forced to endure cruel traditional practices. Examples of widow mistreatment include forced drinking of water used to cleanse the husband's corpse, not being allowed to bathe for the duration of the mourning period, the levirate rights which force the widows into marrying a relative of the husband, loss of property, and forced separation of children. The worst cases can result in death, torture, and permanent psychological trauma.
Gathering to fight this problem was a group of 25 professionals. They included magistrates, lawyers, psychologists, councillors, doctors, members of the gendarmie, police comissioners, social workers, and educationalists. Justice Mbale Goethe of the supreme court opened the conference as a representative of the National Commission for Human Rights and Freedoms.
The primary aim of the conference was to identify the causes of widow abuse and develop a plan of action for combating the problem. The conference members concluded that the abuses were a result of inhuman traditional practices and ignorance of human rights on the part of widows. Most often these practices are enforced by women who have themselves undergone the process of traditional widowhood. Weriwoh said that these practices should stop because they violate human rights, which are enshrined in Cameroonian and international law.
Efforts at correcting the problem are going to be directed at raising awareness among women of their rights and what to do when their rights are violated. According to Weriwoh, women have the right to say no to inhuman practices. They are entitled to mourn their husband however they want and should not be forced into anything by family or community members. Furthermore, they are entitled to the husband's property in a monogamous marriage and cannot be forced to remarry.
Educating women on these rights is the first step in the campaign. GEMANO plans to use all available means of communication including CRTV, primary and secondary school visits, and direct education in all ten provinces. Weriwoh wanted to further emphasise that there are institutions available to help women who feel that their rights are being violated. She listed the ministry of women's empowerment, the police, NGOs like GEMANO, the courts, and the national commission on human rights. She emphasised that women should not suffer because they are protected by the law.
The conference members acknowledged that ending widow abuse will not happen overnight, but they are optimistic that with improved education and awareness women will be empowered to insist on their human rights. It is their hope that in time Cameroon will become a country where every person, widows included, are treated fairly and equally.
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