Women to seize centre stage in Strasbourg

Date: 11/09/1997

By Leyla Linton

THE violence and discrimination women face and their battle for equal opportunities with men in all areas of life are the subject of no fewer than four reports to be discussed by MEPs at their plenary session in Strasbourg next week.

Belgian Liberal MEP Mimi Kestelijn-Sierens said it was the first time for a long while that reports from the European Parliament's women's committee had been scheduled for the middle of the week, when attendance at the plenary session is high.

She said the committee's reports tended to have a “second-class” status, relegated to Fridays when many MEPs had already left Strasbourg.

Commenting on the European Commission's annual report on equal opportunities for women and men in the EU during 1996, Kestelijn-Sierens said it was “long on facts but short on analysis”.

She wanted to know, for example, why it might be that the number of unemployed men is higher than the number of women in Finland, Sweden and the UK.

She called for 'mainstreaming' - defined by the Council of Ministers as promoting the integration of equal opportunities for men and women into the process of preparing, implementing and monitoring all policies and activities of the EU and its member states - to be extended to include gender analysis which would assess policies for their differing impact on men and women.

“I do not think that gender-impact analysis would create an enormous amount of work,” she said, adding that not all legislation would need to undergo the process.

The Commission's view of mainstreaming is analysed by Greek Socialist MEP Angela Kokkola in a separate report. Kokkola said she expected equal opportunities to be a “specific issue” in all forthcoming directives and regulations, and suggested that the Commission should appoint a special official or create a service which would be responsible for coordinating and following up mainstreaming.

In her report, Kestelijn-Sierens also highlights the fact that only 22&percent; of women are aware that national legislation exists on equal opportunities, according to a recent Eurobarometer poll. She argues that this should have been given more emphasis in the Commission's annual report, which should have suggested ways of tackling the problem.

Temporary quotas to encourage a critical mass of women into decision-making positions should be considered, she suggests, adding: “Nordic countries have programmes to assimilate women into decision-making and that has positive results.”

The Belgian MEP is also concerned about what she describes as the “glaring omission” from the Commission's report of the question of violence against women.

That issue is taken up by Swedish Green MEP Marianne Eriksson in a report which calls for an EU-wide campaign for zero tolerance of violence against women.

Eriksson argues that 1999 should be designated as the European Year Against Violence Against Women, with the Commission proposing a dedicated budget-line for related activities. Her strongly worded report includes the subjects of sexual violence - which she suggests should be rephrased “men's violence against women” - prostitution, pornography and rape.

In her analysis of domestic violence, Eriksson says: “Her own home is the most dangerous place a woman can stay. More violence takes place within four walls of home than can be imagined.”

She quotes statistics showing that one-third of German women have suffered domestic violence at some point in their lives and estimates that, in Sweden, a women is killed every ten days as a result of domestic violence.

The fourth report to be debated by the full Parliament next Tuesday (16 September), drafted by German Christian Democrat MEP Marlene Lenz, calls for a fight against sexist stereotypes in advertising, although she acknowledges it is difficult even for women to agree on what constitute positive and negative images of their gender.