Women's Views on News |
| How to shift Scots out of poverty Posted: 14 Apr 2016 03:21 AM PDT
In June 2015 Naomi Eisenstadt was given the task of advising the Scottish Government on reducing poverty – identifying what’s already in place and is working well, what more could be done, and what is not working. In particular, she was to come up with ideas for ‘shifting the curve‘ – making serious proposals that could, in combination and over the longer term, move large numbers out of poverty. In-work poverty is one serious problem. In 2013/14, half (50 per cent) of working age adults in relative poverty after housing costs were in ‘in-work poverty’. That is, they were living in households with at least one adult in employment, and they were still poor. The same was true for more than half (56 per cent) of children in poverty. Employment is regularly hailed as the way for people to get out of poverty, but for increasing numbers of people in Scotland, and the UK more generally, just getting a job has not meant getting out of poverty. This is a depressing picture, as Eisenstadt said, and is one we need to hear about and talk about more. Housing costs push many in Scotland into poverty. This is clear from the gap between poverty measured before and after housing costs. Around 290,000 people (working age adults and children) were in in-work poverty before housing costs, but around 420,000 people after housing costs were taken into account. This means that any attempt to tackle in-work poverty also needs to consider housing-related costs. The focus of this needs to be on core costs like rent and local property-related taxes, and home energy costs. Reducing occupational segregation is crucial for genuinely inclusive growth. Much less is spent on skilling up (mainly young) women from the Modern Apprenticeship programme than is spent on (mainly young) men. The overall level of qualifications gained by young women is lower than those gained by young men. And the average pay of young women emerging from the programme is likely to be lower than the pay of young men. Her ensuing report outlines the actions Scottish Government – and others – could take to significantly reduce the numbers of people living in poverty in Scotland. The report makes 15 recommendations as to how the Scottish Government – and others – could significantly reduce the numbers of people living in poverty in Scotland:
Life chances of young people, aged 16-24
The Scottish Government has already introduced a range of anti-poverty actions, particularly around welfare reform, Eisenstadt pointed out. It has fully mitigated the bedroom tax, plugged the gap in council tax reduction funding, set up a successful welfare fund providing crisis and community care grants, actively supported social housing, funded advice services, strengthened the educational maintenance allowance, and promoted the Living Wage. These policy decisions have been important in protecting people from poverty, or from a greater depth of poverty, and often they’ve had support across the political spectrum in Scotland. But at all levels of government more could be done, and this report offers some specific ideas.  |
| There is no such thing as a child prostitute Posted: 14 Apr 2016 02:55 AM PDT
We are very pleased to see that the Associated Press (AP) now recommends that its writers do not use the word ‘prostitute’ to refer to children or teenagers who are forced into sexual exploitation. Campaigning on this issue has been carried out by the USA-based Human Rights Project for Girls (@Rights4Girls). The Associated Press is one of the largest sources of independent newsgathering, has its headquarters in New York, and operates in more than 280 locations worldwide. There is no such thing as a ‘child prostitute‘, a ‘teenage prostitute’ or an ‘underage sex worker‘. It is always ‘an act of child sexual exploitation’, ‘abuse’ and ‘rape’ and it is essential that the media makes this clear, otherwise it serves only to support rape culture and those who profit from the abuse of children. The No Such Thing campaign will continue to ask leading media outlets, such as The New York Times and USA Today, to stop using the term child prostitute to convey the condition of children being bought and sold for sex. After a similar campaign in the UK, in 2015 Ann Coffey, MP for Stockport, tabled amendments to the Serious Crime Bill to see the term 'child prostitute' removed from UK legislation. Everyday Victim Blaming had campaigned to see the removal of the term from the UK government’s legislative language for several years. The term 'child prostitute' suggests consent – that the child made an active, conscious choice to engage in sexual activity where payment is received for said activity. It is quite clear that those using the term, particularly in the media and the reports into the systemic abuse of young girls in Rotherham, believe that children can consent to their own grooming and sexual exploitation. But when the term 'child prostitute' is used, the perpetrators are erased. There are multiple perpetrators involved in the sexual exploitation of children. These perpetrators include the men who groom the child, the men who act as 'pimps' and those who purchase the body of a child for rape. We need to focus on the perpetrators, not blame their victims. Child sexual exploitation is endemic in the UK – it occurs in every single town and city in the country. Terms which suggest that children can consent to their own sexual exploitation assist perpetrators in denying responsibility and blame children for their own exploitation. 'Child prostitution' is not a choice children make. We need to clearly name the abuse – a 'child raped by men who pay for this service', ‘prostituted child’ or 'child sexual exploitation'. We need to stop using euphemistic language that results in the collusion of the rape of children. For, as No Such Thing has said, while its campaign focuses on national media outlets in the USA, and uses social media to bring attention to the issue, the overall aim of the campaign is not circumscribed only to media circles. Theirs is also a campaign to reshape the larger public narrative on child trafficking. In the same way that the domestic violence movement renamed ‘hitting a woman’ as ‘abuse’, and not ‘a personal quarrel’, the campaign will name the trafficking of children as a form of child rape and abuse. Paid sex with a minor is an unequivocal act of child rape.  |
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