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THE CEE/NIS: Gender Dimensions of Trade Liberalization in the CEE/NIS. Speech presented by Oksana Kisselyova. Trade is a very interesting issue for countries in transition, because trade became the particular feature of nowadays in our countries. People sell everything everywhere. And most of the sellers are women in their most productive age – 35 – 50 years. It means that these women were pushed out from the guaranteed stable labor market. They lost their professions. Previously they were doctors, engineers and so on – people with high education. Now they have to stand on the streets to sell cigarettes, clothes, second hand goods and so on. The second tendency is that women themselves became products. Before we never had trafficking in women. Ten years ago we had never heard about that women could be products. We had prostitution but it was illegal. Now the age of prostituted girls can be 8 or 9 years. We had articles in our newspapers where these girls were described. Trafficking in women became a kind of business. Many of the women that are sold in Turkey or the Netherlands are women from Ukraine, Russia and Belarus. It is because many of these women are naive. They think that they can earn a lot of money and help their families to survive, but as a rule these women come back as invalids. And this is very young women. Another tendency is trade of natural resources. In Ukraine this spring we had great water falls and it was not caused by natural reason, but by human activity. It was because forest cutting became uncontrollable. Private entrepreneurs sell forest cuts and forest and this is out of the state control. And here I would like to emphasize the role of multilateral organizations. Structural Adjustment Programs was imposed by multilateral organizations – by the World Bank and IMF. We need special, very systematic investigations on the gender dimensions of privatization. We made some studies, which show that men benefit more from privatization than women. That is because first of all – those who benefit from privatization are the people who are on the top of the power. And most of them were and are and still are men. Now business needs to be protected from the top of the power, and women have less access to power and less access to protection. And the result of the influence of multilateral
organizations, of liberalization – so-called democratization - is
that the role of the state and state responsibility decreased greatly.
The state is not responsible for social protection, for pension. The
pensioners are miserable; the wages are too low to survive on. And
the result is that people don’t trust the government and don’t trust
the president. In the sociological notions it means anemia. It means
that moral and social values don’t play the correspondent role in
society. Oksana Kisselyova is coordinator of the Liberal Society Institute, Ukraine, the CEE/NIS regional focal point in the FfD process, and of the Ukrainian Women’s Environmental NGO MAMA-86. She is also a senior researcher at the Department of Ethics, National Academy of Sciences, Ukraine, and has published extensively in philosophical and socio-political editions. In 1995, she participated in the UN Women’s Conference in Beijing. Since then, she has had close connections with WEDO, and participated in numerous international conferences and workshops on women’s rights and environmental issues. Oksana Kisselyova can be contacted at: kisselyova@ukr.net
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Compiled and edited by Ingeborg P. Eliasen |
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