Legal Literacy: A Tool for Women's Empowerment

 There are two articles on this page, the Introduction to the book (pages 1-17) and Chapter one: Overview and Theory
​(pages 21-69) both by Margaret Schuler and Sakuntala Rajasingham

​Introduction  ​ 
​At the 1985 Nairobi Women's Conference, the women lawyers, advocates and "rights activists" attending the "Women, Law and Development Forum" established priori­ties for women's rights work. They agreed to undertake a "Know Your Legal Rights" campaign with the goal of : Empowering women throughout the Third World. Such a campaign should include popularizing the language of the law by using mass media and other strategies to demystify the law, and make it more accessible...and working toward an 'alternative law' which maximizes women's rights and is drawn from the language, reality and experiences of the vast majority of Third World peoples. (Schuler, 1986, p. 428).
In the same context, they articulated as their theme and goal for the next period: "empowering women to make the law relevant and real in their lives." It was not an easy concept to frame, but the statement contains an affirmation that sums up and justi­fies a legal rights approach to achieving women's equality. It also offers an important insight about the role of legal literacy. It is significant that the statement does not affirm that the law will empower women, but instead, that once empowered, women become the proactive social agents who act upon the law to make it relevant, who know how to use and direct the law to forge new and more adequate forms of social organiza­tion and interaction.
As often happens at significant moments of creativity— such as occurred at the Nairobi NGO Forum—utopian visions consolidate in what appear to be "flashes" of inspiration. In fact, such insights are not fully understood the moment they are uttered because they both result from and precede the expe­rience of those who articulate or assent to them. Consequently, their meaning and method must be validated through an ongo­ing praxis that elucidates the original inspiration and articu­lates new and more refined understandings of the future envisioned—including its challenges, limits and contradictions.
Such has been the process of understanding the link between law and empowerment. At Nairobi, there existed an incipient pool of experience and an insight about the potential of using the law to empower women, but the complexities of the insight were not yet fully revealed or tested. The six years since Nairobi have provided both time and opportunity to explore, experiment, reflect, frame and reframe ideas about the meaning of empowerment and how to do it. It was an impor­tant time for learning, for developing frameworks and skills, for validating some insights and rejecting others. It was a peri­od in which the concept of legal literacy gained broader cur­rency, while it also came under attack for its potential to be coopted or manipulated. The vision and enthusiasm still exist, but are perhaps tempered with caution over the elusiveness of concepts like empowerment, conscientization, and mobiliza­tion and the dangers of misdirected approaches. Suddenly, the
simplicity of the original insight turned out to be far more com­plex than formerly imagined. Not only does legal literacy involve content, but methodology. Not only is it rooted in the­ories of law, but in theories of learning and of social change.

What is Legal Literacy?
The definition of legal literacy that we will take as our point of departure is one that has evolved over the past few years through practice.1 We understand legal literacy to be:
The process of acquiring critical awareness about rights and the law, the ability to assert rights, and the capacity to mobilize for change.
The book is primarily concerned with how women develop the knowledge and the cognitive, social and political skills related to rights awareness and action and how lawyers and other advocates can foster their formation. The book is also
concerned with how legal literacy, as a component of a strategy, fits into a broader political struggle for justice. Thus, for the def­inition to be useful, we must explore the meaning of "empow­erment," the "politics of rights" and how rights are viewed, the meaning of "critical awareness," what "mobilization" means and for what kind of change. Having clarified these concepts in some kind of holistic framework, it is then important to draw implications for method, action and advocacy.

Tensions and Challenges
Legal literacy is situated at a crossroads in which law, edu­cation, gender, and political action intersect. This fact creates an inherent challenge since each of these domains has it own theory base, its own language and framework for action. As a field of practice, legal literacy tends to be fragmented. Many programs turn out conceptually and methodologically lop­sided because they rely on a single source for definition.
What often happens is that agents of legal literacy fail to appreciate that while their formal training or experience might equip them to understand some aspects of legal literacy processes or content, it does not necessarily equip them to deal with every aspect. Understanding the pitfalls of the "rights dis­course" and having a passionate critique of the limitations of the state, for example, does not automatically lead lawyers to appreciate the connection between educational processes and social change strategies. Those who work in nonformal or pop­ular education and have certain passions about processes they trust to produce certain kinds of learning and action, may not be conversant with critical legal studies or understand the potential or limits of the law as a strategy focus.
These tensions that plague the participants and allies of legal literacy initiatives are often based not only on differentials of training but of power, social identity and self-confidence. The tendency to divide the world into lawyers and nonlawyers sup­ports the impression that other skills, disciplines or people who are not members of the "legal fraternity" have little to offer in matters of law. This practice only reinforces the great caution or resistance toward anything associated with the law by those outside the fraternity.
In legal literacy, the tension between law and social activism represents a recurrent disjunctive. Unless there is conscious effort to develop a framework in which law, education, gen­der, and political practice are adequately aligned, the best intentioned of legal literacy initiatives wilt miss the mark. Overcoming this limitation requires a serious exchange that engages lawyers, community organizers, educators, and polit­ical activists in efforts to develop a coherent framework for action that confronts and clarifies the issues of power, purpose, leadership and process.
A final and related challenge has to do with developing a functional lexicon of terms related to this work. The semantic struggle is a recurrent but necessary one, for if terms like legal literacy, empowerment, consciousness raising, and others are not clear, or if their significance and connotations are not shared, then they become rhetorical clatter, incapable of pro­viding meaning or guidance in carrying out the work.

The Structure of the Book: Themes and Issues
This book is divided into five parts. The first contains the introduction and a theoretical critique of legal literacy as a tool for women's empowerment. The others group the papers into categories relating to some of the issues associated with the prac­tice of legal literacy. Of course, there is considerable overlap among the papers and none can be rigidly categorized as deal­ing with only one issue. Nevertheless, to enhance the conceptual clarity of the book, the papers are grouped according to "strate­gic themes" highlighting the role of lawyers as agents of legal lit­eracy (Part II), nonprofessional community-based organizers as agents of legal literacy (Part III), and legal literacy and political organizing (Part IV). Two other papers that have important, but unique offerings are found in the final section (Part IV).
Part I: Legal Literacy as a Tool for Women's Empowerment: Conceptual Overview
Here we  address two issues directly. First is how women develop rights awareness and the cognitive, social and political skills needed to take action on them. Second is how the needed awareness and action skills can be fostered. We view legal literacy as a strategic tool in these processes and expand the definitional, conceptual, theoret­ical and methodological parameters of legal literacy as common­ly practiced. Challenging the limited and narrow perspective of legal literacy as an information acquiring enterprise, we devel­op the concept of critical legal literacy, a form of cultural politics. Understanding the social, political, cultural and psychological dimensions of women's oppression and the role the law plays in establishing women's status is central to this perspective. We encourage going beyond the "letters" of the law to understand the fundamental social values reflected in and shaped by the law. The paper reinforces the point that only when women under­stand the law in the context of their social and economic position can they use the law as an instrument for empowerment and social change. As part of a social change strategy, legal literacy empowers people personally and socially to participate in creat­ing their society. It provides a transformative learning experi­ence, developing a critical consciousness among grassroots women, lawyers and activists working with gender issues. Legal literacy, however, does not stop at critical awareness, but devel­ops skills and fosters organized action as an integral part of the process. It is this programmatic aspect, often ignored in legal lit­eracy strategies, that is reinforced in this paper. (This link to this paper can be found at the end of the introduction.)
Part II: Making the Law Accessible to Women: Lawyers as Resources and Agents of Legal Literacy
The four papers included in this section are similar in one major respect: they all explore the role of lawyers as "agents" of legal literacy. What unites these papers is not just that lawyers play a dynamic role in the programs they describe; rather, it is the struggle of socially committed lawyers to understand their role as educators in making the law accessi­ble to women, the degree to which their preparation in law equips them for this role, and the skills and perspectives they need to develop to be effective in legal literacy. They ask important questions about the design of the programs, the techniques and strategies used, and the strengths and weak­nesses that emerge when lawyers play leadership roles in processes directed at transformative social change for women.
Roberta Clarke, from the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action (CAFRA) details the genesis, design and implementation of a regional legal literacy project. The paper highlights the importance of the planning process and how developing a legal literacy design based on the real needs of women requires their participation from the outset.
Initial research on women's legal status demonstrated both the paucity of information on women's issues and the lack of strategic action undertaken, even in areas such as domestic and sexual violence, labor law and family law, which are well known to be problem areas for women. A further survey high­lighted a more detailed list of concerns. As CAFRA set about designing a program to strengthen the legal literacy of Caribbean women, it soon became evident that many women already had information and knowledge of the basic elements of law most relevant to their lives. What they lacked was a method to translate that knowledge into systematic and collab­orative strategies for engendering appropriate change. CAFRA responded to this and structured its program accordingly.
Using a mix of strategies, the CAFRA program fosters col­laboration between governmental and nongovernmental orga­nizations, taking care not to duplicate initiatives. Careful consideration is given to the design of educational materials and to topic-specific training for organizations that work with women experiencing legal problems. These organizations include halfway houses, rape crisis centers, and trade unions. As a regional organization, CAFRA plays a complex role and is conscious of the need to be an effective coordinator and to ensure participation both at the national level and at the level of the women's organizations.
Ratna Kapur (India) discusses methodological implications of gender-based legal literacy. From a clearly formulated theo­retical base, she draws lessons from three experiences in legal literacy programming presented in the form of three mini case studies. The first experience, which involved a development organization working in an urban slum, highlighted the lack of critical consciousness among the women and the inability of the organization, given its model of development, to stimulate it. The second case study of women and legal literacy describes a workshop at an information and knowledge "fair." Despite limitations caused by the unwieldy size of the group and the short time span of the workshops, the lawyers focused on stim­ulating critical consciousness among the women by relating the information to the participants' specific contexts and con­ditions. Kapur's third case study describes a workshop on women's health and law with a group that had already devel­oped awareness of gender disparities. The women's analysis of the issues demonstrated the capacity of women to articulate not only their frustrations with the inequities they recognized in their lives and discovered in the law, but alternatives and solutions as well. This paper underscores the importance of critical conscious­ness in legal literacy. Kapur notes the importance of situating legal literacy in the context of broader programs having an impact on women's lives (health, public administration, labor) and focusing on the specific social problems of the group. She proposes that legal literacy should not only provide informa­tion about the law, but should stimulate women to explore gender and the limits of the law, and formulate strategies for social and economic empowerment. Engaging women to understand the "limits of the law" is important to prevent their developing a dependency on the law or placing false expecta­tions in it. Finally, Kapur reflects on the need for educators to come to terms with their hierarchical position in the education­al relationship by acknowledging their power and then using the power creatively rather than denying or rejecting their role.
Florence Butegwa outlines the challenges of legal literacy work with women in Africa and develops a critique of strate­gies used in Uganda. The analysis targets the legal literacy strategy of "sharing information about the law and available legal remedies with as many people in the country as possi­ble," a common approach to legal literacy by NGO's and one in which women lawyers play a dynamic role. A legal literacy program linked to Uganda's recent constitution-making process provided an opportunity to explore issues involved in the design and implementation of legal literacy in the "cam­paign" format and raised questions about whether the approach used for the program was the appropriate one and yielded the benefits it could have.
In her analysis of the experience, Butegwa unsparingly identi­fies the structural problems, and organizational and method­ological flaws that obstructed the realization of goals of both governmental and nongovernmental organizations. She focuses on the importance of deciding on a strategy, the target of benefi­ciaries, techniques to be adopted, and the need for continuity and follow-up services. Recognizing the need to develop appropriate communication skills, Butegwa exhorts women lawyers to pay attention to the approaches provided by popular education. She also confirms the need for the various groups involved in legal literacy to network and coordinate their efforts to increase their impact rather than work in insolation, and even in competition with one another. She underscores the importance of scrutiniz­ing the content and context of the literacy campaigns and evalu­ating them periodically so that mistakes are not perpetuated and the programs keep pace with the real needs of women.
Writing on legal literacy programs in Sri Lanka, Savitri Goonesekere documents and critiques the strategies adopted and services offered by the government and nongovernmental services. She assesses the limited impact of printed legal litera­cy materials in a country with a high literacy rate, because they inform without provoking deeper analysis of ideologies and norms. The quality and impact of the seminar-type discussions offered to middle class or professional audiences are also of limited impact because they are an exercise of "discourse by the initiated for the initiated." Their saving grace, however, appears to be that many of these discussions have had a "con- scientizing" impact on a small but critical group of judges, leg­islators and policy makers.
Goonesekere points to the failure of many research organiza­tions to monitor the media and the courts and for failing to use media pressure to highlight women's issues. Lobbying for law reform, law enforcement, and changes in social and cultural practices have also been weak in Sri Lanka, attributed largely to the inability of women's organizations to utilize the information they have to mobilize for change. According to Goonesekere, most organizations appear to have adopted a service-oriented and politically disengaged model of legal literacy.
In analyzing the structural constraints on legal literacy, Goonesekere points to a political context in which people are alienated from the law at several levels. Not only does the lan­guage of the law and its procedures constitute an impenetrable mystique, but the "law and order" problems consuming the coun­try for several years have further diminished faith in the law as an acceptable method of social control. Unless women's organiza­tions are willing to bring women's issues into the broader political debate, legal literacy cannot be empowering. Goonesekere con­cludes that to be empowering, legal literacy must address the real­ity of the community's "vulnerability to the abuse of power" and give voice to both individual victims of human rights violations and legitimacy for fundamental freedoms, public interest litiga­tion and legal reform.
Part III: De-professionalizing the Practice ofLazv: Paralegal as Resources and Agents of Legal Literacy
Parallel to the focus on the lawyer in legal literacy—her role, responsibility, influence and potential contribution as an agent of legal literacy—is a trend that offers at least a partial answer to these concerns. As an alternative to the lawyer as sole or pri­mary agent and communicator, the community based ''parale­gal" is emerging as an important means to make the law accessible to the grassroots. In the process, legal literacy is becoming "de-professionalized." The lawyer still has a role to play, but the emphasis is different. The next four case studies explore the concept of the paralegal and their contributions as resources and agents of legal literacy. Paralegals, when devel­oped as communicators, educators and organizers in the com­munity, play an important role in demystifying the law and making it accessible to ordinary people.
Elizabeth Dasso's study about a legal services project in Peru reveals her profound faith in what grassroots women can accomplish, despite the dominant ideology of social prejudice,
class oppression, and legal exclusion that characterizes Peruvian society. The program she describes is an alterative to the traditional, welfare-type, "professional" approach to legal services in which the unequal relationship between lawyer and client remains unchanged. Peru Mujer, an association dedicat­ed to promoting and developing grassroots women, adopted a program of community-based legal services in which the women of the community play a major role in legal literacy and legal defense. The goal of the Peru Mujer program is to make women proactive bearers of rights, and agents facilitating the exercise of rights. Key to the program is the formation of a corps of "paralegals," who manage the legal services in their own communities.
Their formal training rests on three theoretical supports: the alternative use of law; popular education; and the gender per­spective. Alternative law provides a base for demystifying the law and challenging the monopolistic control over the law by lawyers/professionals. It also stresses the power of information and legal resources, redefines the relationship between lawyer- client to one of facilitator and user. The alternative use of law also helps break down the myths that limit the exercise of rights, and helps to develop innovative approaches to creating and organizing legal defense. Popular education provides a base for developing creative, participatory methods and innov­ative resources to reinforce the content of learning. Respect for the participants own thinking, for everyday practices and for commonly held attitudes regarding justice and injustice are incorporated in the content of the programs. The gender per­spective provides insights into the magnitude of gender-based issues affecting the content and exercise of women's rights.
In achieving the goal of developing the legal resourcefulness of the community the importance of community counselors and paralegals is clear. They represent a qualitative leap in the effort to achieve justice by integrating participation from below with everyday practice. The Peruvian program also under­scores the importance of an interdisciplinary approach and not being dependent only on lawyers, but cautions all profession­als about overrating their role; rather, professionals and all the other players in legal literacy must remain faithful to the requirements, perspectives and values of popular education.
Meena Patel describes the involvement of the Self- Employed Women's Association (SEW A) from India with the legal system and how paralegals were incorporated into their work. Initially, SEW A was primarily concerned with the labor- related matters affecting its membership. However, it was soon apparent the women faced a multiplicity of problems, many of which may have legal remedies. Thus, SEWA devel­oped an approach to law that recognized the value of litiga­tion in securing the interests of its members. This active use of law and litigation led to legal education and research to enhance the legal knowledge of its members.
Over the years, however, SEWA has not lost sight of its orig­inal purpose, which is to serve as a union for the unorganized. All the strategies SEWA has used and developed are deter­mined by this. The use ard training of paralegals is a case in point. Although it originally responded to a specific need at a certain time, the paralegal program continues to develop in function of the needs of SEWA as an organization. Thus, the paralegals engage directly in litigation and court procedure to serve organizational ends. This is a slightly different approach than that taken in Peru. However, what the two have in com­mon is proving that women with little format education can be successful in using the legal system to their own ends, and in the process, they break down stereotypes about who can do so.
Emelina Quintilian writes about the experience of Pilipina Legal Resources Center (PLRC) in the Philippines. In this case, the search for effective provision of legal remedies and modes of community intervention led to the introduction of a parale­gal training program. Geared to enhancing the knowledge and skills of the people already active as community organizers, PLRC's broadly based training program covers not only legal topics, but gender and community organizing as well. The top­ics include self and community analysis, gender analysis, the laws, rules, regulations and regulatory agencies relevant to the community, organizing skills, skills in data gathering, and documentation.
The program provides two levels of paralegal training. Basic level training is geared toward the personal benefit of the women. The advanced training is for those who finish the basic course and show interest and aptitude in going further. They are given greater exposure to more complex and challenging ideas. The paralegal's role may cover several functions: edu­cating the community about women's rights and human rights; assisting in conflict resolution; documentation; and referring dependent parties to the relevant administrative and judicial fora. After their training, the paralegals return to their com­munities and apply their legal knowledge in the context of other community involvements. In this way, the law becomes an added resource to them and to the community. While they can fall back on a body of legal professionals if they so choose, the majority of those trained do not maintain a structured relationship with PLRC after the training is over. By and large the Pilipina Legal Resource Center prefers the minimalist role of catalyzer.
Salma Sobhan describes the development of a paralegal pro­gram that focuses on the educative role the paralegal can play at the community level. The Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), detected the need for legal literacy among its members and proposed the program. The designers started from a flexible position that recognized that the paralegal
could probably play a positive role as a teacher, perhaps as a counselor or intermediary rather than as a legal assistant. Beyond this framework and a concern that the program be structured on participatory lines and not be exclusionary, nothing else about the program was foreordained.
For these reasons program content was not predetermined, nor was a literacy requirement imposed. The lack of a clear perspective on these issues initially handicapped the program, but the process enabled the group to come up with creative solutions to some of the emerging problems. After the parale­gals received their training and BRAC established how they were to carry out their "teaching" role, they launched a legal awareness program. By 1989 it was estimated that the parale­gals were reaching as many as 9,000 people in classes per year. The legal awareness program, which was not directed primari­ly toward women, included some content that related to women's rights. Although there were mixed reactions to the quality of the program, an evaluation indicated some changes in attitudes about women were taking place and that there was a growing awareness about the issues of dowry and divorce. Even if people's behaviors have not yet changed, a positive sign is that people are beginning at least to discuss the issues.
The varied perspectives of these programs are reflected in how they understand the role of the paralegal, the content of the training the paralegals receive, the level of social analysis they include in the content of the legal literacy, and the empha­sis they give to understanding gender oppression. Despite these differences, each of the cases contributes ideas about the possibilities and value of making the law accessible through community channels that are not entirely dependent on the professional.
Part IV: Legal Literacy and Political Organizing
Moving from a focus on the legal literacy program, per se, this next section consists of two papers, one about Africa and the other about Mexico, that take a broad view of legal literacy as an essential part of developing the political capacities of women. Placing legal literacy in the framework of a strategy to achieve change at both local and policy levels, these papers highlight the importance for women organizers to develop a clear perspective and appropriate methods.
Lisa VeneKlasen presents an overview of women's legal rights organizing and political participation in Africa. Referring to political, economic and social conditions in Africa which traditionally and routinely discriminate against women, she points to the difficulty of promoting women's rights when they run counter to customary law and deeply ingrained nega­tive attitudes toward women. Apart from these constraints, the general undemocratic structures of most African states func­tion as an additional obstacle, limiting women's rights orga­nizing and participation at all levels.
However, VeneKlasen recognizes that important political changes are taking place in Africa that provide a window of opportunity for women's rights organizing. Her survey of ini­tiatives undertaken in eight African countries (Uganda, Zambia, Tanzania, Nigeria, South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe) convey the direction of participatory movements, emerging gender issues, and related activities.
The main emphasis of her paper however, is about advanc­ing women's legal rights within a "strategic" political strategy. This requires influencing institutions that enforce and admin­ister policies, as well as educating and organizing women at the base. In selecting the issue, those that affect large numbers of women and challenge basic institutional and attitudinal obstacles for women have the greatest organizing potential. Thus, it becomes important for women's groups to do more research and in-depth analysis on the strategic issues affecting women. VeneKlasen also underscores the importance of devel­oping community-based approaches and building local leader­ship and taking advantage of emerging political opportunities to strengthen civil society. In the new openness to democratic processes, legal rights information could be broadened to include civic education and thus lead toward building women's political participation and redefining women's status.
Mobilization and participation remain critical strategies for women's movements to adopt. A greater diversity among organizers and activists could do much to add value to legal rights organizing. As VeneKlasen points out, lawyers have played the most significant leadership role in this respect but it is important to draw others, professionals as well as non­professional, into legal rights and legal literacy work and to bridge the rural/urban gap.
In her analysis of the feminist movement in Mexico, Ximena Bedregal also offers a critique of approaches and attitudes toward women's rights strategies and political participation. In Mexico, the feminist movement's association with left par­ties and their historical opposition to the official party, led the movement to place priority on bringing political pressure to bear on the government. Given the governing party's proven capacity to co-opt social movements, the strategy was not inap­propriate at that point. However, it led the movement to a con­ception of autonomy' that hindered negotiation and made the movement more marginal. The fear of cooptation superseded any drive to have an impact, resulting in an inclination to denounce rather than propose alternatives.
Bedregal's organization, The Center for Women's Training and Research {CICAM) was founded to address three major issues:

1. The feminist movement's inability to acknowledge and recall its own experience and history and reverse the lack of communication among its divergent streams;
2. Its repetitive and ineffective methods of diffusion; and
3. The imbalance between the capital and provinces in terms of resources and support.

The Center's work straddles both grassroots practice and academic work. On the theoretical side, the Center does research, evaluation and assimilation of lessons learned and documentation. All of this work is ultimately designed to strengthen the capabilities of the movement, specifically through the women's organizations that are working on domestic violence and other issues of women's rights. The approach of CICAM is to work with these groups to assimilate the lessons of the past and to develop their analytical and polit­ical skills. The goal is to make the feminist movement more politically effective in bringing about social change, in propos­ing alternatives and developing strategies, in engaging the state in ways that move beyond protest and denunciation, and in improving educational and dissemination capabilities.
Part V: Educational Considerations: Problems and Methods
The last two papers do not fall easily into a single category. One discusses the problem of legal literacy and law enforce­ment issues in Ghana and the other presents an experience
from Zimbabwe that offers some useful methodological insights about how to foster rights awareness. In different ways they both deal with changing deeply ingrained social attitudes and the importance of recognizing that legal literacy cannot be seen only in terms of women, but also in the context of other structures and sectors of society.
Akua Kuenyehia from Ghana points very specifically to the legal problems faced by women that are not linked to the nature and content of the laws, but to the ineffectiveness and gender insensitivity of law enforcement agencies such as the police and the courts. In her critique of the nature of the judi­ciary and the law enforcement agencies, she points out that the lower courts comprise that section of the judiciary which has the most immediate impact on women's issues. The Lower Courts are often staffed by village elders and chiefs who have traditional and non-progressive attitudes toward women. Thus, when women's issues come before them, they are resolved within the terms and world-view of the judges and not the law. In this way, the courts become instruments of oppression. Likewise, the police often fail to respond to domestic disputes leaving women vulnerable to the oppression of their menfolk. In addition to the damage done to individual women's rights in these cases, they send a powerful "message" to the public about the law and women's rights and the kind of justice she can hope to achieve in the system.
Kuenyehia suggests that these problems require a different strategy for resolution. A campaign on women's rights and issues needs to be directed not just to women, but to the custo­dians and interpreters of the law. Judges and Law enforcement officers need to be made literate in women's issues, and their gender bias confronted. Kuenyehia suggests that an approach to education that targets this very special group is necessary.
The final paper by Kathy Bond-Stewart contributes a case study about participatory educational methodology. She describes a program in Zimbabwe that engages village-level people in a program to produce educational books about development. After selecting a major theme, the issues to be included in the books are surfaced, discussed and analyzed through participatory community workshops in which peo­ple's real feelings emerge and the content of the published material represents their reality and reflections. The purpose of the program is not just to produce the physical books, but to make producing the books an educational process for people's development. In the process of analyzing the issues and actu­ally writing about them, participants develop new skills and ways of perceiving the issues and their lives. Since the finished products, the books, represent the participants work, they feel a great deal of commitment to what the materials represent and they become very effective in replicating the learning process through workshops with village people.
In the project to produce a book on women, the issue of women's rights was a major theme, developed within a setting of popular resistance to the perceived imposition of a new law meant to benefit women. The fracas associated with the Legal Age of Majority Act provides one of the clearest examples of the importance of engaging the population in the process of defin­ing changes in legislation and then presenting the law in a way that deals with people's perceived interests and feelings. The book project allowed people to vent their fears and frustrations and to develop a better understanding of their own needs in terms of the law. At the same time the project surfaced new issues not previously recognized as problems for women. It reinforced the importance of linking economic, cultural, social and legal issues to provide, a holistic perspective on women's issues. The relevancy of this case study to the discussion of legal literacy is that it provides an example of an alternative to the ineffective educational methods that are often used in legal lit­eracy. This approach just might be a creative -way of producing effective legal literacy materials.

Putting Legal Literacy in Context
Legal Literacy, A Tool for Women's Empowerment, represents part of an on-going international dialogue about the conditions under which the law can be a tool for women's empowerment. The papers are from Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Peru, Mexico, the Caribbean, Uganda, Ghana, Zimbabwe and the Philippines. They are at once specific and diffuse. They high­light gender-based inequities in the legal and political systems, as well as pervasive social oppression. They offer evidence of unequal outcomes for women in the distribution of economic resources and in the delivery of justice, even where the laws themselves are neutral and nondiscriminatory. They highlight the conditions of poverty, ignorance, violence and isolation in which many women live, and the lack of control and direction in their lives. Indian women in the unorganized sector in Ahmedabad, women workers in the Caribbean, Peruvian women in the pueblos jovenes, African women chattelized by customary law—their contexts are different but their conditions and the content of their experiences are the same.
Besides providing primary sources for identifying the issues facing women, the case studies provide a sample of strategies used to empower women. The articles work through the con­cepts underlying the objectives of empowerment and their selection of strategies for empowerment. They place the key issues of this book (legal literacy and empowerment, the mean­ing and relevance of rights, the role of lawyers, political and social activist's) in a concrete political and socioeconomic con­text. The empirical reality they convey is a powerful contribu­tion to the construction of a framework for conceptualizing legal literacy as a means of empowerment.
In general, the collection of papers offers an eclectic mix of resources and agents of legal literacy, and methods and strate­gies by which Legal literacy and its long-term political goals can be pursued. They freely discuss strategy problems, the fail­ure of certain methods and programs, unrealized expectations, and positive and successful experiences. It is largely the frank­ness of the authors in discussing both their central concerns and problems and the strategic approaches they adopted that give value to this book as a facilitating instrument in the dia­logue surrounding legal literacy.
NOTE
1. The definition we use in this book was a consen­sus definition by the group of paper writers meeting in June of 1989 to discuss and prepare an initial concep­tual framework for this book.

Overview and Theory

​"Legal" Literacy: Reading the ABCs of Law?
Like "empowerment/' legal literacy is one of those terms whose apparent transparency of meaning comes under attack in direct proportion to the acceptance it gains. It is unclear exactly where or when the term "legal literacy" was coined or first used, but over the past ten years, as it has gained wider use, at the same time some of its "applications" have been found wanting. Legal literacy is clearly in a process of scruti­ny—semantic, ideological and political—a necessary condition for clarity to emerge. However, legal literacy has no primary source to which to refer to explore an intended, original mean­ing. It is not a question of further elucidating its initial content and exposing inadequate interpretations. Since it is one of those ideas open to broad and often disparate interpretation, to clarify the meaning of legal literacy requires scrutinizing the term itself, its ancillary or supportive concepts, and the man­ner in which its practice is unfolding.
At first glance, the connection between legal literacy and lit­eracy seems simple and obvious: legal literacy is to law what literacy is to the alphabet. If literacy means being able to read and write the "ABCs" (basic symbols) of written culture, then legal literacy means being able to read and understand the "ABCs" of law. ft assumes that filling a void in the individual (learning to read) will make her able to function well in the literary or legal milieu. While such an interpretation seems reasonable at first glance, it is simplistic and misleading. First, it assumes a static view of culture and of law. Second, it locates both the root of the problem and the remedy in the individual. By placing emphasis on the individual's skills, it does not address structural obstacles to participation. In literacy, this approach is often tied to an ideological perspective that seeks to incorporate the poor or underprivileged into the logic of the dominant cultural tradition (Giroux, 1989).
Corollary legal literacy perspectives assume that the law is capable of providing women protection and redress and see the problem only in terms of women's lack of knowledge. Key to this view is the assumption that when women know the law—their rights and obligations—they will be more function­al citizens. Such a perspective essentially supports the status quo, while celebrating the egalitarian achievements of law. Like mainstream literacy, it reaches out to incorporate a disad­vantaged group (women) into an ethic that fosters traditional values, particularly respect for the state, authority, the family, and stratified social roles. Yet, because of its overt goal of improving the situation of a disadvantaged sector and con­tributing to greater citizen participation, literacy programs may incorrectly appear quite benevolent.
The first fallacy of this approach to legal literacy is that mere knowledge of the law is sufficient to assure enjoyment of rights and citizen participation. Enjoyment of rights is not an auto­matic process. In most societies, laws and their application are skewed against women, especially poor women, but even where the laws are responsive, powerful social, cultural, psy­chological and political constraints hinder women's enjoyment of rights. Social structures do not encourage or sometimes even permit women to act independently in their own interests. Patriarchal, economic, and cultural biases and practices keep women isolated, lacking the self-confidence, resources, access to the legal system, and support needed for making a claim or complaint. Where women have managed to gain access or recourse to the legal system, the insensitivity of the judiciary becomes another major obstacle.
A legal literacy approach that merely gives women knowl­edge about laws, rights and obligations, or the functioning of the legal system in such a context, rests on shaky pedagogical and ideological ground. A danger inherent in legal literacy is that it can end up supporting the status quo. As a reflection of the spirit of the people, law reflects and reinforces not only the strengths, but the weaknesses of a society (Sobhan).1 Unless the strengths and the weaknesses are distinguished and con­fronted, legal literacy fulfills a retrogressive function. On the other hand, unless the content of the legal literacy has rele­vance to the lives of those who will supposedly benefit, there is little likelihood that the information will produce change or even reach its target. This simplistic approach to legal literacy in no way resonates with the perspective articulated at Nairobi, of legal literacy as a process for empowerment and a tool for emancipation.
In the alternative perspective of what is called "critical literacy", the learning process:
not only empowers people though a combination of ped­agogical skills and critical analysis, it also becomes a vehicle for examining how cultural definitions of gender, race, class, and subjectivity are constituted as both histor­ical and social constructs (Giroux 1987, 6).
Building on the work of Gramsci, Freire and others, Giroux defines critical literacy as "cultural politics," a process of self and social empowerment grounded in an ethical and political project that permits people to participate in understanding and transforming their society.2 Within this framework, critical legal literacy is also a form of cultural politics concerned with reading, understanding and transforming the cultural values and social norms embodied in the law. With regard to women, legal literacy becomes a "cultural politics of gender" concerned with understanding the social, political, cultural and psycho­logical dimensions of women's oppression, its expression in law, and effective action for change.

Law, Gender and Political Participation
Although the terms "oppression," "marginality," and "dependency" best characterize the female condition, so freely used are these particular words in contemporary discourse that they sometimes border on being slogans and clichés, thus weakening their impact on social consciousness. Nevertheless, since no other terms describe the status of women as succinctly as these do, it is necessary to do more than merely describe the parameters of women's lives and identify the features of their oppression, marginalization and dependence. It is necessary to go beyond the descriptive level and understand who and what causes women's collective lowly status, what are the function­al reasons for their oppression, marginality and dependency, and how these inequities are perpetuated. In other words, the status and condition of women has to be critiqued holistically. The collective low status of women is not the result of an his­torical accident, or the operation of "market forces/' or the law of the jungle ensuring the survival of the fittest. Women are herded into unequal positions and roles and are conditioned to accept inequality; men believe that women are unequal; political, legal and social institutions, the laws, economic rela­tions and other interactive relationships perpetuate this inequality.
As John Stewart Mill pointed out over a hundred years ago, women's negative self-image is determined by a full range of social forces in which the law is both a reflection and an instru­ment perpetuating them.
All women are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men; not self-control, but submission, and yield­ing to the control of others. All moralities tell them that it is the duty of women, and all the current sentimentalities that it is their nature to live for others; to make complete abnegation of themselves, and to have no life but in their affections (Mill, 1971).
More recently, the feminist movement has incorporated as an operating principle its appreciation that laws represent a formal codification of cultural attitudes toward women and definitions of gender (Garfinkle, Lefcourt, & Schulder, 1971).

The Role of Law in Women's Subordination
One of the most powerful insights of the contemporary women's movement is about the critical role the law plays in establishing women's status, and particularly in upholding and legitimizing women's social and economic subordination. Essentially, societies regulate the acquisition and control of land, jobs, credit, and other goods and services through their legal systems, that is, through legislative and adjudicative processes. In a totally just society, the interests of all citizens would be protected through this process, but such is not the reality of life on earth so far. Utopias do not exist, and even if they did, ideas about justice and equality would continue to develop. To varying degrees, what happens in all societies is that law skews access to these resources to the benefit of some and the detriment of other social sectors. In doing so, the law plays a key role in defining or supporting differential power relations based on gender, class, ethnicity, race, caste, etc. With specific reference to gender, patterns of legally sanctioned female subordination are established by limiting women's access to economic and political resources through taw.
Thus, women in Asia, Latin America, Africa and Europe, though separated geographically by race, religion and ethnici­ty and by a Lack of common consciousness, are nevertheless subject to a similarity of experiences, a similarity that even transcends class divisions and the dichotomies of urban/rural living experiences. Women are oppressed, marginalized and dependent in the political, legal, economic and social spheres. Rarely do women actively participate in the political process. Since they are not active constituents, most of the laws do not take their interests into account. Many of the laws are actually hostile toward and discriminate against women. The custom­ary laws prevailing in Asia and Africa are perhaps the most telling examples of political, legal, economic and social exclu­sion and oppression, although gender oppression is not con­fined to customary law.
Women's subordination, based on unequal gender relations, is manifest in the law in several key areas, particularly labor law, penal law and civil law, which governs legal capacity, rights and obligations in marriage, guardianship, inheritance, income, land rights, and participation in public affairs. In some instances women's inferior status results from formal legisla­tion, but it can also result from prejudicial social practices not challenged by the law. Where attempts to redress the gender imbalance through legislation have occurred, women's status can remain unchanged in practice due to the inaccessibility of their rights through differential, discriminatory application of the law by the courts, or lack of understanding or misunder­standing of women's rights by women and society in general. The gap between de facto and de jure treatment is a clear mea­sure of women's social value.
The idea of a "public" versus a "private" sphere as expressed in law is another key measure of society's percep­tion of women's rights. The private sphere (domestic life, home, and family) is considered the traditional domain of women. The public sphere (work and politics) is accepted as the domain of men. This public/private dichotomy is deeply ingrained in the law. Regardless of the operative legal system or cultural context, laws touching the public arena (e.g., labor law) have typically been modernized and brought into line with more enlightened thinking, while family and personal matters in the private sphere have, for the most part, been left untouched by the state. In Asia and Africa the phenomenon is visible in the way state law governs the public sphere and per­sonal (or religious) and customary laws cover family matters in often rigid and regressive ways (APWLD, 1990). But even in Latin America and other regions where there are single legal systems, the state's hands off attitude is confirmed by the slow­ness with which it makes reforms in family related matters.
While the particular legal manifestations of women's subor­dination vary from country to country, there are also striking commonalities. In the family, women's legal rights to make decisions, control resources, inherit, contract marriage and divorce, among others, are deficient in many countries. In the workplace—whether in the formal or the informal sectors— women's roles are still not sufficiently recognized and the exploitation of the female worker's labor is often sanctioned by law. Finally, violence against women in its many manifes­tations—from rape and battering to trafficking in women and even murder—can be found in every country of the world. In most of them, penal law ignores the gravity of the problem— even as the population takes a passive stance in the face of it. This is due to the notions of female sexuality that are ingrained in the law and in popular consciousness that make it possible to tolerate and depreciate the violation of inalienable and fun­damental rights to life and physical integrity.
Another major problem with the law is that the vast majori­ty of women are "outside the system," especially rural and urban poor women. Taking into consideration global demo­graphics it is probably safe to conclude that most women on the face of the earth do not think of themselves as having rights, much less as having any relationship with the official legal system. They are outside the system partly because they don't know what it offers them, but partly because the system doesn't offer them very much. When a woman has been raped and the only response she gets from the law (police and courts) is an accusation making her the guilty party, how can she pos­sibly feel that law offers her anything? When a woman is being beaten by her husband and all she wants is for the beatings to stop but all the law offers her is divorce, she will not see the need for recourse to the law the next time she is in need. While we all would like to believe that our systems of justice and of law protect the rights of all citizens, they do fail and the mes­sages of their failure penetrate deeply. (One only has to recall the recent response to the "not guilty" verdict in the case of the four White Los Angeles policemen whose irrefutable brutality toward a Black man was recorded on tape for the world as well as the jury to see. Even more than the street riots, the image of the tear-stained face of a young woman before the television cameras summed up the impact of this miscarriage of justice when she said: "It means that we don't matter. It means that our lives don't matter.") Such are the messages that penetrate the psyches of those who feel betrayed by the system, never valued by it, or never part of it in the first place. Where con­sciousness of group dignity and of fundamental rights is high, protest is an appropriate response. But where there is little sense of one's group or one's self as being the subject of rights (as in the case of women) the response is withdrawal and alienation.
Thus, in many places a kind of parallel "law" functions that has its own unwritten norms, such as: "Don't get married, don't register births, don't get title to your property and don't make a will" (Zurutuza, 1989). Poor women, particularly, stay outside the official law not only because the Laws and proce­dures of the official system are complicated, expensive and incomprehensible, but also because they are inadequate and informal remedies seem to work better than the formal legal ones. However, since law is an instrument of legitimacy and social order, staying out of the official system also means being marginalized from the benefits of the system. Not being mar­ried or not having official documents often carries negative social and economic consequences for women.
In sum, laws reinforce women's oppression by legitimizing hierarchical gender relations, proprietary rights of men over women, unequal division of labor, and power over the alloca­tion of resources. Three mechanisms are key to this process:

• Unjust laws that are discriminatory and limit the scope of women's rights;
• Prejudicial enforcement of laws favorable to women by police or gender biased judgments in the courts;
• Ignorance of the law and of law-making processes by women who tend to be unaware of their status, of the rights they do possess, of the effect the laws have on them, or the role they might play in changing the law.

Functioning as both legitimizer and as regulator, the law thus plays a critical role in maintaining sexual stratification and in shaping the inferior social and economic position of women in society. Perception of the manner in which the law functions as an instrument of control has become a keystone for the movement in discerning how to create strategic responses with the potential to transform gender biased social structures, processes and relations.

Legal Strategies and the Political Agenda
A second powerful insight of the women's movement relates to the processes by which the law not only reflects but shapes fundamental social values. According to legal sociolo­gists, Nader and Todd:
Law has many functions. It serves to educate, to punish, to protect private and public interests... to distribute scarce resources, to maintain the status quo, to maintain class systems and to cut across them, to integrate and dis­integrate societies—all these things indifferent places, at different times, with different weightings... Law may be a cause of crime; it plays, by virtue of its discretionary power, the role of definer of crime. It may encourage respect or disrespect for itself (1978, 1).
Since law can and does reflect the contradictions that exist among visions of the "ideal" society, it represents a "work in progress" as society struggles to define itself. Perceiving the Law in monolithic terms is a way of empowering the law in a negative sense. Regarding it as sacrosanct and unapproachable is to imbue it with extraordinary and undeserved power and fail to recognize that in fact, the law is not a finished project, but it is the product of historical social processes.
Recognizing the law as a project of social endeavor is to per­ceive law making and adjudication in political terms/ and to recognize why law can be both an instrument of social change and an obstacle to it. Understanding these dynamics led the women's movement to perceive the potential in using the law for creating new norms reflecting new values.

Strategies for Improving Women's Status
Since the causes of women's inferior status and unequal gender relations are deeply rooted in history, religion, culture, in the psychology of the self, in laws and legal systems, and in political institutions and social attitudes, if the status and material conditions of women's lives is to change at all, the solutions must penetrate just as deeply. Solutions amount to more than a result, an end, a goal or an objective. A solution necessarily includes a method, a process or a strategy that is linked to the result or the end. The method and the outcome are integral and in many cases inseparable. Thus, the focus of the solution-strategies should include not only the immediate and specific problems confronting a given group of women and how they may be dealt with, but also the problems facing women on a structural level. The governing political and legal ideology, along with social mores and attitudes, fall within the
category of "structural problems." that women face and they constitute the hidden agenda requiring change.
Unfortunately, in the history of recent women's initiatives, social change and the transformation of women's status and condition have been too often linked to objectives more com­patible with patriarchal norms than to changing them. Many advocates targeted improving specific conditions of women's lives rather than the structures perpetuating their exploitation and domination. Social change was sometimes viewed only in tangible terms, yielding specific results and gains by way of wage increases, law reform or court battles, rather than in transformative terms.

Legal Rights Strategies
Since law provides a framework within which to define and understand rights, social change strategies for women have often been debated, planned for and pursued in legalistic terms. Many social change initiatives adopted the "discourse of rights7' with its "faith in the political efficiency and ethical suf­ficiency of law as a principle of government" to bring about change (Scheingold, 1974, 17). Favoring the legal paradigm, these initiatives give preeminence to legislatures, courts, liti­gation, rules, and the leadership role played by lawyers. Identifying constitutional values with social justice, the frame­work of the rights discourse breaks down social problems into responsibilities and entitlements established under law to be dealt with accordingly. Such an approach places faith in lawyers and relies heavily on their representation, an attitude reinforced by the experience in recent constitutional "revolu­tions" of gains made through lawyers and the legal process.3
However, in recent years, the limits of the rights strategy has come under increased scrutiny and has been exposed for sever­al inadequacies. On a practical level there is concern, for exam­ple, that where there are no laws to protect women, or where the laws are hostile to women, too much energy can be spent initiating favorable legislation and securing law reform. There is a tendency to view law reform and the creation of rational- legal codes as ends in themselves, but that once the laws have been enacted and the objective achieved, all else is forgotten. Little attention is given to the administration and implementa­tion of those laws. Furthermore, even where there are clearly defined rights, the rights that could be pursued through the legal system are individualistic and formalistic. The ability to pursue a right through the court system presupposes some level of assertiveness or empowerment on the part of the indi­vidual. The majority of the marginalized and oppressed women do not know' what levels of protection they enjoy at law, and even if they do have this knowledge they are unable to activate the legal system on their behalf. They may lack the financial resources needed to pursue their rights through formal fora such as the courts of law; distances and communication may be a problem; or they may be culturally entrapped and fear the social consequences of aggressively pursuing their rights. To understand why women do not pursue their rights thus requires a holistic understanding of their circumstances. While lack of information or knowledge of their rights may play a sig­nificant role, it is by no means the complete explanation; nor is the economic factor or the lack of accessibility to legal resources. But together these factors combine to present a formidable barrier.
On a conceptual level the pursuit of rights as a primary or sole strategy must be critiqued as a myth that incorrectly links litigation, rights and remedies with social change. As Scheingold points out, the rights discourse provides a legal frame of reference which obscures or tunnels the vision of both activists and analysts, leading to an oversimplified approach to a complex social process, it is an approach that grossly exag­gerates the role that lawyers and litigation can play in a strate­gy for change. The myth of rights or the rights discourse assumes that litigation can evoke a declaration from the courts; that the declaration can be used to assure the realization of those rights, and that the realization of rights is tantamount to meaningful change.
He also points out that the problems associated with a "liti­gation-inspired" model of rights redress are many. Judges can­not be counted on to formulate a right to fit all worthwhile social goals. Their own ideological predispositions may pre­clude them from doing so. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that a judicial remedy exists for every right. Since rights and remedies amount to a test of wills and resources between the parties to a suit, they are not directly assimilable to a program of social action. This approach has the additional disadvantage of reducing major political conflicts into a mere dispute between two parties at a given time, thereby neutralizing what should be a stirring issue. In fact it amounts to a no-win situa­tion, for victory in litigation may be purely symbolic, provid­ing instant gratification but diverting attention away from the forces which sustain the status quo; whereas courtroom losses can be crippling both in terms of finances and morale. By and large the "rights discourse" draws and maintains an elusive distinction between law and politics.
More importantly, the litigation-inspired strategy can amount to a major distraction to the process of political orga­nization. Lawyers have a natural inclination to think of litiga­tion as a self-contained objective, a "target of opportunity." This method detracts from a careful sorting out of priorities as they relate to long-range goals. Unless the "limits of the law" and the "myth of rights" is well understood, the rights dis­course may ramble on, losing the woods (the empowerment of women and change for women) for the trees (singular achieve­ments in law reform, or success in litigation).

Rights as a Political Resource
However, this critique of the rights discourse is not to say that rights have no relevance to a theory of social change for women. Rights, laws, legality and even the role of lawyers have an important role to play, but within a political perspec­tive on social change. Since the character of law, as well the opportunities for using law as a strategy are linked to the char­acter of the state, the need for a political perspective in devel­oping legal strategies becomes critical. Only a political understanding can locate the patriarchal, class and ethnic bias­es in the law in a specific context. Only a political understand­ing can guide the design of strategies that use law as a resource and not as an end in itself. It is only through a political approach that legal struggles can be placed in the context of larger issues of social justice and transformative change. Particularly relevant in this context is the admonition of Brenda Cossman:
Long term political objectives, as developed by the social movement must not be lost to the shorter term objectives of litigation strategies. Without such linkages, we run the risk of both isolating and reifying the struggles in the legal forum. There is, moreover, the constant danger that the social movement will itself become legalized, its agen­da will be set by lawyers and individual plaintiffs rather than by the women organized as a collective political force, and the effect may well be demobilization rather than mobilization (1991).
Only a political understanding of rights as fluid resources and not as a finished product and a social fact, will overcome the shortcomings of the "myth" of rights. Law and rights become a powerful tool for social change when viewed as goals of public policy and as political resources in the hands of those who want to alter the course of public policy. "The direct link­ing of rights, remedies, and change that characterizes the myth of rights must...be exchanged for a more complex framework, the politics of rights, which take into account the contingent nature of rights..." (Scheingold, 7) From this perspective, the value of a right depends less on its inherent sanctity than on the circumstances and the manner in which it is employed.
Tapping into perceptions of entitlements associated with rights can nurture political mobilization leading to social change at two points: in the process of defining rights and in the process of defending the rights. It is this perspective on rights that makes litigation and law reform strategies relevant and provides the justification for educational and legal literacy strategies. When people see themselves as entitled to rights, they cease to sublimate themselves and their grievances and begin to seek redress. Entitlements contribute to enhancing self-esteem. Deprivations that were endured as a symptom of personal or collective inadequacy are viewed differently. When groups acquire words with which to express and legit­imize demands they begin to tap into and build their own political power. On the one hand "the general character of legal enactments can lay the basis for a collective political iden­tity, since the entitlements provide a joint stake and the depri­vations a mutual cause" (Scheingold, 136-137), but in another sense, political identity can also be built in the process of defin­ing the right and pressing for its legal enactment.
Once it is recognized that rights are political tools, it becomes equally clear that the assertion of rights is a political act. The rights discourse then becomes transformed into a political discourse and rights then become anchored less with­in the legal paradigm than within the politics of social change. The tools that flesh out the legal paradigm—laws and litiga­tion--are recognized as tools more useful in fomenting change when used as agents or strategies of political mobilization than when they are used in the more conventional way for assert­ing and realizing specific rights. The politics of rights involves the artful management of rights, as much as their achievement.
​
Gender, Law, and the Political Agenda
In the Third World, the idea of using the law as a political tool coincided with the focus on women's participation in development stimulated by the UN Decade for Women. The women's movement realized that law, law-making and law enforcement needed to be "democratized" in the sense of tak­ing them out of the reified realm of the untouchable and inac­cessible and putting them into the political realm to be shaped and reordered through organized political endeavor.
Legal strategies (that is, strategies that engage the legal sys­tem in some way) have come to form part of a political agenda to improve women's status. These strategies target either the law's substance (the content of the law), structure (the courts, enforcement and administrative agencies of the state), or cul­ture (the shared social attitudes and behaviors sustaining the law).4 Where the content of the law is discriminatory or unjust, the remedy requires changing, abolishing or creating new laws and policies. Where the structures of the system are the major problem in achieving access to justice, the strategy must chal­lenge and change institutions (courts, police, etc.) through activities such as formal legal representation, counsel and advocacy in various forms. Finally, since inadequate, gender biased and unjust legislative formulations, law enforcement, and adjudication mechanisms reflect underlying social values, changes at those levels require confronting the cultural ground upon which the system rests. In practice, no changes can be effected at the substantive or structural levels without strate­gic educational inputs.
In the context of actions to press for more adequate laws and policies, women gained a clearer understanding of the impor­tance of approaching the law in a political way. Developing the capacity to effector influence the formulation and application of law and policies within the courts, the legislative and administrative bodies of the state meant mobilizing the popu­lation to understand the social, political, cultural and psycho­logical dimensions of women's oppression and to take effective
collective action for change. Approaching the articulation of legal strategies from this political perspective meant going beyond merely placing increased numbers of women at policy making levels or focusing exclusively on the "Three Ls": lob­bying, legislation, and litigation. It has become clear that effec­tive work at public policy levels must be accompanied by organizing, consciousness raising and skill development at the grassroots. On the other hand mobilization at the grassroots alone is not sufficient to change the system either. Achieving effective change requires action and presence at all levels along the continuum, from the grassroots to the highest policy levels.
The idea of democratizing law-making and public policy work was accompanied by a recognition that the exercise and practice of the law by professionals also needed to be democra­tized. This led to the development of the concept of "alterna­tive law" and "alternative lawyering," which searched for ways to make technical legal information and services accessible to  omen of disadvantaged social groups and the popular sec­tors. Many local initiatives drew inspiration from the legal resources approach to services, and the concept of the commu­nity "paralegal/' "adviser," "promoter," etc. began to the sur­face.5 Developing community people as a "multiplier" factor with regard to the exercise of the legal rights, "deprofessionalizing" the legal profession, and proving that ordinary people can participate responsibly in exercising the law also became part of the politics of law.

​Legal Literacy and the Political Process
A woman jurist wrote in 1981 with reference to India: Women's status is determined oniy in part by 'law'. Social conditions, the values of a masculine culture, reli­gion, [and] economic imbalances are very important extra-legal factors that shape attitudes that determine status. What is needed to improve the status of women in India is not a constitutional battle... instead there is an urgent need for a powerful social movement (Jethmalani, 14).
The call for an assessment of the context in which changes are sought implicitly recognizes the importance of developing women's critical and political capacities. To the degree that women learn to "read" (i.e., understand, assert or critique and redefine) the cultural values and social norms embodied in the law, their authentic participation in the sociolegal and political process will be realized. Legal literacy can play an important role in bringing this about. However, to do so legal literacy must take as its point of departure an analysis of where women are vis-a-vis the system and where the system stands with regard to women. The agents of legal literacy need to under­stand women's isolation and alienation from the system as well as the limits of the law as defined and practiced. Legal lit­eracy must move beyond equating political participation with voting, and citizenship with national identity and patriotism (Dasso & Montano, 1991). Legal literacy must transcend the naive view that because constitutions give women the right to vote, the system is functional to women. It must overcome the mistaken notion that to participate, the only thing women need is information about their rights, and that if they assert their rights they have become full citizens. To be effective, legal lit­eracy's proponents must view social change and the transfor­mation of unjust power relations as imperatives of the democratic process, and that women must be key players in deciding the changes to be made. Legal literacy must recog­nize that in addition to knowing what the law says, women need to develop the skills that allow them to participate fully in defining their rights, not just asserting them. Such a strategy recognizes that to do so, women not only need to understand the issues, but to develop the skills to articulate alternatives and mobilize resources to press for effective change. Thus, legal literacy is only justified if it is a process of self and social empowerment that moves women not only to activate the rights they do have, but to redefine and reshape the inadequate ones as expressed in law and in practice.

Empowerment
To understand legal literacy as a process of self and social empowerment, it is useful to examine for a moment the mean­ing and dynamics of empowerment. The term empozverment is another of those appealing but slippery terms that lend them­selves to multiple, sometimes contradictory, meanings. The lit­erature of women's empowerment, if such can be said to exist, does not confine itself to a single discipline or paradigm.
Empowerment draws on individual psychology, anthropolo­gy, political science and economics for theoretical grounding. The literature that deals with empowerment directly—particu­larly women's studies, popular education and women in development studies—rarely offers a complete or precise defi­nition. In the context of legal literacy, however, it is important to clarify what we mean by empowerment, since it is central to the concept of critical legal literacy. Three sources contribute useful elements for conceptualizing legal literacy as facilitat­ing the empowerment process.
Bookman and Morgen (1988) use the terms to "connote a spectrum of political activity ranging from acts of individual resistance to mass political mobilizations that challenge the basic power relations in our society." In the context of rethink­ing women and politics from the perspective of working class women in the United States, they draw on the literature of "power as social relations" (Gramsci, 1971; Foucault, 1980) to establish a framework for understanding women's empowerment: Power is not only understood as something groups or indi­viduals have; rather it is a social relationship between groups that determines access to, use of, and control over the basic material and ideological resources in society (4).
Within this framework, they define the term specifically as "a process aimed at consolidating, maintaining, or changing the nature and distribution of power in a particular cultural con­text" (4). This definition reflects a view of empowerment as essentially a collective process, while acknowledging individ­ual acts of resistance. Bookman and Morgen's critical insight relevant to legal literacy is about the political character of empowerment as a process in which women are engaged in challenging and changing social power relations.
Taking a different approach in their study on the social and behavioral manifestations of empowerment,6 Sidney Schuler and Sayed Hashemi (1991) began with a definition of empow­erment as "a process through which women increase their abil­ity to shape their own lives and environment; an evolvement in women's self awareness, status, and efficiency in social interactions (4). Their study, still in progress, seeks to validate the assumption that participation in credit programs leads to empowerment and that empowered women are better equipped to control their environment and make decisions that lead to improved quality of life, particularly in reproductive health. Using literature reviews and key informant interviews from Bangladesh, they constructed a list of "manifestations" of women's empowerment. Grameen Bank and BRAC {Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee) program direc­tors, field staff, and women participants were asked to identify the changes that indicated to them that women were empow­ered. From the list of manifestations came a set of six general categories or aspects of empowerment:

1. Sense of security and vision of a future—related to plan­ning for the future.
2. Ability to earn a living—related to participation in cred­it programs and increased control over income they earn.
3. Ability to act effectively in the public sphere—manifest in participation in credit and microenterprise programs and in seeking access to health and other services.
4. Increased decision making power in the household—related to income, health, and reproductive decisions.
5. Participation in nonfamily groups—using solidarity groups as sources of information and support.
6. Mobility and visibility in the community—manifest in women's participation in solidarity groups, use of credit, etc.

The study identifies two program features that most signifi­cantly contributed to empowerment. One was women's required participation in "solidarity" groups, and the other factor was the new opportunity for earning cash income the programs provided. These two factors—participation in soli­darity groups and increased earning capacity—were consid­ered important because they contributed to changes that are essential to women's taking action and effecting a change in gender relations, namely, women's enhanced self-perception and self-esteem and their strengthened bargaining power within the family.
Stromquist (1988) analyzes empowerment in terms of three components (cognitive, psychological, and economic) consid­ered essential to its development. The cognitive refers to women's understanding of the conditions and causes of subordination. The psychological relates to the development of feelings, such as self-esteem and self-confidence,, that are prerequisites for women to take action to improve their condi­tions. The economic refers to the ability of women to engage in some productive activity that offers a measure of economic independence and improved status. The mix of knowledge and skills that women need to be able to alter their situation are of three types, according to Stromquist: reproductive, produc­tive, and emancipatory (11). Women's reproductive and domestic burdens need to be lessened and their financial autonomy increased. However, neither of these factors is suffi­cient to change women's situation unless they also realize that they live under conditions of subordination and must develop the skills needed to change them.
Stromquist juxtaposes empowerment to participation and consciousness-raising. In her view, empowerment combines and moves beyond both consciousness raising, (which she defines as "developing a critical mind of the micro and macro reality of an individual") and participation (political involve­ment identified with the vote). While not everyone would define consciousness-raising and participation so narrowly, Stromquist's main point about empowerment is well taken. It means that "individuals not only understand their society and the place they currently have in it, but undertake efforts to modify social relations" (12).
Each of these approaches to empowerment highlight impor­tant aspects that taken together yield a useful framework for understanding empowerment.

1. Empowerment is essentially a process. However, there are two aspects of process that need to be distin­guished. One aspect covers the actions involved'in con­fronting and changing unequal power relations, particularly gender relations. Another aspect of the process relates to acquiring the capacity (psychological readiness, social analysis, organizational skills) need­ed to take action.
2. Empowerment has both individual and collective dimensions. Through group involvement with others of similar interests, women begin to make changes in atti­tude and perspective and develop the organization and mobilization capacity needed to take effective action.
3. Empowerment produces certain outcomes, that is, new ways of acting and relating that imply changes in women's social and economic roles and reflect changes in women's view of themselves and the world.

Thus, empowerment could be viewed as a process for acquiring the psychological and social capacities needed to effect changes in social relations. These capacities range along a continuum from individual awareness to collective political action skills. As a tool for empowerment, legal literacy has a role to play at various points along this continuum.

Legal Literacy as Transformative Learning
In this book, legal literacy has been approached as part of a social change strategy in which it functions as a process that empowers people, personally and socially, to participate in creating their society. It is important now to focus on the process itself and explore the workings and mechanisms that move people to become sufficiently motivated intellectually and emotionally to participate in shaping their society. It is clear that women will not be able to assert rights as long as they see themselves as inferior, no matter how much informa­tion about their rights is available. Thus, it is important to know by what means women stop accepting prejudicial treat­ment as the norm and start to make decisions that contribute to changing those norms in both daily experience and in the law.
If women are to engage positively and effectively in assess­ing the cultural and legal frameworks that determine status, if they are to participate constructively in making changes in the way social and gender roles and relations are defined, if they are to benefit from the changes that have been made, new con­sciousness and new skills are needed. Acquiring a new con­sciousness and skills means transforming old understandings about the world and oneself and developing new understand­ings and new ways of relating.
Formative learning in childhood, which occurs through socialization and schooling, equips people with their initial frameworks for interpreting the world and their own experi­ences.7 Throughout life, culture conspires to maintain those frameworks and related social institutions as the only viable option for seeing and relating to the world. However, continuing to take these frameworks for granted and to accept unques- tioningly the sources of authority that define norms of behavior, social status, role, interaction, etc., becomes counter­productive in adulthood—at worst perpetuating oppressive relations, and at best stifling growth, creativity, and full human potential. While some of culture's definitions are valid and need to be reaffirmed, others need to be challenged. It is only by critically examining culturally defined paradigms assimilated through socialization that new, transformed ways of seeing and relating to the world are created. Developing new ways of seeing and acting requires reformulating old interpretive frameworks by assessing the validity of the assumptions sustaining them (Mezirow, 1991). For women, this implies recognizing culturally-given gender roles and stereotypes, evaluating their supportive rationale, and moving to affirm more valid ways of defining gender differences, of acting and relating. Since societies traditionally define women as second class citizens, the property of some male protector, women will not become full citizens until they recognize accepted gender disparities and question their validity. If women do not have the opportunity, or fail to do so, not only will they remain trapped by the oppression of the stereotype, but they become the unconscious agents of their perpetuation, passing on their own internalized acceptance of their role to the next generation.
Understanding the dynamic of transformative, liberative learning for women is essential to developing a framework for legal literacy. The work of Paulo Freire provides an important source for this understanding, concerned as it is with the processes by which the oppressed became liberated from the structural constraints that limit social, intellectual and political participation.8 Freire, who saw education “as the practice of freedom/' made important theoretical and methodological contributions about how consciousness is transformed.

Conscientization: The Development of Critical Consciousness
Freire (1973) defines a hierarchy of consciousness that dis­tinguishes between an unreflective way of confronting the world and a "critical'' vision of the world. The person with unreflective consciousness is "person as object" without the ability to make choices, subjugated to the choices of others. At the other end of the consciousness continuum in Freire's scheme is critical consciousness, characterized by total engagement with reality, participation in the creative dimension, capacity to make choices and transform reality. This is the "person as subject," maker of history and culture. The differ­ence between the two is the ability to objectify reality and know it in a critical way (Freire, 1970, 36). The process of mov­ing from one kind of consciousness and action to the other is what Freire calls "conscientization" (conscientização in Portuguese).
Conscientization includes both critical reflection and trans­formative action. Critical reflection is the mechanism for devel­oping an "awakened consciousness/' a change of mentality implying an objective, realistic awareness of one's insertion in nature and society; the capacity to analyze critically the causes and consequences of social relations, and finally, action aimed at transformation. Conscientization, however, "implies more than overcoming false consciousness, it means critical insertion into a demythologized reality" (1970, 47). It is a process of developing a genuine theory rooted in some historical struggle.
Freire saw that the modes of consciousness are historically and culturally conditioned by social structures. Closed soci­eties produce consciousness lacking in structural perception. The result is the "culture of silence" in which the dominated remain passive and submerged with a fatalistic perception of their situation. When openings are produced in closed soci­eties through economic, ideological or political challenges, changes in consciousness also occur and people become able to move toward creative autonomy. To maintain their legiti­macy, dosed societies use tradition, religion, culture, and law to formulate ideological frameworks that are difficult for their members to question.
With regard to gender, for example, closed societies use the public/private dichotomy as a cornerstone of an ideology sup­ported by law, religion and culture, to justify control of women's mobility, sexuality, productive and reproductive capacities. Even in so-called open societies, there are closed enclaves when it comes to gender issues. The closed society, unquestioned ideology, and the "culture of silence" go hand-in-hand. In this context, legal literacy must be aimed at breaking the culture of silence among women.
Integral to conscientization is a "radical denunciation of dehumanizing structures accompanied by the proclamation of a new reality to be created" (1970, 46). Thus, conscientization needs to be rooted in some historical struggle leading to a utopian vision and a genuine theory.
The educational process that produces the critical capacity of people grows out of dialogue about meaningful situations in their lives. Rejecting the form of education in which the teacher or authority figure has the answers and the learners are recipients of the knowledge, a basic tenant of the Freirean concept of "critical education" is that both the "educator" (coordinator, facilitator, etc.) and participants join in a com­mon search for truth about relevant problems. Together they search to understand the meaning of living in a changing soci­ety. Learning is accompanied by a process of probing "the ambience of reality, objectifying it, analyzing it (Freire, 1974, 25). There is a distinct role for the educator in the group, how­ever. As the participants analyze the situation, the educator challenges them "to penetrate the significance of the thematic content with which they are confronted," but does not tell them what they know or should know (48).
There are several methodological implications for promot­ing critical consciousness. The learning context is the group and dialogue the medium. The subject matter is the real life sit­uation and problems of the group members, who analyze themes closely related to their reality. Dialogue is stimulated through visual images or other forms of representation that function as "coded" problem situations. "De-coding, as an act of knowing, allows them to 'enter into' their own prior percep­tions of their reality" (1973, 161).
At the heart of conscientization is the concept of "problema- tizing" reality; that is, analyzing a real life situation in the broader social context. The codification/decodification method provides a powerful tool for exploring a problem and analyzing it, and understanding its micro and macro causes. Although the educational process may begin before a person even recognizes the existence of a problem, the development of critical consciousness starts with the recognition of the problem and moves on from there to analysis and then to action and organization. In a study of the conscientization process in several poor urban communities of Lima, Peru, Barndt (1980)9 identified seven stages in which critical con­sciousness emerges (pp. 189-201). Using photographs of "codi­fied" problem situations related to the experience of participants in a literacy program, the study identified a devel­opmental progression of critical awareness.

1. Description: When confronted with the situation, the first response is descriptive, without analysis.
2. Personal Association: Internalization begins with a per­sonal association of participant's experience.
3. Social Relations: Here there is a jump from seeing the issue only in personal terms and recognizing it as expe­rienced by others. (When asked who knows more about the problems in the community, the teacher or the women, one woman responded: "The women. They suffer; they live the problems."[p. 200]
4. Contrasts/Contradictions: Now begins confrontation of the issues and analyzing causes more explicitly ("We survived on the farm, how we worked for food in the sierra. But here it costs money, you have to buy it.")
5. Exploration of Alternative Solutions: Beyond explanation of the problem is the attempt to explore solutions, to discover what is possible in confronting a problem and changing conditions.
6. Critical Action: Taking action on the problem is where critical consciousness is most effectively developed. In trying to transform reality people learn most effectively about the constraints and possibilities of their own situa­tion. At this point "dialogue is no longer abstract, but deeply grounded in actions taken or observed" (203).

Feminist Consciousness-Raising
Feminist consciousness-raising, developed in the early stages of the "women's liberation movement" in the 1960s and 1970s, demonstrated the power of the conscientization process in both personal and political terms. In the process of reevalu­ating and reinterpreting their own experience, women began to understand and act against their own oppression (Hart, 1991). In coming together to share their experiences, women realized that what most people accepted as characteristically "female" behavior was in fact a culturally defined role. They also realized that personal problems had "a social cause and probably a political solution" (Hole & Levine, 1971, 125). These new insights solidified into a powerful new collective under­standing about the detrimental consequences of the "public/private" ideology in women's daily lives. Taking as its slogan, "the Personal Is Political," the movement simultane­ously challenged the trivialization of women's issues and called into question what was legitimately considered "political."
Two principles governed the methods and procedures of consciousness-raising. First, discussion topics were derived from concrete experience, and second, they had to contribute to illuminating female oppression (Hart, 1991, 53). The issues discussed covered topics such as motherhood, childcare, housework, and jobs. Through the medium of the group, per­ceptual changes in the way women saw their lives and its meaning began to unfold. "Through a process of mutual self reflection women's experiences became de-privatized; each individual woman's life became meaningful for herself because it became meaningful within the larger context of women's oppression." (56). Through this process, women's issues were able to transcend the realm of the private and become issues of public concern (Schechter, 1982).
If the "personal" was important as a starting point, it was also important that the process not remain at the level of expe­rience, but move on to analysis in order to formulate new expla­nations and visions for the future. In writing about consciousness-raising as a form of transformative learning. Hart describes the three essential components of feminist con­sciousness-raising: "an analysis of sexual oppression, a ground­ing of this analysis in everyday experience, and a structure of analysis that calls for a reciprocal, interactive relationship among knowers who are linked by common experiences" (48).

Methodological Implications
These ideas about conscientization, consciousness raising and critical consciousness provide the foundation for a dynam­ic and effective approach to legal literacy. However, they can easily be misunderstood or misinterpreted with the result that the practice of education misses the point entirely. Here is a word of caution about several key problem areas.
Participatory process and learning content: The process must actively engage the participants as a necessary condition for learning to occur. However, "group dynamics" and games are not equivalent to participatory education. What is needed is dia­logue and interaction within the group about the theme or issue being developed. But participatory education is not an end in itself. The content also contributes to participation in the broad­er sense and to developing skills leading to more self-confident decision making and political action. It is not just a question of participatory education, but education for participation as well.
Problem posing method: This is not the same as problem solv­ing, in which there is an assumed answer. Using photographs or drawings to reinforce the content (answers) is not the same as using them to provoke dialogue so that the participants explore their deeper meaning and significance to their lives. Only in this way will information be incorporated into a broader analytical framework rather than simply committed to memory.
Analysis: This is the most important aspect of conscientization, i.e., developing the capacity to see problems in the broad­er social context; objectifying them to understand their causes and to develop solutions. Without this, no real conscientization has taken place, even though the participants may be able to repeat political slogans or someone else's analysis. For women, it means understanding their condition as the result of social and historical processes and knowing that they can contribute to changing the definitions of gender, social roles, etc. through both organized political action and by making changes in the praxis of their daily lives.
Action: Conscientization is not just overcoming false con­sciousness, but "insertion into a demythologized reality." This has important implications for action. Having begun to recog­nize oppression (breaking the culture of silence) does not mean that people automatically move toward social transformation based in authentic, democratic and productive action. It is pos­sible to substitute one set of myths for another and for "fanati- cized" consciousness to take hold (Freire, 1970, 1973). This is often seen, for example, in ethnic revivalism. After breaking the culture of silence and recognizing their objective oppres­sion, groups sometimes develop solutions that are based on the oppression of other groups and usually their women, all in the name of overcoming their own oppression through solidarity which requires reinforcing their ethnic or religious identity. This is also seen in political mobilizing where people are herded into simplistic analyzes and solutions that do not represent authentic responses their needs. It is done in the name of populism, yet the constituents have not participated in shaping either the analysis or the solutions.
The role of the "educator": In Freire's writings the role of the educator is an essential part of the conscientization process. However, it also appears to contain an inherent tension; the "educator as participant and learner" who "enters into" and discovers new dimensions of social reality is also the "educa­tor as guide," "leader," the one who challenges. In the context of literacy, Freire describes the educator's role as fundamen­tally one of entering into dialogue with the learners about con­crete situations and offering the instruments with which they can teach themselves to read and write (48). From this it is clear that the educator's role is not merely passive, as she or he must "offer the instruments." Nor is it the ultimate factor, as the learners must "teach themselves" to read and write. For Freire, it is in dialogue that the educator integrates the learner/leader roles. The validity of an educator's specific contribution to the process will be found in how he or she resolves the tension between the two roles and avoids the traps of either "giving the answers" or providing no guidance at all.

Putting it all together: Legal Literacy, a Tool for Empowerment
Reiterating the original definition offered of legal literacy, it is affirmed to be:
the process of acquiring:

• critical awareness about rights and the law,
• the ability to assert rights, and
• the capacity to mobilize for change.

The First important concept underlying this definition is that of "empowerment," a process aimed at transforming social rela­tions and requiring the development of psychological, cognitive, social and political capacities in order to take effective action for change. Within this perspective, legal literacy becomes personal­ly and collectively empowering to women when it fosters under­standing of women's oppression as expressed in law, and their capacity to take action to transform the social relations that main­tain it. Because it is a vital prerequisite to become fully engaged socially and politically, the first imperative of legal literacy is to promote the development of critical consciousness in women as part of the analytical and action oriented capacities and skills needed to take action for change.
In the context of creating and defending rights, legal litera­cy plays an overt political role in this process at several critical points. A “women's rights strategy" is viable and dynamic only if it is grounded in a political understanding of the prob­lem as well as the solution. If laws are inadequate or oppres­sive, if the application of laws are biased against women, and if rights are inaccessible because of misinformation or lack of information, then certain actions must be taken to remedy the negative effects these problems have on women's lives. Law and rights must be defined and the process by which they are defined opened up and democratized. The structures of the system must be exposed, challenged and required to be responsive to gender issues. Lack of awareness and misinfor­mation must be rectified by making laws, rights and the func­tioning of the system intelligible, understandable and usable.
In order for women to become active agents in effecting these remedies, they must acquire certain critical and analyti­cal capacities as well as skills geared toward political action. Understanding the causes and mechanisms of women's oppression and taking action for change requires more than information. A woman in an urban shanty town of Lima or a rural village in Uganda who is in an abusive relationship she believes to be "God's will," will benefit little from a pamphlet that tells her that the law gives her certain rights in marriage, unless there is also some way for her to recognize and articu­late her own personal oppression. For the information to be of value to her it requires a process of critical reflection and assessment of the relevancy of the information to her life. Understanding the cultural and legal constraints that limit women's rights and ability to participate fully in society requires more than critical awareness of oppression by them. It is not enough for a women who has suffered a rape and then discovers that she will find no remedy in the law, to develop a critique of the limits of the law if this critique only serves to oppress further with its inevitability. Unless there is some way to understand her violation in broader collective and political terms and to channel her frustration toward some positive action, her consciousness of the limits of the law could lead her to nothing more than a bitter acceptance of her lot.
In this process of developing the critical analytical capaci­ties and action skills, legal literacy can play an important and vital role. But the legal literacy that is needed is not just about disseminating information, it is about developing capacities in women that allow them to use the law and rights as a political resource and to gain the skill and power needed to effect posi­tive social change within the family and the broader cultural, social, and political community, in the context of what we are calling a cultural politics of rights, legal literacy is a process to empower women by promoting their ability to participate fully in assessing and reshaping the cultural and legal frameworks that determine how status, rights and gender are defined in law and in practice. Legal literacy does this through education­al processes that develop the knowledge and skills women need to participate politically in transforming the conditions of their lives. The kind of knowledge and skills needed cover a range—beginning with critical consciousness about gender roles and status, and legal rights and lack of them—to ability to make choices about what can be changed and how to change it.

​Legal Literacy in Practice
Education and the Gender-Focused Rights Strategy
A comprehensive gender-focused political strategy of rights includes educational interventions that target many groups and institutions having a bearing on the definition and exer­cise of women's rights. The cornerstone of such a strategy is direct, primary legal literacy carried out with women whose living circumstances and opportunities have prevented them from understanding and taking action related to the extent and limitations of their status and rights. From the perspective of the broader rights strategy outlined in this paper, it is impor­tant to consider the other types of legal education, the groups to whom they are directed, and how they relate or have an impact on direct legal literacy for women. In general there are three distinct educational levels that should be distinguished. The purpose, content and format required for each varies accordingly. The chart on page 56 graphically summarizes the differences.

The Public
At the first level is the public “at large." The values people assimilate come largely through the family, school, religion, and other easily identified institutions concerned with the
preservation of culture. The communications media, (newspa­pers, radio, television, film, etc.) plays an essential role in pass­ing on culturally rooted values about gender, legality, justice, rights, etc. and in raising issues for public consideration. Thus, any strategy that targets changing values, beliefs and norms of behavior must consider how to influence the messages that pass through the media. Sometimes the message can be gener­al, such as "women's rights are human rights"—a message gaining resonance with the public in many countries. Through decades of human rights monitoring and reporting many peo­ple now understand that a core of fundamental, inalienable rights exist—whether or not they know the exact content of their constitutions or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.10 In this instance, the media can play a key role in mov­ing the public to take the next step and to begin to see women's rights in this light. At other times the issues and the message are more specific, as in raising public clamor about the incidence of rape or violence against women in the community. Where legislative change is required, it is often essential to use the media to gain public support for specific issues. Disseminating simple information through the media is also useful if the conditions and the motivation exist for women to make the connection between the information presented and their real life situation and needs. For example, the success of "hotlines" in some places depended not only on the media's getting the message out, but on a growing awareness among women that they did not have to suffer abuse in silence, and thus responded to a perceived problem. "Get out the vote" campaigns are not successful if they only give information about times, places and candidates. Unless citizens are person­ally motivated to vote, the information will make no difference in their decision on whether or not to vote.

The "Community"
At the next level is the "community," where people no longer exist "in general" but have names and faces, participate in economic, social, and cultural groupings, and can be direct­ly reached. This is where legal literacy "proper" is located and where most programs need to be rooted. In contrast to the goal of public education (general information and influencing pub­lic opinion), the goal of community legal literacy programs is empowerment.
Targeted primarily to women, community-based legal liter­acy programs ideally seek to develop women's understanding about rights and themselves as subject of rights. Only in this way can rights become a political resource. The purpose of direct legal literacy is also to develop women's functional understanding about the system; that is, specific laws and pro­cedures, so that they will be able to take an active role in assert­ing their rights, demanding justice and confronting the system. This is where transformative learning takes place, where criti­cal consciousness is developed, and other skills generated. This is primarily where legal literacy becomes a tool for women's empowerment. Essentially, community-based legal literacy programs work on developing the analytical and political skills women need to participate in taking action for change. They also target the wider community within which women live, especially the men. Grassroots women are very aware that men also need to understand and respect women as subjects of rights! (Butegwa).

Legal "Professionals"
The final general category of educational interventions is geared toward the "professional" and "structural" levels. Developing gender awareness within the legal system is one of the primary goals for this type of work. Most of it is of a "remedial" nature, since it is geared toward unlearning detri­mental attitudes and behaviors related to the women and to the law. This kind of reeducation is important not only because of the effects biased judges and police can have on women in particular cases, but because of the undermining effect they can have on community legal literacy efforts (Kuenyehia). While it may be unconventional to speak of the "legal illitera­cy" of judges, in a very real sense gender bias prevents even judges from "reading" the law adequately. The "Gender Bias in the Courts" program in the United States is an example of the importance of consistent work aimed at changing the atti­tudes of the judiciary through education and monitoring of their judgments (Wikler, 1987). Most Third World countries have yet to begin judicial education programs, but a few, such as Sri Lanka, (Goonesekere) have undertaken modest initiatives along this line. Of course, at the structural level there are also police and prosecutors whose function in law enforcement has an important effect on how the public understands and toler­ates crimes of gender. Programs to educate the police, particu­larly with regard to rape and domestic violence, are important. Finally, lobbying as a type of educational work targeted pri­marily to legislators and policy makers, also has its place.
In addition to education aimed at the structures of legal sys­tems, educational work at the level of the professional lawyer focuses more on the profession or the practice of law than on the law itself. Its primary concern is with changing the classi­cal liberal paradigm of law, and to generate and disseminate alternative approaches to law. Training of "lay" professionals to handle aspects of what has been the absolute domain of lawyers is part of this work, and retraining lawyers to relate to the community in new ways and develop skill as educators is another.
​
Primary Legal Literacy: Roles, Models, and Issues
Primary (i.e., community-based, programmatic) legal litera­cy is essentially a planned educational process. Although learning happens informally throughout daily life and it may be possible to acquire in this manner the analytical capacities and skills needed for action, programmatic legal literacy pur­sues these goals "by design." It is a strategic approach to pro­moting the acquisition of critical awareness about gender roles and rights and the skills needed to assert rights and mobilize for change. Legal literacy programs seek to accelerate the learning, which may or may not happen informally, by having some control over the process and content of the learning. It is the theory base that provides the framework for deciding how to shape the process. The task, according to the framework pre­sented here, is basically to design programs rooted in an edu­cational methodology compatible with a political approach to gender and to rights.
In practice however, there is a wide disparity in the design of legal literacy programs. While there are several factors at work, the primary difference among programs depends on whether programs are approached in purely legal terms or in political and educational terms. The legal approach is general­ly favored by lawyers and the political approach is favored by organizations representing the interests of specific groups at the community or national levels. Thus, the disparity breaks down along practical lines to a variance between legal literacy organized primarily by lawyers and based on legal criteria, and legal literacy designed and organized by nonlawyer groups (which usually include lawyers) using broader politi­cal criteria. The most important difference between the "legal" and the "political" approaches is the place law occupies. In the former, the law and rights are assumed, a priori, to provide a solution to people's problems, and therefore, there is a heavy reliance on them. In the latter, the problem rather than the solution is the point of departure, with the result that the asser­tion of rights through legal mechanisms forms only part of an overall strategy, including organization and education. This may appear to be a subtle difference, but in practice it is easy to detect.
Lawyer-initiated, law-based legal literacy tends to be con- tent-focused, information-oriented and rooted in the fallacious view that information and knowledge of the law are sufficient inputs for people to exercise their rights. Many of the problems associated with this approach are due to the type of profession­al training in law that most lawyers receive that places undue faith in the law. It is not surprising that lawyers would invest faith in law as a social change strategy and carry over into their progressive social action initiatives the legal paradigm's undue emphasis on the leadership role played by the lawyer.
These formative limitations, however, can have disastrous effects on legal literacy. The educational disparity between university trained lawyers and grassroots women with little formal education causes considerable frustration. This cultural gap becomes exacerbated by the lawyers' use of methods that reproduce their own educational experience from the universi­ty, particularly, the lecture format and written materials. Having heard that it is better to use "group dynamics" they may incorporate games or a question-and-answer format to their lectures, but miss the point about the need to develop the learner's analytical capacities and action skills, and that the process of developing them is linked to certain pedagogical principles as outlined in this paper. When embedded in legal services programs that preserve the lawyer's proactive role in defense of individual rights, this type of legal literacy actually fosters the passive role of the person or group the program is supposed to benefit. Again, the law-based approach to legal literacy rests on the lawyers' inflated belief in their own role and view that the law—in all its aspects—is the specialized domain of the legal professional. Despite the evident good will and commitment of the lawyers who do this work, unless they are sufficiently self critical (professionally and politically), they are guaranteed to end up expending enormous amounts of energy with little to show for it. In the end, lawyer initiated, law-based legal literacy is at best an ineffective educational strategy. At worst, it reinforces the status quo, preserving the lawyer's stake as the primary custodian of rights.
Legal literacy programs do exist, however, that are based on the principles outlined in this paper and that overcome the pitfalls of the type just described. They tend to be organization- initiated, politically framed, and gender oriented, focusing primarily on the interests of the groups they represent rather than on law. Community-based, politically-framed legal litera­cy regards law and rights as political resources and education a tool to empower women to develop the capacities needed to participate as full citizens in advancing their concrete interests. Such programs are interdisciplinary in character, drawing on education, psychology, communications and other disciplines as well as law. These legal literacy programs are often rooted in projects aimed at women's development such as health (includ­ing reproductive health), stopping gender violence, productive enterprises, labor organizing, etc. Their forms and methods of legal literacy tend to be varied and quite creative and their impact on women significant. The lawyer's role is often described as a "resource" to the community, understood in terms compatible with the needs and goals of the group. The interdisciplinary setting helps clarify the distinction between the lawyer's role as "professional in law" and as "educator."
Here it should be noted that the issue is not the presence or absence of lawyers, or that all community organizations run by non-lawyers have developed adequate frameworks and methodological approaches for this work (Kapur). Lawyers play an important role in many of these community-based pro­grams. The critical factors are their perspectives on law, gen­der and the educational function.

Community-Based "Paralegals"
One of the most innovative trends emerging from these pro­grams today is the training and development of "lay" commu­nity members to play a primary role in legal literacy. Sometimes called "paralegals," "community legal educators," "legal promoters," or "advice volunteers," they take on impor­tant functions in disseminating information about rights, orga­nizing, educating, even handling legal procedures. The fact that there is no uniform terminology to describe this phenom­enon reflects a "state of the art" in which no consensus has yet emerged about their role in the community, the training they need, the organizational setting in which they should be based or the follow-up they require. Nevertheless, the paralegal trend has important implications for legal literacy for women.11
The community paralegal approach responds to the need to demystify the law and put legal knowledge into the hands of community women as a tool for their own advancement. Consonant with the idea of law as a resource, training commu­nity women in rights advocacy and legal defense is geared toward developing women's capacities to be proactive subjects of rights and change agents. However, contextual variables and differences of conception about what is appropriate for a "lay" person to handle with regard to the law leads to differ­ences in how paralegals are trained and what they are expect­ed to do at the community level. Programs also vary in the degree of consistency they maintain between the content of the paralegals' training and their function.
In some programs the paralegal is a resource in a very informal sense and the knowledge she receives in a training course is expected to carry over to her neighbors in the community to be activated in the event of need, without a formal structure or sup­port system. Here, distinctions are vague, if they exist at all, about the knowledge and skills that any legally literate person should have, in contrast to those a paralegal should have to fulfill some function. The term "paralegal" should probably not be applied here, but programs do exist that use term in this manner. In other programs, the paralegal is fundamentally a disseminator of infor­mation about law, rights and where to find legal assistance. They often rely on pamphlets, other written materials, and presenta­tions to groups as their primary method of dissemination. Moving a step beyond the "transfer of information" concept of education to an understanding of the educator as "capacity builder," the emphasis turns to consciousness-raising about status and rights, and the development of capacities geared toward action. Preferred methods are counselling of individual women and structured edu­cational sessions (using nonformal, popular education methods) with community groups on the themes of fundamental and human rights, citizenship, the functioning of the system, etc. At the next level is the educator/organizer concept, which empha­sizes the paralegal's role in enabling women to solve problems individually and collectively. Here, the paralegal works directly with community organizations to involve women in developing and organizing their own defense strategies.
These differences in the concept of the paralegal do not just represent a simple progression of functions along a continu­um, all of equal value. The "paralegal as organizer/educator " is the standard by which paralegal programs should be judged. Paralegals who function as mere disseminators of information are limited in the impact they may have.
Paralegals sometimes also play a role in direct legal defense and carry out a more technical legal function. In some programs they work as "lawyer's assistants," connoting a more tradition­al concept of paralegal as one who does some preparatory work on a case, but the lawyer actually handles it. In other programs, while working with lawyers, paralegals take on certain types of cases that are usually of an administrative nature and common to women of their communities. For example, in Peru, Dasso reports that some paralegals prepare and submit child support claims, birth and marriage registrations, land titles, etc. In the Philippines Quintilian describes how paralegals have indepen­dently taken the initiative to prepare and submit to the public prosecutor appropriate documentation denouncing rape and human rights violations. In the case of SEW A, an organization of women workers in India, Patel describes how paralegals have gone so far as to successfully argue their cases in court. Of course, how far a nonprofessional will be permitted to tread on territory jealously guarded by the legal establishment varies from country to country. In many countries the legal definition and regulation of "legal practice" is such that it excludes all non- credentialed lawyers from doing anything but the simplest administrative procedure. Until just a few years ago, the profes­sional association of lawyers in Kenya would not permit even lawyers to offer free legal aid, which they regarded as a threat to their professional standards and economic well being (Schuler, 1986). In Peru, however, after much struggle to overcome preju­dice, the Ministry of Justice agreed to give formal credentials to community paralegals who met certain criteria (Dasso).
While there is no consensus about the appropriateness of this technical function of paralegals, the discussion is very rel­evant to legal literacy. It is true that if paralegals get caught up in handling case after case, they may also fall into the trap of "nonstrategic legal aid" and recur to the law to solve every problem; but it is also a source of power to community women that some among them have developed a certain level of skill in managing the system and making it work for women. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, this knowledge can enhance the paralegal's educational and mobilizing function.
Despite the inconsistency among programs, it is evident that paralegals can play a vital role in legal literacy on the condi­tion that their educational and organizing role is emphasized and their training provides them with the knowledge and skills they need to fulfill this role. Unfortunately, training is another place where legal literacy programs sometimes stum­ble. Not surprisingly, law-based legal literacy programs are likely to see paralegals, if they have them at all, as assistants to lawyers or as disseminators of information—a limited role of dubious value. But even politically oriented legal literacy pro­grams, which tend to see paralegals as capacity builders and organizers, do not always follow through consistently with their training.
Since legal literacy is geared toward women's full participa­tion in society as proactive subjects of rights, the content and process of the educator's formation is of critical importance not only for the paralegal, but for the program, the organiza­tion and the women in the community. For example, knowing how critical consciousness happens provides a framework for designing problem posing learning experiences and deciding what content to include and how to guide the process through dialogue. Understanding rights as a political resource, not as ends in themselves, and that women can be empowered in the process of defending and asserting their rights as well as in the process of defining them, is another powerful concept provid­ing a framework for exploring with the women the meaning of the rights in their lives, how the law defines rights and whether it is an adequate definition, and what action can be taken to defend, assert or redefine rights in practice and in the law. Thus, to develop the paralegals' capacities for legal litera­cy work in the terms discussed in this paper, what is needed— and sometimes lacking—is systematic training grounded in a solid understanding of empowerment and relevant insights drawn not only from law, but from psychology, political sci­ence and education. Such a program will of necessity include as major content areas of personal development, law, educa­tional and organizational methods.

1. Personal Development. As noted in the discussion about empowerment, there are psychological states, particular­ly self-esteem and self-confidence, that are prerequisites to taking action for change. Developing the paralegals' own awareness and analysis of the causes and conse­quences of female subordination, of sexuality, and gen­der roles, among other themes, are a necessity if they are to work with other grassroots women in legal liter­acy. Thus, personal development must be intentionally included in a program to develop community women to work in legal literacy. 
2. Legal Content. In addition to specific legal content relat­ed to the issues and needs of the women in the com­munity, if the legal literacy is to foster women's active participation in engaging the system, the training should always cover fundamental, constitutional, and human rights law-making and the democratic process, the concept of justice, rights as political resources, alternative remedies, the functioning of the system, and relevant legal procedures. 
3. Educational Process and Organization. The training also needs to include educational methods and organizing processes such as leadership, democratic decision making, and community organizing.

It should be noted that paralegal training or formation pro­grams need to develop these themes using experiential, prob­lem posing methods that the participants will be able to incorporate into their own future work. Moreover, it should be recognized that paralegal development cannot be accom­plished in a weekend or two, but will require a commitment of several months for the initial training input and probably sev­eral years of follow-up, evaluation and support afterwards. Another critical ingredient in the paralegal's development is adequate organizational structures and mechanisms through which they can carry out their tasks, receive support, evalua­tion and feedback. Without this, the learning cannot be expect­ed to remain vital. However, where the training, follow-up and organizational structures exist that permit women to develop the paralegal function in the terms described, they have a pro­found impact on the lives of the paralegals and the community within which they live. An organizer of a program in Peru, expressed it this way:
The process of understanding that women's problems are not 'natural', nor individual and isolated, and learning about their legal rights generates a gradual process of validation and self-esteem for the paralegals. Their loss of fear of speaking in public and new capacity for critical analysis is demonstrated in their growing involvement in leadership positions in the community... Other achieve­ments are having placed women's problems in a broader context than a strictly legal one, making links between acts of self-defense and police protection and law enforce­ment, combining law with non-traditional remedies, and searching for collective solutions to problems. The com­munity respects the paralegals as mediators of conflicts, to whom both men and women may come (Yahez, 1991).
In this book, importance been given to the concept and for­mation of paralegals for several reasons. First, the presence of trained paralegals in a community is one of the most effective ways to make the taw and rights available as resources to women at the grassroots, and should be given priority. Once paralegals have proven themselves they become a valued resource of knowledge, leadership and support within the community. Their transformation makes them role models for other women. Second, the process of developing the knowl­edge and skills of the paralegal highlights the same issues and skills that all women need to develop if they are become proac­tive subjects of rights; that is, development of self-esteem and self-confidence, knowledge and analytical abilities related to the law, and rights and political action skills. Third, the lawyers and other professionals who develop and carry out legal literacy, if they want to bridge the gap of educational and class differences, will also benefit by understanding the "process" of the paralegal's development.
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Implications for Legal Literacy
This paper has explored the theoretical underpinnings of the concept of legal literacy and some of the practical and methodological issues that have emerged from experience in implementing legal literacy. The resulting framework, which situates legal literacy within a gender-focused strategy of rights, makes it possible to articulate criteria to guide decisions about where to locate legal literacy programs, the audience to whom they should be directed, and the kind of methods that must be used to make them effective. In this context, there are several important points to consider.
Developing a "political" rights strategy

• Law plays a role in maintaining and shaping women's inferior social and economic position in society through unjust legislation, unjust application of laws, or inacces­sibility of rights to women. Each of these problem areas are potential targets for change.
• Law reform and litigation strategies, however, are inade­quate to the goal of social change unless they form part of a broader political strategy of rights; one that engages women as political actors in the process of critiquing, defining and asserting rights.

The Place of Legal Literacy

• Legal literacy is an essential component of a political rights strategy since the function of legal literacy is to pre­pare women to take part in these processes.
• Legal literacy is thus, not only a process for disseminat­ing information about women's rights, legal remedies and how to activate them, but a process of promoting women's abilities to assess the meaning of rights, assert rights, and/or take action to change the definition of rights through the political process.

Legal Literacy in Practice

• Keeping this concept of legal literacy in mind, agents of legal literacy, particularly lawyers, should redefine their role and develop the appropriate educational skills to be compatible with the goal of developing women's capacitates.
• Programs need to have an interdisciplinary approach to assure adequate preparation of their personnel in participa­tory, problem posing methods of education as well as law.
• The approach to legal literacy that develops community-based paralegals as educators and organizers is an important inno­vation in the legal literacy process and should be promoted.
• Community-based programs aimed at women's develop­ment (production and income generation, labor organiz­ing, education, community development, reproduction and health, violence against women, etc.) provide a great potential for establishing programmatic legal literacy among women.
• Community-based, direct legal literacy needs to be sup­plemented with educational strategies that also target the public through the media and the structures of the legal system, especially the police and the courts, schools and other public institutions, law school curricula, and con­tinuing education of legal professionals.

NOTES

1. 1.    References to authors with articles in this book will be indicated by placing their names between parentheses, e.g., (Sobhan). No date appears either within the parentheses or in the text. References to other material follows the APA convention of listing the author's sur­name together with the year of his or her publication.
2. 2.    This use of term "cultural politics" should not be con­fused with a narrower use that refers to the politics of subjective cultural identity.
3. 3.    The early nationalist struggles of Asia and Africa and the persistent and inventive use of litigation to score major legal victories by the American Civil Rights Movement reinforced the belief in lawyers and litigation as a strategy.
4. One useful approach to understanding and categoriz­ing strategic action is by analyzing the structure and interactions of the legal system (Friedman, 1973).
5. Conceptualizing law as a "resource to the community" is the cornerstone of many legal services programs in vari­ous parts of the world. The International Center for Law and Development, and the Inter American Legal Services Association, have provided support and inspiration to many groups in making the idea a workable reality.
6. A multicountry network of studies on women, credit, empowerment and reproductive health began in 1991. Developed by the Empowerment of Women Program of the JSI Research and Training Institute, in conjunc­tion with programs that provide credit to poor women for self-employment purposes, the first of the studies are being conducted in Bangladesh and Bolivia.
7. ​One source for explaining how adults develop new frame­works for thought and action is transformation theory (Mezirow 1991; Mezirow & Associates, 1991), which builds on and synthesizes the work of Habermas, Freire, and many other learning theorists. Mezirow's approach to transformation theory draws on constructivism, critical the­ory, and deconstructivism in social theory in the social sci­ences, law, and art as well as cognitive psychology arid psychotherapy.
8. Freire's seminal work, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, written in 1970, is complemented by several other important essays, particularly, "Education as the Practice of Freedom"1 (1969) and "Extension or Communication," (1969), published in English as "Education for Critical Consciousness", (1973).
9. In the study of a literacy program in an urban community of Lima, Peru, Barndt (1980) explored the relationship between action and reflection in the learning process. Using the medium of the "photo-novel" on the theme of the liter­acy program itself, women participants revealed their thoughts and reactions that the photos provoked in them.
10. A study reported on one of the major news networks in the U.S. (heard by the author) at the time of the bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution, found that most people thought health care was a constitutional right. While it probably ought to be and maybe someday will be, health care is not, in fact, guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States. The number of people who believe it to be so, however, reveals how values and beliefs about law, rights, and enti­tlements can and do change on a massive scale and that the media is a key player in that process.
11. Here the term paralegal will be used to connote the role and range of functions that community-based women, trained in some aspects of law and community organizing, have developed. It is acknowledged that paralegal is not a per­fect term for our purposes since its use is not consistent and may connote to some people elements that are antithetical to our meaning. However, none of the other terms avail­able works well in English. For example, the term "promotora" in Spanish is much closer to the concept we seek, but there is no uniformity' in Latin America on terms, and "promoter" in English does not work at all. "Advice volunteers," used in Africa connotes a too limited func­tion. The term "barefoot lawyers" is insulting and "com­munity legal educators" doesn't quite cover it either. Thus, given that "paralegal" is the preferred term with many groups in both Asia and Africa, we ask the indul­gence of the Latin Americans in our use of the term para­legal, which is rarely used there.

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