Advocate urges post-9/11 female empowerment

Women's rights advocate Theresa Loar called for greater efforts to promote women's involvement in global politics in a lecture yesterday in Robertson Hall.

"Networks of intolerance and despair and greed need to be countered by networks striving for justice and equality and opportunity," Loar said. "We need to raise the voices of global women leaders, because we cannot build the kind of future we want without women being at the table."

Loar is president of Vital Voices Global Partnership, an organization based in Washington that trains women from across the globe to assume positions of leadership and promote democracy in their home countries.

Previously, she advised Hillary Clinton and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on international women's issues, co-founded and directed the President's Council on Women and developed the U.S. government's campaign against trafficking in women and children.

The lecture, "Vital Voices: A Global Partnership for Women," was sponsored by the Wilson School and the Gender and Policy Development Network.

In her lecture, Loar cited the Taliban's oppression of women as the catalyst for greater discussion in the U.S. on international women's rights.

"On Sept. 11, we saw that decisions made in caves half a world away in Afghanistan can have serious effects here," she said. "The Taliban imposed a land of lawlessness, where women were silent and faceless, and where the ground was fertile for dangerous, violent people like al Qaeda."

"For the first time in history, the enemy of women and the enemy of the U.S. were one, and we saw how important it is to recognize women's human rights, and how when women are completely taken away from public life, a dangerous situation results," she said.

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Loar said there is no doubt that the U.S. should work to stop oppression of women.

To promote women's human rights, Vital Voices focuses on skills training and confidence-building in women selected from around the world, Loar said. She named several examples of the organization's successes in 13 countries, including training Kuwaiti women seeking the right to vote and run for office, providing rural Vietnamese women with business skills and employing Afghani women to tailor uniforms that were then given to Afghani girls so they could attend school.

"Vital Voices is a network of high-powered women, not necessarily all in positions of power, but all fueled by their passion for the issues they want to address," Loar said. "Our training sessions let these women see the possibility of change and the capacity within themselves to create this change."

Loar also discussed her campaigns against the trafficking of women and children. "There's a view held in many countries that these women and children are simply prostitutes, that they know what they're getting into," she said. "But did they expect to be raped, tortured, to end up in slavery? No."

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Citing domestic servitude, sweat shops and brothels in the United States, Loar said greater attention must be paid to assert women's rights in our own country.

"This may seem unthinkable to us in the 21st century, but these criminal networks are even able to bring people into the U.S., into New Jersey, capitalizing on their hope of improving their lives and then putting them in conditions of slavery," she said.

Loar said these practices must be stopped through prevention, protection and prosecution.

To effect change, Loar called for greater cooperation between private organizations and governments. "'Governments and NGO's have to work together," she said. "It can't be done alone."

Loar called on women in the United States to use their influence to stand up against "forces of intolerance."

"Who will prevail?" she said. "Will it be intolerant, bigoted networks and organizations, looking to silence and hold women back, or will it be the women in Vital Voices? We must all do our very best in the positions we have, to work for equality and peace throughout the world."