Bay of Plenty Times

PICTURE: MARK McKEOWN: TMAPS co-ordinator Jessica Trask is buried under a pile of paperwork.

Pushing paper instead of helping victims

20.09.2007
By MICHELE McPHERSON
A lack of funding has left the co-ordinator of a family violence programme launched five months ago in Tauranga, desk-bound and struggling to find time to be out in the community.

Less than three weeks after the launch of the Government’s $14 million “Family Violence _ It’s not OK’ campaign, Jessica Trask of the Tauranga Abuse Prevention Strategy said most of her day is spent pushing paper.

A funding shortage has meant 20 hours of administrative support has recently had to be cut leaving Miss Trask to deal with paperwork and phone calls generated by up to 60 family violence callouts each week.

Time spent sourcing funding is now added to the list of tasks.
Her role previously included educating Western Bay residents on domestic violence _ something she now has little time for.

Miss Trask said that while the Government had poured $14 million into the national campaign, encouraging the public to ring in and report family violence, organisations and community groups had not received additional funding to deal with an increasing workload.

“What was 15 per cent of my role before now has become something like 70 per cent of my role and that’s largely paperwork,” said Miss Trask.

The strategy was 18 months in the planning and aims to bring agencies that deal with family violence together to stop families falling through the cracks and to educate the public on domestic violence.

This week marks the strategy’s five-month anniversary_ a lifespan that has proved too short to fully tap into crucial government funding received by similar organisations in Whakatane and Rotorua.

Miss Trask had been hopeful of receiving $80,000 funding from the Te Rito collaborative fund _ established by the Government in 2002 to ensure local agencies could work together to develop family violence prevention strategies in their region.

However, Ministry of Social Development spokeswoman Marti Eller said the strategy was not eligible for the amount granted to similar groups because it was not in existence during the original contestable funding round in 2003.

Conditions of the Te Rito fund stipulate that applications for a second round of funding _ securing $80,000 a year for three years _ were only open to the original applicants.

The strategy, known as TMAPS, lodged an application regardless and was able to secure $25,000 a year from an unspent allocation of the Te Rito fund nationally.

“The fact that the local team have worked hard to find funding for them (and will prioritise them should any further funding free up) is a tribute to what they have established,” said Ms Eller.

Miss Trask said TMAPS was appreciative of ongoing support from local Government funding agents but a lack of prioritisation of the Te Rito Strategy at a higher financial level meant successful community collaborations like TMAPS were under serious threat.

She had hoped Government funding would result in further expansion across the sector.

“It will mean a considerable shortfall and we will need to be looking to the community to help us to continue this,” she said.

“We don’t need a new strategy, the strategy’s been decided. We just need to fund it properly.”

Tauranga Women’s Refuge manager Hazel Hape said TMAPS, which works closely with 18 family violence related organisations in Tauranga, was a good initiative but its longevity was dependent on ongoing Government funding.

TMAPS was exploring other funding avenues.

Are women united against violence and for peace?

September 17, 2007

LONDON: Women celebrities and activists – including the Australian actor Cate Blanchett, model Elle Macpherson and writer Germaine Greer – have urged world leaders to demand an immediate ceasefire in Sudan’s Darfur region and the swift deployment of an expanded peacekeeping force there.

The women made the statement in an open letter to newspapers around the world on Saturday before the United Nations General Assembly meeting to discuss the crisis this week.

Their letter was also published before street protests in Britain, the US, New Zealand, South Africa and Japan marked Global Day for Darfur yesterday.

Organisers including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Save Darfur Coalition urged protesters to wear blindfolds and to tell world leaders not to “look away now”.

“The crisis in Darfur and eastern Chad remains one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world. The international community must not look the other way as the situation deteriorates,” said the letter by the 26 activists, eight of whom recently travelled to the western region of Sudan.

More than 200,000 people have died and 2.5 million have fled their homes since ethnic African rebels took up arms against the Arab-dominated Sudanese Government in 2003, accusing it of decades of neglect. The Government is accused of retaliating by unleashing a militia of Arab nomads known as the Janjaweed – a charge it denies.

Efforts are under way to speed up the deployment of a 26,000-strong African Union-UN peacekeeping force in Darfur that is to replace a smaller, ineffectual mission of African Union troops.

The letter urged politicians meeting at the UN to “move beyond sympathy for the suffering” and to “step up the pressure on all parties in the conflict to agree to an immediate ceasefire”.

Other signatories included the US actor Mia Farrow; Dame Anita Roddick, the Body Shop founder who died in England last week, and the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Associated Press

Over the semester teaching break, I took a short trip to Palmerston North where this item was front page news on the Manawatu Weekend Evening Standard, Sept 1-2.

“Bullying and intimidation is scaring women away from the Palmerston North City Council chamber..only a small number of women are standing for local government election this year…councillors said the environment is not a welcoming one for women…No matter what the outcome of the election the council will be dominated by men for the next three years. Of the 34 candidates for the 15 spots on council only 6 candidates are women (that’s a little over 15%).

Alison Wall, a councillor for 15 years said she is “very sad so few women are standing because it is vital that there is balanced representation”. “Its very important, because we have a different pespective and another point of voiew”…But the small number is to be expected said Cr. Wall because many women are aware of the bad treatment they would receive on council”…”This behaviour includes bullying tactics and name-calling generally..The environment of intimidation with males sanding over you and shouting across the table would be very off-putting to a lot of women. They’re male chauvinists”.

Council structures were also geared against women..all the meetings are at 5pm!! This is definitely a problem if you are a parent, and especially a mother who take those responsibilities seriously as many women are and do. Whose interests were considered when this time was chosen??

Remember our question — what explains the massive gender gap in political representation – the fact that only 16% of national representations are women worldwide? We always thought things were more gender balanced in local government. But not so in this and many other cases.

How many women do you see standing for Auckland city mayor among yesterday’s businessman, a pornographer and a few others?

Would you consider standing for a local government position if the meetings were all at 5pm and the hyper-masculine adversarial culture prevailed?

Your thoughts?

Jacqui

Barnett makes some good points – note the website advertising alongside the artice “dating withut drama -be the woman men love; “catch cheating wives” etc. from whose perspective?

Do you have a good wife? Do men make good wives? Can we share the load?

– Jacqui

National StoryRSS
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Tracey Barnett: Women need good wives
5:00AM Wednesday August 22, 2007
By Tracey Barnett

Answer this: Which list reflects countries with the higher percentage of women executives?

A: United States, Britain, Canada.B: Brazil, Philippines, Botswana.

If you chose list A, you’d be dead wrong. Not one of those countries even made it into the top 10 of 32 countries polled, whereas each one in list B did, a survey by international business consultants Grant Thorton shows.

In fact, the old boys of Europe – such as Germany, Italy and The Netherlands – landed at the bottom of the heap, ranking only slightly above the biggest loser, Japan, where just 7 per cent of executive ranks were filled by women, even though half the workforce is female.

It doesn’t make sense. Canada and Britain represent open, rich, developed societies with highly educated women who take their civil rights as a given.

If these nations aren’t pumping out power women, who is?

The surprise winner is the Philippines, where a whopping 97 per cent of businesses have women executives and where 50 per cent of senior managers are women, compared with 24 per cent in New Zealand.

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AdvertisementWhat’s in their water? Is the Filipino power elite starting to hand the torch to this new generation of highly educated working daughters? Or are the high rankings of Brazil and Botswana testament that developing countries are learning from the mistakes of tradition-entrenched Europe and are now doing a better job utilising the newer half of their executive workforce?

There are briefcases of material to digest on this topic, but one less palatable point that most of the highest-rated countries have in common is that they have extreme socio-economic inequities, meaning there is a big enough population of poor people willing to work at low wages, so even the middle class can afford cleaners and nannies. Translation: these working women have a wife.

Unsuspecting Kiwi working women may not have heard of this concept. People are actually paid to do things that you’ve always done after you’ve come home from a long day at the office. Really.

When I asked a woman at the Ministry of Women’s Affairs if she had statistics on how many of us have a cook, a driver, a cleaner and a nanny, the poor woman laughed so loudly that she snorted into the phone. I believe I can interpret that number as statistically small.

The last check in New Zealand, in 1999, showed that 60 per cent of men’s work is paid, but 70 per cent of women’s work is unpaid.

Not a problem if there is an agreed trade-off between doing important societal duties such as raising children or raising pay cheques.

It gets considerably less pretty when both partners are working full time, yet she – compared with him – is putting in an extra two hours a day at home on unpaid work.

Suddenly that adds up to two entire extra working days tacked on to her fulltime work week – time that does zilch for the executive potential of her CV.

More crucially, are her unpaid work commitments at home early in her career, especially with children, keeping her from bagging the executive chair in the long term? Forget the glass ceiling, nobody’s talking about the sticky floor that’s also draining the working achievements of women.

We’re not exactly a poster child for female potential. Although women make up 59 per cent of university graduates, only a paltry 16.9 per cent get tapped to be professors, 17.2 per cent to join top legal partnerships and 24.2 per cent to become judges. And a pathetic 7.13 per cent of women sit on corporate boards.

Even if we just quietly set aside the argument that elite men promote their own from familiar power networks, let’s just go back a step. Shouldn’t we be teaching our most ambitious young women to be having a drink with a new client rather than cleaning the pizza cheese off the bottom of the oven?

Because that’s how her male partner is getting ahead.

For potential women leaders in their field, isn’t part of this equation about conscious choice and not just economics? If you want to see your daughter in Helen’s job some day, teach her that committing disproportionate time to unpaid work relative to her male partner carries a real long-term personal cost.

In the name of crucial national research, I’d like to ask our Prime Minister this: Who changes the empty toilet rolls in your house? If it’s Peter, then this country owes him an Iron Cross for allowing you to realise your career potential. But if it’s been you all these years, we need to talk.

Forget policy to bolster future Girl Power, instead send a package to every man in this fine land with a note that reads: “Boys, it’s called oven cleaner.”