WUNRN
UNECE is one of the 5 official Regional Commissions of the United Nations. UNECE Member States include the countries of Europe, and also countries in North America (Canada and United States), Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan) and Western Asia (Israel) - http://www.unece.org/oes/nutshell/region.html
Widows for Peace through Democracy:
http://www.widowsforpeace.org/widowhood-ece-beijing-plus-20/
Widowhood Issues for the UNECE
Region - Beijing: 20 Years On
WIDOWHOOD IN THE CONTEXT OF ACTION AREA A:
POVERTY
Written statement to Pre Prep NGO CSW Geneva for ECE Region
Beijing+20 Review
WIDOWS
and WIDOWHOOD get no mention in the 1995 BEIJING DECLARATION AND PLATFORM FOR
ACTION (BPFA) although each of the twelve action areas has clear relevance to
the low status of widows and their children.
The Declaration and the BPFA recognise age discrimination as one of the
factors contributing to barriers to women’s advancement, and specifically
mentions older women with regard to their poverty, health,
violence against them, and obstacles they face in entering the labour market,
and as a civilian group particularly affected by armed conflict. Yet,
regrettably, even scandalously, it ignores completely the problematic status of
widows, widowhood-related discrimination and abuse which makes them so poor.
In
1995 there seems to have been a complete disregard of three crucial facts.
First, that in many countries, developed and developing, widows of all ages
experience multiple forms of discrimination and lack of rights that causes
their poverty and vulnerability to violence; secondly, that in most countries
the majority of older women are in fact widows; third, that widows generally
have no collective voice; few organisations exist to represent them; and
governments often have little knowledge of their life styles, needs or roles.
Widows
also, especially the elderly, may experience what Professor Amartya Sen defines
as “non-income poverty”: The poverty of isolation, exclusion and lack of
dignity and respect. This aspect of poverty exposes them to violence, in the
home, in the community, and, as has been revealed in the United Kingdom,
ill-treatment and abuse in care and retirement homes.
The
omission to address widows’ basic needs, reduce their poverty, and recognise
and support their key important social and economic roles in their families and
communities must be remedied in this review of the BPFA at the 59th CSW.
Governments everywhere need to address this neglected gender and human rights
issue.
For
never before has the world witnessed such a huge increase in the numbers of
widows of all ages, and wives of the “missing”, due to armed conflict,
revolutions, sectarian violence, lawlessness and criminality, natural
disasters, HIV and AIDS and harmful traditional practices such as child
marriage that create further child widows.
The
longer life expectancy of women over men, and the often great age differences
in partners to the marriage has always been a contributory factor to the
escalation in the figures for this category of women. Widows are less likely to
remarry, especially if they have children, whereas widowers even in their later
years, often find new partners, who will care for them in their old age. But
the increase in the size of this category of women in recent years is unprecedented.
POVERTY
There
are multiple reasons why widows are among the very poorest of poor women and
why it needs urgently to be addressed by governments. The economic and social
costs of ignoring this issue are grave. Widowhood is a root cause of poverty
across the generations, impacting so irrevocably and negatively on widows’ children’s
futures, promoting further inequalities that can fuel instability and conflict.
Common
coping strategies of impoverished widowed mothers is to withdraw their girl children
from education since the opportunity costs of keeping daughters in school is so
high. Such survival initiatives are common throughout Eastern Europe and
Russia, and among many migrant widows in the West. The cost of keeping children
in secondary and tertiary education is often beyond the means of widows, and
child labour in the informal economy is rapidly increasing in those European
countries accommodating the strongest austerity measures.
Widows’
poverty is directly related to the absence of economic opportunities, and
economic resources, including inheritance and land ownership; access to credit,
education and support services, and their minimal, often for cultural reasons,
participation in the decision-making processes.
Widows
are usually given lower state pensions than men due to the gender pay gap in
their work histories. Also, many widows may have never been employed in the
formal sector, having been unpaid domestic workers in the family. Even where
pensions and other social security systems exist that are intended to support
the poorest people in populations, uneducated illiterate widows often face
bureaucratic barriers to accessing what is their right. In some communities
their pensions may be taken over by male members of their family and they are
unable to benefit from them.
The
poverty of widows and their daughters, especially in countries such as Moldova,
Romania, Russia, Slovakia, makes them vulnerable to prostitution and human
traffickers who transport them across the region for sex work and domestic
slavery. Lithuania leads as a transit and sending country, due to its close
proximity to the UK.
AUSTERITY CUTS
ECE governments
have responded to the current economic recession with austerity cuts that have
disproportionately affected women and children. In particular widows have seen
the value of any pensions they may have greatly devalued and inadequate to
sustain them in a decent mode of living.
In
Portugal earlier this year the Constitutional Court declared illegal the
government’s attempt to legislate to reduce the pensions of widows and
widowers. In Greece, Cyprus and Italy, for example, widows, especially the elderly,
and the unemployed, are living precariously, below the poverty line. In all
countries in the region, the austerity cuts have eliminated or reduced other
social support programmes that widows rely on, leaving them further isolated,
to the detriment of their physical and mental health.
In
some countries, particular in rural areas, widows may be barred, through
discriminatory customs and traditions, from accessing their rights to
inheritance, land ownership and property. There may be customs that harshly restrict
their very mobility, barring them from participating in community activities
that could help them to engage in training programmes for income-generation.
Illiteracy, ignorance of their actual legal rights, and discriminatory
practices, fear of violence may hinder their seeking remedies to improve their
economic status. In parts of rural Azerbaijan, for example, customs prohibit
widows from moving outside the homestead unless accompanied by an adult male
relative, thus barring them from participation in community development
programmes that could help them reduce their poverty and rebuild their lives
economically and socially.
GAP IN DATA
There
is very little reliable data on widowhood for many of the 57 countries in the
ECE, and several countries do not count widows in their census. Worldwide it is
estimated that between 7% and 15% of all adult women are widows, making over 15
million widows worldwide and 500 million children of widowed mothers. However,
these figures do not include child widows. Forced marriage and under age child
marriage is a common practice in several ethnic minority groups, in the Czech
Republic, Slovakia, Turkey, Bulgaria, and Hungary and is prevalent in the Roma
population wherever they are.
Migrant and Asylum-Seeking Widows
There
has been little research on the status of immigrant and asylum widows who have
migrated or fled to EU countries. Widows from countries where their marital
status is regarded as “inauspicious” may experience intra-household poverty
where family members exploit them as domestic slaves, denying them equality in
the sharing of food and other services.
Widows
who seek asylum in EU countries alleging persecution by family members, the
community or the state because they refuse to participate, for example, in harmful
traditional practices in mourning and burial rites; flee forced marriage or
levirate to a dead husband’s brother; are threatened with death in witchcraft
accusations; are likely to suffer physical, sexual and psychological violence
if they remain in their country of origin. These widows may have to wait
several years for a decision, but in the meantime they endure great
restrictions and deprivations.
In
the United Kingdom asylum seekers are not allowed to work or receive council
housing and must exist on the most paltry financial assistance so they can
barely afford to eat, have no money for clothes and live in appalling
conditions which put their lives in danger. Widows with young children and
those that are alone live in terror of deportation, and their poverty and
dependency as they seek asylum leaves them vulnerable to sexual violence and
other forms of economic exploitation.
CONFLICT WIDOWS IN THE ECE
Conflicts
in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey and
the Ukraine have created uncounted numbers not only of widows but of wives of
the “disappeared”. Widows predominate in refugee and IDP camps, where they are
effectively the last in line for services and resettlement, and without an
adult male to negotiate for them, are unable to obtain even the basic needs for
their survival.
Furthermore
conflicts outside the region have driven war widows to seek settlement in safer
countries. Also ECE Countries are home to the many widows of their soldiers who
have lost their lives recently in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in other conflicts
and peace-keeping activities around the world. All of these women live in
relative if not absolute poverty.
RECOMMENDATIONS TO GOVERNMENTS
§
“Marital Status” should be added to the criteria for
the disaggregation of data in international, regional and national statistic
policy documents.
§
Governments need to gather data on
the numbers, ages, situations, and status of their widows, and support widows
to form their own organisations so their
collective voice can be heard so as to influence national economic, social,
agricultural and related policies. The census of several ECE countries contain
no data on widows.
§
Governments need to ensure pensions and social security for
widows are ring-fenced in the context of austerity cuts.
§
Governments in review of the Beijing+20 process should ensure
that widowhood issues are addressed in the agreed conclusions of the 59th
session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW)
and are also incorporated in all policies and strategies for the post-2015 Millennium Development Goals, and in
all international and domestic legislation to
eliminate violence against women and girls.
§
Governments need to establish or strengthen state-based and
community-based support systems, so that widows can
withstand poverty, keep their children in school and have their parts as key
economic and social roles as sole supporters of families recognised and
rewarded.
§
Governments need to implement Article 5 of
the CEDAW and all the other articles that are relevant to
widowhood, to modify negative and harmful social attitudes to widows and
eliminate harmful traditional practices and other forms of violence suffered by
widows throughout the ECE due to their poverty and marginalisation.
§ Governments must ensure that widows can access free legal services to obtain their basic rights.