Alice Salomon Award

Laudatio – Tilly Vriend,
Aletta Amsterdam

Dear Rugiatu,

Dear Madam Chair, dear friends and colleagues, dear ladies and gentlemen

It is an extreme honour for me to address you at the occasion of the presentation of the Alice Salomon Award to Rugiatu Neneh Turay.

Today we celebrate women who do make a difference as is shown throughout their lives and their actions. Women who are not indifferent to other peoples pain and despair.

I like to start with a quote from Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate, Elie Wiesel: "Indifference can be tempting - more than that, seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes. It is, after all, troublesome, to be involved in another person's pain and despair. Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbour are of no consequence. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the other to an abstraction' - (Wiesel gave this speech in the White House on April 12, 1999, as part of the Millennium Lecture series).

Alice Salomon

to whom we dedicate this award, was an example by excellence, of a woman who made a difference. She was one of the most unique social advocates at the beginning of the 20th century and one of the most prominent figures in the German and international women's movement. She helped create and develop modern social work practice by making important contributions to its theoretical and pedagogical foundations. She was a teacher, a publisher, a scientist, social reformer, lecturer and an activist in the struggle to obtain the right to vote for women.

Alice was born in 1872 in Berlin as the daughter of an assimilated Jewish middle-class family. She attended a girls´ school. Like many girls from affluent families in this period, she initially was denied further education, despite her ambition to become a teacher. She continued her education through private tutoring. In 1902 she received permission to attend university lectures. She attended lectures on political science, history and philosophy. She influenced initiatives and brought enlightenment and innovation to many professional fields. In 1933 when they came to power, the Nazi party stripped her of all her offices and six years later, when she was 65, she faced interrogation by the Gestapo. The Nazis objected to Salomon's Jewish origins, her Christian humanist ideas, her pacifism and international reputation. She was expelled from Germany, where she had been running a relief committee for Jewish emigrants. She went to New York, her German citizenship and her two doctorates having been taken from her. In 1944 she became an American citizen. A year later, she was honorary President of the International Women's Federation and the International Association of Schools of Social Work. She died in New York in 1948.

Against all odds she remained faithful to herself and everything she stood for and left a great legacy for all of us to learn from. Information about her struggle, research and campaigns would not have survived if it had not been stored properly. In this respect we owe a lot to the Alice Salomon Archiv which is celebrating her 10th anniversary today. They preserved her legacy and made it accessible to all. If there are no records of women's movements and women's lives, then future generations cannot be inspired by them. They may think these issues were not relevant in our times. I would like to thank the Alice Salomon Archiv, and in particular my colleague Adriane Feustel for this important work !

Rugiatu Neneh Turay

Women like Alice Salomon are few, but throughout history brave women like her, have been fighting for women's human rights. One of them is the woman we honour here today, Rugiatu Neneh Turay.

We honour her because of her brave fight against one of the most brutal forms of violence against women, violence practiced in the name of culture. A form of violence seldom mentioned by its full name: female genital mutilation, or fgm, as it is often referred to. Talking about this issue is taboo in the country where Turay comes from. She was only twelve years old when she experienced this practice herself. She knows how it feels to be mistreated without anesthesia in the most intimate parts of the body. She was told that her belly would swell up and she would die, if she ever spoke about her circumcision. At that moment she realized that she had to do everything in her power, to prevent that other girls like her had to experience this practice.

Turay was born 32 years ago in the north of Sierra Leone, a small country in the west of Africa. She had to flee her country in 1997 because of a terrible civil war. In a refugee camp in neighboring country Guinea she met women who opposed the brutal practice of female genital mutilation as well. Together they founded the human rights organization Amazonian Initiative Movement (AIM), a grass-roots non profit organization. Their goal is to prevent that girls are discriminated against in the name of culture, and to save their lives. In 2003 she returned to her native country and began her educational work . Fighting FGM in Sierra Leone is very difficult. UNICEF estimates that some 90% of Sierra Leonean women are subjected to genital mutilation. In Sierra Leone, female genital mutilation usually takes the form of a crudely performed operation to remove the clitoris - sometimes with razor blades, penknives and even with broken glass - as a key part of the initiation ceremonies that prepare girls for marriage and motherhood. 13 countries in Africa have by now passed laws to prohibit female genital mutilation. In Sierra Leone a new law passed last year, prohibiting FGM until the age of 18, which is just an excuse to postpone FGM until the age of 18. Even politicians support the violent practice, for fear to lose votes. Last year journalists who had commented critically on the radio on FGM, were chased and abducted. Turay herself was threatened several time.