Women's Views on News |
- Give help and support, not prison
- UK prison reforms failing women
- New DPP announced – and she’s a woman
- Women on the edge of time
- International Breastfeeding Week begins
| Give help and support, not prison Posted: 01 Aug 2013 06:39 AM PDT Guest post from Eaves Man Charitable Trust has been supporting Eaves' Poppy Project over the last two years through funding a specialist Prisons and Detention Centres Outreach Worker in addition to supporting other aspects of Poppy's work. They have kindly agreed to support us again this year. The specialist role is funding Man Charitable Trust is dedicated to helping female victims of trafficking who are being unfairly incarcerated in prison or detention centres and is the only role is its kind in England. This is an absolutely vital service. Victims of trafficking are often treated like criminals rather than victims of crime. All victims of trafficking should be afforded certain rights and be able to access support, not be held in prison. Funding from Man Charitable is vital in enabling Eaves to challenge these wrongful imprisonments and advocate for women's release, but it also goes further – we have been able to stop victims of trafficking being unlawfully deported back to their home countries where they could face further exploitation or re-trafficking This funding has allowed Eaves' Prisons and Detention Centres worker to: assess and identify trafficked women as victims of trafficking; advocate for the release of more than 30 women and prevent wrongful deportations. Hanna's story: Hanna was only 17 years old when she was referred to Eaves' Poppy Project by her solicitor. A couple of days later Stacy Ziebel, Eaves' prisons and detention centres worker went to visit Hanna at Yarl's Wood Detention Centre where she was being held for entering the UK with false documentation. Hanna was trafficked from East Africa by her stepfather to a Saudi Sheik for domestic servitude when she was just nine years old. She returned home years later at the age of 16 and was forced into marriage with an elderly man. After fleeing this forced marriage, she fell back in with her traffickers who brought her to Europe. Her traffickers sexually abused Hanna and forced her to do domestic work too. Hanna managed to escape from her traffickers with the help of someone who worked in the household and she fled to the UK for safety. She was arrested upon her arrival in the UK and despite only being 17 years old and a victim of trafficking she was detained in a centre for adults. Stacy went to assess Hanna and concluded that there were clear indicators that she was a victim of trafficking. It was immediately evident that not only was Hanna a very young and fragile looking 17 year old, she was also pregnant as a result of being raped by her traffickers. Hanna was facing almost immediate deportation and was so traumatised that she found it almost impossible to talk about her experiences of trafficking. Despite this, through fierce advocating to UK Borders Agency by Stacy, 48 hours later the deportation order was cancelled and Eaves obtained Hanna's release to safe accommodation. Eaves also successfully fought to have her recognised as a minor. Hanna gave birth in November 2012 and although she still has much to overcome, she is doing so in a supportive environment where she is safe and her needs are being met. Both the Young Women's Worker and the Family Reunification Workers at the Poppy Project work closely with Hanna to ensure her and her baby's needs are being met. She has also engaged in counselling and is studying English. Stacy Ziebel says: "It is almost impossible to say how many female victims of trafficking are being wrongly held in prisons and detention centres across England and Wales. “But given that I am the only specialist advocate for this group of women, and that the service is in great demand, I worry that there are many women who never receive the support to which they are entitled. “The UK needs to do more to ensure that women in these hard to reach circumstances are identified so they can receive this support. “Not only should this mean more training across the criminal justice system and ground staff, but that organisations like Eaves receive funding to ensure that no woman is being wrongly detained and to prohibit any unlawful deportations." Eaves’ Poppy Project was set up in 2003 to provide high-quality support, advocacy and accommodation to trafficked women; that is, women who have been brought into England or Wales to be exploited in some way. This could include but is not limited to sexual exploitation, labour exploitation, forced illicit activities and organ harvesting. For information about how to support their work, click here.  |
| UK prison reforms failing women Posted: 01 Aug 2013 06:06 AM PDT
In 2006, after six women died in the Styal prison in Cheshire, Baroness Jean Corston was commissioned to provide recommendations on ways to keep vulnerable women out of prison. She made 43 recommendations and called for 'radical change in the way we treat women throughout the whole of the criminal justice system, [including] not just those who offend but also those at risk of offending.' She called such change 'a woman-centred approach' that necessitated 'a fundamental re-thinking about the way in which services for vulnerable women are provided and accessed.' And six years later? On May 9 this year the government announced justice reforms which the Parliamentary Justice Select Committee called ‘unfortunately symptomatic of an approach within the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and National Offender Management Service (NOMS) that tends to deal with women offenders as an afterthought.’ An article in the Law Gazette says “six year after the Corston Report, which recommended that only the most serious female offenders be jailed, the [House of Commons justice] committee said that the women's prison population has not fallen sufficiently quickly and that more than half are serving ineffective short custodial sentences.” Called Transforming Rehabilitation, the government's plans have also been criticised for focusing on a payment-by-results privatisation of probation reforms at the expense of funding and of support for a network of women's centres. Announcing the new measures in Transforming Rehabilitation in May this year, the Ministry of Justice emphasised the inclusion of 'extended, targeted rehabilitation' for every offender leaving prison after sentences of two years or less. The Ministry also said, following extensive engagement 'with relevant stakeholders on meeting their [women's] needs,' that 'for the purposes of this piece of work we are focusing on other protected characteristics'. But in July the chair of the justice committee, Sir Alan Beith MP, introducing a report by the Justice Select Committee, said that "Helping vulnerable women break the cycles that lead to offending or reoffending is about recognising that women face very different hurdles from men in their journey towards a law-abiding life." The statistics tell the story. There are approximately 4,000 women and 80,000 men in prison. Women make up five per cent of the total prison population, and the vast majority of those women (80 per cent) committed a non-violent offence. Nearly half of female prisoners (48 per cent) surveyed by campaign group Soroptimist UK reported having committed offences to support someone else's drug use. More than half of women in prison report having suffered domestic violence, and one in three women in prison has experienced sexual abuse. More than 80 per cent of women in prison say that they suffer from a long-standing mental illness, compared to 32 per cent of the general female population. It is estimated that four out of ten women in prison are mothers, and in 2012, it was estimated that more than 17,000 children were separated from their mothers due to her imprisonment. And the reconviction rate for women serving sentences of less than 12 months is 62 per cent. All of which point to the fact that prison is ineffective for the majority of women convicted of a crime. The Justice Select Committee said in its report that 'Prison is an expensive and ineffective way of dealing with many women offenders who do not pose a significant risk of harm to public safety. 'We recommend a significant increase in the use of residential alternatives to custody as well as the maintenance of the network of women's centres, as these are likely to be more effective, and cheaper in the long-run, than short custodial sentences.' Campaign group Women in Prison responded to the Justice Committee's report by saying, 'As recommended by the committee, a radical shift is needed from custodial sentencing to community alternatives that place emphasis on rehabilitation and support women to tackle the root causes of their offending to lead a life away from crime. 'Therefore, community service programmes at local women's centres must be made widely available as a sentencing option to courts’. There are worries among campaigners that continued cuts to government funding, both centrally and locally, will adversely affect availability of women's centres in general and the volume and quality of their services, particularly as 'funding on women's community projects is not protected’. Baroness Corston's view on the current reforms is that policy on women's issues is "in danger of going into reverse" and said that the damage being done to women and their children is "incalculable." Justice minister Helen Grant said the government would respond to the report in due course.  |
| New DPP announced – and she’s a woman Posted: 01 Aug 2013 03:12 AM PDT
Last week the Crown Prosecution Service announced that Alison Saunders would be the new Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), and will take over from Keir Starmer in November. She will be the head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), responsible for deciding whether or not to prosecute people for crimes and what the charges should be. She is the second woman to hold the job. According to the Guardian, Saunders is one of the most experienced prosecutors in the country. She has worked on some of the most high-profile cases, such as the retrial of Stephen Lawrence's killers and the successful conviction of David Mulcahy, the 'railway rapist', who was convicted of a series of rapes and murders in the 1980s. In 2011 she and her staff kept the courts open day and night to prosecute suspects following the London riots. She was awarded a CBE in 2012. Saunders joined the CPS in 1986 when it was first formed after spending time advising underwriters at Lloyds of London, which she described as 'a bit boring'. She spent time at the CPS policy unit, where she developed expertise in child victims and child witnesses, as well as a stint at its Serious Crimes Unit which deals with offences like people trafficking and drug running. She is currently head of the Crown Prosecution Service in London. Saunders has strongly-held views about rape. In an interview for the Guardian last year she said she was frustrated by how many rape trials end in acquittals and said society was lagging behind the legal system when it came to its view of women. She and her colleagues have done a lot of work to challenge myths and stereotypes about rape within the CPS, but in an interview with the Guardian last year she acknowledged that there was still a lot of work to be done with juries. “We have had consultant psychiatrists to talk to us about things like – you cannot expect a rape victim to break down in tears, you cannot expect them to tell the story straight. “You can see how some members of the jury can come along with preconceived ideas. They might still subscribe to the myths and stereotypes that we have all had a go at busting," she said.  |
| Posted: 01 Aug 2013 02:15 AM PDT
Called Women on the Edge of Time, it promises futuristic “worlds free of sexism”. Tellingly, time-travel movies are absent from the programme. And as Anna Smith writes in the Guardian, 'From The Terminator to Back to the Future to Richard Curtis’s new film About Time, movies love time travel – but it’s strictly for men. In 2009 The Time Traveller’s Wife, Eric Bana played a Chicago librarian 'darting through time while his on-screen wife McAdams plodded on faithfully in the present' In Midnight in Paris. Owen Wilson 'got to party in the roaring 1920s every day of his holiday, while oblivious fiancee McAdams went sightseeing'. And now in Richard Curtis’s new film, About Time, once more Rachel McAdams stay home while her partner Domhnall Gleeson goes time-travelling in secret. And, continues Smith, from the Time Bandits in 1981 to the more recent Hot Tub Time Machine, sci-fi films have rarely allowed female characters to leave the present. 'When Marty McFly’s girlfriend tried to come along for the ride in Back to the Future II, she was hastily sedated by the Doc for “asking too many questions”. 'In their excellent adventures, Bill and Ted travelled to medieval times to meet some “babes” and the women were then permitted to time-travel – ‘but only with male characters, and purely to serve their needs’. This while other areas of sci-fi were making progress – take Sigourney Weaver beating her many-jawed foes in the Alien films. The film festival Women on the Edge of Time is on Friday and Saturday evening, 2-3 August, at The Horse Hospital, a progressive arts venue in London’ Bloomsbury providing an encompassing umbrella for the related media of film fashion, music and art. The inexhaustible and speculative realms of science fiction have traditionally and continue to be an effective and vital arena to play out the various potentials of feminist politics and ideologies, a platform to re-imagine and critique the current structures, norms and gender/identity constructs and lay bare the most fundamental and pervasive of injustices. On Friday evening from 6.30pm, Club Des Femmes is proudly hosting an evening of feminist future vision. What will the woman of tomorrow be like? Will technology govern our future? Or Nature? Or will we? This is the chance to share future visions by two of the world's most exciting women directors see Tilda Swinton four times over in Lynn Hershman-Leeson's Teknolust: a critique of a world where science controls our destiny, and Wanuri Kahiu's Pumzi: an encouragement to an eco-consciousness now before it's too late. And, you can help create the Club Des Femmes' Futurewoman. Working with filmmaker and artist Lisa Gornick, try a night of performative zine-making. Bring your future visions, utopian ideas, texts, images, visions and concepts and see published an amalgam of the night's findings of what Club Des Femmes women want for the future. It is, you see, time to make a plan. On Saturday they are showing two Austrian films. At 6.30pm 'Flaming Ears' from 1991, 'a vengeful comic book artist, a red rubber suit wearing alien and a pyromaniac performance artist play out a story of love and revenge in the lesbian populated future city of Ache'. And at 9pm, 'Invisible Adversaries' made in 1977: 'In the debris of a civilization in decline and the painful disintegration of a relationship Anna's grasp on reality is flagging rapidly. ‘Determined that extra-terrestrials are controlling the minds of those that surround her, increasing the violence and mobilizing destruction Anna's interior and material worlds collide with irrationality and paranoia. Simultaneously a sensitively reflexive film about art and being an artist and a radical essay on the self, the image and sexual politics.' For more information about this, click here. But back to time travel. There are mainstream exceptions, Smith admits, but astonishingly few, given the 500 or so time-travel movies. But this month does, as Smith points out, see the release of Teen Beach Movie, a Disney film pitched as the new High School Musical. Maia Mitchell plays Mack, a teen surfer magically transplanted – with her boyfriend – into a 1960s surf movie. And Mack scoffs at old surf movies, saying: “The girls never surf as well as the boys.” And her lesson to the unemancipated girls of the early 60s, says Smith, is simple: “Girls can do anything boys can do.”  |
| International Breastfeeding Week begins Posted: 01 Aug 2013 01:00 AM PDT
World Breastfeeding Week was first held in 1992 and it is now observed in over 120 countries with support from UNICEF and WHO, along with governments, organisations and individuals. The event is organised by the World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action (WABA) formed in 1991 to act on the Innocenti Declarations (1990 and 2005) and the Global Strategy for Infant and Young Child Feeding. WABA aims to "foster a strong and cohesive breastfeeding movement, which will act on the various international instruments to create an enabling environment for mothers, thus contributing to increasing optimal breastfeeding and infant and young child feeding practices." This year's theme is 'Breastfeeding support: close to mothers' and highlights breastfeeding peer counselling. In the UK the NHS Information Centre carries out an Infant Feeding Survey every five years. The last survey took place in 2010. The results were published in 2012. The survey found that 81 per cent of UK babies are breastfed at birth but that the number of women exclusively breastfeeding tailed off to just 1 per cent by 6 months. However, the figures do show that 34 per cent of mothers were still breastfeeding to some degree at that point. So, a large portion of mothers clearly wanted to breastfeed, but many find it becomes untenable. The WABA notes this sharp decline in breastfeeding a few weeks or months after birth and believes that this is the time when community support is essential. Gone are the days when we had a large, extended family around us to offer support and encouragement when, 6 weeks into their newborn’s life, mothers were just simply exhausted. Many women, especially those with their first baby, can feel isolated or anxious and, once the initial adrenalin and excitement of a new baby has drifted away, the realities of breastfeeding can begin to feel oppressive. It is at this point that support from a wide range of sources – health workers, lactation consultants, community leaders, other mothers, fathers and partners – can help. The peer counselling program, the WABA argues "is a cost effective and highly productive way to reach a larger number of mothers more frequently". By actively encouraging support from the community the hope is that they will enable more women to breastfeed for longer. With this focus in mind, Women's Views on News is looking at breastfeeding throughout the week. We hope to offer you a number of viewpoints and provide you with a little background and understanding into, what is for many mothers, a hugely emotional, significant and contentious issue.  |
| You are subscribed to email updates from Women's Views on News To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |