(Video players are available here: QuickTime | Windows Media)
Transcript:
Biography
My name is Tonita Murray, and I'm the gender adviser to the Ministry of Interior. The project I'm doing as an adviser is funded by the Canadian International Development Agency through CANADEM, which is a Canadian non-governmental agency.
I am newly retired from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, where I was the Director General of the Canadian Police College. I've been in policing for over 30 years, and towards the end of my career I thought it would be worthwhile to do an overseas assignment and try to pass on some of the knowledge I've gained over the last 30 years.
My job as adviser is somewhat open ended; I have terms of reference which will see me doing evaluations and writing a report on the status of police women in Afghanistan. I'll be setting up a statistical system on gender, and also encouraging the Ministry to set up a gender unit-assuming we can find the resources for it. Generally, I'm raising awareness among both male police officers and women police officers in the Ministry of Interior on the importance of gender equity.
Under the new constitution, men and women have equal rights and now it's a case of putting that into practice. The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) and the Afghan government have instituted a new initiative to mainstream gender across government. Starting with the government, they will be attempting to bring about gender equity, increase the numbers of women in the Afghan government and generally ensure that women are doing the same work as men, which is not the case at the moment.
Bringing men and women together
Things are moving very slowly. I can only speak for the Ministry of Interior, but what I notice is that although there is eagerness to bring about balance between the two sexes, the Afghan officers don't really know how to go about it and there is a lot of organizational inertia.
What we now call the constable level-consisting of conscripts who weren't paid and were conscripted for two years-would come and live here for those two years, receive no training, no pay, no social time, and no time off the post at all. So they lived in a very narrow male society. That is now changing because the constable level is getting some training.
The family violence training, which has been organized by a Canadian, Corey Levine, who is the gender adviser for UNAMA, will be staffed not only by police women but also by the male criminal investigators because there is a feeling we should be sensitizing them to family violence issues and to the problems that women face in the community. It's really been a very innovative approach to bring men and women together.
