Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Women's Views on News

Women's Views on News

Conservative think tank launches attack on gendered analysis of domestic violence

Posted: 08 Oct 2012 10:41 AM PDT

Heather Harvey from the women’s charity Eaves explains why we should beware a new interpretation of domestic violence from the Centre for Social Justice.

The paper "Beyond Violence" published this summer by a leading Conservative think tank seeks to challenge our understanding of domestic violence (DV) as a gendered crime. The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) was established by conservative MP and secretary for the department of work and pensions, Iain Duncan Smith.

In their paper, CSJ endorses the suggestion that 89% of DV is what can be termed "situational couple violence", which occurs between two mutually abusive partners within a dysfunctional relationship. It states only 7% of DV is "coercive and controlling".

By suggesting that only 7% of DV is "real DV" as we understand it, the position taken by the CSJ is reminiscent of the notion of "real rape" and “less-than real rape” promoted recently, most notably by Republican politician Todd Akin and by people commenting on the rape cases of Roman Polanski and Julian Assange.

The CSJ suggest a new crime should be framed to deal with the 7% of "real DV". For the remaining 89% of "situational couple violence" which they describe as a being driven by "hot, emotional issues" this can be dealt with relationship counselling.

Eaves work closely with women who have suffered domestic violence. We believe this paper represents a cynical, ideological attempt to degender DV and to reduce government's obligations to respect and protect women's human rights.

The paper seeks to provide the rationale for a further reduction in funding for DV services. Language which recasts DV into an issue of relationship and behaviour management attempts to reduce police responsibility for what accounts currently for a quarter of violent crime.

By minimising the seriousness of DV, the CSJ try to reduce women's right to refuge and their recognition as a priority group for accommodation. If the analysis and the recommendations of this paper are accepted, we risk returning to a time where DV was regarded as a private matter between individuals rather than a matter for which the state has a responsibility to address adequately.

Here are some of the worrying excerpts from the paper:

"We do not address forms of domestic abuse specific to ethnic, sexual orientation, age, immigrant or other groups."

"This report looks at the root causes of domestic abuse and provides solutions grounded in evidence rather than ideology. We avoid overly simplistic narratives that ascribe all the blame for domestic abuse to male desire to control and subjugate women."

"While power, control and patriarchy are explanatory factors in many contexts of domestic abuse, there are many other that are also significant, including poverty, substance misuse, psychological vulnerabilities rooted in people's past experience and the dynamics that play out between two people in a relationship"

"A Women's level of depression can also have some bearing on men's violent behaviour".

"In many areas of social policy people are treated as individuals and the importance of interpersonal connections is lost. Domestic abuse is a problem with a relationship and solutions lie within this and other relationships".

"Current policy and practice is dominated by the important but insufficient goals of punishing perpetrators and ensuring safety for victims".

Here are some quotes from the list of recommendations made by the paper:

"The Home Office and/or the Ministry of Justice should pilot a number of restorative justice programmes specific to domestic abuse"

"We recommend that local authorities and other commissioners of domestic abuse services do not neglect any particular group of victim in their commissioning….In practice this could mean giving priority to universal services rather than to those which, for example, work only with a particular minority ethnic community. This may involve ….mergers. (One criterion for evaluating refuges could be how well they meet the needs of diverse victims)."

"Perpetrators' programs should have at least two streams – one for perpetrators involved in strategic, controlling abuse and the other for those with more "hot emotional" reasons behind their behaviour. Funding should be redirected from "traditional" approaches".

Click here to read a full copy of the “Beyond Violence” paper.

Partnership to improve access to contraception

Posted: 08 Oct 2012 07:00 AM PDT

The British Government joins new international partnership aiming to increase contraceptive access for 27 million women and girls in developing countries.

The partnership, launched at the United Nations on the 26 September, intends to provide a new contraceptive device called Jadelle to some of the poorest women and girls around the globe.

Jadelle consists of two small, thin silicone rods that are inserted into the upper arm where they release a synthetic progestin into the bloodstream, preventing pregnancy for up to five years.

As well as the UK, the Clinton Global Health Initiative, the US, Norway, and Bayer Healthcare AG are some of the other partners involved.

Bayer has agreed to cut the $18 price tag of the contraceptive device by at least half, on the condition that the partnership purchase at least 27 million devices between 2013 and 2018.

The contraceptive will be distributed in countries that are least likely to meet the Millennium Development Goal (MDG5) in improving maternal health and reducing the number of child deaths by 2015.

Currently more than 200 million women and girls who do not want to get pregnant have no access to modern contraceptives and family planning services.

The World Health Organisation estimate that maternal deaths could be cut by one third if all women wishing to use effective contraception had access to it.

When fully implemented, the partnership will avert more than 280,000 child and 30,000 maternal deaths due to improved spacing of pregnancies and avoiding other complications such as pre-term births.

This is the second partnership focusing on increasing access to contraceptive devices to be announced in the past six months. A similar effort by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the UK, the US, USAID, UNFPA and Pfizer was unveiled at the London Summit on Family Planning held in July.

First UK festival of female entrepreneurship

Posted: 08 Oct 2012 01:00 AM PDT

Britain's first festival of female entrepreneurship is taking place today in Bristol.

Around 1000 women are expected to attend Women Outside the Box, an event aiming to inspire and celebrate female business success.

The event will feature workshops on setting up a business and advice for existing entrepreneurs on how to boost growth.

There will also be networking and talks from high-profile local businesswomen.

Founder Joni Farthing wants it to spur more women on to strike out on their own.

"Too often women over-train for business. They are more likely to take yet another qualification rather than simply 'going for it'," she said.

"Women Outside the Box wants women to stop hiding behind this. It wants to provide information, but also to get women looking at the hundreds of others who have made the leap, and to think 'Yes, we can'."

The event injects some positivity into the somewhat bleak economic landscape for many UK women.

While female unemployment recently fell to 1.1 million, according to the TUC more women are now taking on lower-paid, insecure forms of work.

The TUC wants the government to promote better, full-time jobs and wages, while, Women Outside the Box wants to build on the growing trend for female entrepreneurship sparked by the current recession.

Farthing points to government figures which suggest that supporting women-led businesses could lead to a £42 billion boost for the UK economy.

Untouchable: Jimmy Savile

Posted: 08 Oct 2012 12:47 AM PDT

In a society hyper-alert to paedophiles why was Jimmy Savile untouchable?

Sir Jimmy Savile, who spent forty years carefully cultivating his celebrity-status, would have no doubt been delighted to find that after his death he's taking up more column inches than at any other time in his glittering career.

But the subject of his posthumous notoriety is certainly not as he'd have planned it.

Since 'Exposure', the ITV documentary into Savile's alleged abuse of young girls aired on Wednesday night, more and more women are coming forward saying the star groomed and assaulted them as children.  

Who could have guessed that the broadcasting legend could be de-throned quite so spectacularly by claims of child sex offences? Well, quite a few people as it happens. Celebrities from Paul Gambaccini to Janet-Street Porter have spoken out, saying that Savile's abuse of young girls was an open secret at the BBC.

Esther Ranzen, broadcaster and founder of child safety charity Childline has spoken of her distress at hearing accounts from women who say they suffered at the hands of Savile. "In a funny way we all colluded with this, didn't we?" she says.

Former BBC radio producer Wilfred De'Ath doesn't share Ranzen's feeling of collective culpability. De'Ath speaks to 'Exposure' about being confronted first hand with Savile's behaviour towards young girls. He describes meeting Savile in a Chinese restaurant with a girl he guesses was 12 years old:

"I asked him, where did you pick her up and he said 'Top of the Pops'. I found it rather demeaning to have to talk to him in front of a little girl like that. The next morning I phoned and he was obviously in bed with this young girl, in fact he told me he was in bed with her. And I had to rather demean myself and say hello to her, and she said 'hello, hello Mr Producer'".

This account is startling not just for its insight into Savile's sexual habits, but for the fact that he didn't try to hide his behavior, presumably because he didn't have to.

When the presenter of 'Exposure', Mark Williams-Thomas asks De'Ath why he thought the girl was 12 he replies, "well I've had two daughter so I know about little girls".

De'Ath has had half a century to reflect on what he witnessed and since had two daughters of his own. And yet, breathtakingly, it's never occurred to him that it was the young girl who was being demeaned and not him.

What is clear from De'Ath's attitude towards the victim, particularly when he mimics her, using the voice of an insufferable cockney waif, is that he considers her unworthy of empathy and protection.

But let's not be fooled into believing that De'Ath is deviant in his attitude.

De'Ath is symptomatic of a male-dominated media industry where the voices of young women, particularly vulnerable and working class women count for nothing.

The fact that De'Ath spent two years in jail after leaving the BBC for credit card fraud perhaps explains why he speaks so candidly where other more influential media figures with much more to loose continue to play dumb about Savile's predatory behaviour.

A former Radio One DJ who didn't want to be named told the Guardian: "It was a unique 25-year period in human history in which it was possible to have sex without endangering yourself and people took advantage".

And the anonymous DJ isn't the only person to use cultural relativism to excuse Savile's alleged abuse.

Alan Leeke was a local reporter in Manchester at the time when Savile was making a name for himself as a celebrated Northern DJ. He says: "In those days you couldn't tell if a girl was 15, 16, 17. You didn't ask for a birth certificate in those days….It was the era of free love".

Free love? Spare me.

The loosening of sexual mores had nothing to do with these reports of abuse: They occurred within a society where young women were still expected to be seen and not heard, at the hands of a man who was supremely powerful, abusing girls who were supremely vulnerable.  In this sense Savile's sexual behaviour was depressingly conservative.  

And before we console ourselves that Savile's alleged abuse and impunity was the product of a bygone era, where sexual morality was as dubious as the wardrobe choices, it's worth reminding ourselves about the recent abuse scandal in Rochdale which led to nine convictions of men for grooming and abusing young girls.  

The men who ran the organised abuse ring where allowed to carry on for so long because when victims did come forward, police and social service didn't believe them.  Police assumed the girls were prostitutes.

To this day, vulnerable teenagers, children in care, girls dismissed as miscreants who don't fit the mould of the innocent victim, are not being heard. The evidence suggests that Savile, like other abusers, knew which girls were vulnerable and which ones wouldn't be believed and chose his victims accordingly.

The claims against Savile are particularly alarming because, surely by now ours is a society so alert to the threat of paedophilia that we live in a state of perpetual vigilance, suspiciously eyeing the milkman from our home security systems and demanding enhanced criminal disclosures for every adult that comes within a 10 meter radius of our children?

Isn't the figure of the eccentric, unmarried child abuser a bogey man so feared we couldn't miss one skulking in the park at night, let alone prancing across our screens at prime time?  

The tabloid press, who display an unwavering commitment to exposing every pervert and paedophile that lurks in the undergrowth, have on this occasion severely let us down.

Street-Porter and Gambaccini have parroted the theory that Savile played the tabloids like a puppet master, threatening to stem the flow of money he raised for hospitals like Stoke Mandeville if they printed claims of sexual abuse.

Is it just me or does this explanation sound completely implausible? Are we to believe that ruthless, hard-nosed journalists vetoed the type of story tabloids dream of, just because they didn't want Savile's fundraising to cease? Surely once the litany of Savile's alleged abuse had broken, his role as charity fundraiser extraordinaire would screech to a grinding halt in any case.

Whatever Sir Jimmy was using as a black mailing chip to dissuade the papers from running the story, it was far more devastating than a threat he’d stop his charity work. The impression we get is of a sinister, deeply entwined relationship between Savile and the tabloids, one which, even in the post-Levenson era, we'll be lucky to ever uncover.

But for the majority of us who weren't being directly blackmailed, why were we so easily fooled? Isn't part of the problem that we make paedophiles into degenerate monsters, ogre-like figures with nothing in common to the people we love and respect?

A national treasure, a charity worker, an emblem of a more innocent age, and a paedophile? To suggest it is heretic. It goes against everything we believe in our guts about child abuse.

In the wake of these revelations an entire media establishment and nation is reeling back in horror with a sense of collective guilt and shame. And let's hope our period of reflection is meaningful. Because if we're blind to sexual abuse on our TV screens and in our workplaces, what chance have we of spotting and speaking out against it when it occurs closer to home, in our own lives?

Fifty Shades of Grey

Posted: 05 Oct 2012 05:31 AM PDT

From Words about Women.

When this series first came out it was almost liberating. Women could be seen reading it on the tube, the train or hunched over it at lunch. Now however they have gone into hiding.

Critics have completely rinsed E. L. James's 50 Shades of Grey Trilogy. Their reviews are either hilarious or angry. They rip in to the poor prose, the unlikely pairing and the stereotypical nature of the sexual fantasies.

Some even say this book has pushed feminism back slightly by the piggy-tailed virgin protagonist Ana who becomes the wife of a billionaire sex pest.

Now yes it may be a tad trashy, the story IS fanciful and unsophisticated but…. WHO CARES?

Since when were we only ALLOWED to read books which directly reflected reality or were written with such complexity that you need to couple reading time with a thesaurus. Do we have to read books that only describe appropriate fantasy's?

Now my review of the book would go something like this:

"I picked up the book not knowing its context. Read the first book in about 4 days. It was exciting, liberating to read in public and not too graphic that I read it in the bath only…but that did happen. I read the second book slowly, I lost interest as the story line wasn't strong enough to carry me through without increasingly graphic sex scenes and I became a desensitised and annoyed by all of the 'oh my's that continued every time the protagonist saw a bit of flesh. I was pretty horny though so a little treat all round."

What's annoying is that I bet a lot of the critics felt the same yet they blast both the book and its readers for being, let's face it, stupid.

This is what makes me mad.

You have to remember that this was originally published as an E-BOOK printed on demand. The demand was so great it was published. So technically we VOTED for the series. Approximately 31 million copies have been sold worldwide, the book rights having been sold in 37 countries and the series has set the record for the FASTEST selling paperback of ALL TIME.

OF ALL TIME!

Now it's not Shakespeare, it's not well written chicklit (god I hate that term) but it’s vanilla, mainstream erotic fiction.

Women are not stupid. They don't need to be kept away from this novel in case they all start sewing up their hymens and chasing after men who are disturbed and like to spank us. Don't patronise us. If a book is crap we will put it down not act it out, we aren't children.

It's a FANTASY. I can bet you that when those critics fantasise it is something a little bit embarrassing to admit, a little bit weird and little bit 'wrong'. All feminists don't go home and masturbate over being the dominant and they don't have to say no to any submissive act in fear of being hung up and pelted with tomatoes for letting down feminism.

Maybe you like the white knight submissive fantasy or maybe you like to dominate. Whatever you want to read or do is absolutely fine and if you don't like what you read buy another one that you might!

It's no bad thing that millions of women who may never have been brave enough to pick up an erotic novel are now reading and having an opinion on what they would like to read. Sexy times!

So to the women who are now ashamed of reading their 50 shades book I say to you: FLICK your way through all three!

Words about Women is a feminist blog that discusses everyday feminism with tongue firmly in cheek. Author Holly Peacock, encourages guest blogs. If interested, please email Holly: hollyapeacock[@]hotmail.co.uk