Identities

Almost nine years after signing the Istanbul Convention (IC), the United Kingdom has yet to ratify it. Turkey’s recent withdrawal from the IC makes now the perfect time for the UK to send an important message. The legal protection of women and girls is essential, and could catalyse a shift in our society’s towards a better understanding of how they should be able to enjoy public spaces.

Identified as the most common form of gender-based violence within the UK, public sexual harassment (PSH) lacks any specific legislation to tackle it. PSH can be anything from unwelcome and unwanted attention, sexual advances and intimidating behaviour that occurs in public spaces, happening both in-person and online. Not all experiences of PSH are the same and, as an intersectional issue, different identity categories influence an individual’s experience.

Despite several countries – including France, Peru and Chile – implementing legislation to tackle PSH, the UK still refuses either to ratify the IC or to enforce a dedicated legal framework to tackle violence against women and girls (VAWG). Given the recent tragic death of Sarah Everard, coupled with the findings by UN Women UK that 97% of women aged between 18-24 have experienced sexual harassment and 80% of women of all ages have experienced PSH, the need for ratification and additional legislation is blatant.

Beyond just the UK, a 2014 survey by the European Union (EU) Fundamental Rights Agency revealed that sexual harassment was the most prevalent form of violence against women across the EU. As a result, countries such as France and Portugal have implemented legislative measures. In 2018, France introduced a law allowing on-the-spot fines of up to €750. Within the first eight months, 447 fines had been handed out for street harassment. Backed by 90% of the French public, these laws provide the building blocks to form better protection for women and girls across France.

British law must go further still. As 97% of young women have experiences of sexual harassment, it is unlikely that the perpetrators of these incidents would have been caught committing the offence by police if a similar law had been in place. Instead, legislation similar to that in Chile (where Fair Planet report that 85% of women had experienced harassment prior to legislation) could prove more beneficial at protecting women, girls, and marginalised genders as laws carry financial penalties as well as possible jail time for those found guilty. Yet still, the UK is in a unique position regarding VAWG.

In 2016, former Prime Minister and then Home Secretary Theresa May said in her department’s Ending Violence Against Women Strategy that “no woman should live in fear of violence, and every girl should grow up knowing she is safe, so that she can have the best start in life”. The Government argued that their strengthened legislative framework was underpinned by work to change the attitudes to prevent offences and improve police response. Yet five years later, particularly following the harrowing death of Sarah Everard, thousands of women across the UK are sharing their countless stories of PSH online. The lack of legislation, alongside the normalisation of harassment in UK culture and communities, has deterred women from reporting these offences.

All of these statistics present the fundamental need for legislation against PSH. This is crucial to prevent an environment and culture that disregards historically vulnerable and oppressed groups of people, diminishes their sense of self-worth, and denies equal access to public space.

The UK government must do more. It must protect and prepare its citizens by ratifying the Istanbul Convention and introduce a new bill. Turkey’s departure should not be viewed as an excuse for the UK to ignore their failings. Instead the UK should use this as a platform to steer and encourage other global powers into signing, ratifying and ensuring that their country enshrines the safety and legal protection that women and girls so desperately need.

Kendal Sefton is Researcher, Public Affairs and Partnerships Officer at Our Streets Now.

Although swathes of the British Empire collapsed in the late 20th century, following independence movements, attitudes from this colonial era still persist. The UK’s rhetoric is characterised by liberal acceptance of sexual minority identities, juxtaposing it with the supposedly contrary ‘global South’. Such discourses are oblivious to ongoing homophobia and transphobia in the UK, however, and ignore the fact that homophobic laws elsewhere predominantly originate from British colonial rule.

Discourses which romanticise the Western world as wholly accommodating to LGBT individuals ignore the fact that the many national laws which criminalise homosexuality remain in place from the British Empire. Colonial rule was often particularly destructive for indigenous people who were not heterosexual or who did not adhere to gender norms. In Nigeria, prior to colonisation, there was not a clear gender binary. The Hijra in India, sometimes known as the third gender, were seen as sacred. Despite this cultural significance, the British criminalised them in 1871.

These examples illustrate how the Empire enforced heterosexuality as the default, and solely acceptable, way of engaging in sexual or romantic relations. The imposition of such Victorian cultural attitudes has left many post-colonial states with deeply embedded homophobia and a legacy of heteronormativity, despite the formal end of the Empire decades ago. This is felt strongly in both cultural attitudes and through the lack of legislative protection.

A 2008 report from Human Rights Watch found that the criminalisation of homosexuality among adult men in more than half of the countries with those laws today, emerges from lingering colonial-era legislation. Eleven countries can still enact the death penalty for same-sex activity; Britain exercised significant power over domestic policy in nine of these countries, with all but one being formal protectorates. Slowly, it seems some laws are being abolished. In 2019, the Indian Supreme Court repealed a clause criminalising homosexuality from the Indian Penal Code, originally implemented by the British Raj in 1860.

Although vaguely addressed by Theresa May in her 2018 speech during the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, governments still fail to take genuine responsibility for the detriment that their legacy has caused for the lived experiences of sexual minorities in post-colonial states.

Turning back to the contemporary UK, it was only since December 2020 that all gay and bisexual men have been able to donate blood, following a modification to donor rules. Such change triggers discussion around just how accepted, and legally protected, sexual minorities really are in Britain. This alteration, which the Government called a “landmark change”, is just one reason why it is not productive for Britain, or the West more generally, to be seen as the ideal framework for the acceptance and integration of sexual minority identities.

Cultural constructions of sexuality are shaped by both implicit attitudes, as well as the actions of those in power and the codification of rights. In the UK, symbols of LGBT activism are commonplace, including pride demonstrations and marches. From these gestures, one might conclude that Britain is truly accepting of diverse sexual and gender identities. But such rhetoric remains centred around ‘tolerance’, rather than ‘acceptance’.

In Angels of America, playwright Tony Kushner highlights that tolerance is not enough, because “underneath is intense, passionate hatred”. These attitudes materialise in daily life, particularly through the stigmatisation of sexual minorities, and the ongoing mainstream use of derogatory slurs. These displays of homophobia translate into real life violence, with hate crimes against sexual minorities in the UK tripling in the last five years, as reported by the BBC in 2020.

This implicit, and explicit, demonisation of non-straight individuals embodies the extent to which heteronormativity remains the hegemonic discourse in the UK, just as the British once imposed elsewhere. This should be dealt with, as stigmatisation and abuse has real, internalised effects on the health and wellbeing of LGBT persons, evidenced in a landmark research paper by Mink et al. in 2014.

Domestically, the Government should promote strong rights and encourage a more inclusive rhetoric surrounding sexual minorities in the media. The UK must also deconstruct its outlook of superiority over countries in the ‘global South’, and admit there is significant work to be done within Britain to improve the lives and protection of LGBT individuals. This requires a fundamental switch in how we conceive of sexual minorities: they are not something to be ‘tolerated’, but rather, real people who deserve to be celebrated and admired for their diversity.

April Whitworth is reading Anthropology at the University of Bristol.

The full consequences of COVID-19 are unknown, but there are several critical factors which will accentuate its impact on girls’ education.

The consequences of COVID-19 are countless. Many of them we do not know about yet, and will only become apparent in the coming years. Nevertheless, it is clear that the pandemic has already had a dramatic impact on schooling and that students will experience it differently based on their gender. There are several critical factors which will accentuate the impact of COVID-19 on girls’ education around the world, and recovery initiatives will need to consider these gendered experiences if they are to succeed.

In the current health crisis, education is being undertaken through laptops, tablets, and smartphones outside of the classroom. However, few are discussing how these changes will exacerbate the gender digital divide. This divide, which long proceeded the spread of coronavirus, is where women and girls have less access to technology and the internet than men and boys. For instance, a recent study by the International Telecommunications Union found that the share of women worldwide using the internet is 12% lower than the share of men using the internet, and this rises to 25% in Africa. The same problem is seen with mobile phone ownership. In South Asia, for instance, women are 23% less likely than men to have their own mobile, according to the Global System for Mobile Communications Association (GSMA).

With this in mind, what happens when you impose remote studying to students across the world? It is a real possibility that many girls may never recover the time and education that they would have gained if they were able to physically go to school. Indeed, our relationship with technology will never be the same as it was before the pandemic. The way we work, shop, exercise, travel, and entertain ourselves has been revolutionised, and the majority of these changes will remain in place long after we have overcome the challenge of COVID-19. Alongside the advantages of this transformation, the hard truth is that our economies and societies will leave behind those without access to digital technologies and the skills to use them, and many of these will be women and girls.

Beyond the digital skills gap, women and girls face an additional barrier impeding their access to education. Prior to the present pandemic, research from UN Women found that women across the globe were already doing three times as much unpaid care and domestic work as men. In forcing people into their homes, coronavirus has increased this gender skew, with women taking on the bulk of the housework and care responsibilities (often combining this with their newly-remote job). Data collected by IpsosMORI in May suggests that women around the world are more likely than men to find that their care responsibilities have increased during the pandemic.

UNICEF has shown that this inequality starts from an early age, with girls between the ages of five and 14 spending 40% more time on unpaid household chores than boys of the same age. Combined, that represents 160m hours per day of time which could be spent elsewhere, including studying. What does this mean for girls who were previously going to school, and are now required to pursue their education from home? It likely translates into them having less time to focus on their schooling than previously, because their support is required on domestic tasks and care duties instead.

Furthermore, these girls might be prevented from going back to school once the pandemic is over, particularly if they need to take on new domestic tasks and care responsibilities as a result of illness or death in the family caused by COVID-19. The Malala Fund estimates that an additional 20m secondary school aged girls could be permanently out of school once this pandemic has passed. Again, this would effectively result in a generation of girls being prevented from reaching their full potential in school, with the plethora of consequences this has on the social and economic opportunities available to them later in life.

Our recovery from COVID-19 will take decades, but it is important that we think about these issues now and take the necessary steps to ensure that women and girls around the world are not disproportionately affected by the pandemic’s impact on school closures. So much effort has gone into getting girls into school to begin with that we simply cannot afford such a monumental setback.

Maëlys Bablon is a research analyst working on gender equality.

Finding the proper word to describe the diverse minority groups within Britain is about more than just semantics; it becomes an issue of finding a single word that is both accurate and respectful. In contemporary Britain, the acronym ‘BAME’ (Black, Asian, and minority ethnic) is often used as a catch-all term to describe non-white people. However, this superficially conflates Black and Asian identities and promotes a false sense of unity in favour of linguistic expediency.

Reviewing the historical dynamic between Africans and Indians in the British Caribbean exemplifies how the burden of societal injustice is seldom borne uniformly; using a single umbrella term to encapsulate an inherently diverse experience obfuscates the social realities of each group.

In the wake of the emancipation of African slaves in 1833, British plantation owners were desperate for a new source of cheap labour. To fill the labour vacuum, destitute Indians were recruited by the hundreds of thousands through the promise of a better life in the British Caribbean. Known as the indentured labour system, Indians who were otherwise unable to pay for the voyage signed a contract binding them to approximately five years of plantation labour for a fixed wage in exchange for passage to the British Caribbean. Between 1845-1917, 147,592 Indians arrived in Trinidad under the indentured labour system and an approximate total of 239,000 Indians arrived in Guyana. While slavery was technically illegal, indentured servitude became a new form of government-sanctioned ‘unfreedom’.

The influx of cheap Indian labour kept wages artificially low. Workers were unable to strike for higher wages or better treatment because the constant arrival of new Indians with contracts binding them to low-wage labour made all workers dispensable. Additionally, the draconian terms of Indian labour contracts, strictly enforced by colonial authorities, meant that any insurrection or refusal to work would result in heavy fines and imprisonment. Although initially the white plantation owners were outraged by African emancipation, the indentured labour system filled the labour vacuum as Africans moved to other occupations, which ultimately enabled the British to consolidate power and production that might have otherwise been challenged by freed Africans on their own.

Although Indian indentured labourers occupied the lowest socio-economic positions in Trinidad and Guyana, emancipated Africans generally viewed these new arrivals as an existential threat to their economic livelihood. Few freed Africans worked for their former slave masters. Rather, their newfound economic mobility had laid the foundations for a fragile yet burgeoning middle class. In his book Caribbean Masala: Indian identity in Guyana and Trinidad, Dave Ramsaran explains how “Africans, once at the bottom of the social scale, now had an easily recognisable class to which they could feel superior”. Furthermore, “Indo-Trinidadians were also hostile to African Trinidadians […] because of the colour of the Africans’ skin and the texture of their hair, Indo-Trinidadians equated them with the followers of the demon god Raavan from the Hindu Ramayana”. British colonial authorities recognised and manipulated these economic and political conditions to consolidate the social divisions amongst Indians and freed Africans, thereby pre-empting any threat of a unified African-Indian front.

While there is inherent power in solidarity, this extends only as far as it does not compromise the unique interests of each group. In the case of colonial Trinidad and Guyana, both Africans and Indians may have benefitted from lobbying collectively for fairer labour laws. However, despite both groups being oppressed under British rule, the African and Indian experience under this repressive rule diverged greatly. Using a single term to describe this oppression would unjustly conflate the experience of both groups and promote a false sense of historical unity.

Similarly, using the term BAME when describing the nuances of contemporary societal injustices, would be as futile as trying to use this umbrella term to understand the diverse historical reality of oppressed groups in colonial Trinidad and Guyana.

Furthermore, the term BAME explicitly singles out two groups: black and Asian. Yet delineating a rigid separation between these two groups implies that ethnic identities are mutually-exclusive. In reality, according to the CIA World Factbook, around 20% of Guyanese and 23% of Trinidadians today identify as ‘mixed race’ to some degree. Umbrella terms with specific delineations, therefore, run the risk both being too ambiguous and too specific to represent the true intersectional nature of identity.

Viewing racial oppression in colonial Trinidad and Guyana through a BAME lens exemplifies how superficial terms often lead to a superficial understanding of reality. The contemporary use of the term in the UK equally conflates the unique experience of each group it is meant to represent, which undermines its overall utility as an accurate descriptor. While there is space in the English vernacular for certain umbrella terms, BAME attempts to balance the intersection between generalisation and specificity, but ultimately fails at both.

Christopher Lindrud is International Coordinator at the Trade Center of the Americas.

The #YouClapForMeNow campaign emerged following a video in which key workers from immigrant backgrounds recited a poem, targeting an audience who demonstrate anti-immigrant sentiments. A hashtag using the poem’s title has now come to symbolise a powerful online wave, which is thanking the ethnically diverse community of key workers. With the streets of Britain filled with clapping every Thursday evening to celebrate the efforts of a multicultural NHS, this video urged those clapping to not forget this nationwide diversity in a post-coronavirus Britain.

The poem in the video aims to break down identity-based divides and appreciate immigrant workers. Nevertheless, the importance given to solidarity is convoluted by the repeated reference to antagonising differences. Constructed around the binary of ‘you’ and ‘me’, a hashtag for solidarity became one bound up in a separating logic, exacerbating the issue of ethnic differentiation. Yet perhaps it is this awareness of systemic, racial segregation that gives the poem its power. By consciously critiquing a historically divisive rhetoric, it demands an acknowledgement and re-articulation of anti-immigrant sentiments, hinting towards an inclusive future beyond reductive identity-based divides.

A multicultural society must recognise ethnic minorities’ contributions towards collective, socio-economic progress. In the recently published Research and Development Roadmap Policy paper, Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Alok Sharma writes that “we want to send a powerful signal to talented people around the world: come to the UK, be part of this exciting new future”. Society must recognise that this ‘future’ relies upon diverse talent.

With visa regulations favouring ‘skilled’ workers and graduate routes favouring those attaining higher education, many ethnic minorities – especially key workers – are slipping through the net. In spite of the increasing demand for workers, ethnically diverse workers who might not technically qualify as high-skilled are notably underrepresented. For the UK to truly build a brighter future for all, society must move to displace the deep-rooted perception that ethnic minorities are taking jobs, and instead value their present resilience and courage. Yet, as we remember the efforts of immigrant workers in a post-COVID-19 society, these efforts should not constitute their place in a UK allegedly ‘for all’; a place where inclusivity must not be contingent on tangible contributions.

Frequent circulations of the phrase ‘COVID-19 doesn’t discriminate’ has perhaps only exposed and exacerbated the societal structures that do. As the global crisis intensified, the conversation shifted to its disproportionate impact on certain domestic demographics. Belly Mujinga, a key worker for TfL, suffered a racially motivated attack when she was spat on by a man claiming to have COVID-19. A few days later, Mujinga tested positive, dying after two weeks. In spite of her respiratory problems, she was expected to resume work on the concourse as usual, where she was not supplied with personal protective equipment (PPE). Alongside the attack, Mujinga’s deprivation of PPE reflects the systemic, discriminatory treatment of many ethnic minority workers. her death represents the ultimate outcome of a societal injustice where socio-economic structures are both a causal and enabling factor.

As racial prejudices often impact the quality of life of individuals and communities, we must be able to trace the racially divisive foundations on which these are built. To envision a post-COVID-19 UK that intrinsically appreciates and celebrates ethnic diversity, policy makers must deconstruct the umbrella of racism when examining the correlation of socio-economic divides with ethnicity. We know that 63% of healthcare workers who died due to COVID-19 were from a BAME background, prompting researchers to investigate why ethnic minorities are overwhelmingly vulnerable. As Judith Butler has asserted, “the virus alone does not discriminate, but we humans surely do”.

Socio-economic inequality has isolated minorities in their particular battles with the pandemic. Due to existing social and economic factors, COVID-19 is worsening inequality in a society already laced with, and built upon, structures that discriminate. Amidst a pandemic encouraging an increasingly global consciousness, society and governing structures must assume this mindset in the UK as well. To normalise diversity, we must act upon the reality of racial disparities exposed by COVID-19, epitomised by the binary of ‘you’ and ‘me’; a binary that reflects the prevailing treatment of ethnic minorities. A future that is able to break-down identity divides must celebrate the claps that are fuelling national efforts to investigate ethnic inequality, proposing a future consciousness that seeks to overcome racial divisions and is built on present hopes for a more inclusive society.

Mahi Shah studies German and Spanish at the University of Cambridge.