Cape Town - The Women’s Legal Centre (WLC) is working to bring more feminist litigators into the legal sphere, in an attempt to see social justice for woman.
This week, the WLC commenced its inaugural Feminist Academy of female law students from universities across the country, equipping them with feminist litigation strategies, advocacy and movement lawyering.
Over 200 applications were received and 14 chosen for the three-week programme.
WLC director Seehaam Samaai said the Feminist Academy formed part of WLC strategic five-year plan and objective of building a cohort of black feminist litigators.
“A key thing of feminist litigation is to ensure that women’s experiences and specifically the strategy involved in identifying to a particular court how the law affects women’s lives. So as feminist lawyers, we try to improve women’s social and economic status and also to enhance women’s self-respect, empowerment, and ability to alter their own institutional arrangements,” Samaai said.
“They will be taught about feminist litigation methods - how to develop it, how to bring about a gendered lens to judgements and work. They’ll also know about feminist theories underpinning the cases that we’re doing. We will teach them drafting, we will teach them feminist advocacy as well as feminist activism lawyering, or what we call broadly ‘movement lawyering’.“
The students will be attending advocacy centres, meeting with women rights activists working at a grassroots level and other progressive organisations, client centred consultations, and tours of important legal institutions.
Samaai said they would like to include candidate attorneys and pupils as the programme strengthens, with the Feminist Academy running annually.
Feminist thought leader and author of the Female Fear Factory, Pumla Dineo Gqola will be conducting a session with the participants, and the programme will also include a session on mental health.
Samaai said they hoped universities would start incorporating this into their courses.
“(Firstly), because women are more than 50% of the world, secondly, challenges and issues faces us disproportionately, it is only right that we need to be able to teach them of the lived realities of what faces not just women, but also LGBTQIA+ community, and disabled persons to bring about a consciousness with the law as well as social justice.”
WLC attorney Khuliso Managa said WLC recognised an absence of feminist training within both the education system and legal profession.
“We accordingly seek to use our WLC Feminist academy as a space where young female future litigants will be exposed to the realities women face, and will be introduced to this specialised and necessary way in which we tackle social issues and use litigation, advocacy and education to bring about substantive equality for women.”
UCT third year LLB postgraduate student Nuraan Armino, 23, said the Feminist Academy was about empowering future women legal practioners.
“A feminist academy is something that should be implemented at a university level. It is thought provoking and made me feel proud to become a first generation female lawyer.”