LONDON - 15 April 2008 - 320 words
Journalism student wins international prize
A second year Journalism and Sociology student at City University in London has come second in an international competition organised by the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) Europe.
Stav Shaffir submitted an article entitled 'Shall We Dance' in the 2007/08 JRS Student Journalism Prize. It dealt with the difficulties faced by homosexual asylum seekers and the jury members agreed that Ms Shaffir's piece tackled an issue that is still not getting much coverage in the mainstream media. Stav came to City as part of the Olive Tree scholars programme, a peace and reconciliation project for Palestinians and Israelis. She is also developing an educational project with the ParliaMentors programme of the Three Faiths Forum, which promotes understanding among people of different faiths and cultures.
The report from the JRS-Europe jury said Ms Shaffir's entry was "an original article that dealt with a topic that is still viewed as taboo in many newsrooms and something that is not given enough exposure in Western media". Jurors also complimented the writer's style and appreciated that she was able to take a step back from the subject in order to give a relatively objective account of the issue.
The first prize was awarded to Dane, Anastasia Stolovitskaya, whose article, 'The Politics of Fighting Windmills', was an account of the day-to-day reality of life in a detention centre for one Iraqi family.
Speaking after the result was announced, Stav Shaffir said: "I wanted to investigate the question of asylum from a few different angles: not only through the eyes of those who escape violence or poverty, but also through those who escape their very own culture, in which they are not accepted as they are. There's also the third type of asylum seekers - people who live in a relatively safe place, but are different from what their society expects them to be, and therefore they often find themselves escaping.
"The question of asylum is just a subtopic of a much greater one the question of freedom. The freedom that our society allows us, and the freedom we allow others. As a society that spends so much time talking about freedom - building detention centres and sending asylum seekers to places they have escaped is a sad, unsolvable contradiction."
The winners will attend a prize-giving ceremony hosted by Ms Hiltrud Breyer MEP in the European Parliament on April 15. As part of her prize, overall winner Anastasia Stolovitskaya will visit a refugee camp in Malawi this summer and document her experiences for JRS.
The Jesuit Refugee Service Europe invited
aspiring journalists to investigate the reality behind the headlines
by asking students across Europe to write an article on the theme:
'Access to Asylum'. JRS said they had received an overwhelming
response to the Student Journalism Prize, with entries that dealt
with a diverse range of topics submitted from all corners of Europe.
© Independent Catholic News 2008
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