Young women under attack It is ironic that in this, International Youth Year, young people are confronting attacks on every front - on their rights to a job, on their right to a culture of their own, indeed on their right to a future. And as if this was not enough, in some countries governments are beginning to launch a new attack on the right of young people, and especially young women, to determine their own sexuality.
In the USA legislatures in 12 states have introduced bills to require women under 18 to notify their parents before obtaining an abortion. In Britain similar measures have been introduced through the courts. In Italy, youth are being threatened with legislation which will prevent young people from expressing affection in public and also increase police harassment.
Young people really are up against the wall in the capitalist crisis, but as the articles below demonstrate, they are fighting back.
as a bears no resembl to the original.
Instead of being a law which allows for greater freedom of sexuality for women, it is a direct attack on those freedoms it sought to express.
If the law is passed, it will be illegal for youth to express intimacy in public on pain of arrest, until proof of age can be verified. This particular clause is not included in order to stop sexual assaults occuring; if it was why make it illegal for a 16 and 14- year old to kiss or embrace in a public place? This section of the law makes it illegal for any 'intimate contact to take place between two persons aged 16 or under if there is an age difference of two years or more, and illegal for a person over 16 to have any such contact with a person under 14. The new proposed law also makes it illegal for able-bodied and disabled persons of any age, to demonstrate physical affection in public. In both these cases, such physical contact would be seen under the provisions of the Woul be seen under the provisions of the new law, as violence, regardless as to whether consent for such intimacy had been given.
Youth in Italy are rejecting these new restrictions on their sexual expression.
On October 19 last year the day after the law was agreed (but not passed), a campaign was launched to reject it. Unfortunately, this was not seen as an on-going campaign and because of this and the fact that the Italian senate are playing 'the waiting game' with this legislation, the campaign did not get off to a very good start.
Not to be deterred the OGS (Revolutionary Youth Organisation -in solidarity with the Fourth International) organised an action for December 1, 1984. It was originally planned in order to provoke other actions. However, it was much more successiul than they dared hope (see International Viewpoint No 70, February 25, 1985). There were mass 'kiss-ins' in Milan, Brescia and Rome and in Milan alone 5,000 school students went on strike for the day. These actions were successful enough to be taken up not only by the Italian media. but also in other countries.
Since December 1, Rivoluzione the newspaper of the OGS has issued a series of postcards saying 'I've kissed a minor' (Ho Baciato un/a minorenne) which are to be sent to the Italian president. These have been very widely used by Italian youth.
International Women's Day was another day of demonstrations against this new repressive proposal. Most March 8 demonstrations were based on this issue. In the future, the OGS hope to set up local meetings to organise against the bill, in order to get the movement going again by September, when youth return to school after the holidays and also to begin to organise a campaign for a referendum on this issue.
21
Sue PIERCY
In December 1984 in Britain Victoria Gillick won a ruling in the appeal court giving her legal assurances that none of her daughters would be given treatment or advice on contraception or abortion without her consent. The ruling, which also applies to everyone else under 16, is based on the assumption that all young people but particularly young women, are the property of their parents, and takes away not only the right to seek contraception, but to confidentiality in virtually any other medical advice.
The consequences of this ruling so far have been horribly predictable. There have been countless cases of young women no longer able to obtain contraception becoming pregnant, and even two suicides attributed to the desperation caused by the judges' decision. À clause which mentioned exceptions in cases of 'emergency' has now been clarified to mean only life-endangering situations.
In 1983 17,000 women under 16 attended family planning clinics, nearly all were already sexually active and only one third had any support from their parents. It is now illegal for doctors not only to prescribe contraception to the other two thirds, but even to give them advice. Attendance at clinics by under 16s has dropped dramatically (more than a third in some cases), and of course more and more young women are confronted with the trauma of unwanted pregnancy. What is more, since advice on abortion is also conditional on parental permission increasing numbers of young women will be forced into having children they do not want or driven to backstreet abortionists.
And Gillick claims that all of this is designed to protect young women! If contraception and abortion, or even advice, information or education about sex are no longer available, the argument goes, pressures for young women to enter into sexual relationships will International Viewpoint 17 June 1985 suddenly disappear. Her real attitude was clear, however, when she let slip her view that,
"There will always be a hard core of silly girls who get pregnant. They'd be no more able to make contraception work than they can make their brains. Short of physically sterilizing them, there is little to be done'
The Gillick ruling clearly has nothing to do with confronting the sexual coercion of young women, but is rather a further denial of what limited rights to make decisions about their own lives young women have ever had.
But Gillick can still be reversed. The case is due to be heard in the House of Lords [Britain's second parliamentary house] on June 24. So far the views of young people have been notably absent from the deliberations of the judges, so a demonstration has been called for June 23 to make it perfectly clear that young people are not prepared to have their rights to control their own lives and their own bodies taken away. AND IN ITALY... Ruth CHENETTE Five years ago, the women's movement in Italy put forward suggestions for a new law to counter violence against women. Since that time little campaigning has been done to defend these proposals. This has allowed the right-wing and the Christian Democracy to remove all the pro-women clauses, a removal made more easy by the socialists abstaining at every stage of its passage through parliament.
Each and every clause in the women's proposals has been so thoroughly amended that the current proposed law, which is due to go on the statute books
INTERNATIONAL