Fouzia Saeed, PhD (born 1959 in Lahore, Pakistan) is a social activist, gender expert, trainer/facilitator, development manager, folk culture promoter, television commentator and author. She is the author of the well regarded ethnographic look at prostitution in Pakistan, (TABOO!: The Hidden Culture of a Red Light District (Oxford University Press[1], Karachi, 2001).
Saeed is well known in the activist circles of Pakistan's social movement , having worked for decades on women’s issues especially those linked to violence against women, prostitution , women in the entertainment business, women’s mobility and sexual harassment. Her work on violence against women spans over 20 years and includes founding Bedari, the first women’s crisis center in Pakistan in 1991. For the past several years, she has been working to reduce the level of sexual harassment and debt bondage in the country and has most recently focused her attention on the ways terrorists establish themselves in fragile communities. She organized a large gathering of citizens at the National Library on 23 June 2009 to map out a strategy for countering talibanization in Pakistan and has supported a constitutional amendment establishment local government as a third tier of the state administration
On 10 March 2009, the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Mr. Yousaf Raza Gilani, named Saeed to a three year term as one of the 15 members of the National Commission on the Status of Women.
Dr. Saeed has been named by the Government of Japan as one of seven Asian Leadership Fellows for 2010. She will attend the Fellowship program in Tokyo from September to November 2010 .
Saeed says of herself: "I want to be judged by my abilities, my struggles and my achievements and not labeled or stereotyped by my gender, my economic background, my nationality or my beliefs."
Saeed was born on the 3rd of June, 1959, in Lahore, Pakistan. She received most of her schooling and early college education in Peshawar, Pakistan where she graduated from the University of Peshawar with a BS in Home Economics as the University Gold Medalist for Academic Excellence in 1979. As a result of her academic achievements, she received a Quaid-e-Azam Overseas Educational Award and spent 8 years at the University of Minnesota, where she earned an MS in Design and a Doctorate in Education. She received additional funding from the Ethel L. Parker International Fellowship Award of the American Home Economics Association for her doctoral research. Saeed returned to her native land immediately after completing her degrees, but has returned to Minneapolis on several occasions as a visiting lecturer and to receive a Distinguished International Alumni Award in 1998 and the International Leadership Award in 2008, both presented by the University of Minnesota in recognition of her contributions to the field of education and the women’s movement in Pakistan.
She presently serves as the Director of Mehergarh: A Center for Learning where she heads its programs on youth, gender and human rights.
She lives in Islamabad with her husband, Paul Lundberg, who she met in 1995 when they were both working in the United Nations in Pakistan. They have also lived together in Manila and Cairo. She is one of the very few Pakistani women of her generation who has learned how to SCUBA dive and has dived in the Bahamas, the Mergui Archipelago of Burma, Fiji, and various islands of the Philippines.
In 2000, Saeed was instrumental in forming a network called AASHA [2] (An Alliance Against Sexual Harassment) in Pakistan. Six organizations form the core membership of AASHA. They, along with several hundred individuals and organizations serve as partners and friends of AASHA. In 2002, AASHA, together with the Government, developed a Code of Conduct on gender relations at the workplace that was initially adopted voluntarily by over 130 companies in Pakistan. From 2002 onwards, AASHA continued to collaborate with the Government to press for the passage of a law requiring all public and private organizations to adopt and implement the Code. On November 2009 an amendment to the Pakistan Penal Code was passed by the Pakistan National Assembly explicitly making sexual harassment a cognizable offense anywhere in the country. This was ratified by the Senate on 20 January 2010 and signed into law with immediate effect by President Zardari on 29 January 2010. On 21 January 2010, the National Assembly approved a second bill requiring all organizations in Pakistan to adopt and implement the Code of Conduct. After lengthy debate, this bill was also passed by the Senate on 25 February and signed into law by the President on 9 March 2010. On 10 May 2010, Saeed was named by the NCSW to head the Government's Implementation Watch Committee, which will facilitate and monitor the progress of adoption of the sexual harassment legislation.
Although she had been working on gender issues since the late 1970s, her attention became more focused on this particular issue when she and ten other women found themselves trapped in a systematic sexual harassment scenario by several of their managers when she was working for a agency of the UN in Pakistan. Despite being competent, well respected and committed to their careers, they each had to take the risk of jointly reporting their supervisor to the UN Headquarters in New York. The women fought the case together, despite serious attempts by the UN leadership in Islamabad to break them up and discredit their professionalism, and finally won after nearly two years of effort. . After the main perpetrator was removed from the UN, the case became widely known and resulted in many policy changes in the work environment of the entire UN system. However, as reported in May 2009, this issue remains one of the most difficult for the management of this large, international organization to properly address.
In her efforts to counter the stigma that Pakistani society attaches to the victims of sexual harassment Saeed has started to highlight the role of the harasser. Together with her colleagues from AASHA, she created a series of characters whose behavior constitutes sexual harassment, whether knowingly or not. She gave each character a humorous name in order to break the aura that prevents women from complaining. Naming also concretizes an issue and makes it manageable. Sabir Nazar, a famous cartoonist in Pakistan, drew the cartoons and they were compiled in a calendar in 2007. The response was electric with the calendar being reprinted several times. The calendar was widely discussed on television and in the press as a major breakthrough in shifting the public's perception of the root causes of harassment away from women's clothes and to on men's personal behavior. A second calendar, with 12 new characters, was brought out in 2008.
Violence against women
Saeed has worked extensively on issues of Violence against women (VAW) and its effects on women and their children over the past 25 years. Other than crisis counseling and sensitization on the issues, she has given numerous talks on the subject of VAW in general, Domestic Violence, Rape, Incest, and Bride burning. While studying in the United States at the University of Minnesota, Saeed actively volunteered at crisis centers in Minnesota. She received training as an advocate and a councilor to deal with violence survivors at Chrysalis [3]. She worked on the helpline, counseling violence survivors on the phone and provided them with references for legal help, medical and shelter facilities. She also received training from Minnesota Intervention Center for facilitating small groups of women. Later, she conducted a research study for St Paul Intervention Center [4] where she assessed the satisfaction level of violence survivors from the law enforcing agencies. This included police, courts, counselors and shelters. The outcomes of the report and the specific recommendations were presented to a body of senior judges and police officials. She also worked with St. Paul Intervention Center as a woman’s advocate and volunteered in a program which provided violence survivors direct support after they had requested police intervention.
After returning to Pakistan in 1987, she joined Women's Action Forum[5]. She formed a taskforce under its Islamabad chapter called Committee for Violence Against Women. This committee analyzed factors that have helped this violence persist and initiatives needed in the society to address some of these aspects. In order to deepen the discussion she and others on the task force organized workshops on the issue.
Bedari
Saeed was a Founding Member and Executive Director of, Bedari [6], a community organization focused on women’s issues, specifically related to violence. The organization was founded in 1992 by Saeed and Ambreen Ahmad. At that time others among the core members who formed the first executive body included Sara Tirmazi, Shazreh Husain and Roshaneh Zafar. Bedari became the first Crisis Center in Pakistan that dealt with women experiencing violence.
Women in Folk Culture
Fouzia Saeed has been working throughout her career on women’s issues in the field of folklore, development and social change. Her career started as a Deputy Director Research at the Pakistan National Institute of Folk and Traditional Heritage (Lok Virsa) where she developed and supervised a folklore research program and contributed to improvement of the folklore archives and the library of the Institute. She herself has done research on various aspects of folklore, through the Institute and on her own. The book, Women in Folk Theatre, is the best known of her work at Lok Virsa. In the book, she chronicled the life of Bali Jatti, the first women to own a travelling stage theater in Punjab, as a vehicle to capture the tradition of Punjabi folk theatre through the eyes of the female performers whose careers are spent in front of audiences of men who keep their wives hidden at home. She has also done research on other entertainment forms like folk circus, folk dances and folk natak (drama), and has mostly focused on women’s experiences in each of them.
Her book, Taboo: The Hidden Culture of a Red Light District, is the first book-length ethnography that captures the fading traditional systems of prostitution in Pakistan, with their close relationships with classical music and dance, as they are steadily replaced by the more exploitative modern brothel systems. The culture of the prostitutes serves as reverse-image of mainstream Pakistani society with their female heads-of-household and male family members who serve no economic purpose. Saeed used this culture as a mirror for Pakistanis to assess their own gender relations. For this reason, the book became a cult classic among young English-speaking Pakistanis. The book was published in English and Urdu by Oxford University Press and has been translated into Hindi and Marathi by nonprofit groups in India. A Japanese translation will be out soon.
She also contributed a shorter, more technical version of her book in an international collection of articles comparing legal systems for prostitution in Europe and Asia.
Saeed has been actively involved in reviving Pakistani folk performance arts through organizations she has been associated with, and is also a folk dancer herself. Together with the Folklore Society of Pakistan she helped to re-establish the Manganhar folk singing genre that had almost died out in Pakistan.
Media
Saeed has been associated with electronic media since 1977 when she was among the first female television news announcers on Pakistan Television Corporation (PTV) from Peshawar. She was a college student at the time. After completing her studies in the USA, when she returned to Pakistan in 1987, she started her engagement with PTV again. This was through conducting programs for PTV and later with other television channels from time to time.
She hosted four different television series of talk shows on social and cultural issues: Hum Qadam, Bholi hui hun dastan, New Horizons and Rishtay (about 50 programs in total). In addition, she has hosted numerous live transmissions and special programs onvarious occasions.
She continues to appear on PTV and other channels as a commentator on political and social issues . On October 11, 2009, her latest television program began. This is on anti-talibanization called Ye Kon Log Hen? (Who Are Those Guys?). The program will run for three months.
