Women's Views on News |
- They call it the ‘cutting season’
- Help for breastfeeding working mums
- Jenny Jones wins an Olympic medal
- We need to talk about the UK media war on women
| They call it the ‘cutting season’ Posted: 11 Feb 2014 06:26 AM PST
Although it is illegal in the UK, it is still happening – 24,000 girls in the UK are currently at risk of female genital mutilation (FGM). People just don’t talk about it, doctors don’t check for it and teachers don’t teach it. FGM is child abuse. It forces girls into a future of pain from the moment they are cut. They face the risk of infertility, pain during urination, menstruation, childbirth and sexual intercourse. The pain doesn't go. It's a traumatic experience they have to live with every single day, physically and emotionally. That is why Fahma Mohamed started this campaign with The Guardian. ‘”I know of people who have been cut – anyone who knows girls from FGM affected communities will know girls who have been cut. “We were told Ofsted would be asking schools what they are doing to protect these girls from FGM, but it never happened. “Me and my classmates campaigned for our school to do more on FGM. Now all the girls at school know the risks of FGM and feel able to talk about it. “But this is one school. We need this to happen at every school in the country – so that no girl is missed. “We need to act now.” Many girls are sent away to be cut over the summer holidays. Some are cut at home. They call it the ‘cutting season’. If every headteacher was given the information they need to talk about FGM to students and parents we could reach every girl who is at risk before the holidays. “We could convince families not to send their daughters to be cut and we can help girls who are at risk. “We could break the cycle so the next generation is safe. “That's why I'm calling for Michael Gove to get schools to teach about FGM before the summer holidays. “Please sign my petition. We really need to get schools to teach about the risks of female genital mutilation.” Before the summer.  |
| Help for breastfeeding working mums Posted: 11 Feb 2014 04:24 AM PST
The Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (Acas) published new guidelines for employers recently aimed at helping them create ‘an accommodating environment’ for women who are breast feeding. The booklet, called ‘Accommodating breastfeeding employees in the workplace’, provides information about the legal position, gives tips on how to create the right environment and facilities for breastfeeding women, offers advice on considering the mothers’ requests and shares examples of good practice. The law requires an employer to provide somewhere for a breastfeeding employee to rest and this includes being able to lie down. There is no requirement to undertake a risk assessment, although the guide says this would be good practice. Employers do not have to provide facilities, or paid time off for employees to breastfeed or express milk. The guide suggests that companies adopt and publicise breastfeeding policies, and explains that providing facilities for breastfeeding women can increase loyalty and retain skills. The guide warns employers that enabling women to express or breastfeeding at work may lead to inappropriate behaviour and banter among co-workers and they must guard against this and take swift action if this occurs. The guide says that breastfeeding women will need a private space, equipped with a fridge to enable them to store milk. Employers should make clear to women returners how they can make a request for breastfeeding facilities. They should 'reasonably and objectively' consider requests for breaks, taking care that they do not discriminate against the breastfeeding woman. Employers should be sympathetic to requests for flexible working or consider extending existing breaks to accommodate breastfeeding. Maternity Action, which campaigns for the rights of pregnant women and new mothers, welcomed the guidance as it has been campaigning on these issues for some time.  |
| Jenny Jones wins an Olympic medal Posted: 11 Feb 2014 03:55 AM PST
By the No More Page 3 campaign. On Sunday, a woman won the UK's first EVER snow medal at the Winter Olympics. British snowboarder Jenny Jones took home the bronze medal on Sunday in the snowboarding "slopestyle" competition. Wow, WOW!!! It was lovely to see her picture all over the newspapers, right? Well yes, all except for The Sun newspaper, who hid a tiny thumbnail picture and Jenny's story on page 55. On the front page The Sun ran a story about a schoolgirl who apparently wanted sex with her teacher. And of course the biggest single image of a woman in yesterday's Sun was… yep, you guessed it: Page 3! It is time newspapers in the UK represented women in their pages for their contribution to the news. And what bigger news than making Olympic sporting history? Not only this, but we know that less than 5 per cent of mainstream media sports' coverage is of women's sport and that girls in the UK need more encouragement to exercise regularly, largely due to body image issues caused by unrealistic images of beauty featured in the media. This win was a perfect opportunity to show our young women and girls what they could aspire to. Instead, The Sun continued to ignore the mood of the nation in order to cling to their 1970's heritage of titillation over inspiration. Pictures speak louder than words and when – instead of these historic sporting achievements – we fill our best selling newspapers and our public spaces with sexualised pictures and stories, we fail to show the next generation what is possible. Dave Dinsmore, please inspire the next generation of sportswomen. Today we at the No More Page 3 campaign are asking readers to please inform editor David Dinsmore @davedins, The Sun newspaper @TheSunNewspaper and @rupertmurdoch of your disappointment. We are going to use the No More Page 3 #KitOn hashtag to continue to promote women's sport. Here's some things you could say: @davedins a UK woman made history in the Winter Olympics. U gv her a thumbnail on pg55 & kept topless pg3 @NoMorePage3 #iKitOn @davedins why no front pg for UK sportswomen making history? #KitOn @davedins where was Jenny Jones? #KitOn And please sign our petition asking David Dinsmore to take the bare boobs out of The Sun. Thanks.  |
| We need to talk about the UK media war on women Posted: 11 Feb 2014 01:09 AM PST
By Sarah Graham. A number of years ago I heard British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) journalist Bidisha quote feminist academic Germaine Greer: "The corporation changes the woman before the woman changes the corporation." These words have weighed heavily on me in the early years of my journalism career. I later found myself at a protest, working with a reporter from a national news outlet. He spent a long time with his camera trained on an attractive blonde woman handing out flyers. "I don’t make the rules, I just try not to break them," he told me. These rules are no more evident than when you look at media reporting on violence against women and girls, which is rare and often dubious. Since January 2012 Karen Ingala Smith has begun the thankless task of logging all the women killed by male violence in the UK. As chief executive of domestic violence charity Nia, she is particularly passionate on the subject. Her Counting Dead Women campaign recorded 140 women killed in 2013 by boyfriends, husbands, sons, grandsons, friends, relatives, acquaintances and strangers. That's one woman every 2.6 days. Almost all of these deaths were reported as one-off incidents, many of them never going further than their local newspaper. At the same time, 85,000 women are raped in the UK in a year. But many of these incidents are not deemed newsworthy enough for coverage. Favoured cases tend to feature attractive victims, sensational details, false allegations and violence committed by women. Young, conventionally attractive, mostly white victims are invariably granted the most column inches: if it can't be illustrated with a photo of a pretty, smiling blonde in her school uniform, or the smutty details of some so-called 'crime of passion', it's not worth printing. In coverage of the murder of Meredith Kercher, all mentions of the victim and of the male co-accused were overshadowed by the media wankfest over "Foxy Knoxy". Just recently I read a headline about Amanda Knox's "dramatic makeover before Meredith Kercher murder retrial", as if Knox's new bob was a newsworthy addition to the story. Even when cases are responsibly reported, many are presented as isolated aberrations, perpetrated by evil individuals. For the women whose abuse frequently remains incidental to the media angle, social change can only happen when individual journalists tear that rulebook up and throw it out of the window. The media industry requires a radical transformation in the way it treats women. It's no longer enough to blindly continue working to the same sexist formulas that the newspapermen have been using for decades. Journalists instead need to rewrite the rules, exercising their right to hold power to account, starting with their own editors. Feminist campaigns about media imagery and the way women are represented do exist. The campaign to have topless models removed from Page 3 of tabloid paper The Sun has so far exceeded 130,000 signatures. The Lose The Lads Mags campaign successfully saw one supermarket chain demand that soft porn mags be delivered in sealed "modesty bags". But for me it's the language that's really pernicious – and no more so than when it comes to reporting violence. Dylan Farrow this week published an open letter reaffirming allegations (first investigated in 1992) that she was sexually abused by her adoptive father Woody Allen. Dylan’s allegations are the latest in a string of child sexual abuse claims made in recent years against male celebrities. Currently in the UK ageing TV and radio personalities Dave Lee Travis, Rolf Harris and William Roache are all facing courts over allegations of historic child sexual abuse, and comedian Freddie Starr has been arrested (for the third time) over further sexual abuse allegations. In the Metro newspaper on my morning commute, I observed an entire page dedicated to rape allegations against male celebrities. The Jimmy Savile revelations, and subsequent arrests of other household names, have had a profoundly transformative effect on the public consciousness. They have forced the UK to acknowledge the scale of sexual abuse so many of our national treasures were allowed to get away with by virtue of their celebrity. The phrase that's always stuck with me about the Savile case is: “just the women”. This quickly became a catchphrase after the producers of the BBC's flagship news programme, Newsnight, spiked their exposé of Savile's abuse. When justifying the decision to drop investigation into Savile’s abuses, Newsnight editor Peter Rippon sent an email to producer Meirion Jones stating: “Our sources so far are just the women and a second-hand briefing." He thought the feature wouldn’t stand up with “just the women” as evidence. The personal integrity of the ITV producers who later did break the story was more than just an embarrassment for Newsnight; it kick-started a sea change in the public consciousness about sexual abuse and empowered many more victims to come forward to report their abuse, with a renewed confidence that their allegations will be listened to and taken seriously. By December 2012, two months after the exposé aired, 589 victims had come forward with allegations, of whom 82 per cent were female and 80 per cent were children or young people. I had just started a Masters in newspaper journalism at London’s City University when ITV broke the story. I learnt a huge amount at City, but the biggest lesson I learnt during that time came from the aftermath of the Savile revelations: in the media, women are always “just the women”. As a woman, a feminist and a journalist, I refuse to play by those rules. The real protagonists of this story, it quickly became clear, were Jimmy Savile and the BBC. In a lecture on journalism ethics, Professor Roy Greenslade asked who the real victims of Jimmy Savile were. Some bright spark, who in all likelihood is now a professional journalist working in a newsroom somewhere, said “Newsnight”. To him, the women were peripheral to the important story – caught in the line of fire between a dead national icon and a disgraced broadcasting corporation. For Savile’s many other victims, the women who bravely told their stories on camera were not incidental at all. Their words were evidence that they were no longer alone in their experiences of abuse. When hundreds more victims stepped forward it exposed a horrifying, ugly truth that the media were unprepared for. The post-Savile cases have been remarkable for forcing journalists to report male abuse as part of a pattern. The sheer number of cases make it impossible to ignore the fact that something bigger is going on. But the analysis remains far too narrow. The accepted angle on how these crimes could have happened is to blame "the culture of the BBC in the 1970s" – a time and place when groping was the norm and DJs couldn't move for groupies throwing themselves at their feet. The implication is that we should ask: was it really any wonder that the lines between 'flirtation with adoring fans' and 'abuse of children' were a little blurred? This defence is troubling; it confines male violence to a particular space and time – the isolated acts of sick individuals within a specific and (atypical) culture. Few journalists, for all their analytical skills, have made the connection between "the culture of the BBC in the 1970s" and discussions about the impact of race in the Rochdale grooming case, where nine Asian men were convicted of abusing white girls as young as 13-years-old. What really links the Rochdale abusers with Savile, Hall and the other alleged abusers is not their race, religion, employer, or the decade in which their crimes were committed. It is that they are all men, operating under male-dominated structures, abusing their power over more vulnerable women and children. Those links are there to be made, but they won't be until feminist and pro-feminist writers force a shift in the media narrative by continuing to shout about it. In order to truly tackle violence against women, people, especially men, need to recognise the pattern of male violence against women and understand the power dynamics behind it. The power men hold in the political sphere and the power they seek to exert through violence in the domestic sphere are not incidental. Under patriarchy we learn that masculinity is power and control, yet, for male journalists in male-dominated newsrooms, there is often no personal incentive to acknowledge those structures. The media, as shapers of public opinion, hold a huge responsibility here; changing attitudes calls for a structural and personal shift in the way we report such violence. That starts with addressing your own complicity in patriarchal power. In the last few months, with my Feminist Times hat on, I've had a number of conversations with women working in the domestic violence sector about how we can start enacting that change through our editorial content. The Counting Dead Women list of names reveals a shocking reality. It's also a powerful piece of journalism, which has had a radical effect on the way I think about my journalistic responsibilities. These incidents should always be reported as part of a pattern of male domination and patriarchal control. Last week Ingala Smith reported that 99 members of the British armed forces have been killed during the last three years of conflict in Afghanistan, compared with 264 dead women in the two years that she's been counting. 15 women in the UK were killed in December 2013 alone. Why isn’t there a national outcry? In the United States, the phrase 'war on women', is used to refer to conservative anti-choice policies. How radical a shift would it be to talk about a literal war on women, in which women are being raped, abused and killed, in this country, on a daily basis? A version of this article was originally published in the Transformation section of openDemocracy.  |
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