'Most important struggle' is gender equality: Lewis

from the Waterloo Record

TAMSIN MCMAHON
RECORD STAFF

WATERLOO

War, poverty and even the spread of disease can be traced back to gender inequality, both in Canada and abroad -- and solving the problem starts with teachers.

That was the message from Stephen Lewis, the speaker, activist and politician who addressed the Waterloo unit of the Ontario English Catholic Teachers Association during a professional development day at RIM Park yesterday.

"The single most important struggle on the face of the planet is the struggle for gender equality," Lewis said.
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"If schools can do nothing more than get young boys to understand and respect young girls, you will have made an immense contribution."

Lewis's talk comes on the heels of a safe schools conference this week in Toronto where school board officials admitted teen girls increasingly see sexual violence as normal.

A recent report from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health found that as many as a third of Grade 9 girls in Southwestern Ontario have experienced sexual harassment or assault.

In some places, like Eastern Congo, rape has become a strategy of war.

Soldiers try to humiliate the women of a community in order to steal its resources and enslave its population, he said.

The brutal nature of rape only increases the transmission rates of HIV and AIDS, which predominantly affect young women.

But at same time that it condemns sexual violence as a weapon of war, the United Nations offered amnesty in the Congo for war crimes in an accord that made no mention of sexual violence, Lewis said.

"It's as if one part of the international system hasn't got the faintest idea what the other part of the international system is saying."

At age 70, Lewis finished his five-year term as UN special envoy for HIV-AIDS in Africa at the end of 2006.

Since then he's been teaching at McMaster University and Columbia University in New York, and is heading up a new advocacy organization called AIDS-Free World along with the Stephen Lewis Foundation, run by his daughter Ilana.

He is still in regular demand as a professional speaker, having come from a talk in Seattle the day before. Teachers are among his favourite audiences.

"I love to speak to teachers just on a matter of principle," he said in an interview.

He hopes teachers can take his message of community activism and global citizenship to their students.

It's a message Lewis thinks finds a more open ear in Canada than elsewhere.

"I always get the impression after speaking to an American audience that they think I belong in Guantanamo Bay," said the avowed socialist and former leader of the Ontario NDP.

Despite his steady stream of speaking engagements, he rarely prepares a speech.

"This is long for me," he said, pulling a leaf of paper from a small daytime organizer that contains a few point-form notes scrawled in pen.

He later tells the audience he's tossed those notes in favour of something more spontaneous.

Those remarks, nearly two hours long and rich in anecdotes from his years in travelling through Africa, wander from B.C. legislation on carbon tax, to a teaching hospital in Zambia where children died every 15 minutes to the anguished cries of their mothers.

Lewis emphasized the failure of western countries to achieve the eight UN Millennium Development Goals, which include eradicating poverty, stopping spread of diseases such as AIDS, and providing education for every child of primary school age.

Whenever speaking with children ravaged by war or disease, Lewis said he constantly hears what they want more than anything is to go to school.