Twenty years after Cairo, women’s rights are reduced around the world

October 2, 2013 by 9 Comments

Almost 20 years ago, the Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) took place in Cairo (1994). ICPD, also called the Cairo Consensus, declared women’s reproductive and health rights as fundamental to the well being of women and to the full political and economical participation of women.

In Paris last week, Medecins du Monde (Doctors of the World), Planning Familial and Equilibres et populations hosted a briefing, titled: “Access to contraception, unwanted pregnancies and unsafe abortions:  the state of reproductive rights and health in the global South.” The briefing panel consisted of Margarita Gonzales and Catherine Giboin, both of Medecins du Monde; Serge Sabier, from Equilibres et Populations; Lise Marie Dejean from Solidarité Fanm Ayisyen, SOFA, a Haitian feminist organization; and Véronique Séhier, of French Family Planning. They all agreed that the global conservative turn has had tremendous and destructive consequences for women. Serge Sabier, who participated in the drafting of the Cairo resolutions, said that today it would be impossible to get 172 countries to agree to sign such a document.

Véronique Séhier added that these rights are still not considered fundamental. The goals have not been reached. For young women, access to reproductive health services, and to education and education about sexuality in particular, is limited. In many regions, and not only in the South, contraceptives are difficult to obtain or unavailable. Meanwhile, many countries oppose the right to abortion. In Europe, three countries officially deny access to abortion services, thereby defying European law.  Séhier insisted that no dissociation should be made between contraception and abortion; access to both is a fundamental right.

Catherine Giboin reminded the audience that data on reproductive health were almost non-existent until 1985. She then shared some data to show that evidence is not enough to have sound politics to support women’s rights. One fourth of women in the world have no access to contraceptives. In 2012, 73% of the women who did not receive the contraceptives they needed were in the poorest countries. About 40% of the pregnancies in the world are unwanted, and this rate climbs to about 60% in Latin America and the Caribbean. One out of ten births occur with girls between the age of 15 and 19. The ratio of unsafe abortions has increased from 44% in 1995 to 49% in 2008; 98% of unsafe abortions are in developing countries. In 2008, 47000 women died as a result of not having access to safe abortion and 8 million had complications. 40% of the world women live in countries that have very restrictive abortion legislations. Chile, Malta, Nicaragua, and El Salvador forbid abortion without exception.

Lise Marie Dejean put these data and numbers in the reality of Haitian women who represent 52% of the country’s population. Haiti’s high maternal mortality and high rate of complications after abortion have to be linked to women’s under-representation and invisibility in Haitian institutions and politics.  Dejean affirmed the crucial role that the colonial and post-colonial patriarchal power has played, reminding the audience that contraceptive pills were tested on Haitian women, who now have little to no access to those very contraceptives. She insisted that women’s reproductive health and women’s health in general, are interdependent with women’s levels and quality of participation, women’s poverty, and rape. As Dejean noted, in Haiti “our body doesn’t belong to us, the patriarchal system has profited from this body to establish places of domination (des lieux de domination).” Across Latin American and the Caribbean, women are organizing to demand that their right to control their body be respected as well as their right to have equal participation in the decisions of their countries.

France’s Minister for Gender Equality, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, presented the position of her ministry. Although France has some problems of access to abortion services, its situation is still one of the best in the world, with free-of-charge reproductive services, including for undocumented immigrant women. Vallaud-Belkacem insisted on the commitment of France and its diplomacy in asserting women’s rights and also more practically in supporting women’s organizations through its embassies. One NGO representative asked how activists from poor countries who are often poor themselves could have a voice in international instances. Vallaud-Belkacem replied that feminist diplomacy is there to facilitate their travel and to increase the visibility and real participation of those activists in international conferences.

The Minister’s language radically departed from the usual monolithic paternalistic language that often prevails in such meetings. She recognized the difficulties and said that while her action in promoting women’s rights and also participation of feminist organizations has been oriented to francophone countries, she also inscribed that in a broader feminist diplomatic perspective. For example, at the conference des ambassadeurs (ambassador conference) in August 2013, she argued for a new diplomacy for women’s rights. Additionally, according to Vallaud-Belkacem, France is the fourth country in terms of financial aid in the world and 500 million Euros were dedicated between 2012 and 2014 to support reproductive health initiatives around the world.

A member of the Greek’s family planning and the vice president of UNICEF Greek committee then made a striking remark that demonstrated once again that women are the first affected by the neoliberal order, which begets crisis. In Greece, women’s rights registered a major set back when austerity measures privatized public services and gutted the social state. And so now 40% of the population cannot access health services. While abortion remains legal, it now costs too much for many Greek women. The fee for an abortion is about half a minimum monthly wage, and contraceptives are expensive and hard to find. Greece, which had a good health care system, has seen a significant increase in infant mortality.

Greece demonstrates the pervasiveness of the neoliberal order on women’s health and reproductive rights. The current reduction of women’s reproductive rights and health has to be recognized as part of a political and economic order rather than as some unfortunate situation.

 

(Photo and Video Credit: Daily Motion)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Women organize the choir to end mass incarceration … and beyond

September 30, 2013 by 6 Comments

Michelle Alexander presented her thoughts on race, rights, and mass incarceration in the United States at a recent talk in Washington, DC.  A law professor and civil rights lawyer, Alexander is the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.  In this book, Alexander examines how State political-economic policy—specifically the War on Drugs—has created a regime of caging and profiling Black and Brown men and led to a new racial caste system, a New Jim Crow.

At her talk in DC, Alexander said that she wanted her book to be not just a tool for educating more people on mass incarceration.  She remarked that it should be a starting point for further organizing and activism.  Alexander stated, “Nothing short of a major social movement, a human rights movement, has any hope of ending mass incarceration.”

However, in conversations about mass incarceration, including in Alexander’s book, women are left out of the narrative.  Women, especially women of color, have faced the fastest-growing rate of incarceration in the world.  Though in the United States women’s imprisonment has slowed a bit, this fact remains true globally.

When asked a question about how the lack of women in her book and talk adds or subtracts from movement building, Alexander affirmed the importance of women’s experiences and voices in conversations about ending mass incarceration.  She highlighted that “women often pay a higher price than men do” in the prison system, such as the burden of being separated from their children.  Alexander added that because men are the vast majority of targets of mass incarceration, women and other people’s experiences (such as immigrants, gays, and lesbians) are often marginalized, though it is extremely important to include them in movement-building conversations.

Alexander is correct, but her answer is incomplete, for two reasons.  First, the State positions women’s incarceration in the neoliberal economy as both a pre-condition and most extreme condition of economic exploitation. This means that women get jailed the fastest, women experience extra violence in prison, and, as Alexander also noted, women must do the work of surviving and fighting back in criminalized communities.  It means that women’s migration provides enough bodies to fill the new warehouses of immigrant detention centers, and that we must connect the reasons for women’s migrations—namely economic interventions of the IMF/World Bank, militarism by the United States, and the worldwide crusade to criminalize sex work—to the rise of mass incarceration, as well.  Women, especially women of color, have always been primary, not secondary, targets of the global prison system, just as women have always been primary, and not secondary, targets of economic exploitation.

The second reason is that movement building cannot relegate women’s experiences to just ‘being included.’  Women of color, immigrants, LGBTIQ people, and all others marginalized under neoliberalism must be (and already are) leading the conversations from the beginning.  By ensuring our anti-incarceration conversations follow their lead, we can best do as Alexander suggested in her talk: not just preach to, but organize the choir.

 

(Image Credit: UprisingRadio.org)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

John Greyson, Tarek Loubani, and the Notorious Tora Prison

September 29, 2013 by 14 Comments

 


Tora Prison, in Cairo, has long been notorious. Over seven weeks ago, John Greyson and Tarek Loubani, on their way to Gaza, were arrested in Cairo, never charged, and thrown into the `notorious’ Tora Prison. They protested. Others protested. They are now in an extended hunger strike. This weekend, it appears the Egyptian State has decided to keep them in `the notorious’ for another 45 days.

(In 2005, the George Washington University Women’s Studies Program brought John Greyson, Jack Lewis, Siphokhazi Mthathi, Shereen Essof, Amit Rai, Patricia Clough and others for three days of films, discussions, engagements, and more. The highlight, or keynote, of the festival was a showing and discussion of Proteus, a terrific movie collaboration between Greyson and Lewis, a film about Robben Island prison … in the eighteenth century, a meditation, through historical and archival and visual assemblage, on prison, sexuality, justice. And now … John Greyson and too many others sit in the notorious Tora Prison.)

Here’s John Greyson and Tarek Loubani, a couple of citizens of the Republic of Tora, in their own words:

“We are on the 12th day of our hunger strike at Tora, Cairo’s main prison, located on the banks of the Nile. We’ve been held here since August 16 in ridiculous conditions: no phone calls, little to no exercise, sharing a 3m x 10m cell with 36 other political prisoners, sleeping like sardines on concrete with the cockroaches; sharing a single tap of earthy Nile water.

“We never planned to stay in Egypt longer than overnight. We arrived in Cairo on the 15th with transit visas and all the necessary paperwork to proceed to our destination: Gaza. Tarek volunteers at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, and brings people with him each time. John intended to shoot a short film about Tarek’s work.

“Because of the coup, the official Rafah border was opening and closing randomly, and we were stuck in Cairo for the day. We were carrying portable camera gear (one light, one microphone, John’s HD Canon, two Go-Pros) and gear for the hospital (routers for a much-needed wifi network and two disassembled toy-sized helicopters for testing the transportation of medical samples).

“Because of the protests in Ramses Square and around the country on the 16th, our car couldn’t proceed to Gaza. We decided to check out the Square, five blocks from our hotel, carrying our passports and John’s HD camera. The protest was just starting – peaceful chanting, the faint odour of tear gas, a helicopter lazily circling overhead – when suddenly calls of “doctor”. A young man carried by others from God-knows-where, bleeding from a bullet wound. Tarek snapped into doctor mode…and started to work doing emergency response, trying to save lives, while John did video documentation, shooting a record of the carnage that was unfolding. The wounded and dying never stopped coming. Between us, we saw over fifty Egyptians die: students, workers, professionals, professors, all shapes, all ages, unarmed. We later learned the body count for the day was 102.

“We left in the evening when it was safe, trying to get back to our hotel on the Nile. We stopped for ice cream. We couldn’t find a way through the police cordon though, and finally asked for help at a check point.

“That’s when we were: arrested, searched, caged, questioned, interrogated, videotaped with a ‘Syrian terrorist’, slapped, beaten, ridiculed, hot-boxed, refused phone calls, stripped, shaved bald, accused of being foreign mercenaries. Was it our Canadian passports, or the footage of Tarek performing CPR, or our ice cream wrappers that set them off? They screamed ‘Canadian’ as they kicked and hit us. John had a precisely etched bootprint bruise on his back for a week.

“We were two of 602 arrested that night, all 602 potentially facing the same grab-bag of ludicrous charges: arson, conspiracy, terrorism, possession of weapons, firearms, explosives, attacking a police station. The arrest stories of our Egyptian cellmates are remarkably similar to ours: Egyptians who were picked up on dark streets after the protest, by thugs or cops, blocks or miles from the police station that is the alleged site of our alleged crimes.

“We’ve been here in Tora prison for six weeks, and are now in a new cell (3.5m x 5.5m) that we share with ‘only’ six others. We’re still sleeping on concrete with the cockroaches, and still share a single tap of Nile water, but now we get (almost) daily exercise and showers. Still no phone calls. The prosecutor won’t say if there’s some outstanding issue that’s holding things up. The routers, the film equipment, or the footage of Tarek treating bullet wounds through that long bloody afternoon? Indeed, we would welcome our day in a real court with the real evidence, because then this footage would provide us with our alibi and serve as a witness to the massacre.

“We deserve due process, not cockroaches on concrete. We demand to be released.

“Peace, John & Tarek”

CONTACT: Cecilia Greyson, cgreyson@gmail.com, Justin Podur, justin@podur.org”

Peace … and an end to `the notorious’. Now.

Tora Prison

 

(Photo Credit 1: IndieWire) (Photo Credit 2: Amr Abdallah Dalsh / Reuters)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Rebecca Mafukeni, citizen of the Republic of Chikurubi

September 27, 2013 by 16 Comments

 

Rebecca Mafukeni died last month, in remand in Zimbabwe’s `notorious’ Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison. She had meningitis. Her bail application was denied. Her appeals for medication attention were rejected, and so Rebecca Mafukeni died … or was killed.

Mafukeni was one of 29 MDC-T supporters who were arrested two years ago, in 2011, on suspicion of having killed a police officer. Last week, 21 were acquitted because of lack of evidence. There was no evidence, and yet they remained behind bars, in Chikurubi, some for more than two years. The High Court Judge Chinembiri Bhunu took great pains to discuss the case of human rights activist Cynthia Manjoro. Manjoro had been released on bail in 2012, after a State witness testified that Manjoro had only been arrested “as bait” to lure her boyfriend into a trap. Whatever the plan was, Manjoro spent May 2011 to October 2012 in prison.

Yvonne Musarurwa had been with Rebecca Mafukeni in Chikurubi. She has described the experience as a nightmare, especially the months long period held in complete solitary confinement, under a `no human contact’ order. During that period, they thought they were Zimbabwe’s “most isolated women.”

This is the story of women’s lives, and deaths, in the Republic of Chikurubi. Chikurubi is one of those prisons that give notorious a bad name. It is the house of beatings, intimidation, sexual violence, and degradation. It is a place in which people are meant to rot, literally. It is a women’s prison where violence against women extends from overcrowding to refusal to dispense sanitary pads to direct sexual violence to torture to continual abuse and threats to isolation. It is a place that aims to destroy people, individuals, families, communities. In Chikurubi, the personal is political, and the politics is death.

Ask Jestina Mukoko. Ask Beatrice Mtetwa. Ask Violet Mupfuranhehwe. Ask Jennie Williams and Magodonga Mahlangu. Ask Cynthia Manjoro. They’ll tell you. Ask Yvonne Musarurwa. She’ll tell you: “During the first few weeks, we couldn’t cope with living in prison. Rebecca and I broke down completely. We thought we were going to die. But slowly, when we realized there were people who have been there many years before us, the condemned prisoners, we thought okay, we might make it as well.”

We might make it as well. Rest in peace, Rebecca Mafukeni. The struggle continues. We might make it as well.

(Photo credit: Newsday)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Those Who Fell Through The Gap of Justice

September 26, 2013 by 8 Comments

Marie “Mechie” Scott

Marie “Mechie” Scott has been serving a life sentence without parole since she was 19 years old in Pennsylvania. She is now 60 years old.  Mechie developed a persuasive legal essay arguing that under rulings by the SCOTUS that take into account that “children are different” when sentenced to the harshest prison sentences, life without parole along with research in brain development which proves that the youthful brain is not fully developed until the age of 25, rulings such as Graham, Roper, Miller/Jackson ought to apply to offenders up to the age of 25 retroactively.  Below is an excerpt from Mechie’s essay:

Personal Background

My co-defendant was 16, I was 19. He is the principal offender of our case. He will be released on the SCOTUS decision in Miller/Jackson if the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania accepts the decision retroactively.  Yet I will remain in prison based on the felony act law that he is no longer governed by. My brain at 19 was no more developed than his and he was more culpable than I was.  I was only a teenager, who had been physically and sexually abused from the age of five to 15, I had been hospitalized in a mental institution in my adolescent years,  I had become a severe co-dependent who had my life saved at my job during a hold-up in Philadelphia by my co-defendant 10 days prior to this terrible tragedy.  I didn’t have the ability to say no when he asked me to be the look out in his hold up 10 days later. Afterwards, I had tried to overdose on pills.

Imprisoning me until I die alters the remainder of my life by a “forfeiture that is irrevocable.” If this lengthiest possible incarceration  is an “especially harsh punishment” for my co-defendant, then it is the same for me. I will have inevitably served more years and a greater percentage of my life in prison than an adult offender.  Forty years ago, my judge sentenced me to life while at the same time, instructed my lawyer to explain to me that my release on parole would be the sole discretion  of the PA Board of Pardons.  I had no reason not to believe that the judge, district attorney  and defense attorney didn’t know what they were talking about! Soon after I met my judge on a tour of SCI Muncy and he visited with me.  He told me that if I “behaved” myself, that he would sign my parole papers after I have served at least the maximum sentenced required for 3rd degree murder.  Unfortunately when I matured, the PA legislature had changed the maximum to 40 years. The is my 40th year in prison. I applied for parole. The BOP responded that they have no jurisdiction over my life sentence.  This leaves me with no meaningful opportunity to obtain my release based on demonstrated maturity and rehabilitation.  (There have been only nine women in PA to be granted commutation since 1971.  Therefore, commutation of a life sentence in Pennsylvania is currently not a meaningful option.)

What is a juvenile under Pennsylvania Law

In the Commonwealth of PA, when juveniles are sentenced to juvenile facilities for violent crimes, they can be held in such facilities until they turn 21.  Pennsylvania child labor laws state that minors are between the ages of 12 and 21.  Juvenile Matters classify disorderly minors between the ages of 18 and 20. A child is an individual who is under the age of 21 who committed as act of delinquency before reaching the age of 18.  A juvenile is a person who has attained 10 years of age and is not yet 21 who is alleged to have, upon or after the juveniles’s 10th birthday, committed a delinquent act before reaching 18  years of age.

Felony Murder

I recognize that in the context of felony-murder cases the question of intent is complicated.  Felony-murder is based on “transferred intent.”  In my opinion transferred intent is not sufficient to satisfy the intent to murder that could subject a juvenile to LWOP. We do not rely on transferred intent if an adult may receive the death penalty.  For juveniles, the inability to consider the full range of consequences  is precisely what we know about the brain under the age of 25.

Wait no longer

The Honorable Judge Mary Jane Bowes wrote in the decision of Commonwealth v. Ludwig that, “Perhaps the SCOTUS may in the future determine mandatory life sentences  for adults under the age of 25, violates the 8th Amendment…that day has not come yet.”  I say that day has come and it is now!  As I enter my 40th year of incarceration at the age of 60 and experience the deaths and terminal illnesses of my aging sisters who have been serving life, I’d like to hold on to the hope that I will one day be released.

Marie “Mechie” Scott

OO4901

SCI Muncy

PO Box 180

Muncy, PA 17756

(Photo Credit: Worldwide Womens Criminal Justice Network)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , ,

Westgate: There must be more than grief

September 23, 2013 by 17 Comments

Westgate. There must be more, something more human, than reports of smoke and explosions and flying bullets and destruction and carnage. There must be more than `eye witness accounts’ and there must be more than smart analyses of why Kenya, why now.

There must be more than, other than, grief to unite a people, a nation. Kenyans have responded not only with horror at the violence. They have responded with support, with blood, money, sweat and tears, and prayers.  But there must be more …

Last year, Kenyan poet Njeri Wangari performed part of her poem, “When Change Comes”, to a gathering in Nairobi. The poem begins:

“When villages grow into towns
Towns into cities
Shops into malls
Spaces into estates,
When streets turn into avenues
Avenues into highways, super highways
Subways and runways
Then things change.

Villages become old frail women deserted by their offspring
All gone to the cities with big lights,
Who, unlike prodigal sons, only return in coffins.”

Wangari’s reading omits the last part of the poem:

“When you realize that your fate was sealed in that moment of conception
Even before you took your first breath in this cosmic space
You then know, it takes more than yourself to survive.

When you are born in a small dark room
In the slum-ghettos of Nairobi,
The wrong side of town
Born in the wrong side of jobs
Wrong side of school
Wrong side of life
Wrong side of everything good in life
Except life itself
Then you know it takes more than yourself to be on the right side

It takes governments that are willing to accept the growing gap
The gap between those with and those without
It takes bridging that gap with informal jobs, equal opportunities
With Youth, women, men empowerment bridges
Bridges that seek to empower minds, endanger idlers
Bridges that recapture people’s dream of equal opportunities
And put them back into peoples’ hearts

It takes more than corrupt officials
It takes more than paying taxes for more government officials
It takes more than policemen gunning down innocent youth
It takes more than black men looking down upon their brothers as lesser mortals

It takes leaders willing to listen to the cries of their people
It takes systems that will help its people come out of mental slavery, self pity, oppressed lives
It takes everyman to make that change.
you, me, him, her, them,
Us.”

That was July 2012. A few months later, a poem by Kenyan poets Shailja Patel and Wambui Mwanji wrote a poem, “Our Camera Has Come Home: A Found Poem”. Here it is in its entirety:

Our Camera Has Come Home: A Found Poem

in her absence we could not see properly
a way of being
engendered by her presence
was denied us

we did not die
we were not sick
or even depressed
just newly prone
to random piercings
of grief

she allowed us
to quarrel
with ways of reading the world
she explained
why our eyes stop
where they stop

other cameras
work well
we have nothing against them

other cameras
sit badly in our hands
like borrowed reading glasses

only she who has come home
is ours

The world mourns. The world mourns the loss of poets, such as Kofi Awoonor, and presenters, such as Ruhila Adutia-Sood. The world mourns the loss of those connected to people with names, such as Mbugua Mwangi, nephew to Kenya’s President, Uhuru Kenyatta. The world mourns the children, and the adults. Around the world, the national news media report on `their own’ who were killed in the massacre. The Westgate Mall has been a popular, and safe, place for many in Nairobi.

The world mourns, and world leaders and their messengers claim `We all stand with Kenya.’ We don’t. Instead, we watch the spectacle of grief at a distance, as a distance. After the post-election violence of 2007, Kenyan poet Sitawa Namwalie understood this. She understood that a first, decisive step in creating a road to peace would be to scramble the map. When they ask you where you come from, answer “I come from everywhere.”

I come from everywhere

you, me, him, her, them,
Us

only she who has come home
is ours

There must be more to grief, and life, than reports of smoke and carnage and loss in the distance.

 

(Image credit: A Mishmash Life!

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Must punishment mean prison? Why are you asking?

September 21, 2013 by 9 Comments


In a recent television interview, Christiane Taubira, France’s Minister of Justice, was questioned about her personal philosophy of justice: “Is the mission of justice to punish delinquents?” The journalist repeated the question in different forms, emphasizing the word “punish”. Finally, the journalist added “some may feel that for you, an efficient justice system would put reeducation and reinsertion at the center?” Taubira answered immediately, “Why are you asking me this question?”

Does the act of punishing mean sending someone to prison, as the journalist repeatedly suggested?

Why pose such a question to Taubira? Because she has taken a strong stand against using public funds to contract private companies to build new prisons. These contracts would have eaten up 50% of the budget devoted to the penal system. Instead Taubira has abandoned this way and is instead toward using the funds for alternative sentencing programs, programs that have been proven to be more efficient in reducing violence.

These questions reappear in an emerging climate of crisis. While many magistrates, such as  Serge Pertolli, have argued “prison has never resolved anything in crime control,” the idea that the society must punish with prison is securely imbedded in the privatization of public services.

This is all relatively new for France. After World War II, the State’s power and right to punish existed in the service of rehabilitation. As Denis Salas explains, at that time, “what counted was to defend the delinquent in danger of exclusion in his or her own society.”

Today’s penal populism is built on opposite concepts. The victim and delinquent don’t belong to the same society, and social and economic situations have no relevance any more. Instead fear, largely fueled by the instability of economic crisis, should govern society.

Moreover, the project of penal populism is attached to the larger neoliberal project, which has impoverished many and deprived the society of its social structure through the privatization of social responsibility. The crime rate has not increased in France. In fact it has decreased, but violence is not on the decrease. Violence is gendered, marked and inflected with a neoliberal and patriarchal system of intimidation, which leads to societal destabilization through the disintegration of social cohesion in a globalized economy without a human face.

If we are to think about addressing root causes rather than merely astutely selected consequences, we must attend to the impoverishment and destitution of the notion of civil and societal care with messages of competition that have excluded so many.

 

(Photo Credit: Huffington Post)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

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)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , , , ,

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)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Prisoners have visitors in France and in many other European countries

September 9, 2013 by 8 Comments

Prisoners have visitors in France and in many other European countries. The prison visitors are volunteers who respond to prisoners’ requests to have visitors. As a prison visitor explained: “We are not contracted, we are not entertainers, we come to share and we don’t come to judge the act that sent this person to prison but to meet with the person who is beyond the act. The act is his or her business, our goal is that this person breaks free from the spiral of losing self esteem.”

How does it work? When a person is incarcerated, he or she is informed about the possibility of having a prison visitor assigned, and then the prisoner has to send a request to the prison authorities.  The prison visitor commits to visit the prisoner regularly. The visit is confidential, takes place in cells reserved for meetings with lawyers, and may last from 45 minutes to one hour and thirty minutes.  For the detainee, this moment with the prison visitor is one rare instant without surveillance.

The association of prison visitors, ANVP, was created in 1932 and became state approved in 1951. It presently counts over 1500 members, not enough, they say, to guarantee the ideal ratio of 1 visitor per 20 prisoners. The president of the association, himself a prison visitor, explains that they are always looking for and recruiting volunteers. The age required is between 21 and 75 years old, and it takes about 2 months to be accredited after an interview and a police background check, followed by six months of probation with more training.  The main quality expected is to be able to listen: “We are here to listen. We are the wind coming from the outside.”

For prisoners in France, the outside world continues to exist and detainees remain full citizens. As Stephanie Balandras, director of “Les Baumettes” women’s prison in Marseille, explained, prison visitors “ensure that a detainee remains a citizen”.

In a democracy, everyone with citizenship has the right to vote. In France, as in most democracies in the world, detainees retain the right to vote. The right to vote is recognized by the European Court of Human Rights and the Council of Europe as an essential right in a democracy; its suppression is incompatible with a true democratic system of governance.

Among the 47 countries of the European Council, 19 have no restrictions on civic rights for detainees, 21 have some restrictions, mostly decided in court, and 7 states suspend the right to vote for detainees.

Meanwhile, in the United States prisoners lose their civic rights when convicted. Writing on the extension of the robotized war with the development of the American drone program, Barbara Ehrenreich quoted the US Secretary of Education who reported in 2010 that “75% of young Americans between the ages of 17 to 24 are unable to enlist in the military today because they have failed to graduate from high school, have a criminal record, or are physically unfit.” As African Americans fill the American prisons, they are losing their civic rights in greater proportion than Whites. There are no prison visitors to listen to them or help them retain a sense of belonging as they are pushed further to the margins.

According to Denis Salas, “The principle of human dignity is the reference on which lies the right to bend state power.” As one prison visitor put it, this principle has to come from the outside to the inside: “The prison visitor’s objective is to make each detainee aware of her or his own riches and deficits, and to help him or her to build their own project for the future”.

Let’s imagine more prison visitors in the United States, people who would help make American prisoners more visible, retain and develop their own humanity, and have their civic rights restored.

 

(Image Credit: Sentencing Project)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , , , , , ,
« Previous Page
Next Page »