Category: Torture
Abuse and systematic cruelty against women and children is common across the world, but the term torture is still reserved mostly for men - think political prisoners, prisoners of war, victims of evil regimes.
But guests on today’s episode, retired-community-nurses-turned-global-human-rights-activists Jeanne Sarson and Linda MacDonald has a 60-year plan - a plan to broaden our understanding of torture to include women and children, and to get non-state torture recognized as a crime everywhere.
Jeanne and Linda spent their whole working lives as public health nurses in Nova Scotia, Canada, providing womb-to-tomb care throughout their province. As nurses they came into contact with a lot of family violence and abuse of women and children - and advocating for and counseling victims were an essential part of their job and their personal mission.
But in 1993, Linda and Jeanne had a fateful encounter with a woman who reported being a victim of life-long systematic torture, and they soon realized that they were dealing with a very different category of harm - and this set their careers and their lives in a whole new direction.
The story of how Jeanne and Linda helped and cared for this torture victim, what they discovered about organized torture networks and perpetrators, how they created the model for understanding non-state torture as a phenomenon and as a crime - and how they became global activists in the process - is chronicled in their book Women Unsilenced.
In this hour Elle talks with Linda and Jeanne about their story, their decades of research and founding the organization Persons Against Non-State Torture - and how they used nursing science and an unshakable ethic of care to help victims break out of silence, to tell of their victimization, to escape, and to heal from their traumas.
EPISODE LINKS
Persons Against Non-State Torture website
United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights
CONTACT US
Website: subjecttopower.com
Instagram: @subject2power
email us at subjecttopower@gmail.com
Founders of Network Against Non-State Torture & Authors of Women Unsilenced
Jeanne Sarson and Linda MacDonald are grassroots feminists, human right activists, and independent scholars, who in 1993 co-founded Persons Against Non-State Torture, (NST), a campaign to gain human rights and legal equality for women and girls who are victimized by family and non-family non-state torturers who also trafficked them to like-minded others, such as buyers and pornographers within organized local, national, or international criminal informal networks.
Their backgrounds in public and community health nursing provided the foundation for their innovative healing practices as well as exposing the modus operandi of perpetrators. Both Linda and Jeanne have received Excellence in Nursing Practice awards, achieved Canadian Federation of University Women’s (CFUW) International Relations Award for their advocacy that led to the CFUW national policy statement on non-state torture. This policy statement was later adopted in Istanbul as an international policy of the NGO Graduate Women International (GWI), and in 2017 they received the Women of Peace Award from Women’s PeacePower Foundation for their relentless campaign.
Featured in Hidden Horrors, a CBC radio documentary and on WMC Live with Robin Morgan, Jeanne and Linda are determined to break the silence around the well-hidden phenomenon of non-state torture. They feel privileged to be entrusted with women’s stories of victimization, including women who participate in their global participatory research. Linda and Jeanne lecture and present on non-state torture victimization at universities and con…Read More