Item I3 - Lerato Legoabe speaking at the Canadian Forum on Women's Activism in Constitutional and Democratic Reform, 2006, Parliament Hill, Ottawa

This video documents Lerato Legoabe, Coordinator of GirlsNet, South Africa, speaking at the Canadian Forum on Women’s Activism in Constitutional and Democratic Reform on February 14th, 2006, Parliament Hill, Ottawa. The event was an intergenerational forum on democratic renewal to produce forward looking strategies in a global context for intergenerational women’s equality rights. Lerato states in the video: "[...] I want to end with three challenges and, like I did yesterday, I want to cluster them together. The issue of access to information. The issue of violence against women because I feel violence against women, as a South African and I think, as a young woman of the world, is a very big challenge that many governments, civil society and people in general are struggling to deal with and I feel that, as the young women's movement, we need to be a voice that has a position on this issue. We also need to come up with strategies that will influence some of the activism that needs to happen on the ground on this issue: HIV AIDS and its link to violence against women, child trafficking (it's now called modern day slavery). We need to have a position on that. [...]" The 2006 forum was held in the same room on Parliament Hill as the 1981 Women’s Constitutional Conference twenty-five years prior. The 2006 forum was attended by original members of Ad Hoc Committee of Canadian Women and the Constitution (who organized the 1981 conference) along with parliamentarians, students and other activists over the course of two days.