THEMATCHGIRL& THESUFFRAGETTE
Louise Harrison International Women’s Day provides us with an opportunity to celebrate the achievements of women, but it is also an opportunity to highlight that women still have a long way to go to achieve equality. Staggeringly, in the 1990s, the United Nations calculated that women owned 1% of the world’s wealth. In the UK, the latest figures from the Trade Union Congress reveal that women are at least 15% behind men’s wages. More worrying still, Child Poverty Action Group estimate that of £26 billion of cuts made to benefits, £22 billion have come from women. This helps us to understand why one in every four children live in poverty, and explains why it’s so difficult for women to engage equally within society at every level.
terms of disclosures, prosecutions and convictions. Instead, we have a trickle of private disclosures that poorlyfunded specialist and statutory services nationwide struggle to manage, whilst news items repeatedly tell us of the murder of wives and girlfriends, often at the same time as other family members, as if each domestic homicide is a one-off, unconnected and inexplicable event. This is so obviously not the case and for many decades UK statistics have proved this, as every week two women die at the hands of an intimate partner and three women commit suicide as a result of living with domestic abuse. One child a week also dies at the hands of someone they know.
Women’s inequality is a huge issue of our time, but on International Women’s Day there is an equally pressing issue facing women and children that I believe does not receive the necessary media coverage - domestic abuse.
For any adult who experiences DV, it may take them up to seven years to leave an abusive relationship and it can take many more for them to overcome the impact of it. For young people, for young women who are disproportionately affected by this crime, the physical and mental effects can be devastating.
In this era of austerity, two things are certain. Women’s life chances will be worsened and this in turn will have a detrimental impact for decades to come. It will impact on women’s health, welfare, educational and other social areas of their lives. Make no mistake about it women and children will find it much harder to live with, leave and survive domestic abuse.
The national trend is borne out in Doncaster. Over the last few years, the
As we celebrate International Women’s Day, Doncaster should take inspiration
Formally known as domestic violence (DV), it is still the case that for many survivors, workers and campaigners, we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg in
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Photography: “Domina Berchta Mother Archetype” Christiane Pedros ©2009
number of calls to the police in Doncaster disclosing incidents of domestic violence has risen from 12 to 18 a day, and this may be even higher going into 2015. Even though this figure is alarming, it hides the frightening fact that it takes at least 35 incidents of abuse before a woman will call the police or disclose to an outside agency that abuse is taking place. Like elsewhere, in our own town it appears that young women are now at most risk of being in an abusive relationship which at its most stark can encompass violent, emotional, pshychological, sexual and financial abuse.