Kinda like that issue of Time Magazine where they said "the person of the year is everyone", only less cheesy. (photo via Flickr, taken by user Jessica E Sideways. Shared under a Creative Commons license.)

This post, then, is about those people; people who are getting on with the everyday business of making change happen. That ranges from people who work in charities, NGOs, and support organisations; people who lobby and campaign; and people who are acting on the change they’d like to see in their interactions with the people around them.

So here, then, are just some of the many organisations run by awesome people, doing awesome things on a daily basis.

• African Feminist Forum – They run biennial conferences for feminist activists in Africa, and make efforts to include the voices of groups often marginalised within African feminism (and arguably feminist movements in many countries) – commercial sex workers, women with disabilities, and bisexual rights activists.
• Central American Women’s Network – They’re working to improve the political, social and cultural rights of women in Central America through advocacy and campaigning, and raising awareness in the UK and US. Freedoms in Honduras have been a particular issue since the coup d’etat of 2009.
• Women’s Budget Group  – Based in the UK, they’re bringing gender analysis to economic policy, because it’s hard to work for an equal society when the vast impact of government expenditure is skewed in favour of one portion of the population.
• British Insitute of Human Rights – Because human rights for everyone is very much a feminist issue, and the BIHR are one of several fantastic groups supporting that. (See also: Liberty, Amnesty International)
• Race On The Agenda – Too often the history of feminist discussion has been marred by an unfortunate exclusion of the voices from often-marginalised groups such as the Black and Asian communities. ROTA are one of the organisations helping to keep things more inclusive.
• Powerhouse – Women with disabilities are another group that’s been too often pushed to one side or rendered invisible. Run “by and for women with learning disabilities”, Powerhouse bring focus to this.
• The Feminist Library – Libraries are basically the most awesome things ever, and this one carries a huge stock of feminist literature. It should hardly need explaining why this is an entire industrial-sized vat of pure brilliance.
• The Survivor Project – I want to include these folk, because judging from what I’ve read they’re awesome, but unfortunately they seem to be without a website currently, so, er, you’ll have to find them yourselves later. They’re a non-profit working against domestic and sexual violence against anyone, but with a particular focus on trans* and intersex survivors. It’s an issue that’s all too often ignored in the mainstream. (If in the future a website becomes available, hopefully we’ll be able to draw attention to it.)

This list isn’t even remotely exhaustive, and couldn’t possibly hope to be. There are more people out there working to support good ideas than I have any chance of adequately enumerating here. The fact that I can only post a tiny, miniscule example of some of the many groups and organisations involved in this is, honestly, brilliant. It’d be a worrying sign if every beneficial organisation could be summed up in the space of one post. For more comprehensive overviews of the groups out there though, do check the members list for the Women’s Resource Centre and the National Alliance of Women’s Organisations. (Of course, that only covers groups based at least partially in the UK. The list gets even longer when we go global.)

And then of course there’s the fact that the above list has only covered organisations, groups, and charities. We’ve yet to even touch on the vast array of feminist bloggers, writers, artists, and others out there making their ideas visible. Or the yet wider group who don’t have a public podium from which to spread their message but are engaged in thinking about, discussing and living with this as a part of their daily world view.

What I’m saying is that there’s a lot of us, and the collective weight behind this set of ideas is formidable. And that’s seven shades of kickass.

• Unsung Heroes: spotlighting fascinating people we never learned about at school. Rob Mulligan also blogs at Stuttering Demagogue. Stay tuned for future Heroes, or send your own in to [email protected]!

The government’s point of view was that it was time to make big decisions about priorities.

BBC article, 15 November 2010

In cutting legal aid for nearly all areas affecting the family sphere, the government has made it very clear where their priorities lie, and it is not with the most vulnerable members of society. The cuts are all over the place – family law, immigration, employment – and it is difficult to decide which of these is going to disadvantage women the most.

Even looking at a single area – family law – yields some very interesting data. Legal aid is not available for uncontested divorces, it can only be applied for where the other party contests the petition. Of the divorces granted in 2008 in England and Wales, 67% were granted to the wife. For all of the divorces granted, unreasonable behaviour was the most common reason for divorce. Of the contested divorces initiated, women were more likely to be granted Legal Aid as they are more likely to have no income of their own.

Taking Legal Aid away from contested divorce cases, therefore, is likely to result in far fewer cases being brought before the court, as the main instigators of divorce proceedings will not be able to afford to do so. So what are the alternatives if you’re stuck in a marriage and you want out?

Mediation isn't possible for everyone. Image captured by rsepulveda on Flickr.

The problem with mediation

Well, there’s mediation, which only works if the two individuals can agree on an amicable arrangement. I’m thinking that most people wouldn’t want to go through the court process if an amicable arrangement was possible. Even setting aside the thorny issue of child custody, solicitors claim that 4 out of 5 men try to hide wealth in divorce settlements. Going to court can prevent this through the agreement of a “consent order” deciding how property and assets are to be split. If the parties do not follow the order, the court can then enforce it. I find it laughable that those men would volunteer their hidden wealth because they’re around a mediation table rather than in a court room. Net result: wives lose out in a settlement, and have no recourse if the other party reneges on the agreement.

Domestic violence cases

Suppose that it’s worse, and that the woman is in an abusive relationship. Currently, if a woman wishes to keep her address secret, she can apply to use her solicitor’s address instead of her own. Most importantly for violent cases, it is recognised that mediation, which is voluntary, is inappropriate where there is a fear of violence by either party. Ah, I hear you cry, but funding will continue for family law cases involving domestic violence.

The thing is, “domestic violence” comes under section (b) of the Act, “unreasonable behaviour”. This doesn’t need to include the particulars of any violence experienced, but can be something much milder. In fact, unless the husband has a string of convictions for violence, it’s actually easier in some ways to have a divorce granted by citing milder grounds, as the other party is less likely to contest the petition. With domestic violence cases under-reported, it is difficult to estimate how many mild petitions for “unreasonable behaviour” hide battery and abuse. 77% of domestic violence victims are women, 1 in 4 women will experience domestic violence in their lifetime, and on average a victim will experience 35 assaults before calling the police. An inadequate avenue of escape previously partly available to thousands of women across the UK is now being firmly barred.

The cost of being single. Image captured by CascadeAndSTAN on Flickr.

The cost of being single

So why even get married? Surely it’s safer for all women to apply for divorce now, and to refuse to enter matrimony in the future. Why not simply opt for that? Put simply: money.

Women’s access to income through employment will be significantly curtailed as public sector jobs are shed, and their access to government assistance and benefits will be cut. The cuts will hit women twice as hard as men, and the poorest 13 times harder than the richest. I guess it’s a good thing that the number of women already below the poverty line is negligible… oh wait, one third of women earn less than £100 a week. A working lone parent with two children will suffer cuts of 10.4% of their income, compared to a two-parent, two-child family on a modest income’s drop of 6.2%. To give you an idea of what this means, in London, 9 out of 10 lone parent households are headed by women.

What am I supposed to do about it?

Taken individually, any of the above measures are regressive. Put together, and they are positively draconian. The only saving grace is that these changes have not yet been confirmed, and are still subject to a public consultation (ending 14 February 2011). Make sure your voice is heard, by completing the online form. Unless we speak out now, it may cost us far too dearly in the future.

If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.

Metafilter user blue_beetle in the thread User-driven discontent

The above is a particularly trenchant quote that it is increasingly important to bear in mind, when using online services.

With any luck, most people reading this will already have read Facebook is a feminist issue, and a lot of what’s being talking about here will be redundant. In case you haven’t, though, and in case your clicking finger is suffering from temporary paralysis, the broad point it is making is that on-line privacy is a very, very real concern for feminists, since it affects any number of vulnerable classes of people, and particuarly those who are victims of abuse, and that Facebook is quite staggeringly bad when it comes to online privacy – it’s another path by which people can abuse one another, and more importantly, it makes it increasingly easy for abusers to track down and/or monitor the activity of their victims – even if their victims block their abuser from their profile, the abuser may still have friends in common with their victim, and therefore be able to see their victim’s activities where they intersect with friends via Facebook photo albums and similar.

Considered in the light of the above quote, it’s very easy to see why this is the case. Facebook’s business model absolutely relies on sharing the personal information of its users with as wide an audience as possible, for marketing purposes – its user-base is the product that it sells. But what’s worse is that even if you yourself choose not to share certain information, that’s no guarantee that it will not be available.

Project Gaydar is a research project by some students at MIT, who built some software that analysed Facebook profiles. They found that even if a person’s Facebook profile did not mention their sexual orientation, they could predict it to 85% accuracy, simply by analysing the profile data of the people they are Facebook friends with. It’s important to stress that there’s no evidence of this research being used outside of the project, or with any sort of malicious intent – it’s simply a demonstration of the possibility.

It’s worth noting that the problem presented by Project Gaydar is actually not Facebook’s fault. It’s simply an emergent property of any social network, on-line or off – one is judged by the company one keeps. And one cannot fault the companies that provide these services, and make us into the products they sell (without getting into anti-capitalist theory, a topic for another time and another place) – the companies are simply behaving as the market dictates.

And this sort of thing in only going to get worse – companies like Foursquare, Gowalla, and Facebook’s new “Places” feature make their users real-time location information available to their friends, on-line. At time of writing, there hasn’t been a high-profile case of this sort of sensitive data being abused or leaked, but it’s surely only a matter of time.

Even beyond the sphere of social networking, there are, of course, other sorts of privacy concerns on-line, relating to anonymity – witness the outing in the press of Zoe Margolis on the publication of her first book. The issue of privacy management on-line is not going to go away any time soon, and as line between the online and the offline increasingly blurs away into nothing it’s a conversation that feminists should be gearing up to be part of.

So, what can you do?

If you’re concerned about your Facebook privacy settings, then you can look at Reclaimprivacy.org – it’s a volunteer-run site that does its best to stay on top of the ever-shifting goalposts of Facebook privacy.

If you’d like to do further reading on this issue surrounding social networks, privacy and vulnerable people, then searching the brilliant danah boyd’s archive is likely to yield a lot of further reading – it’s not always her primary concern, but the nature of her research into social media means she comes up against it a lot.

You might also like to consider volunteering with, or donating to organisations like the EFF or the ACLU both of which regularly deal with privacy issues as part of their broader remit, and whose blogs are good sources of information on current events in this area.

Cuts for women - image by degilbo via Flickr

To head off any arguments at the pass, I believe that these cuts are more a political decision rather then an economic one and that the government has taken over a country in a time of perceived crisis and confusion, using the “chaos” as a convenient smokescreen to push through its own agenda without the appropriate debate, safeguards or reference to GCSE economics textbooks. But the wrong-headedness of the budget is better discussed by Liberal Conspiracy and Red Pepper. Direct arguments over the necessity of the cuts there.

I’ve been thinking specifically about the gulf of difference between what is legally allowable and what is morally correct, and more importantly what we can do to bridge the divide. I’m not going to back down on my assertion that morality is the right word to use here – a budget which is demonstrably more unfair (it’s a generally unfair budget) to women than to men is an immoral budget. So far, so philosophical.

This is where it gets better. This is where we get practical. The valuable question posed by the Fawcett Society is whether it is also an illegal budget, because if so, then there are grounds for actual change. Not only in this instance but for the future. If they succeed then there will be precedent for further challenges to unequal, unacceptable political decisions.

…we are all in this together.

– George Osborne, Conservative Conference Speech, 4 October 2010

Good point George, but not in the way you think we are.  A man who wants us to pay whilst large companies don’t , who grew up on a fat trust fund and is the heir apparent to the Osborne Baronetcy of Ballentaylor is probably only dimly aware of the Real World Implications of the “this” that “we” appear to be “in”. Nonetheless, he has one bit right. The key word is “together”. We – the actual, genuine we – who are going to bear the brunt of these cuts must use the laws that we have to protect the rights that we need. Laws do not stand up for themselves. We need to make the system work for us. The tools for change are there. We need the knowledge to wield them and we must show solidarity with those who do.

Yes, I used the “s” word. It’s an old fashioned word but so are “honour” and “truth” and “love” and I like them all.

Solidarity is not a matter of altruism. Solidarity comes from the inability to tolerate the affront to our own integrity of passive or active collaboration in the oppression of others, and from the deep recognition of our most expansive self-interest. From the recognition that, like it or not, our liberation is bound up with that of every other being on the planet, and that politically, spiritually, in our heart of hearts we know anything else is unaffordable.
– Aurora Levins Morales, Medicine Stories (1998)

We must work together, and use whatever means are at our disposal to ensure that the laws that should protect us are enforced. Otherwise they are literally worth nothing. Just words and empty promises. Rather like a group of politicians I could mention. So yes, it’s absolutely time to pull together and muck in and all those other buzz words that seem to have echoes of the Blitz, trying to soft-soap us into accepting being short changed for some nebulous “greater good”. Don’t be fooled.

Challenge the cuts. Because we’re all in this together.