Since 2004, we have been advocating for the need to build the Peace Memorial Museum of the Comfort Women and Women’s Rights (temporarily name) which will act as an important site for the anti-gender-based violence movement. Our efforts have not been wasted. The Department of Culture Affairs, Taipei City Government, has promised to relocate the Datung Police Station in 2014, and allow TWRF to take over part of the original site for the museum. This museum will be designed under the theme of ‘Anti-Gender-based Violence ‘covering sexual abuse, domestic violence, and sexual assault and harassment, as well as in combination with the issues that TWRF advocates such as underage prostitution, domestic violence, and the comfort women.The site will be designed as a record of Taiwan’swomen rights movement.

 

TWRF has acted as one of the most important roles in the history of Taiwan’s women rights movement. The movement ranged from the comfort women issue, which is the only openly discussed group rape in Taiwan, to the underage prostitution movement, which we cooperated with lawyers, academia, and ministers in the policy reform. Through our services, we also discovered the negative impact domestic violence had on children and women. The negative impact further encouraged us to push for more reforms and campaigns. Our experiences had led us to accumulate abundant primary resources, such as conference and policy reform records and videos, campaign pictures, and workshop productions. These precious resources have stayed hidden in our warehouse for many years, untouched, destroyed and lost. They were not systematic recorded or arranged, and hence, this became our first step in the preparation of the museum.

 

TWRF has been an active organization in the defence of women’s rights. In the earlier years, we provided services for underage prostitutes; today, we are involved in the comfort women issues, and service provision to victims of domestic violence and human trafficking. We have witnessed the evolution of women’s rights over the years. However, our resources do not originate solely from our direct service provision to victims, but also campaigns for policy reforms, social awareness, and social advocacy. To protect this precious evidence of history, we need to arrange and record them, so that they can be further used for research purposes. The evidence has included digital information (videos, tapes, and recordings) and documents (news articles and unpublished materials). Some even dates back to decades; thus, to protect the evidence, our primarily aim now is to convert all resources to formats that are readable on computers.

Objectives:

1)      Arrange all resources into a list

2)      Convert all resources to formats that are readable on computers

3)      Manage our resources and establish an open platform of information for researchers

4)      Manage our contacts with the public interested in our work

5)      Display the information in stages as follows, the comfort women, underage prostitution, domestic violence, child witness to domestic violence, and human trafficking