Women's Views on News |
- Why We Need Woman vs The State (UK)
- Where are the women journalists over 50?
- England crash out of Euros at group stage
- Stigma, sex work and safety
- The backlash against misogyny
| Why We Need Woman vs The State (UK) Posted: 30 Jul 2013 09:15 AM PDT
As news spreads of how huge outsourcing companies like G4S are failing to deliver on public service contracts, a new project aims to tell the human story behind the headlines. In the last few weeks, accounts of the outsourcing giant G4S’s flailing track record to deliver on public service contracts have been exploding across our newspapers, blogs and screens. Female asylum seekers evicted because firms contracted by G4S fail to pay rent. A G4S guard involved in the fatal restraining of a 15 year-old gets promoted and ‘secretly’ applies to open a G4S private children’s home. Rape Crisis concerned about contracts awarded to G4S to work with rape victims in Sexual Assault Referral Centres (SARCs). Unfortunately, these are but some of the many stories highlighting the multiple failures of G4S and other corporate giants to deliver on their promises to UK taxpayers. So when I was asked recently by UK social enterprise Kazuri to co-edit a new book seeking to tell the stories of women failed by privately-run public services, I didn’t hesitate to get involved. Woman vs The State (UK) highlights the stories behind the headlines, stories of women failed by the very systems that promised to protect them. Stories of women like Anna B, a Nigerian woman trafficked into the UK as a sex slave who fled her captors to seek asylum in 2010. Anna and her young son were forced to move six times in six months as a result of the failure of a G4S subcontractor to pay their rent, electricity and utility bills. She told the Guardian recently, “A lot of people are going through the same thing but they are scared to speak up. It’s not right to treat people this way but no one listens to you if you are an asylum seeker.” The director of the project and founder of housing social enterprise Kazuri, Farah Damji, believes it is vital to reveal the stories of women who have been re-traumatised as a direct result of the actions of huge corporations like G4S and others. “The health and wellbeing of women like Anna are being sold for private profit,” says Damji. “The increasing procurement of public services from the private sector is, in many cases, not only failing to protect traumatised and vulnerable women from further farm, but also frequently inflicting further trauma upon victims, survivors and their loved ones.” Damji is now asking women’s organisations across the UK to come forward with their stories of women who have experienced such failures in the criminal justice system, exile, secure hospitals, domestic violence shelters and sexual assault referral centres (SARCs). These stories will be collected into a book, with individual stories presented anonymously in order to protect the identities and to prevent further distress to those involved. The Woman vs The State book will include a foreword from head of the Criminal Bar Association Michael Turner QC, and will be published by independent publisher Off Press. It will form part of the evidence base for a broader campaign calling for a formal public inquiry into the procurement, commissioning and monitoring of public services by large private sector companies, to be launched in the House of Lords in November. “G4s was awarded a contract to provide social housing to asylum seekers, though it had no previous experience of doing so,” said Damji. “Given the repeated failings of G4S in delivering on its contracts – even those related to their core business of security, like the Olympics – I simply do not believe that that this is a company in whose ‘care’ vulnerable people are safe.” If you have a story to share with the Woman vs State (UK) project, get in touch for more information, or go to our website.  |
| Where are the women journalists over 50? Posted: 30 Jul 2013 08:09 AM PDT Harriet Harman has been hard at work since heading up the Labour party's Commission on Older Women, established last year. The commission was set up to focus on three key areas – older women in the workplace, older women and their caring responsibilities and older women in the media and public life. One of her headline inquiries, carried out just a few months ago, sought to establish how many women over the age of 50 were employed by the country's broadcasters. The results were shameful. Less than one in five presenters over the age of fifty employed by the country's major broadcasting organisations was a woman. Overall, women account for 48 per cent of on-screen presenters under the age of fifty, but only 18 per cent of on-screen presenters over the age of 50. The percentage of women over fifty, when considered as a proportion of the entire onscreen workforce, both men and women of any age, was a microscopic five per cent. It was a story that was written about in newspapers big and small across the country, indignant that something had to be done. Well, now the deputy leader of the Labour party has taken on print journalism, writing to the editors of Britain’s 16 national newspapers and also the Evening Standard to establish the same data – how many women aged over 50 they employ. Her letter contains fifteen questions to editors which aim to gather data not just on female employees over fifty, but on female employees in general. Strangely, however, the newspaper coverage of this story has been practically non-existent. Should we be taking this as a bad sign? The Guardian seems to be the only publication to report the story in any detail – one can only assume that their figures are going to be somewhat equitable. But that, it seems, is that. With the exception of a short and unsurprisingly scathing piece in the Spectator by Rod Liddle, more of which later. In Harman's letter to editors, she points out that a 'balanced team', which would include older women, was needed to ensure balanced reporting. She said, "I’m writing to national newspaper editors to ask them to be open about the number of older women working in UK newspapers. "We see the world through news and comment in our newspapers so a balanced team which includes older women is needed to report the world as they see it. “Equality is not just important in principle – it is important for the quality of newspaper reporting and comment.” In a separate piece in the Guardian, Polly Toynbee pointed out that, when it comes to Fleet Street, 80 per cent of newspapers are owned by a handful of "obnoxious moguls with nasty agendas – 40 per cent owned by Murdoch, the rest by Richard Desmond, the Barclay Brothers and Viscount Rothermere of the Mail…" Unsurprisingly, she says that she will "be watching the outcome of the Fleet Street leg of Harman’s commission with slightly less than bated breath," another sign, perhaps, that the results of Harriet's inquiry will not make for happy reading. The only other mention of the print inquiry I could find was in the aforementioned Spectator magazine. Referred to as Harriet Harperson by Rod Little… sorry Liddle (quid pro quo Rod, quid pro quo), she seems to have got right on his wick with all her feminist bunkum. He counters Harman's campaign with a call to examine Labour's own employment practices when it comes to women and then goes on to bemoan the fact that Harman has also been in the news this week, supporting a Tour de France for, as he says, 'wimmin.' He says, and I quote, "Why the apartheid? Surely the Tour de France proper should be open to women too? They'd just about be finishing now." That about sums up his view on gender equality. Shame, though, that the only other media comment on the newspaper inquiry comes from someone only too happy to ridicule and mock women. Perhaps the impact of these investigations will become clear as time goes on. But God knows they are needed. As Polly Toynbee says, "a generation of women is being bundled out of jobs at an alarming rate, dumped into low-paid, part-time slots. "Since 2010 there has been a 30 per cent increase in unemployment among women in their 50s, compared to a general increase of 5 per cent. “If they keep their jobs, they are paid on average a fifth less than men. “Most women over 50 are part-timers though nearly half want full-time jobs, unable to save for decent pensions. "They are ordered by government to work until 67, but then thrown out of good jobs, with the over-50s staying on the dole for longest." Bleak, I know. At the time when the Commission for Older Women was established, Harriet Harman said of women over 50: "These women are angry about being regarded as 'past it' – overlooked for responsibility and promotion but prioritised for redundancy. They are caring for grandchildren whilst also feeling responsible for their elderly parents. "It is time public policy caught up to properly consider the lives of women in their fifties and sixties, and to better reflect their experiences and expectations." But how long is this going to take? Generations of women over 50 have been all but invisible in the workplace. It will be an unforgivable waste of experience and talent if this trend is allowed to continue.  |
| England crash out of Euros at group stage Posted: 30 Jul 2013 03:00 AM PDT
A couple of weeks ago I was lauding the launch of Kick off Your Career, the new initiative to get women involved in all aspects of football. I cooed over the glossy brochure, the high profile unveiling by the Football Association (FA) and the Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation(WSFF), and the super-positive emphasis on straplines such as "it's your sport too." It is, therefore, particularly hard for me this week to have to focus on the all-too-obvious inadequacies of the current English women's game, as embodied by the team's performances recently at the European Championships. I think you'll find I said it here first, and I apologise for quoting myself but: "If they get out of the group, they surely have a chance, but at the moment, this is all we can hope for." Well, they didn't. And how. Three abject performances against two mediocre teams and one very good one saw England record their worst tournament result since 2001. They finished bottom of group C with one point, and that one point was gained through a last minute equaliser against Russia. And I hate to say it, but, in truth, they were lucky to get that. As a PR exercise for women's football in this country it has been a disaster. There is no doubt that the media was "bigging up" the team's chances; the BBC committed plenty of radio and television air time to cover the tournament. It was supposed to be a second massive summer of sport to rival last year's Olympics. There have already been notable performances this summer; Andy Murray at Wimbledon, Chris Froome at the Tour de France and England's men's cricketers walloping the Aussies (so far) in the Ashes, with the athletics World Championships and women's Ashes still to come. The only disappointments have been in football. The men's Under-21 side failed to win a game in the Under-21 European Championship, as did the Under-20s in their World Cup both earlier this summer. So should we have been expecting any more from the women? A huge sum – £105 million – was spent on the new St George's Park ‘centre of excellence’ in Burton upon Trent, opened after much argument and delay in October 2012. It is home to the FA's educational department, FA Learning. It provides a base for all 24 England teams, from the senior sides to the junior boys' and girls' sides. And one of its key roles it to deliver courses to prospective coaches. The chairman of St George's Park, David Sheepshanks, told the BBC on its opening: "The teachers of the game have the defining influence. We are investing in the teachers so that we can get ahead of what they are doing in France and Spain. "Really it is the investment in coaches that is crucial and from 2020 onwards we will have winning England teams." So there it is, 2020 is the big goal. But we're already in 2013, and the gulf seems to be widening rather than closing. The lack of coaches is something I have written about, not only in women's football, but in women's sport generally. It is something the new director of elite development at the FA, Dan Ashworth, has recognised. “I certainly think it’s important we make sure that women have the same opportunities on coach education courses and with these new jobs that are coming up. It’s healthy and important that there are women’s role models working within the women’s game." Not that I'm saying only women can coach women, but it would be nice to think there were several candidates waiting in the wings if Powell ever does quit. But to go back to the Euros: trying to be positive, this tournament was always going to be a watershed moment for the England set-up. Several of the players are coming to the end of their international careers. Coach Hope Powell was obviously hoping it would be a fond farewell to the likes of Kelly Smith, Fara Williams, Rachel Yankee and perhaps even Casey Stoney, but for some it was clearly a tournament too far. It is thought that Powell herself may be "bumped upstairs" to the newly created post of Director of Elite Women's Football at the FA. The frustrating thing, and this is what I really don't understand, is that Powell took youngsters with her to the championship. She took Gemma Bonner and Lucy Bronze as defensive cover but they didn't get a look in. The defence she did play looked creaky, at best. Steph Houghton was clearly unfit, as was the captain. Without Rachel Unitt marshalling the back four they looked disorganised and slow. Aluko and Duggan aside, the front players looked clueless, devoid of inspiration and, again, incredibly slow and ponderous. It was far too late when Powell brought on Toni Duggan against France. She looked cool and fast, but was not given enough time to show her class. Nor could she do it all on her own. WSL top scorer Natasha Dowie wasn't even in the squad. But even if she had been, she probably couldn't have turned it round, as multiple instances of poor defending had already cost us. The most worrying aspect for me was the tactical naivety and inflexibility shown by England and, I'm afraid, blame for this must lie at Hope Powell's door: she has played the same system for 15 years and while other countries have moved on, England have been treading water. TV pundit Michael Gray called the England performance against France "embarrassing". While I wouldn't go that far, I would say that England were so far behind France in terms of speed, agility, fitness and finesse it was scary. In an interview with BBC television on 21 July, Powell was disappointingly unrepentant. When asked why she didn't make changes when the established team obviously wasn't working, she said she didn't think the young players were ready. So why take them to Sweden in the first place? Why have them there just to warm the bench? As Geoff Boycott always says (kill me now, I'm starting to quote the great Sir Geoff), "if you're good enough, you're old enough." And I suppose that's the point. When Powell says "they weren't ready" is she really saying, "they're not good enough"? And if she is, that opens up a whole new can of worms. If Powell thought she didn't have sufficient players good enough to make up a full tournament squad, what does that say about the state of the women's game in this country? France made changes for the last group game against England. They had already qualified and had nothing to play for. And yet the replacement players were just as good as the first team. They were keen, they were fast and they were skilful. The idea of strength in depth is a cliché, but no less true for that, and is the key to any sporting side winning anything. The French training system is very different from ours. Eleven of the squad play for the same side in France, Olympic Lyon, and get to train together six times a week. Players from English teams can be sometimes lucky to train twice a week. While I'm not sure that having such a large number of players playing for the same team is necessarily a good thing, there can be no doubt that the levels of professionalism and commitment are impressive. The results since England's exit have also shown that there are fine lines between victory and defeat in tournament football. Neither France nor Sweden, by a large margin the best teams in the group stage, will contest the final. Both were defeated in close, tense matches. This makes it harder to judge exactly how far England have slipped. I am as keen as anyone to give the new St George's Park facilities, the time and money invested in the women's game and the improved media coverage time to work, but I cannot help thinking that 2020 is approaching fast and we have a long way to go. Next up for England's women is the long process of trying to qualify for the 2015 World Cup in Canada. Their first game is against Belarus on 21 September at Dean Court, Bournemouth. I just wonder how many of the 2013 Euros squad, and indeed if coach Hope Powell, will be there to see it.  |
| Posted: 30 Jul 2013 01:30 AM PDT
As reported last week on this site, on 19 July an International Day of Protest was held in reaction to the murders of Dora Ozer and Petite Jasmine. On 21 July, just two days after these protests, Tracy Connelly was found murdered in the St Kilda area of Melbourne, Australia. These women, separated by thousands of miles, and with undoubtedly very different experiences and lives, held one important thing in common. And no, this was not only the fact that they were sex workers – although all three were – but that their lives, their deaths, and the way both were represented, held the unjust taints of stigma, prejudice and marginalisation. In the case of Dora Ozer, a trans woman, this was compounded and amplified by the discrimination she suffered living in Turkey, a country which holds the second highest worldwide level of hate crime against trans people. The message from 19 July was that the stigmatisation of sex workers, largely but not only through criminalisation, increases their vulnerability to violence and decreases the chances of society really, truly, caring about their lives. The message was that stigma kills. Stigma means that in the UK a woman engaged in sex work is 12 times more likely to be murdered than the rest of the population. Stigma means that in the UK, since 1990, there have been at least 136 sex worker murders. Stigma means that rape, violence and assault are endemic, with well over half of UK street sex workers subject to rape or violent assault. These shocking figures should sit at the masthead of campaigns concerning violence against women, though they rarely do. In fact stopping structural violence against a particular and marginalised group, which is what this is, should be at the forefront of any human rights campaign. It should, at the very least, have formed part of last years' United Nations Commission on the Status of Women outcome document, the very document in which 'all references to sex workers were dropped'. UK feminism and activism is currently, and quite rightly, deeply concerned with and attuned to our societal tendency to 'victim-blame'. Recent campaigns have served to highlight the cultural saturation of victim-blaming in cases of violence against women: the erroneous assumption that a woman's actions can render her culpable in acts of violence perpetrated against her. These assumptions lead to the abhorrent notion that the length of a woman's skirt dictates her culpability in rape cases; that if a woman 'answers back' she was implicitly asking for violence; that if you drink too much alcohol on a night out you can't really complain if someone you know and trust violates that trust in the most horrific way possible. In the case of sex work, these victim-blaming tendencies are, arguably, even further normalised into our culture, into our lexicon, and etched into our prejudices. The prevalent fallacy that you cannot rape a sex worker is probably one of the reasons sex workers rarely, if ever, report such crimes to the police. ‘Silence on Violence’ a 2012 report by London Assembly member Andrew Boff revealed that sex workers also fear being criminalised themselves and do not feel anything would come of their complaints. Many in our society find the idea of selling sex abhorrent, and displace this abhorrence onto those engaged in sex work. And so we find that human life, and human dignity, are measured with adherence to an ideology that appraises the 'worthiness' of a victim in accordance with the social palatability of their acts. When we learn that a British police officer described murdered sex workers as 'shite, murdered by shite, who gives a shite?', or that an Indianapolis police officer recently likened sex workers to cockroaches, we can see how a group of often already isolated and marginalised people are told, by inference, that their lives matter less; that what they do, and by common conflation who they are, is morally repugnant to us. The recent acquittal of Ezekiel Gilbert, who shot and killed Leonora Frago, a sex worker who refused to have sex with him, says much about how we view women’s' bodies and how we objectify – in the most literal sense – and dehumanise those who sell sex. The jury agreed with Gilbert's defence that he used deadly force on Frago while 'attempting to retrieve property stolen at night' – perfectly justified under Texan law. In some cases it is as if the fiscal element has blinded us to the universal issues of bodily autonomy and consent. Sex work shifts our perception, horribly skewing the terms of reference, so that we make judgements about who can and cannot be a victim based on logic or reasoning that belongs with contract law, not human bodies. When this country's media consistently and insistently refers to murdered women as nameless, anonymous, 'prostitutes' or, even worse, as 'vice girls' and propagates the rhetoric of cleansing when talking of police operations (as if the Yorkshire Ripper's reference to 'just cleaning up the streets' wasn't enough to eliminate any association with the cleaning metaphor) the public, in turn, retain their prerogative to make value-judgements about people and situations they know and understand little about. The media myth that sex workers are preyed upon and murdered because no one will really miss them is patently untrue. If you look behind the othering of these women, and the media erasure of their importance as human beings, you will see that they were loved by many. Witness the families who grieved over the victims of the 'Craigslist Killer'; the outpouring of grief and anger for Jasmine and Dora; the flowers and balloons tied to a gate near to where Tracy Connelly lived and died. But then we live by the othering creed; the creed of 'that which is not me', for it's far easier to pretend someone doesn't exist in the world the way you do than to attempt the difficult task of unpacking your own prejudices. The UK Ugly Mugs Scheme, which has been operating nationally since 2012, allows sex workers to make anonymous reports of crimes against them, which can be used to warn other sex workers in the form of 'alerts', and for police intelligence and information sharing. The scheme circulates alerts for sex workers in an effort to increase safety and helps to promote good practice among local police forces and local schemes, formalising important relationships and increasing confidence. The Ugly Mugs Scheme is also important for the message it sends: someone cares if you were raped. Someone is outraged that eggs were thrown at you and whoreaphobic epithets viciously shouted in your face. Someone is aware of the vulnerability and isolation of lone workers. Someone looks at you long enough to notice the bruises, and when they do notice, they do not file them away under the same branch of comprehension that they would the calloused hands of a carpenter, or the impact-atrophied knees of a runner. The rape of a sex worker is rape. There is no mitigation for this; none at all. Sex workers do not feel less pain and are not armour-plated against trauma. No one gets to decide who is more worthy of victim status based on an opinion of what that person does, nor because of the egregious notion that if you have sex for money you've got to expect people to steal that sex every once in a while. Occupational injuries are things you would expect, but to expect and accept the brutalisation of another human being speaks devastating volumes about just how appalling the dominant perception of sex workers is. I am concerned with a person's human right to safety, their human right not to be harmed, and more acutely for this harm not to be implicitly sanctioned because we'd rather look the other way. I believe that this is an important, necessary conversation. I believe this because I believe in social justice, and in universal human dignity. And because I know that sex workers are so often denied both.  |
| Posted: 30 Jul 2013 01:00 AM PDT
After announcing the success of her campaign to get the Bank of England to keep a picture of a woman on British banknotes, campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez, co-founder of The Women’s Room, was sent hundreds of rape and death threats on Twitter. A petition was then set up to get Twitter to improve its reporting mechanism (67,000 signatures and counting). And the conversation about the abuse that women suffer when daring to have a voice online exploded, ironically enough, on Twitter. The issue went mainstream, and over the weekend Criado-Perez was interviewed by Sky News, Channel 4, Radio 5, and last night she was featured briefly on BBC Newsnight. The story was also picked up by the Independent, the Guardian, the Express and the Daily Mail. In short, the issue of the online abuse that women routinely suffer when daring to voice their opinions online has finally made it into the public eye. And a man has been arrested over the online abuse. Such misogynistic abuse has been going on for a long, long time, and up until very recently, any complaints have been dismissed as women over-reacting. This latest backlash against the routine misogyny practised in the public sphere against women builds on the back of several recent campaigns. Campaigns including: #FBrape, which resulted in Facebook having to revamp its policy of ignoring gender-based hate speech (@womenactmedia); Everyday Sexism, which catalogues instances of sexism experienced by women on a daily basis (@EverydaySexism); HollabackLDN which, in conduction with the London Transport officials TfL and the British Transport Police, has lead to the launch of a campaign to address the harassment women face on London’s public transport (@hollabackLDN); Everyday Victim Blaming, which charts overt victim-blaming tones in news reports (@EVB_Now); No More Page 3 which aims to get the Sun to finally join the 21st Century and stop objectifying women’s breasts in a national newspaper (@NoMorePage3) and Lose the Lads Mags, which aims to stop the displaying of page 3-style front cover images in high street shops (@UK_Feminista @ObjectUpdate). It is heartening that women are fighting back against misogyny and not just the well-known faces behind the campaigns – but all the women and men who make their voices heard every time a corporation, an organisation or an individual chooses to try and silence women’s voices. It is also heartening that thousands of people all over the country are quietly volunteering to try and stem the tide of damage done to women as a result of this sickening acceptance of cultural misogyny. Heartening that we have rape crisis centres, domestic abuse organisations, sex worker programmes, free debt advice centres, mental health helplines, child abuse counsellors, the LGBTQIA groups, the racial harassment and discrimination services, the ageism organisations, reproductive health groups, and the disability champions. So – thank you.  |
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