[News] The IMF: Violating Women Since 1945

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/ahn05252011.html

May 25, 2011


Systematic Violations of Women's Rights


The IMF: Violating Women Since 1945

By CHRISTINE AHN and KAVITA N. RAMDAS

As Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the world's 
most powerful financial institution, the 
International Monetary Fund (IMF), spends a few 
nights in Rikers Island prison awaiting a 
hearing, the world is learning a lot about his 
history of treating women as expendable sex 
objects. Strauss-Kahn has been charged with rape 
and forced imprisonment of a 32-year-old Guinean 
hotel worker at a $3,000-a-night luxury hotel in New York.

While the media dissects the attempted rape of a 
young African woman and begins to dig out more 
information about Strauss-Kahn's past 
indiscretions, we couldn't help but see this 
situation through the feminist lens of the "personal is political."

For many in the developing world, the IMF and its 
draconian policies of structural adjustment have 
systematically "raped" the earth and the poor and 
violated the human rights of women. It appears 
that the personal disregard and disrespect for 
women demonstrated by the man at the highest 
levels of leadership within the IMF is quite 
consistent with the gender bias inherent in the 
IMF's institutional policies and practice.

Systematic Violation of Women's Human Rights

The IMF and the World Bank were established in 
the aftermath of World War II to promote 
international trade and monetary cooperation by 
giving governments loans in times of severe 
budget crises. Although 184 countries make up the 
IMF's membership, only five countries­France, 
Germany, Japan, Britain, and the United 
States­control 50 percent of the votes, which are 
allocated according to each country's contribution.

The IMF has earned its villainous reputation in 
the Global South because in exchange for loans, 
governments must accept a range of austerity 
measures known as structural adjustment programs 
(SAPs). A typical IMF package encourages export 
promotion over local production for local 
consumption. It also pushes for lower tariffs and 
cuts in government programs such as welfare and 
education. Instead of reducing poverty, the 
trillion dollars of loans issued by the IMF have 
deepened poverty, especially for women who make 
up 70 percent of the world's poor.

IMF-mandated government cutbacks in social 
welfare spending have often been achieved by 
cutting public sector jobs, which 
disproportionately impact women. Women hold most 
of the lower-skilled public sector jobs, and they 
are often the first to be cut. Also, as social 
programs like caregiving are slashed, women are 
expected to take on additional domestic 
responsibilities that further limit their access to education or other jobs.

In exchange for borrowing $5.8 billion from the 
IMF and World Bank, Tanzania agreed to impose 
fees for health services, which led to fewer 
women seeking hospital deliveries or post-natal 
care and naturally, higher rates of maternal 
death. In Zambia, the imposition of SAPs led to a 
significant drop in girls' enrollment in schools 
and a spike in "survival or subsistence sex" as a 
way for young women to continue their educations.

But IMF's austerity measures don't just apply to 
poor African countries. In 1997, South Korea 
received $57 billion in loans in exchange for IMF 
conditionalities that forced the government to 
introduce "labor market flexibility," which 
outlined steps for the government to compress 
wages, fire "surplus workers," and cut government 
spending on programs and infrastructure. When the 
financial crisis hit, seven Korean women were 
laid off for every one Korean man. In a sick 
twist, the Korean government launched a "get your 
husband energized" campaign encouraging women to 
support depressed male partners while they 
cooked, cleaned, and cared for everyone.

Nearly 15 years later, the scenario is grim for 
South Korean workers, especially women. Of all 
OECD countries, Koreans work the longest hours: 
90% of men and 77% of women work over 40 hours a 
week. According to economist Martin 
Hart-Landsberg, in 2000, 40 percent of Korean 
workers were irregular workers; by 2008, 60 
percent worked in the informal economy. The 
Korean Women Working Academy reports that today 
70 percent of Korean women workers are temporary laborers.

Selling Mother Earth

IMF policies have also raped the earth by 
dictating that governments privatize the natural 
resources most people depend on for their 
survival: water, land, forests, and fisheries. 
SAPs have also forced developing countries to 
stop growing staple foods for domestic 
consumption and instead focus on growing cash 
crops, like cut flowers and coffee for export to 
volatile global markets. These policies have 
destroyed the livelihoods of small-scale 
subsistence farmers, the majority of whom are women.

"IMF adjustment programs forced poor countries to 
abandon policies that protected their farmers and 
their agricultural production and markets," says 
Henk Hobbelink of GRAIN, an international 
organization that promotes sustainable 
agriculture and biodiversity. "As a result, many 
countries became dependent on food imports, as 
local farmers could not compete with the 
subsidized products from the North. This is one 
of the main factors in the current food crisis, 
for which the IMF is directly to blame."

In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), IMF 
loans have paved the way for the privatization of 
the country's mines by transnational corporations 
and local elites, which has forcibly displaced 
thousands of Congolese people in a context where 
women and girls experience obscenely high levels 
of sexual slavery and rape in the eastern 
provinces. According to Gender Action, the World 
Bank and IMF have made loans to the DRC to 
restructure the mining sector, which translates 
into laying off tens of thousands of workers, 
including women and girls who depend on the 
mining operations for their livelihoods. 
Furthermore, as the land becomes mined and 
privatized, women and girls responsible for 
gathering water and firewood must walk even 
further, making them more susceptible to violent crimes.

We Are Over It

Women's rights activists around the globe are 
consistently dumbfounded by how such violations 
of women's bodies are routinely dismissed as 
minor transgressions. Strauss-Kahn, one of the 
world's most powerful politicians whose decisions 
affected millions across the globe, was known for 
being a "womanizer" who often forced himself on 
younger, junior women in subordinate positions 
where they were vulnerable to his far greater 
power, influence, and clout. Yet none of his 
colleagues or fellow Socialist Party members took 
these reports seriously, colluding in a consensus 
shared even by his wife that the violation of 
women's bodily integrity is not in any sense a 
genuine violation of human rights.

Why else would the world tolerate the unearthly 
news that 48 Congolese women are raped every hour 
with deadening inaction? Eve Ensler speaks for us 
all when she writes, "I am over a world that 
could allow, has allowed, continues to allow 
400,000 women, 2,300 women, or one woman to be 
raped anywhere, anytime of any day in the Congo. 
The women of Congo are over it too."

We live in a world where millions of women don't 
speak their truth, don't tell their dark stories, 
don't reveal their horror lived every day just 
because they were born women. They don't do it 
for the same reasons that the women in the Congo 
articulate – they are tired of not being heard. 
They are tired of men like Strauss-Kahn, powerful 
and in suits, believing that they can rape a 
black woman in a hotel room, just because they 
feel like it. They are tired of the police not 
believing them or arresting them for being sex 
workers. They are tired of hospitals not having 
rape kits. They are tired of reporting rape and 
being charged for adultery in Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia.

Fighting Back

For each one of them, and for those of us who 
have spent many years investing in the tenacity 
of women's movements across the globe, the 
courage and gumption of the young Guinean 
immigrant shines like the torch held by Lady 
Liberty herself. This young woman makes you 
believe we can change this reality. She refused 
to be intimidated. She stood up for herself. She 
fought to free herself­twice­from the violent 
grip of the man attacking her. She didn't care 
who he was­she knew she was violated and she 
reported it straight to the hotel staff, who went 
straight to the New York police, who went 
straight to JFK to pluck Strauss-Kahn from his first-class Air France seat.

In a world where it often feels as though wealth 
and power can buy anything, the courage of a 
young woman and the people who stood by her took 
our breath away. These stubborn, ethical acts of 
working class people in New York City reminded us 
that women have the right to say "no." It 
reminded us that "no" does not mean "yes" as the 
Yale fraternities would have us believe, and, 
most importantly that no one, regardless of their 
position or their gender, should be above the 
law. A wise woman judge further drove home the 
point about how critically important it is to 
value women's bodies when she denied Strauss-Kahn 
bail citing his long history of abusing women.

Strauss-Kahn sits in his Rikers Island cell. It 
would be a great thing if his trial succeeds in 
ending the world's tolerance for those who 
discriminate and abuse women. We cannot tolerate 
it one second longer. We cannot tolerate it at 
the personal level, we must refuse to condone it 
at the professional level, and we must challenge 
it every time it we see it in the policies of 
global institutions like the International Monetary Fund.

Christine Ahn is a<http://www.fpif.org/> Foreign 
Policy In Focus columnist and the senior policy 
and research analyst at the Global Fund for Women.

Kavita N. Ramdas is a contributor to Foreign 
Policy In Focus, a visiting scholar at Stanford 
University, and the former president and CEO of the Global Fund for Women.




Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

www.Freedomarchives.org  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20110525/09848b0e/attachment.htm>