Get lads mags and sexually explicit newspapers displays in shops out of the sight of children.

The ‘Child Eyes’ campaign began when a Local Mums Online blogger saw her three-year-old staring at a copy of the Daily Star which had a half-naked woman on the front.

There was a huge response to her resulting post from mothers who were angry about such images being displayed at child height.

Wandsworth mums are among those now demanding David Cameron protect children from pornographic images by forcing shop owners to move them to the top shelf.

Kathy McGuinness, founder of Wandsworth Mums Online, said: “I would like him to listen to what parents are saying. This is a child protection issue and he should act.”

“We are not talking about censorship or banning images, just moving them out of children’s view when they’re in a public space.”

Mother-of-two Alex Hughes, said she supported the Local Mums Online campaign “because my kids have to see sexualised images at toddler height in so many shops in Wandsworth. I’m really sick of it.”

Following government recommendations, Local Mums Online asked mums to press shop owners ‘to police themselves’ and to move the offending material, but they were either laughed at or asked to leave the shop.

The Department for Education said it was up to shopkeepers to police themselves.

A disappointing response.

Department spokesman David Tate said: “The Government believes that self-regulation is the best way forward, rather than Government intervention with legislation, unless there is a very strong case for doing so.”

McGuinness, like so many women, was angered to hear David Cameron respond to the No More Page 3 campaign by saying it was the parent’s responsibility to shut the newspaper if children were around.

She articulated everyone’s astonishment at his attitude when she said: “How is it parent’s responsibility when it’s all over the shops? It’s everywhere they go.”

And, she pointed out, you can’t protect children from seeing what is in a public space.

“We need leaders that have the guts to stand up for women and children,” she concluded.

The government’s report ‘Letting Children Be Children’ recommended that magazines and newspapers with sexualised images on their covers are not in easy sight of children.

The report also said that ‘publishers and distributors should provide such magazines in modesty sleeves, or make modesty boards available to all outlets they supply and strongly encourage the appropriate display of their publications.

‘Retailers should be open and transparent to show that they welcome and will act on customer feedback regarding magazine displays.’

Feedback shows this clearly isn’t happening

And as for ‘welcome’ – the majority of Mums Online have reported being ‘laughed at’, ‘ignored’ or even ‘verbally abused’ by shop owners when they voiced concerns about the displays of these publications at child height.

The Child’s Eyes petition puts it succinctly.

‘How is it legal to display women bending over with barely a covered groin and naked breasts in public places where children can see?’ petitioner Kirsty Hopley wants to know.

It would, she points out, ‘be a sexual offence if a parent or other person deliberately showed a child indecent pictures. Yet every day children see sexual covers on adult and lads mags.

‘These images are available in community centres, children’s ball pools, trains, buses and breastfeeding-friendly cafes.’

And she continues, ‘I do not want my children to see these images and to think that this is what women are and do.

‘I do not want to have to explain to my baby daughter why there are women pulling their pants down on the front of the newspaper when I go to get milk.

‘I do not want my children to grow up in a culture where it is o.k. to have countless images of semi-clothed women next to clothed men.

‘In the Bailey review the Government made it clear that if satisfactory progress cannot be made on a voluntary basis, it will consider further legislation.

‘Satisfactory progress has not been made, sex is in every shop.’

Now is the time for change, she concludes.

Tis indeed.

Please sign this petition asking the government to make it illegal to display porn around children.

What else you can do:

Give this letter to the owner of the shop displaying pornographic material.

Contact your local MP and explain how you feel and what you would like them to do about it.

Share this article on Facebook and twitter and follow our campaign on twitter at #Childeyes and on our website.

And please use ParentPort as much as possible and share it with other parents.

This is a one stop shop to report inappropriate media. We really need to make it clear to our minister for children and families what children are seeing in the real world.

Twenty years on, comedian and storyteller Rosie Wilby traces former colleagues from a feminist newspaper.

Starting with her treasured old copies of Matrix – Greek for ‘womb’ – the newspaper that she and a collective of women set up at York University in 1990, Rosie Wilby peeks through a kaleidoscope of cultural history and personal activism including poll tax riots, Reclaim The Night rallies, political lesbianism and same sex wedding demos and wonders how on earth we ended up with ‘Girl Power’.

Was she partly to blame when she put a frivolous ‘Celebrate Women’ cartoon on the cover of Matrix instead of a Rape Crisis logo, in the vain hope that more people might pick up it and read their articles about body image, sexual harassment, domestic violence and eating disorders.

Or when, during her tenure as Student’s Union Women’s Officer, she dressed up as Kylie Minogue for a publicity stunt.

Channeling a riotgrrrl-like DIY energy, the Matrix collective would cut and glue an issue together each month – once daubing a wall with splendid green and purple ‘Sisterhood is Powerful’ graffiti on a guerilla midnight mission just for the cover photo.

In this funny and moving show, part documentary, part detective story and part unrequited love story, Rosie Wilby traces this original collective and investigates what happened to feminism.

And to the woman that everyone had a crush on.

Twenty years on, the Matrix women have diversified into all kinds of work.

Some have remained in journalism, others are authors, academics and playwright, poets, one is a clinical embryologist and another a former barrister now running a successful vintage hair company styling hair on film sets.

“I started reading books and articles by some of the younger feminists coming through, like Kat Banyard, and started wondering again about Matrix – what our legacy had been, whether it was still going and what my fellow writers were doing these days,” Wilby explained.

“I found my dusty old copies up at my Dad’s among all my old stuff and, once I started reading them again, found myself on a detective mission to find out.

“It turns out a later group of York students started up a new feminist zine, Matrix Reloaded, in 2006.

“They were still featuring a lot of the same issues which, in some ways is frustrating as it demonstrates that we haven’t come very far over the last decade, but it was great to meet them and know we’d inspired them to create something.

“That meeting wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t started making this show.”

Nineties Woman is  award-winning comedian Rosie Wilby‘s brand new show, and uses live interactive storytelling interspersed with video interviews, music and photo archive to trace a journey through early 90s feminism, refracted through a very personal lens.

Catch her on 30 May at Battersea Arts Centre, 6 June a the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, or on 2 July at the Face to Face festival of Solo Theatre, Lost Theatre, Wandsworth.

Or if you can’t make those: click here.

For further information, click here.

And, in the meantime, if you want a giggle, click here.

A year-long survey of the position of women in today’s art world, the ‘Great East London Art Audit’ was started by East London Fawcett (ELF), the East London branch of the Fawcett Society – the UK’s leading campaign for equality between women and men  – in the spring of 2012.

The event on May 24 is to mark the culmination of a year’s worth of work from a dedicated team of volunteer campaigners, researchers and statisticians.

The intention of this campaign is to raise awareness of the gender imbalance that persists within London’s galleries, and to celebrate those women who are defying the statistics and the galleries that support them.

The body of up-to-date statistics generated by the team will reflect the representation of women in today’s art world, and will hopefully provide an objective basis for future discourse on women in the arts.

The launch will form part of Calvert 22’s month-long exhibition and events programme comprising talks, workshops, screenings and new commissions.

Founded in 2009, Calvert 22 is dedicated to building cultural bridges between Russia, Eastern Europe, the former Soviet republics and the rest of the world.

Fostering conversations on subjects such as how histories are written and recorded in print and on screen ‘…how is it towards the east?’ is partially an opportunity to critically examine modes of self-organisation within the arts.

Over the past year, the audit campaign has demonstrated the power of self-motivation and campaigning that is both passionate and sensitive.

The campaign is illustrative of the impact of positive feminist campaigning today.

Following an introduction from ELF arts director Gemma Rolls-Bentley, the audit team will unveil and explain their results and offer a series of short presentations on what motivates ELF, how the campaign has been organised and what they hope to achieve by releasing these results.

The informal structure of the evening will allow for an open dialogue around the findings of the Art Audit.

The event is from 7 pm – 9pm, at 22 Calvert Avenue, London, E2 7JP and is free and open to all.

The full audit results will be published on ELF’s Audit website.

Following the recent conviction of seven Muslim men involved in grooming and sex trafficking girls as young as 11 in Oxford, next month imans across Britain are to give simultaneous sermons condemning sexual grooming.

This is in support of a Muslim-led coalition set up to tackle sexual grooming problems by gangs on England’s streets and the issue of abuse.

This synchronised event, due to take place on 28 June,will follow a conference set up by the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) to discuss ways of preventing further cases of abuse.

Amsar Ali, 50, co-founder of the Facebook group ‘Together Against Grooming’, and co-ordinator of Muslim efforts against sex gangs, said: “We’re asking [mosques] to devote their khutba [sermon] to this issue on the last Friday in June.”

And Julie Siddiqi, 41, executive director of the Islamic Society of Britain, one of Britain’s largest Muslim organisations, has appealled for street-grooming gangs in England to be exposed and eradicated.

“Child exploitation is a crime which affects all communities but the number of street-grooming convictions in the past few years involving Omars, Ahmeds and Faisals means the time has come for action,” she said.

“I assumed other people were dealing with it more than they perhaps were,” she added.

“I’m not sure the Muslim community’s response has been good enough. The MCB need to accept that they haven’t done enough.”

Siddiqi, who converted to Islam in 1995, helped launch the Community Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation (CAASE) recently, which aims to ensure that the subject is not hijacked by far-right groups.

“The BNP and the EDL have been campaigning on this issue for the last two years.

“They’ve been saying openly ‘look at these horrible Muslims and what they do to our white girls.’ The most dangerous thing is for us to allow a vacuum to be created so their voice fills it,” she said.

“But if there are patterns emerging – and I think there are – of people from a certain background engaging in this type of activity, then that can’t be ignored either.

“I’m not saying all Pakistani men are prone to this, or Islam says that; of course that’s nonsense.

“But if we ignore these patterns we’re going to do an injustice against the victims.”

“I think possibly some of the men in the community are finding it harder because I’m a woman, regardless of whether I’m white or not.

“But once people have got over the fact that we’re talking about this in an open way, maybe they also feel that I have a role to play because of my background because I can maybe understand aspects of this differently to others.”

“Our community structures are too male-heavy, there’s no doubt about that”, she said. “People need to realise why that’s not helpful.”

A briefing paper on grooming was published in July and a fuller report four months later, reflecting on the high-profile court cases that have “mainly involved adult males of British Pakistani origin and white British female victims”, the BBC reported recently.

The reason for the spate of similar cases, this inquiry suggested, was that police and other agencies responded to publicity around previous trials by investigating whether the same problem existed in their area.

The authorities were indeed “effective in readily identifying perpetrators and victims with similar individual characteristics”, the inquiry panel concluded.

“Data is gathered more assiduously on perpetrators identified by professionals as Asian, Pakistani or Kurdish,” the report asserted.

But the focus on one particular type of perpetrator, model and approach to child sexual exploitation, disguised “a much more difficult and challenging truth”.

The abusers “come from all ethnic groups and so do their victims – contrary to what some may wish to believe”, the inquiry panel said.

“The failure of agencies to recognise this means that too many child victims are not getting the protection and support they so desperately need.”

Census figures show bulk of caring responsibility falls on women, especially those aged 50-64.

Figures released from the 2011 Census last week reveal that the majority of unpaid carers in England and Wales, 58 per cent, are women.

And 11.8 per cent of all women are carers, compared with 8.9 per cent of men.

Caring responsibilities increase with age – and so does the gender imbalance.

Nearly a quarter of women aged 50 to 64 are carers, compared with 17 per cent of men in the same age group.

Working women are more likely to be carers than those who do not work;  12.1 per cent of full time female workers and 16.1 per cent of part-timers in England were carers.

And this extra work takes its toll on their health.

Women in full-time work providing more than 50 hours unpaid care were almost three times more likely to report poor health than full-time female workers who are not carers.

Male carers in full-time work were only two and a half times more likely to report poor health.

According to Carers UK, the number of middle-aged female carers in the UK as a whole has risen by 13 per cent in the last 10 years and now totals 1.2 million.

This is a sharper increase than the total number of carers which has increased by 11 per cent to 6.5 million.

Carers UK estimates that the total cost to the economy of carers giving up work is £5.3 billion a year.

The charity also points to the increasing challenge for employers, as Census figures also show that 1 in 8 workers are juggling work with caring for older or disabled loved ones.

Heléna Herklots, chief executive of Carers UK, said: “Becoming a carer can turn your world upside-down and when that responsibility falls in middle age it can change your working and personal life irreversibly.

“Women who have struggled to juggle childcare and work are now also finding themselves caring for ageing parents – and sometimes also a seriously ill partner.

“Without the right support, women are forced to leave work, or reduce their hours at an age where it is a real challenge to re-enter the work force when caring comes to an end.

“This brings serious consequences for their incomes and pensions, as well as a wider cost to the UK economy.”

The problem of women broadcasters being sidelined and ignored as they age is something that has been discussed at length in the media, and there is much anecdotal evidence to that effect.

Now, the Older Women’s Commission, set up by Labour’s shadow culture secretary Harriet Harman, has published irrefutable evidence in terms of figures to support what everyone already knew was true.

Despite prior protestations of broadcasting bosses to the contrary.

Once a woman broadcaster reaches a certain age, she loses her employability.

According to the findings of the Commission, which was set up to consider the experience of older women in the workplace, as carers and in public life, less than one in five of the presenters over the age of fifty employed by the country’s major broadcasting organisations is a woman.

The research looked at cross sectional employment figures (gender and age) of the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Sky News, Channel 5 and ITN.

Results showed that, overall, women account for 48 per cent of on-screen presenters under the age of fifty, but only 18 per cent of on-screen presenters over the age of 50.

The percentage of women over fifty, when considered as a proportion of the entire onscreen workforce, both men and women of any age, was a microscopic five per cent.

However, it was clear that some broadcasters were performing better than others.

ITV had an impressive 55 per cent of their over-50 presenters being women.  The BBC had a less impressive 20 per cent.

That’s not really a great number.

Until you compare it to Sky News who employ just 9 per cent of women in their over 50 category.

Shocking?

Well, ITN and Channel 5 employ none.

And it’s not just the on-screen talent who are affected by ageist sexism… or is it sexist ageism?

Only 7 per cent of the total TV workforce, on and off screen, are women over the age of 50.

This is completely unrepresentative of a country where the majority of people who are over 50 are women – 53.1 per cent in fact.

Harriet Harman was far from pleased.

“The figures provided by broadcasters show clearly that once female presenters hit 50, their days on-screen are numbered.

“There is a combination of ageism and sexism that hits women on TV that doesn’t apply to men in the same way.”

She did go on to say, “It is an encouraging first step that broadcasters have been open in providing these statistics. Their response shows that they all recognise that this is an important issue that needs to be addressed.

“I will be publishing these figures annually so we are able to monitor progress.”

Let’s hope she does.

Although the figures speak for themselves, the aggregation of them was complicated.

ITV responded to the inquiry, providing only general percentages and no raw data.

The BBC also included radio presenters in their figures, making it difficult to extrapolate between what we can see and what we can hear

Presumably not being able to see an older woman makes her more palatable.

Miriam O’Reilly, who was at the centre of a much-publicised age-related employment tribunal with the BBC – which she won – must have felt utterly vindicated.

She had this to say: “In the lead-up to my tribunal against the BBC, I knew it would help to know how many women over 50 broadcasters employed.

“They wouldn’t give me this information, citing data-protection issues. So I have enjoyed being involved in getting the answers out of them.

“And to see that this is not just about prime-time shows and news and current affairs but is across all output.

“All broadcasters say they are committed to the fair representation of older women but clearly they are not. They can’t make that statement now we have these figures.”

Sadly, despite the depressing reality of the situation, there was little sympathy from some corners.

Journalist Carol Sarler said that most of the women who are now being judged and marginalised because of their age and looks, should have thought about that when they were younger, when they were “happy to trade on their looks in order to get ahead of ‘plainer’ women”.

Sarler continued, “The problems didn’t start when on-screen women got older; they started when they were 25 and perfectly happy to muscle past their plainer-Jane colleagues by primping and preening themselves into what passes for contemporary beauty: big eyes, glossed lips, defined breasts, dieted hips.

“They sold their souls to the Devil decades ago and now comes payback.”

She also said that older women broadcasters should not have a beef with contemporaries such as David Dimbleby and John Simpson who seem to be indestructible, no matter what age they notch up.

She said that it was “irrelevant” that these men now look like “dinosaurs” because they were never hired for their looks in the first place.

So, women like Joan Bakewell and Selina Scott (Sarler’s comparators) were hired (by male bosses) for their looks?  You admit that Carol?  And that’s ok?  Did they have not an iota of talent?

The fact that the highly intelligent, erudite and articulate Joan Bakewell is still described as ‘the thinking man’s’ crumpet’ is somehow her own fault for also being attractive?

Remember, also, that for many years, the physical appearance of women on screen was largely dictated by male bosses.

Happily, it looks as though employers will no longer be able to dictate this, if Harriet Harman holds true to her promise of a yearly audit.

The bottom line is that, in television, like in any other profession, the job should always go to the person best suited to that job, regardless of what they look like.

Would men still watch Saturday afternoon football in their droves, even if it was presented by a monkey, rather than an Armani clad 7-figure earning ex footballer?

You bet they would. I rest my case.

Routledge are to publish the first peer-reviewed journal on pornography amid concerns over the approach of its editorial board.

Due to debut in Spring 2014, the journal claims it will ‘critically explore those cultural products and services designated as pornographic’.

Most reports on the impending journal struck a not so fine balance between cheap quips on ‘practical research’ and spurious attributions to the novel Fifty Shades of Grey.

There was, however, a tacit acknowledgement by the Guardian that the perspective of the publication’s editors may dictate the tone and content of the journal.

The editors won’t, apparently, ‘be inhibited by ‘70s ambivalence’.

For Feona Attwood and Clarissa Smith, the two English university professors set to edit the journal, are both very firmly on the ‘pro’ side of pornography’s eternal dichotomy.

Clarissa Smith recently took part in an Intelligence Squared debate in which she advocated for the motion ‘pornography is good for us’.

During the debate she argued that ‘porn has narrative and art’ and asked ‘what is wrong with being known for your body?’.

She also said to Salon magazine that ‘porn is…very marginalized as a media form but at the centre of a lot of scares’.

Positioning pornography as a cultural phenomenon rather than a sociological concern has lead American campaigners Stop Porn Culture (SPC) to petition Routledge about the journal.

The online petition asserts that “Routledge is in a position of authority, and framing the editorial “experts” on porn as pro-porn under the auspices of neutrality (which is what the journal title does) further fosters the normalization of porn and misrepresents the academic, political and ideological debates about the issue.

“In the interest of academic integrity and thorough critical inquiry, it is imperative that a journal titled Porn Studies creates space for critical analyses of porn from diverse and divergent perspectives”.

A critical, empirical and rigorous research publication would surely be welcome given the increasing concerns over the ubiquity and normalisation of pornography and the vexed issues of internet regulation, extreme pornography and causal harm.

Unfortunately, the supposedly detrimental effect of feminism on the ‘progress’ of pornography studies is regularly used in an attempt to sideline such concerns.

In an interview about the journal, Clarissa Smith bemoaned the limits of an Anglo-American pornography debate ‘framed within the feminist and objectification rubric’.

Coverage in the Guardian also made thinly-veiled references to the halting effects of pro versus anti-porn feminisms on the development of pornography as a cultural study.

Reclaiming pornography for cultural studies in this way smacks of silencing, and reduces binaries within feminism to nothing more than obstructive bickering.

The point, surely, is that pornography is not made or consumed within a vacuum and cannot be divorced from its sociopolitical context; a context feminism is very much a part of.

For whatever your view, one thing is certain: pornography affects women, and competing feminist discourses are an integral part of the debate, not a distraction from it.

Glam makeover of ‘Brave’ princess highlights Disney’s all-pervading reach into childhood.

The ‘princess phase’ is one which has rendered many of my friends with little girls utterly helpless against a tirade of pink nylon frills and sparkly accessories.

No matter how progressive, liberal or open-minded they had been in raising their daughters, they have all had to face the day their feisty little girls decided that all they wanted to be was a pink princess.

From the tie-dye vegetarian mum to the high-flying exec mum, I’ve witnessed countless modern women who I know and love try to instil independence and ambition in their daughters, only to be met with a Stepford Wife-style commitment to conforming to the princess ideal.

Mass marketing, particularly of the multi-billion dollar Disney Princess phenomenon, has a lot to answer for.

It’s no surprise then that mothers and fathers across the western world welcomed the arrival of Princess Merida, the feisty heroine of Pixar’s animation, ‘Brave‘, last year.

Here was a princess who refused to conform to outdated stereotypes – both those about princesses and about girls in general – and gave little girls an alternative.

It’s equally unsurprising then that plans to sex-up the character for her induction into the Disney Princess Collection this month were met with fierce opposition.

In images doing the rounds online, the red-headed tomboy appears to have been aged by at least ten years and was given bigger breasts, a slimmer waist, full make up and a sparkly, lower-cut number.

She also appeared minus her trademark bow and arrow.

The makeover sparked the creation of an online petition calling for Disney to ‘Keep Merida Brave’.

The campaign, by A Mighty Girl, has garnered the support of over 220,000 people in just two weeks.

Addressed to the Chairman of Disney, Bob Iger, the petition says: “The redesign of Merida… does a tremendous disservice to the millions of children for whom [she] is an empowering role model who speaks to girls’ capacity to be change agents in the world rather than just trophies to be admired.”

One of the campaign’s supporters is Merida’s creator and co-director of the film, Brenda Chapman, who was controversially replaced by a man half way through the film’s production.

Speaking to her local newspaper in response to the makeover she said: “I think it’s atrocious what they have done to Merida.

“When little girls say they like it because it’s more sparkly, that’s all fine and good but, subconsciously, they are soaking in the sexy ‘come hither’ look and the skinny aspect of the new version. It’s horrible!

“Merida was created to break that mould — to give young girls a better, stronger role model, a more attainable role model, something of substance, not just a pretty face that waits around for romance.”

Subsequent reports have claimed victory for the campaign, after the altered image of Merida disappeared from the Disney website. However the global fantasy power-house has denied that the media controversy has had anything to do with this.

Using a Disney blog, the company is at pains to explain away the vamped up Merida as a “one-time stylised version” that was “blown out of proportion” online.

If you look at the collection of Disney Princesses, it’s easy to see why Merida didn’t fit the saccharine-sweet, pastel princess norm, with their submissive poses and coy looks.

To trivialise the protest as Disney has, however, is to shirk its responsibility.

Millions of girls are effectively brainwashed every year by their mass marketing reach, and if they’re not affected by it directly they’re experiencing the peer pressure that comes from it.

Some may view it as a harmless phase, but the rise of the princess phenomenon over the last 15 years has solidified gender roles among children like nothing that came before it.

Children are being defined by gender in their pre-school years; girls with their pink fairies, princesses and ballet dancers, and boys with their trucks, tools and monsters.

The pressure to conform kicks in at a very early age, and pity any child that should deviate from the norm.

With so many media channels available to children, it’s nigh-on impossible for them to avoid being sucked into this new type of gender stereotyping, and perhaps equally difficult for parents to resist the pressure to provide an endless supply of tiaras and glitter.

No one wants to be the miserable mummy who wouldn’t throw a princess party.

The Merida makeover, regardless of its scale, is just part of a much wider culture in which girls are encouraged to see their looks as their only passport to success.

As regular WVoN readers will know, in 2011 we fought a hard campaign against rape jokes on Facebook.

The campaign went international and the outcome was a particular page being taken down after we contacted advertisers to warn them about what kind of pages their ads were appearing against.

However we did not win the war – Facebook simply informed users that if they marked content as humorous, pages featuring rape, domestic violence and pornographic images could stay up.

Since then, there have been numerous protests against Facebook’s questionable application of its terms and conditions, because these apparently allow all kinds of offensive and violent material against women to be published, but not pictures of breastfeeding.

The latest campaign is being run by the Women, Action and Media (WAM), an independent North American nonprofit dedicated to building a robust, effective, inclusive movement for gender justice in media.

The campaign, which WVoN enthusiastically supports, aims to end gender-based hate speech on Facebook.

An open letter demands that the monolithic organisation takes three specific actions:

1. Recognise speech that trivialises or glorifies violence against girls and women as hate speech and make a commitment that you will not tolerate this content.

2. Effectively train moderators to recognise and remove gender-based hate speech.

3. Effectively train moderators to understand how online harassment differently affects women and men, in part due to the real-world pandemic of violence against women.

Signed by over 40 organisations that promote women’s rights and/or campaign to end violence against women, the letter goes on:

‘Facebook’s response to the many thousands of complaints and calls to address these issues has been inadequate.

‘You have failed to make a public statement addressing the issue, respond to concerned users, or implement policies that would improve the situation.

‘You have also acted inconsistently with regards to your policy on banning images, in many cases refusing to remove offensive rape and domestic violence pictures when reported by members of the public, but deleting them as soon as journalists mention them in articles, which sends the strong message that you are more concerned with acting on a case-by-case basis to protect your reputation than effecting systemic change and taking a clear public stance against the dangerous tolerance of rape and domestic violence.”

To join the campaign:

- tweet specific companies who advertise on Facebook

- tweet other companies using the hashtag #FBrape

- send examples of offending pages, along with the actions you’ve taken to hold Facebook and its advertisers accountable, to facebook@womenactionmedia.org.

Over 30 companies sign accord to protect Bangladeshi clothing workers.

International trade union organisations and anti-poverty campaigners are celebrating the signing by 31 major clothes stores of a five-year, legally binding agreement which guarantees independent fire inspections, worker-led health and safety committees and union access to factories in Bangladesh.

It also grants workers the right to refuse dangerous work, in line with ILO Convention 155.

This ‘Accord on Fire and Building Safety’ covers more than 1000 Bangladeshi garment factories.

The signatories, including Marks and Spencer, Tesco and H&M, have agreed to fund improvements in dangerous factories and deal with fire safety and structural problems.

This agreement comes after the Rana Plaza factory complex in Bangladesh collapsed on 24 April killing 1,127 workers.

According to the ‘If you tolerate this then your daughters will be next’ blog, the Bangladeshi garment industry accounts for over 80 per cent of the country’s exports.

Its workers are among the lowest paid in the world, earning on average USD38 a months, according to IndustriALL.

For campaigners this agreement is a game changer.

International trade union organisations IndustriALL and UNI Global Union and pressure groups like the Clean Clothes Campaign and the Worker Rights Consortium have been pushing major clothing retailers to improve pay and working conditions for garment workers in Bangladesh for some time.

But Bangladesh is not the only country where garment workers face low pay and poor working conditions.

This week the Guardian reported that a shoe factory had collapsed in Cambodia killing several workers.

Clearly agreements like the one in Bangladesh need to be signed throughout the developing world, and we need to put pressure on companies with the worst pay and safety record by refusing to buy their goods.

This is more difficult than it seems, as there are many factors to take into consideration.

Netherlands-based campaign group Rank a Brand has come up with a list of criteria which they use to score brands on their labour conditions.

These include whether companies have a code of conduct, outlining hygienic conditions and standards against forced child labour and discrimination; whether their workers can join trade unions; their factories are audited and audit information is responded to, and whether they aim to improve labour conditions as a wider organisation.

@sssukiii has invented an infographic to help consumers identify which brands have the best policies.

Interestingly the cheaper, high street brands like H&M, Zara, Gap and Monsoon tend to perform better than high-end designer labels like Paul Smith, Versace or Vivienne Westwood, who make statements about environmental sustainability or workers rights and even support campaigns, but appear to have no formal, published policies in place.

To see if your favourite brand has set up solid initiatives so as to reduce their impact on the climate, makes serious efforts to improve their environmental performance or has the best and clearest policies for improving labour conditions in their factories, click here.

Maria Stubbings was murdered by her former partner despite repeated calls for help to Essex police.

Refuge, the national domestic violence charity, and Maria Stubbings’s family are calling for the government to open a public inquiry into the response of the police and other state agencies to victims of domestic violence.

Maria Stubbings was murdered in 2008, by her former partner, Marc Chivers, despite making repeated calls for help to Essex Police.

An investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) has shown that Essex Police made a catalogue of shocking errors in their response to Maria:

- Marc Chivers killed Maria just 11 months after being released from prison in Germany for killing a previous girlfriend. He was released from prison in January 2008 without any conditions and deported to the UK. Essex police were aware of Marc Chivers’ previous conviction for domestic murder.

- In July 2008 Chivers assaulted Maria and was prosecuted and convicted. Before Chivers release from prison, Essex police disabled an alarm in Maria’s home. On his release, no conditions were placed on Chivers and no steps were taken by Essex police to provide protection for Maria. MAPPA (Multi Agency Public Protection Arrangements) concluded Chivers did not fall within their remit.

- A friend of Maria’s called the police in early December 2008 to express concern about her but the police took no action.

- On 11 December 2008 Maria called the police to report that Chivers was ‘hanging round’ her home and had entered it and stolen items from her handbag. The call was logged as urgent but then downgraded. The case was closed after officers visited Maria’s home and got her to sign their notebooks saying she didn’t want further action taken, despite the fact that they believed Chivers might be present at the time in Maria’s home.

- On 14 December, a domestic violence officer saw the police log and became concerned about Maria. After a series of ineffective visits, officers finally visited on 19 December with specific orders to search the property and arrest Chivers for burglary. Maria’s body was found.

Maria’s case is not an isolated one.

Two women are killed every week in this country by a current or former partner.

We are calling on the government to open a public inquiry to investigate why victims of domestic violence are still not getting the protection they deserve from the police and other state agencies.

The following women were all horrifically killed by their current or former partner.

They were also all failed by the police and other state agencies:

- In 2011, Christine Chambers and her two-year-old daughter Shania were shot dead by Christine’s former partner. Christine’s 10-year-old daughter fled to safety

- In 2011, Jeanette Goodwin was stabbed to death by her former partner

- In 2009, Clare Wood was strangled and burned to death by her former partner

- In 2009, Casandra Hassovonic was murdered by her husband in front of her mother and her two children while she was trying to flee to a refuge

- In 2008, Sabina Akhtar was murdered by her husband after experiencing years of abuse at his hands

- In 2005, Colette Lynch was fatally stabbed by her partner while he held their two-year-old daughter in his arms

These are just a few examples – sadly, there are many, many more.

Numerous IPCC investigations into police handling of domestic violence have shown recurring failings in forces across the country – sometimes in the most basic of policing duties.

Refuge also receives feedback from women using our services, who tell us that they feel completely let down by the police.

Areas of poor police practice include:

- Poor response to women at high risk of serious violence

- Failure to gather evidence

- Failure to understand the risks involved in domestic violence

- Complacency; inertia

- Poor domestic violence training – police are unable to recognise domestic violence as a crime

State failure is not just limited to the police – other state agencies fail women who experience domestic violence.

The coroner in the inquest into the death of Sabina Akhtar found that Greater Manchester Police, Manchester Social Services and the Crown Prosecution Service made serious and significant failings which possibly contributed to Sabina’s death.

In the Colette Lynch inquest, the jury found that a series of failings by the police, social services and mental health services contributed to Colette’s death.

Maria’s family is determined to ensure that Maria did not die in vain.

Something positive has to come out of her tragic death and the deaths of so many other women who have lost their lives because of domestic violence.

Together Refuge, the national domestic violence charity, and Maria’s family are calling for the government to open a public inquiry into the response of the police and other state agencies to victims of domestic violence.

The state has a duty to protect women and children.  Only when the truth is uncovered will women and children get the protection they need and deserve.

Maria’s family and Refuge are urging you to take action today.

Please sign the e-petition and strengthen the call for a public inquiry into domestic violence.

Maria’s family are also fundraising for Refuge in her memory. Click here to donate.

There are opportunities for women to get into coaching or sports management.

The retirement of Sir Alex Ferguson last week has sparked much discussion throughout the world of sport.

However, it is still relatively rare for a manager or coach to be the cause of so much adulation; it is more often the case that we are obsessed by the “talent”.

And although women are making great progress as “talent”, this seems to be at the expense of promoting women in backroom roles.

So what opportunities are out there for women hoping to make their way in sport, other than on the field of play?

Let’s get the depressing statistics out of the way.

According to research by Sports Research UK, out of every three coaches, only one is a woman.

And when it comes to qualifying as a coach, the figures are even worse; the ratio is approximately 1:5 women to men.

If you are going to come up with a name of a female coach, it will probably be that of England women’s football coach, Hope Powell.

Powell was appointed as the first full-time England women’s coach in 1998.

She had won 66 England caps and scored 35 goals in a distinguished international career.

In 2003 she became the first woman to achieve the highest coaching award in the game, the UEFA Pro-Licence.

As well as leading the senior team, Powell oversees the system from under-15 level to the under-23s.

She is an incredible example for any woman hoping to get into coaching, but, more than that, she is an example for any sportswoman who needs a way forward after retirement from professional sport.

And yet, dig deeper and you find that Powell is not alone.

The new Women’s Super League (FAWSL) has a number of female coaches and managers in place.

Chelsea has a female first team coach in Emma Hayes.

Lincoln also has a female coach in Leanne Hall, who is one of the few women with an FA “A” Licence for goalkeeping. She also is the goalkeeping men’s academy coach for Sheffield United.

Arsenal’s manager was Laura Harvey until January this year, when she left to take up a position in the USA with Seattle Reign FC.

Liverpool has Donna Wortley as video analyst, and Vicky Jepson is coach at the Liverpool Girls Centre of Excellence.

Other sports could take note from football’s lead.

Cricket, certainly, has a way to go.

Mark Lane last week resigned as England women’s coach after five years in charge. No successor has been announced, but there will be no women in the shortlist.

Women are just beginning to make waves in administration. Former England captain, Clare Connor, has the title of Head of Women’s Cricket with the ECB, but, now entrenched in administration, is unlikely to take up a coaching role.

The only other female “big name” in coaching is Judy Murray.

Until recently she was seen as a just another pushy sporting mum, but since taking over as Captain of Britain’s Fed Cup team, she has started to shake off this tag.

What you may not know is that this recognition comes after a mere 20 years of coaching experience, first as a volunteer in Dunblane and then coaching juniors and men professionally. The Fed Cup appointment is her first actually coaching women.

“For many, many years our Fed Cup captains were male and all of the girls have said it is nice to have a female captain,” she told The Scotsman (no irony intended).

And perhaps this is the point.

No one is saying that sportswomen would be better off being coached by a woman, but, as ever, it’s all about equality of opportunity.

So many sportswomen never get the chance to be coached by a woman, and, with no role models, never think to become coaches at the end of their careers, so perpetuating the situation.

So, what’s the good news?

Well, as usual, The Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation (WSFF) is at the forefront of trying to redress the balance.

Its campaign, “Trophy Women”, aims to get more women into higher positions in sport, whether this be in coaching, administration or sports development.

Check out its factsheet entitled ‘Developing Female Coaches’.

There is also an excellent article on the sportingcoachuk website called ‘Women…get coaching!’ by Inclusion Lead, Sarah Cohen. It goes a long way to discuss breaking down the barriers women face in getting involved and is full of great advice.

Finally, there are grants of between £500 and £5,000 available through the Women’s Sports Trust to support many aspects of women in sport, one of which listed is coaching. Click here for details.

You may have to search for help, work harder and be prepared to push yourself forward, but it could be worth it.

If you’re interested in becoming the next Hope Powell or Judy Murray, why don’t you go for it?

Cross-party political think tank Demos marked its twentieth birthday last week, celebrating with ‘a series of lectures looking at some of the biggest challenges facing society over the next 20 years’.

No mean feat.

Jon Trickett MP, shadow minister for the Cabinet Office, talked about tackling political disengagement and increasing civic participation.

Paul Burstow, MP, tackled the subject of the aging population and whether our public services are fit for purpose for the future.

And delivering the inaugural lecture was shadow health secretary Diane Abbott.

Not known for her disinclination to engage with the media or her mainstream opinions, she identified as one of society’s biggest challenges the phenomenon she describes as the ‘crisis of masculinity’, arguing that rapid economic and social change have affected male identity.

In the first of a number of speeches in which she will address the role of the modern family, Abbott said that unemployment, shifting gender roles and the economic downturn are creating, as a by-product, a generation of disaffected young men.

She said that the move away from traditional male roles in societal and economic terms, is fuelling homophobia, machismo and misogyny.

She said it is really to do with male identity – a lack of jobs, a change in traditional ‘breadwinner’ status and the ‘pornification’ of society have created a sense of disenfranchisement among boys and men and exacerbated the lack of respect for women’s autonomy.

Abbott also said that pornography has a damaging effect upon men, and has added to the growth of a “Viagra and Jack Daniels” culture.

It is interesting that Diane Abbott uses the sex industry as yet another reason why men are behaving badly.

She said of Viagra: “Growing numbers of men of all ages [are] turning to the drug by themselves due to performance anxiety, triggered by a host of psychological issues – from our increasingly pornified culture making ‘normal’ sex seem boring, to financial pressures.

“It may be a secret, psychological crutch for some men, who are under pressure to meet a pornified expectation.”

What does she mean, ‘under pressure to meet a pornified expectation’?

The porn industry was neither created by nor for women.

Any expectation, as she puts it, is not on the part of women. Believe me.

And referring to it as ‘our increasingly pornified culture’ is ownership that I, for one, reject.

It is certainly not my culture.

She actually said “this pornified society is not something that men do to women.”

Let’s just say that one left me speechless.

All of this, Abbot said, has perpetuated a culture of ‘hyper-masculinity’ and created an ideal of manhood that is impossible to aspire to and fundamentally detrimental.

Social anthropologist Geoff Dench, who spoke at the same event, claimed that women’s desire to excel in the workplace is making men feel unwanted.

Gosh, I wonder what that must feel like?

So this new generation of lost souls, for whom homophobia and sexism has become normalised is, Abbott says, the fault of the economy, and Dench thinks that women have a hand in it too.

He said: “We all need, both men and women need to feel like they are needed, and in this realm women are much more central and powerful than many of them like to recognize. Men are a bit marginal.”

You can’t ascribe male anti-social behaviour to not feeling wanted.  We are not talking about children here.

The problem with all of this is that it suggests mitigation – that homophobic, violent or  misogynistic behaviour in men can be blamed on the economy, on their sense of loss for days gone by when men knew where they stood, on the breakdown of ‘normal’ family structures.

But women’s roles in society have been fluctuating for years.

During the Second World War women took on what were traditionally seen to be male roles in the workplace, filling gaps left by those who went off to fight.

When war was over, not only was the country in financial flux, but women had experienced a sense of emancipation and empowerment, taking on the role of breadwinner as well as primary carer in the family unit.

The fall of Britain as an industrial nation in the 1980s caused many women to go out to work to help support their families, and, at the time, the economic crisis had never been worse for working class families who no longer had mines or shipyards to support them.

So why is it only now that we are seeing a rise in misogyny, a testosterone fuelled backlash caused by economic and social change?

Forget mitigation.

Isn’t it about choice?

You don’t have to hate gay people. You don’t have to resent women.

No one will make you do these things, particularly not the inanimate economy.

If we returned to the times Diane Abbott refers to, when men felt more needed, more defined, head of the household, master of the house, then that would put women firmly on the back foot once again, second class citizens who answered to their menfolk.

But to be fair, although mostly disconnected and slightly nebulous, some of what she said had a core of sensibility to it, in terms of the lived experience of some men today.

Yes, we need to teach our children to “see through gender stereotypes and sexualised media from an early stage.”

Yes, we should condemn the consumer society in which we now find ourselves, which is teaching young people ‘the price of everything and the value of nothing’.

Yes, there is a lack of decent male role models.

But maybe what we need is a new type of role model for our men and boys.

Not the soldier, the head of the family, the worker, the ‘macho man’ of old, but someone who is flexible and confident enough in themselves to evolve with a changing world and society, where women work and the sky doesn’t fall in.

Where pornography isn’t ‘normalised’ and homophobia is just crass and juvenile.

Any suggestions?

This is not the first time The Watchtower has printed a dangerous message for DV victims.

When I wrote about the dangerous message being given to domestic violence (DV) victims by the Jehovah’s Witnesses a couple of weeks ago, I had no idea the response I would get, and just how bad the problem was.

I had written my article in response to a piece in an edition of the Jehovah’s Witnesses Awake! magazine, which I had unwittingly received through the letterbox.

The overriding message in Awake! was that perpetrators of domestic violence can be rehabilitated with the help of the bible, other Jehovah’s Witnesses and prayer.

My original article explained why I think this is such a dangerous message, and why I think it is irresponsible of the Jehovah’s Witnesses to propagate this message, with no reference to any domestic violence helplines or organisations that can help victims.

Since my article was published on the Women’s Views on News website it has received 29 separate comments.

Comments left mainly by women who are ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses and themselves victims of domestic violence.

The horror unveiled in the comments these women have left is shocking. It seems that what I saw in an evangelist magazine is but the small tip of an enormous iceberg.

And it seems that this is not the first time The Watchtower has printed a dangerous message for DV victims.

Two commentators directed us towards a piece from The Watchtower study guide from 2012 entitled “Happiness Is Possible in a Divided Household”.

In this article Selma told her story. It included the following:

‘Selma recalls a lesson she learned from the Witness who studied with her. “On one particular day,” says Selma, “I didn’t want to have a Bible study. The night before, Steve had hit me as I had tried to prove a point, and I was feeling sad and sorry for myself. After I told the sister what had happened and how I felt, she asked me to read 1 Corinthians 13:4-7. As I did, I began to reason, ‘Steve never does any of these loving things for me.’ But the sister made me think differently by asking, ‘How many of those acts of love do you show toward your husband?’ My answer was, ‘None, for he is so difficult to live with.’ The sister softly said, ‘Selma, who is trying to be a Christian here? You or Steve?’ Realizing that I needed to adjust my thinking, I prayed to Jehovah to help me be more loving toward Steve. Slowly, things started to change. After 17 years, Steve accepted the truth.’

Here, the responsibility for her husband’s violent behaviour is placed squarely on Selma’s shoulders, and again the potentially dangerous message to ‘pray and stay’ is given.

Many of the comments sent in after my article  include accounts from women who have been victims of domestic violence.

Practicing Jehovah’s Witnesses at the time, they described the way that domestic violence is dealt with by ‘The Elders’.

One commenter explained that church members are discouraged from reporting anything to secular authorities, instead they must go to the church elders for their council and instruction.

Another wrote: “My husband was a Witness too, and still is. I spoke to elders several times about his violent behavior. Their excuse was that I wasn’t doing enough. I wasn’t a good wife. I didn’t pray enough.”

And another: “I was raised a Jehovah’s Witness and I can tell you from personal experience that Witness women are taught that if they have an issue (violence or otherwise) they are to approach the Body of Elders and it will be handled internally. Is it handled internally? I guess that depends on what you consider handled; in my case I was read a variety of scriptures on how to be a better Christian wife and told if I fulfilled my responsibilities as Jehovah had outlined, all would be okay.”

Or “Reprehensible. Support from the congregation Elders consists of: ‘You’re a spiritually weak wife. If you were stronger, spiritually, he wouldn’t have to beat you.’, ‘You’re too headstrong and don’t respect your husband’s authority.’, ‘That’s what you get for marrying into a Spiritually Weak(tm) family!’ And my favorite — ‘You probably deserved it.’ Gratefully, I left the husband and the religion in 1982.”

Yet another: “Fourteen years ago I was a young (19 years old) Jehovah’s Witness that unfortunately married a man that physically and emotionally abused me. He was also a Jehovah’s Witness.It went on for about a year and the elders (the congregations clergymen) were aware that it was happening. They met with him privately and decided that he was repentant, so they publicly reprimanded him at a congregation meeting and had him promise not to do it again. They told him the next time he felt like abusing me, he should pray to God instead. You can guess how well that advice worked.”

The women who have bravely shared their stories on our comments thread also described the practice of shunning, where family and congregation members cut off ex-members, including women who have attempted to leave because of domestic violence.

One woman described how, after she was finally able to leave her abusive husband, her children were kidnapped by her ex-partner and hidden in the homes of her ex-congregation.

As I pointed out in my initial article, the Jehovah’s Witnesses were keen to point out that they believe the only justification for divorce is adultery, and not domestic violence.

This was reiterated by the comments.

One woman wrote: “Despite how seriously the authorities took the situation, the Jehovah’s Witness elders tried to force me to go back to that man. I spent almost two years separated from him and the elders would purposely try to put us in situations together. Finally, I chose to move on and got a divorce. But the Watchtower does not recognize spousal abuse or threats as valid grounds for divorce. So, I was kicked out of the congregation and I have been shunned by the entire JW community.”

Another: “Within the first week of separation the elders sought me out to tell me that while they sympathized with my situation, they needed to remind me that I was still a married woman and would eventually have to go back to my abusive husband.”

The JWfacts website, which seeks to illuminate the dangerous advice given by The Watchtower society, has quotes from Watchtower publications showing their advice pertaining to a range of areas.

You can see what they have to say about divorce here.

They are quite clear that although a victim of domestic violence may separate from a violent spouse, they should not divorce, and they tell believers that, “Through prayer and by displaying the fruitage of Jehovah’s spirit, the believer may be able to prevent such outbursts and make the situation endurable.”

They also tell them that “After thoughtful and prayerful consideration of the circumstances, the Christian may feel that there is no recourse but to separate from the abusive mate.

“On the other hand, the Christian may find that there are things she can do to avoid outbursts of anger on the part of her mate, thus making the situation endurable.”

It gets worse.

One woman, who was raped, explained her ordeal.

“I was a victim of rape and I had to have what is called a “judicial committee” where 3 of the congregation elders (only men are allowed to be elders) are to determine your heart condition. In reality it is 3 untrained men asking you if you screamed, what exactly happened and judging you if, in their opinion, you were complicit in any manner whatsoever. If you are found complicit then you are disfellowshipped or publicly reproved for immorality.”

The way The Watchtower treats reported cases of rape deserves a whole article in itself, and perhaps I will write one next time.

However, if you wish to read a collection of quotes from Watchtower publications about what constitutes rape you can find some on the JWfacts website.

Read with caution, it will make you upset and angry.

The stories shared in this article are but a few of many.

The Battered Lambs Project was set up to provide a place where women can share their stories.

It should be viewed with a trigger warning; the website contains pages of similar stories of physical and emotional abuse, facilitated by male elders who tell the victims they should stay with their abusive partners, that they are not allowed a divorce, that it is their responsibility for not being a good enough wife, and so on.

Many of the stories shared on the Battered Lambs Project website begin with a tangible sigh of relief; relief that these women have found somewhere they can share their story, and relief at the knowledge that they are not alone.

Another – recently established – group is Advocates for Awareness of Watchtower Abuses (AAWA), an organisation representing an international group campaigning against the Watch Tower Society.

Most of its associates are either current or former Jehovah’s Witnesses.

The group launched earlier this year with a video created by members around the world, who speak out about the dangers of The Watchtower.

The group cites 5 key areas that they challenge The Watchtower Society on, which include ‘The mishandling of cases of domestic abuse’.

It is encouraging to see that there are groups out there waving a red flag to alert those within the organisation to the dangers they may be facing.

But it is frightening to imagine how many more women in the world are being put in danger by these dangerous edicts and such advice.

I decided to write this follow up piece to give a voice to some of the victims who have been brave enough to share their stories.

The need to raise awareness is imperative, as is pointed out in several of the comments left by ex-victims.

One says: “Thank you for bringing light to this issue – the more ‘outsiders’ who are able to dissect this organization for its dangerous faults and practices.”

A second says: “Thank you for your attention to this irresponsible doctrine. The more media attention that can come to spotlight the crimes and doctrines enforced by the leaders the sooner those stuck inside can find the help and happiness they deserve.”

If you are affected by domestic violence, there are lots of people who can help you.

The freephone 24-Hour National Domestic Violence Helpline, for example, is run in partnership between Women’s Aid and Refuge.

The number is 0808 2000 247.

Activism:

21 May: Hollaback Sheffield Chalk Walk 

Starting at Sheffield University Student’s Union at 6.00pm

Join us as we chalk our way around the streets of Sheffield on an adventure to show whose streets these are… all of ours! Let’s reclaim the streets where we’ve been followed, insulted, harassed or assaulted.

Go with your chalk and the messages you want to spread!

For inspiration take a look at the last Chalk Walk.

24 May: Reclaim the Night Northampton 2013

Starting from Abington Park, Park Avenue, Northampton, NN1 5LW

The first ever Reclaim the Night Northampton,  a march to demonstrate the belief that it is a community-wide responsibility to make Northamptonshire a safe place, free from risk of rape or any form of violence.

Please bring a torch, a glowstick or whatever you fancy to light up the night! Don’t forget your placard!

For further details call NRICC on 01604 250721.

Entertainment:

21 May: Girl Rising t the Harris Lecture Theatre, Oriel College, Oxford University at 7.15pm

A groundbreaking film, directed by Academy Award nominee Richard Robbins, which tells the stories of 9 extraordinary girls from 9 countries, written by 9 celebrated writers and narrated by 9 renowned actresses.

Girl Rising showcases the strength of the human spirit and the power of education to change the world.

Tickets are £3 with online ticket booking. Watch the trailer. Or email Suzanne  for more information.

Ends 25 May: The Gut Girls at The Space, 269 West Ferry Road, London, E14 3RS:  from 7:30pm – 10:30pm

This play is a fantastic representation of Victorian oppression and early feminism.

Set at the turn of the 20th Century in Deptford, South East London, it centres around the lives of 5 young women working 13 hours per day in the gutting sheds, discussing their existence, deliberating their futures, recalling their past, all the while disemboweling live stock. Unmarried and ostracised by polite society for their vocation and unrefined manners, the girls compensate by earning adequate salaries, reveling in their independence and putting by a few bob for extravagant hats.

Evidently, they yearn for finer circumstances, but The Gut Girls are aware their lives could be far more harrowing – dreading the likelihood of domestic toil embodied by working class marriage or domestic service.

Fundraising:

22 May: The Stand – Comedy night fundraiser  at 33 Woodlands Road, Glasgow, G3 6NG from 7.30pm

To book, call The Stand – 0844 355 8879 or go to  their website

The Women’s Support Project works to raise awareness of the extent, causes and effects of violence against women, and for improved services for those affected by violence. Main areas of work are:  support for women whose children have been sexually abused or exploited; raising awareness of the harmful impact of commercial sexual exploitation and highlighting demand as the root cause; improving service responses to violence against women including delivery of training; public education

Lectures/Debates:

21 May: Feminar – London Feminist Network: Women and the City : how urban planning policy impacts on women

Held at Future Leaders Assessment Centre, Unit 2 Bridge Wharf, 156 Caledonian Road, London N1 9UU from 7.00pm

Clara Greed, Professor of Inclusive Urban Planning, University of the West of England, will examine how urban planning can impact on us as women in every aspect of our lives, both at the level of overall policy decisions and at the more detailed design level to show that urban spaces are still heavily gendered.

Transport: nearest tube station King’s Cross; buses 17, 91, 259 nearest stop Killick Street on the Caledonian Road.

RSVP  by email to Jennifer Milligan. Donations of £5, or whatever you can afford, to cover the cost of room hire are kindly requested.

21 May: Feminist Object(ive)s: Writing Art History at The Treehouse, Berrick Saul Building, York University, York from 12.00 noon – 7.00pm

Feminist object(ive)s: Writing Art Histories will explore the aims, challenges and complications of writing art histories from a feminist standpoint, considering feminist methodologies, encounters with feminist art and culture, working with women artists as well as more broadly politically engaged art practices.

22 May: Transforming politics: how women activists can and should participate in electoral politics

The Sheila McKechnie Foundation (SMK) -  the only UK charity that connects, informs and supports campaigners – invites you to a special talk and networking event aimed at campaigners, lobbyists, policymakers and strategists alike who are trying to increase the participation of women in politics.

At 356 Holloway Road, N7 6PA London: sliding scale tickets from £0.00 to £25.00

Cricket:

This year’s Ashes will be contested over three formats of the game.  Points will be accumulated and the team with the higher points aggregate will win the Ashes.

The series will comprise one test match, three one-day internationals and three Twenty20 matches.

Winning the test match will earn six points. The three one-days and Twenty20s will be worth two points each.

“The women’s game has seen huge growth in interest and profile as a result of the limited overs formats in recent years,” said Clare Connor, head of women’s cricket at the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB).

“The new women’s Ashes series looks to combine this reality with the prestige and tradition of test match cricket.

“We believe that this new multi-format series will gain significantly more profile and context than can be generated by playing a one-off test match every couple of years.”

Australia currently holds the Ashes, having won the one test match contested in 2011.

Disability athletics:

Paralympian Mel Nicholls took a surprise T34 1500m world record, beating the previous record by a massive four seconds.  The previous record, set by Deborah Brennan, had stood for 10 years.

Nicholls, usually a wheelchair sprinter, was shocked by the record as she only took part in the race as a training exercise.

Football:

The Continental Cup semi-final line-ups were decided last weekend.

Everton booked their place with a 3-1 win over Doncaster Belles in their last group game on May 18.

Doncaster took the lead through Beth England in the 35th minute but Everton equalised before half time with a strike from Nikita Parris.

In the second half Vicky Jones gave Everton the lead, which was consolidated by Toni Duggan’s penalty in stoppage time.

Liverpool continued their good recent form with a 4-0 win over Chelsea on May 19.

The Reds were three up by half time through two goals from Natasha Dowie and one from Nicole Rolser. The rout was completed in the second half with a goal from Fara Williams.

Arsenal qualified for the semis in style with a comprehensive 4-2 win over the league leaders Bristol Academy. The goals for Arsenal came from Ellen White, Jordan Nobbs, Danielle Carter and Kim Little, with Nicola Watts and Ellen Curson scoring for the visitors.

Lincoln took the last semi-final spot following a 1-1 draw with Birmingham on May 19. They will now face Liverpool for a spot in the final, while Everton face off with Arsenal.

Bristol Academy went to the top of the Women’s Super League (WSL) table on May 16 after an impressive win over Chelsea 2-0. The goals came through defender Jemma Rose and Spanish striker Natalia Sanchon in the second half.

Bristol now hold the only 100 per cent  record in the WSL this season.

The spoils were shared between Lincoln and Arsenal on May 15. It seemed a no-score draw was on the cards until the 89th minute when Lincoln took a surprise lead through Emily Roberts.

Arsenal were not beaten, though: just one minute later, England midfielder Steph Houghton equalised with a 20-yard strike.

No-one was able to take the points in an entertaining match between Everton and Birmingham City on May 15.

Both sides had plenty of chances, and it looked as if Toni Duggan was going to snatch the win in the last minute when put through with only the keeper to beat, but managed to put her shot wide. The match ended a nil-nil draw.

Rugby Union:

England Women Sevens finished second in the World Series behind New Zealand after coming fourth in the final leg in Amsterdam on 18 May.

After their loss 7-12 to Canada, England had to settle for the third/fourth place play-off.

But England failed to win this, losing 26-5 to a strong Russia side. Russia had raced into a 21-0 lead by half time, effectively sealing the match. Ruth Laybourn scored a try in the second, but Russia added fourth try through Marina Petrova.

England coach Barry Maddocks was pleased with his side’s performance, though, especially as his focus is on the World Cup in June.

Tennis:

Laura Robson played one of the best matches of her career to date to beat seven-time grand slam winner Venus Williams in the first round of the Italian Open in Rome on 13 May.

She broke Williams’ serve six times, taking the match 6-3, 6-2.

However, in the second round she came up against Serena Williams, which was a whole different ball game. Although she broke Serena in the first game it was pretty much one-way traffic after that with the American taking the match 6-2, 6-2.

The final was contested by Serena Williams and Victoria Azarenka. Serena took her fourth consecutive tournament, – and in truth was not tested by Azarenka. The final score was 6-1, 6-3.

Serena now goes to Roland Garros for the French Open as firm favourite to take the title.

A report published for the UN shows that all but the wealthiest women in the UK are in a worse position now than they were in 2008.

‘Women’s Equality in the UK – A Health Check’ has been produced by a coalition of 42 women’s and human rights groups, including The Fawcett Society, Rape Crisis (England and Wales) and Women’s Aid.

The report, published by the Women’s Resource Centre, will be submitted to the UN Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) this summer.

It has been produced with the aim of highlighting to the UN the true state of women’s equality in the UK and ‘support[ing] the Government to make positive change in the future’.

Often referred to as the ‘Women’s International Bill of Rights’, the CEDAW is committed to eradicating all forms of discrimination against women, and to ensure the protection of women and the promotion of equality in the public, political and private spheres.

Once a state signs up to, and ratifies, the convention it is obligated to put the provisions into practice.

That state must also submit reports at least every four years on how it is complying with its obligations.

The UK ratified the convention in 1986 and the government is due to be examined by CEDAW in July.

Vivien Hays, chief executive of the Women’s Resource Centre, said that “evidence in our report raises serious questions about the UK government’s commitment to women’s equality.”

“Austerity,” she pointed out, “is not an excuse for discrimination.”

Highlighted within the report are the continued failures of the government to address such issues as increasing levels of violence against women and girls; reductions in legal support; inadequacies of healthcare provision; inequalities in welfare reform; unequal pay; under-representation in politics and incomplete support for refugee and asylum seeking women.

Emily Thornberry MP, Kate Green MP and representatives from groups such as Imkaan, Coventry Women’s Voices and the North East Women’s Network were at the report’s official launch on 13 May.

Minister for Women and Equalities Jo Swinson also attended.

She told the audience that the government is “always looking at ways to improve its work around gender equality” and stressed that it is trying to fill gaps in provision.

Michele Hanson, writing in the Guardian, suggested the report was from the ‘University of the Bleeding Obvious’ and that ‘it’s our government that needs to be told’.

This seems to miss the point.

Vivien Hays pointed out that diverse concerned groups have tried to tell the government, time and again.

Speaking on Woman’s Hour recently, she said that the government is “not listening to us” and that “this is our attempt to be heard”.

The report will be given to the CEDAW committee in an attempt to ‘shame’ our government on an international stage into adhering to its rights and responsibilities under the convention.

For, as the report acknowledges, the government has done little to promote public awareness of CEDAW and rarely cites the convention in any consultations, legislation or policy.

It is hard to believe that in 2013 we find ourselves in a position where we have to shame our government into taking responsibility for discrimination against women.

The government needs to take CEDAW, and the legal obligations within it, much more seriously.

And women need to be more aware of CEDAW’s existence, and the fact that we have recourse to it.

The Women’s Resource Centre (WRC) website has a wealth of information on CEDAW and how organisations can use it for campaigning and for lobbying purposes.

For, as the WRC says, “it is easy for a UN Convention to seem far away from the grassroots work of many women’s frontline and campaigning organisations.

“However, its status as a binding UN agreement is what gives it power as a platform for lobbying and holding the State to account”.

I have just spent two weeks working with Strengthening Families, a project of Aldeas Infantiles SOS, in La Paz.

Gender inequality is unfortunately evident to most in Bolivia. It was even part of our in-country induction.

As an example, one colleague told us how she had seen a husband beating his wife in the middle of a street.

When she stepped in, telling the man to stop, the wife only affirmed her husband’s right to beat her – and told her to mind her own business.

Womankind’s research found that 64.1 per cent of women in Bolivia are survivors of one form of emotional, physical, or sexual abuse.

To make it worse, according to Aldeas, the wife who faces violence and oppression often inflicts the same on her children in frustration.

It is not only violence that effects Bolivian women but a staggering lack of legal rights and education: 19.35 per cent of women are illiterate – as opposed to 6.95 per cent of men.

This means women are less able to get work and gain financial independence.

A more important factor in a lack of economic independence is a woman’s role as a mother.

Motherhood is integral to the image of a woman – with abortion illegal – yet maternal mortality is one of the highest in the world.

Many women die as a result of illegal abortions in Bolivia, and of course, abortion is a class issue too.

As Maria Galindo of Mujeres Creando, the biggest feminist movement in Bolivia, said, “White young women, if they have four hundred dollars they can get an abortion.

“The indigenous, poor young women who don’t have the money get an abortion with a big risk, and they die.”

Bolivia is seen by many to have a progressive leader in Evo Morales, its first indigenous president.

And it is true that women’s rights have progressed under his leadership.

He appointed a government in which women are equally represented for the first time in the country’s history.

However, he is still very much apart of ‘machismo’ – he once said that eating chicken caused homosexuality.

Women were central to bringing ‘Evo’ to power in 2006 – as a part of the demonstrations and road blocks that lead to big political change in the country.

But though they’ve proved they can be as powerful as their male counterparts, they are still maligned and often powerless within their own families.

There is still a very, traditional, patriarchal image of women in Bolivian society – even in its new laws.

A form of child benefit for every expectant woman has been established by the state. Woman equals motherhood right?

Even so, the law in itself would not be a problem, but the poorest mothers in Bolivia do not have the means (eg identity papers) to receive this money.

Recently I attended a community meeting at one of Aldeas’s children’s centres. Although it was a packed room, I sighed as I counted only one man in attendance.

Volunteering at the children’s centres, I notice the girls playing with babies and even a dust pan and brush whereas the boys make guns from any inanimate object.

When I catch myself ‘feministing’, I remind myself it will be a long process to change long established gender roles. And in the UK, too.

It’s the abuse that it is harder to ignore, however.

Aldeas Infantiles tells us charities often struggle to help women because of a certain degree of community justice. Shockingly, a man who rapes a women can often pay a sum to her family to clear him of guilt.

Aldeas’s project Strengthening Families aims to raise awareness about sexual health, HIV and smear tests. A British charity, International Service, helps implement this.

Sexual health may not strike you immediately as a way to empower women. But machismo often means men make the decisions about contraception.

They may even prevent their wives from seeing gynaecologists because they are likely to be male.

By taking good care of their children in nurseries, we get a rare opportunity to provide women with information that is important for their own lives and bodies.

It’s a tough task in a predominantly Catholic country.

There are other groups too who are looking out for Bolivian women.

Most importantly, there are groups of Bolivian women who are empowering themselves. And that surely is the only way change can come in Bolivia. Not from Evo, but from women themselves.

Ten women now sit in government.

Pro-choice movements are becoming more common.

And Mujures Creando promotes feminism through a range of often cultural methods, a radio show and a documentary about violence against women.

This week I begin working on a community greenhouse project in El Alto.

The project means mothers can feed their children healthy food, cheaply.

And it is also possible that by selling vegetables they will be able to gain some degree of economic independence.

This could go a long way – giving the women self-worth, not to mention a better chance of leaving their husbands if they are faced with violence.

A chance to empower women in Bolivia.

Before I arrived in Bolivia, I had heard of another means of empowering Bolivian women.

This was ‘cholita’ wrestling’.

Cholitas are women in traditional dress, usually wearing long skirts and even longer plaits in their hair.

Recently I watched as glamorous wrestlers entered the ring – but cholita wrestling was not empowering.

The women took on men alright, but they lost – to cheers from the crowd.

And one woman’s comeback only occurred when the referee stepped in to protect her.

Although it was a staged fight, I can’t help but think this says something deeper.

That Bolivian women cannot wait for a saviour.

As Mujures Creando have scribbled on a Coachabamba wall: “Neither God, nor master, nor husband nor party”.

Machismo in Bolivia should be fought by the women themselves.

Imagine if you or  a member of your family or your best friend was a victim of rape, how would you feel if the perpetrator was allowed to apply to come off the sex offenders register?

This has now been possible since 1 September 2012, after the Supreme Court ruled that a life-long inclusion on the register breached the Human Rights Act 1998.

Shocked?

So was Prime Minister David Cameron.  He appealed the decision, but the appeal was rejected.

Suffolk police received and approved four requests from sex offenders asking to be removed from the register. The names of these ex-offenders have not been released because of privacy laws.

Detective Superintendent Alan Caton of Suffolk Constabulary said  said of these particular decisions: “Members of the public should be reassured that sex offenders who we believe continue to pose a risk will remain on the register.”

So, now, it is possible there are convicted sex offenders walking around UK streets, maybe a street near you, under no restrictions or with no supervision whatsoever.

Is that so bad?

The law in the UK currently requires anyone jailed for 30 months or more for a sex offence to be automatically placed on the sex offenders’ register for an indefinite period.

This means that their names, addresses, date of birth and national insurance number are recorded. They must notify the police of any changes in personal details, such as their name or address. If they wish to leave the country they must inform the police in person.

In some respects the decision by the Supreme Court sounds worse than it is.

While it is true that sex offenders can now apply to be removed from the register and if successful, to live their lives without scrutiny from the police, they are only able to apply to do so 15 years after their release from prison.

During that time, they should have received rehabilitation both in custody and in the community on licence.

For some this may take longer than fifteen years, for others it will be less.

Factors taken into consideration in support of an application to be removed include the applicant’s age and whether or not they have re-offended during their time on the register.

Police officers and representatives from partner agencies must be content that the applicants no longer pose a risk to the public.

Figures released under freedom of information laws showed that sex offenders are already being successful at appealing their life-long inclusion on the register.

Critics of this change include not only victims of sexual offences, but also the support agencies who work with rape victims.

They argue the law is unfair, as victims are forced to serve a life sentence following the offence.

They also say that the human rights of the victims have not been considered.

Andrew Flanagan, chief executive of the NSPCC, said the NSPCC had “been told the legal ruling could not be overturned”.

He is concerned that there is no proven or recognised ‘cure’ for adult sex offenders who abuse children and they must therefore always be considered a risk.

“Physical and emotional harm caused by sexual abuse can damage children’s lives,” he said. “We will monitor the appeals process closely and will raise concerns if we believe the civil liberties of convicted sex offenders are being put before the protection of children.”

Below is the view of a sex offender, writing anonymously, who feels that life-long registration impacts not only on his ability to rebuild his life but also impinges on his family’s right to a private life.

‘At each visit [to the police station each year] my photographs and other details like my National Insurance number and my car’s registration number are also taken.

‘Being on the register also means that every time I leave the country for work or holiday, for more than three days, I have to go to the police station and give them full details of my visit including the destination address and length of stay, also if I am to visit friends or family within the United Kingdom and my aggregate stay anywhere is more than seven days, again I have to register that address with the police.

‘In other words you have to register the details of my friends and family as well who have not committed any crime.’

You could argue that this is one of the repercussions of committing an offence of a sexual nature, and perhaps a consideration which should have been thought about by the offender before committing the offence.

The other side of the coin is that if we deny sex offenders this right of appeal, we are labelling them and accepting the view that people are not capable of changing.

And in reality, if a sex offender wants to re-offend, does registration on the sex offenders register prevent him from doing so?

Does a list really protect the public?

This is undoubtedly a contentious issue.

Are we protecting the public and balancing the rights of the victim and of the offender?

Is it a fair and just decision for those involved?

We are yet to see the full affects of the Supreme Court’s decision. For now, the jury remains out.

Disarming Grandmothers is a web series looking at the lives of veteran peace campaigners Helen John and Sylvia Boyes.

The series provided an  insight into the UK’s peace movement through two extraordinary women, and shows their relationship with the authorities, the press and their families and their more recent actions – and trial for terrorism.

Disarming Grandmothers was a very organic project, Claire Pope, documentary filmmaker, explained on her blog.

‘It started with a camera and a newspaper article and ended 6 years later with 31 mini documentaries and the creation of this blog.

‘Here were two grandmothers who in-between shopping, taking the dog for a walk and going to Quaker meetings, were writing graffiti on Government buildings, laying down in front of nuclear truck convoys and boarding US Military planes, oh and I almost forgot… being tried for terrorism.’

But that was then.

Helen John is now among those protesting about the new generation of unmanned armed drones that are operating from an RAF base in Lincolnshire.

Drones are unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) which can be operated from the ground, as in the case with RAF Waddington, or be designed to follow a pre-programmed mission.

They hover above chosen communities 24 hours a day, seven days a week, Kat Craig, legal director of human rights charity Reprieve, explained to the BBC.

They present an aerial occupation, almost a form of collective punishment, and there is real concern about the accuracy of the targeting.

With drones imposing no risk to the crew operating them they are becoming the preferred weapon of choice, but Helen John argues that they are illegal, murderous weapons that need to be stopped.

“There is no chance of escaping these weapons, this is remote assassination, where are our moral standards?”

It had been thought that America’s ‘notorious drone programme operations’ in Iraq, which have been condemned by human rights groups as war crimes, were run solely by the US Air Force.

But the Ministry of Defence (MoD) recently admitted for the first time that British personnel helped fly the drones from bases in the United States.

The MoD conceded that these embedded missions ran from 2004 to 2009, but a spokesman was unable to provide further details.

On 26 October last year a group of people – including Greenham Common veteran Helen John – gathered at the entrance to the base, RAF Waddington, near Lincoln, to protest against the growing use of drones.

Inside, the RAF were ceremonially ’standing up’ 13 Squadron, its new drone unit.

And this year, on 27 April, about 600 demonstrators took part in a march from Lincoln out to a protest rally outside RAF Waddington shortly after British drone missions in Afghanistan actually started from there.

The MoD admitted that Reaper drones, operated remotely and controlled from RAF Waddington, had for the first time flown missions in Afghanistan.

The actual drones are all based in Afghanistan, launched from Kandahar air base, and can carry 500lb bombs and Hellfire missiles.

The protesters are calling for the international community to emulate action taken against cluster munitions by outlawing armed drones.

Helen John said she was disgusted the UK was using Reaper drones controlled from British soil.

She said: ‘If you are going about your normal business without interfering with anyone else you should not be able to be targeted by a drone.

‘The opposition [to armed drones] is growing but it really has to speed up so that this type of weaponry is outlawed.’

Research from The Brookings Institute in 2009 showed that for every militant leader killed, 10 civilians also died, and ‘women and children’ are often included in news reports as being among those injured and killed in such strikes.

And as Helen John said, it is quite horrifying how people are happy to accept this happening.

In the wake of the local elections at the start of the month, the topic on mouths of most political commentators has not just been the gains made by UKIP, but the implication of those gains on a future general election, as well as what those gains say about UK voters.

Is UKIP simply benefiting from a large protest vote by those that are frustrated with a stagnating economy/disillusioned by the three main parties/mistrustful of the current political modus operandi (delete as applicable)?

Is it Nigel Farage’s “blokey friendliness”, as one Conservative MP put it, or simply that he is “on telly more often”.

Certainly a large proportion of UKIP voters want a curb on immigration to the UK.

But I am not the only one who thinks that is an inevitable consequence of the right-wing media’s scapegoating of our current economic turmoil on migrants and benefit claimants.

But is that really it?

The answer, I suspect, is ‘all of the above’ and more.

Perhaps surprisingly though, recent research from YouGov suggests that  increased support from women has also had a part to play in UKIP’s recent rise in popularity.

Stephan Shakespeare, chief executive of YouGov, said, “It used to be heavily more male than female. Recent gains have been among the females – that’s where the surge is from.”

This particular “surge” must, of course, be viewed in context.

The number of seats that UKIP now holds puts them on a par – at a local level anyway – with the Green party, still without overall control but recognised as the official opposition on a few councils around the country.

Still, as WVoN explored earlier in the week, UKIP’s supporters have a history of being a far from female-friendly bunch, so why the support from women?

This is a tough nut to crack.

A party which would make maternity pay discretionary for small to medium sized businesses, and the very public defections of both of its female MEPs after accusations of sexism within the party makes it far from an obvious choice for most women, I would suggest.

However, one constituency where UKIP has made significant gains is in Boston, Lincolnshire.

The mainstream media rechristened the town “Little Poland” because it has the highest eastern European population outside London, and UKIP have no doubt capitalised on very public local concerns about immigration.

Indeed, the victory speech of one newly elected UKIP councillor, Tiggs Keywood-Wainwright, speaks volumes.

She said: “I think the British people  feel like they are second best.

“People are not against immigration [if] it is for the rights reasons. I think a lot of people feel that if they say anything they are classed as racist but it is not about racism.

“A lot of people feel they are in the minority.”

Nine male and 7 female UKIP councillors were elected in Lincolnshire.

The 7 were a cross-section of women of different ages including a Conservative defector, as well as two twenty-something sisters and their mother.

And this ratio of male to female UKIP councillors in Lincolnshire puts the other parties to shame.

To put that in context, the Sex and Power report published earlier this year, found that only 1 in 3 councillors were women.

This strong female presence in Boston is not representative of UKIP’s incumbents around the rest of country; indeed, of the 147 UKIP councillors elected, only 16 of those were women, which falls far below the national average.

Still, with a country disenchanted with the current situation, of a government perceived as a self-serving, Oxbridge, boys club, don’t female candidates provide the perfect foil?

Labour MP Sarah Champion, claimed that voters “feel more encouraged to vote when there is a woman standing.

“They feel that women, as outsiders in the political process, are more trustworthy and more in touch with everyday matters.”

While electioneering for the Rotherham by-election that she went on to win, Champion said: “The women I met were genuinely surprised and delighted that I was standing and felt a shared sense of pride that I could become the first female MP of their town.

“Often daughters were brought to meet me and they were told “look, you could do this when you grow up”.

“Almost without exception, women told me we needed more women in politics and I could definitely count on their vote. And vote they did!”

And so they did in Boston, too.

In light of UKIP’s marginal successes, that David Cameron is having to make drastic changes to appease a right-wing contingent of the Conservative party is of little consequence to many.

As Zoe Williams wrote in the Guardian: “I do not think, if UKIP looks set to divide the Tory core, that that is cause for anyone’s concern except the Conservatives.”

What is a concern, however, is the continued under representation of women in politics, and it is here that drastic changes do need to be made, irrespective of political ideologies.

By and large, women’s sport has not been able to completely break away from the question of gender.

In many cases, gender-based disputes catch the attention of the media, overshadowing the women actually playing sport.

Golf is besieged by the row over the admission of women into prestigious clubs; women’s cycling remains woefully underfunded; England’s women footballers recently had to battle for a pay rise to £20,000.

But there is one notable exception: tennis.

While many people would struggle to name a single female footballer, everyone knows of Maria Sharapova, the Williams sisters, and Laura Robson.

Top-level women’s tennis is not plagued by the half-empty stadiums which are a frequent sight at women’s football matches. Instead, fans clamour to see women play. Television and newspaper coverage is accordingly excellent.

Sponsors and tournament organisers, too, display a level of support unheard of in most other women’s sports.

According to Forbes, an astonishing seven of the world’s ten highest paid female athletes are tennis players. Number one on that list, Maria Sharapova, reportedly earned USD27.1 million in 2011.

Since 2007, all four Grand Slam tournaments have offered equal prize money for men and women.

Things are not perfect; there are still those who are willing to suggest that women are less capable than men, but they find themselves increasingly on the wrong side of public opinion.

When French player Gilles Simon declared last year that women did not deserve equal prize money, he faced withering criticism in the press.

Sharapova and Serena Williams spoke out strongly against him.

“No matter what anyone says, or the criticisms that we get, I’m sure there are a few more people that watch my matches than his,” said Sharapova.

This was not always the case.

At the beginning of the Open Era in 1968, when the Grand Slam tournaments allowed professionals to compete alongside amateurs for the first time, men earned more than twice as much as women.

At the first open Wimbledon, Rod Laver took home £2000 with his trophy; Billie Jean King received £750.

At one 1970 tournament, the ratio was 12:1 in favour of the men. Nine female players boycotted the event in protest.

The turning point came in 1973.

A week before the Wimbledon Championships, the now legendary Billie Jean King organised a meeting of top female players and founded the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA).

The WTA brought a new level of organisation to the women’s game, securing sponsorship and television coverage deals, and with them, increases in prize money.

As the WTA approaches its 40th anniversary next month, tennis is arguably the most commercially successful women’s sport in the world.

More than 5.4 million people attended women’s tennis tournaments in 2012, and millions more watched on television.

Increasing tournament revenues have led to a 70 per cent increase in prize money since 2009. The total prize money for the 2013 season was USD100 million.

And women’s tennis shows no sign of slowing down.

From next year, the WTA’s prestigious end of season championship tournament will be held in Singapore, as part of a drive to expand the sport in Asia.

The WTA has also secured another long term broadcasting deal, with telecommunications group BT agreeing to show up to 800 hours per year of live women’s tennis in the UK.

BT will broadcast from 21 WTA tournaments worldwide on two dedicated sports channels to be launched in July.

At a time when many women’s sports are struggling to gain the support and funding they need, the WTA serves as a reminder that it can be done. And that the results are well worth the struggle.

Washington DC resident Sara Alcid was appalled and outraged when she went to cheer on friends at the Nike Women’s Marathon in DC recently and saw groups of men holding sexist signs commenting on the women runner’s looks and clothing.

The signs read stuff like “You look beautiful sweaty”  and “Cute running shoes!”

If what they wanted was to be encouraging, Alcid pointed out in Everyday Feminism, they could have chosen slogans that didn’t focus on how the runners looked.

Especially, she wrote, since “You look beautiful sweaty” ‘totally sounds like some creepy comment a dude would make catcalling you’.

‘Getting people to cheer on runners would have been a sweet idea’, she continued, ‘but “frat boys” telling you how attractive you look while running a marathon?’

Running a half marathon is,  as Alcid pointed out, an empowering act of strength and motivation and has absolutely nothing to do with how you look.

And that includes how “beautiful” a group of random fraternity brothers on the sidelines think you look when you’re “all sweaty.”

Or any other male.

Women do not run for male approval of their sweatiness.

The signs, it turned out, were a part of BareMinerals by Bare Escentuals’ “Go Bare” campaign and tour, and DC was the tour’s first stop.

Alcid then  joined up with Collective Action for Safe Spaces (CASS) and Holly Kearl, of Stop Street Harassment (SSH), and launched a petition to get BareMinerals to stop promoting street harassment and objectifying women runners.

According to research conducted by Kearl, 99 per cent of women experience street harassment in the form of sexually explicit comments, sexist remarks, groping, leering, stalking, public masturbation and assault.

And Kearl found that 46 per cent of women said they exercised at a gym because of fear of harassment and assault while outdoors.

Street harassment is a real and scary part of many women’s daily runs, commutes to work and trips to the grocery store.

It is hard enough for women to feel safe, secure and comfortable running in their own neighbourhoods so they can train for half marathons in the first place.

Shortly after the petition was set up BareMinerals notified the petitioners that they would no longer use the sexist, pro-street harassment signs on their #GoBare Tour of America.

But they did not say that they are sorry they objectified women, they just said they are sorry they caused offence.

And on May 2 – after the apology – they still had photos up on their #GoBare Instagram site.

So it is not over yet.

We want a formal apology and them to promise not to degrade women runners or support street harassment and objectification on the rest of their tour too.

So, everyone,  please keep petitioning, Tweeting and sharing!

And in England, Sarah Ditum, remarking on the Go Bare campaign, said it for us all when, writing in the Guardian recently, she said that one thing she has never been struck by while running is a shortage of volunteers to critique her ‘hotness’.

From the beepers and leerers hanging out of car windows to the ‘moped-riding little tit who took time out from his pizza delivery round to bark at her (because it was important for her to know that he considered her a dog), her journey from couch to 42K has been punctuated by all too many men who’ve been all too willing to let her know whether they’d put her on the do or do-not list.’

Been there…

So as she said, ‘making a special effort to bring this stuff to race day seems an unusual way to hawk foundation’.

Because, she continued, ‘if I’m running a race, it’s not so I can get an index of my bangability’.

‘It’s because I want to run 13.1 miles or 26.2 or however many it takes to push me over the finish line, and during that time I will be gross.

‘I will sniff and spit and sweat and grunt and piss in chemical toilets fouled by hundreds of nervous runners ahead of me.

‘I will hurt, with the dull lactic ache of constant propulsion and the flayed sting of blistered feet.

‘If things go really well, I might be sick.

‘And I won’t care about how any of it looks, because all I want is to get to the end.”

And at no point during any of this, as she points out, should anything remotely resembling the question “Does a frat boy want to prod me?” be invited into anyone’s brain.

In conclusion, and Sarah Ditum puts it so well I will quote her, ‘it is not a welcome development when some powder shark drags up a horndog army to tell women that the real race isn’t for your personal best, but for the position of Most Desirable Ambulant Vagina 2013.’

‘Urgent need to take more courageous and decisive action against human trafficking’.

A high-level meeting of the General Assembly on the United Nations Appraisal of the Global Plan of Action to Combat Trafficking in Persons took place on recently  at the General Assembly in New York.

 Lakshmi Puri, who is UN Women’s acting executive director, spoke during an interactive panel discussion there on “Sharing Best Practices and Lessons Learned for Prevention and Prosecution in the Implementation of the Global Plan of Action”.

Human trafficking, she said, ‘is one of the world’s fastest-growing crimes points to the urgent need to take more courageous and decisive action.

It is one of the most vicious and shocking forms of violence and exploitation and ‘a web of slavery that overwhelmingly ensnares females’.

Women and girls, she pointed out, comprise more than half of all trafficked victims of forced labour and 98 per cent of all victims of sexual exploitation.’

But such trafficking does not take place in a vacuum.

It takes place, she pointed out, in a world plagued with widespread discrimination and violence against women and girls, a world where the rule of law still all too often rules women out.

And these conditions of gender inequality and injustice, she said, provide fertile ground for trafficking, and for traffickers themselves and their clientele, to flourish and enrich themselves at the brutal expense of others.

Which is why the new General Assembly resolution on trafficking and the historic agreement reached by governments this past March at the UN Commission on the Status of Women are of major relevance.

They contain, she continued, the latest thinking and lessons learned to prevent and end all forms of violence against women and girls, including human trafficking.

One of the main lessons we have learned, she said, ‘is that we have to put human rights and justice for victims at the very centre of our efforts.

‘Today too many women victims are blamed, shamed, arrested and put in jail. They are treated like criminals when they are victims of crimes whose rights have been violated and who deserve justice.’

And she called for ‘a focus on the four P’s: Protection of human rights, Prosecution of offenders, Prevention of Trafficking, and Provision of Services to survivors.’

‘The agreement from the Commission on the Status of Women’, she continued, ‘moves us forward in these four directions.

‘It calls on governments to take measures to ensure that identified victims of trafficking are not penalized for having been trafficked.

‘They are to be provided with appropriate protection and care, such as rehabilitation and reintegration in society, witness protection, job training, legal assistance, confidential health care, and repatriation with their informed consent.

‘The agreement calls on governments to criminalise all forms of trafficking in persons, to strengthen laws to better protect the rights of women and girls and to bring justice to offenders and intermediaries involved, including public officials.

‘It also calls for stronger action to prevent trafficking and address its underlying causes. And here, the agreement urges governments to take appropriate measures to address the root factors of trafficking.

This, she said, ‘requires wider efforts to increase education, economic empowerment and to create decent jobs for women, to provide social services and social protection and to ensure women’s participation and leadership.

‘It means working together to generate a pervasive culture of gender equality and the empowerment of women.’

‘The achievement of equality between men and women in families, societies, economies and politics is central to the elimination of violence against women and trafficking.

‘We need gender responsive institutions and we need more women serving in office and on the front lines of justice, as judges, investigators and police officers.

‘We also know that we must reform labour, immigration and migration policies, and conditions of stay and work, so that women and girls are less vulnerable to traffickers and to unscrupulous employers.

‘And’, she said, ‘we need to open spaces for trafficking survivors to be heard so that their real life experiences can inform policymaking.

‘It is only by listening to the women and men, girls and boys who have been trafficked that we can mount a response that is truly effective.

At UN Women, she explained, ‘we are working on all of these fronts and have contributed to significant policy and legal reforms in 25 countries to address trafficking.

‘For example: Brazil and Viet Nam have developed national plans to fight trafficking; India has undertaken a mapping study that identified districts with a high risk of trafficking to take responsive action; and in Cambodia and Nigeria, women’s groups trained police and community leaders to combat trafficking.

She also mentioned the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women, which, she said, ‘is also triggering progress.’

There is, for example, an NGO called CARAM Asia in Malaysia that has developed a comprehensive pre-departure orientation programme for the region, whereby women looking to work abroad are informed about the realities of migration, the risk of violence and told about ways to protect themselves in the destination countries.

And, she said, women’s rights organisations in Egypt, Jordan and Morocco have developed the Arab region’s first model law on female trafficking.

She ended her speech by pledging ‘the full commitment of UN Women to provide strong support to end human trafficking and all forms of violence against women and girls.’

Its members have expressed discriminatory and downright vitriolic anti-women ideas in the past.

In the absence of a clear manifesto, we tried to establish UKIP’s position on some of the issues affecting women in the UK.

As WVoN reported in the run-up to the recent county council elections, UKIP are often uncharacteristically quiet when it comes to many real world issues, and this is certainly the case when it comes to those pertaining to women.

The same cannot be said, however, for its members. They have expressed not just discriminatory, but downright vitriolic anti-women ideas in the past.

Geoffrey Clark, a UKIP candidate later suspended by the party, considered the compulsory abortion of a foetus detected with Downs Syndrome or Spina Bifida a viable way of reducing the current budget deficit.

In an interview with BBC1’s Politics Show in 2010, UKIP’s leader Nigel Farage said that his party was calling for a ban on the “covering of the face in public places and public building”, describing the veil as “a symbol of something that is used to oppress women, it is a symbol of an increasingly divided Britain.”

UKIP prides itself on its councillors being free to govern independent of ‘party diktats’ or having to toe the party line, and stresses that individual’s opinions should be viewed as such and not extrapolated as indicative of party ideologies.

Although in the absence of anything else, it is certainly hard not to.

But more than that, with the party’s youth leader and a prospective parliamentary candidate claiming they were forced out after ‘breaking from party policy’ and publicly supporting gay marriage, the sceptics among you would be forgiven for thinking that UKIP’s apparent abandonment of the ‘whip’ is little more than a cynical vote grabber which taps into the country’s current political apathy.

So while support for women is notable by its absence in their policies, anti-women sentiment is arguably present in the political actions of those UKIP parliamentarians who have been elected.

When the European Parliament brought a resolution calling on all member states to ban female genital mutilation and prosecute all those convicted of carrying it out, the resolution was passed by 545 votes to 13.

Not one of the seven UKIP MEPs, however, voted in favour of the motion – and one of those nay sayers was Nigel Farage.

As the UKIP website makes clear, their electoral manifestos are produced in response to the particular issues faced by the people at the time of an election.

So at the moment, you can only scrutinise their latest  -‘Common Sense Politics’  – relating to eight areas, including same-sex marriage, immigration and fishing.

Included in these ‘common sense’ policies, UKIP pledges a commitment to small and medium sized businesses (SME) by setting out that it will ‘repeal [the] damaging regulation’ that emanates from the European Union (EU).

One example of the ‘excessive’ regulation that the party strives to overturn is the ‘burden’ of statutory maternity pay and parental leave, which it describes as both ‘disproportionately damaging’ and ‘ruinous’.

It proposes, instead, that parental leave should be discretionary.

This will result, it suggests, in an SME either having to ‘offer young women higher salaries than other businesses which offer a long leave period or they will simply have to recruit from a smaller pool of potential employees’.

Read: Men.

But were employers to limit those they sought to employ based on their gender, they would be ‘simply’ breaking the current Sex Discrimination law. Unless they plan to repeal that as well.

This is not the first time that UKIP has raised the issue of maternity pay.

When Godfrey Bloom, UKIP’s spokesperson on economic affairs and women’s issues, was interviewed in 2004, he made his opinion on the issue clear.

“Regulation in protection of women is all well and good in academic and government circles,” he said. “If you’re a small business, you’d be a lunatic to hire a woman of child bearing age.”

Labour MEP Glenys Kinnock was not alone with the sentiment when she said: “We always knew they [UKIP] were Neanderthal, but this guy is really outrageous.”

However, when asked to defend his comments in a later interview, he claimed he had been quoted out of context, before continuing: “…no self-respecting small businessman with a brain in the right place would ever employ a lady of child-bearing age.

“That isn’t politically correct, is it, but it’s a fact of life.

“The more women’s rights you have, it’s actually a bar to their employment.”

Women’s rights are to blame then for the under-representation of women on boards, the proliferation of women forced to work in low paid, unskilled part-time jobs, and the gender pay gap?

Not according to another former UKIP candidate.

He says it is women themselves.

Speaking at the recent business select committee on the issue of implementing quotas for women in the boardroom, Steve Moxon said: “There’s no surprise that women have difficulty in the work place, not only do they have difficulty but they don’t want to be there in the first place!”

Grounding his argument in biological theory, Moxon claimed, “Not only is the nature of the workplace structure in accord with male sociality and at odds with that of the female, but competitiveness per se is inimical to how women behave in the presence of the opposite sex: whereas men actually become more competitive as part of their displaying to women; women actually back away from being competitive because this compromises their displaying to men the attributes that confer female mate-value.”

Moxon was dropped by UKIP in the run-up to the recent elections.

Not for his misogynistic and biologically deterministic arguments, but because he expressed sympathy with Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Breivik and described the claims against Jimmy Savile as “hysteria”.

A spokesperson for the business committee claimed Moxon had been invited so that “a broad range of opinions” could be heard.

Laura Bates, of the Everyday Sexism Project, said, “It’s concerning they should be seeking out the view of someone who has openly expressed these opinions and demonstrated that he is prejudiced against women as a gender.”

A similar accusation of gender prejudice was also made about Farage by UKIP’s last remaining female MEP before she defected to the Conservative party in February this year.

Speaking to the BBC before her move, Marta Andreasen claimed that Farage “did not like women”.

“He doesn’t try to involve professional women in positions of responsibility in the party.

“He thinks women should be in the kitchen or in the bedroom.”

In the absence of a clear manifesto, is it too much to infer that UKIP has a woman problem?

I’ll leave that up to you.

The Women’s Support Project is disappointed to hear that a licence has been granted for a lap dancing venue in Inverness.

Lap dancing is recognised as a form of violence against women, as highlighted in the Scottish Government national approach in “Safer Lives Changed Lives.”

The decision by the Licensing Board highlights the difficulties Boards face in meeting their requirements under the Equality Act.

The current licensing system makes no allowance for concerns around the impact it has on women and on gender equality.

As shown in this instance.

Boards find they have no grounds for refusing such applications and must grant them, despite concerns around violence against women.

The decision by the Licensing Board highlights the need for a new category of license for such venues – an “Adult Entertainment Licence” which would allow permit more effective regulation.

Linda Thompson, Women’s Support Project development officer, said, “ As ever our concern lies with the potential for exploitation for women.

“We would like to commend the Highland Violence Against Women partnership for bringing this to the public’s attention.

“We know that many people feel very strongly that this form of sexual exploitation is present on our High Streets and feel powerless to take action and have their voices heard.

“We urge everyone concerned to write to their MSP and to Kenny MacAskill, Justice Secretary, to demand effective regulations.”

To find and contact your MSP, click here.

To contact Kenny MacAskill, click here.

The Save Legal Aid Campaign has been set up by Young Legal Aid Lawyers to fight cuts to legal aid.

Young Legal Aid Lawyers (YLAL) is a group of lawyers who are committed to practising in those areas of law, both criminal and civil, which have traditionally been publicly funded.

Its members include students, paralegals, trainee solicitors, pupil barristers and qualified junior lawyers based throughout England and Wales.

YLAL believes that the provision of good quality publicly funded legal help is essential to protecting the interests of the vulnerable in society and upholding the rule of law.

The campaign involves raising awareness of the importance of legal aid through blogging, and engaging with those charities whose membership is particularly affected by cuts in legal aid; lobbying MPs and Peers on the issue; and monitoring the impact of cuts as they happen, in order to influence future policy.

The legal aid system was introduced after World War Two as one of the pillars of the welfare state, providing a safety net for those who could not afford to pay for legal assistance.

It provides a vital safety net, ensuring that individuals are able to enforce their legal rights, regardless of their income.

However, this safety net has come under repeated attacks by successive governments determined to curtail public spending on legal aid, often at the expense of access to justice.

The current round of cuts to legal aid is primarily contained within the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO).

One of the main consequences of LASPO is that individuals will no longer be able to access free legal help for many important issues including welfare benefits advice, immigration appeals and family law disputes such as contact over children.

This will leave many individuals without access to legal advice unless they can afford to pay privately.

In addition, funding cuts mean that many law centres, advice centres and high street solicitors are starting to cut back services or even close down, meaning that many areas of the country will be left without any provision for free legal advice.

The inevitable result of the legal aid cuts is that thousands of people, especially the most poor and vulnerable, will be denied access to justice.

At the moment, the focus of YLAL’s campaign is on monitoring the impact of these cuts, so they can let everyone, including the politicians, know just how damaging they are.

So if you have a story to tell about how you, or someone you know, has been affected by the cuts in legal aid, then let YLAL know. You can email them here.

You can also sign a petition asking the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) not to proceed with plans to reduce access to justice by depriving citizens of legal aid or the right to representation by the solicitor of their choice.

Or write to or email your MP expressing your concerns. For help with that, click here.

Get #saveukjustice trending on Twitter every Friday morning to spread the word about the proposals.

Changes to the legal aid system could remove legal aid for many who need a divorce.

Does the introduction of legal aid reforms to family law cases by the government on 1 April 2013 mean the end of divorce as a way out for victims of domestic abuse?

In May 2012, the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LAPSO) came into force.

On 1 April 2013 the Act was reformed, bringing significant changes to the legal aid system in family law cases, and removing legal aid as an option for many in cases of divorce.

Whilst drastic changes have been made in terms of eligibility for cases of child contact and divorce proceedings, an individual is still able to claim legal aid if they can provide evidence of the existence of domestic abuse within their relationship.

On first reading, this appears to be a positive aspect to the changes.

But if you are a victim of domestic abuse, is the government really throwing you a lifeline by allowing legal aid claims to be made in this instance?

Take a closer look at the figures cited by the government on issues of violence against women.

‘Around 1.2 million women suffer domestic abuse, over 400,000 women are sexually assaulted, 60,000 women are raped and thousands more stalked each year.

‘These crimes are often hidden away behind closed doors, with the victim suffering in silence.

‘Fewer than 1 in 4 people who suffer abuse at the hands of their partner – and only around 1 in 10 women who experience serious sexual assault – report it to the police.’

These figures are taken from the gov.uk website which focuses on policy making.

These figures were published on 26 March 2013.

The amendments to the LAPSO Act 2012 came into force only a few days later on 1 April 2013.

Look more closely at the amendments and see how they sit alongside the figures quoted by the government.

Crucially – and less than one week after the government acknowledged the large number of women suffering abuse at the hands of their partners – women seeking to divorce their partners on grounds of domestic abuse will now need to provide evidence of domestic abuse before they will be offered any financial assistance to help dissolve the marriage.

The government has just explicitly said that fewer than one in four people will report abuse to the police; is the onus of proving that abuse as a means of funding your escape, truly the avenue the government has devised to help victims leave abusive relationships?

As incomprehensible as it sounds, it appears so.

From 1 April 2013, in order for a divorce from an abusive partner to be funded by legal aid, victims will need to provide one of the following specified forms of evidence in order to satisfy the government that they are indeed a victim of domestic violence:

‘Finding of fact by the court that they are a victim of domestic violence

‘An unspent conviction or caution against an individual for a domestic violence offence

‘Criminal proceedings for domestic violence that have not yet concluded

‘Protective injunctions in place such as a non-molestation order, an occupation order or a restraining order in the preceding two years

‘Medical evidence from a registered GP who will assert that the victim has presented to them with injuries consistent with domestic abuse in the preceding two years

‘Written confirmation from a domestic violence support agency  that in the preceding two years a person was admitted for 24 hours or more to a refuge due to domestic violence

‘Written confirmation from social services which states that in the preceding two years the victim was assessed as being, or at risk of being a victim of domestic abuse

‘Letter from a Multi Agency Risk Assessment Conference chair confirming that the individual is at high risk of domestic violence and that a protective plan has been put in place in the preceding two years

‘The police have issued a caution against the perpetrator for a domestic violence offence in the preceding two years

‘The perpetrator is on a current order or one has been granted one for domestic violence offences in the preceding two years

‘An undertaking has been given to the court in place of an injunction order within a family relationship in the preceding two years but excluding cross undertakings’

When you first see this list, it appears to provide the victim with a number of options.

In reality though, the number of practical options available to victims caught up in the mechanics of an abusive relationship are very few.

The first option, for instance, requires private funding to attend court and to be legally represented.

If a victim is considering an application for legal aid this is unlikely to be something they can afford to do.

The remaining options also prove difficult if a victim has not disclosed the abuse to anyone else – as is so often the case.

Home Office Circular 003/2013 defines domestic violence and abuse as ‘Any incident or pattern of incidents of controlling, coercive or threatening behaviour, violence or abuse between those aged 16 or over who are or have been intimate partners or family members regardless of gender or sexuality.

‘This can encompass but is not limited to the following types of abuse: psychological, physical, sexual, financial emotional

‘Controlling behaviour is: a range of acts designed to make a person subordinate and/or dependent by isolating them from sources of support, exploiting their resources and capacities for personal gain, depriving them of the means needed for independence, resistance and escape and regulating their everyday behaviour.

‘Coercive behaviour is: an act or a pattern of acts of assault, threats, humiliation and intimidation or other abuse that is used to harm, punish, or frighten their victim.’

But if a victim has not previously reported the abuse to anyone, the remaining options are also not available to her.

Acknowledging abuse can take place over a number of years, as abuse doesn’t necessarily take place on a frequent basis.

The LASPO definition of domestic violence is any incident, or pattern of incidents, of controlling, coercive or threatening behaviour, violence or abuse (whether psychological, physical, sexual, financial or emotional) between individuals who are associated with each other.

The very definition of what constitutes abuse, as provided by the government, describes behaviour which isolates victims ‘from sources of support’.

It is not uncommon for perpetrators to control victims by making it nigh on impossible for them to seek support.

They will isolate them from their friends and family and withhold money to prevent them from socialising or having any reason to leave the house.

In such a situation, how will it be possible to provide the evidence listed in the government’s legal aid reforms?

The reforms make it difficult to understand how it is possible for a victim who does not have the means to fund it privately to divorce a perpetrator of domestic violence and abuse.

It appears that the effect of the amendments will be to completely trap a victim in an abusive relationship – and all this by a government which professes to be ‘determined to support victims in reporting these crimes, and to make sure perpetrators are brought to justice.’

The legal aid reforms appear to focus predominantly on physical violence – yet the LAPSO definition clearly states domestic abuse can take many forms.

Victims can be so afraid of their partner they do not tell anyone, making obtaining ‘objective evidence’ as necessitated by the new legal aid reforms, very difficult.

Given the complex nature of domestic abuse cases, it seems unreasonable to have placed a two-year time limit on a large number of the possible evidential options available to the abused partner.

Even where a protective order has been granted it must have been within the last two years.

It often takes far longer than two years for a victim of domestic abuse to develop the courage needed to seek support or report the issue to anyone.

Often the only form of possible evidence may be a report obtained from a GP.

But it seems the government has not properly considered what this means for a victim of domestic abuse.

Although, with that evidence secured, the victim may be entitled to legal aid for the divorce proceedings, very often the cost involved, which can be upwards of £50, is not something the victim can afford.

The government has boldly declared  that ‘We all must do much more to prevent violence against women and girls happening at all…’, but is it?

When it comes to preventing further domestic abuse and violence – to enabling a victim to permanently leave an abusive marriage and to break free from an abusive partner – the government appears to want to hinder the process, not support it.

And we have to conclude that with these new family law legal aid reforms, the government has made it even harder for those victims of domestic abuse who cannot afford to fund a private case for divorce to find safety away from their abuser.

MPs have said that more must be done to entice women into ICT careers.

Chi Onwurah, Labour MP for Newcastle upon Tyne Central, led a debate about women and ICT in the House of Commons recently.

Addressing what she described as “such an important issue”, she said that only 6 per cent of information and communications technology (ICT) jobs in the UK games industry are held by women and that between 2001 and 2011 the proportion of women in technology jobs decreased from 22 per cent to 17 per cent.

Moreover, the percentage of women taking computing A-levels declined from 12 per cent in 2004 to 8 per cent in 2011, meaning that in a typical computing class there is one girl for every eleven boys.

Onwurah said that “the lack of women in ICT is a scandal but it is also a huge loss”.

Not only does the nation lose out economically and on desperately-needed talent, but the gender pay gap increases as technology professionals tend to earn more than those in other sectors.

Onwurah, who worked in ICT as an engineer for 23 years, said that employers are vital for boosting the number of women in the industry.

As well as helping female employees advance in their their career and their skills, they can work with schools to encourage girls to study ICT, showcase female role models and challenge “our culture, which socialises girls to think that ICT is not for them”.

Last year, Onwurah wrote to ten leading employers in the engineering and technology sector and found that while many are taking steps to improve the situation, a lot more could be done.

“Most firms said that the main problem was a lack of qualified female candidates in ICT,” she said.

“ARM was the most forthright when asked what private or public sector initiatives firms found useful.

“It said most initiatives that directly address the issue are clearly failing at a national level and make little difference.”

Onwurah believes that the government’s lack of support and the absence of any framework to help assess the progress made towards attracting more girls into ICT are responsible for this failure.

“While there are many initiatives, the challenge is to know how well they are working and how to help them to work better, yet I fear that the government are failing to take up that challenge.

“The government ended funding for UKRC, [the UK Resource Centre] the organisation dedicated to supporting girls and women into ICT,” she said.

Onwurah added: “They have reduced support for, and undermined, careers advice, which is the key way of helping into ICT those many girls who have no direct contact with ICT professionals as part of their background.”

In response, education minister Elizabeth Truss said: “We are giving computing a new impetus through a challenging new curriculum, sustained support for teaching training and robust qualifications.”

Truss hopes that the new curriculum, under which primary school students will learn about coding and programming, will make ICT “a universal subject that is attractive to boys and girls alike”.

She went on to say: “Our focus on ensuring that teachers are trained up so that they understand the career opportunities in ICT and know what programming is and how to teach it to young children will be critical in shaping the future and in shaping young girls’ expectations of their potential.”

Many MPs expressed their concern at the government’s plans.

Seema Malhotra, Labour MP for Feltham and Heston, called for a “cross-government strategy that involves the education system as well as the Department for Culture, Media and Sport”.

Julie Hilling, Labour MP for Bolton West, said that the Department for Education needed to do more to “encourage interaction” between young people and employers as they “could then make decisions much earlier about whether ICT was a career they would be interested in”.

The debate took place a day before Girls in ICT Day, which is celebrated every year on the fourth Thursday in April.

This international day is backed by member states of the International Telecommunication Union and aims to encourage girls and women to consider joining the ICT sector.

Celebrations this year included a European parliament debate about women in ICT and a wearable technology event in London that was hosted by Little Miss Geek and supported by Dell and Microsoft.

Women’s comedy business What The Frock! will celebrate its first birthday this weekend, with a bumper comedy fest featuring, among others, funny women Tiffany Stevenson, Bethany Black and Jayde Adams.

The Bristol-based business was launched by Jane Duffus, a journalist and blogger, after her blog post about TV panel shows went viral in January 2012.

“There was a lot of tension at the time about shows like Mock The Week rarely booking any women, and there was a lot of discussion about the absence of women in comedy going on,” Duffus told Women’s Views on News recently.

“It made me realise that it was hard to see female comedians in clubs anywhere, and it became a case of putting my money where my mouth was and doing it myself.”

The first What The Frock! comedy night took place on 18 May 2012, as part of the Bristol Festival of Ideas, and has since evolved into a full-time business venture.

Duffus said: “I really can’t thank the Festival enough for helping What The Frock! get started, and I’m very pleased to be doing an event with them on May 18 as part of their 2013 festival.”

The anniversary gig for the Bristol Festival of Ideas will take place at the Arnolfini, compered by Luisa Omielan, with sets from Tiffany Stevenson and Bethany Black.

But before all that, the celebrations kick off on Friday night with the What The Frock! birthday party at The Square Club, Bristol.

Hosted by regular Frock! compere Jayde Adams, the birthday party will feature performances from Viv Groskop, Alice Frick, Sophie Johnson and Charlie Benson, plus plenty of other treats.

Ms Duffus said: “We’ve got free birthday cakes, sweets, special “Frock! On” badges and tons of other stuff.

“There’s a birthday present for the first 15 people to arrive on the night, and we’re doing a raffle for Bristol charity One25, who we’ve proudly fundraised about £500 for in the past year.”

What The Frock! certainly has plenty to celebrate – in January, after three pilot comedy nights, Duffus began running it as a business, and the show took up monthly residency at The Square Club.

“It just seemed the natural progression. All the shows sell out, the events have had some national attention, the momentum is there, and people want to be a part of it,” Duffus said.

“There’s a lot of good will for What The Frock! locally, which is fantastic, and there’s a few faces who I’ve seen at every single event I’ve put on.”

Just two months later, in March, What The Frock! was profiled on BBC Radio 4’s Women’s Hour and hosted a comedy show at the Royal Festival Hall in London as part of the Women of the World Festival.

Celebrating International Women’s Day with the Women of the World gig has been “the absolute highlight” so far for Duffus: “It was our biggest crowd, and when else am I going to be sandwiched on a line-up between Jenni Murray and Sandi Toksvig?!”

Despite the financial challenge of running a small business, and the geographical challenge of booking London-based comics for her shows in Bristol, Duffus has big plans for the future of What The Frock!, including more focus on nurturing up-and-coming women comics.

“We launched our Open Mic Award in March, and the competition night is June 5.

“I was staggered that all 17 places were filled within 24 hours, and I’ve sadly since had to turn a lot of people down,” she said.

In the autumn What The Frock! branch out to Exeter on 26 October, and there is the launch of a Live at St Georges series in Bristol, on 19 October, with a triple-bill of comedy from Sara Pascoe, Shazia Mirza, and one more act yet to be confirmed.

“There are a ton of other plans as well, some of which are so secret I can’t tell you about in print,” Duffus said.

“But rest assured that they are very exciting and will guarantee that people realise the wims can be a bit funny, and that comedy by women isn’t just for women audiences. Far from it!”

What The Frock!’s first birthday party is on 17 May, at The Square Club, Bristol. Tickets are £15 on the door or £12 when booked in advance.

On 18 May, What The Frock! will be at the Arnolfini, Bristol, for a showcase gig as part of the Bristol Festival of Ideas. Tickets are £12 pounds. To purchase, click here.

Activism:

18 May                No More Page 3 Flash Mob

Sun HQ, London, 2pm.

Flash mobs are also being planned in Brighton and Belfast.

Entertainment:

7 May-25 May   The Gut Girls

Space, London. E14

The Gut Girls is a fantastic representation of Victorian oppression and early feminism. The play centres around the lives of 5 young women working 13 hours a day in the gutting sheds. Unmarried and ostracised by polite society for their vocation and unrefined manners, the girls compensate by earning adequate salaries, reveling in their independence and putting by a few bob for extravagant hats.

16 May                SHE BOP presents Gasoline Thrill, Maid of Ace, and Sean Bean Death Scene

The Lady Luck, St. Peters Street, Canterbury

SHE BOP is an event celebrating girl bands, grrl rock and female artists from the 1950s to the present day. Also showcasing female-fronted bands from Kent and beyond.

16 May                “Freedom”: A Night of Poetry in Support of EWRSAC

The Blind Poet Public House, Edinburgh

A fantastic group of poets will be performing original pieces which in some way relate to the idea of freedom. All donations will be going to Edinburgh Women’s Rape and Sexual Abuse Centre.

18 May                What the Frock? Women’s Comedy Night

Arnolfini, Bristol

Comedy showcase with a headline set from Tiffany Stevenson, support from Bethany Black, and Luisa Omielan as MC

Lectures/Debates:

16 May               “Anti-Porn: The Resurgence of Anti-Pornography Feminism”,

                            a lecture with Julia Long

Bookmarks the Socialist Bookshop, 1 Bloomsbury Street, London, WC1B

Julia Long explains the comeback of anti-porn feminism, and controversially challenges liberal perspectives and the mainstreaming of a porn culture that threatens to change the very nature of our intimate relationships.

19 May                “The Sexual Revolution – Progress or Decadence?”: A debate with Linda Grant

                             and Peter Hitchens

Watershed, Bristol

As part of Bristol’s Festival of Ideas, Peter Hitchens, Mail on Sunday columnist and author of books on drugs, religion and liberty, debates the sexual revolution and its impact with Linda Grant, feminist, novelist and commentator whose books include Sexing the Millennium: A Political History of the Sexual Revolution and We Had It So Good, a portrait of the baby boomers and their legacy.

19 May                “Fifty Shades of Feminism”

Arnolfini, Bristol

Fifty years after the publication of The Feminine Mystique, have women really exchanged purity and maternity to become desiring machines inspired only by variations of sex, shopping and masochism – all coloured a brilliant neuro-pink? InFifty Shades of Feminism, 50 women – young and old, writers, politicians, actors, scientists, mothers – reflect on the shades of feminism that inspired them and what being woman means to them today. Two of the editors – Lisa Appignaesi and Rachel Holmes – join two of the contributors – Bidisha and Linda Grant – to discuss some of the issues raised about being a feminist today.

19 May                London Irish Women’s Network hosts an afternoon focussed on the Magdalene

                             Laundries 

Feminist Library, Westminster Bridge Road, London, SE1

The keynote speaker is Mary Lodato, who is writing a PhD on her personal journey of survival, redress and recovery, charting the childhood experience of institutional abuse in an Industrial School which had a Magdalene Laundry attached to it. Some of Mary’s artwork will be on display and Survivor poet, Emer Keefe, will read poetry.

Sport:

18 May               London Rollergirls – Season 5 Championship Bout

Tottenham Green Leisure Centre, London. N15

Watch Harbour Grudges take on Suffra Jets for third place, then Steam Rollers versus Ultraviolent Femmes for the top spot.

Tennis:

It has been a changeable week for British number one Laura Robson, both on and off the court.

Robson took three sets to beat Magdalena Rybarikova in the first round of the Mutua Madrid Open on May 6, a less than encouraging start against a player ranked 48th in the world.

However, in the second round Robson defied her detractors and her recent run of inconsistent results with an outstanding straight sets win over number four seed Agnieszka Radwanska, during which Robson broke serve five times.

The win against last year’s Wimbledon runner-up was only her second victory against a top 10 player this season.

Yet she was unable to capitalise on this career-best victory, falling to Serbian former world number 1 Ana Ivanovic in the third round.

Robson led 5-2 in the final set, but was unable to seal the win.

Robson also announced this week that she has split with her coach Zeljko Krajan.

Robson hired the Croatian after last year’s Wimbledon, and during their partnership she rose to a career high ranking of number 38 last month.

However, the relationship was clearly not a harmonious one. Krajan, who is known as a hard taskmaster, laid the blame for the breakdown at Robson’s door, accusing the 19 year old of lacking maturity.

“The mentality is different. I did expect more from Laura but when it doesn’t go that way any more it is not the time to stay.

“She was not mature enough to do this kind of work enough times for me. She needed to be more serious and to commit herself more.

“She had to do this every day, not only in the big tournaments.”

For the time being, Robson will work with Sven Groeneveld, a coach with the Adidas Player Development programme.

Despite her recent inconsistent results, Robson has her sights set firmly on the challenges ahead.

At number 41 in the world, Robson is within striking distance of seeding at Wimbledon next month.

A good performance at next week’s Italian Open, or at Roland Garros at the end of the month, would give her a good chance of being one of the 32 seeds for the first time.

“I could avoid a seed in the first round and really try to do some damage on the grass,” Robson told the Independent.

“If you’re not seeded you always end up playing Serena Williams in the first round. But it definitely takes a lot of hard work to get there.”

Football:

The Women’s Super League kicked into another gear this week.

Liverpool Ladies delivered a stunning performance against Arsenal on May 7, defeating the defending champions 4-0. It was Arsenal’s first WSL loss since 2011.

American midfielder Amanda Da Costa scored the first goal in the 37th minute, followed by a second in the opening minutes of the second half. Within minutes, goals from Natasha Dowie and Louise Fors had secured an unassailable, if unexpected, lead for Liverpool.

The victory briefly secured Liverpool a spot at the top of the table, while the usually all-conquering Arsenal remain joint bottom with Doncaster Rovers Belles.

In the second match of the week, Lincoln Ladies were defeated 2-0 by Everton on May 8.

Lincoln started well, but a mistake by England goalkeeper Karen Bardsley allowed Brooke Chaplen an easy goal. Lincoln fought back, but Everton’s win was sealed in the 89th minute with a goal from Nikita Parris.

On May 9, Bristol Academy secured a 3-1 win over Doncaster Rovers Belles, while on May 12, Chelsea pipped Liverpool to a 2-1 win.

Chelsea finished the week at the top of the table, with Liverpool and Bristol both just one point behind.

Triathlon:

British triathlete Jodie Stimpson earned her first World Series podium this week, taking third place in the series event in Yokohama, Japan, behind Gwen Jorgensen of the USA and Australia’s Emma Moffatt.

“I couldn’t be happier,” Stimpson said. “I tried to stay with Gwen but I couldn’t. Her legs are up to my armpits!”

Athletics:

Christine Ohuruogu began her Diamond League season with a third place finish in the 400m in Doha on May 10.

Ohuruogu’s time was a season’s best of 50.53, but she was beaten to the line by Botswana’s Amantle Montsho and the imperious American Allyson Felix.

London 2012 silver medallist Ohuruogu has only ever won one Diamond League gold medal, last year at Crystal Palace. However, she and her coach have targeted a full Diamond League programme this year for the first time in her career.

International charity Save the Children ranked 176 countries according to maternal health and under-five mortality, as well as women’s education, income and political status.

Finland, Sweden and Norway took the top three places.

The UK is ranked 23rd, down 13 places from last year.

The USA came in at 30 because it has the ‘highest first-day death rate in the industrialised world’.

The Democratic Republic of Congo was identified as the worst place to be a mother.

Women there have a one-in-30 chance of dying from maternal causes, whereas in Finland the risk is just one-in-12,200.

Save the Children believes that poverty, war and a lack of nutrition are to blame for high mother and infant mortality rates in the region.

The charity partly attributes the UK’s poor ranking to the lack of women in parliament.

Only 22 per cent of the UK’s MPs are women and there are very few women in cabinet, so issues that are important to children and mothers are less likely to be considered at a national level.

The UK’s relatively poor maternal and infant mortality rates also influenced its ranking.

Babies born in the UK are at a greater risk of dying before their fifth birthday than children in 21 other European countries, including Cyprus, Portugal and the Czech Republic, all three of which have lower GDPs than the UK.

Women in the UK face a higher risk of dying during pregnancy or childbirth than women in Lithuania, Montenegro and Slovakia.

Save the Children claims that there are three key reasons for these shocking statistics.

With a high rate of teenage pregnancy and an increasing number of women using IVF, the UK has a greater proportion of young and old mothers than many other European countries.

Poverty is also a factor as women with unemployed partners are six times more likely to die from complications during pregnancy or childbirth than those with partners who work.

Rising health risks in the UK, particularly obesity and cardiac arrest, have a similar effect.

Responding to these findings, Save the Children has called on the UK government to increase universal access to healthcare, and the Royal College of Midwives has requested 5,000 more midwives to address the country’s current shortage of midwives.

Louise Silverton, director of midwifery at the Royal College of Midwives said: “Women giving birth here are becoming more complex, older and giving birth later, and are more socially and culturally diverse.

“All these factors require more time and energy from midwives.”

Reflecting on the report as a whole, Justin Forsyth, chief executive of Save the Children, said: “Overall the world has made unprecedented progress in reducing child and maternal deaths.

“But within the progress, there are two big challenges – newborns and malnutrition.

“We can end child and maternal mortality in our generation – by using tried and tested interventions to stop mothers and babies being lost from what should be simple preventable causes.”

He added: “The G8 in June, chaired by the Prime Minister [David Cameron], has a critical opportunity to tackle hunger which accounts for a third of child deaths. He must make sure we seize this opportunity.”

With one million babies dying each year on the day they are born, childbirth remains one of the most dangerous times for children and women – in both developing and industrialised nations.

The Women’s Library is closed for the summer move – but is hosting an online exhibition.

After eighty-seven years, thousands of visitors and months of a very long campaign to prevent this happening, activists have said farewell to the Women’s Library.

Founded in 1926 as the Library of the London Society for Women’s Service, the Women’s Library has housed artifacts from women’s history spanning four centuries in a purpose-built site in Aldgate, in London’s East End.

In 2012, it was threatened with closure by London Metropolitan University (London Met), who argued that too much of the library’s use came from outside the university.

Threatened with closure despite the fact that it is the only library in this country where men and women can access the full spectrum of female fiction and non-fiction.

And despite the fact it is one of the only resources for feminist activists and still one of the only libraries to have a respectable zine collection

The London Met branch of UNISON did try to save it, and a petition against the closure gained over 12,000 signatures.

But now the London School of Economics (LSE) will house the collection in a reading room and a planned exhibition space in the British Library of Political and Economic Science on Portugal Street.

Researchers and students will continue to have full access to this unique accumulation of women’s social history.

The purpose-built East End site – bought only ten years ago with a £4.2 million lottery grant – will remain in the hands of London Met.

The staff from The Women’s Library and the collections will transfer to LSE’s Lionel Robbins building, on Portugal Street, near The Strand, in Central London.

The Women’s Library will be thus be closed until 30 July 2013.

Archive and museum collections will be available from August 2013, books, periodicals, pamphlets and other printed materials will be available from September 2013.

And until the completion of a new reading room, The Women’s Library service will operate from LSE Library’s existing Archives Reading Room.

Further information about ‘The Women’s Library @ LSE’ can be found here.

In the meantime, if you missed seeing the library’s exhibition Dirty Linen: The History of Women and their Laundry, in 2002, you can catch up with it now, as it has been transformed into an online exhibition.

The exhibition ran at The Women’s Library from 28 September to 21 December 2002. Edited highlights from the exhibition text and photographs are now being presented online.

Click here to have a look.

The Women’s Library occupied the site of the old Goulston Street Baths, which opened in 1846.

Introduced by Victorian philanthropists to offer local women the means to keep both their clothes and themselves clean, Wash Houses became a social focus for many women and for the lengthy work of washing.

Goulston Street Baths was one of the first Wash Houses in the East End and was set up as a model institution, to be emulated by others.

The exhibition Dirty Linen celebrated the building’s history and place in the locality.

Dirty Linen looked at how cleanliness is sold to us as a moral necessity and at how it has become a modern obsession.

For what is basically a chore for most women is often portrayed as a means to shining – white – goodliness.

The hard labour of washing has, thankfully, been replaced by technological advance, but it is suggested that the extra hours gained only release us to keep more things clean.

The exhibition closes with a look at doing the washing now.

Still women’s work? More marketing is now aimed at men, but they still do less laundry.

And what do heavily perfumed products actually keep clean? Probably not our environment.

A growing number of women  in the US favour over the counter contraceptive pills, a survey has revealed.

About 30 per cent of women using either no birth control at all or depending on condoms said they would consider the Pill if it was sold without a prescription, researchers found.

Dr Daniel Grossman, from the University of California, San Francisco and the non-profit Ibis Reproductive Health, who led the new study, said it remains to be seen how this would play out in reality but the finding shows some indication that making the Pill available over the counter could help improve use of more effective contraception, help women use the method they would like to use and could potentially reduce unplanned pregnancies.

Grossman told Reuters Health that there was mounting evidence that this was safe and effective and that women really wanted it.

According to Think Progress, research has shown that the prescription requirement prevents many women from gaining access to and using birth control.

Studies have revealed that women who get the Pill without a prescription stay on it just as long or even longer than women who have to get a prescription for refills.

The report claims that women who are able to get the pill over the counter like the convenience of getting it directly in a pharmacy without a prescription, and that they still see their providers for well-woman care.

Being able to pick up your pills at the store, without needing a prescription or paying additional costs, would provide relief for many women, particularly those who currently face the biggest barriers to getting the birth control they need on time and affordably.

For the new survey, about 31 per cent of participants each said they were “strongly” or “somewhat” in favour of women being able to buy birth control pills without a prescription, according to findings published in the journal Contraception.

However, there were concerns that women need a doctor to determine whether the drugs are safe given their particular situation, and that the women will not go for regular check-ups if they can get pills without a doctor’s help.

In 2008 the British National Health Service (NHS) started making birth control pills available without a prescription as part of a pilot project in several London pharmacies.

And the pilot scheme found a significant drop in emergency contraception after the launch of over-the-counter pill access.

Meanwhile, an Advisory Group on Contraception audit has found that 28 per cent of NHS Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) have no strategy to address unintended pregnancy.

Last year an NHS report suggested that the contraceptive pill should be available at pharmacies without a doctor’s prescription, including to some under-16s.

It also suggested widening the service to include girls as young as 13 – two schemes offered this in the Isle of Wight and Manchester – not without controversy.

But as Dr Richard Ma, a GP in Holloway, north London, and London sexual health champion, has pointed out: ‘There could be concern about pharmacists offering contraception to under-16s, but there is an unmet need.’

Natural resources do not automatically bring prosperity, particularly for women.

On 4-5 April, representatives from civil society, government and the United Nations gathered in Dar Es-Salaam, Tanzania, to discuss how they could work towards a gender-responsive extractive industry.

This was the first milestone in a new partnership between Publish What You Pay, a coalition which campaigns for transparency in the gas, oil and mining sector, and UN Women.

Publish What You Pay is a global network of more than 650 member organisations around the world, including human rights, development, environmental and faith-based organisations.

They campaign ‘for a world where natural resources benefit all citizens, today and tomorrow’”.

Carlo Merla, Africa Programme Manager for Publish What You Pay, explained that “We formed this partnership in order to explore how we can combat the negative effects of extractive projects on women, while at the same time harnessing the economic opportunities and giving them a greater say in the management of their natural resources.

“It is only by giving women a space at the table that we can ensure natural resources truly benefit all citizens”.

Natural resources have the potential to deliver change to the lives of millions of people. In 2008, natural resource exports from African countries were worth nine times more than aid.

Yet natural resources are not always harnessed to their full potential and to the benefit of people in their source country.

And in many communities around the world, oil and mining projects have had a negative and specific impact on women.

Although the dangers of extraction for whole communities and countries are well known – from environmental disasters to civil wars – the impact they have on women’s day to day lives rarely make the headlines.

Yet this impact is immediate and significant, with women often the most vulnerable to the negative effects of extractive projects.

This problem is compounded by the fact that they have very little say over how their natural resources – and their extraction – are managed.

What happens when an extractive project is launched next to a community?

Firstly, communities often lose land, to be used for extraction rather than farming.

In areas where women make up the majority of rural smallholders farmers, they are often the first to lose their livelihood.

Communities are transformed when an extractive project starts, with an informal economy springing up that revolves around the project.

It also means a very significant – and sudden – increase in the price of basic foodstuffs.

And as women are often taking care of providing food for their families, this makes their lives particularly difficult.

Women are often – also – in charge of providing water for their families. If they have to go out to fetch water to their homes, any environmental spills mean that they have to go further, and expose themselves to more dangers, in order to get to safe water.

The influx of transient male workers and disposable cash also creates dangers for women and can expose them to increased sexual violence and sexually transmitted diseases.

For more on the impact of extractive projects on women, the World Bank has a number of resources and Oxfam Australia conducted a study on gender and mining in 2009.

This isn’t to say that women are merely victims in this situation. In many communities they have sought to capitalise on the informal economy that springs up around a project.

They have adopted new jobs and ventures – from selling beer, to washing clothes for the workers or selling mining-related implements.

Yet is shouldn’t be a case of women having to make the best of a bad lot.

Women should be more involved throughout the whole extractive process.

When environmental and social impact assessments gauging the effects of a project are carried out, they should take into account the specific – and different – impacts on women.

If women had seats at the negotiating table they could talk about and make clear how they are affected by extractive projects – and ensure that suitable steps are taken or that adequate compensation is arranged.

These – and other initiatives – were discussed at the workshop, which you can find out more about here.

It’s not a case of ‘saving’ women from the extractives, but of giving them a say – over how their natural resources are managed and exploited and where the revenues go.

With full participation and transparency natural resources are more likely to benefit all citizens, including women.

An estimated 70 per cent of women working in prostitution in the Netherlands are foreigners.

‘Amsterdam. Stag weekends were pretty much made with this city in mind.

‘Even if you’re a Dam virgin, you will naturally have heard about the Red Light District. Who hasn’t?

‘Amsterdam stag weekends don’t have to be all about the neon lights, but you can’t come to the Dam and not at least take a tour of her famously debauched district.

‘All in the name of research of course!

‘We show Amsterdam stag weekends the hottest bars and strip clubs in the area, so stick with us if you want to experience the city’s wild side at her very best. It’s one of those things to do before you’re 30.

‘If by some weird twist of fate you’re over 30 and haven’t done the Red Light thing yet, Amsterdam stag weekends give you the perfect excuse to pop your cherry.’

One of many ‘stag night’ ads that come up when you use the internet search engines.

Delightful.

An estimated 70 per cent of women working in prostitution in the Netherlands are foreigners, primarily from Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and South America.

Or, put another way: over 25,000 women work as prostitutes in the Netherlands, many of whom are from poor countries in Eastern Europe and around the world.

The absence of job opportunities in their origin countries is widely recognized as the main reason given for their presence there.

Not For Sale is working to provide dignified work for women vulnerable to exploitation in Amsterdam and other countries.

Not For Sale Netherlands, located in the heart of Amsterdam’s Red Light District, offers professional skill training in culinary arts and catering to survivors of red light exploitation being rehabilitated in Amsterdam.

The women training in the project’s kitchen learn to prepare soup, and that is sold to individual women working in the brothels in the surrounding Red Light District.

The catering programme thus becomes visible through the soup kitchen and the community space where meals are made for the women by the women and in doing so displays possible employment alternatives to prostitution.

The idea is that during their internships, the women experience a normal, healthy work environment that offers a sense of equality and empowerment and gain valuable jobs and life skills that will lead to dignified employment in their home countries.

As well as a healthy meal and a taste of home.

Most significantly, selling soup to women in the Red Light District enables Not For Sale to build credible and lasting relationships that can through a light on their backgrounds and the factors that contributed to their current situation.

This information can be used to create solutions that improve economic opportunities for those most vulnerable communities in Eastern Europe, and ultimately prevent trafficking before it occurs.

For more information about Not For Sale and what you can do to help, click here.

Hollywood’s increasing on-screen age gaps are under scrutiny again.

A young actress pulling out of a heist movie is not usually an event to pre-occupy feminist thought.

It is more the kind of ephemera reported by websites fond of the irksome term ‘starlet’.

Yet when Kirsten Stewart recently departed from ‘Focus’, claiming her co-star Will Smith was too old to play her lover, it warranted comment.

Vulture magazine picked up the thread and plotted the data of ‘ten middle-aged leading men and the ages of the women they wooed on-screen’.

With some anomalies, the graphs were inversely proportionate: the older the actor became, the younger, comparatively, was his love interest.

This is not a new phenomenon.

The history of narrative cinema has, infuriatingly, been predicated upon the union between gorgeous female youth and mature male virility.

The problem, as Molly Haskell and more recently Lindy West, have pointed out, is not that such relationships don’t occur in reality, or shouldn’t. To critique the convention is not to critique the concept per se.

However, with an average two-year age gap in UK relationships, film couples are vastly unrepresentative of our reality.

They are instead an unreferenced testament to the invisibility of older actresses and a startling filmic double standard: men get to stay sexy and age on screen, women don’t.

Proof, as Susan Sontag put it, that “getting older is less profoundly wounding for a man”.

It is almost 40 years since Laura Mulvey conceptualised what is now the bedrock of Western feminist film theory, the concept of ‘the male gaze’. Mulvey asserted that in film women are typically the objects, rather than the possessors, of the gaze; that they are the ‘watched’, while men are the ‘watchers’.

In those 40 years nothing has changed.

It remains the primary function of women on screen to fit the paradigm of heterosexual male desire. Older women, and in particular older women’s sexuality, is denied.

A UK Film Council survey from 2011, reflected this, with 61 per cent of women aged 50-75  stating that women of their age were portrayed on film as ‘not having sexual needs or desires’.

The disinclination to show older women on screen has lead to absurdities such as 29 year-old Angelina Jolie playing the mother of 28 year-old Colin Farrell in Alexander.

When female sexuality does appear, it is often filtered through a comic or predatory lens, particularly if the male counterpart is younger.

Mrs Robinson is an obvious archetype of  what has now developed the pejorative moniker of ‘cougar’.

Women desperately need the chance to portray their lives honestly and realistically.

For if what we see on screen affects the way we view reality, the age we stop seeing women as ‘useful’ to society is being truncated at an alarmingly rapid rate.

Unfortunately, director Nancy Meyers probably stands alone in producing films that depict sexually active older women in relationships with their peers.

If it were easier for women to make mainstream films, and Hollywood didn’t “worship at the alter of the 18-25 year old penis” (thank you, Helen Mirren) I’m sure we’d see a damn sight more.

A busy schedule sees England face Pakistan as well as fighting for the Ashes.

England’s cricketers will look to banish memories of their last two tournaments when they take on Pakistan and Australia this summer.

Captain Charlotte Edwards will be hoping the team can live up to its status as favourite, especially when they take on the Aussies for the Ashes in August.

The last eight months have undoubtedly been disappointing.

In October Australia won a tight T20 final in Colombo. England had hoped to wrest the title from Australia, who had won it in 2010, but fell four runs short. This defeat was only England’s second in 26 T20 matches.

This was followed by the even bigger disappointment of finishing third in the 50-over World Cup in India in February.

England went into the tournament as firm favourites, but all-too-obvious nerves caused a series of inconsistent performances including tight but telling losses to both Sri Lanka and Australia along the way. They could only watch as Australia demolished the surprise finalists West Indies to win by 114 runs and claim their second championship title in four months.

In addition to these disappointments, off-field debate and controversy have proved a distraction.

In Edwards’ first media conference after the World Cup final she was quick to admit her frustration.

“We came here to win this tournament and we haven’t even reached the final.  There’s no excuse,” she said.

This, and other reported comment, gave rise to intense speculation over Edwards’ future as captain.

No sooner had that issue been settled, than the furore over Sarah Taylor’s inclusion in Sussex men’s second XI squad this summer erupted.

Many column inches were devoted to this topic, but Charlotte Edward’s commented on Sky News: “Sarah is a wonderful player and I am sure that she can adapt.

“From a captain and England perspective we want them training for women’s cricket. They are slightly different games.”

So, is there dissension in the ranks? Probably not. This is an incredibly talented, focused team that is hurting. This is a new season with new challenges and it’s time to move on.

England will be hoping to play themselves into form in their games against Pakistan in July. The games will be:

1 July – 1st ODI at Louth CC, Lincolnshire from 10.45am
3 July – 2nd ODI at Loughborough University from 10.45am
5 July – 1st and 2nd T20I at Loughborough University from 10.00am and from 2.30pm

However, the real business of the summer will be against the Australians.

They play three one-day internationals, three twenty20 internationals and one test match in a tight timescale in August.

August 11-14 – Test match Wormsley Cricket Ground, Buckinghamshire 11.00am
August 20 – 1st ODI Lord’s 10.45 August 23rd – 2nd ODI The BrightonandHoveJobs.com County Ground, Hove 10.45am
August 25 – 3rd ODI The BrightonandHoveJobs.com County Ground, Hove from 10.45am
August 27 – 1st T20I The Ford County Ground, Chelmsford from 7.00pm
August 29 – 2nd T20I Ageas Bowl, Southampton from 2.15pm
August 31 – 3rd T20I Emirates Durham ICG from 10.15am

One concern for Australia will be the fitness of their star fast bowler, Ellyse Perry.

In March, Perry had surgery on her ankle and she was on schedule to take a full part in the tour of England, but an infection has caused her to have a second operation.

In an interview with the BBC, Cricket Australia’s chief medical officer, Justin Paoloni said that Perry’s anticipated return to bowling was another 10-12 weeks away, and that this latest surgery was “expected to set Ellyse’s rehabilitation timeline back an extra two to three weeks”.

They are still expecting Perry to be fit for the vital Ashes match, but it may be touch and go.

In terms of broadcast coverage, there is no word yet about radio coverage, so watch this space. However, the first T20 at Chelmsford will be televised by Sky.

The second and third T20s will be part of a double-header with England’s men’s games and will be also be on Sky.

For the past 22 years, the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) has paid tribute to women journalists who risk their lives to report the news with its Courage in Journalism Awards.

The Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes a woman journalist who has a pioneering spirit and whose determination has paved the way for women in the news media.

This year, the Awards honour Najiba Ayubi, Nour Kelze, Bopha Phorn and Edna Machirori.

Najiba Ayubi, 45, is managing director for The Killid Group in Afghanistan.

Ayubi also co-founded the Afghan Independent Media Consortium and the Freedom of Expression Initiative, both with the intention of providing resources and support for independent journalists in her country.

Ayubi has spent more than a decade working under anonymous threats and attacks from government entities for her reporting on politics and women’s rights.

She leads a team of reporters working in print, broadcast and online media and has refused calls for censorship.

For more than two decades, Ayubi has been a leading independent voice in Afghan media, and she has regularly received threatening phone calls and letters since 2004.

Threats tied to her critical reporting and her refusal, as director of a news organization, to censor the stories that are published and broadcast on her watch.

Politicians have sent gunmen to her home, anonymous aggressors have vowed to harm her family, and she has been publicly defamed, but in each case, she has faced her attackers and has rejected calls to limit her work.

Nour Kelze is a 25 year-old photojournalist for Reuters in Syria.

Kelze occupies the front lines of the conflict in her country, working to document the human cost of the Syrian revolution; she has been shot at countless times, hospitalized twice for wounds sustained while photographing, and targeted in pro-Assad propaganda.

She has been working as a photojournalist and stringer since 2012 – when she was discovered taking pictures of revolutionary fighters on her cell phone by a well-known war photographer.

She was a school teacher prior to the war, but is now doing a job that few Syrian journalists – and even fewer women – have been willing to do.

Kelze has been on the front lines of the Syrian revolution, recording the human cost of Syria’s fight for democracy, has been targeted in pro-regime propaganda and has received threats via social media.

In February 2013, Kelze’s ankle was broken when a wall fell on her as she retreated from sniper fire. Four days after surgery to repair the break, she was back to work in a cast.

She now plans to set up a media center in Aleppo. Her vision is to provide training and support for Syrian and international journalists, with a focus on women.

Bopha Phorn, 28, is a reporter for The Cambodia Daily in Cambodia.

Her reporting on environmental exploitation nearly got her killed in April 2012, when her car came under heavy fire during a reporting trip in the Cambodian jungle.

She was investigating claims of illegal logging in a protected area of the Cambodian jungle with another journalist and an environmental activist when gunmen with AK-47s sprayed the car with shots. The activist, Chut Wutty, was killed.

Phorn’s reporting on land and environmental issues, as well as her stories about criminal activity and human rights abuses, have made her the target of other life-threatening attacks.

But in spite of the danger she is committed to journalism and has taken up some of the most controversial stories of the day.

This year’s IWMF Lifetime Achievement Award goes to Edna Machirori, the first black female newspaper editor in Zimbabwe.

As a woman journalist in post-colonial Zimbabwe, Machirori rose through the ranks of several newspapers, including The Chronicle and The Financial Gazette, in spite of a deeply patriarchal culture.

Machirori writes about development, corruption and social issues, has acted as a mentor to other women throughout her career and has faced down critics of her incisive reporting.

She started  in journalism in 1963 as a cadet reporter for the African Daily News, a nationalist newspaper based in Harare – known as Salisbury under colonial rule – after sending the paper “letters to the editor” while she was in high school.

During her early years with the African Daily News, Machirori was the only woman on the staff at any level. Later, she occupied editing positions at The Chronicle and The Financial Gazette.

In 1988, she was leading the news team as news editor when The Chronicle published “The Willowgate Scandal”, an investigation into corruption among high-level members of ruling party ZANU-PF.

Today, Machirori freelances for several publications in her country. She has been publicly criticized by ZANU-PF officials for her writing on politics, but she continues, working to challenge the official line on important issues.

BBC News’ Kate Adie is among the 22 journalists who have so far been honoured with the IWMF Lifetime Achievement Award. Previous Award winners include Zubeida Mustafa, columnist, Pakistan; Barbara Walters, ABC News, United States; and Magdalena Ruiz, Radio Mitre, Argentina.

Seventy-eight journalists have been honoured with Courage in Journalism Awards.

Previous award winners include Khadija Ismayilova, RFE/RL, Azerbaijan; Adela Navarro Bello, Zeta, Mexico; Tsering Woeser, blogger and writer, Tibet; Jill Carroll, The Christian Science Monitor, United States; May Chidiac, Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation, Lebanon; and Anna Politkovskaya, of Novaya Gazeta, Russia, who was shot dead in 2006.

It is often difficult finding any reference to women in history, let alone understanding what they did and how they contributed to society.

Until quite recently women routinely changed their names after marrying, they were not allowed to vote and own property, men paid the bills and wrote the wills, so finding them is not so easy.

Sharon DeBartolo Carmack, author of Finding Female Ancestors, believes following the female line can open up new possibilities.

Women are important to trace because they are the ones who give us new family lines to pursue, and researching your female line can help explode myths and challenge stereotypes.

Carmack believes getting to know your female ancestors can help develop a more rounded picture of life in the past.

“While we may find many records for men detailing their military service, land purchases and civic lives, women were more likely to be the letter writers, the family Bible recorders, and the diarists.

“They recorded family and daily life,” she said.

A good example of this, for Carmack, came from one of her clients.

“She’s fortunate to have her mother’s high school diaries from the 1930s.

“Here you have the mom’s own writing, her own voice, her own thoughts, her own opinions, as well as the names of all the boys she dated and had crushes on.

“No other record will give you that kind of information,” said Carmack.

But for genealogist Emma Jolly, author of titles like Family History for Kids and an upcoming book about women in war, tracing her female line helps her understand her own experiences.

“I’m a mother, so I’m interested in the pregnancy, child rearing and childbirth experiences of my ancestors.

“It’s something you can learn from, as pregnancy is something that women experience whatever era you’re in.

“I grew up with my grandmother, she used to live with us and my grandmother, my mother’s and my pregnancy experiences have been the same. We all had the same morning sickness and childbirth experiences,” she said.

“When you trace your female line you realise how many women worked outside the home,” she said.

“If you have a more middle class line you may find women who engaged in political campaigning. Many working class women were working all the time, right through pregnancy in some cases.

“My great, great grandmother worked as a domestic servant in a London townhouse while pregnant, so she would have had to go up several flights of stairs,” said Jolly. “It must have been very hard.”

You often have to dig deep to find out what your female ancestors were doing, Jolly said.

“Newspapers are really useful for finding female ancestors. There are the digital archives of the Times, Guardian, Observer and Daily Mirror.

“Women were often involved in church and community activities, so you may have to look at more specific archives, so for example if your ancestor was a member of the Methodist church it might be with the National Methodist Archives.

“There may be a really detailed obituary or an example of your ancestor running a church fete.

“You can also check marriage certificates and birth certificates for maiden names,” she said.

Vital – and fun.

‘Fat shaming’, although hard to succinctly define, is exactly what it sounds like.

It is behaviour borne from the cultural assumption that being overweight is shameful and that it is therefore acceptable to mock, harass or belittle people because of their size.

Two bloggers, Karina and Bethany, spoke to BBC Radio Four’s Woman’s Hour presenter Jane Garvey recently about public reactions to their bodies, and how this affects their lives.

Karina described the extent to which her life is restricted by the treatment she receives in public.

She explained how she rarely leaves the house because of cruel comments about her weight; people regularly shout abuse from cars or barge her in the street.

She also described a recent event in which a teenage girl walked up to her on the underground and went ‘oink’ in her face.

For any decent human being, it is hard to conceive of a world where this is allowed to happen.

But of course it does happen, in one form or another, everywhere.

From celebrity magazines to the Daily Mail’s ‘sidebar of shame’, women’s bodies are scrutinised and mocked and journalistic vitriol is poured on any woman who deviates from a culturally constructed ‘acceptable’ size, even if they are pregnant.

For women like Karina, this is nowhere more apparent than on the street.

One of the most common misconceptions of street harassment is that it only happens to those who fit the paradigm of conventional female attractiveness.

The stereotypical image of the slim young woman passing a site full of leering builders has become entrenched in the psyche.

It may be difficult, then, for people to realise that the harassment women face in public is often about male entitlement, not ‘sexiness’.

It is also about a culture within which the policing of women’s bodies, and of their movement through public space, is normalised.

Some women have described fat shaming by men who, they believe, feel anger towards them for not fitting the sociocultural norm of the female body.

Women fat shame other women because our culture has made the female body public property.

Fat shaming is not entirely gender specific but both Karina and Bethany agreed that men are not subject to the same level of treatment in public.

Indeed, one recent study concluded that ‘women tend to bear the brunt of anti-fat prejudice’.

Women have been given space to share their experiences of harassment through the Everyday Sexism and Coventry Harassment Projects.

It would be interesting to know how many women do not view comments on their size through the spectrum of street harassment or gender discrimination because the comments do not – ostensibly – appear sexualised.

American photographer Haley Morris-Cafiero, a university professor and photographer, has recently completed a fascinating project entitled ‘Pictures of People who Mock Me’.

The photographs capture members of the public – unaware they have been caught on camera – reacting negatively to her body.

She described the project as ‘[taking] my power back’.

Susie Orbach wrote Fat is A Feminist Issue in 1978. Last year she wrote that ‘fat people are so rarely included in visual culture that fat is perceived as a blot on the landscape of sleek and slim’.

Some people are working to change this.

Bethany, for example, now runs the brilliant ‘fatshion’ blog archedeyebrow and describes herself as having ‘[reached] my full potential as a happy, confident fat person’.

Most women who settle in the UK from Eastern Europe find work and are happy here. But some need support.

Barka UK is an organisation that helps vulnerable Eastern Europeans in Britain.

Barka is Polish for barge and the organisation provides a lifeboat for people who are homeless or out of work in London.

It also runs a national telephone helpline where women can get immediate support and advice.

Dorota Harembska, who runs the outreach and resettlement service, says that 90 per cent of the homeless people they come across are men, and they often suffer from severe drug and alcohol addiction.

Most of the people who call Barka UK’s helpline however, are women.

Agnieszka Baczkiewicz runs the helpline, and receives calls from Eastern European women, not just in London but from across the country.

“I can have a call about something simple like free school meals, but there are quite a few calls about legal issues such as housing benefit, finding a private landlord that will be willing to accept them, or finding a council willing to house them.

“We are not always able to find services that can reconnect people to their home country.

“Someone living in the middle of nowhere can find themselves homeless with no language services.

“A lot of the phone calls come from women, because women are quite pro-active in looking after their families.

“They are worried about things going wrong,” she said.

Malgorzata Bachmiak runs the Social Economy Centre, which provides support with vocational training and job seeking.

“We know quite a few people who were paid under the minimum wage.

“They were paid £6 an hour which is illegal and were not being paid National Insurance,” she said.

Although most of her clients are men working in industries like construction and catering, Bachmiak says that most Eastern European women work, and they tend to return to work very quickly after having children.

“I had this woman she had never worked before, she lived here for two years she had three kids and then she got pregnant again.

“She went to the Jobcentre and applied for JSA, but she wanted to get some work and get some rights.

“She had to return to work after two weeks [after giving birth].

“It was very difficult, as she had a caesarean. She gave her baby to her mother to look after.

“It’s quite difficult, especially for single mothers, the father runs away, what should they do, should they go back to Poland?

“They are in a different country. Maybe the kids are not three years old yet, so they can’t go to pre-school, but there is nothing for them in Poland,” said Baczkiewicz.

She said her helpline receives some calls about domestic violence, but not as many as she would expect.

“Perhaps women are afraid, they just put up with it. Perhaps its not so much of an issue, but I don’t think so because of all the alcoholism. Maybe they find other services,” said Baczkiewicz.

The women thought Barka UK offered a unique and valuable service to their community.

“We are different from other services first of all because of the language. We are able to communicate with people from Eastern Europe, some of the staff speak Russian as well.

“We are closer to them culturally. We know their situation better,” said Monika Zerbin, who worked as an outreach worker for the charity.

However Barka UK has recently faced worrying funding cuts.

Lambeth Council and the City of London decided not to continue commissioning it to provide reconnection services for Central and Eastern European migrants living in these boroughs, although they will still be able to access Barka’s helpline and Social Economy Centre, which are funded from other sources.

Lord Roberts of Llandudno, President of the Friends of Barka UK, wrote last month: “Such decisions make little sense since migrants from countries such as Poland account for nearly a third of London’s homeless population, a figure which may rise when barriers to Romanian and Bulgarian workers are lifted next year.

“Barka UK must be allowed to continue making a difference.

“London councils need to realise that organisations that know what they are doing in this difficult area should be supported in these tough times.

“Now, more than ever, we need to reach out and help migrant rough-sleepers on the streets of our capital.

“And we must ensure that inspirational groups such as Barka UK can continue to do their unsung and indispensable work.”

Featuring 14 short stories from roller derby players, referees and fanatics from all over the world, compiled following an open call for submissions from For Books’ Sake, Derby Shorts is the first collection of its kind.

Aground-breaking anthology, it tells bold and brilliant tales from the track, from inter-team love, lust, rivalry and rebellion to rollerblading assassins in punk-apocalyptic London, brats and ballerinas turned derby superstars – and much more.

But maybe first things first: what is roller derby?

The Guardian has called it “one of Britain’s fastest-growing grassroots sports’ and ‘the perfect pastime for feminists with attitude,” Time Out calls it ”The most exciting sport on wheels.”  The Independent reckons it is “becoming the next big thing.”

And with over a thousand roller derby leagues across the globe, roller derby is now exploding out of the underground and into the mainstream.

Part of its ‘taking off was in 2009 after Whip It! when cinema audiences worldwide saw Juliette Lewis, Ellen Page and Drew Barrymore on rollerskates.

And it grew and grew. The first ever Roller Derby World Cup took place in 2011, and last year the National Museum of Roller Derby was established.

There’s even been talk of the sport being included in the 2020 Olympics.

The first, largest and longest-running roller derby league in the UK, the London Rollergirls came hot on the wheels of the sport’s American resurgence, making them the perfect partner for this ground-breaking collaboration with

The stories in Derby Shorts feature emerging and established authors from across the UK, Europe, America and the world, range from the bittersweet and beautiful to the brutal and bizarre, but keep one thing in common; their obsession with a sport and subculture far too fierce, fearless and exciting to stay underground.

The 164-page paperback, published by For Books’ Sake, Derby Shorts is out on 20 May 2013: to pre-order click here.

For Books’ Sake was founded in 2010.

It is – and it says so itself – the UK webzine dedicated to promoting and celebrating writing by women, ‘providing a dedicated platform for readers and writers alike’.

With daily news, reviews, essays, features and interviews, For Books’ Sake shines spotlights on classic and contemporary writing by both iconic and upcoming women authors.

It also has a national live events programme involving arts and literature festivals throughout the UK, panel discussions, workshops and ‘much more’.  That’s what its blurb says. Click here to see.

The Bank of England announced it will replace the only woman on English currency with Churchill.

The Governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King announced on 26 April that the current five pound note will be phased out in 2016.

Social reformer Elizabeth Fry is to be replaced as the face of the five-pound note by Winston Churchill.

This means that– barring the Queen – there will be no women depicted on English currency.

The Bank of England has featured historical figures on its notes since William Shakespeare appeared on the £20 note in 1970.

Of the 15 icons that have figured since then, only two have been women: Florence Nightingale and Elizabeth Fry.

Caroline Criado-Perez, co-founder of The Women’s Room, has launched an online petition, calling on the Bank of England to reverse their decision and keep a woman on English banknotes.

Having an all-male cast on our banknotes would consign women to the sidelines of history, ignoring their achievements and contributions.

Unfortunately, this is not a new trend; last January, leaked plans revealed that Education Minister Gove’s overhaul of the history curriculum included the removal of Mary Seacole, to give yet more attention to – male – figures such as Winston Churchill and writer George Orwell.

This tendency to airbrush women out of history sends the message that women have never been agents of change, but mere spectators.

The way a nation interprets its past reflects its current values and priorities, and if no women are deemed worthy of being on the currency, we will not be able to build a culture that respects women as having a role as leaders and decision makers.

With the currently small number of women Members of Parliament or in the Cabinet, a political climate deemed anti-women and a ‘dearth’ of women in the private sector’s top jobs, this is a dangerous message to continue to send.

Another reason for which this issue is crucial is that – as Perez says in her petition – currency is everywhere.

“These notes will change hands every hour, every minute, every second. And every time they do, the message will drive a little deeper home: women do not belong in public life – they never have, and they never will.”

It’s not as if there is a shortage of women to choose from.

A Guardian poll suggested women’s rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft, suffragette Emily Wilding Davison, author Jane Austen, scientist Rosalind Franklin and Crimean war heroine Mary Seacole.

To this list, the Independent added paralympian athlete Tanni Grey-Thompson, educator Frances Buss, social reformer Octavia Hill and suffragette Millicent Garrett Fawcett.

The Women’s Room, has created a storify collating all the suggestions – of which there are plenty.

The Huffington Post has even created a series of mock-ups of what five pound notes featuring some of these historical figures might look like.

All these lists are one of the positives to come out of this situation, as they raise awareness, even if briefly, of female historical figures people might not otherwise have been exposed to.

Considering that a poll on ‘inspirational women’ run a couple of months ago generated enthusiasm for mainly fictional characters, this is not an insignificant development.

But one of Chancellor George Osborne’s aides and chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Sex Equality, MP Amber Rudd, has called for women to be considered for other banknotes.

With politicians joining the debate, growing media coverage of this issue and a petition that continues to collect signatures we may yet avoid having English currency devoid of women.

To sign the petition, click here.

Athletics:

Not too British – but showing women picking up bad habits too: Turkey’s Olympic 1500m champion, Asli Cakir, has been charged with a second doping offence.

She has already served a two year suspension after being banned in 2004, when she tested positive for drugs while competing at the World Junior Championships.

This time she faces a lifetime ban.

Football:

Continental Cup

The Continental Cup features the eight Super League teams playing in two groups of four, with the top two from each group qualifying for the semi-finals.

This week’s fixtures finished as follows:

Lincoln 1 – 1 Arsenal

Arsenal scrambled a draw with a late equaliser.

Lincoln’s Jess Clarke took the lead in the 23rd minute, and the home side managed to hold off Arsenal until the 82nd minute, when Arsenal’s Ellen White struck from close range to secure the draw.

Bristol Academy 0 – 2 Birmingham City

Bristol’s 100 per cent start to the season came to an end with a loss to Birmingham – the Blues.

Birmingham’s Rachel Williams scored with a header in the 30th minute, and shot from Kirsty Linnett in the 65th made it two for the Blues. Birmingham were the better side throughout and deserved to take the plaudits.

Professional Footballers’ Association Awards:

Kim Little was named the first winner of the Professional Footballers’ Association Player of the Year Player of the Year award this week.

The 22 year-old midfielder has been a fixture in the Arsenal side since signing from Hibernian six years ago.

“To win the award with so many great footballers in the room was a great occasion,” she said.

Squash:

England’s women retained their European team title in Amsterdam this week.

Although Alison Waters lost her game, Laura Massaro and Jenny Duncalf both won, securing the title for the team with a 2-1 win over Ireland.

This was England’s third European team Championship title in a row.

Taekwondo:

Bianca Walkden took gold in the +73kg category at the Spanish Open on May 4.

The final was just about as tight as it could be, with Walkden and her French opponent, Gwladys Epangue, impossible to separate at 6-6 after sudden death. It took a referee’s verdict to decide the match.

Jade Jones took a bronze medal after being beaten by Spain’s Eva Gomez in the semi-final of the -57kg category.

Next stop for the team will be the World Championships in Mexico from 15-21 July.

Raising funding for a film aiming to shed more light on the issue of sexualized violence.

Persephone Speaks: The Forgotten Women of Bosnia, is (hoping) to be a documentary film looking at the use of rape as a war strategy.

And looking at a survivor’s quest to shed light on the international community’s failure to acknowledge the effects this crime has on women’s lives, long after the war has ended.

‘Hoping’, because it still needs funding. Which is why there is a Kickstarter appeal for money.

We want to make this documentary, Ivana Ivkovic Kelley explains, because females are nonstop targets during wartime, as demonstrated by the mass rapes implemented as a policy of genocide during the Bosnian war.

This atrocity is grossly ignored by the international community and international tribunals.

This film revisits one survivor who continues to fight for justice on behalf of others all over the world.

From her tiny smoke-filled office on the shrapnel-damaged outskirts of Sarajevo, to her monthly sojourns to The Hague, her goal is for perpetrators to be brought to justice.

To this day, war rape survivors continue to join her group, finally sharing their stories with this woman who will ensure their testimonies are heard in the courts in Sarajevo or the Hague.

In many cases, the perpetrators are either awaiting trial or have been rewarded by the Serbian government for successfully running a “camp”, often in the form of a promotion within the local police force.

We have witnessed incidents of this same “reward” behavior in similar conflicts around the world.

In situations such as these, many survivors have expressed anger, fear, and shock, especially when they see their attacker, years later, in high level positions or vacationing beside them on the Adriatic coast, which numerous victims have witnessed.

The main subject of my film, Bakira, takes justice into her own hands when others have given up…and sets out to find where the perpetrators, named in numerous testimonies, now live, subsequently providing this evidence to The Hague and other courts.

This is a critical project – one that needs immediate attention and any support you can give.

It is through projects such as these that light is shed on human rights issues.

The continued treatment of women around the world, especially during times of conflict, needs to be heard through as many channels as possible.

Unfortunately, war rape survivors are often seen as a problem, a by-product of war that needs to be swept under the rug…a reality in many post-war countries.

Our work will be done, Kelley says, when the world comes together to ensure female victims of war are not forgotten and the perpetrators are brought to justice.

Kelley worked interviewing survivors of systematic rape during the war in Bosnia, as well as translating their testimonies and travelling into enemy-occupied territory to deliver food and medical supplies.

She has been interviewed twice by NPR, by a number of domestic newspapers in the USA, and was invited to speak at the University of Stockholm and University of Uppsala during the last year of the Bosnian war.

Not too long ago, she decided to leave her studio job in order to dedicate her time and soul to this project.

She launched the Kickstarter campaign to raise $12,000 for  Persephone Speaks: The Forgotten Women of Bosnia, her first documentary, at the beginning of April.

With your help, Persephone Speaks could be completed by autumn: please click here to donate.

The Knitting Circle is about a a group of women locked up for decades in a Hertfordshire asylum.

Julie McNamara lived and worked as a nursing assistant and social work trainee in the Harperbury hospital in Radlett, Hertfordshire, in the 1980s.

That was on the eve of the introduction of Care in the Community, a government policy which saw the closure of most of the large asylums and their replacement with smaller group homes.

Harperbury was one of six ‘big bins’ in Hertfordshire and could accommodate up to 2,000 patients.

It survives to this day, in a smaller form, and is now known as Kingsley Green.

At the time she worked there, McNamara wanted to do something constructive for the women at the hospital, but Sister Mary Frances, an old style nursing sister working there, warned her that she could not be seen to be doing anything political.

“She told me the only way you can get away with it is if you do something for the hospital shop.

“She suggested I form a knitting circle,” recalled McNamara.

Years later McNamara came across an old tape of the knitting circle conversations, which gave her the idea for the play.

“I heard those voices and I said whatever happened to those people on that tape?” she said.

So she put out feelers on the survivor networks and was amazed at the response.

“I was absolutely inundated.  I am still hearing from people with nowhere else to tell their stories.

“There were thousands and thousands of people who were put away for no good reason.

“I lived and worked with a woman who was put away for 48 years for stealing a bicycle aged nine.

“I met people who had children to their own fathers or grandfathers.

“These were young, young women. They were placed in these asylums ‘for their own protection’ and described as ‘morally deficient’.”

The play is based on the testimonies of 70 women, including a woman who was born in an asylum and wondered why she had never been adopted.

“When she traced her mother she found she had done 34 years in this ‘bin’. She had been nursed for years in a women-only ward, and had 12 pregnancies. She had a PhD in Philosophy,” said McNamara.

“The only way these women survived was through their own love for each other and through utter mischief,” said McNamara.

One of her favourite stories was from Anne from Enfield.

“Every Christmas the Friends used to give them chocolate brazils.  She had never liked brazil nuts so she sucked the chocolate off and gave the nuts to the nurses as presents.

“It took them four years to find out,” said McNamara.

McNamara started to think of new ways of working with actors, because she wanted them to hear the voices of the people who were telling their stories.

“I wanted them to hear from the patients themselves. I wanted them to hear from former staff members,” she said.

So she cast six actors and matched them with some of the survivors and staff.

The play is a moving and authentic portrayal of a group of patients and staff as they struggle to maintain their morality, dignity and individuality in a world where the only thing to look forward to is the next cup of tea.

And where, if you step out of line, you can expect a cold bath, a beating and a spell in isolation.

“Nobody gets off lightly in here,” says Colin Shine, the charge nurse in the piece, played by actor Sanjiv Hayre.

McNamara says the people who gifted her their stories think of this as their play.

“It’s been enormous fun.  I’ve had huge mischief.

“The people who have given me their stories have stayed in touch with me for the past three years.  It’s become a huge tribe,” she said.

McNamara is now in talks with producers about turning the play into a film.

The Knitting Circle  will visit Oxford, Liverpool, Wolverhampton, Deptford and Bristol.

The performances have integrated sign language interpretation, and some, such as the performance at Liverpool’s Bluecoat Theatre on 9 May, are audio described.

In Bristol, the cast will be joined on stage by some of the survivors, who will receive a public apology.

In February Ireland’s Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, apologised on behalf of the Irish state to the survivors for the appalling treatment of hundreds of women in the Magdalene Laundries, and McNamara believes those who survived the asylums deserve the same from the British government.

When I heard that, I thought my God we’ve heard not even an acknowledgement of what women went through in the asylums, in the so-called long care system where, for the most spurious of reasons, women were thrown away for the rest of their lives.

Nobody is after compensation, she points out, but every single story-teller who gifted their stories to this play wants an apology.

McNamara believes services for today’s mental health patients are patchy.

“It’s chequered. It depends where you live, it depends whether you’ve got money, it depends whether you’ve got access to the protocols that allow you to be treated, it depends whether you’re black or white, whether you are rich or poor.

“It is an appalling time to be unwell in the mental health system in this country, because we are taking a huge retrograde step by selling off the health service and by decimating the welfare system.

“Nye Bevan must be spinning in his grave,” she said.

You can catch The Knitting Circle at the following dates, times and venues:

May 8th and May 9th at 7:30pm at the Bluecoat, in Liverpool, L1 3BX.
May 11th at 7:30pm at the Arena Theatre in Wolverhampton, WV1 1SE
May 15th and MAY 16th at 7:30pm at The Albany, Douglas Way, London, SE8 4AG
May 20th at 8:15pm at The Brewery at the Tobacco Factory, Bristol, BS3 1TF

By Thea Raisbeck.

A petition to ban ‘thinspiration’ hashtags on Twitter has admirable intentions, but won’t stop the rise in eating disorders.

The petition, started by American student Tori Singer, is calling for Twitter to “restrict the use of thinspiration language and hashtags currently circulating the twittersphere”.

For the uninitiated, ‘thinspiration’ and pro eating disorder (Pro-Ed) sites and groups encourage extreme thinness as a desirable goal and advocate for eating disorders as a lifestyle choice.

Users find support to entrench their illness; sharing tips for suppressing the appetite or hiding signs of the disorder from others.

Thinspiration and Pro-Ed sites are nothing new.

Many years ago, when I was at the height of my struggle with anorexia, Pro-Ed content could be found – if you looked hard enough – on Yahoo! Groups or in the Livejournal community.

Concern over these sites is also nothing new: in 2001 Yahoo! banned around 115 Pro-Ed sites or communities, with AOL and MSN following suit shortly after.

Twelve years later, as internet use and social media burgeoned, Pro-Ed sites have increased exponentially.

A recent study has indicated that there are now over 500 such sites on the internet, the majority set up by sufferers, many of whom are under 18.

The sprawl of social media has made the dissemination of thinspiration that much easier, and Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest have all attempted to prohibit or limit the use of Pro-Ed content.

These measures have met with varying degrees of success, with many sites a kind of ‘thinspiration by any other name’.

Despite the images these groups share, which deify eating disorders and sanctify the prominence of bones, anyone who has struggled with an eating disorder knows it is a painful, isolating and almost unequivocally miserable way to exist.

And it is this sense of isolation and despair that Pro-Ed sites often speak to.

Claire Mysko, of the National Eating Disorders Association, claims that ‘young people who are prone to disordered eating…feel very isolated, so this world…provides a community and a sense of belonging’.

Yet, it is undoubtedly the case that Pro-Ed sites also allow sufferers to remain deeply rooted in their illness.

One study revealed that 61 per cent of sufferers who visited Pro-Ed sites ‘engaged in new weight reduction or purging methods’.

Any attempt to limit the spread of thinspiration communities should therefore not be discredited and it is certainly the case that social media sites have an obligation to ensure responsible content.

However, we cannot simply ban these sites without appreciating the – unmet – psychosocial needs they may be fulfilling, or without positing an alternative.

The effectiveness of punitive ‘banning’ measures has been the subject of some concern.

Susan Ringwood, of Eating Disorder charity B-eat, worries that such pressure may drive anorexic networks underground, ‘stoking their sense of persecution and making it harder for help to reach them’.

The way we talk about Pro-Ed sites is also of concern.

If we express disgust, shock and horror at these communities there is a danger we are replicating the stigma already faced by eating disorder sufferers in wider society.

It is surely more productive to think of what can replace the need these sites are fulfilling.

We need to look at the complex etiology of eating disorders rather than relying on the erroneous assumption that looking at images of thin women causes the problem.

Thinspiration is the product of a culture that praises absence: the absence of flesh, of wrinkles, of body hair.

It is not the cause.

The images used on Pro-Ed sites largely come from a fashion industry in which fatigue from starvation is the norm.

The proliferation of these images, and the ease with which such images can be shared through social media, ratifies the idea that this is how people with eating disorders look.

In reality, anorexia is the rarest of the eating disorders, affecting only around 10 per cent of all sufferers, yet it is the most publicised, the most mythologised and the most representative form of the disorder.

Sadly, razor-sharp hip bones and paper-thin flesh are more likely to generate interest than an outwardly ‘normal’ looking woman who is on the verge of a gastric rupture due to incessant self-induced vomiting.

And this is why we need to increase awareness of eating disorders – in all forms – and cease focusing solely on physical emblems of the disorder.

Reports that eating disorder admissions were up 16 per cent in 2012 have been attributed by experts to late diagnosis.

Perhaps dieting and thinness have been normalised to the extent that they are coded as typical ‘feminine’ behaviour so go unnoticed.

Perhaps stereotypes and misrepresentation have lead many doctors to assume that if a patient is not a white, middle class teenage girl they can’t possibly be anorexic.

Much of my early treatment path was hampered by professionals who refused to see a problem as I had not yet reached that arbitrary ‘anorexic’ weight.

I sought solace in online communities, but was fortunate enough to stumble upon a pro-recovery site that, without hyperbole, probably kept me alive.

There are many great pro-recovery sites out there where members can still share their pain and seek solace with those who understand.

The difference is no one pretends that eating disorders are anything other than they are.

Most people will not have heard of webiteback, proud2beme, FYOURED, or the Something Fishy website.

They do not create ghoulish headlines so most people remain unaware of their existence.

Pro recovery sites are not a panacea.

Glancing through a slideshow of healthy body affirmations isn’t going to make a chronic anorexic immediately pick up a fork and start eating.

They are, however, our best alternative.

Wider promotion of such sites – and more promotion of the idea that eating disorders are only superficially about food and weight – is probably the most effective antidote to a seemingly unstoppable tide of aggravating imagery.

We need to tear down the myth that emaciation is natural and can be achieved by any other means than control, starvation and unending amounts of pain.

Journalist Charlotte Raven is leading work on new website and magazine.

Groundbreaking feminist magazine Spare Rib is to re-launch with original co-founder Rosie Boycott now a confirmed member of the team led by freelance journalist, Charlotte Raven.

The Guardian announced the re-launch, quoting from Raven’s email to potential supporters outlining her plans and asking for contributions.

‘We’re looking for a commitment of £100 or more from prominent supporters who are as frustrated as we are by the PR and celebrity-filled women’s magazines and long for an alternative,’ she wrote.

Having already raised the £6,000 needed for the on-line aspect of the project, Raven also recently announced that the new Spare Rib website will be formally launched on 27 May.

The team of ‘disaffected artists, activists and journalists’ that Raven has gathered will create a magazine that will sit alongside Cosmopolitan on the newsagent’s shelf, ‘instead of on those carousels in Whole Foods alongside Green Parent [and] will revive the spirited and soulful vision of feminism that SR once embodied, not the timid liberal one that dominates the mainstream media.’

The news of the re-launch has been met with general enthusiasm tempered with caution.

The caution relates to the somewhat fractured feel of today’s feminism and the role of the internet in disseminating ideas and debate.

Sophie Wilkinson wrote in the Observer recently that she hopes Spare Rib doesn’t fall victim to the internet’s ‘dissections and preference for immediate reaction instead of thought-out reasoning’, because ‘as much as it has to look out for itself in this unregulated territory, it could be a welcome guiding light’.

‘The brand’s legacy’ she continued, ‘is one of a time when women achieved change through genuine activism, not idle clicktivism.’

Writing in the Independent, Louisa Saunders said that she was ‘still slightly smarting’ from the feeling she had in the 1980s that ‘it sometimes felt less like I was fighting the enemy, more like I was the enemy,’ and that she hopes the new Spare Rib is the forum she always hoped it would be – ‘accessible, intellectual, campaigning and far-sighted.’

Raven’s email could be seen as addressing some of those types of concerns, saying that the new version will be funny and will feel like an inclusive girls’ club, rather than an old boys’ club.

Launched in 1972, the original Spare Rib magazine was considered radical, in both look and content.

Its purpose, ‘as set out in its editorial, was to investigate and present alternatives to the traditional gender roles for women of virgin, wife or mother.’

Articles were political and used as campaign material for the Women’s Liberation Movement.

Some retailers, including WHSmith, refused to stock the magazine, and some women readers felt unable to subscribe to the magazine or read it openly.

Subscriptions to the original Spare Rib numbered around 20,000 per month, although readership was probably higher as women passed the magazine around their various social groups or read it in the library.

The tagline for the 2013 version of Spare Rib is ‘Life, Not Lifestyle’, and at the moment, while the website is being built, readers can contribute financially and sign up for email announcements via the on-line holding page.

Raven says that she hopes to begin publishing the print magazine in autumn 2013.