Interview
What is your vision for the WCC’s impact at CSW 69?
Rev. Ashwood: This year, as the Commission on the Status of Women, as the United Nations and all the world commemorates 30 years since the Beijing Platform for Action, I anticipate that the World Council of Churches will be engaging beyond the physical CSW meeting to invite our member churches, through our delegates and partners, to engage in the Beijing Platform for Action, and to challenge the status quo and norms that are already established, because we recognize that, this year, the outcome documents have already been accepted at the beginning. However, we do hope that our delegates will have the opportunity to engage with the different stakeholders who are gathered here for this meeting and, in that way, they will be representing us to the world, and taking the world back home to their contexts.
What are the biggest challenges or injustices you are trying to call attention to?
Rev. Ashwood: When it comes to issues related to women, just about every act of injustice is huge. Violence can be perceived in a very physical or sexual way but the act of silencing someone’s voice, the act of minimizing or reducing their value and their contributions is also seen as violence. So I would not say there is one issue that is at stake here. All the issues are important. All the voices must be represented at the table, and in a season when civil society’s voice is not as actively engaged, I think the biggest issue I would want to then push for is not just on one of the issues of the Beijing Platform for Action but rather a call for a revitalization of CSW through inclusion of civil society, for access to the various decision-making policies and procedures by the ordinary person.
What would you most like the WCC member churches to know about the delegation’s presence at CSW?
Rev. Ashwood: Our delegation this year is a very interesting one. Most of our delegates are coming from Africa, or with African backgrounds, or from the African diaspora, and their engagement has been very strategic in various spaces. We have two researchers, and a survivor of sexual and gender-based violence. As it relates to the staff team, we have a communications expert with some serious experience in healthcare. We have an expert in health and healing issues related to reproductive rights, and we also have myself, and all combined we were able to engage with other delegates from ecumenical partners who were looking at how to connect with the unintended or perhaps planned distancing between civil society and the CSW, and we were able to do that by examining the outcomes of the surveys taken last year in relation to the Beijing Platform for Action, and where nations had been.
What we have done through our delegates is to prepare surveys and to help other partners gathered to identify where our nations have fallen short in the promises made and, more critically, to unify a plan of action for what we shall do when we return. Another aspect of the work that we are doing is, through our delegations, engaging with delegates not just in terms of blogs and conversations they are having with folks back home but even in their participation in worship spaces this week, to share about the work we are doing, and to invite presence from people with whom we are worshipping and sharing with them about the implications of decisions that are made for us, and what that means in our daily lives. We are calling the local person at the grassroots to advocacy. But we are, more crucially, inviting the people sitting in the pews to advocacy for action—for together, we can make this world better.
Why is the voice of churches so important?
Rev. Ashwood: It has been argued that churches tend to be more of a bane than a blessing.The argument is that we are conservative. The argument is that we have been a great force for the pushback. One of the things I’ve said to many folks affiliated with the United Nations is, whether or not we are being the pushback, if we are behind the pushback, you need to help us to see why your argument is valid, and if it is, then we are part of the liberals and part of those who are pushing for transformation. Then it is time to see: how can we make the change happen? Not only do churches—in particular, the member churches of the World Council of Churches—have a far reach, but there’s a sense in which, if every church, every minister, every congregant were able to take on these very real issues and understand that CSW is not about “those crazy people over there” those “feminist and far liberal people over there” but it’s about my son, my daughter who need to see their rights affirmed, who need to see that, if we are both made in God’s likeness, then it means we ought to be afforded equal opportunity, equal access, equal levels of dignity, and equal levels of agency. In a time when funding, access to resources, access to speech is being reduced, I think this is a time when the churches need to be engaging with UN spaces, need to be engaging with UN mechanisms, need to be allowing our voices to be heard, because sitting in our pews are ministers of government. Sitting in our pews are delegations on the national and local councils. Sitting in our pews are people who effect the change and until we realize that we all have a responsibility, then we will come to see the same old, same old with little room for the transformation of women, men, boys, and girls.
