Naomi Wynter-Vincent

National News

• Babyfather – A new survey by the Equal Opportunities Commission
  has found that a majority of fathers in the UK are still failing to pull
  their weight in the home. EOC chairwoman Julie Mellor said: “Until we have
  equal pay, decent childcare and more opportunities to work flexible hours,
  many fathers will continue to find it hard to be there for their
  children; and many women will continue to lose out at work. This is not
  necessarily the best solution for parents, children or employers.” The
  study identified four ‘styles’ of fathering: from the ‘Enforcer’ dads who
  spend little time with their children but see themselves as the final
  arbiter of rules in the household; the ‘Entertainer’ dad, who gets
  involved in the ‘fun’ aspects of parenting, like playing with the
  children, but rarely helps to help with cooking and cleaning; the ‘Useful’
  father, who is happy to help with household and parental tasks, but still
  takes his cues from the mother, and the ‘fully involved’ dad, who is
  equally involved in household tasks and raising the children. The EOC
  found that most men in the UK fall into the middle two categories. 
• Designer babies – The UK moved one step closer to parents
  being allowed to choose the sex of their baby. The Human Fertilisation and
  Embryology Authority has produced a consultation paper this month making
  the case for a relaxation of the rules surrounding sex-selection
  techniques, following medical advances in fertility treatments. Currently,
  reproductive sex-selection may be made only where there is a clear medical
  case, for example where there is a high risk of a sex-specific hereditary
  illness being passed to the foetus, but changes to legislation might mean
  that couples could choose the sex of their baby on ‘family balancing’
  grounds as well.
• Date rape – The revelation that TV presenter Ulrika Jonsson
  was date-raped when she was 19 has put date-rape firmly back on the
  agenda. The Home Office is set to tighten up the ‘honest belief’ defence,
  in which defendants are able to say that they believed the woman had
  consented to sex. Men accused of rape will now have to convince the court
  that they took all reasonable attempts to gain explicit consent at the
  time. Currently only one in ten reports of rape ever result in a
  conviction and thousands of attacks go unreported each year.
• Smooth criminals – It has been interesting again to note the
  way in which the press responds to women associated with violent crimes
  against children. Whilst the tabloid press still can’t countenance the
  release of jailed Moors murderer, Myra Hindley, many years after finishing
  her original sentence, Maxine Carr, charged with seeking to pervert the
  course of justice in the Soham murder case, has been the subject of
  frenzied media interest. Amidst speculation that she may have attempted
  suicide a couple of weeks ago, it is interesting to consider her treatment
  by the press compared to that of her partner, Ian Hunter. Unlike him,
  Maxine Carr has not been accused of murder but she has suffered as much if
  not more vilification in the press, and was the subject of the serious
  crowd incident which happened outside Peterborough Magistrates Court, when
  hundreds of people gathered to shout abuse (such as ‘Kill her! Kill her!),
  despite her case not yet having reached trial.

International News

• Indians with attitude – The results of a survey in India
  suggest that Indian women are becoming more sexually assertive and less
  willing to put up with abusive or uncaring husbands. It found that Indian
  women valued sensitivity and honesty over good looks or money, and
  preferred to marry a man who was sexually inexperienced. Nearly half of
  the 2000 women interviewed declared that they were happy to take the
  initiative in sex and tell their husbands about former boyfriends. The
  survey also found a marked unwillingness to put up with domestic violence,
  with a third of those questioned saying they would fight back or leave
  their husbands. The survey has gone some way to reflect the changing
  attitudes of women in a country widely thought to be still traditionally
  patriarchal. 
• Lipstick liberation? – There are plans to open a
  western-style beauty school in Afghanistan, funded by American companies,
  in January 2003. The school, which will be based inside the Afghan
  Ministry of Women’s Affairs in Kabul, will provide courses on hairdressing
  and beauty therapy, as well as advice on setting up and running a
  business. Companies such as Revlon and MAC will be donating make-up and
  beauty products. The idea was devised by American Aid worker Mary
  MacMakin, who sees the school as a way to encourage financial independence
  as well as a boost to the confidence of Afghan women who are only now
  emerging from their burkhas after the demise of the Taliban. Critics say
  that instruction in beauty techniques should be low on the list of
  development priorities: “Women in Afghanistan need midwives, then
  mascara,” said a spokesperson for the Women’s Alliance for Peace and Human
  Rights in Afghanistan. Supporters point out that there were underground
  beauty parlours during the Taliban regime, and that this is one way to
  help Afghan women to support themselves, re-establish themselves in the
  workforce and feel more confident about their future.
• Sex trade in the Middle East – A conference in Dhaka has
  highlighted the problem of migrant Bangladeshi women being forced into the
  sex trade in India and the Middle East. Thousands of young women, some as
  young as 12, travel abroad to India, Kuwait, Dubai, Bahrain and Saudi
  Arabia, looking to escape a life of poverty. The Bangladesh government has
  banned young, unskilled women from travelling overseas by themselves,
  ostensibly to protect them from being sucked into the sex trade, but in
  practice women continue to travel abroad through the black market by
  paying large sums of money to unscrupulous black-market dealers who
  subsequently force the women to repay the money through prostitution.
• Women’s gun club in US – the Second Amendment Sisters (SAS),
  a women’s pro-gun lobby, has opened its first college group at Mount
  Holyoke, a prestigious and historically left-wing women’s college in
  Massachusetts. Reacting against women’s groups in the US who oppose the
  gun-lobby, SAS see themselves as an empowered and even feminist group of
  women who do not need to rely on men to defend them: “I feel like
  self-defence is a natural part of empowerment, and I really question those
  who say they’re feminists… usually they turn to men for defence, and
  depend on them. That’s not what I was taught taking care of yourself
  meant.”