Bennylyn & Jellica Burke
Women changemakers have started to evolve because of the recent community experience of violence and racial injustice. Our organisation was conceived from the community organising and legal action we supported to seek justice for Bennylyn and her toddler Jellica Burke who were brutally murdered in the UK. Their violent deaths demonstrate the ongoing threat to women and girls from the Southeast and East Asian community.
Predatory men specifically targeted vulnerable women and children from Southeast Asian communities. This is borne out of sexualising and racially profiling our community as vulnerable migrants, many of whom have no recourse to public funds and have an insecure immigration status.
Co-learning workshops
Our aim is to fight misogyny and institutional sexism perpetrated against our community by enabling women to assert their rights and speak out on these issues. We also support women who are victims of gender violence, those who were trafficked, but experience cultural and language barriers that prevent them from getting adequate support. We run co-learning workshops to raise awareness, to enable sharing of experiences, and to empower the community to lobby and campaign for changes in policy that provide better opportunities and protection to all women regardless of their immigration status.
International Women’s Day
On International Women’s day, we held a joint event with Kanlungan and the Filipino Domestic Workers’ Association. We held co-learning workshops on Southeast and East Asian Women campaigns against patriarchy and violence. The event facilitated discussions in a safe space where speakers can share their experience of emancipation. The workshops explored women’s awareness and views on how to build a women’s movement that will expose and fight violence, patriarchy and misogyny.
We will build on these conversations to plan actions by organising women and supporters in lobbying policy makers, using the media, and to amplify our cause and build our network of women change makers.