The Federal Government’s War on Mothers & Children

It’s been quietly breaking my heart to have to face the realisation, once again, that the Gillard government hate women as much as the Liberal National Party do. Around the same time Prime Minister Julia Gillard was making the world famous Misogyny Speech, which brought a tear of joy to my eye, the Gillard government and Abbot’s opposition, united to pass the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Fair Incentives to Work) Bill 2012. They also timed it to coincide, more or less, with Anti Poverty Week. Cute. The bill, one of the most significant examples of claw-back policy to date, was passed in order to force single mothers from one social security payment to another lower payment once their youngest child turns 8 years – from Parenting Payment Single to Newstart, which is not actually a payment, but an unemployment allowance. It’s about $266.50 a week, maximum.

The use of the word “fair” in the new legislation is Orwellian. There is nothing fair about it. In a nut shell it means that single mothers who rely on the government to help them raise their families will now get less money. Quite a bit less. Reports of just how much less depend on the different circumstances of women’s social security arrangements.

Most women will lose their Health Care card because this supplement is not a part of the Newstart Allowance, which will result in poorer health for women and children. Variables such as having a child with a disability will be managed on a case by case basis and will depend a lot on who the woman happens to speak to on the day she makes an enquiry, what kind of mood they were in and how well they know the legislation. My personal and professional experience of Centrelink informs me that many Centrelink workers do not know their jobs very well at all. Quite often I had to inform them about my entitlements and requirements, and I am an able-bodied white woman who speaks fluent english. Many women will not have the social capital, language skills or self-advocacy skills to negotiate with Centrelink staff. Many will not push the point for fear of retribution or fear that the worker will report them to Community Services if they disclose domestic violence, for example. Most Centrelink workers wield power and privilege against women carelessly and insensitively.

Women will also lose the opportunity to study as a way of enhancing their income-earning capacity in the future as the Pensioner Education Supplement will now only be paid to women who were already studying when the legislation went live, and then only for the duration of the course they are currently undertaking. So too bad if your big picture plan was to complete a Tafe course or your HSC equivalent in order to be eligible for a university degree. Your capacity to engage in tertiary education while juggling child-raising, domestic labour and menial pink collar paid work outside the home, was just reduced even further. I have to wonder how this aspect of the legislation will impact on women who had already enrolled in courses for this year, but were technically not studying when the legislation went live.

Many women will, right now, be experiencing high levels of anxiety. Women who are already just scraping by because they thought they had their situation assessed and their strategies to keep their families out of poverty worked out. These women were told by the government that they could stay on the Parenting Payment until their youngest child turned 16 years. Now that the government has pulled the rug out from underneath them their long term plans have been smashed. Their chances of avoiding poor health, homelessness, and avoiding or escaping men’s violence have been greatly reduced. Social security payments for single mothers originally gave many women a degree of economic independence and enhanced capacity for self-determination, benefits which have now almost completely been eroded away by forces of economic rationalism and principles of workfarism, and have forced women into institutional dependency on the state. They have exchanged dependence on one male, private patriarchy, to dependence on the collective male, public patriarchy. This change to social security arrangements seems a bit at odds with the government’s previous statements about violence against women. “The great silent crime of our age” said Kevin Rudd when the government launched the National Plan to Reduce Violence Against Women. Violence which the same government also recognises as the “major driver of homelessness” in this country, as stated in the White Paper on homelessness.

It is also unclear just whether or not the issue of social security debt has been factored into this. Many women accrue Centrelink debt due to reporting requirements being so damned complicated, or because provision of information regarding reporting minor changes to circumstances is extremely unclear, even for able-bodied, english-speaking women. For example, will a woman’s debt repayments be reduced when she moves onto the Newstart Allowance? Many women do not even know the process for appealing a Centrelink debt, or just how easy it is, because the anxiety produced by Centrelink interactions is so great that women often only go there or pick up the phone (if they have one) when they absolutely have to.

It is also becoming apparent that many women have not been provided with adequate information about how the changes to the legislation will affect them or what they need to do. The Dept of Human Services website states that women whose youngest child has already turned 8 years will receive a phone call advising them of how to access payments after January 1, 2013. However, I know many women who did not receive a phone call, some because they have no access to a phone. Of the women who did receive one, many of them were not told clearly that the transition was not automatic. That is, that their Parenting Payment would suddenly be cut off after January 1, 2013, and that they would have to actually submit a new application for the Newstart Allowance. Remaining on a Centrelink payment is hard work at the best of times, and time-consuming. Women who are already over-extended through raising children, through the constant effort of just providing basic needs for children, and all the other unpaid work that women do, now have to negotiate an entirely new hurdle – right in the middle of the Christmas school holidays.

I do not buy the workfare rhetoric of “helping” women to move into paid employment. Most of these women are already doing paid employment along with everything else that they have to do to survive. The new arrangements will mean that the threshold for extra income will be lowered once women are on Newstart. So women who were on the Parenting Payment Single actually had more incentive to work outside the home than they will once they are on Newstart. On the Parenting Payment, a woman could earn up to $176 a fortnight, plus an extra $24 for each extra child she has, before her payment would be reduced by 40c in the dollar. Now she will only be able to earn $62 a fortnight, with apparently no consideration of how many children she has, before her payment will be reduced by 40c in the dollar. So like what the actual fuck, Gillard Government? Your statements about “helping” people into the workforce are lies. Filthy fucking lies. This so called “fair” legislation even seems at odds with the government’s stated economic aim of saving itself money. The costs will arise in other social service areas such as increased pressure on housing and health services.

British Social Worker, Lena Dominelli, has talked about the paradigm of the welfare state in relation to women (Feminist social work theory and practice, Palgrave, 2002). She talks about the ways Social Workers who are mostly women working to help other women, are just another sub-class of women who are dependent on the state for their income. Seeing as Social Workers get paid very little compared to people in male dominated professions, despite the requirement of a four year degree, and the great show made by the Gillard government of implementing the Equal Pay Case recommendations last month, it appears to this cynical radical feminist that divisions between women have been exploited once again. I wonder if the Equal Pay Case came at the expense of the women we seek to help. Overall it appears to be a very short term, but very vicious solution to the issue of the need to deliver a budget surplus in an election year – at the expense of women and children. What a surprise.

Edit: For people wanting more information about the changes I would suggest the Welfare Rights Network as a good starting point:

https://www.welfarerights.org.au/

Classism in education

Note: all of you scumbag males who found this post by searching for child porn, please drop off the face of the planet.

Background information for readers outside of australia: Schoolies is a traditional end of Year 12 holiday that many students participate in after final exams. It is not uncontroversial of course, despite the money that adults make off these young people, because society is scared of young people in large groups. Schoolies is a public reminder that lots of young people have temporarily escaped the shackles of the state – they have left the mechanism of social control we call school, but are not yet engaged in work or further study. Nobody is watching them!

This load of bigoted drivel from Chris Fotinopolous, a teacher, had my blood at boiling point. It’s difficult to say what Fotinopolous is actually getting at in this poorly researched, unsubstantiated little hate piece; is he annoyed at young people having part time jobs and therefore a degree of empowerment and the resources to participate in celebrations he considers the domain of the elites? Probably. Has he not connected the dots regarding the relationship between child abuse and social participation? Definitely. But there is also a subtle undertone of classism in this piece. Have a go at this:

No doubt, encouraging children to stay at school is enormously beneficial for the individual and society, but it also leads to some students continuing with school when they probably would have been better off leaving earlier and doing something else.

The point that’s often missed by social commentators is that the ugly side of schoolies is largely due to the behaviour of students who performed poorly in year 12. It’s the kind of student who repeatedly neglects homework and refuses to attend after-school detentions because they work up to five nights a week.

I suspect these underperforming and disengaged students are behind the interstate schoolies shenanigans that we see on news bulletins.

Right, the poorly-performing students. The young people marginalised by structural inequality, social isolation, and inadequate access to social and other resources. Because the children of the rich and powerful never do anything wrong.

Fotinopoulos forgets that it is the law that keeps young people at school until the age of 17, unless they have an apprenticeship or are going to TAFE, a policy enforced by the witholding of Centrelink payments. It is governments that want to keep young people under their watchful eye until they are of legal majority, whether it be through institutions such as educational, law and welfare systems, or informal social controls such as media-driven rhetoric of youth-gone-wild or family values. It is not the fault of young people that they are forced to remain in a system that has already failed them. Neither do we encourage poorly-performing young people with rich families to leave school before completing the HSC. In fact, the pressure to complete the Higher School Certificate is enormous for all high school students.

So why does Fotinopoulos consider poor and marginalised young people to be somehow immune to the HSC propaganda? What he seems to be saying is, that the wrong types are somehow coming through the school system with a certificate. And this is in conflict with the true purpose of school, which is either to transfer wealth and resources from generation to generation, or to keep the offspring of the masses under control long enough that they can be channelled into safe, social order-maintaining activities, whether that be to support the labour market, as cannon fodder, or to line the prison system. Fotinopoulos’ hand-wringing over safety issues appears to be a bit of concern trolling, often indulged in by the privileged classes in order to push the marginalised back in their place. It must be, because to state that it is poor, under-achieving young people who cause trouble at end of school celebrations, is a fucking dirty lie.

In her book, Right to be hostile: schools, prisons and the making of public enemies (2007), Erica Meiners, teacher and social justice advocate, describes what has come to be known as the “school to prison pipeline” or the “school push out”, a pattern of systemic exclusion of students from certain social groups, mostly black students. This exclusion derives from increasingly harsh behaviour policies directed at poorer, marginalised students, and tends to masquerade under the guise of “safety”.

This is exactly what Fotinopoulos is on about. This is not a safety issue; he’s not calling for a ban on Schoolies. He just wants a ban on certain young people from participating in a school-related activity that he and other teachers have no power to control. He also wants the poorer young people, and young people already most excluded and disadvantaged within the school system, to be squeezed out early. But how early?

Because this month we care about child abuse, we’ll all be aware of the increasing awareness and prevalence of it in society. So many men abuse children – who would have thought? The only people not surprised by this news are radical feminists (and some social workers), because we faced the awful truth long ago. But child abuse features highly in the collective public mind at the moment. As a teacher, Fotinopoulos would have some awareness of the prevalence too – he’s a fucking mandatory reporter. He would be aware that these poorly-performing students as he calls them, the disengaged, the ones labelled with “behavioural problems” are very often young people who as children, were abused, either emotionally, sexually or physically, and/or neglected. They are the young people who, as children, were the subject of child protection reports, were removed from their families, passed around the foster care system and who suffer from ongoing post traumatic stress disorder, learning disabilities, impaired social development, mental health issues and all the attendant problems in regulating their own behaviours.

NSW schools are suspending and expelling these children from kindergarten onwards, because they do not have the resources to include them (many of them do not have the compassion or insight either) and so these children quickly get tagged as the naughty ones and become scapegoats for entire school communities. Many of them move from school to school, either because of expulsion (often due to pressure from parents of higher socioeconomic backgrounds), or due to multiple foster care placements.

These are the young people that Fotinopoulos is whining about, and he would be well aware that these young people rarely have the resources to participate in schoolies. This is why I call bullshit. He doesn’t so much care about young people’s safety at schoolies – he just wants these young people out of school. This is a shameful attitude from a person who makes a living off children and young people. Not surprising that he did not enable comments on this piece, nor did he mention the name of the school he works for.

Drug law reform

A new drug law reform report has just been released and states a few truths that seem to get lost in mainstream drug policy debates. A copy of the report can be seen here.

Titled: “The prohibition of illicit drugs is killing and criminalising our children and we are letting it happen”, the report focuses on the social impact of drug laws rather than on drug use. As someone who has worked with drug “offenders” in the criminal justice system for several years, I welcome the report. It’s about time. I also think the authors have been really smart by framing the issue as being one about the safety and wellbeing of children. No doubt this was to counter all the screams of “family values” advocates who will claim that any move in the direction of de-criminalisation or legalisation will harm people’s kids as it will remove deterrents. Parents don’t want their children getting into drugs but I’m sure they equally don’t want their kids to be imprisoned and experience all the attendant trauma, social exclusion and health problems that go with a prison sentence.

This report is highly relevant to radical feminist struggle. Because, as I have written about before, women are suffering from the harsh criminal justice response to problematic drug use in the name of a so-called “war on drugs”.
As NSW drug court judge, Roger Dive , once stated: “When women go to gaol it’s different from men; men can just get on with the sentence but women have the worry of all their caring and familial responsibilities to deal with.” That quote, by the way, is from memory of a personal communication. There is more to it than that of course but if advocates of drug law reform want to go with the “family values” line, then it can be seen how the criminalisation of women drug users is devastating to families and children.

Like I said, there’s more to it, much more. Let’s remember, the increase in rates of incarceration for women has been around 60% over the last decade and a half or so, compared to 15% for men (Sawer et al 2009). Further to this, over 80% of women in the NSW prison system are there for drug/ drug-related offences. Having worked closely with this client group I can tell you that the majority of these women are from backgrounds steeped in social and economic disadvantage. It is rare for a criminalised woman not to have a horrendous history of experiencing the extremes of male violence. Poverty, violence and social exclusion lead to mental health issues and/or self-medication. As critical criminologist, Rob White, states “When people are socially excluded they will find their own ways to participate…” (2008). This is the source of most problematic drug use for women.

I make the distinction between problematic drug use and drug use, for a reason. Lots of people use drugs without ever ending up in the criminal justice system. The higher up the patriarchy you are, for example, the more white/middle class you are, the less chance you have of getting busted. Not only that but the higher your capacity to participate in society, the less likely you will be to allow your drug choices to take over your life. You have more to lose. I know people who run businesses, pay mortgages, hold down jobs, in other words, participate in normative socially-valued ways, but who enjoy their drugs on the weekend. The less isolated a person is the easier it is to keep drugs as an amusing pastime, which may or may not lead to health problems, but never spirals out of control and into offending behaviour, unemployment etc. Therefore, the tough on drugs response is disproportionately impacting on certain social groups, and particularly on women, indigenous and non-indigenous.

I can’t stress enough the role of men’s violence in all of this. Most people reading here will be familiar with the dynamics of domestic violence. Many women become trapped in domestic violence situations that involve a pattern of shared recreational drug-using. Male partners encourage women to join them in using and dealing, and women protect them of course. They risk carrying drugs, even into gaols, in order to appease violent partners. They risk stealing in order to fund a partner’s habit. I have known women who were pimped by abusive men, sometimes from a very young age, and intentionally introduced to drugs as a form of control.

The current harsh treatment of women with drug problems is doing very little except exacerbating all of the problems that have led to problematic drug use and criminal justice involvement in the first place. Going to gaol has an adverse effect on women’s health, decreases life expectancy, increases the risk of post-traumatic stress disorder depression and anxiety, increases the risk of further violence and smashes familial and kinship networks (Health of Australian Prisoners 2009).

Drug law reform is one step towards ameliorating the long term social consequences of the war on drugs; there needs to be more work done in the areas of affordable housing, education, employment, health and men’s violence – all the social determinants of offending behaviour, if we are to take an honest and holistic approach to this issue.

The ethics of Valentines Day: why you should boycott.

Charming slave bracelet courtesy of Dear Lover

When I was a very young girl of fifteen, working full time in the local bakery, I unexpectedly received a box of orchids from one of the male workers who had been preying on me. I was so excited. I asked my boss, a wise woman who had escaped a violent husband and moved to Sydney from the country to start over, what I might have done to deserve this honour. She looked cynical and replied “It’s more about what you’ll have to do”.

Valentines Day – it’s harmful on so many levels that I need to keep the focus of this post narrow lest I be sat here all day. National Pronging Day would be a better title for it. Dude, pressured by masculinist propaganda, forks out a shitload to persuade the unforunate woman he prongs or aspires to prong, that today of all days she must succumb to social pressure and offer up her body for his personal use. He’s paid good money for it after all. He’s made the purchase of the obligatory red thing and carried it proudly through the town as a demonstration of his capacity to buy access to the female human body and PIV. Straights like to call it romance or love. I see it as re-gilding the cage for her but as badly as we might feel for hetshackled women at this time of year, the practice serves as a public reminder to ALL women of the neverending reign of male domination. She is socially and culturally obligated to grant access to her body every other day of the year, after all. Today is more about reinforcing ideas of gender power relations in the public sphere than about individual expressions of affection between drone-like hetcouples.

As if all this isn’t bad enough, it gets much worse when we peek beyond quaint hetwestern sex rituals and examine all of the other ways that Valentines Day reifies global patriarchal structures. Basically, V Day wouldn’t have morphed into the current nauseating circus that it is now, without the cut flower, chocolate and lingerie industries and their reliance on slave labour of women and children.

This piece by Adeline Lambert makes a powerful case against V Day. The article focuses on the cut flower industry in the americas but things are not all rosy here in australia either. In australia we have industrial regulations and employment laws to protect workers to a degree, however during peak and high demand times such as V Day, the market is saturated with imports from the countries mentioned in the article linked to above. Local growers are annoyed about this, not because of any ethical concerns about child labour of course, but because it hurts their profits. So people who purchase flowers for Valentines Day are most probably helping to sustain child slave labour in other countries or at the very least, the labour exploitation of large numbers of women and children.

When we talk about “death by chocolate” we’re not usually talking about human trafficking and slave labour. In the west, chocolate is heterocentric code for het sex.

Found here.

According to National Geographic, in 2010 47% of consumers were expected to purchase candy for V Day, and 75% of those purchases were expected to be in the form of sexy chocolate, which, according to antislavery.org means that Valentines-related chocolate purchases are directly supporting child slavery and abuse.

Finally, the lingerie industry, mass producer of women (and children’s) subordination uniforms, also relies heavily on slave and exploited labour of children. Rarely do we hear about forced labour of vulnerable peoples (well, except when a woman-bashing opportunity arises), and certainly not at times when it might put a dampener on our hetcentric festivities.

So we can see that what appears on the surface to be a fun day of lerv and romance for western straight folks, is actually playing a very significant role in upholding oppressive social structures and institutions. You might be flattered by a bunch of cheap red roses, or cheesy red satin, but access to those items is facilitated by a vast global capitalist system of abuse, violence, misery, poverty and exploitation of many millions of people, mostly women and children. People who actively buy into the bullshit are cheerfully supporting this. Anything other than actively seeking to abolish V Day is to show tacit approval of this dirty rotten system.

Still feeling sexy?

Life in paradise. Death in custody.

Many of us who work in criminal justice reform have been waiting for the release of this documentary based on Chloe Hooper’s book about police brutality within the indigenous community of Palm Island.

You can find some tokenistic recognition here, on a thread that has remained mostly ignored. One commenter, however, points out that:

The femosphere has talked a lot about capital punishment recently, but there’s been less on the kind of ongoing racism inherent in the ‘justice’ system and how black deaths within it are much more than just the abolition of the death penalty can solve.

Emphasis is mine.

So… why don’t liberal feminists care about this shit? This seems to be the question the commenter is asking.

Allow me.

This raises the issue of white colonisation, white supremacy and white privilege. Issues which, despite what some ignorant racist feminists at IBTP think, is an ongoing process that continues to subjugate indigenous peoples in order to privilege non-indigenous peoples. The commenter I just quoted was the only person to respond to the thread linked to above. Apparently all the “Hoydenizens” are either ignoring it, or are out promoting another of the status quo-enforcing institutions of the white man, marriage, and therefore far too busy to bother with issues of colonisation and racism. Or they might just be caught up with discussing their husbands or their otters or whatever.

Since whites invaded this land, law enforcement agents have played a primary role in the colonisation process, in the massacres, in the genocide and then later in the implementation of public policy designed to further coloniser’s aims of total white domination. Policies such as enforced removal of children and restriction of movement of all native peoples.

This process continues today and while the role of law enforcement agents may have evolved, it is no less powerful, no less dangerous. Cops continue to perpetrate monstrous acts of violence against Aboriginal men, women and children, on the street, in police stations, and in police vehicles. When they are not engaged in the actual perpetration of these acts of violence, they are threatening to engage in them. Feminists will recognise this strategy. Just as the ever-present threat of male violence serves to keep women subjugated, so does the ever-present threat of white colonial violence impact on the lives of indigenous peoples.

Police are racist, sexist, domineering thugs; the hired goons of the ruling classes. Prison officers are racist, sexist, domineering thugs who didn’t make it into the police force. The police force is made up mostly of low class males who would otherwise have had little or no access to traditional white male power structures. Policing is how they embiggen themselves, how they participate in patriarchy. They grovel in the service of dominant white males to enforce the social order and protect the elites from the masses.

This is why you won’t see much challenging of police brutality coming from the liberal femosphere. Because liberals are white people who enjoy enhanced social privilege thanks to colonisation and white supremacy. The law enforcers are hired specifically to protect their interests which means they can’t afford to risk too much critical analysis of issues like deaths in custody or police corruption. Their privilege is bound up with maintaining the legitimacy of the criminal justice system, of law, of the police force. Because those institutions are all there to serve and protect us, right? Who cares if these institutions don’t serve everyone equally, or don’t protect everyone equally? They have to be blindly supported and maintained because the existing social order depends on it. Who cares if “Us” actually only applies to some people and not others?

This is why we see television saturated with the glorification of police who bravely put their lives on the line to protect “Us”. It’s why the fact that despite all these supposedly brave and courageous individuals who go out there every day to keep “Us” safe, we’re actually NOT safe as evidenced by statistics on sexual violence. It’s why we’ve recently had conversations about whether a cop’s life is worth more than your’s. It’s why politicians win elections based on “tough on crime” rhetoric. Because we all understand who “Us” is.

It’s why liberal feminists, whose interests are bound up with the males of the white, ruling classes, the colonisers, don’t say much about this issue.Their privilege hinges upon being associated with “Us”. After all, it’s really only indigenous people and poor white people who experience being verbally abused or harassed in public, threatened with a good bashing, or, as is the case with the young indigenous man in the documentary, murdered, by police. It’s not the middle classes who get targeted and arrested by police, then shoved into the back of a police wagon and driven around in such a way that they are flung all around the back of the wagon, and end up in court with bruises and broken bones. Or who get crash-tackled by police and have rough hands forced down their throats to the point where they start to vomit, in order to find a miniscule amount of some illegal substance that might get them thrown in gaol. It’s not the middle classes or their wives who are routinely humiliated and ordered to strip just so the dominant class can have a “legitimate” reason to lock them up. Because this is what cops do when they’re not busy throwing homeless people off the trains in wet weather.

“Us” refers to all the people who don’t live with this threat in their every day environment. It refers to all the people who actually benefit from this brutal enforcing of the social order, whose privilege is very much dependent on the myth that cops are tops. This is why Li won’t see any challenges of this form of social control in the libfemosphere. It’s not in their interests to challenge it or offer any kind of radical criticism, or any comment at all beyond “Oh how sad!” This force only exists to protect the rights of some people to subjugate other people, to profit out of other people, to exploit and dominate other people. To own property at other people’s expense. The rights of Humans vs Non-Humans.

It’s exactly the murderous brutality of cops like Chris Hurley that allows the privilege of liberals to exists. Why would they challenge it?? They can’t even name it!

Vilification of young women

As I pointed out on the previous thread, social security law in this country changes every couple of months, and never in women’s favour. In fact, given that social security payment recipients are mostly women, single women, single mothers, we can understand this constant tweaking of the law as effectively sexist and a strategy to keep women poor and disempowered. It is an enforcement of the social order, which, despite millennia of ‘empowerfulising’ sex work, has not seen women’s social status change much.

Welfare in this country has historically been about regulation of certain “problem populations” such as non-hetpartnered women, Aboriginal women, children and young people. It still is. Recently we have seen social security arrangements become increasingly punitive and controlling. This is exacerbating existing social problems for women and children, homelessness and domestic violence, for example. It also completely erases women’s non-economic contributions such as caring work, particularly parenting work.

This latest ‘reform’ announced by the Gillard Government seriously almost made my head explode. Teenage mothers, already high up there as society’s most despised pariahs, are now being constructed as a drain on the economy. Gillard wants to send those naughty little sluts back to school or cut off their payments. The argument is being framed as “for their own good” which also harks back to Australia’s original welfare model which saw young women being incarcerated simply for being sexually active – I shit you not I’ve written about in here. It has not even been two years since the Government made a national apology to the Forgotten Australians and now here we are reverting to the same moral judgements and prejudice that devastated the lives of so many young people.

As if young mothers are to blame for exploiting the economy. How about some policy measures to curtail the activities of white collar criminals? They are the ones who exploit the economy and destroy the environment. How about restricting the amount of land one person is allowed to own? How about telling the truth about middle class pigs and their bulging property investment portfolios?

Until something is done to address the appalling rates of sexual violence that men continue to perpetrate against women it is highly unfair to target women who have children outside of socially-sanctioned kinship arrangements. How about addressing pick-up culture? Or making abortion services more accessible? Or abolishing the fricking baby bonus? Five thousand dollars is fuck all to raise a child. Yet the Gillard Government continue this rort to coerce women into pregnancy. Then they blame them for needing state assistance to raise their children. The O’Farrell Government has refused to support the Australian Services Union’s equal pay case for women. If women are to be raped, coerced, cajoled and guilted into pregnancy, and the pay gap continues to be unaddressed, then how can the government back away from financially supporting single mothers?

I agree, that education is important for women to increase social and economic participation, but imposing top-down measures such as this is not the way to go. If women were not so poor, if they have stable, affordable accommodation and adequate social supports to make the parenting role less-disadvantageous to them, then they would be free to become self-determining, fully-participating individuals.

I also don’t hear the government talking about increasing social services, or introducing free child-care in high schools or anything at all like that. Who will care for these babies while their parents are studying? This whole idea stinks of age discrimination. The parent-child bond is not considered as legitimate because the parent is young. No thought has been put into the the possibility of disrupting the bonding process, not to mention breast-feeding. Forcing punitive policy changes will do nothing for these women but allow social vilification of them to continue. It will also ensure that young mothers are vulnerable to abuse by male relatives if their income is suddenly cut off as they will be forced into relying on financial support from them.

Incarceration: a radical feminist issue

In australia, rates of incarceration for women have risen by about 60% over the last few years. Rates of incarceration for men have risen by 15%. Given the relationship between poverty, or economic hardship, and imprisonment, the fact that 70% of the world’s poor people are women, and the growing gap between the Haves and the Have-nots, this figure makes sense.

Most women (80%) go to gaol (jail, to my american readers) because they have a drug habit; many are now going to gaol for welfare ‘fraud’ if you can call it that. Generally, women go to gaol because they are women. Because they are impoverished; because they have long histories of experiencing male violence and abuse; because their capacity to function in society has been severely fucked up by patriarchy.

The actual experience of incarceration causes severe trauma for women who have already experienced more than the usual share of patriarchy-related trauma. Norwegian critical criminologist, Nils Christie, once compared women’s incarceration to a domestic violence situation. This analysis is right on the money. Women in gaol are under the control of, and at the mercy of, powerful men, and this living arrangement exists behind closed doors, away from public scrutiny.

Further to this, women in australian gaols are constantly strip-searched. This can involve prison officers, mostly men, manually penetrating women’s vaginas and anuses. Women are not just strip-searched on arrival to a correctional centre, but each and every time they need to leave, for say, court attendance or a tranferral to another gaol. They are also strip-searched after every visitor, even after visits from children. This is a form of institutional sexual assault which has absolutely no evidenced-based justification, and is perpetrated against women who typically already have histories of experiencing male sexual violence. Not only this, but Corrective Services NSW state a committment to the principles of rehabilitation and reduction of recidivism. One highly recognised recidivism-reducing factor is the maintenance of familial connections. How better to deter the maintenance of familial connections than to strip search prisoners after each visit?

When women go to gaol, their experience is different to the male experience of incarceration. This is not only to do with the institutionalised sexual assault (which is also perpetrated against men in prison, but men just don’t have that same experience of sexual assault in the community that women have; so they are not being re-traumatised). The difference is to do with gender roles. We know that women carry out the bulk of the world’s caring work (see my post on the gendered division of labour), so when women go to gaol, they have usually had several caring roles disrupted. Unlike men, who can just go to gaol, do the time and not worry about anyone else but number one.

Aboriginal women particularly, have caring responsibilities that are heavily impacted upon by a period of incarceration. Further, women’s gaols are few, and most are far from the CBD. Women are far more likely than men to serve their time well out of reach of family and supportive significant others. As well as that, women’s gaols are just way inferior to men’s. Men’s gaols have better services and facilities, better programs, better food even. Women in gaol are fed high-processed shit. Men in gaol have better access to fresh food.

Women in gaol are trying to do more, with less resources. They are trying to keep families together, deal with the constant threat/practice of sexual assault, negotiate the fear of male power and deal with health issues.

When they leave gaol, they have nowhere to live, which sets them right back on the path that led them to gaol in the first place.

Renters

This post has been fermenting for about twenty years.

Private property ownership in this country is so heavily promoted as a sociocultural norm, that people who do not own land, who have to pay unregulated, exhorbitant fees to government-protected investors in order to have shelter, are considered to be some kind of repugnant sub-species. Popular discourse positions greedy landlords as victims and the people who are at their rental mercy, as perpetrators, trespassers on some kind of perceived human right to profit out of other people.

I can recall feeling alienated by the assertion of John Hewson in the early 90s that renters were the people who neglected their living space. It made me feel like there must be something wrong with me. Thankfully, I can now identify that type of propaganda for what it is, classist othering speech. I used to work as a domestic cleaner, and I can testify that rich landowners can often be filthy, lazy and neglectful of their living spaces.

The othering goes on; it is practiced by landlords, real estate pigs, journalists, tradespersons and body corporate stooges. Interactions between tenants and these representatives of the ruling classes are under-pinned by the assumption that the tenant is stupid, lazy and destructive. When a tenant contacts a real estate pig to make a repair notification the first thing the real estate pig says is “What did you do to it?” It doesn’t matter if the repair is a routine replacement of a twenty year old appliance/fixture, the assumption is always that the tenant has broken it, the tenant is at fault. Very young real estate pigs quickly learn how to harness their associated class power in their interactions with tenants. In interactions with them the assumption is always that the tenant is a complete idiot who does not have even basic living skills. When a tradesperson is commissioned to work on a rental property their expectation of the tenant is that the tenant will be available at any time; the tenant’s job, study, caring responsibilities etc. do not matter. The tradesperson might even negotiate to have the real estate pig give them access to the property at their convenience, because people who do not own land apparently have no sense of privacy, no sense of home. Their living space can be invaded any time and they won’t care, because tenants are not really human or anything. They’re just a mechanism by which middle/upper middle class fuckwits can profit through the exploitation of people’s need for shelter.

Male-identified women and collusion with white male supremacy

One of my projects right now is policy development at a women’s service. The workers at this particular service are all white, het, married and middle class. This is a major pain in the arse when I’m trying to have conversations around service delivery to a client group who are mostly Aboriginal and poor. Today I sat in a meeting with these workers and one of them tried to pull the old “but women can be just as violent as men” shit on me. As I said, this is a women’s service and the client group have long histories of experiencing male violence in all it’s many forms. Needless to say I had a brain explosion.

This is an example of the way in which the more privileged women, domesticated females as Dworkin would say, participate in the continued oppression of other less privileged women. All of the women at this meeting are attached to Nigels and I understand this attachment as a barrier to their being able to acknowledge the heinousness of men in general. I saw their faces cloud over when I pointed out that statistically it is men who commit certain acts of violence. Their thoughts all went immediately to their obligations to defend their own Nigel. Their continued privilege hinges upon this unspoken agreement to turn a blind eye to the heinousness of men as a class.

I recently made a post about the heinousness of men, and I was quite shocked to realise the extent of this agreement, when two male-identified feminists of the internets tried to post comments which actually attempted to minimise male violence. When I think back, it has only ever been white, male-identified women who have objected to my posts. Those women tend to use a certain tone of condescension with me because their nigel privilege has inflated their sense of superiority. When I called one of these women on her abuse of privilege, nigel and middle class privilege, she informed me that privilege does not mean she is wrong and that I am not right because I “perceive” someone as having more privilege than I do, thereby exhibiting the very same privilege that she is trying to minimise. Apparently, privilege is just some kind of subjective perception, rather than actual social, political and economic advantage over others which makes a person feel qualified to stand over and silence less privileged people from challenging the structures and norms which keep them down. Another nigel addict tried to pull the same shit when I posted about teachers abusing children. Why? Because her precious nigel is a teacher. When I called her on using her privilege as a weapon to bludgeon other’s into silence she suddenly cried victim. She accused me of inducing her into a panic attack and ran away like a snivelling brat rather than stay and examine her own oppressive behaviours. After she had invaded my space to specifically oppress me with her nigel privilege and talk down to me like I’m some kind of lesser being.

These women hang out together online, in spaces that they kid themselves are somehow progressive, where they do nothing but chat about their middle class property ownership and their glorified nigels and their PhDs and their amazing whiteness and their amazingly white children. Spaces which they actively police against invasion from alternative or marginalised voices.

Do these women think we don’t see them for the white male supremacists that they are? I mean, many of them get the concept of male privilege and can discuss in detail when it is wielded against them. So one would think that it should only be a short step to understanding that non male-identified women can easily see when nigel addicts are doing the same thing to them. For them to keep denying this is just an example of disgusting white het privilege.

lolcats – yet another vehicle for promoting the social hierarchy

This fascination that the white middle classes have with humanising animals and constructing their behaviour through a narrow humancentric lens, ranges from piteously cheesy to downright offensive. The intent is usually just to amuse other white middle class humans, but at times I observe the way in which lolcat culture reproduces dominant social values such as heteronormative coupledom. Being me, I also observe other stuff.

The most recent “hilarious lolcat” post at Hoyden is a demonstration of the downright offensiveness. The theme “A life of crime” sustains the view of crime as represented in popular culture, something that makes for entertaining reading/viewing for the middle classes. For these people, the issue of crime and crime control, is something that exists only within cool tv shows. It’s risque and exciting and distracts people from otherwise mundane existences. This is an example of a kind of exoticification of the poverty classes often seen in old school cartoons with images of ‘criminals’ wearing stripes and chain balls, and displaying the classic sloping forehead of Lombroso’s biological determinism. Such images manage to condition entire generations into supporting government “tough on crime” mantras and other dog whistles regarding keeping the lower classes under control.

They also enable governments to construct certain groups as “criminal” such as Indigenous people, homeless people and people with mental illness. These constructions then serve to enable discriminatory policies. After all, it is the people in power who get to decide who is “criminal” and who is not. As I have stated previously, the vast majority of people caught up the criminal justice system pose no threat to community safety.

Given the known over-representation of Indigenous peoples and poverty-class peoples in the criminal justice system in Australia, I find it quite appalling that feminists would consider it ok to make use of such white-constructed representations of crime and criminality for the purpose of amusing white middle-class folks.

The construction of racoons hiding from cops, was, in my opinion, a particularly offensive component, given the long history of Aboriginal people experiencing law enforcement as an apparatus of oppression and control.