November 14, 2012

The impact of austerity measures on women in Europe

"Women are the real creditors of the public debt," writes Christine Vanden Daelen of and for The Committee for the Cancellation of the Third World Debt. "Just as structural adjustment plans have exhausted and impoverished women in the global South, austerity will bleed the women of Europe dry."

25 October 2012:

(continued) "...The debt, Trojan horse for an unprecedented social war against the peoples of Europe, is not neutral from the point of view of gender. The austerity measures imposed in its name are gender-determined, both in their characteristics and their effects. Everywhere, they are hitting workers, pensioners and the unemployed, both men and women, as well as all the different kinds of "those without" (without housing, without papers, without the minimum needed to survive...), seeking to make them pay for the effects of a profound crisis for which they are in no way responsible. Everywhere, they impose the worst forms of social regressions on the most vulnerable, the poorest populations and thus predominantly on women! And among them, the most vulnerable (single mothers, young women, elderly women, migrant women, women from ethnic minorities, women who live in rural areas or who have been victims of violence) will suffer the strongest pressure to rush to the rescue of the profiteers of the debt.

Just as structural adjustment plans have exhausted and impoverished women in the global South, austerity will bleed the women of Europe dry. The same mechanisms, arising from same neoliberal ideology, are now everywhere at work. The privatisation, liberalisation and budget constraints that are on the menu of the austerity measures are eating away at the social rights of women, accentuating their poverty, hardening and exacerbating gender inequalities and undermining feminist gains. There is no doubt that the countless socio-economic regressions that are being tested on them today so that the capitalists do not have to pay for the crisis they have caused, will be tomorrow inflicted on all the popular classes, women and men."
more: http://cadtm.org/Women-are-the-real-creditors-of

What is the CADTM?

"The Committee for the Cancellation of the Third World Debt (the CADTM - Comité pour l’annulation de la dette du Tiers Monde) is an international network of individuals and local committees from across Europe and Latin America, Africa and Asia. It was founded in Belgium on 15th March 1990.

"The network acts in close liaison with other movements and organisations fighting for the same ideals. Its main preoccupation, besides the debt issue, is the planning of activities and radical alternatives for the creation of a world respectful of people’s fundamental rights, needs and liberties." more