by Laura Bates
Respond chief executive Noelle Blackman worries that the nuance of the cases they see is not allowed for by the new legislation: ‘The new Health and [Social] Care Act promotes advocacy for people with learning disabilities, but we are concerned that this is likely to come from generic advocacy agencies without the specialized knowledge that would be needed.’
Let’s hope, as Khan does, that this first case to be prosecuted ‘will send out a very strong message’. And, as slow progress continues to be made towards addressing the problem of forced marriage, My Life, My Marriage will continue to highlight the complexity of the issue, supporting victims who might otherwise fall through the gaps.
Originally published 26 June 2015
BABIES BEHIND BARS: WHY CAMERON’S SUPPORT OF PRISON REFORM FALLS SHORT
On Monday, David Cameron made a speech about the need for comprehensive prison reform, including a particular mention of the detention of pregnant women and mothers with young babies. Speaking at the Policy Exchange think tank in Westminster, he said: ‘A sad but true fact is that last year there were 100 babies in our country living in a prison. Yes, actually inside the prison. In the prison’s mother-and-baby unit, to be precise. When we know the importance of the early years for child development, how can we possibly justify having babies behind bars?’
Under the new reforms, the government would consider alternative forms of dealing with offenders, including satellite-tagging technology and ‘problem-solving courts’, which would order offenders into treatment programmes for issues such as drug addiction.
Cameron was right to raise the issue of the catastrophic state of the prison system (he’s the first prime minister for twenty years to do so, in a speech solely focusing on prisons), and right to recommend reform. The current system is not working, as the statistics show: 46 per cent of all prisoners and 60 per cent of those with short sentences reoffend within a year. The situation is equally dire for prisoners’ well-being: there are, on average, 600 incidents of self-harm in prisons every week. But the problem demands a more comprehensive solution than Cameron suggests, particularly with regard to women.
More than 9,000 women were received into prison last year, the majority for non-violent offences. An estimated 17,240 children, including many under five years old, are separated from their mothers by imprisonment. Only 5 per cent of children with a mother in prison are able to stay in the family home, and only 9 per cent are cared for by their fathers. In 2011–12, according to the Prison Reform Trust, just 8.7 per cent of women were able to find employment on release, compared with 27.3 per cent of men.
According to the London-based charity Women in Prison, 46 per cent of women in prison report having suffered domestic violence, and 53 per cent report having experienced emotional, physical or sexual abuse during childhood (compared with 27 per cent of men). Despite making up only 5 per cent of the prison population, women in prison account for 28 per cent of the self-harm incidents. Women in custody are five times more likely to have a mental health concern than women in the general population and 46 per cent say they have attempted suicide at some time in their life. Many vulnerable women end up in prison because they have been coerced into committing crimes by male partners or family members; in 2013, 48 per cent of women said they committed their crime in order to support the drug habit of someone else.
The problem doesn’t end when women enter prison – former inmates have described abuse, and a recent report by national charity the Howard League for Penal Reform found that female prisoners had been coerced into sex and pressured into abusive relationships with staff.
It is already clear that sustainable, properly funded alternatives to custody are a vital part of making any prison-reform plan work. This is especially true for prisoners with complex needs, including those who have experienced domestic or sexual abuse, and single mothers. But this is where Cameron’s passionate support of reform could fall short in the light of funding cuts to specialist services for supporting female offenders and cuts to domestic and sexual violence services.
There is evidence that the financial cost of such services would be negligible. According to the Prison Reform Trust, if alternatives to prison were to achieve an additional reduction of just 6 per cent in reoffending by women, the state would recoup the investment required in just one year.
If we want to resolve the gargantuan problem of the failing prison service, a wider view needs to be taken and it must include real, well-funded action on violence against women; not only responsive measures, but preventative ones, too. It is also vital to take into account the experiences of all women. The charity Women for Refugee Women has been campaigning against the detention of refugee women, including those who are pregnant, for some time.
Natasha Walter, director of the charity, says: ‘Detaining pregnant women is ineffective: in 2014, 99 pregnant women were held in Yarl’s Wood detention centre – despite government policy that these women should only be detained in exceptional circumstances – but only nine of these women were actually removed from the UK. Ninety per cent were released to continue with their cases in the community, so their detention served no purpose at all. In January 2016, a review of the welfare of vulnerable detainees, commissioned by the Home Office and undertaken by the former prisons and probation ombudsman Stephen Shaw, recommended that there should be an absolute ban on the use of immigration detention for pregnant women.
Urgent attention is also due to the plight of transgender women serving sentences in UK prisons, an issue not raised in Cameron’s speech; particularly after the tragic deaths of Joanne Latham and Vicky Thompson within a single month in 2015. A review of the care and management of transgender offenders is currently underway.
These issues affect some of the most voiceless members of our society. Cameron should be commended for broaching the subject of prison reform. But for female prisoners in particular, there is a lot more that needs to be said.
Originally published 11 February 2016
WOMEN’S SUPPORT SERVICES SAVE LIVES. SO WHY IS THE GOVERNMENT CUTTING THEIR FUNDING?
A powerful new report from the black feminist organization Imkaan has revealed a state of emergency among black and minority ethnic (BME) women’s groups working to end violence against women and girls and providing specialist support for survivors. The report, which campaigners handed in to Downing Street along with a petition to protect such services, outlines a funding crisis affecting BME services, including refuges, helplines, outreach and advice provision.
In this week’s spending review, Chancellor George Osborne announced that, instead of ending the ‘tampon tax’ (which requires women to pay 5 per cent VAT on sanitary items by classing them as a luxury), he would use the £15m levied by the tax to help fund women’s charities. But quite apart from the problematic conflation of periods and refuges which, intentionally or not, suggests male violence against women is a women’s problem for women to solve, his speech didn’t make clear how the funding would be distributed or whether charities, apart from those explicitly named, would be supported. Even a major national organization, such as Rape Crisis, which wasn’t named in the Chancellor’s speech, remains uncertain of its future, with a spokesperson saying the charity is in ‘a very precarious position’. For smaller, specialist organizations, which are more likely to get their funding from local councils, deep cuts to local government budgets mean that the situation remains hazardous.
Responding to the spending review, the End Violence Against Women Coalition pointed out the ‘alarming 29 per cent cut to the Communities Department budget’ and expressed serious concern about the impact this could have on violence against women specialist support services. It concluded: ‘Today’s announcement fails to offer them a life raft.’
There are more than thirty-four dedicated specialist BME violence against women and girls services in the UK, offering flexible and diverse support systems that take into account the specific and complex needs of their service users. But when Imk
aan, which acts as an umbrella group for BME organizations, surveyed its members, a shocking 67 per cent reported uncertainty about their sustainability in the current climate. One organization responded: ‘Very uncertain. We did a tender for a refuge in April/May and still don’t know the outcome. If it is not given to us, it will mean we close in the next year or so.’
Imkaan’s report finds that BME women and children in the UK have great and urgent need of specialist services, which uniquely understand the situations they face. During the last financial year, in London alone, 733 BME women sought refuge spaces and only 154 were successful. Nationally, seventeen BME violence against women and girls organizations supported a total of 21,713 women, also over the course of just one year.
Marai Larasi MBE, executive director of Imkaan, says: ‘These organizations are well known in the communities they serve and have the highest numbers of women approaching them directly, rather than being referred on by police, social workers or others. Bigger, more generic services are rarely able to achieve this profile or these “self-referrals”. If these services are lost, lives will be lost. When this lesson is learned, it will be hard to start again and rebuild. We urge the government to show that it understands the needs of BME women facing violence and to commit to a nationally ring-fenced funding solution.’
As funding cuts continue to impact the women’s sector, the report highlights a trend towards councils awarding funding to larger generic providers at the cost of specialized services. Apna Haq, Rotherham’s only BME women’s service, remains at risk of closure after its £145,000 contract for providing domestic violence support was terminated by the council in favour of a mainstream provider with no specialism in minority ethnic women’s needs, which could carry out the work at a slightly lower price.
Zlakha Ahmed, executive director of Apna Haq, says: ‘Independent, specialist and dedicated services, run by and for the communities we seek to serve, are life-saving. Our “led by and for” services offer uniquely empowering experiences to women and children as service users are reflected in staffing, management and governance structures . . . Demand is increasing every day. We, and many others, simply cannot afford to close.’
In 2012, the European Institute for Gender Equality carried out a review of the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action in the EU member states on violence against women and victim support. One finding of that review reads: ‘Specialist BME services are in short supply throughout the European Union. As a result, it is of upmost importance for member states to strive to support their existence, in order to not only provide effective support for BME women and children, but also to contribute to states’ fulfilment of their human rights obligations in the area of combating violence against women, including Article 22 of provision of specialist support services, as specified in the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence.’
The convention referred to, also known as the Istanbul Convention, came into force twelve months ago. It specifies the requirement for short- and long-term specialist services for those who have experienced violence against women. But despite signing up to it three years ago, the UK government has still failed to ratify it. In February this year, the Joint Committee on Human Rights released a report under the headline ‘Government doing less at home than abroad on violence against women and girls’, in which it explicitly warned that the government could harm its international reputation by failing to ratify the convention. And in March, Women’s Aid received a letter from David Cameron confirming that the coalition government would not ratify the Istanbul Convention, allowing the issue to drag on. Though eighteen states, including Italy, France, Spain, Denmark and Sweden have all ratified the convention, the UK still has yet to do so.
Ratification would mean that the UK government would have to bring its provision, such as the one cited above relating to specialist support services, into force through domestic policy and legislation. While it drags its feet, services providing specialist provision for black and minority ethnic women are at crisis point.
Originally published 30 November 2015
SEXISM, DOUBLE DISCRIMINATION AND MORE THAN ONE KIND OF PREJUDICE
Since the Everyday Sexism Project started, many of the stories we have catalogued have described not just sexism, but sexism intermingled with other forms of prejudice – racism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, ageism, disableism, stigma around mental health problems, and more. Again and again, we’ve heard from women in same-sex relationships being fetishized and asked for threesomes when they’re just trying to walk down the street, trans women mocked and belittled and hounded from public spaces, Asian women being labelled as ‘easy’ or ‘obedient’, sex workers accused of being complicit in their own assaults, disabled women infantilized and patronized, and countless similar stories.
‘Double discrimination’ (or, indeed, triple or quadruple) has proved to be a major recurring theme within the project and is a crucial focus for modern feminism. Intersectionality means being aware of and acting on the fact that different forms of prejudice are connected, because they all stem from the same root of being other, different or somehow secondary to the ‘normal’, ‘ideal’ status quo. So just as women suffer from sexism because our society is set up to favour and automatically take men as the norm from which women deviate, so the same is true for people who are different from other dominant norms – such as being heterosexual, white, cisgendered and non-disabled. People also often face prejudice as a result of other characteristics, such as age, class and religious belief.
If we are to tackle the fact that women have been historically oppressed because of characteristics that are seen to be different from the male norm, how can we protest such treatment while simultaneously excluding from our own movement the needs and agendas of those with other stigmatized characteristics? This is particularly true in the case of our trans sisters, who some feminists believe should be excluded from some areas of the movement by virtue of not fulfilling required characteristics of womanhood – a deep irony for a group fighting for equality regardless of sex.
There were huge numbers of project entries that clearly demonstrate two or more kinds of prejudice combined. Many women of colour, for example, have described suffering not only from both racism and sexism but also from a particular brand of racist sexism that conflates and exacerbates the two.
‘I am Japanese. Frequently told by white men that Japanese, Chinese, Filipina, Asian women are “better” than the “feminazis”, “femicunts” in the West and “know how to treat men”; we will cook and clean.’
‘I was walking on my university campus with my boyfriend, when we walked past a group of guys, one of whom shouted out “What did you pay for her then? Is she a mail order?” My boyfriend is Chinese and I’m half Indian.’
Writer Reni Eddo-Lodge says that not all women experience incidents like street harassment in the same way: ‘There’s particular fascination with African women’s bodies and because of the likes of hip-hop videos – the production of which is controlled by black men in a heavily male-dominated industry – our bodies are rarely equated with innocence and piety and instead are deemed as permanently sexually available.’ This idea of black women as exotic, hyper-sexualized creatures can be seen again and again in cultural stereotypes. Try typing ‘pretty’ into Google image search and you are greeted with pages and pages of white women’s faces (the fashion industry is notoriously white: of the seventy-five British Vogue covers since the beginning of 2008, black women have featured on just three, while Kate Moss alone has graced nine); but type in ‘sexy’ and suddenly far more women of colour appear – though they remain far less represented than white women. Sexism impacts hugely on women’s lives, careers and success. When prejudices intersect, the same is doubly true.
And, as demonstrated by accounts of other forms of sexism, these combined prejudices become evident at a tragically young age. ‘I reported a boy at school who had
been making racial and sexual remarks to me and other girls of ethnic minorities for about a year. Because, even though teachers and other students could hear the disgusting comments he was making about me being a “black whore who he wanted to put in a cage”, a Pakistani girl being a “bomber” and stating the only attractive females were white, it was dismissed and nobody said a word.’
The huge effect of media stereotypes on the treatment of particular groups of people – especially those suffering various forms of double discrimination – is a vital part of the problem. According to new figures released in May 2013, just 18 per cent of television presenters over the age of fifty are women. The percentage for disabled women, LGBTQIA women and women of colour is likely to be even lower.
The problem is exacerbated and inflamed by two key factors. First, such women are so rarely portrayed on screen as to be considered strange and unusual. Second, when they are present they have generally been moulded into hackneyed caricatures that play to every stereotype in the book and exist solely to satisfy a specific storyline.
‘The dearth of any women in the media anywhere near my size (I’m a UK 18) who isn’t a) a pathetic lonely loser or b) the “before” shot on a weight-loss show.’
‘As a physically disabled woman, I feel invisible, both in the media and in real life. No one seems to think that I have a sexuality or even sensuality. There seem to be very few characters in films and TV shows who are incidentally disabled and/or queer.’
