According to some we have already achieved equality in the UK: women can vote or have a safe abortion and it is no longer legal for them to be raped by their husbands. Job done.
If you believe that, says Sabrina Qureshi, of the Women and Girls Network (WAGN) management committee, then you are sadly misinformed.
The 36-year-old former outreach worker is elemental in the organisation of this year’s Million Women Rise March on International Women’s Day (IWD), which aims to call for an end to male violence against women.
Women must march against violence
The statistics rule out any need for superlatives: according to
Amnesty International one woman in every three will be beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her life time; 70 per cent of female murder victims are killed by their male partners or ex-partners; and domestic violence accounts for nearly a quarter of all recorded violent crime in England and Wales.
So Sabrina is reluctant to embrace the spotlight for this interview, stressing that this is not about her but about the importance of the march. She says “I’m just a grass roots level women’s worker. I’m not interested in politics. Really, I’m just any woman saying that I want to end violence against women.”
Fighting acceptance of violence against women at home and abroad
Where Sabrina was born, in London’s east end, she saw such violence treated as though it were normal for some. The youngest of three children raised by a single mother who had come to the UK from Pakistan, Sabrina grew up on a large, multicultural council estate in the capital.
She says: “I never understood it. We would see one of our neighbours with bruises and no one would ask her where they came from. I just don’t understand what that is about. Why should we just accept that?”
But Sabrina’s sense of 'sisterhood' and consciousness of the fight against the control of women through violence transcends far beyond her childhood environment and, indeed, beyond the UK.
She recently visited Palestine and says she was floored by the activism for women by women that survives amid mortal danger, yet it is largely free from publicity. She said the message from the women there was to remember them to women at home; to let people know they are there and be their voice in the UK.
“Here we have little to fear from protesting and much reason to do so. Yet of the 30 million or so women in the UK, I am told that if we get 10,000 of them to march on IWD we will be making history. Well, I can’t believe that. Frankly, I think that is shameful.”
Standing strong together
Sabrina compares the number to an Arsenal home crowd, pointing out that men have such a “visible presence” in our world in general, whether at a football match or marching in front of the queen. She says: “Tell me where you would ever see a large group of women mobilised and united like that. Never.”
Sabrina believes that when she first came out in the 70s the “women’s scene” was generally stronger. “There were so many strong women around. I didn’t struggle because of all the hard work women had done before me. Then, around the mid 90s, it just suddenly went dead. There was this feeling that women had reached a place where it felt like everything was okay.”
But in her experience things are still not “okay” for millions of women, in the UK and abroad. Puzzled by images of the emancipated 'post-feminist' woman often favoured by the media, Sabrina says: “This is not the woman I see, afraid to wait on her own at a bus stop at night but with no other choice, returning to a partner who could kill her or her children because she has no recourse to public funds and so cannot rescue herself. And how can we feel emancipated when women all over the globe are suffering?”
Yet it was never Sabrina’s intention to work in the domestic violence sector and she explains that she simply fell into it. Herself a proud recipient of support and guidance from Women & Girls Network, she then transformed herself from a troubled, knife-carrying teen, to an outreach worker making a tangible difference to women 'on the ground'.
"I wish my job didn't exist"
Throughout her long career in the women’s sector Sabrina has seen the type of horrors which could fill the best of us with despair, yet she refuses to lose hope. She says: “I have seen women who have been beaten beyond recognition yet, through the trappings of poverty, have still had to return to their partners. Last month a trafficked woman from eastern Europe was sold by a pimp over a cup of coffee at Heathrow Airport. She was just seen as a commodity, like so many of us. Yet I believe, I truly, solidly believe that we could put an end to male violence against women in my life time. We just have to be united in our aim and active together.”
In her opinion, it is what Sabrina sees as the fragmentation of the women’s sector which stands in the way of this vital unity. She points out that barriers of class, colour and, in particular, language can all divide us all when, in essence, are goal is a shared one; we would all rejoice in an end to male violence against women. “We may not have the physical presence of a million women on the march, but the name represents the millions of women who are with us in spirit or who want to be with us but can’t.”
When asked about her own motivation Sabrina describes it as a “spirituality”, an inner strength which she partly derives from the work she does, though she is loath to say that is it what she wants to be doing with her life.
“Really I want to be redundant. I want to live in the sun, build my own house and grow a pomegranate tree. I never wanted to work with domestic violence victims and I wish my job didn’t exist. But the strength of the women I work with, their ability to strive for life is amazing. That is what inspires me and that is what this march is about.”
The day itself promises to be a celebration as well as a demonstration, with speakers, musicians and artists occupying Trafalgar Square for the day. And Sabrina’s aura of explicit optimism and focus, if nothing else, should help ensure the success of the march. Any woman indeed.