Gender Equality Cultural Festival
2012-01-09 Lim Soo-bin
Many of the principles and social customs in society have been evolved throughout thousands of years. In order to make the world a better place to live, people ceaselessly contemplated to create a novel ideology. Despite their effort, problems related to sex still exist today. This is because people who possessed authority were mostly men, so they made rules in society for the sake of themselves. Living in such a man-oriented society, women were compelled to be discriminated against and to lead suppressed lives. Although many people believe that sex issues have been almost completely eliminated, there are still many women who suffer from sexual discrimination. In order to ameliorate and inform recent situations about sex issues, a cultural festival of gender equality was held at CAU from November 1st to 11th. It was supervised by the CAU Gender Equality Counseling Center and was hosted by Nok-ji, Rainbow Fish, the Gender Equality Counseling Center and the Women’s student body.
The events of this festival are divided into three parts: lecture, outdoor activity and gender equality movie festival. On the first day of the festival, November 1st, the delegate of the Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan called Yoon Mi-Hyang gave a lecture about the civil rights restoring movement done by survivors of Japanese sex slavery. She introduced the work of the Council she is associated with, which has been demonstrating every Wednesday in front of the Japanese embassy for 20 years. In addition, she mentioned that more donations of constructing funds are necessary to build the Museum of War and Women’s Human Rights. She also gained students’ attention by showing videos about the human rights of the survivors of Japanese sex slavery. This lecture was held at the R&D center, and over 79 students participated.
The next event was held in November 3rd, in front of the student union building. There were four main programs: Jeong Eun-jin’s photo exhibition, a campaign of War and Women’s Civil Rights, a fund-raising campaign for construction of the Museum of War and Women’s Human Rights, and posting stickers of politician’s statement and hanging ribbons. The photo exhibition made many people to stop by and look around at the photos since the photographs included the sexual violence of women in the Congo and Africa during the war. The War and Women’s Civil Rights Campaign was to protect the human rights of women in the military camp town and break prejudices towards prostitution. The Women’s student body students sold women’s specialty items in order to raise fund for construction of the Museum of War and Women’s Human Rights. Finally, Nok-ji held the last event, which was to gather people around to read the sexually discriminating statements of some politicians and post stickers on what they thought were the most severe statements. Students also chose the most hopeful message on the board and hung the same color of ribbon as the color of the message. This outdoor event was done successfully since many students as well as some professors participated.