Making Real Life Women’s Issues Relevant to Everyone

Lately, politics has been focused heavily on women’s issues, but many people have only a basic intellectual understanding of how these issues affect women in real life. That can make it difficult for lawmakers and others who don’t see the daily effects of such women’s issues and people empowerment issues as domestic violence, human trafficking and drug cartels, to understand what it’s really like to live in a world that’s shaped by them. The inability to see the daily realities faced by women and children affected by these issues can further isolate their victims and make it seem almost impossible to ever rise about their current circumstances.

Storytelling Puts a Human Face on Women’s Issues

Throughout history, stories have put a real face on human issues. Traveling minstrels are credited with rallying the countryside to deal with injustices and occupations. They carried the stories of heroism and daring deeds to all corners of the known world. Writers like Shakespeare and Charles Dickens highlighted everyday injustices and corruption in high places, quietly fomenting revolutions that brought around huge social changes. It has always been the job of the storyteller to highlight societal problems and bring awareness to issues that matter in the world around them.

Today is no different, though we may not recognize the Shakespeare and Dickens among us. News stories only go so far in defining the scope of a problem. A statistic is just a number, and it’s hard to care about a number. You may hear that a woman is abused every 9 seconds in the United States or that one in every four women will be victims of domestic violence at some point in their lives, but there is no real emotional impact to those statistics because there is no human face attached.

Fueling People Empowerment with Stories About Women’s Issues

No change ever takes place until people care about those changes. Stories make people care. It’s easy to dismiss a faceless woman every 9 seconds, to believe that she brought it on herself somehow or to wonder why she doesn’t just leave. When that woman is someone you’ve come to know and care about, it’s much harder to dismiss her – and not just her, but the societal problems that create the situation in which she finds herself.

Today, many writers are taking on the task of bringing women’s issues into the light of day. They are creating real, breathing, conflicted women who are living with the realities of domestic violence, drugs and cartels, human trafficking and the con artists who prey on women through Internet love and money scams. From romance novels to true-life memoirs, these stories help bring about people empowerment in the same way that Dickens and Shakespeare did in centuries past – by attaching these important women’s issues to stories and faces you’ll never forget.