Women's Views on News |
- Kitemark for carer-friendly employers
- Global summit undermined by hosts
- New campaign for sex education
| Kitemark for carer-friendly employers Posted: 17 Jun 2014 07:42 AM PDT
A new scheme to recognise employers who give extra help and support to carers in their workforce was launched to mark Carers' Week. This scheme, the Carers' Kitemark, is one of the Scottish Government's key policies and aims to help Scotland's estimated 660,000 carers. Under the scheme, employers will be able to sign up to demonstrate their commitment to supporting employees who provide care and support for elderly or disabled relatives. Developed in conjunction with Carers Scotland, the Kitemark will be launched as "Carer Positive" and employers, who can find out how to join on this site, will be known as a Carer Positive Employer in Scotland. There are some simple steps employers can take to help carers, including offering flexible hours, or access to a private phone line Michael Matheson, Minister for Public Health, who launched the project, said: "Carers make up a significant proportion of Scotland's working population, meaning there's a strong business case for developing carer-friendly policies. "If you look after the carers in your workforce you'll have better staff retention, better morale and higher productivity. "I'd urge all employers, big and small, to consider signing up to the Carers' Kitemark. "This Government has invested nearly £114 million in supporting carers and their families since 2007. "We have introduced the Self-directed Support Act, invested heavily in the Short Breaks Fund, and consulted on proposed new legislation to further support carers and young carers." Simon Hodgson, director of Carers Scotland, said: "Carers Scotland is acutely aware of the challenges many people face juggling work with their caring responsibilities. "We are confident that raising awareness through the Carer Positive employers' Kitemark will both provide vital support to working carers and help employers retain their skilled and experienced staff." The Kitemark aims to raise awareness of the growing number of working carers and give recognition to employers who support carers in their workforce. It also aims to highlight the strong benefits to employers of supporting attracting and maintaining carers in the workplace. It is estimated that there are around 250,000 working carers in Scotland – approximately 1/7 of the workforce. Some of the benefits of carer-friendly polices include retaining experienced workers, reducing staff absences and better morale. A number of organisations, both public and private, have joined the scheme as early adopters. Their feedback will be used to improve the scheme as other employers come on board. One of the scheme's early adopters was the Scottish Court Service. Senga Gracie, a carer who works for the Scottish Court Service and has a son with diabetes explained the benefits the Carers policy has given her. She said: "Having a Carers policy allows me to achieve a good balance between my caring and work responsibilities. "I work full time and, at first, my son required a lot of attention and support in dealing with his condition. "His school needed to be able to contact me at short notice and needed guidance on managing his condition in certain situations. "He also had regular medical appointments to attend. "My managers agreed to me working flexible hours by compressing my working week into 4 days instead of 5. "I also use carer's special leave in conjunction with flexi and annual leave to cover his medical appointments and any absence he had to take due to his condition. "The support of my line managers, colleagues and Judiciary made a huge difference in assisting me to be able to cope through difficult times and still feel a valued member of staff." But as a 12-month inquiry by Carers UK exposed, the stark reality faced by those looking after loved ones who are older, disabled or seriously ill means a loss of savings, debt and a major struggle to afford food and heating. And as a result of the inquiry, Carers UK is now calling for an end to cuts to carers' benefits and support services; ugent reform of financial help for carers and for the government to make a commitment that future policy will not leave carers worse off, by implementing a 'carer' test for future benefits and social care proposals The main carers' benefit, Carer's Allowance, is currently £59.75 a week – for a minimum of 35 hours caring. That is equivalent to £1.67 an hour. It is not available to those who earn more than £100 per week or to those in receipt of the basic State Pension. Carers who gave evidence to the inquiry spoke of the need to keep the vulnerable and ill warm, which meant families footing bills for running heating for 12 and more hours a day, with no let-up in warmer months when those with serious illness must be kept cool; costs of travel to medical appointments and the need to rely heavily on taxis; the need to wash three or more loads of washing a day when caring for someone with continence problems, or who is tube fed; the increasingly prohibitive price of buying in care to simply get out of the door for work or respite, compounding the isolation caring can bring; the cost to future financial security and resilience of quitting work or cutting hours to care Heléna Herklots, chief executive of Carers UK, said: "Those caring, unpaid, for loved ones save society vast sums, but at huge personal cost – a cost this Inquiry shows is pushing families to the brink. "Caring is often a dual blow, with household incomes hit by reduced earnings, and bills rising as a result of the extra costs of ill-health or disability. "With an ageing population, more of us will care for loved ones – yet a blizzard of cuts to social care and benefits mean there is less and less support available. "This is unacceptable and unsustainable. This country's carers are being badly let down. "Unless [the] government acts to stop the cuts to support for carers there is the risk families will be pushed to breaking point and left unable to care for their own."  |
| Global summit undermined by hosts Posted: 17 Jun 2014 04:10 AM PDT
By Heather McRobie. Last week's London conference on wartime sexual violence was urgent and important. Sexual violence in war is epidemic, the invisible frontline of war; in the case of genocidal rape as seen in Bosnia and Rwanda, wartime sexual violence is used specifically to assault and wipe out communities. As the Women Under Siege project has documented, the record of complicity of peacekeepers in wartime sexual violence, and the lack of efforts by governments and intergovernmental organisations to address such acts, has led to virtual impunity for wartime sexual violence, as in the present,urgent case of Syria and sexual violence in Syrian refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan andTurkey. Globally, wartime sexual violence is a humanitarian catastrophe and a mass violation of human rights, as grassroots campaigners and researchers on the issue have long argued. A global conference should have been a positive step, and discussions on the conference's #TimetoAct twitter hashtag expressed a widespread sense of urgency in addressing the issue. However, here are five ways the summit was undermined by its hosts: 1. The UK government, who hosted the conference, fuels and funds wars – the site of wartime rape. The involvement of the UK government in the London conference posed numerous problems, from the policing of the event itself to its complicity in wartime sexual violence. The UK government's involvement in perpetuating global war is obvious – from the 'war on terror' to its role in the global arms trade. Yet wartime sexual violence has specific dynamics related to its particular situation in wartime – it is a type of mass human rights violation that occurs in conflict, due variously to the rigid identities demarcating others as 'enemies' or through the chaos in civilians' lives of a war and post-war period. This cannot be credibly addressed by a government such as the UK's where militarism and perpetual conflict is stitched into the logic of the state. Not only does this include the last decade of ongoing overseas wars, drone strikes, rendition flights and 'anti-terrorist operations', but also epidemic levels of sexual violence within the US military, and how the militarisation of US and UK life under the 'war on terror' has fed back into the 'homeland'. 2. The 'war on terror' militarised both 'homeland' and 'abroad', and sexual violence in the US military is epidemic. There have been shocking cases of sexual violence perpetrated against civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq by UK and US troops over the last decade, which undermines the credibility of the UK government to 'tackle' wartime rape. The abuse of prisoners in Abu Graib (warning: graphic images) by occupying soldiers was sexualised, the infamous photographs themselves taken to dehumanise and degrade the Iraqi prisoners by documenting their forced sexual humiliation. These acts of sexual humiliation perpetrated by invading troops on Iraqi bodies aligns with the epidemic levels of sexual violence and sexual harassment within the US military itself: in 2012, a female American soldier was more likely to be sexually assaulted by another US soldier than die by enemy fire. Reported sexual assaults in the US military increased by 50 per cent in 2013; the lack of adequate recourse to justice for sexual assault survivors within the military not only re-traumatises survivors but works to the benefit of perpetrators. The sexual violence festering through the ranks of the US military, and the established tropes of sexualised humiliation perpetuated against Iraqis in Abu Graib and elsewhere against the backdrop of the 'war on terror' are metastases of the same constructions of militarism and militarised gender roles. Both are stitched into modern conflict, and the rigid roles conflict creates of combatants, civilians and enemies. Wartime rape cannot be tackled without dismantling the war context from which it arises, and yet this context – perpetual war and dehumanised enemies framed through a 'clash of civilisations' narrative – is intrinsic to the UK's foreign policy in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. 3. The UK brutalises asylum seekers who have fled wartime sexual violence. In the run-up to the conference in London, activists and organisations working on the inhumane treatment of asylum seekers at the hands of the UK government called on Angelina Jolie – the iconic 'figurehead' of the conference – to meet with asylum seekers who have fled sexual violence or experienced sexual violence within the asylum system. Not only is the UK government's mistreatment of detained asylum seekers an experience likely to re-traumatise people who have fled wartime sexual violence, but asylum seekers have also been subject to sexual violence in detention. There is an obvious cognitive dissonance between William Hague's promises at the London wartime sexual violence conference and the UK's brutalisation and re-traumatisation of asylum-seekers in detention centres. 'Wartime sexual violence is bad when it happens over there, but if you flee and seek asylum we will detain you in traumatic conditions' is hardly a coherent position, and exposes the subtler, structural violence of the British criminal justice system and detention policies. 4. And what about peacetime sexual violence? The UK government doesn't seem to care about that. The conference's focus on wartime sexual violence can be justified: although it differs significantly in different places and times, wartime sexual violence has its own disturbing internal logic in which rape functions as a weapon of war – literally, the body is weaponised. However, there is increasing evidence that the prevalence and nature of sexual violence in 'peacetime' colours the severity of wartime sexual violence when conflict then occurs — Kirthi Jayakumar, an expert in International Humanitarian Law, has developed a conceptual model of a 'wartime-peacetime sexual violence continuum', in which pre-existing rigid gender roles and 'peacetime' gender violence lays the foundations for wartime rape. In ethnic conflicts wartime sexual violence can draw upon 'peacetime' conceptions of 'good women' and 'bad women', the classic patriarchal virgin/whore dichotomy, whilst imbuing it with racist overtones in which, for instance, the women of the 'enemy' side are 'dirty' or subhuman; similarly, patriarchal restrictions on male behaviour are both drawn upon to humiliate the 'enemy' and create specific stigmas for male sexual assault survivors in the aftermath of their assault. In other words, a comprehensive approach to addressing wartime sexual violence would have to address sexual violence as a whole, whilst recognising the specific militarised dynamics of sexual violence when it occurs in war. Yet the UK's shockingly low conviction rape conviction rate is mirrored in the UK government's cuts to domestic violence shelters and rape crisis shelters, leaving those traumatised by sexual violence with little support. Such cuts were introduced in the UK under the guise of austerity, itself a gendered and ideologically-driven programme that disproportionately harms the poorest and most marginalised in society, including working-class women. William Hague's focus solely on wartime sexual violence 'abroad' – outside of the island of the (historical) colonial centre – falsely situated violence against women as something that happens 'over there', in the periphery, rather than an injustice that is also endemic in the UK homeland, with the policies of the Conservative government making it harder for sexual violence survivors in the UK to receive both care and justice. 5. The role of G4S in the conference underlined the UK's complicity in sexual violence and brutality. Activist and Nobel Laureate Jody Williams criticised how grassroots activists and long-term campaigners on wartime sexual violence were on the 'fringe' of the conference, literally a level below the ministerial tier, despite the fact these activists are the ones with the expertise and longstanding tireless commitment to justice for survivors of wartime rape. Even more concerning was how notorious private security organisation G4S provided 'security' for the London event – even aside from the fact that asylum seekers have suspiciously died in G4S custody, the symbolism was that activists and researchers attending the conference were at the mercy of G4S 'permitting' them to enter the building, which entailed locking out Congolese sexual violence survivors. The unnerving involvement of G4S at the conference played out in physical space the wider power-imbalance of the UK's appropriation of wartime violence against women to further its foreign policy agenda: who was allowed to speak on the subject of wartime rape, and who was allowed to be present, was being policed by the same powers that have themselves colluded in and directly perpetrated violence against women and violence against civilians, through structural violence in the homeland and brutalising military invasions abroad. A version of this article first appeared on Novara Wire’s site.  |
| New campaign for sex education Posted: 17 Jun 2014 01:09 AM PDT
The Sex Education Forum is campaigning for statutory sex and relationships education (SRE) as part of an entitlement to statutory personal, social, health and economic (PSHE) education. With a general election less than a year away, and a Select Committee inquiry into SRE and PSHE open, there is an opportunity to get cross-party commitment to legislative change to ensure that all schools provide SRE. Providing SRE as part of an entitlement to statutory PSHE would transform the subject. Statutory status would allow SRE to be treated the same as other subjects – with teachers getting the training they need and enough time being allocated in the time-table for this vital subject to address real life issues including respectful relationships, domestic violence and consent. A letter, signed by members of the Sex Education Forum and printed in The Guardian launched the campaign. The letter pointed out that David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband have all stated publicly that sex and relationships education is important, yet Ofsted recently found that it remains unsatisfactory in a third of schools. This, it said, is hardly surprising when a survey of teachers showed that seven out of 10 felt they needed more training to deliver the subject properly and that regulations require only a handful of the more biological topics to be addressed. And, it continues, 'All children and young people need age-appropriate teaching. If pupils approaching puberty don’t learn the proper names of sexual parts of the body, and those in secondary school are taught little or nothing about consensual relationships or sexual health, we are failing in our duty to safeguard pupils.' To see the list of signatories, click here. The Sex Education Forum is now inviting people in England to help the campaign by emailing their MP to get them to call for their party to commit to statutory SRE. And there is a petition for young people under 18 to sign. Responsibility for SRE in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland lies with the Scottish Government, the Welsh Government and the Northern Ireland Executive, so please help by contacting your local Parliament or Assembly Member. In Scotland, Sexpression:UK has already launched a petition for the Scottish Parliament to make SRE statutory in Scottish schools. It calls on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to introduce comprehensive sex and relationship education (SRE) into the Scottish Education Curriculum and make it statutory for all schools to teach and recommends that SRE should build upon current education guidelines and include additional criteria to keep up with technological advances, on the grounds that providing non-judgemental accurate information in these areas, the children and young people of Scotland can have the skills and knowledge to make informed decisions for themselves. Please sign it.  |
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