Women demand cities that value women

June 30, 2013 by Dan Moshenberg 4 Comments

In this season of mass protests and demonstrations, much of the news media has decided that this global phenomenon is an expression of `middle-class rage’. It’s not. The waves of mass protests are a creative response to the form of urbanization that now covers the globe. Remember, already more than half the world population lives in urban zones, and, according to the United Nations, soon more than half the world population will live in urban slums. This means the urban local is global. That’s the lesson that protesters, and in particular women protesters, are once again bringing to the streets and beyond.

The march of protests is a global urban uprising. Ask the women, and their colleagues and friends, who, through policy brutality, have become icons of the protest movements.

When Ceyda Sungur, Gezi Park’s `woman in the red dress’, was interviewed, after the police pepper sprayed her in the face, she deflected personal attention: “A lot of people no different from me were out protecting the park, defending their rights, defending democracy. They also got gassed.”

How does protecting a park equal defending rights equal defending democracy? On one hand, in the specifics of the moment, the equation is part of the pro-democracy rhetoric. On the other, more pertinent hand, Ceyda Sungur is an urban planner. When Sungur says, “For me this is about freedom of speech and the power of the people”, she means the struggle for the park, rights, democracy, freedom, power, is an urban struggle, a struggle against authoritarian, anti-human, anti-woman urban development.

Then there’s Liv Nicolsky Lagerblad de Oliveira. She lives in Rio. One night, she was standing alone on a street corner where there had been demonstrations earlier. Hours earlier, the riot police had forcefully removed all the protesters, but they were still hungry. They descended upon Oliveira, alone, late at night, just standing, and pepper sprayed her full in the face at close range. Yet again, the riot police created a new icon, yet again a woman.

And yet again the message, this time Oliveira’s, was urban: “The city is being gentrified. The poor can no longer afford to live in some favelas and the elite is taking their place. The cost of life is increasing and the increase in bus fare was just the last straw.”

Around the world, thanks to `urban development’, the working poor can’t afford to live in the slums. Women know this story, because they’re the central, disallowed subjects.

Repeatedly, protestors argue the City has become the epicenter of debt-and-death. Worldwide women are protesting the designed hostility of `the new Jerusalem’ to women and girls. Women, like Ellen Woodsworth, the founder of Women Transforming Cities, are organizing with women to address the complete and systemic lack of gender equity lens that marks city planning and governance. Urban public lighting, transportation, access to medical care, access to police, affordable housing, green common spaces, toilets, living wages, decent working conditions, violence, crime, peace, well being, inequality, equality are all particular to women and are all feminist issues. For example, in Japan, the environmental recycling movement had to rethink everything when women challenged the assumptions of their mandated unpaid, unrecognized, `informal’ labor … in the name of a green economy. The women in Japan said, “No gender equity, no peace.” The women in Istanbul, Ankara, Dhaka, Rio, São Paolo, Vancouver, Cape Town, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, and beyond, are saying so as well.

The last green space in Istanbul is an urban women’s issue, and a feminist crisis. The rise in public transport fares and the pricing of slums out of the reach of the working poor in Rio de Janeiro is an urban women’s issue, and a feminist crisis. Thais Gomes, Brazilian `shantytown dweller’, understands that. It’s not “middle class rage”. It’s urban.

Around the world, women are saying “Hell no!” to the “gift” of global hyper-urbanization and “Hell yes!” to cities that respect all living beings as valuable, to city administrators and planners who see value in the social, to those who value women as humans, neighbors, partners.

(Photo Credit: Bianet)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Brazil, Canada, Ceyda Sungur, Dan Moshenberg, Ellen Woodsworth, Gezi, Haunts, Liv Nicolsky Lagerblad de Oliveira, protests, Rio de Janeiro, Taksim, Thais Gomes, Turkey, Vancouver, Women Transforming Cities

For women workers, it’s time to change the song

June 9, 2013 by Dan Moshenberg 19 Comments

Reading the names of missing women

Across Turkey, women are at the forefront of the demonstrations. And not only women. Feminists: “At first groups of students chanted: `We are the soldiers of Ataturk’; this died out after feminist protesters objected to its militaristic overtones.”

From the first eruption through today, the Turkish movement has been a giant popular feminist education site, and one that includes sex workers: “`We used to sing ‘Erdogan is the son of a whore’. But when the police teargassed us, one of the brothels on Taksim Square opened its doors, and the women gave us shelter and treated us with lemons. We don’t sing that any more.’”

The solidarity of sex workers taught demonstrators that sex workers are workers, sisters, and women. Sex workers are not epithets or metaphors, and they are not criminals. They are part of the working mass, and they can represent themselves.

In the past week, sex worker organizations have taught exactly the same lesson to workers, social movements, and the State, around the world.

Across Canada this weekend, sex workers and supporters demonstrated, under the Red Umbrella, for legalization of sex work and for sex workers’ rights as workers, women, and women workers. This week, Canada’s Supreme Court will finally hear a challenge by Terri-Jean Bedford, Valerie Scott and Amy Lebovitch to the constitutionality of the laws concerning sex work.

Former and current sex workers have argued that criminalization makes sex workers more vulnerable, forces them further underground, further isolates them, and impedes access to public and social services. It’s a hard life, and the laws only make it harder, sometimes fatally so: “When Kerry Porth remembers her life as a sex worker in Vancouver, she can’t help but wonder how she survived when so many other prostitutes died a gruesome death at the hands of notorious serial killer Robert Pickton. `They were women just like me. Looking back, realizing just how much risk I was at, it was a real eye-opener.’”

In Kenya, sex workers in Laikipia District have organized a group called the Laikipia Peer Educators. They want formal recognition. They want the protection that formal recognition might provide, and they want the citizenship, the opportunity to participate and contribute to the common good in the same manner as every other worker. They want to trade in stigma for taxes.

In Australia, the Scarlet Alliance, representing Australian sex workers, lobbied to have foreign sex workers included among the skilled work visas. Sex work is legal across Australia, to varying degrees, but it’s not considered “skilled labor” by the State, at least not yet. Massage therapists, gardeners, florists, cooks, dog handlers, fashion designers, bed and breakfast operators, entertainers, dancers, recreation officers, makeup artists, jockeys, gymnastic coaches and horse riding instructors are considered skilled labor, but not sex work.

This is about work that is not called work, workers who are not called workers, and women who are told they cannot represent themselves. This concerns sex workers, as it concerns domestic workers in the United States. Both Hawaii and California seem to be on the verge of implementing or of passing respective Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. All workers are workers. Period.

Feminist political economists have argued for decades that women’s work is work, whether it’s waged or not, whether it’s called work or not. Women workers have known this and have organized for centuries for recognition, dignity, autonomy, rights and power.

From the social movements in Turkey to the courthouse in Canada to the District government in Kenya to the Australian Department of Immigration and Citizenship to the state houses across the United States, it’s time. It’s time to recognize women’s work, all work, as work, and to recognize all workers as workers. It’s time to change the song.

(Photo Credit: Rabble.ca / Murray Bush / Flux)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Australia, Canada, Dan Moshenberg, domestic workers, Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, Haunts, Kenya, sex workers, Turkey, women workers

Miss G Gets Gender Studies into Ontario’s High Schools

March 27, 2013 by Dan Moshenberg Leave a Comment

Starting in the Fall 2013, the Ontario high schools will start offering a gender studies course as part of its curriculum. This terrific news emerges from the work and play of something called The Miss G Project For Equity in Education, a grassroots feminist organization working to combat all forms of oppression in and through education organized by five fabulous feminist college students.

In some ways, The Miss G Project sits at the intersection of two stories.

The first story: It’s January 2005. Some students are sitting in a dorm room, at the University of Western Ontario, when they hear a story, one they recognize instantly as altogether too typical. There’s a high school party over a weekend. Something happens between a young woman and a young man, both students. Some kind of sexual violence is involved. Come Monday, the young woman is being “slut-shamed’ and the young man is getting props.

The university women students look at each other and decide to organize. They decide that the reason they know how to respond to this story is the information and the consciousness that they’ve encountered at university. They decide that the idea that that kind of information somehow must wait `until after the Revolution’, in this instance meaning after high school graduation and entrance to college, is worse than wrong. It’s pernicious, and a part of a general unwillingness to really address the capacity of educational spaces to intervene in oppressive structures and actions.

So, they decide to organize a campaign to get a Women’s and Gender Studies course into the Ontario high school curriculum. That was 2005. The women – Sarah Ghabrial, Sheetal Rawal, Dilani Mohan, Lara Shkordoff, and Laurel Mitchell – then set off to change the world … and succeeded.

The second story is the story of Miss G.

In 1873, Dr. Edward H. Clarke of Harvard Medical School wrote about “Miss G,” a top student “leading the male and female youth alike” at a time when women were just beginning to push the boundaries holding them from higher education. Miss G died. Clarke `explained’ her death: “And so Miss G died, not because she had mastered the wasps of Aristophanes and Mecanique Celeste, not because she had made the acquaintance of Kant and Kelliker, and ventured to explore the anatomy of flowers and the secrets of chemistry, but because, while pursuing these studies, while doing all this work, she steadily ignored her woman’s make. Believing that woman can do what man can, for she held that faith, she strove with noble but ignorant bravery to compass man’s intellectual attainment in a man’s way, and died in the effort.”

As the organizers at Miss G explain, “We stumbled across the mysterious Miss G in a Women’s Studies syllabus in 2005 and named the Project for this righteous intellectual whose real identity is `lost to history.’ By reclaiming her from the Dr. Clarkes of the world and repositioning Miss G as the feminist educational pioneer she was, through our own activism and education we aim to ensure that her story and the stories of others like her do not go unrecognized.”

So, they organized, and pushed, and organized, and formed new coalitions, and challenged everyone, and held garden parties for women Members of Parliament and held rallies and mobilized students and others across the Province. And now, eight years later, they have pushed open a door that involves far more than the Province of Ontario and that exceeds the borders of Canada.

If this project had involved only one high school, it would have been great. If it had involved only one province, it would have been terrific. If it had involved only one nation-State, only one country, it would have been stupendous. But it wouldn’t have been enough. Coming soon to a high school near you, courses in Women’s and Gender Studies, and courses in feminist action for social justice? Coming soon to a high school near you, respect for the capacity of high school students to make this a better world? Make it so.

(Image Credit: http://www.themissgproject.org)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Canada, Dan Moshenberg, Dilani Mohan, Gender Studies, Haunts, high school, Lara Shkordoff, Laurel Mitchell, Miss G Project, Ontario, Sarah Ghabrial, Sheetal Rawal, Women' Studies

Canada’s Highway, Prisons, Foster Homes, and Schools of Tears

February 19, 2013 by Dan Moshenberg 7 Comments

The Ashley Smith inquest continues. Ashley Smith was a 19-year-old woman prisoner who troubled the government of Canada too much with her constant acting out and suicide attempts, and so, finally, was allowed to commit suicide while seven guards stood and watched.

The guards, four women and three men, have now testified. They all say their hands were tied; they were only following orders. They’re very sorry, even anguished, for how Ashley Smith died. They know they failed her, they know the State failed her. They were misinformed. They were told Ashley’s problems were “behavioral not mental.” Behavioral not mental is code for in control of one’s actions. When the madwoman in the attic is a 19-year-old in solitary confinement, somehow she becomes `sane.’ The guards say they knew something was wrong, but the doctors had told them otherwise. It was a victory of military discipline over human and common sense.

Some ask, “How does an 18-year-old end up doing serious time in a federal prison for throwing crab apples at a postman?” Others wonder if Ashley Smith’s death was suicide or murder. Did Ashley Smith die or was she killed?

The Ashley Smith inquest continues, and Ashley Smith is still dead.

Here’s another question. Is Ashley Smith’s experience an isolated one? How does Canada treat its troublesome children? Three current reports suggest that the treatment of Ashley Smith is more common public policy than exceptional horror.

One study documents “ongoing police failures to protect indigenous women and girls” in Northern British Columbia. This “failure to protect” includes gang rape, torture, abduction, and a whole menu of violence. This “failure to protect” has contributed to the construction of what many call the Highway of Tears, as has the national government’s `failure’ to care about the lives of indigenous women and girls. That’s not failure. That’s refusal, and it’s an aggressive public policy, not an omission or lack of action.

A second study follows a 13-year-old Aboriginal child from cradle to cage. Taken from his parents at an early age, he was tossed from one foster home to another. Most of them were abusive environments. The one foster parent who actually cared and tried to take care of the boy couldn’t get help from the State, and so had to give the child up. When the boy turned eight, and was in a residential facility, the staff started disciplining him by calling in the police. And so began his life of being Tasered, followed by time in prison.

His story is a common one. In British Columbia, of children and youth `in care’ more enter into the juvenile criminal justice system than graduate from high school. One in six youth in care have been in youth custody. Close to one-third of the youth in the juvenile justice system is Aboriginal, which pretty much accords with the adult prisons. As above, so below. That’s equality in a prison State; that’s public policy.

An unpublished study reports that more than 3000 Aboriginal children died in Indian residential schools. Children died of disease, malnutrition, and accidents. Children froze to death. From the 1870s to the 1990s, 150,000 First Nations children were forced through the meat grinder of “civilizing” instruction, and at least 2% of them died in house. The names of 500 of the 3000 dead are still unknown. What is known is that in 1917, the Department of Indian Affairs stopped reporting the deaths and death rates of Aboriginal students in residential `care’: “It was obviously a policy not to report them.”

In each instance, from the 3000 Aboriginal children to the one Aboriginal child to hundreds of missing Aboriginal women and girls to Ashley Smith, the State responded with silence, followed by denial.

The Highway of Tears is not a road to nowhere. It leads to the Prisons of Tears, to the Foster Homes of Tears, to the Schools of Tears. Ashley Smith’s suffering is part of the brutal disposal of children in a world in which care is forced to surrender to the business of security as usual.

(Photo Credit: cbc.ca/highwayoftears.ca)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Aboriginal, Ashley Smith, Canada, Dan Moshenberg, Haunts, Highway of Tears, Native women, prison

Woman is the first environment

January 19, 2013 by Dan Moshenberg 1 Comment

Canada’s Globe and Mail asks, “What’s behind the explosion of native activism?” Their answer? “Young people.” As usual, the answer hides as much as it reveals.

The explosion of Native activism, organizing, and sheer presence across Canada, has been ignited and inspired by Chief Theresa Spence and by the four women founders of Idle No More — Jessica Gordon, Nina Wilson, Sylvia McAdam, Sheelah McLean. These five women are not behind the explosion. They are the explosion.

At the same time, the fire that continues is indeed made up of young Native people, specifically, young Native women. The Globe and Mail focus on Erica Lee, a former student of Sheelah McLean, and Tala Tootoosis, a Facebook friend of Nina Wilson’s, suggests as much.

Young Native women have always been organizing. One example would be Jessica Yee Danforth, who describes herself as a “multiracial Indigenous hip-hop feminist reproductive justice freedom fighter!” Founder and Executive Director of the Native Youth Sexual Health Network, Yee Danforth is also the editor of Feminism for Real: Deconstructing the academic industrial complex of feminism, and a maker, shaker, and movement builder.

In 2011, on her way to the UN Climate Change Conference COP 17, Yee commented, “Climate change, for us, is a central issue because it has to do with what’s going on in our lands and our territories. And the way that we think about climate change is very broad. …When things impact our land and our air, they simultaneously impact our people and what’s going on in our communities. And for us, we understand that if we’re going to be talking about environmental issues of any sort, that woman in fact is the first environment. …What climate change is doing is not allowing our women to have healthy pregnancies. It is creating situations where there’s more violence in our communities, because of industry, for example. …We’re talking about issues of genocide. We’re talking about issues of survival of our peoples. And I know that we’re going to have some uncomfortable conversations even with organizers in our own communities this week, who just want to see this as a land-only issue or as an air-only issue and not understand that women being the first environment or the simultaneous, intersecting effects are really critical.”

What does this have to do with the current explosion of `raw energy’? Everything. Women are the first environment. Native women, young Native women and Native women elders, have always known this. When Jess Housty, a young Heiltsuk woman Idle No More organizer, explains, “I believe it’s in the best interests of people who care about the environment to support this,” she is invoking woman as the first environment. When Innu elder Marie Louise Andre Mackenzie explains, “I will always protect my land and my language,” she too understands, and teaches, women as the first environment. The Native women who researched and gathered stories of the hundreds upon hundreds of Aboriginal women and girls “missing” across Canada, and buried and lost in Canadian national policy. When those Native women refused to let their sisters go, refused to treat them as less than nothing, they understood, and insisted, that woman is the first environment.

These Native feminisms and feminists continually engaged and continually write deeper maps as they deepen and broaden the world. Behind the explosion of Native activism lies centuries of Native women’s resistance and emancipatory organizing and mobilizing. Right now, daily, across Canada and beyond, Native women, and in particular young Native women, are lighting the flame and taking it forward. Woman is the first environment. Remember that.

(Photo Credit: Rabble)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Canada, Dan Moshenberg, Erica Lee, Haunts, Idle No More, Jess Housty, Jessica Yee Danforth, Marie Louise Andre Mackenzie, Native women, Tala Tootoosis

Ashley Smith haunts Canada’s total peace of mind

January 14, 2013 by Dan Moshenberg 8 Comments

For the second time, Canada is trying to investigate the death of Ashley Smith. The inquest starts today. The coroner leading the inquest says Smith’s death was a tragedy. The lawyer representing Smith’s family says it was a case of “absolute torturous circumstances.”

On October 19, 2007, 19-year-old Ashley Smith, an inmate at the Grand Valley Institution for Women, in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, tied a rope around her neck and choked herself to death. Seven guards watched and actively did nothing as all this transpired.

Some called her death inhumane, while others hoped her death would haunt Canada. Now, more than five years later, it’s unclear that even the Canadian prison system feels particularly haunted by Ashley Smith’s death.

What has been clear from the start is the State’s attempt to shut down the investigation. From the beginning to today, the State has fought tooth and nail to bury any evidence of the event.

What emerged early today was evidence that “the State cares.” In the early days after the release of `shocking’ and `damning’ videos that showed how Ashley Smith died, Don Head, Commissioner of Correctional Service Canada, wrote to the guards to express his concern for their well-being. Did he communicate with Ashley Smith’s family? No. Did he speak with the Press or, in any other way, with the public? No. But he did write to the guards, to make sure they weren’t traumatized … by the public attention to their practices, that is.

This is reminiscent of the European police inspector who, during the Algerian national liberation struggle, went to the psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon, for help. The inspector complained that his work, torturing Algerians, was negatively impacting his home life. Part of the problem, according to the inspector, was that torturing was exhausting. He wanted the doctor to help him: “As he had no intention of giving up his job as a torturer (this would make no sense since he would then have to resign) he asked me in plain language to help him torture Algerian patriots without having a guilty conscience, without any behavioral problems, and with a total peace of mind.”

“Are these men tortured by remorse? … The sick police agents were not tormented by their conscience. If they continue their professional practices outside their offices or their workshops—which happen to be torture rooms—it is because they are victims of overwork. “ They “manifest an exemplary loyalty to the system.”

Grand Valley Institution for Women is a prison for adult women. Weeks before being shunted into the adult prison system, Ashley Smith wrote in her journal, “If I die then I will never have to worry about upsetting my mom again.”

Ashley Smith rests in peace, and the system that killed her wants to get back to work, without having a guilty conscience, with a total peace of mind.

(Image Credit: The Toronto Star)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Ashley Smith, Canada, Dan Moshenberg, Frantz Fanon, Haunts, prison

In Canada, five women set the spark

December 24, 2012 by Dan Moshenberg 12 Comments

Thanks to five women, four of them First Nation women, who have had enough, winter in Canada suddenly turned very hot. Idle No More is sweeping the country with the heat of justice, democracy, emancipation, and peoples’ power. It’s a Native Peoples’ Northern Lights, and it could shine on all of us.

Five women have started a national movement with global reach. Chief Theresa Spence of the Attawapiskat First Nation is on the fourteenth day of a hunger strike. Her immediate demand is that the Prime Minister and the Queen meet face to face with her and other First Nation leaders to address the longstanding violations of treaties. First Nation peoples and communities have had enough of sitting on the sidelines of their own histories.

At the same time, Chief Spence has another, call it existential demand: life with dignity. Last year, Chief Spence drew international attention to the deplorable living conditions on her Northern Ontario reservation. Since then … nothing has improved. So, Chief Spence is saying that death-in-life, that survival without dignity, that being turned into something less than a shadow is unacceptable. And so she is on a hunger strike.

The hunger strike is as well part of a mass strike, initially organized by four women in Saskatchewan: Jessica Gordon, Nina Wilson, Sylvia McAdam, Sheelah McLean. The women were fed up with the intensifying assault against First Nation peoples by the Canadian government, not to mention the assaults by the State on Native women. The last straw was something called Bill C-45, a monster omnibus bill that threatens First Nations with loss of land, environment, life, agency and autonomy. To the four women, it seemed that Bill C-45, and the Canadian government and State, offered First Nations people, and everyone, loss and the promise of more and deeper loss as the only absolute value. And, of course, the State calls it democracy.

So they organized, and the organizing effort has spread like prairie fire. The lesson here is the lesson the women of Egypt, Sudan, Spain, Chile, have brought over the last couple years. It’s the lesson the women of the Indignados, Girifna, the Arab Spring, the Chilean Winter, Occupy, UK Uncut, and, behind them, of the Zapatistas and Ya Basta, and behind them …

The lesson is that hope is material. Hope must be maintained as a concrete, material part of all of our lives. When loss is offered instead of hope, when debt is offered instead of hope, when autocracy and kleptocracy are offered, in the name of democracy or security, instead of hope, it’s time to be idle no more. It’s time light the winter skies.

And that’s the star the five wise women of Canada and their sisters and brothers have taught us to follow this December. They are “opening the eyes of this land” and, hopefully, this world.

(Photo Credit: Idle No More)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: #IdleNoMore, Canada, Dan Moshenberg, First Nation women, Haunts, women

Domestics: For Children of Filipino Transnational Families, Classification as Control

December 19, 2012 by Amy Sun Leave a Comment

Geraldine Pratt’s recent work with Filipina domestic workers in Canada examines the narratives of ambitious mothers who travel overseas to take care of others’ children in order to provide for their own. Once their children are able to reunite with them in Canada, mothers cite issues of deskilling, where they “lose their skills during the years that they work as caregivers,” limiting them to caretaking jobs and unable to further develop their human capital. Furthermore, Pratt reports that these mothers usually spend an average of eight to twelve years engaged in domestic work overseas and separated from their families before reunification.

As a former educator, I taught in a rural high school in Hawaii, where we had a high Filipino student population whose parents and/or grandparents were immigrants. Many of my students’ family members had limited English speaking ability. When calling home, older sibling often translated my messages for me. We also saw low attendance for parent-teacher conferences. However, when mothers did attend these conferences, they shared their frustrations at being unable to help their children with schoolwork, emphasizing their hopes that their hard work would enable their children to gain “a better life.”

My experience with immigrant Filipino families as an educator prompted me to investigate the education for Filipino American students from transnational families. However, I must stress that Filipino students were also among my best students. It is important to remember that stereotyping all Filipino students according to ethnicity is more dangerous than excluding these narratives. We must look at all contributing factors, such as family education and class in host country, discrimination, and generation.

Despite popular depictions of Filipino migrants as working in highly skilled professions, the US continues to recruit domestic and home care workers. Among Filipino domestic and home care workers: 80% are women, the median age is 44, 60% hold US citizenship, the median annual income was $17,050 in 2005, 1/3 have at least a college-level degree and another 30% attended college without completion, and 3% have graduate and post-BA level degrees. Filipino women are disproportionately represented among domestic workers, and, contrary to prevailing views of Filipinos in the US, a majority of Filipino domestic workers are neither highly educated nor have much opportunity to leave domestic work to enter other skilled professions. The median annual income is just below the federal poverty line. With only 60% of domestic workers reporting citizenship status, some Filipino domestic workers lack access to most social services.

I wrote to Geraldine Pratt on the topic of classifying Filipinos and the use of “Asian/Pacific Islander.” Pratt responded:

“I think in Canada there is a tendency not to lump Filipino youths with other Asian-Canadian youths, because the migration of Filipinos to Canada has been so particular.”

For example, consider how the Canadian and the US census approach the question of race and ethnicity. The Canadian census uses an open-ended question, along with examples and guidelines, which requires respondents to write in their race/ethnicity. The US census requires respondents to check off one or more race/ethnicity box (where Filipinos would fall under “Asian”) and allows respondents to specify their subgroup. Since respondents are not required to specify their subgroup, the US Census Bureau is continuously working on better ways to track race/ethnicity. At the same time, Canadian research tends to give more attention to Filipino academic achievement while research focused on Filipino Americans generally still include Filipino Americans in the pan-ethnic group of “Asians.”

As Michel Foucault suggested, the classification of individuals drives governmental strategies of control. By inventing all-encompassing pan-ethnic terms, which represent group otherness rather than group needs, the counting of certain “kinds of people” informs state allocation of resources and penalties. The state’s power to name a people translates into a power over people’s daily lives. When I report my ethnicity, which box(es) am I allowed to check off, how is it packaged and interpreted in study results, and later, how does someone else’s interpretation of my identity continue to mold my everyday identity and life chances, and consequently, manipulate my identity further through defining my race/ethnicity?

In Pratt’s study, Filipino domestic workers are “sacrificed for the vitality of the Canadian population”, and Canadian families “prosper” while Filipino domestic workers labor and live under conditions “unacceptable to national citizens.” Following Foucault’s critique of the state, state racism and discrimination against certain “inferiorized races” serves a “murderous function” in order to regenerate the general population. In this way, the state “saves” by denying care to domestic workers and their families, but the state also “gains” when domestic workers provide privatized services, such as health care and child care, which the state normally provides its citizens. The state denies transnational domestic workers’ full citizenship rights in order to sustain citizenship rights for others without actually investing in those services.

Though there are issues with the education system and its reinforcement of capitalist ideals and hierarchies of power, a lack of support for Filipino students from transnational families could prove to be more detrimental. When we assume that all Filipino or all Asian students are successful and fail to recognize specific needs, we allow false assumptions to further deny students their rights. For Filipino children of transnational families, lower academic performance and higher dropout rates perpetuate their place among low-waged workers. Filipino Canadian youth struggle to exceed their parents’ educational levels and work almost exclusively in certain service professions. More academic support and guidance can help Filipino American youth from transnational backgrounds overcome these statistics and use education as a tool to achieve the social mobility which originally prompted their parents to become transnational domestic workers.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Amy Sun, Canada, domestic workers, Filipinas, Geraldine Pratt, Michel Foucault, United States

In criminalizing HIV transmission, the US and Canada lead a global war on women

December 3, 2012 by Dan Moshenberg 1 Comment

The United States leads the world in prosecuting people for HIV transmission and exposure. Canada comes in second. All but two of Mexico’s 30 states criminalize HIV-status nondisclosure. North America leads the way … in a global war on women.

Globally, women bear the brunt of the HIV pandemic. In the United States, that’s particularly true for women of color. In the US, HIV-positive women of color face extraordinarily high rates of morbidity and mortality. They also report high rates of intimate partner violence. This doubles the risk of death for HIV-positive women. The house is a war zone, and then the State jumps in and intensifies it … through laws that universally and without distinction criminalize `everyone’ for nondisclosure of their status.

Women in abusive, toxic relationships are supposed to `share’ with their partners? It’s that simple? Cicely Bolden shared with her partner. He killed her. He justified his murder by claiming the disclosure drove him mad.

In October, the Supreme Court of Canada handed down two decisions concerning so-called criminal transmission. The Court claimed its decisions were meant to clarify some vagueness in a 1998 decision, R. v. Cuerrier. In that decision, the Court said people living with HIV and AIDS had to disclose their status before engaging in sex. To not do so constituted `fraud’. The two recent cases, R. v. Mabior and R. v. D.C., dismally clarified the Court’s understanding of what’s at stake here: risk.

Here’s the story of the D.C. case:

A woman living with HIV, D.C., had a partner for four years. The partner claims the first time they had sex together, she had not disclosed her status to him. When she did reveal her status, he said it was fine. They stayed together for four years. At some point, he became abusive and violent. Finally, he was convicted for beating D.C. and her son. That’s when he accused her of not disclosing her HIV+ status. Although she claimed that they used a condom the first time they had sex, the trial judge did not believe her and found that their first sexual encounter was unprotected. D.C. was convicted of sexual assault and aggravated assault for not disclosing her HIV status to her partner. The partner is HIV negative, by the way. On appeal, the Quebec Court of Appeal overturned D.C.’s convictions on the basis that, even if no condom had been used for that first sexual encounter, her viral load was undetectable at the time. Based on her viral load, there was no “significant risk” of transmission. Non-disclosure, thus, was not a crime. That’s the case Supreme Court of Canada heard.

The Court decided against D.C. and, in so doing, declared that the risk of AIDS is so great that those living with AIDS must disclose, use condoms, and have low viral loads if they are to avoid criminal prosecution.

According to the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, with this decision “the Supreme Court of Canada made the law even harsher for PHAs: people must now disclose their status before having sexual relations that pose a `realistic possibility’ of HIV transmission. But in the Court’s view, a `realistic possibility’ encompasses almost any risk, no matter how small.”

For the Court, the risk of disclosure, especially for women, means less than nothing. In its decision, the Court further codified the absolute lack of value of a woman’s life. It ignored study after study and legal argument after legal argument, some local and others international, which demonstrate that criminalization of HIV-positive status does not impede the spread of AIDS. The Court ignored as well innumerable studies and legal arguments that clarify the impossible position HIV-positive women in dependent as well as abusive relationships face when forced to disclose.

None of that mattered. All that mattered was `risk aversion.’

You know what has actually spread over the last decade? Criminalization of HIV disclosure. And you know who has pushed that spread? The United States Agency for International Development, USAID, which first funded and then `encouraged’ nations to adopt a so-called Model HIV/AIDS Law. Over 60 countries now criminalize HIV transmission or exposure. These laws do not protect women. These laws attack women and do them harm. It’s an active front in a global war on women, lead by the United States and Canada.

(Image Credit: Positive Women)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Canada, criminal transmission, Dan Moshenberg, Haunts, HIV crimes, HIV/AIDS, prison, United States, women

Ashley Smith, who haunts the Correctional Service of Canada

November 9, 2012 by Dan Moshenberg 14 Comments

Ashley Smith and her guards

On October 19, 2007, 19-year-old Ashley Smith, a prisoner under suicide watch, killed herself. Seven guards watched and did nothing to stop her. They were under orders to let her go. Someone wanted to teach her a lesson, not to be `a nuisance’. And so, she died … or was killed by active neglect.

Now, five years later, perhaps, the Canadian government will finally conduct an inquest. The murder of Ashley Smith didn’t stop at her death. For five years, the Correctional Service of Canada has fought tooth and nail to bury any evidence of the event … other than the corpse of Ashley Smith, the pain of her family and friends, and the horror.

For five years, the Canadian prison system first denied the existence of the damning videos released, finally, just recently. They didn’t inform the parties in the inquiry of the existence of the tapes. Then, when the tapes could no longer be denied, the Correctional Service tried to keep the public from having access.

If Ashley Smith were the only young woman prisoner who was effectively tortured in prison, left to die slow death or `self-inflicted’ death in solitary, left to die while monitored in suicide watch, her death would indeed be a tragedy.

But Ashley Smith is not alone in her fate. Many prisoners, and especially women prisoners, living with mental health disabilities, find themselves deep in a system of abuse and exploitation. Many prisoners, and especially women prisoners, find their attempts at self-harm are not viewed as symptoms of a need to be treated but rather as bureaucratic inconveniences. Taking care of mentally ill prisoners `costs’ too much. Caring about the welfare of mentally ill prisoners costs way too much. Caring about the destiny and lives of young women … priceless.

There has been and will continue to be much condemnation, much finger pointing, all of it well deserved. But at the same, Ashley Smith’s death by proxy was precisely part of the `service’ the Correctional Service offers. Adjudicating those involved is important, getting the details of the story is important, too. Transforming the system and the nation and world that built it is necessary.

That won’t bring Ashley Smith back. That won’t mean she didn’t die in vain. But it could mean something for those who follow.

(The Globe and Mail)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Ashley Smith, Canada, Dan Moshenberg, Haunts, prison, prisoners with disabilities, women prisoners