A response to recent stories in the press...

‘A woman’s work is never done’ is a truism that we’re all too familiar with and it seems frustratingly true at present. Although women have been fighting tirelessly to overcome both exploitative treatment within society and oppressive stereotypes of themselves our work is still far from done. A few stories that have been making headlines of late demonstrate this all too well.

John Hutton’s recent speech on child poverty, examining the employment rate among lone parents in the UK and praising the Swedish model in which there is ‘little distinction between lone parents and other benefit recipients in terms of the obligation to look for work’, suggests a shift in welfare provision that will coerce lone parents back into work rather than letting them make the right choice for themselves and their families. His conviction that we ‘ask very little of lone parents on benefit’ ignores the hard work they do for their families and hard choices they face in balancing their caring responsibilities with a working life. Although he’s good enough to concede that ‘lone parenthood is rarely a lifestyle choice’, Hutton doesn’t stop to consider the lifestyle that you have as a single parent or the choices that you have in real terms with regard to childcare and employment.

In both areas, New Labour policies have left a lot of work undone. While the government has invested in childcare, it has failed to invest to levels comparable with that of Sweden and other European nations. A recent Daycare Trust survey demonstrated that typical childcare costs have increased to over a third of average earnings and, while European parents pay around thirty percent of such costs, British parents still find themselves paying around seventy percent of childcare costs. Add to this the realities of working life in Britain. The phrase ‘lone parents’ should not be taken as synonymous with ‘single mothers’, but still ninety percent of lone parents are women and women’s work continues to be undervalued and concentrated in low paid areas of the employment market. Although New Labour are proud to have delivered a National Minimum Wage, they are yet to deliver a Living Wage.

A recent report on the failure of the criminal justice system to convict rapists further demonstrated that we have a lot of work to do, in this case to secure women their most basic right to live without the threat of sexual violence. While somewhere between seventy and ninety percent of rapes remain unreported and only five percent of recorded cases lead to a conviction, Labour’s Lord Campbell-Savours is busy calling for the DNA of all victims of crime to be kept on record so that the police can identify women who make false claims. Although this call was firmly rejected by the attorney general, it demonstrates the sexist and prejudiced views that circulate in our society, too often unchallenged. The most recent research shows that false rape allegations are no higher than in any other crime, and stand at around 3%. However, police officers questioned in the same report assumed 23% were false. Still women must fight against the assumptions that if you were drunk you were asking for it or you can only really be raped by a perverted stranger waiting for you behind the bushes. They are stereotypes that women have shown time and time again to be only stereotypes but they still lurk in the minds of many within our society, the minds of people who will be police officers, jurors, prosecutors, judges, politicians even. That’s why our work isn’t yet done.

Claire Chalmers