• Lifetime risk of maternal mortality
• Percentage of women using modern contraception
• Skilled attendant at delivery
• Female life expectancy
• Expected number of years of formal schooling for females
• Ratio of estimated female-to-male earned income
• Maternity leave benefits
• Participation of women in national government
• Under-5 mortality rate
• Percentage of children under age 5 moderately or severely underweight
• School enrollment ratios
• Ratio of girls to boys enrolled in primary school
• Percentage of population with access to safe water

It is pretty comprehensive and, of course, it reflects the fact that market-based policies (translation: do-nothing policy stances) do not provide the benefits necessary for healthy motherhood. The index also assumes, rightfully so, that gender equality is also a condition for healthy motherhood.

2008 Mothers’ Index Rankings

Top 10 Best places to be a mother

• 1 Sweden
• 2 Norway
• 3 Iceland
• 4 New Zealand
• 5 Denmark
• 6 Australia
• 7 Finland
• 8 Ireland
• 9 Germany
• 10 France

In case you’re wondering, the United States ranks 27th, down one slot from last year (must be these great family values-based social policies Bush implemented). Unsurprisingly, the Scandinavian social democracies fare the best, what with all the social programs, and vacations and health services. And all that with the general public policies designed to reduce inequalities, create safer societies.

Bottom 10 Worst places to be a mother

• 137 Ethiopia
• 138 Mali
• 139 Djibouti
• 140 Eritrea
• 141 Guinea-Bissau
• 142 Angola
• 143 Sierra Leone
• 144 Yemen
• 145 Chad
• 146 Niger

These are not surprising either. Sub-Saharan Africa is plagued with poverty and other problems that completely gendered, that is, these problems affect women the first and the worst (bad sentence / bad grammar… hey, at least France makes it to the top 10!).

As StC CEO Charles MacCormack states,

And here I thought all we had to do was to encourage abstinence and marriage. </snark>

Feminism has never been more relevant.

I have been amazed (in a bad sense) by the story of the raid by the State of Texas on the Fundamentalist Mormon compound in El Dorado and the removal of 460 children. It is indeed incredible that such practices are allowed to persist in the 21st century United States.

When it comes to religious fundamentalist movements and other reactionary and fascist groups, there is no better source on the Internet than the blog Orcinus (David Neiwert’s blog, with co-author Sara Robinson). In this cas, Sara Robinson got the thankless task of reporting on this and in this post (which is well worth a read), she recommended Daphne Bramham’s book, The Secret Life of Saints - Child Brides and Lost Boys in Canada’s Polygamous Mormon Sect. I fully trust Sara’s judgment, so, I got the book and, boy, it was quite a read.

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Unfortunately, it’s all in French, so, if you don’t speak the language (you mean the whole world is not francophone? Well I never!), you’re missing out on all the good stuff on the structural study of myths as language and the raw and the cooked as symbolic representations of the duality between nature and culture. I still think there is very little that is more powerful than structural analysis (and post-structural as well… damn, I have to blog more on theories, especially the French ones).

The good news is that there is a YouTube clip for everything, so, without further ado, let’s hear it from Pierre Bourdieu (gosh, I miss him!) - with sub-titles - on Levi-Strauss.

L’emploi protège de moins en moins contre la pauvreté
LE MONDE | 29.04.08

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Employment constitutes less and less a protection against poverty. This is one of the conclusions of a report in France, from the National Observatory on Poverty and Social Exclusion (ONPES - a national research institute).

The report confirms that the trend of poverty reduction over the past two decades seems to have paused: in France, in 2005, 6.3% of people were below the poverty line (approximately $1,000/month for a person living alone), a percentage similar to that of 2003. What has changed is the intensity of poverty, which has gotten worse: the gap between the median income of the poor and the poverty line is widening. What this means is that the poor are getting poorer and their income becomes more distant from the poverty line and their quality of life is more and more marked by precariousness.

And this is where employment becomes a factor. There are more and more working poor: in 2003, they were 1.47 million; by 2005, they were 1.74 million (7% of the active population). Poverty affects first and foremost those that experience long periods of unemployment, but also those are work all year long in part-time jobs (21% of the working poor) and the non-salaried or independent workers.

Family status also has an impact on the probability of being working poor. One third of the working poor have an unemployed spouse (as opposed to 23% of the active population), another third has no partner (as opposed to 25%). So, even when individually, workers make more than the poverty line, their familial situation is what drags them into the category of working poor.

When I read this article, it reminded me of something similar I had read weeks before on the sociology blog OrgTheory, by Kieran Healy on the declining significance of occupation on wage inequalities, reporting on an article from the American Sociological Review. The abstract states this:

“Wage inequality has increased dramatically in the United States since the 1980s. This article investigates the relationship between this trend and occupational structure measured at the three-digit level. Using the Current Population Survey from 1983 to 2002, we find that the direct association between occupations and wage inequality declined over this period as within-occupational inequality grew faster than between-occupational inequality. We estimate multilevel growth models using detailed occupational categories as the unit of analysis to assess how the characteristics of occupations affect changes in mean wages and levels of wage inequality across this time period. The results indicate that changes in mean wages across occupations vary depending on the characteristics of individuals in those occupations and that intra-occupational inequality is difficult to predict using conventional labor force data. These findings seem largely inconsistent with the common sociological view of occupation as the most fundamental feature of the labor market. Correspondingly, a more comprehensive approach—one that incorporates the effects of organizational variables and market processes on rising wage inequality in the New Economy—is warranted.”

Bottom line: one’s occupation is less and less correlated to wages, hence the article title: “The Rise of Intra-Occupational Wage Inequality in the United States, 1983 to 2002″. That is, 70% of the increase in wage inequalities occurs within (rather than between) occupations.

Kieran Healy focuses on the organizational implications and how this flies in the face of the idea that as occupations require more skills, then, they should command greater wage inequalities than less skill-based occupations (the old trope that education solves everything, to put it dumbly). I would argue that this is the practical version of the Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of Liquid Society.

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“Women’s groups in Malaysia have reacted angrily to proposed government restrictions on women travelling abroad on their own. State media say the plan would require women to obtain written consent from their families or employers. The Malaysian foreign minister said the move would prevent single women being used by gangs to smuggle drugs.”

See? It’s not repressive at all. It’s just to protect single women. Because the proper and safe state for a woman is to be married and under the protection of her husband. Now, of course, the damn women’s groups have criticized the proposal as oppressive and regressive. They also argue, foolishly, that women can make their own decisions. Obviously, these groups hate women. [/snark]

If that weren’t enough, we get the second item from the BBC as well, it is both sad and encouraging:

“A religious court in Malaysia has allowed a Muslim convert to leave the Islamic faith, in what is being hailed as a landmark ruling. Penang’s Sharia court ruled that Siti Fatimah Tan Abdullah was free to return to Buddhism, following the collapse of her marriage to a Muslim man. It was decided she had not had proper counselling during her conversion. Malaysians are rarely allowed to renounce the faith - those who do can be prosecuted under stringent laws. Religious rights are a sensitive issue in Malaysia - which is 60% Muslim.”

The sad thing is that Malaysia uses Sharia law, a reactionary body of religious law. The encouraging thing is the ruling in itself. But I really like the BBC’s last sentence here. It turns euphemization into an art form: look, Malaysia is a religious country where Sharia law applies, meaning, widespread sexism and religious privilege as well as stratification.

The ruling itself looks very much like the Muslim version of the Catholic annulment: she’s allowed to leave Islam because she never really was a Muslim in the first place. Had she received more counseling and guidance (my translation: more indoctrination), she’d be stuck with that religion.

“A South African woman divorcing her husband has tried to publicly shame him into paying her maintenance. She has plastered posters on her car detailing his infidelities. Passers-by in George, Western Cape, who stopped to read them, took out their phones to take pictures of the captions, Die Burger newspaper reports. “I decided to make a peaceful point for women everywhere who struggle to get their maintenance,” the woman, whose case is still in court, told the paper. A poster on the boot of her car read:

“If my soon-to-be-ex-husband thinks he can:
bed down cheap women,
buy them underwear,
wine and dine them in the best restaurants,
take them on five-star holidays,
take ‘excite’ tablets for erectile dysfunction,

go out boozing each night AND not pay me my maintenance as ordered by court,
and think I will take no action, he has another thing coming.”

Standing by her car, the woman explained that she had discovered her husband had been cheating on her after 36 years of marriage.”

Yeah, that sucks. That also means that this woman has to put herself through what Harold Garfinkel used to call a degradation ceremony in order to shame her husband into pay his alimony. Unfortunately, that is something not uncommon in a patriarchal context.

“The leader of Nepal’s Maoists has said that his party’s recent election victory is a sign of the global resurgence of communism. But Pushpa Kamal Dahal, also known as Prachanda, stressed his party believed in retaining multi-party competition. Prachanda has made it clear that he wants to become the first president of a Nepalese republic. The Maoists won twice as many seats as their nearest rivals in last month’s polls for a constitutional assembly.”

Prachanda hopes to start a revolutionary chain reaction in developing countries (well, the Mercosur countries certainly have taken a left turn which I blogged about here a while back). This is also communism 2.0 in that Prachanda believes multi-partyism is an acceptable political format and that competition in political ideas is healthy for society (that’s certainly new… can he tell that to Kim Jong-il?) and that it was the lack thereof that had been fatal to previously communist countries. More than that, these communists believe in private foreign investments (so, how are they communist, again?). Anyhoo, at least, we know they’ll abolish the monarchy once the Assembly is seated. It will be interesting to see how things turn out.

Communism 2.0. Hmm… should be interesting.

Photo Source: Wikipedia Commons.

“Injustice et impunité” autour de scandales de pédophilie dans l’Etat mexicain d’Oaxaca
LE MONDE | 26.04.08

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So what’s the story here? Hugo Constantino et Adan Perez are wanted by the police. They are accused of having repeatedly raped a 4-year old boy, in a wealthy private school and to have filmed their sadistic acts for a network of pornographic and pedophiliac videos. What is making everything worse (can it get worse than the sadistic rape of a 4-year old?) is that the State of Oaxaca is trying to cover it up and to stall the investigation by all means necessary. It has been over a year since the legal proceedings started and the 2 men are still at large.

On April 3rd, federal agents have discovered where Hugo Constantino - the husband of the school owner, the San Felipe Institute - was hiding in Oaxaca. But member of the state police intervened and stalled them for several hours to give him time to disappear again.

The victim’s mother, Leticia Valdes, has stated that the state is trying to hide the existence of a global network. After filing a complaint for the rape, she has received death threats by telephone, unidentified men are constantly watching her house, her car has been vandalized. She has been offered hush money. The little boy is in therapy but is still much traumatized by what he has been through (yeah, no shit). The suspicion of a global network of pedophiliac pornography has emerged because the director of the Institute (the wife of Constantino) has done a lot of unexplained travel to Spain. Mexico is the world’s third producer of pornographic pedophilia.

Ms Valdes also has a hard time finding an attorney to represent her and her son in Oaxaca. She has had four already, and they all resigned under pressure and because of the potential implications of the complaint. The second man on the run, Adan Perez, teaches computer sciences at the Institute, is also the nephew of the director (Constantino’s wife again). This woman is heavily connected to the state branch of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI - Mexico long dominant political party), especially, the governor’s wife.

And while Ms Valdes has problems finding legal representation, the Institute has no such difficulties. All the attorneys representing it are influential members of the state PRI, former senators, former state prosecutor, former state secretary of interior. This legal powerhouse is led by a legal mind who defended the members of the military involved in the “disappearances” during the 1970s “dirty war”.

This is not the first time that the Institute has been accused of something like that. And following the example of Ms Valdes, three other mothers have filed complaints for the same crime against other private institutes (what the hell is going on in these places?). Public opinion in the state is divided over this and only one newspaper has dared reporting on it.

Why is it that power and sexuality are always so intimately intertwined? Well, feminists have answered that one over and over (often to deaf ears). So, just go read Feminism 101.

“India’s agriculture minister has rejected calls for additional debt cancellation for millions of farmers. In February, the government agreed a $15bn scheme to write off the debts of millions of small farmers - those with less than two hectares of land. But there have been demands from opposition and some governing coalition parties to extend the loan waiver to farmers who own more land. Farm activists say debts have been driving many farmers to suicide.

At least 10,000 debt-ridden farmers have committed suicide in India each year over the last decade - and activists say hundreds more have done so in recent months, despite the aid package. Rejecting the demand, the federal agriculture minister, Sharad Pawar, said the government was not in a position to take on new responsibilities. Drought, a fall in crop prices and an increase in the cost of cultivation are cited as reasons for the farmers’ plight. Many farmers have been forced to take out loans to buy necessary supplies, but these have left them heavily in debt. Some turn to moneylenders, who charge much higher rates of interest than banks.”

It is not a new issue, just one made worse by the current crisis. I have blogged enough on microcredit to underline how much access to credit is central to survival in many poor areas. Without access to legitimate credit, poor peasants in Asia have no other option than to use moneylenders who charge them usury interest rates. One of the major persistent forms of slavery in India is debt bondage, which can be passed from generation to generation.