Dan Moshenberg

Dan Moshenberg is an organizer educator who has worked with various social movements in the United States and South Africa.

Lede: Two million women workers … ¡presenté!

September 18, 2013 by 8 Comments

Alpha Manzueta

Good news: “The Obama administration announced yesterday it will extend labor benefits and overtime pay to health care workers providing home care. This ruling affects nearly 2 million health care workers, who daily manage the needs of elderly and chronically ill people, as well as people with disabilities. One of the fastest-growing professions in the U.S., these workers have been exempt from benefits provided by the Fair Labor Standards Act since 1974.”

Bad, and unsurprising, news: 41% of women in the United States are poor or verging on poverty. The poverty rate among women is at the highest it’s been in twenty years. For Black and Latina women, almost one in four is `living in poverty’. From non-profit to corporate America, from not-for-profit sea to shining corporate capital C, women are paid less for the same or equivalent work, are promoted less often and less rapidly, and generally are positioned for hard times and slow death. Women workers won’t come anywhere near pay equity until, say, 2058. In other words, most women workers will not see any kind of gender equity or equality in their working lives.

Two-thirds of caregivers are women. Across the land, daughters are the caregivers to family elders: “It’s almost like being back at the turn of the century.” There’s no almost about it, and there’s no `back at’, because there hasn’t been progress. When it comes to care work, we live at the turn of the twentieth century.

When it comes to the description of care work, as well, we live at the turn of the twentieth century. Consider these examples from the past day’s news.

Alpha Manzueta is a full-time worker and single mother who lives with her daughter in a homeless shelter in New York. You know who lives in homeless shelters in New York City? The working poor. And you know who the working poor are: “Mostly female, they are engaged in a variety of low-wage jobs as security guards, bank tellers, sales clerks, computer instructors, home health aides and office support staff members. At work they present an image of adult responsibility, while in the shelter they must obey curfews and show evidence that they are actively looking for housing and saving part of their paycheck.”

Mostly female. A sidebar more or less buried in the fourth paragraph.

And who are the home care workers who will benefit from yesterday’s important decision to extend workers’ hard earned rights? “Mostly female” and almost never in the opening paragraph.

“Home care workers, like domestic workers worldwide, are mostly female, and many of them are immigrants and women of color.” Fourth paragraph.

“More than 90 percent of home care aides are women. About 30 percent are black, and 12 percent are Hispanic.” Ninth paragraph.

“President Barack Obama first proposed the rules nearly two years ago as part of broader effort to boost the economy and help low-income workers struggling to make ends meet. More than 90 percent of home care aides are women. About 30 percent are black, and 12 percent are Hispanic.” Seventh paragraph.

“The federal government estimates that 90 percent of home health workers are female and that 50 percent are minorities. As the population ages, the home health industry is expected to grow rapidly, expanding by 69 percent between 2010 and 2020.” Sixth, and final, paragraph.

“According to the Obama administration, almost 40 percent of aides receive government benefits like food stamps and Medicaid. Ninety-two percent of these workers are female, almost 30 percent are black and 12 percent are Hispanic.” Seventh paragraph.

Bloomberg Business Week actually began their report with the women: “Overturning a decades-old exemption, the U.S. Department of Labor has extended minimum wage and overtime benefits to the mostly female and minority workforce of nearly 2 million home health-care workers.”

Meanwhile, The San Francisco Bay Guardian reported yesterday, “The California Legislature gave final approval to the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights on Sept. 12, legislation sponsored by Assemblymember Tom Ammiano (D-SF) to finally extend some labor rights to this largely female and immigrant workforce. Advocates are hopeful that Gov. Jerry Brown will sign it this time.”

Women workers. Women of color workers. Immigrant women workers. That’s the news. Put it in the lede. Two million women workers … ¡presenté!

 

(Photo Credit: Michael Nagle for The New York Times)

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Let a thousand Yarl’s Woods blossom, and may the women be damned

September 16, 2013 by 21 Comments

Evenia Mawongera

 

On Friday, Zimbabwean activist, outspoken critic of Robert Mugabe’s regime, grandmother, long-time resident of Leicester, England, Evenia Mawongera made her weekly visit to the Border Agency. She shows up each week because she’s applying for asylum. Mawongera was detained, held and then shipped off to Yarl’s Wood, where she now awaits deportation.

Evenia Mawongera has lived in England for a decade. She went to England, fleeing persecution in Zimbabwe. She went to Leicester because her two daughters lived there. They had gone to University in England and had been allowed to stay. The daughters have lived in England since 1999. Mawongera has no family left in Zimbabwe.  Her daughters and her grandchildren are all British citizens.

By all accounts, since her arrival, Mawongera has been a model and exemplary person. A little over three weeks ago, Evenia Mawongera was awarded the Good Neighbour Award for her many contributions to the community.

And now she sits in Yarl’s Wood.

And what exactly is Yarl’s Wood? It’s Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre, and, as we’ve written many times, it’s a bad place, and a particularly bad place for women: Mojirola Daniels, Aisha, Denise McNeil, Gladys Obiyan, Sheree Wilson, Shellyann Stupart, Aminata Camara, Leila. Bita Ghaedi. Azbaa Dar. Gloria Sestus. Brenda Namigadde. Betty Tibikawa. Lemlem Hussein Abdu. Marie Therese Njila Nana. Jackie Nanyonjo. Roseline Akhalu.

It’s only a partial list, which doesn’t include the names of those who must remain anonymous, to `protect’ their identities, nor the widows and widowers and children. Others have written as well of the sexual predation, of the abuse of pregnant women that takes place in Yarl’s Wood.

For example, yesterday, Tanja’s story broke. Yet another story revealed the systematic sexual predation that is the bread and butter of Yarl’s Wood. Yarl’s Wood is a designed community in which staff preys upon the most vulnerable, typically young women fleeing sexual violence. The police yet again say they will conduct an investigation.

For some, Yarl’s Wood isn’t the disease, it’s the symptom. Others have named the disease: evil. A building whose express purpose is `removal’ is a factory that produces sexual violence, torture, despair and death. It’s in the architecture of the mission. If human beings are just so much dross to be removed, then vulnerable human beings, and especially vulnerable women, are less and worse than disposable, and they are less and worse than despicable.

And this is where Evenia Mawongera sits today.

Yarl’s Wood is part of a global political economy in which vulnerability is a natural resource, meant for exploitation and abuse. Yarl’s Wood is meant for export. Just last week, the newly elected Australian government announced its plans to emulate the fast-track immigrant `processing scheme’ of the United Kingdom. Let a thousand Yarl’s Woods blossom, and may the women be damned, each and every one.

 

(Photo Credit: The South African)

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In Botswana, a great victory for Edith Mmusi and women everywhere

September 4, 2013 by 10 Comments

 

Edith Mosadigape Mmusi and her three sisters – Bakhane Moima, Jane Lekoko, Mercy Kedidimetse Ntshekisang

Edith Mosadigape Mmusi and her three sisters – Bakhane Moima, Jane Lekoko, Mercy Kedidimetse Ntshekisang

October 12, 2012, was a great day for Edith Mosadigape Mmusi, her three sisters – Bakhane Moima, Jane Lekoko, Mercy Kedidimetse Ntshekisang – and women across Botswana and southern Africa. On that day, the High Court of Botswana ruled that women should be allowed to inherit by customary law. The Court ruled that Edith Mmusi, who had lived continuously in her house and home, should not be excluded from inheriting … her own home.

The sisters were supported by Priti Patel, of the Southern African Litigation Centre, based in Johannesburg, as well as other women’s rights activists across Southern Africa. They were also supported by the earlier Attorney General v Unity Dow, a landmark women’s rights case. From top to bottom and side to side, this was a women’s case, brought by women activists, women jurists, women elders, women. Upon leaving the High Court in Gabarone on October 12, Edith Mmusi said, “It’s a great day for us.”

It was indeed, and it just got better.

Yesterday, in a unanimous decision, the Court of Appeal in Ramantele v Mmusi and Others upheld and strengthened the High Court’s October decision: “Constitutional values of equality before the law, and the increased leveling of the power structures with more and more women heading households and participating with men as equals in the public sphere and increasingly in the private sphere, demonstrate that there is no rational and justifiable basis for sticking to the narrow norms of days gone by when such norms go against current value systems.”

In his concurrence, Chief Justice Kirby noted, “Any customary law or rule which discriminates in any case against a woman unfairly solely on the basis of her gender would not be in accordance with humanity, morality or natural justice. Nor would it be in accordance with the principles of justice, equity and good conscience.”

Priti Patel put the day’s decision and event in context: “The judgment today by the Court of Appeal made it clear that women are not second class citizens in Botswana. The Court of Appeal’s unanimous decision – noting that customary law unjustly discriminating against women solely on the basis of their gender would violate the Constitution and the laws of Botswana – was a significant move forward in ensuring the end of gender discrimination in Botswana. Some people had feared that the Court of Appeal would set the fight for women’s rights back yet again,” said Patel. “But instead they ruled unanimously in favour of equality and against gender discrimination. It is a hugely important decision not only for Botswana but for women across southern Africa.”

It’s a great day for Edith Mmusi, for Bakhane Moima, Jane Lekoko, Mercy Kedidimetse Ntshekisang, for Unity Dow and Priti Patel, for women across Botswana, across southern Africa … and beyond.

 

 

(Photo Credit: BBC)

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At HMP Bronzefield, we were dismayed

August 30, 2013 by 22 Comments

Welcome to HMP Bronzefield, a “Private Finance Initiative”, or PFI, prison for women in southeast England. If you are a `women with complex needs’, a women who is both `vulnerable and violent’, you can expect to spend your time, years and years of it, in isolation, in a squalid cell.

That is the finding of an unannounced visit by Nick Harwick, the Chief Inspector of Prisons. In April he visited Bronzefield, and here’s part of his report: “HMP Bronzefield is a closed women’s local prison run by Sodexo Justice Services that at the time of this inspection held 446 women on remand or serving sentences ranging from a few weeks to life … At our last inspection in 2010 we reported:

“The prison held a small number of ‘restricted status’ women, some of whom had severe personality disorders. Their needs could simply not be met by the prison. One woman, who had exhibited unpredictable and violent behaviour, had effectively been held in the segregation unit for three years with very little human contact or activity to occupy her. The conditions in which she was held seemed likely to lead to further psychological deterioration and were completely unacceptable. There was little evidence that senior staff in the Prison Service had oversight of women segregated for long periods to ensure their conditions were humane. Bronzefield is not an appropriate place for women with these needs and there was a lack of a national strategy to manage women with such complex demands.

“We were dismayed that the woman who had already been in the segregation unit for three years in 2010 was still there in 2013. Her cell was unkempt and squalid and she seldom left it. Although more activities had been organised for her and better multi-disciplinary support was available, she still had too little to occupy her. Her prolonged location on the segregation unit amounted to cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment – and we use these words advisedly. The treatment and conditions of other women held for long periods in segregation was little better. Much of this was outside the prison’s direct control and required a national strategy for meeting the needs of these very complex women – as exists in the male estate. However, Bronzefield itself needed to do more to ameliorate the worst effects of this national failure.”

When Bronzefield opened in 2004, it was the first PFI prison for women in the United Kingdom. In their nine years of operation, they have not managed, or refused, to take into account `women with complex needs.’

Juliet Lyon, of the Prison Reform Trust, wondered, “Why in this day and age are women with such complex needs transported like cattle and dumped in prison, where one of the most damaged women is left to rot in some form of solitary confinement for five years?”

Frances Cook, Chief Executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, was a bit more direct: “This shocking case of treatment, which appears to amount to torture, in an English prison should shame ministers who tolerate the over-use of custody for women and consequent poor treatment.”

It should should … but it didn’t. They loudly proclaim their opposition to violence in Syria but for `women with complex needs’ in their own backyards? Not so much.

Jan Sambrook, the Chair of the Independent Monitoring Board at Bronzefield, wrote, today, “We are … very concerned about the humane and fair treatment of a small number of such women. The discussion so far has been about one woman. This is not an isolated case … I, previous chairs, and members of the IMB have raised our concerns repeatedly about the women held long-term in the segregation unit. This is in direct contravention of National Offender Management Service (Noms) guidance, falls well below what is fair, decent and humane, and discriminates against female prisoners, as the special accommodation available to men is not provided for women … I’d like to emphasise that the concern is not just about the one woman being talked about today, but the wider issue of the holding of the small number of women who are potentially very violent, difficult and volatile but also vulnerable. Presently there are no dedicated facilities for the holding of these women such as those available in the male prison estate, meaning that they get held in what we consider unsuitable conditions, including being isolated for far too long. This is unfair and discriminatory.”

What do we know about women’s prisons? They have a higher ratio of people living with mental health illnesses and a higher ratio of people who have been sexually and otherwise abused. What else do we know about women’s prisons? If you’re a woman prisoner in the United Kingdom and you’ve got any problems, unlike in the male prison system, there’s nowhere to go but in a hole … for a long time.

Call it torture. Call it systematic as well. And please refrain from expressions of shock. This is not an isolated case; this is not about one woman or one prison; and none of this is new.

 

 

(Photo Credit: Martin Argles / The Guardian)

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A specter haunts Pennsylvania

August 28, 2013 by 15 Comments

 

Sharon Wiggins

Sharon Wiggins died in March. Wiggins was a 62-year-old Black woman living with serious health problems. But it wasn’t her health that did her in. What killed Sharon Wiggins was the criminal justice system in Pennsylvania. Sharon Wiggins died behind bars at SCI-Muncy, the maximum security and intake `facility’ for all women prisoners in Pennsylvania, as well as the site of its death row for women.

Wiggins entered Muncy at the age of 17, convicted initially to death and then, a few years later, to life without parole. She spent 45 years behind bars. When she died she was the oldest and the longest serving woman prisoner in Pennsylvania. That’s no mean feat. Pennsylvania has more prisoners who began as juvenile lifers than any other state in the Union. Effectively, this means Pennsylvania has more juvenile lifers than any place else in the world.

Reports suggest that Wiggins set out, early on, to improve her life, to atone for her crimes, sins, and mistakes. She finished a degree at Penn State and when on to tutor and to manage tutoring programs. She completed thousands of educational certificate programs. She mentored others; she took care of women and helped women grow, and not only women prisoners. Nancy Sponeybarger, a former counselor at Muncy, has said, “As I got to know her a little bit, she was the one person who always made me feel my humanity.”

On another occasion, Sponeybarger elaborated, “She’s grown into a really insightful, compassionate, capable older woman – despite all the odds, because it’s not like you have a ton of role models when you’re in prison, especially when you’re tossed in there as a little girl.”

Especially when you’re tossed in there as a little girl.

Last June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it’s unconstitutional to sentence juveniles to mandatory life sentences without parole. Wiggins applied for release, and she and her lawyers and supporters hoped that she would be released, at last: “I want to know what it feels like to wake up by myself. Here, you live on public view. There’s always a big piece of glass on your door. I want to wake up by myself. I want to know how it feels to walk down the street. I want to know how it feels to sit in the car and hear the rain just beat down. I want to know how it feels to sit with my sister and have a cup of coffee.”

The State dragged its feet, and Sharon Wiggins died. She never got to know.

Pennsylvania leads the nation and the world in the incarceration of children for life without parole. Last year, nationally, close to 1600 people were serving out juvenile life sentences without parole. Of the girls, almost 80% reported physical abuse, and over 77% reported sexual abuse.

And it gets worse. Historically and immediately, juvenile justice institutions are designed for boys. They don’t work for boys, mind you, but for girls, they’re particularly and specifically toxic, lethal even. The research on this systematic `oversight’ is abundant and easily available.

“Custody for girls virtually guarantees that that their unique needs are not met and they react differently to their treatment than boys. Sentencing young girls to LWOP (life without parole) in adult court exacerbates girls’ unique issues in several ways. First, with the small number of women in the prison population, girls are often sent to women’s prisons with adult offenders rather than to separate units for youth offenders.  Girls are all too often subjected to sexual abuse and rape while in prison. Male corrections staff at women’s prisons may use coercive methods to initiate sexual relationships with inmates, or may abuse their position to obtain sexual favors. Sentencing girls to serve a life sentence in adult prison creates circumstances that are very traumatic and that should raise the specter of a punishment that is cruel and unusual.”

A specter haunts Pennsylvania, the specter of a punishment that is cruel and unusual, the specter of compassion and decency, the specter of justice for Sharon Peachie Wiggins. It is the specter of those children tossed in there as little girls.

 

(Photo Credit: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

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More support is needed for South Africa’s subsistence fisherwomen

August 22, 2013 by 16 Comments

South African women fish for a living, and for their lives.

Fishing for a living is a hard life, everywhere. Subsistence fishing can be brutally difficult, but it has its dignity. For example, in Durban, on the east coast of South Africa, women and men have been subsistence fishing off the piers and beaches for over a hundred years. Generation after generation, they have used the skills their forebears brought when they came from India as indentured workers. Across generations and for decades upon decades, subsistence fishing brought fisherwomen and fishermen economic income as well as spiritual and cultural fulfillment.

Four years ago, that all came to a crashing close when much of the harbor was closed to fishing. On one hand, there were `security’ issues. On the other hand, there was rapid private development, referred to `expansion’. It wasn’t `expansion’. It was privatization; it was theft of public and common space. The results for the subsistence fisherwomen and fishermen were devastating, and continue to be so.

For the fisherwomen and fishermen, the act of fishing successfully, of bringing home food and some money from the sales of their day’s labor, is value. Honoring the labor of their forebears is value. Being on the water, being together, being a community, is value.

For those who occupy the commanding heights of Durban, real estate is value, and the water, the beach front, recreational fishing, have all become big business, and promise to intensify, or `expand’, in the future. For them, extraction is value.

For fisherwomen, the closure of and exclusion from public spaces has particular, gendered aspects. Fishing together off the piers provided safety. As the spaces closed, competition increased. As the competition intensified, tensions turned to violence. This occurred in an environment that was already hard on fisherwomen. Women’s subordinate position in fishing communities generally made them more vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. This has meant high levels of HIV and AIDS, drug and alcohol abuse, and violence. With the reduction of available spaces for fishing, the loss of income, increased and intensified unemployment, the daily lives of fisherwomen and of women in fishing communities predictably became more perilous and more toxic.

It’s the predictability that has to be taken into account. None of this is a surprise and none of this is a secret. It’s public policy; it’s part of the development scheme for Durban … and beyond.

During the last two decades, South African fisherwomen have organized. The South African Fisherwomen’s Association, organized by Sahra Luyt, has been on the frontline of integrating women into the fishing industries, as well as combating the increased difficulties due to climate change. There’s the Oceanview Fisherwomen’s Association, colored women from the Cape Flats who took up fishing to survive and to live with dignity, as documented in Penny Gaines’ 2002 documentary, “Strong Enough”.

That women fish for a living, and for their lives, in South Africa is well known, except at IRIN, “a service of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs”, which ran a news piece today headlined, “More support needed for South Africa’s subsistence fishermen.” The article should come with a disclaimer, “No fisherwomen were interviewed in the making of this article.” Nowhere does the article reference fisherwomen. Not even fisherfolk. Only `fishermen’ make the IRIN cut.

South African subsistence fisherwomen have always had a tough time in fishing communities. More recently, they have been under attack by State and private developers. And now they are erased by coordinators of humanitarian affairs. More support is needed for South Africa’s subsistence fisherwomen.

 

 

(Photo Credit: Lee Middleton / IPS)

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The political economies of mental illness, solitary confinement, and women’s labor

August 17, 2013 by 7 Comments

Sonya Hall, Amir Hall’s aunt.

Across the United States, people living with mental illness are sent to prisons, rather than hospitals, clinics or other health programs. In the last three decades, prisons and jails have become the single largest institutional residence for those living with mental illnesses. While this is more or less public knowledge, the prison and jail systems have steadfastly refused to address the new tsunami. Funding for mental health providers has not increased. If anything, it’s been sliced and diced. Guards and other staff have not received additional training to address the `new populations.’

And so …

And so, what happens is exactly what you expect would happen. Prisoners `manifest symptoms’ and are placed in solitary confinement, often for prolonged periods of time. Acting out is seen as acting up, and that means the hole. And for prisoners living with mental illnesses, that can, and often does, mean death.

In this theater of atrocity, women take a number of specific hits. Here’s one.

Meet Sonya Hall, Shaleah Hall, and Donna Currao.

Donna Currao is the wife of Tommy Currao. Tommy Currao is one of the `lucky ones’. Currao attempted suicide at least ten times in ten months in solitary confinement. He tried to overdose, to hang himself, to slash himself, using the metal inside of his hearing aid. For the last attempt, with the hearing aid innards, Currao was charged $500 for `destruction of state property.’ In New York, where Currao is imprisoned, irony is not dead.

Donna Currao pushed and pulled and pushed some more. She saw what was happening to her husband in solitary. She knew how to read the words and, even more, the silences, and she forced the State to do something as her husband lost both weight and words.

A few months ago, Donna Currao’s insistent organizing finally forced the State to send her husband to a psychologist, who diagnosed the prisoner as in serious need of help. He was moved from the hole to health treatment and now, a mere months later, is “1,000 times better.”

Donna Currao now wonders, “Why do we have to fight so hard to get them evaluated?”

Sonya Hall and Shaleah Hall also ask why. Sonya Hall is Amir Hall’s aunt. Shaleah Hall is Amir Hall’s sister. Both are now part of the United States’ version of Mothers of the Disappeared.

Amir Hall’s story is tragically short. He lived with severe mental illness. He would have outbursts. One outburst resulted in prison, for parole violation. He had outbursts in prison. That led, finally, to ten months in solitary. He never returned. As Shaleah Hall noted, watching a video of his `transfer’, “There was somebody who looked defeated, like the life was beat out of him. I don’t know who that person was. The person in that video was not my brother.”

Why? Why, when doctors and pretty much everyone else had diagnosed and recognized Amir Hall as someone living with severe mental illness was the young Black man `diagnosed’ by prison staff as not serious? Why? Why must Shaleah Hall and Sonya Hall now work so hard, so intensely, so long to get something that will not be justice and will not be healing but will be something? Why? Why must Donna Carao fight so hard to get something so obvious?

The populations targeted for incarceration are also targeted for intensive and extensive labor, none of which counts as labor. That population, the laboring non-laboring ones, is made up overwhelmingly of women. Who benefits from women’s non-laboring labor in the prison industrial factory system that shoves those living with mental illnesses into death holes?

 

(Photo Credit: Shannon DeCelle / ProPublica)

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Marikana: Don’t commemorate. Compensate.

August 14, 2013 by 33 Comments

It’s been a year, almost, since the massacre at Marikana, and the nation, and its media, are struggling, sort of, to find a way to address all that has, and even more has not, happened in the intervening year. A year later, tensions simmer, the Farlam Commission is more or less falling apart, some great and moving documentaries are beginning to emerge, and the widows of Marikana organize and wait, wait and organize.

This is how the week began. On Sunday, in a prayer service in Langa, national police commissioner Riah Phiyega announced that South Africa would `commemorate’ the Marikana tragedy. How exactly will the police, who used live ammunition to put down a mineworkers’ strike, `commemorate’ the event?

More to the point, is commemoration the best way to honor the dead miners and, even more, their survivors, the widows and children? As one widow explained, soon after the massacre, “Today I am called a widow and my children are called fatherless because of the police. I blame the mine, the police and the government because they are the ones who control the country.”

How will `the nation’ commemorate those who are now called widows and those who are now called fatherless? What happened on August 16, 2012? 34 miners were killed. Many others were wounded. And widows were made. Soon after one mineworker was arrested, police told him, “Right here we have made many widows … we have killed all these men.”

The State machinery, call it a factory, produced widows of women that day, and has continued to produce widows of those very women every single day since. So, here’s a suggestion. Rather than `commemorate’, compensate.

(Photo Credit: Greg Marinovich /Daily Maverick)

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A girl hanged herself. A girl was hanged here.

August 3, 2013 by 10 Comments

Women prisoners in Eloy Detention Center in Florence, Arizona, are on hunger strike to protest conditions there. This hunger strike was sparked by the internment of the Dream 9 activists, and in particular of 24-year-old Lulu Martinez and 22-year-old Maria Peniche, who have spent practically all of their time in isolation. No doubt, the conditions are `preventive’. What is the women’s crime that places them in solitary? Too much autonomy? Too much independence? Too much hope?

The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday ruled that overcrowded is overcrowded, and too much overcrowded is inhumane, as in cruel and unusual punishment. It’s good news for thousands of prisoners in the California prison system, who soon will be released. And who “bears the brunt” of California’s systematic prison overcrowding? Women.

At first, women benefited from both early-release programs and from alternative sentencing programs. Those benefits were shortlived. Now the women’s prisons are once severely overcrowded and getting worse by the day. As so-called low-level women offenders are shunted off to county jails, which are not and more to the point have not prepared for the particularities of this influx, the levels of violence in the prisons intensifies. This means more and more women are being sent to solitary. And so the cycle not only continues but spins ever more rapidly, ever more violently, ever more viciously.

Given all the studies that point to the concentrated levels of mental health issues among women prisoners, what has been California’s response? Solitary isolation. It’s … preventive. It’s also typical.

The same abuse of women prisoners occurs around the world. In Australia, journalist Christine Rau laments that nothing was learned from the abuse her sister, Cornelia Rau, suffered in immigration detention. It’s a common story. Cornelia was picked up and wrongfully detained, by immigration authorities. She then vanished into the system. Literally. For a year, her family and NSW Missing Persons detectives searched for her. Finally, she was located, in an immigration detention cell.

While fellow prisoners recognized that Cornelia Rau lived with serious mental illnesses, the prison guards and system chose to ignore the symptoms, and so effectively ignored the woman.

Upon her release, Cornelia Rau received a hefty settlement for her torture, but the money is meaningless. As Christine Rau, her sister, notes: “Her life is a misery. Her neurological pathways have been so damaged after 10 months in an untreated psychosis, that she cannot settle in any permanent residence, she can’t sustain relationships beyond fleeting ones, and she is one of the unhappiest people I know. The money is meaningless: it’s handled by financial administrators employed by the NSW Government; her medical needs are rarely followed up, and we rely on a network of friends and acquaintances to try and make sure she’s safe. It’s a nightmare; but anyone with a family member without insight into a mental illness would tell you that. It’s hardly unusual.”

It is hardly unusual.

It is more than hardly unusual. It is the entire system. While immigrants are treated abysmally in “detention centers” around the world and prisoners with disabilities are abused pretty much universally, there is a special hell designated for women immigrants, for women prisoners with disabilities, for women. In Australia as in the United States, private corporations profit from the particular abuse of women, and so does the State.

It is hardly unusual. It is the systematic abuse and torture of women.

So, the women prisoners of Eloy are on hunger strike. As Thesla Zenaida, a sister prisoner and hunger striker at Eloy, explained: “Look, a girl hanged herself. A girl was hanged here. [After] she was hanged, they didn’t want to take her body down. And for the same reason—because they treat us poorly. A guard treated her poorly, and that guard is still working here.”

The torture and abuse of women is the work of the State. That’s the lesson we are meant to learn.

 

(Photo Credit: NACLA.org)

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What exactly is the women’s crime? Democracy? Autonomy?

July 31, 2013 by 1 Comment

Ingrid Turinawe

In Kampala yesterday, Ingrid Turinawe and eleven other women activists were placed under `preventive arrest.’ Preventive arrest means the person arrested hasn’t actually done anything wrong … but might. What was the imminent danger posed by Turinawe and her sisters? Some would say a petition, others might say illegally approaching Parliament, and still others would say, democracy. Yet again, Ingrid Turinawe has been arrested for wanting to take that long walk to democracy.

The story, in a nutshell, is this. A hundred or so Forum for Democratic Change women activists gathered at the FDC headquarters. They wanted to write and present a petition to Parliament protesting new, higher taxes on water and kerosene. Water and kerosene are women’s issues, in Uganda as everywhere else in the world. That’s it. That’s the whole present and imminent danger. A women’s petition to Parliament. The police heard of the meeting, surrounded the building, forced their way, selected and arrested 12 of the women, including Ingrid Turinawe, head of the FDC Women’s League, and Anna Adeke Ebaju, Makerere University Guild President.

As of this morning, five of the women are still being held.

What exactly is the women’s crime that is being prevented? Democracy? Autonomy?

The same question is being asked in Harare, where, on the cusp of today’s elections, dozens of women were rounded up and charged with prostitution. The women’s initial `crime’ was ostensibly `loitering’, which simply means being a woman on the street. This time, the manly cleansing of the public spaces was dubbed “Operation Zvanyanya.” Operation It’s Too Much.

It’s too much … what?

Zimbabwean feminist activist Judith Chiyangwa went to the places where the women had been arrested and she found loads of men, hanging out on the streets, selling, chatting, being. They weren’t arrested.

Too much … what? Too many women in one room in Kampala? Too many individual women on the streets in Harare? Too many women being women, demanding and creating oppositional, autonomous, independent, and even democratic women’s spaces?

(Photo Credit: Pearl Posts)

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