Reweaving

Today I went and did some training so I can be a volunteer for women’s aid, while this isn’t totally altruistic because I need to do some voluntary work because I’ve been out of the job market for such a long time, it has always been really important to me to do voluntary work for issues that I care about and i want to bring my feminism and my activism back down to the baseline, I feel like I’ve grown out of the whole banner waving protest thing, the feminist group I was helping run is changing direction from where it was going and so needs less input and I feel need to do my feminism differntly, I need to make a difference to individual women as well as women in general.

Most people reading this will know the obvious statistics about Domestic violence but they gave us a handout with loads of others and I’ve picked some out here because they are ones that maybe are not so known about

• Domestic violence accounts for between 16% and one quarter of all
recorded violent crime. (Home Office, 2004; Dodd et al., 2004; BCS,
1998; Dobash and Dobash, 1980)

• In any one year, there are 13 million separate incidents of physical
violence or threats of violence against women from partners or former
partners. (Walby and Allen, 2004)

• 54% of UK rapes are committed by a woman’s current or former partner.
(Walby and Allen, 2004)

• Partner violence accounts for a high proportion of homicides of women
internationally: between 40% - 70% of female murder victims (depending
on the country) were killed by their partners/former partners, whereas the
comparable figure for men is 4% - 8%. (Krug et al. 2002)

• At least 750,000 children a year witness domestic violence. (Department
of Health, 2002).

• 70% of children living in UK refuges have been abused by their father.
(Bowker et al., 1998

• A survey of 130 abused parents found that 76% of the 148 children
ordered by the courts to have contact with their estranged parent were
said to have been abused during visits: 10% were sexually abused; 15%
were physically assaulted; 26% were abducted or involved in an abduction
attempt: 36% were neglected during contact, and 62% suffered emotional
harm. Most of these children were under the age of 5 (Radford, Sayer &
AMICA, 1999)

• In a study by Shelter, 40% of all homeless women stated that domestic
violence was a contributor to their homelessness. Domestic violence was
found to be “the single most quoted reason for becoming homeless”
(Cramer and Carter, 2002).

• 70% women psychiatric in-patients and 80% of those in secure settings
have histories of physical or sexual abuse. (Phillips, 2000; Department of
Health, 2002).

• 1 in 5 young men and 1 in 10 young women think that abuse or violence
against women is acceptable. (Zero Tolerance Charitable Trust, 1998).

• 30% of domestic violence starts in pregnancy. (Lewis and Drife, 2001,
2005; McWilliams and McKiernan, 1993)
• Domestic violence has been identified as a prime cause of miscarriage
or still-birth (Mezey, 1997), and of maternal deaths during childbirth
(Lewis and Drife, 2001, 2005).

You can see more here

I asked about their position o transwomen and they said that if a woman had had gender reassignment surgery and considered themself a woman then they would take them, while there are still issues here for women who haven’t had reassignment surgery It was good to see that there wasn’t the anti trans stance that is often presumed in refuges,

I also asked about women who have No recourse to public funds and they said that although they couldn’t take them the referred them on to BASWO who do have the resources to help women in that position.

For myself, i don’t know too much about domestic violence from a partner, I know about different types of abuse from parent figures and I have had some instances of domestic partner abuse and I vacillate from saying they dont count to thinking maybe I minimise them

My first serious relationship was with a man/boy (we were 16) who was arrogant and selfish and my boundaries were fucked due to life experiences so he used to continue pawing me till I gave up and let him have sex with me, he would push me around physically and then tell me I was overreacting if he said he hurt me. he would “play” wrestle with me, even when I told him I didn’t want to do it. I only stayed with him so long because the rest of his family was lovely to me.

I also had a relationship with a woman who was belittling and controlling and on one occasion threw me across a room and threatened to kill me and I haven’t ever really processed that, partly because I never feel I have anywhere to take it because either people think that women in lesbian relationships don’t have those experiences or they think experiences like that “prove” that lesbian relationships are deviant.

Anyway I have some more training next week and I have to fill in the relevant police check forms and then I can start working for them.

[EDIT: I notice I've been linked by some pro life blogs, While I respect their right to do that I do not want this post used as fodder to explain that the pro choice position is wrong, I am and always will be 100 percent pro choice]

Last night I went to the abortion rights protest against the pro life road show, protesting is important and obviously abortion rights are really, really important but the way the protest happened really disturbed me.

From the off I was kind of annoyed, as we started gathering one of the protesters pointed out another group of people and there was some discussion on weather they were there for the roadshow or the protest and she said “I don’t think they are pro life they look too nice.” I think that’s really unacceptable firstly aren’t we about getting away from judging people on what they look like, but also because pro lifers are not bad people, they are not nasty people. They absolutely believe what they are doing is right and moral.

The protesters arranged themselves right outside the door of the city temple with a walkway between the middle of them that was just narrow enough to those going to the roadshow to walk through, then when those attending (some of whom were older people and the majority of whom were female) walked through the protesters chanted slogans really loudly, which must have been incredibly intimidating. Some of those in the front rows of the protest were male and from what I could see were the most vocal. So there’s a situation where men are shouting at women and telling them what to think.

If we want to protest and make a difference protesting then we need to unpack and discard the patriarchal attitudes that say the best way to make people do what we want them to is through intimidation and aggression. And really left wing men need to unpack their male privilege and think about how shouting at women because they are doing something they don’t want them to do is upholding a capitalist patriarchal system. Also while I think its good that men are involved in the abortion rights movement if as feminists we believe it is not okay for men to tell women how to think and behave then it shouldn’t be okay for men to tell any woman how to think and behave, even if we find her politics to be reprehensible

I also had a problem with the chanting. One of the chants was ““Pro-life, that’s a lie - you don’t care if women die” I think this is really, really unhelpful. I grew up in a very right wing hard line church that was very anti abortion and although it did many damaging things to women, and had many rules on women’s submission and inferiority, the pro life position is not about carelessly killing women, the pro life position is not about women being less than men. In fact the pro life position from a philosophical perspective is extremely logical

1)Humanity begins at conception

2)Abortion kills the human in the womb

2)Killing humans is wrong/sinful

3) Therefore abortion is wrong/sinful

While it lacks compassion for women it makes perfect sense that a person who thinks a foetus is as human as the woman carrying it wouldn’t think that the woman had the”right” to “Kill” another human being.

Telling the opposition what they think and getting it wrong does not help the cause. It makes us look stupid and vindictive. We don’t appreciate it when they do it to us so we shouldn’t do it to them.

We need to be a movement that understands what pro lifers actualy think so we can refute their actual arguments and not straw ones, we need to be a movement that doesnt use the tactics of the status quo to try and get people to change.We need to be a movement that doesnt automaticaly write pro lifers off as nasty/evil/woman hating

I just finished reading “My Forbidden Face” which is a young woman’s account of her experience of the Taliban seizing power in Kabul. (you can read the first two chapters here
and here) and the thing that struck me was how brave she was.

Part of the account was of how she and some friends set up a secret school in their homes as normal schools were forbidden and girls were forbidden schooling and boys only got Taliban sanctioned religious education

This was when she was eighteen and she had so much to lose, her bodily integrity, her life, her families lives and she knew this:

One of our former teachers was recently caught in the act by the Taliban-right in the middle of teaching a class. First they beat the children, then they hit her. They threw her down the stairs of her building so violently that she broke a leg. Then they dragged her by the hair and jailed her. And after that, they forced her to sign a declaration promising that she wouldn’t start again, that she respected the law of the Taliban. They threatened to stone her entire family in public if she didn’t acknowledge the error of her ways (page 106)

But she went ahead and did it anyway because it needed doing.

It just makes me think. Really what am I doing? Although feminism is locked into my life it is not my life, I am not running risks for it and maybe I should be. Could I be that brave? Could I have that much courage? That much determination? No probably not but I can still be braver than this, braver than I am now, more committed and more principled than I am now.