Italy: Austerity is violence on the bodies of women
italy calling | 28.11.2011 21:21 | Occupy Everywhere | World
In Rome, activist women responded to the #occupypatriarchy call out initiated by the Occupy Wall Street Movement. The group, composed of students, precarious workers and migrants, marched through the city centre’s high streets on November 25, International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.
Recent reports and stats show how in Italy the new “welfare system” feeds on unpaid women’s work: the unpaid work of grandmothers looking after their grandchildren because nursery schools cannot be afforded, daughters supporting their elderly parents, mothers supporting their grown up children. With the cuts to social services the responsibility of that work falls on the women.
In these austere times, gender equality has become a “luxury item”. When the government seems to support policies on work/life balance, what they’re de facto supporting is the principle according to which a woman must undertake several jobs at the same time: all precarious, without the guarantees of the “official” job market, without wages and employment rights. This is violence masked up as austerity!
The crisis attacks every possibility of autonomy, self-determination and freedom of choice. This is, for example, the aim of the Tarzia Law, which wants to turn our formerly independent family planning centres into family and baby protection centres in the hands of non-qualified Catholic “advisers”. This goal has already been achieved in the region of Lazio, in what appears to be an experiment undertaken to legitimise the same savagery on a national scale. Independent family planning centres and abortion rights are an area of conflict on which women in Italy must keep fighting, especially with our new government and its Vatican friends.
Sources: articles by Collettivo Le Malefiche and Le Ribellule.
Original article:
http://italycalling.wordpress.com/2011/11/28/austerity-is-violence-on-the-bodies-of-women/
In these austere times, gender equality has become a “luxury item”. When the government seems to support policies on work/life balance, what they’re de facto supporting is the principle according to which a woman must undertake several jobs at the same time: all precarious, without the guarantees of the “official” job market, without wages and employment rights. This is violence masked up as austerity!
The crisis attacks every possibility of autonomy, self-determination and freedom of choice. This is, for example, the aim of the Tarzia Law, which wants to turn our formerly independent family planning centres into family and baby protection centres in the hands of non-qualified Catholic “advisers”. This goal has already been achieved in the region of Lazio, in what appears to be an experiment undertaken to legitimise the same savagery on a national scale. Independent family planning centres and abortion rights are an area of conflict on which women in Italy must keep fighting, especially with our new government and its Vatican friends.
Sources: articles by Collettivo Le Malefiche and Le Ribellule.
Original article:
http://italycalling.wordpress.com/2011/11/28/austerity-is-violence-on-the-bodies-of-women/
italy calling
Homepage:
http://italycalling.wordpress.com/
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They are our bodies not public bodies
29.11.2011 01:34
To start with austerity is not "violence" in it's self.It is not violence because to stop giving someone some thing is not the same as taking something off someone. When I was a child my parents gave me pocket money. I had no "right" to pocket money, but non the less I got it. When I got to my late teens the pocket money stopped without warning. Should I consider this to be "violence" against me or the end of a privilege? Clearly the latter!
We have no "right" to handouts, no "right" to health care, no "right" to education. But conversely no one has the "right" to deprive us of anything. You are not depriving some one of something by not handing it to them on a silver spoon. We have a "right" to be healthy. We have a "right" to learn.
The real violence was coercing us to become dependent on the handouts in the first place.
We have clearly become accustomed to the violence of our "rights" being denied and become confused when our government stopes giving stuff to us. We have become accustomed to the state dictating how we should look after our bodies; what we must or must not put into them. What we must or must not do to ourselves. We have become accustomed to state occupation of our own sovereign bodies.
We have become accustomed to the violence of force taxation. We have become accustomed to violence of fraud in money. We have become accustomed to the violence of force land rent. We have become accustomed to the violence of force exclusion from fair and equal access to the earths resources. The things which truly are our "rights" we don't seem to mis, although we mis the point of what a "right" is: something which comes to us naturally without harm to others. We can only be deprived of a right by the actions on others not the inactions. We have a "right" to breath fresh air. We can only be deprived of fresh air if others actively pollute it. It is the polluter who denies us our "right" to fresh air, not any body and everybody who fails to clean the polluted air.
To stop true "violence" and claim true "rights" it is first necessary to recognise what each is, and secondly to face the truth that what we would possibly like to be our "rights" are in fact a poor trade off for our true "rights".
Dose it really matter what our "rights" are?
Isn't it more important to just get what we can?
Can I ask you would you put up with a violent partner regularly forcing his penes into you vagina and slapping you about a bit if he gives you wonderful presents?
Or would you rather live in dignity and austerity?
No rape.
No force taxation.
No fraud.
No force land rent.
No force boarders.
No theft.
Rob the rich is a slogan we hear far to frequently. How can we rob some one of something if it is not rightfully theirs but ours? And if it is not ours we should not take it. Two wrongs do not make a right!
Give me austerity and I shall happily take it along with my rights which you have denied me for so long. Offer me presents to turn a blind eye to your violent rape I shall throw them in your face.
If we need to take several jobs to pay tax, stop paying tax.
If we need to take several jobs to pay rent, stop paying rent.
If we need to take several jobs to pay for child care, care for your own child.
If the government dose not care about our body, care for our own body and stop caring about the government.
If the government dose not care about our family, care for our own family and stop caring about the government.
If the government dose not care for our community, care for our own community and stop caring about the government.
They are our bodies not public bodies.
Violence only exists because so many of us see it as a solution to our problems.
The government only exists because so many of us see it as a solution to our problems.
Government is violence.
Government is rape.
They are our bodies not public bodies.
We live in our own sovereign mortal bodies, our own property from birth to death.
anarchist