Women's Views on News |
- Stand together for Choice
- Family rights: time for change
- Settling in on a spousal visa: difficult
- ‘Prove’ rape for third child tax credits
| Posted: 16 Jul 2015 02:10 AM PDT Last week the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) announced the launch of its Charter for Choice, calling for wide-ranging changes to the way women's reproductive issues are handled in the UK. As well as asking for support online, the website highlights people and organisations who work tirelessly to uphold and improve women's reproductive rights with its 'Champions of Choice'. The Charter calls for the following actions to be realised: Decriminalise abortion: treat it as a healthcare procedure, nothing more; With this Charter, BPAS has brought together what are often viewed as disparate issues concerning women's reproduction. It is a conversation starter, a game changer and an overdue call for a change in perception. For too long issues such as those outlined in the Charter have been considered as poles apart. The implication being that each one affects different groups of women entirely. But the issues the Charter highlights have the potential to affect all woman, albeit at different stages of their life. WVoN spoke to Clare Murphy, director of External Affairs at BPAS, who put it perfectly, "The women who have abortions are the same women who have children, who have miscarriages, who have IVF." Explaining the reasons behind BPAS launching the Charter, Murphy said, "The Charter is really about repositioning the discussion about reproductive choice in the UK, and firmly claiming the territory of women’s bodily autonomy. "…We want women to be trusted to make their own decisions, with access to evidence-based impartial information. "We believe this should be the approach that underpins all reproductive healthcare services – from contraception to birth." BPAS recently intervened in a case concerning a mother of a baby girl born with Foetal Alcohol Syndrome. As explained on the BPAS website, a council in Northern England had brought a criminal case against the mother. BPAS and the charity Birthrights, joined together to intervene because they believed if this ruling went ahead it would "it would establish a legal precedent which could be used to prosecute women who drink while pregnant and would do nothing for the health of alcoholic mothers and their babies." In December 2014, the Court of Appeal ruled that the mother did not commit a crime under the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 by drinking during pregnancy. This court case, which ran against a backdrop of increasingly judgemental media stories surrounding women's reproductive choices, is part of the reason BPAS has chosen to launch the Charter now. As a way of counterbalancing the negative. In recent years there has been a huge amount of focus on women's behaviour in pregnancy and an increasing climate of telling women how and when they should pro-create, – and BPAS is saying, ‘no more’. This is the thing – every demand BPAS is making with their Charter makes sense. But in order for changes to occur people and organisations need to join together, raising their voices in solidarity and insisting these issues are looked at and resolved. The good news is that the Charter is the first part of a bigger plan. Working at a grass-roots level this is about bringing people together to fight for women's reproductive choices to be upheld and improved. The individuals and organisations highlighted through the Charter's Champions of Choice demonstrates the vast amount currently being done in support of women's rights. The numerous campaigners, practitioners and organisations listed work tirelessly for their causes and often receive little or no recognition. So while in many ways we are experiencing a backlash against women's reproductive choices there is also a lot of good work currently underway in the opposite direction. It is not all doom and gloom. What I personally find interesting about the Charter is that it has brought to my attention injustices I simply hadn't registered previously. For example, I naively never questioned why it is necessary for women to engage in conversation with perfect strangers (pharmacists) about their sex lives in order to purchase emergency contraception. Or why these pills are so expensive. Or why nothing is ever done about people protesting outside clinics. Or why all women don't have the same access to fertility treatment. Or the lack of suitable aftercare for women who have suffered miscarriages. The list goes on. It is easy to take it for granted that living in the UK we don't have anything to fight for anymore concerning women's reproductive rights – but looking at the Charter for Choice makes you realise there is still a lot of work to do. Murphy said, "Together we are stronger. "Women’s reproductive rights are constantly threatened, with a series of attempts in the last parliament to restrict access to abortion, a legal bid to criminalise a woman who drank heavily while pregnant, but I am confident that we will see off the opposition not to just defend the status quo, but improve the situation for ourselves and our daughters." If, like me, you have found yourself a seemingly useless bystander watching anti-abortionists shouting outside a women's health clinic, numb with rage but feeling powerless to do anything, perhaps now is the time to find you can. Visit the website and sign the Charter. Share it with your friends. Nominate your Champion. In whatever way you can, get involved in activism for women's reproductive rights. Many voices joined together as one have the power to affect change and now, thanks to BPAS and the many people they are championing, you can feel that positive change is indeed possible. For more information go to: www.charterforchoice.org  |
| Family rights: time for change Posted: 16 Jul 2015 01:29 AM PDT
Family reunion campaigners have renewed their commitment to press for change. Three years since the rules on family migration were changed campaigners are being proven correct in their predictions on the perverse outcomes the measures have led to. Here are some ideas on what needs to be done to continue pressure for change. The events organised last week to mark the third anniversary of family migration rules which hugely increased the income level required from people sponsoring the admission of family members was rewarding for all involved in the sense of solidarity and mutual aid which passed between participants. Despite the fact that the rules remain firmly in place supporters of the campaign who have been going through the experience of trying to bring in spouses and children reported very welcome success in a number of cases getting over the obstacles which the Home Office has put in place to make reunification with loved ones an immensely difficult task. The information which passes between supporters and the groups involved in the campaign, notably BritCits, JCWI, the Family Immigration Alliance, and of course, Migrants’ Rights Network (MRN), is proving to be of some help in getting a result at the end of long months of battling with the Home Office. But it is the case that early hopes that the rules would be quickly overturned by a successful legal challenge on human rights grounds have been disappointed. The case of 'MM' versus Secretary of State for the Home Department will be coming up for consideration by the Supreme Court only in February next year. Lawyers acting for the families involved are working hard to ensure that the judges understand the full magnitude of the harm that these immigration rules are inflicting on people. Discussions at the anniversary events made it clear that the campaign should not be putting all its eggs in the single basket of the legal challenge however, and that renewed efforts need to be made to get the issues back on the political agenda. Three years after the introduction of the rules we now see that the worst predictions that the rules would have draconian impacts on families have become a reality for thousands. This is even more true for those living outside of London and the South East, women, young people at an early stage of their career, people from certain ethnic minorities, and sponsors living with disabilities. The briefing on the extent of this discrimination published by the Oxford University-based Migration Observatory in November last year sets out the facts on how this discrimination has become entrenched in the policies of the Home Office. Yet it seems to be the case that the extent of the unfairness that now exists in this area is still only poorly understood even by Members of Parliament. Campaign supporters reported how their contact with local MPs revealed the common belief that the policy was acting to safeguard the public purse from additional expenditure arising from the admission of dependent members of low income families. The point that the public purse was in any event under no risk from the arrival of spouses and non-British children owing to the imposition of long-standing 'no recourse to public funds' conditions on with limited leave to enter and remain, is still not widely acknowledged by the people who are responsible for drafting and overseeing the implementation of rules and regulations. The government's line that the measure will save the British taxpayer £660 million over the space of ten years has been challenged by a review of the effects of the policy conducted by experts at Middlesex University. Their work sets out the compelling counter-argument that, by failing to take into account the wider benefits of the economic activity of migrant partners UK taxpayers are likely to have to bear a cost of £850 million over the same period of ten years. The reluctance of legislators in Parliament to address the evidence emerging from the implementation during these past three years needs to be addressed with a renewed effort to explain the true position to them. The opportunity to do this might be present in the fact that the Parliament elected in May contains over 180 new MPs who have not participated in the discussions which led up to the introduction of the measures back in July 2012. The campaign will be playing a useful role in ensuring that Parliamentarians receive a fresh briefing on all these issues, tailored as far as possible to include a report on what the implications of the provisions of the rules are for people living in their own constituencies. The report prepared by MRN back in June 2014 on the differential impact of the income requirement on people living in regions and Parliamentary constituencies needs to be looked at again and presented to the new Parliament. Other strands of work that will need to be taken up and supported include the inquiry initiated by the Children's Commissioner on the impact of the rules on children needs to be taken up and supported. The Commissioner for England, Anne Longfield, spoke at the anniversary event in Parliament and called on people affected by the issue who have children in their family to provide evidence through the on-line survey form on their website. The issue of the wider impact of tougher rules in family reunion on the participation of migrants as full members of society also has to be reconsidered in the light of the findings of the Migration Integration Policy Index which has seen the UK falling out of the top ten countries which are generally seen as having the best outcomes in this area, largely as a consequence of the changes in family reunion policy. Any campaign will have to make sure that MPs and others fully understand this fact, and are up to the task of taking the action needed to remedy the situation. Events of last week have underscored the fact that this remains a live issue which is continuing to generate injustice for large numbers of people who have a right to fair consideration of their wish to enjoy a family life in this country. As the evidence continues to mount of perverse and unjust outcomes for so many people we will be renewing our efforts to press for substantial change to the rules, and for this to happen sooner rather than later. A version of this article by Don Flynn, the director of the Migrants Rights Network, appeared on the Migrant’s Rights Network blog on 13 July 2015.  |
| Settling in on a spousal visa: difficult Posted: 16 Jul 2015 01:21 AM PDT
By Rahila Gupta. Women with a high level of educational qualifications who migrate to the UK to join their British husbands are finding the path to employment strewn with obstacles. There is one group of migrant women in the UK of whom we hear very little in the news: those who come here on a spousal visa i.e. on the basis of marriage to a British citizen. Although it appears to be the largest group of women migrants (there is no gender breakdown for the spousal visa category), over and above asylum seekers and women trafficked into the sex industry or domestic slavery, their day to day difficulties of settling in do not attract the same attention as the dramatic disclosures of women asylum seekers in the Yarl’s Wood detention centre who have died, or been sexually harassed and assaulted, and gone on hunger strike in protest against the conditions in detention. When this group of migrant women on spousal visas has hit the headlines, it has been largely because of the longstanding efforts of Southall Black Sisters and their allies to draw attention to the fact that their marriages had failed as a result of violence, and they were unjustly faced with deportation and/or No recourse to Public Funds. However, these are women who, even by the severely restricted scope for legitimate migration under the law, should be on a route to settlement in the UK on the basis of their marriage to British citizens, find their aspirations ground down on a daily basis. New research, Settling In, by Eaves, a charity which specialises in supporting trafficked women and women exiting prostitution, has found that women on spousal visas are frozen out of British society at every level. The report – launched in Parliament on 24 June – is based on in depth interviews with 86 women, from 32 countries, ranging from the USA to Yemen and Venezuela to China. You would have thought that a government so committed to the idea of marriage and family would do everything in its power to smooth the path of the newly-weds. Wrong. First, David Cameron tried to drastically restrict the number of people who can enter the country to marry British citizens in order to fulfil his pledge to reduce immigration. New rules declared that the British spouse must earn a minimum of £18,600 in order to be eligible to sponsor a non-British partner. It has been calculated that only 47 per cent of the British population would qualify. Incidentally, this is much higher than the minimum wage of £13,240 for a 38 hour week which the government obviously believes is adequate to keep body and soul together for locals but not enough for migrant spouses. English language tests for incoming spouses have been made much more difficult and the probationary period for such marriages has been increased from two to five years which means that foreign spouses cannot apply for the right to remain until five years have elapsed. Whilst some of the new findings around loneliness and language barriers, racism and rejection are predictable, the most astonishing finding which surprised even the researchers was the high level of educational qualifications and lack of commensurate employment among this group. Nearly 92 per cent of women had been enrolled in formal education prior to coming here, and nearly 58 per cent of women had one or more graduate and post-graduate degrees. Despite this, a majority of women were not in paid employment, and those who were, were working mostly in part-time jobs that were well below their abilities. A Turkish woman who had been a senior director in a company with 800 construction engineers, mainly men, could not find a job in Britain. Women feared their 'economic vulnerability' if they were reliant on their husbands because they were unemployed or worked in unpaid jobs. This was especially hard for women who had been used to their financial independence. Having failed to get job after job, one woman wondered whether she should have adopted her British husband's surname, a classic case of how race and gender intersect to keep a migrant woman down. The fact of being on a spousal visa with an expiry date also made them less attractive to employers. Nor could they access careers advice at jobcentres because this is only available to women on benefits. Lack of fluency in English restricted access to jobs and meaningful social relationships and basic information. One woman who was in a violent relationship rang 911 to contact the police because that was the number used in the Hollywood films she watched on TV. Free English classes and free childcare is not available to this group of women. Everything that women cited as lifelines – English classes, community centres, NGOs – are all facing cuts in any case. Even when these women find jobs, they are unable to take them up because childcare is so expensive. A newly set up charity, Breaking Barriers, which is trying to bridge the gap between qualifications and employment for newly arrived immigrants, has an Iranian architect and a Kosovan woman with business degrees on their books. For the Iranian architect, they found a job as architectural assistant but her earnings would equate to about 80 per cent of child care costs; the Kosovan woman wants to work as a teaching assistant while she studies to become a teacher but her earnings would cover less than 60 per cent of child care costs, and she would receive no pay outside of term times. Whilst all women have to deal with expensive childcare, for migrant women who have even greater difficulties finding work, it can feel insurmountable. Although the Eaves report touches on domestic violence and how the women's dependence on their spouse's settled status can hand the controls of their relationship over to the men, it does not explore how a system that is set up to make the foreign spouse feel unwelcome might lead to relationship failure. Furthermore, it does not examine how a woman's place in the family is further undermined by her uncertain migration status. Many women report the 'starting from scratch' syndrome: the sacrifices they have had to make by giving up their jobs, families and social circles to join their husbands. Surely this resentment would impact on their relationships. Surprisingly, the Eaves report uses the discredited terms 'host society' and 'integration' which were squarely rejected in the early days of debate in the UK around race and immigration; and by early I mean the 1970s. 'Host' was rejected because it diminished the status of immigrant to receiver of charity rather than holder of rights. Integration was rejected because it was usually synonymous with assimilation, a process by which migrants stripped themselves of their cultural markers and were absorbed into the mainstream. After 9/11 and the perceived failure of multiculturalism in sections of the establishment, there was an ideological return to integration, most famously in the speech delivered by Blair in 2006 when he warned Britain’s different communities that they have a 'duty to integrate' and that the promotion of basic values must take priority over separate beliefs and customs. The anti-terror agenda drove the return to integration as a Communities and Local Government paper made clear in 2012, "Integration benefits us all, and extremism and intolerance undermine this as they promote fear and division. An integrated society may be better equipped to reject extremism and marginalise extremists." But the term remains contested. A spokesperson for Eaves said that the use of these terms was partly determined by the agenda of the European Integration Fund which supported the report. However, the report attempts to inject a progressive understanding of 'integration' by blaming the government's failure to support new migrants rather than placing the onus on immigrants to do more to integrate. The report also gives the women the power to define it – to own the process of integrating. One woman says, quite simply, 'So coming here and making it your own, you know? I think that would be integration for me as an all-encompassing definition.' A version of this article appeared in OpenDemocracy on 23 June 2015. The sentence regarding the launch date has been amended. Rahila Gupta is a freelance journalist and writer. Her books include: From Homebreakers to Jailbreakers: Southall Black Sisters; Provoked; Enslaved: The New British Slavery, and ‘Don’t Wake Me: The Ballad of Nihal Armstrong (Playdead Press, 2013).  |
| ‘Prove’ rape for third child tax credits Posted: 16 Jul 2015 01:09 AM PDT
The government wants to limit tax credits to the first two children in a family as part of its £12 billion welfare cuts. From 2017, this will mean the loss of tax credits for a third child or any further children. With a few token exemptions – including multiple births and 'women who have a third child as a result of rape or other exceptional circumstances'. This effectively means that women who have a third child as the result of rape will be forced to 'prove' to the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) that the rape occurred and resulted in the birth of this third child. SNP MP for Glasgow Central, Alison Thewliss, first drew attention to the clause on Twitter last week. 'We think the policy on limiting tax credits is appalling anyway, and tantamount to social engineering, but putting a woman who has been raped – and her child – in that position is shocking,' she has been quoted as saying. "It is completely unfair to limit child tax credits to the first two children in a family; it is absolutely callous and inhumane however to ask a woman who has been a victim of rape to fill in some kind of form or to declare to a member of DWP staff that her child has been the product of rape," Thewliss said in The National. "It piles humiliation on top of trauma. Tory ministers cannot say whether a woman will have to prove this, whether it will depend on a conviction – we know that rates of conviction are still far too low. "It puts a woman in a very vulnerable position, and risks stigmatising both mother and child. "The government must rethink this offensive proposal as a matter of urgency," she said. Lisa Longstaff, from Women Against Rape, described the proposal as "disgusting". "Asking women to disclose very difficult information and expecting them to be able to prove it – in what is frankly a very hostile environment when the DWP is trying to take your money away – will have appalling consequences," she said. And Kirsten Oswald, SNP MP for East Renfrewshire, called on the government to dedicate time for a debate on the "incredibly distasteful" proposal. However this was refused by the leader of the house, Chris Grayling, who in his response managed to combine patronising Oswald with toeing the Tory party line of scaremongering about benefit fraud . Firstly he talked down to Oswald, saying she had already had the opportunity to raise this issue, and implied that she was overreacting, saying: "The Chancellor [of the Exchequer, George Osborne] was very clear yesterday that this provision will be designed in a way to handle difficult cases in the most sensitive possible way." Then he proceeded with the scaremongering, saying: "But she [Oswald] must also understand the necessity of putting in place a system of welfare that is grounded in common sense, that is designed to help people back into the workplace, and she will know that there have been many, many examples of people with very large families who are absolutely overt in their statements that they have had large families in order to take advantage of the welfare system." Oswald Tweeted afterwards that she was 'appalled' by Grayling's response. However the Treasury has yet to back down on the issue, saying vaguely that 'details' of the special protections received by mothers having a third child due to rape will be set out 'in due course'. The problem with the policy is that for all the 'sensitivity' in the world, the onus will still be on the women to claim she was raped in order to avoid being hit by the benefits and tax credits cuts, as Anoosh Chakelian pointed out in The New Statesman. 'This would put women in the distressing position of having to tell the authorities about having been raped, and would also introduce another level of potentially damaging intrusion from government departments into the lives of welfare claimants,' she wrote. Sandy Brindley, a spokesperson for Rape Crisis Scotland, has pointed out that the policy "inherently unworkable". "How does a DWP worker prove someone has or hasn't been raped?" she asked. "I think many women would find explaining that situation extremely uncomfortable. Many don't report to the police that they have been raped or go years without reporting it or speaking about it, so they cannot be expected to explain it to a DWP worker. "And what training does a DWP worker have to deal with rape victims?" she asked. "It's an unrealistic, ill-thought out and unhelpful proposal." Roger Mullin, SNP MP for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, has gone further and doubted the plan's morality. "What on earth is moral about dragging women to have to talk about the fact that they may have been raped to get some decent treatment out of benefits in this society?" he asked. "I would appeal to the Government… for goodness sake, you may seek savings in many other parts of welfare but don’t punish children and don’t force women who have gone through the trauma of rape to have to justify themselves to the taxman."  |
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