Women's Views on News |
- What is it with violence against women?
- Review: Blue Stockings, by Jessica Swale
- The reality of welfare
| What is it with violence against women? Posted: 25 Sep 2013 08:12 AM PDT
A UN report on men and violence has revealed that sexual violence against women is prevalent in the Asia Pacific region, with nearly half of men interviewed admitting to using some form of sexual or physical violence against a female partner. The report, entitled "Why Do Some Men Use Violence Against Women and How Can We Prevent It?" and released on 10 September, is based on more than 10,000 interviews with men from the Asia-Pacific region aged between 18 and 49 years old, and almost 25 per cent admitted that they had raped a woman. Close to 75 per cent did not anticipate any legal consequences for the rapes. The study was conducted in Bangladesh, China, Cambodia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Papua New Guinea. The lowest rates were in Bangladesh and the highest in Papua New Guinea. A large majority of sexual violence in these countries does not result in legal consequences because of severe underreporting as well as problems with the respective legal systems. Marital rape is either legal, as in the cases of Cambodia, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh, or illegal but the law is not strictly enforced, as in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. Hence, the report argues that "Impunity remains a serious issue in the region." It also says that "the absence of legal sanction is important because it reinforces the socialization that a woman's body belongs to her husband upon marriage." The UN based their study on the hypothesis that violence against women results from unequal gender relations and "patriarchal beliefs, institutions and systems.” Dr Emma Fulu, one of the authors, said: “I think this study reaffirms perhaps what we have known by interviewing women in the past.” “What’s new about this study," she says, "is that it tells us for the first time, by speaking to men, about what some of the underlying causes are of that violence.” The study reveals strong connections between rape and sexual entitlement. The most common explanation male interviewees who had perpetrated rape offered was a belief that a man has the right to sex with a woman regardless of consent. Of the male interviewees 87 per cent believed that to be a man you need to be tough, and those who used violence against an intimate partner were also more likely to also control their partner's behaviour and appearance. The story of violence against women in the UK charts female victims rather than male perpetrators. A January 2013 report released by the UK’s Ministry of Justice, the Office for National Statistics and the Home Office revealed that on average about 85,000 women are raped in England and Wales each year. And according to the report, "An Overview of Sexual Offending in England and Wales," over 400,000 women are sexually assaulted every year and 1 in 5 women between the ages of 16 and 59 have experienced some kind of sexual violence since the age of 16. Programmes to end violence against women in recent years have focused upon male awareness of what constitutes sexual violence rather than placing the burden of responsibility on women to protect themselves. In March 2012 the UK Home Office launched a provocative campaign about rape aimed at teenagers. And the London Borough of Lambeth has developed a "Real Men Know the Difference" advertisement. Organisations such as Men Can Stop Rape, a US-based programme, offers institutions awareness workshops to encourage men to "become role models for healthy masculinity in their communities." In Indonesia, Nur Hasyim has established a pro-feminist men's movement called Alliansi Laki-Laki Baru (New Men Alliance) to help promote alternative ways of being a man. He says, "the seeds for change have been planted, both at a policy and grassroots level." "Around the country I now run workshops for men who have perpetrated violence where they are invited to reflect on the effect violence has on their families, their wives, their children and themselves." “Once men understand the true consequences of their attitudes and behaviour, they feel stronger, more respected." In the meantime the UN report is not without its detractors. Stuart Brown in The Guardian argued that the study's findings do not fairly represent the region or the individual countries because the interviewees are not appropriately sampled. He also argues that the questions used in the interviews were not consistent across the countries and the differences in wording negatively impacted the findings. However, the report’s authors say it is not intended to be an authoritative statistical overview of rape in these six countries or of the Asia-Pacific region.  |
| Review: Blue Stockings, by Jessica Swale Posted: 25 Sep 2013 04:07 AM PDT
It is Girton College Cambridge 1896 and its principal Elizabeth Welsh (Gabrielle Lloyd ) is determined that her small group of female students will be allowed to graduate at the end of their studies. Welsh had sacrificed everything to establish the college and provide an education for women. She has had to beg lecturers to teach them. Some, like Mr Banks (Fergal McElheron), are happy to help. The play opens with him enthusiastically leading a session on the mechanics of the bicycle, but we soon learn what the young women are up against when one, Tess Moffatt (Ellie Piercy) is thrown out of a lecture by the misogynist Professor Maudsley (Edward Peel) for daring to argue that hysteria was not caused by the womb floating around the body. It may be hard to believe now, but that is what medics believed then. They also believed that education, or the exercise of the brain, harmed a woman's ability to perform other functions, like childbirth. Even Queen Victoria subscribed to this view. Women who pursued an education were effectively assigning themselves to a life of spinsterhood and financial hardship – for who would employ an educated woman? The men will graduate, but the women will leave empty handed, with nothing but the stigma of being a 'blue stocking'- an unnatural, educated woman. The young women grapple with these dilemmas as they struggle to motivate themselves to finish their studies and match the grades of their male counterparts. Tess thinks she has found a kindred spirit when she falls for Ralph, until he bows to peer pressure and drops her for a student at the less political Newnham College. The women have their supporters, but they too have to make sacrifices; Mr Blake is forced to turn down a fellowship as it would mean he was no longer able to teach the women. Other women lend their support. The women are not supposed to leave their quarters at night, but a maid smuggles Tess out through the kitchen so she can meet her sweetheart. And the audience broke into spontaneous applause as a female shop assistant tells a particularly offensive group of male students to get out of her shop. There are arguments among the women about tactics. Miss Walsh wants to operate by stealth, focusing on the fight for degrees, but her colleague Miss Blake (Sarah MacRae) wants to link the struggle for women's education to the wider suffragist movement. Blue Stockings is the first play written by Jessica Swale, artistic director of the Red Handed Theatre Company. In 2010 she directed Bedlam, the first play by a female playwright – Nell Leyshon – to be staged at Shakespeare's Globe. Swale believes the Girton women's struggle for education is relevant today. She began researching Blue Stockings when Malala Yousafzai was shot for standing up for girls' education in Kashmir – and has dedicated Blue Stockings to her. Swale also recognises that the right to higher education is under threat nearer to home. In the programme Swale writes: "Recently a young friend was devastated when he realised that university was no longer a feasible option because of the fee increases. "After so many years fighting for access to higher education, how are we once again in a position where able, passionate students don't have access to higher education?" Blue Stockings is on at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, London, until 11 October.  |
| Posted: 25 Sep 2013 01:09 AM PDT
We all know what it's like to live on benefits, whether we've ever had to do so or not. We've heard the tales, imbibed the rhetoric, grown fat on our daily diet of stereotypes and scaremongering. Mouthing the words as we shake our heads knowingly, we learn the language; the shirkers and the scroungers, the dependency and the cheats and the worklessness. You see the government, the media, and so common parlance, tells us all we need to know about the characteristics of benefit claimants in modern Britain. It's the perfectly manicured nails of the benefit cheat as she flicks through the channels on her flat-screen TV. It's the three generations, work-shy and feckless, crammed onto the sofa to stare listlessly at the Jeremy Kyle show Or maybe it's the behemoth of Broken Britain; the 'benefits mum' who has borne her twelve children with the sole purpose of obtaining a bankers' salary worth of benefits, each new life first envisaged as a name on her Child Tax letter, not something to care for or to love. Where the benefits debate may once have been about the efficacy, or place, of welfare it has now become mired in demonisation, seemingly concerned with increasing poverty and perpetuating a damaging image of stereotypes and spreading more and more misinformation. But at (long) last someone is looking at reality. 'Who Benefits?' is a new campaign brought together by five charities; Mind, Crisis, Gingerbread, Macmillan and The Children's Society, as a response to the negative perceptions of benefit claimants. Many other charities including Shelter, The Terrence Higgins Trust and the YMCA have also given their support to the campaign. Who Benefits? aims to represent the reality of benefit claimants' lives, and shift the focus back on to the real reasons people are struggling. The campaign's website says that “Who Benefits? aims to give a voice to the millions of us who have been supported by benefits at some point in our lives. “By sharing our stories we can show the reality of who needs help, why they need it and the difference that it makes”. All too often the media focuses on the supposed character flaws or traits that render a person 'reliant' or dependent' on benefits rather than on structural and societal reasons, such as low pay or the housing crisis. So, by using personal stories through their website and Twitter feed, Who Benefits? seeks to change our collective mindset. It aims to stop the monolithic conception so many of us have of the 'welfare dependent' and bring a reality sharply into focus; that we are all a sliver, a knife-edge, away from crisis: we are all just one problem away from needing the benefit system ourselves. Varied stories fill the Who Benefits? twitter feed, each reminding us of the reasons we need a benefit system, and giving prominence to the silent majority that the government would rather remained hidden: “I fled domestic abuse with 2 small children. Benefits got us on the road to help and safety” “I was an attack victim & my spine was fractured. I could not work. Without benefits I’d be lost” “Since my Dad left, my Mum has solely been responsible for all the bills & has struggled financially” "I had a stroke, then a heart attack. Benefits have made a fantastic difference to my wife and I” “I have Ovarian and Breast Cancer. W/o benefits I could not heat my house or buy food” But cases such as these don't create sensationalist headlines. They don't serve an agenda that seeks to cut back further and further into the meagre incomes of the worse off. These realities do not help to widen the deep fiscal and ideological divide already present in this country between the rich and the poor, a gap that is, economically speaking, the third largest in the developed world. Far better for this purpose is to push forward the anomalies, to drown out the facts with a divisive lexicon: To create a false dichotomy between the 'tax payers' and the 'benefit scroungers', when we all pay tax in various ways, and indeed the poorest in our society actually pay the most tax. To talk about the 'cheaters' versus the 'workers' and labour the point of 'fairness' in defiance of the reality that only 0.7 per cent , or £1 billion, of benefit claims are fraudulent compared to the £70 billion lost through tax evasion last year. To hide the fact that 53 per cent of benefit spending actually goes on pensions, and so the welfare bill is not swallowed up by some imaginary generation of alco-pop drinking, corner-loitering, work-shy under-25s. And if it ever needed debunking, large households receiving equally large amounts in benefits are exceedingly rare; 91 per cent of benefit-claiming households have three or fewer children. Women, as the Fawcett Society recently pointed out, rely more on benefits and tax credits than men, 'in particular due to their caring responsibilities and their relative economic inequality and poverty'. On average, one fifth of women's income is made up of welfare payments and tax credits compared to one tenth of men's, and one million more women than men claim Housing Benefit. These factors are coupled with the scarcity of jobs in the private sector for women, with the Guardian recently reporting that 73 of every 100 new jobs in the private sector go to men. The stigma of the single mother, of course, remains strong, but has been accentuated by the mythical figure of the benefits matriarch, presiding over her brood while claiming income support and getting weekly taxis to Tesco. More so than the stock photo of the lonesome male outside the job centre, the 'benefits mum' seems to have come to represent the ills of the welfare state to a certain portion of the poor-bashing media. The stories shared through the Who Benefits? campaign will hopefully go some way to separating fact from fiction, the reality from the agenda-serving myth. Reading the tweets, and the individual stories, should help to disseminate a view that benefit claimants are people, not caricatures, stereotypes or a months' worth of fodder for lazy Daily Mail columnists. People claim benefits for a myriad of reasons, some of which are relatively mundane, some are tragic. The individualisation of these reasons needs to continue, alongside a loud and repeated debunking of myths, as the only way to drown out the stigmatising language of oppression so many of us have unconsciously assimilated. This campaign asks who benefits? Rents are sky-high and wages stubbornly low, with the minimum wage now worth less in real terms than in 2004. Jobs are less secure and sick pay, if it exists, finite. People are unable – not unwilling – to work due to cancer, blindness, physical disability or mental health problems. So for many families, and individuals, they aren't 'benefits', they are a necessity.  |
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