Calafate Women’s Collective

The group will mobilize women residents of Calafate, in Salvador, Bahia, in the struggle for the guarantee of human rights. The focus is to combat discrimination based on gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and economic condition. The proposal to spread information on these themes, offering access to rights and the exercise of citizenship.

First there will be a meeting of leaders and organizers who will further the debate on human rights; following that, divided into eight pre-defined areas, the women will spread their information amongst the community, encouraging residents to act to defend their rights; finally there will be a “Second Collective Encounter of Calafate Women,” which ought to attract the attention of local media and social networks.

The project commemorates the Collective’s twenty years creating a place to exchange experience and political advocacy. Around 1,200 women – adolescents, young adults, adults and elderly – could be reached directly or indirectly by their activies.

The Collective finds that the absence of greater understanding of human rights still persists within the very organization and in the community in which it is active. According to the group, the effect of this is the naturalization of the violence experienced by residents of Calafate. Women especially feel frightened by the police violence they suffer and don’t believe in the possibility of having their rights guaranteed, feeling excluded due to being women, black and poor.

The result is that rights violations against these people are treated with impunity. According to the Collective, no government initiative has been carried out to promote the exercise of citizenship in the community of Calafate. Added to this is the negative image portrayed in the media and propagated by the Military Police, which makes residents internalize their own exclusion, marginality and the premature death of young blacks as a natural process here in the city’s poor, outlying neighborhoods.

In such a context, the Collective perceives the need to strengthen women leaders that still believe in the struggle for their rights and the rights of other women, in the community and/or at the municipal, state and national levels.

The Calafate Women’s Collective is a feminist community organization that holds activities to strengthen the self-esteem, autonomy and empowerment of women in the community of Calafate, in Bahia. The group’s mission is to end violence against women by promoting health and human rights.

Lectures, workshops, conversation groups and research and focus groups are the methodologies used to bring information to the community. Currently, the group has been developing the Communitarian Tourism project, whose aim is to demystify the negative image of the community put out by traditional media.

The group is organized to intervene more effectively and propose public policies on the rights of women, participating in councils, conferences, mixed networks – composed of government and non-governmental organizations – and in the feminist movement.

Among the organizations that the Collective directly works with are the Calafate Social Network; the Attention to Women in Situations of Violence Network; and the Brazilian Women’s Organization, through the Bahian Women’s Organization. The group also has a partnership with the Support and Prevention of AIDS Group (Gapa) and with the Brazil Star Association, to promote sustainable, solidary Community Tours. It also participates in research projects as extensions of the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), with a focus on the theme of violence against women and conflict resolution, and those of the State University of Bahia (UNEB), with a focus on Community-based Tourism.