Women's Views on News |
| UN Women to continue to fight trafficking Posted: 15 May 2013 07:09 AM PDT
A high-level meeting of the General Assembly on the United Nations Appraisal of the Global Plan of Action to Combat Trafficking in Persons took place on recently at the General Assembly in New York. Lakshmi Puri, who is UN Women's acting executive director, spoke during an interactive panel discussion there on "Sharing Best Practices and Lessons Learned for Prevention and Prosecution in the Implementation of the Global Plan of Action". Human trafficking, she said, ‘is one of the world's fastest-growing crimes points to the urgent need to take more courageous and decisive action. It is one of the most vicious and shocking forms of violence and exploitation and 'a web of slavery that overwhelmingly ensnares females'. Women and girls, she pointed out, comprise more than half of all trafficked victims of forced labour and 98 per cent of all victims of sexual exploitation.’ But such trafficking does not take place in a vacuum. It takes place, she pointed out, in a world plagued with widespread discrimination and violence against women and girls, a world where the rule of law still all too often rules women out. And these conditions of gender inequality and injustice, she said, provide fertile ground for trafficking, and for traffickers themselves and their clientele, to flourish and enrich themselves at the brutal expense of others. Which is why the new General Assembly resolution on trafficking and the historic agreement reached by governments this past March at the UN Commission on the Status of Women are of major relevance. They contain, she continued, the latest thinking and lessons learned to prevent and end all forms of violence against women and girls, including human trafficking. One of the main lessons we have learned, she said, ‘is that we have to put human rights and justice for victims at the very centre of our efforts. 'Today too many women victims are blamed, shamed, arrested and put in jail. They are treated like criminals when they are victims of crimes whose rights have been violated and who deserve justice.' And she called for 'a focus on the four P's: Protection of human rights, Prosecution of offenders, Prevention of Trafficking, and Provision of Services to survivors.' 'The agreement from the Commission on the Status of Women', she continued, 'moves us forward in these four directions. 'It calls on governments to take measures to ensure that identified victims of trafficking are not penalized for having been trafficked. ‘They are to be provided with appropriate protection and care, such as rehabilitation and reintegration in society, witness protection, job training, legal assistance, confidential health care, and repatriation with their informed consent. 'The agreement calls on governments to criminalise all forms of trafficking in persons, to strengthen laws to better protect the rights of women and girls and to bring justice to offenders and intermediaries involved, including public officials. 'It also calls for stronger action to prevent trafficking and address its underlying causes. And here, the agreement urges governments to take appropriate measures to address the root factors of trafficking. This, she said, 'requires wider efforts to increase education, economic empowerment and to create decent jobs for women, to provide social services and social protection and to ensure women's participation and leadership. 'It means working together to generate a pervasive culture of gender equality and the empowerment of women.' 'The achievement of equality between men and women in families, societies, economies and politics is central to the elimination of violence against women and trafficking. 'We need gender responsive institutions and we need more women serving in office and on the front lines of justice, as judges, investigators and police officers. 'We also know that we must reform labour, immigration and migration policies, and conditions of stay and work, so that women and girls are less vulnerable to traffickers and to unscrupulous employers. 'And', she said, 'we need to open spaces for trafficking survivors to be heard so that their real life experiences can inform policymaking. 'It is only by listening to the women and men, girls and boys who have been trafficked that we can mount a response that is truly effective. At UN Women, she explained, 'we are working on all of these fronts and have contributed to significant policy and legal reforms in 25 countries to address trafficking. 'For example: Brazil and Viet Nam have developed national plans to fight trafficking; India has undertaken a mapping study that identified districts with a high risk of trafficking to take responsive action; and in Cambodia and Nigeria, women's groups trained police and community leaders to combat trafficking. She also mentioned the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women, which, she said, ‘is also triggering progress.’ There is, for example, an NGO called CARAM Asia in Malaysia that has developed a comprehensive pre-departure orientation programme for the region, whereby women looking to work abroad are informed about the realities of migration, the risk of violence and told about ways to protect themselves in the destination countries. And, she said, women's rights organisations in Egypt, Jordan and Morocco have developed the Arab region's first model law on female trafficking. She ended her speech by pledging 'the full commitment of UN Women to provide strong support to end human trafficking and all forms of violence against women and girls.'  |
| Posted: 15 May 2013 04:49 AM PDT
In the absence of a clear manifesto, we tried to establish UKIP’s position on some of the issues affecting women in the UK. As WVoN reported in the run-up to the recent county council elections, UKIP are often uncharacteristically quiet when it comes to many real world issues, and this is certainly the case when it comes to those pertaining to women. The same cannot be said, however, for its members. They have expressed not just discriminatory, but downright vitriolic anti-women ideas in the past. Geoffrey Clark, a UKIP candidate later suspended by the party, considered the compulsory abortion of a foetus detected with Downs Syndrome or Spina Bifida a viable way of reducing the current budget deficit. In an interview with BBC1's Politics Show in 2010, UKIP's leader Nigel Farage said that his party was calling for a ban on the "covering of the face in public places and public building", describing the veil as "a symbol of something that is used to oppress women, it is a symbol of an increasingly divided Britain." UKIP prides itself on its councillors being free to govern independent of 'party diktats' or having to toe the party line, and stresses that individual’s opinions should be viewed as such and not extrapolated as indicative of party ideologies. Although in the absence of anything else, it is certainly hard not to. But more than that, with the party's youth leader and a prospective parliamentary candidate claiming they were forced out after ‘breaking from party policy’ and publicly supporting gay marriage, the sceptics among you would be forgiven for thinking that UKIP's apparent abandonment of the 'whip' is little more than a cynical vote grabber which taps into the country's current political apathy. So while support for women is notable by its absence in their policies, anti-women sentiment is arguably present in the political actions of those UKIP parliamentarians who have been elected. When the European Parliament brought a resolution calling on all member states to ban female genital mutilation and prosecute all those convicted of carrying it out, the resolution was passed by 545 votes to 13. Not one of the seven UKIP MEPs, however, voted in favour of the motion – and one of those nay sayers was Nigel Farage. As the UKIP website makes clear, their electoral manifestos are produced in response to the particular issues faced by the people at the time of an election. So at the moment, you can only scrutinise their latest -'Common Sense Politics' – relating to eight areas, including same-sex marriage, immigration and fishing. Included in these ‘common sense’ policies, UKIP pledges a commitment to small and medium sized businesses (SME) by setting out that it will 'repeal [the] damaging regulation' that emanates from the European Union (EU). One example of the 'excessive' regulation that the party strives to overturn is the 'burden' of statutory maternity pay and parental leave, which it describes as both 'disproportionately damaging' and 'ruinous'. It proposes, instead, that parental leave should be discretionary. This will result, it suggests, in an SME either having to 'offer young women higher salaries than other businesses which offer a long leave period or they will simply have to recruit from a smaller pool of potential employees'. Read: Men. But were employers to limit those they sought to employ based on their gender, they would be 'simply' breaking the current Sex Discrimination law. Unless they plan to repeal that as well. This is not the first time that UKIP has raised the issue of maternity pay. When Godfrey Bloom, UKIP's spokesperson on economic affairs and women's issues, was interviewed in 2004, he made his opinion on the issue clear. "Regulation in protection of women is all well and good in academic and government circles,” he said. “If you're a small business, you'd be a lunatic to hire a woman of child bearing age." Labour MEP Glenys Kinnock was not alone with the sentiment when she said: "We always knew they [UKIP] were Neanderthal, but this guy is really outrageous." However, when asked to defend his comments in a later interview, he claimed he had been quoted out of context, before continuing: "…no self-respecting small businessman with a brain in the right place would ever employ a lady of child-bearing age. "That isn't politically correct, is it, but it's a fact of life. “The more women's rights you have, it's actually a bar to their employment." Women's rights are to blame then for the under-representation of women on boards, the proliferation of women forced to work in low paid, unskilled part-time jobs, and the gender pay gap? Not according to another former UKIP candidate. He says it is women themselves. Speaking at the recent business select committee on the issue of implementing quotas for women in the boardroom, Steve Moxon said: "There's no surprise that women have difficulty in the work place, not only do they have difficulty but they don't want to be there in the first place!" Grounding his argument in biological theory, Moxon claimed, “Not only is the nature of the workplace structure in accord with male sociality and at odds with that of the female, but competitiveness per se is inimical to how women behave in the presence of the opposite sex: whereas men actually become more competitive as part of their displaying to women; women actually back away from being competitive because this compromises their displaying to men the attributes that confer female mate-value.” Moxon was dropped by UKIP in the run-up to the recent elections. Not for his misogynistic and biologically deterministic arguments, but because he expressed sympathy with Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Breivik and described the claims against Jimmy Savile as "hysteria". A spokesperson for the business committee claimed Moxon had been invited so that "a broad range of opinions" could be heard. Laura Bates, of the Everyday Sexism Project, said, "It's concerning they should be seeking out the view of someone who has openly expressed these opinions and demonstrated that he is prejudiced against women as a gender." A similar accusation of gender prejudice was also made about Farage by UKIP's last remaining female MEP before she defected to the Conservative party in February this year. Speaking to the BBC before her move, Marta Andreasen claimed that Farage "did not like women". "He doesn't try to involve professional women in positions of responsibility in the party. “He thinks women should be in the kitchen or in the bedroom." In the absence of a clear manifesto, is it too much to infer that UKIP has a woman problem? I'll leave that up to you.  |
| Lap dancing licence granted in Inverness Posted: 15 May 2013 01:15 AM PDT
The Women's Support Project is disappointed to hear that a licence has been granted for a lap dancing venue in Inverness. Lap dancing is recognised as a form of violence against women, as highlighted in the Scottish Government national approach in "Safer Lives Changed Lives." The decision by the Licensing Board highlights the difficulties Boards face in meeting their requirements under the Equality Act. The current licensing system makes no allowance for concerns around the impact it has on women and on gender equality. As shown in this instance. Boards find they have no grounds for refusing such applications and must grant them, despite concerns around violence against women. The decision by the Licensing Board highlights the need for a new category of license for such venues – an "Adult Entertainment Licence" which would allow permit more effective regulation. Linda Thompson, Women's Support Project development officer, said, " As ever our concern lies with the potential for exploitation for women. “We would like to commend the Highland Violence Against Women partnership for bringing this to the public's attention. “We know that many people feel very strongly that this form of sexual exploitation is present on our High Streets and feel powerless to take action and have their voices heard. “We urge everyone concerned to write to their MSP and to Kenny MacAskill, Justice Secretary, to demand effective regulations." To find and contact your MSP, click here. To contact Kenny MacAskill, click here.  |
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