‘Only yes means yes’: Spain plans new rape law to put more emphasis on consent

Move follows outcry and protests over gang-rape case

Zoe Tidman
THE INDEPENDENT
Spain’s rape laws could change to put more emphasis on consent after a high-profile case caused outrage over current legislation.

The government has approved the “only yes is yes” bill, under which victims of sexual assault would no longer have to prove that they were subject to violence or intimidation.

Instead, rape would be defined by an absence of consent.

The move follows public anger and protests over a gang-rape case during the San Fermin bull-running festival in Pamplona in 2016.

Five people were initially found guilty of sexual abuse but not ​rape, as the victim was not deemed to have objected.

Women's March 2020: in photos
Show all 19





The Sexual Liberties Law will drive home that an “explicit expression of consent” is needed for sexual acts to be considered legal, according to Irene Montero, the equality minister.

According to Amnesty International, only nine of 31 European countries have laws that define rape based on the absence of consent, instead defining it by other measures such as whether violence or the threat of violence was used — as is still the case in Spain.

If passed, the bill will also provide 24-hour centres for victims staffed by specially trained personnel.

Aggravating factors such as physical violence or the use of drugs or alcohol to incapacitate the victim would carry heavier sentences for perpetrators.

Such cases would be heard by special judges in courts dedicated to sexual crimes, as is already done with crimes relating to gender violence.

The bill has been approved by the Spanish government, but still needs to be debated and approved by parliament.

It would take several months for it to become a law.

Additional reporting by agencies

HERSTORY
On This Day: Frances Perkins becomes 1st female Cabinet member
On March 4, 1933, Frances Perkins was sworn in as U.S. labor secretary, becoming the first female member of the Cabinet.

By UPI Staff


President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Social Security Act into law at the White House on August 14, 1935. On March 4, 1933, Frances Perkins, standing behind FDR, was sworn in as U.S. labor secretary, becoming the first female member of the Cabinet. File photo by ACME Newspictures

March 4 (UPI) -- On this date in HERSTORY

In 1917, Jeanette Rankin, a Montana Republican, was sworn in as a member of the House of Representatives. She was the first woman to serve in Congress.

In 2005, homemaking guru Martha Stewart returned home after serving five months in a federal prison for conspiracy, obstruction of an agency proceeding and making false statements to federal investigators.

THE REST OF TODAY'S HISTORY

THE ATOMIC AGE AND THE SPACE AGE OVERLAP
In 1958, the U.S. atomic submarine Nautilus reached the North Pole by passing beneath the Arctic ice cap. It would become the first submarine to pass underneath the North Pole later that year.

BLASPHEMY
In 1966, John Lennon told Britain's Evening Standard that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus." The comments sparked condemnation and protests the following summer.

UPI File Photo

IRAN CONTRA
In 1987, U.S. President Ronald Reagan acknowledged his administration swapped arms to Iran for U.S. hostages and said, "It was a mistake."

BLACK LIVES MATTER 

In 2015, a report released by the Department of Justice found that the Ferguson Police Department routinely performed "suspicionless, legally unsupportable stops" against the African-American residents of the Missouri city.

Mansplaining, explained in one simple chart 

CLICK ON CHART TO MAKE IT BIGGER

Mansplaining is, at its core, a very specific thing. It's what occurs when a man talks condescendingly to someone (especially a woman) about something he has incomplete knowledge of, with the mistaken assumption that he knows more about it than the person he's talking to does.

Although mansplain is most likely the coinage of a LiveJournal user (thanks, Know Your Meme), no discussion of mansplain is complete without mention of Rebecca Solnit's 2008 essay "Men Explain Things to Me," now also the title of her 2014 collection of essays. (The essay was published first at TomDispatch.com and later in the Los Angeles Times. It was reprinted in Guernica with a new introduction by Solnit in 2012.) Although Solnit didn't use the word mansplain in her essay, she described what might be the most mansplainiest of experiences anyone has ever had. Solnit and a friend were at a party where the host (a wealthy and imposing older man), upon learning that Solnit had recently published a book on 19th century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, proceeded to tell her all about a very important book on the same photographer that had just come out. The book, of course, was Solnit's, but the man had to be interrupted several times by Solnit's friend before he'd absorbed that knowledge and added it to the knowledge he'd absorbed from reading the New York Times review of the book.

Mansplaining gained traction at first on feminist blogs, as writers and activists finally had a catchall way to talk about a specific, albeit insidious, dynamic experienced by qualified women in male-dominated fields. When I heard it for the first time, the term helped to instantly describe so many interactions I had with men over the years that left me feeling annoyed and bad about myself. Mansplaining encapsulates the sexist, condescending tendency men can exhibit in classrooms, at work, and in casual conversation to assume that they know more about a topic than a woman, no matter what it is or what her credentials are.

But as it’s become a household phrase on the internet in the last few years, mansplaining has been used to characterize an ever-growing variety of unpleasant or uncomfortable interactions between a man and a woman, even those that aren’t actually marked by sexist aggression. Maloney’s apology to Hill for the mansplaining she “endured,” for example, belies the fact that members of Congress have castigated both male and female witnesses at the impeachment hearings (as they often do at most hearings, really). Solnit herself has said that mansplaining is applied too broadly; part of this is because of how viral moments in politics and otherwise travel now, quickly and without context — something pithy and broad like mansplaining acts like a stamp, telling us how to react and share.

Which is the much more worrisome implication of mansplaining’s ballooning definition: that some people, many of whom actually oppose the goals of feminism, have figured out how to use it as a political attack, to deflect engagement with the contents of their positions.

BYE BYE CHRIS MATTHEWS
 WE WON'T MISS YOUR MANSPLAINING AND TALKING OVER YOUR GUESTS AS IF YOUR OPINION OR QUESTIONS WERE PEARLS OF WISDOM

Chris Matthews: TV host quits with apology for (SEXIST) 'compliments'

Jewish Group Demands MSNBC's Chris Matthews Apologize for Sanders Remark

Sanders Campaign Manager Slams MSNBC, Says Fox News Is ‘More Fair’ 

NO! AMERICA; FIDEL CASTRO IS NOT BERNIE SANDERS RUNNING MATE

I'm a proud gun-owning Republican because of my feminist (SIC) beliefs.

And I think Bernie Sanders is dangerous

My parents are Democrats, but I realized at college that I was more conservative than them

Antonia Okafor Colorado

Unaffiliated voters have a choice in Colorado to change the dynamic of the Democratic Party today. With Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg’s decision to step down from the campaign, the two viable candidates have narrowed down to Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. The fact of the matter is that I saw this split coming years ago. I realized that the party was inevitably turning into a place more for Bernie and less for Biden, and I knew my pro-life, pro-gun beliefs would soon be seen as hostile in a less inclusive Democratic Party.

INCLUSIVE OF REACTIONARY GUN AND FETUS FETISHISTS
NO THANKS THAT'S WHY THE DEMOCRATS ARE FEELING THE BERN

AND THE WINNER IS.....

REPUBLICAN BLOOMBERG SPENDS HALF BILLION DOLLARS 

AS A DEMOCRATIC POTUS CANDIDATE ON SUPER TUESDAY RACES AND WINS......

AMERICAN SAMOA

HOME OF THE ROCK 

HEY MIKE DO YOU SMELL WHAT'S COOKING!

 

Billionaire Bloomberg who pumped $400 million into race says he achieved the impossible after winning American Samoa

Former mayor of New York has spent more than half a billion dollars of his own money on his campaign

Richard Hall New York @_richardhall

THE INDEPENDENT

Billionaire Mike Bloomberg said his campaign has “achieved something no one else thought was possible” after winning his first Democratic primary delegates — in the territory of American Samoa.

The victory gave the former mayor of New York, who has spent more than half a billion dollars of his own money in his bid for the nomination, his first delegates of the primary race.

"No matter how many we win tonight, we have done something no one else thought was possible," he said, touting his rise from “one percent in the polls to being a contender for the Democratic nomination for president."

But even as he celebrated his first delegates on Super Tuesday, the key states targeted by Bloomberg’s campaign provided less than hopeful results.

Despite spending more than $17 million on television advertising alone in North Carolina, and building a significant ground game, Bloomberg is projected to finish third in the state behind Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders.

Super Tuesday: Lively scenes as results flood in across 14 states
Show all 29

One campaign aide blamed the former mayor’s poor performance in his debut debate in Las Vegas last month.

"This isn’t going as planned," a campaign adviser told CNN’s Jeff Zeleny. "Things changed after Las Vegas debate and never recovered."

In Virginia, too, the signs were bad. Bloomberg has a long history of spending heavily in Virginia politics, giving millions to help elect Democratic candidates over the years. His campaign has flooded the airwaves with television commercials in the past few months, and he has visited some seven times.

But that effort has shown little reward so far, with polling currently placing him in fourth place with 9.5 percent.

Despite the disappointing early results, campaign manager Kevin Sheekey told reporters that Bloomberg was “absolutely” not dropping out.

Bloomberg’s spending has dwarfed that of his rivals, a strategy that is credited with propelling him in the polls from around 5 percent in November to around 15 percent today.

Hand sanitisers are flying off the shelf amid coronavirus - but are there greener alternatives?

NO

 THIS ARTICLE IS ANNOTATED BY ME AS A PROFESSIONAL CLEANER.
Jessica Jones
THE INDEPENDENT

iStock

With Coronavirus causing such a panic at the minute, it's no surprise that antibacterial products like hand sanitisers and soaps are flying off the shelves. I can see why hand gels are popular - they’re small, cheap and you can even get them in fun scents, colours and packaging. But antibacterial gels might not be as pretty as they first look. In the midst of a global pandemic are we profiting from convenience at the cost of the environment?

I’m not saying we shouldn’t clean our hands, in fact the World Health Organisation emphasises the importance of hand hygiene, saying that it's the most effective method of preventing the spread of harmful germs. It advises that hands should be frequently washed with soap and hot water, or hand sanitiser but only if hands are visibly clean.

I often use hand gels; they don’t take up space in my bag, they’re useful if I’m not eating lunch at home, they’re practical if there is no place to wash hands anywhere nearby or if the soap has run out.

However, there are environmental problems that come with using them. For a start, they come in small plastic bottles that contain roughly 30-50ml. On a mass scale, if everyone is using hand gels then these small plastic bottles could amount to a lot of waste, a large proportion of which will not get or be able to be recycled and will eventually end up in landfills.

YOU CAN REUSE YOUR BOTTLE BUY BUYING A LARGER CONTAINER FROM A CUSTODIAL OR JANITOR SUPPLY COMPANY. AS WELL PUBLIC SITES WILL HAVE 

HAND SANITIZERS AVAILABLE SINCE THE H1N1 PANDEMIC

ALWAYS DAB ONCE AND THEN DAB AGAIN TO DISINFECT

THE FIRST DAB CLEANS YOUR HANDS, THE SECOND DISINFECTS

Antibacterial soaps are no better. They contain the chemicals triclocarban (TCC) and triclosan (TCS), which are particularly harmful to the environment as they are washed down the sink and cannot easily degrade, contaminating our water systems. And according to the FDA, there is not even evidence proving that these antibacterial soaps are more effective than plain soap. 

IN ALBERTA AND ACROSS NORTH AMERICA THESE ARE BANNED PRODUCTS AS TCC/TCS ARE  KNOWN AS A FULL SPECTRUM BACTERIA KILLER, WHICH MEANS IT KILLS GOOD BACTERIA AS WELL AS BAD. BUGS DO NOT NEED DRUGS, IS THE MOTTO OF ALBERTA HEALTH SERVICES.

USE SOAP OR ALCOHOL BASED HAND SANITIZER NOT ANTI-BACTERIAL'S
ALCOHOL HAND SANITISERS EVAPORATE QUICKLY. AVOID HAND SANITISERS WITH QUATS/ WHICH AGAIN ARE A FULL SPECTRUM ANTI BACTERIAL AND IS A PESTICIDE

So this week I began searching for alternatives. I swapped the plastic bottle of antibacterial liquid soap in our bathroom for a plain bar of soap that came in paper wrapping (although like many other items in my uni house this has now mysteriously disappeared).

Bars of soap are cheap to buy, last longer than liquid soaps and are also relatively easy to make yourself if you have the right ingredients. Unfortunately, summative assessment season did not allow the time to make my own soap this week but it’s something I plan on doing over Easter. 

SOAP IS FINE BUT, IF IT IS DIRTY OR HAS NOT BEEN CHANGED, IT BECOMES INFECTED WITH BACTERIA, SAME WITH SOAP DISPENSERS OLD SOAP FEEDS 

BUGS.

WHEN CLEANING DURING A PANDEMIC START WITH FRESH SOAP.

I've been trying to limit my consumption of hand sanitiser, only using it when absolutely necessary and if there is no possible way of washing my hands with soap and water.

The traditional old method of soap and water is not always practical on the go or in public though and hunting for sustainable hand gel alternatives was a bit trickier. I looked into making my own hand sanitisers however a lot of the online advice warned against this due to the complex method and ingredients.

I had better luck exploring the high street, where I found several organic and natural options and even more online. These are only slightly more expensive than regular ones and are much better for your skin too. When I bought one I made sure it was a reusable bottle so that when it runs out I can refill it from a larger container.

Game on: How PlayStation 2 changed the entertainment industry forever


The PlayStation managed to dominate the market by redefining what a video games console could be – and its impact can be felt throughout modern culture, writes Ed Power

THE INDEPENDENT

PS2, I love you: these games are woven into the cultural fabric ( Alamy/Sony )

In December 2000, reports began to circulate within intelligence communities in the United States and Europe of a powerful new technology acquired by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. It would allow Saddam to upgrade his guided missile programme and place many targets in the west within reach, went the whisperings. The name of the technology was the Sony PlayStation 2.

Speculation that Saddam was “hoarding” hundreds of box-fresh PS2s in order to harness their extraordinary processing power was eventually debunked. But not before the Pentagon had thoroughly investigated the rumours. Sony, meanwhile, had to obtain a special permit from the Tokyo Trade Ministry to export a device that, in theory at least, “could be adapted for military use”. At that point, eight months after the PlayStation 2’s launch in Japan, it seemed the console could do virtually anything.

PlayStation 2 must certainly have felt like a weapon of mass destruction to Sony’s rivals when it was unveiled in Japan 20 years ago today. PS2 saw off Sega’s Dreamcast, selling $250m (£200m) worth of kit in its first day compared to the Dreamcast’s $95m. And it would trump Microsoft’s more technically advanced Xbox. The PS2 ultimately shifted 155 million units worldwide against Xbox’s 25 million (and Nintendo GameCube’s 22 million).

Twenty years on, it remains the best-selling console of all time. That achievement is even more impressive considering the next four highest-selling games devices are all cheaper hand-held machines from Nintendo (the DS is in second place, followed by the GameBoy). The PS2 re-shaped the face of gaming, home entertainment and even popular culture.

“It was a big game-changer,” says Richard Lee Breslin, editor of gaming website Push Start Play. “Going from the PS1 to PS2 really took it to the next level. Two of my favourite games from the PS1 were Silent Hill and Metal Gear Solid.

“But Silent Hill 2 on PS2 was really something else. It was a massive leap in the quality of visuals. And while Metal Gear Solid 2 wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, it really excelled in terms of gameplay, not to mention Metal Gear Solid 3 that soon followed. Both Silent Hill 2 and Metal Gear Solid 2 set a benchmark in story-telling for videogames.”

Read more

20 best PS2 games ranked, from Final Fantasy X to GTA: San Andreas

How Sega conquered video games – and then threw it all away

The 20 best PS4 games, from Grand Theft Auto V to Marvel’s Spider-Man

Games were already part of the mainstream in 2000. But it was PS2 hits such as Grand Theft Auto III and Call of Duty that confirmed gaming’s evolution from a pastime, largely for kids and teenagers, into a juggernaut more lucrative than movies or music. The age of the blockbuster video game was also the age of the PS2.

“It offered a new level of visuals, gameplay, and story-telling as it gave developers even greater tools to tell their story. And not only in-game. I also remember being blown anyway by the FMV [full motion video] cut-scenes,” says Breslin. “Don’t get me wrong, I loved the N64 and it told some great stories. But with the PS2 game being on DVD and not on a cartridge, I felt so many aspects of a game’s overall quality benefited.”

One surprise, as we look back, is just how obscure the origins of the PS2 and its predecessor, the original 1994 PlayStation, remain. The sense among many gamers is that the Sony hive-mind willed these extraordinary devices into existence from its bunker-style HQ in Tokyo’s Minato ward. And, hey presto, there they were on our shelves.

In fact, the PlayStation story is the story of one man and his vision. As with Apple and the maverick Steve Jobs, the PS2 and its forerunner were essentially the product of the force of will of a singular individual, Ken Kutaragi – known to his underlings as “Crazy Ken”.

Kutaragi had joined Sony as an engineer in its digital research labs in his twenties. By the early Nineties, when he was in his forties, he had become convinced gaming was the next big growth area for tech. He pushed his bosses towards an alliance with the king of the industry, Nintendo.

His big idea was for Sony to produce an accessory for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. There was a sense in the early 1990s that the SNES was limited by Nintendo’s reliance on game cartridges. These had a relatively puny capacity, maxing out at around four megabytes. The hot new trend was the CD-Rom, which could store upwards of 600 megabytes. This made it possible to include movie-style cut scenes and to flesh out the cinematic aspect of the gaming experience.

Nintendo was wary because CD-Roms could lag, for as long as 15 seconds, when loading data. This, it was felt, would detract from the slick experience that was part of the Nintendo brand.
Ken Kutaragi, the president of Sony Computer Entertainment, aka Crazy Ken (AFP/Getty)

Kutaragi’s suggestion was that Nintendo outsource the problem. Sony would produce a SNES-compatible CD-Rom device. But Sony drove a tough bargain. It wanted a share of the profits from software sold for the device, excluding Nintendo from any cut (it got 30 per cent of all cartridge sales for the SNES).


Nintendo initially assented. But then, to Sony’s shock, it backed out at the final moment and instead announced an alliance with Philips at a 1991 press conference. Sony “had learned about the pending press conference 48 hours earlier, and were… stunned”, wrote David Sheff in his 1993 book Game Over.

Kutaragi was devastated. He was also convinced he had seen the future – a future in which Sony got into gaming independently of Nintendo. Sony had actually made a prototype device to show to Nintendo. It even had a name: the Nintendo PlayStation. What if Sony ditched the Nintendo angle and proceeded with the rest of the plan? What if it did PlayStation on its own?

Against considerable internal opposition, Kutaragi made his dream a reality. He even overcame the doubts of Sony founder Akio Morita, who saw the merit in video games but hated the name PlayStation. Fate intervened in the cruellest fashion when Morita suffered a stroke. By the time he recovered, it was too late. “PlayStation” had been copyrighted by Sony, and the project was too advanced to call a halt.


“We had to win the battle against Nintendo; we had to win over the internal opposition within Sony; we had to get this entire endeavour off the ground. I was swept away with this feeling and committed myself to succeeding,” recalled Shigeo Maruyama, former chair of Sony Computer Entertainment.

“Kutaragi was the main reason why. He’s an extremely charismatic individual ... and he forced his staff to comply with what he wanted, like a madman. I don’t think there was anything that the staff pushed back on and told him couldn’t be done.”
Part console, part discount DVD player, the PlayStation 2 became a record-breaking success (AFP/Getty)

Yet even as the original PlayStation became a smash, Kutaragi was looking to the future. It is said that the week the PS1 was released he was already drawing up plans for a second console.

It would have to be more powerful, he knew. With the PlayStation, Sony had produced a more accomplished package than the Sega Saturn or the N64. Sony had also won the marketing war with a savvy and often surreal advertising campaign.

But it couldn’t rest on its accomplishments, especially with rumours swirling that none other than software giant Microsoft was thinking of getting into gaming. Clearly, there was room for one newcomer in a sector historically dominated by Nintendo and Sega. But two?

As with the lead-up to the PlayStation launch, Kutaragi was not one for taking prisoners at Sony. Superiors recalled him speaking to them as if they worked for him, rather than the other way around. In one key meeting with Sony North America executives, two senior members of the company’s board, who had flown in from Tokyo, found themselves reduced to translating for Kutaragi as he laid out his vision for where the PS2 would take Sony.


His big idea – the one that arguably secured victory for Sony in this latest round of the console wars – was to bundle a DVD player with the PS2. At the time, DVDs were the hot new format. But players were horrendously expensive, with an entry-level device costing around £600.

At less than half that price, the PS2 was the perfect stealth technology. Now parents had a justification for shelling out on one for their kids. And kids had a legitimate cause to lobby their parents to spring for a games machine: it could play movies too!

Kutaragi also pushed the company to make a great fuss about the PS2’s “Emotion Engine” – a processing unit tailored to running sophisticated 3D games. The other unique selling point was backwards compatibility. With some exceptions, you could play your old PlayStation faves on the new console.

Gamers crowd outside a Japanese computer shop on 3 March 2000, waiting for the PS2 to go on sale (AFP/Getty)

“Backwards compatibility was a very cool feature,” says Oli Welsh, editor of Eurogamer. “It really helped make a purchasing decision on a new console if you knew you would still be able to use your old games on it. Unfortunately it set an expectation the games industry wouldn’t be able to meet. It’s been a very rare feature on games consoles since, and will only really finally become standard when PS5 and Xbox Series X launch later this year, 20 years after PS2 did it.

“Much more important to PS2’s success than backwards compatibility, though, was its ability to play DVDs,” he continues. “DVD was a relatively new format at the time and PS2 was competitively priced with standalone DVD players, but could play games as well. That made the purchase a no-brainer in a lot of households.

Still, it was by no means an entirely miraculous device. Under the hood, the PS2 was notoriously tricky to get a handle on. Developers found the vaunted Emotion Engine a nightmare to programme for. Which might explain the underwhelming slate of launch titles, of which only snowboarding simulation SSX is remembered fondly today.


“You are handed a 10-inch thick stack of manuals written by Japanese hardware engineers,” is how developer Cory Bloyd described coding for the PS2 in a Reddit post. “The first time you read the stack, nothing makes any sense at all. The second time you read the stack, the third book makes a bit more sense because of what you learned in the eighth book. The machine has 10 different processors and six different memory spaces that all work in completely different ways.”

Sony, however, had learnt from the success of its PlayStation marketing campaign. If its PS2 launch slate was wildly iffy, the pitch to gamers was laser-focused. It wasn’t just selling a console – it was selling an entirely new vision of what gaming could be.

The resonances continue to this day. Sam Mendes’s Oscar-nominated 1917, for instance, is essentially a first-person shooter as reimagined by Stanley Kubrick. Video games are in the DNA of mass-market entertainment and popular art. Without the PS2, that surely would never have come to pass.

“Sony’s marketing for PS2 was even more ambitious, really selling the idea of games as a cinematic, emotional storytelling experience,” says Welsh.

“The games weren’t quite there yet, but almost. Over time, though, as the machine racked up huge sales, the focus broadened into a very mass-market pitch, with family friendly software and poppy, non-traditional stuff like Singstar sitting alongside Sony’s ‘cool’ stock-in-trade.”

20 best PlayStation 2 games
Show all 20





Slowly but surely, developers got to grips with the knotty hardware. And soon the PS2, which created an industry standard with its vibrating “dualshock” controller, was redefining gaming. There was the ethereal Ico, the gaming-as-philosophical-treatise Shadow of the Colossus, the incredibly realistic Grand Turismo 3: A-Spec. Oh, and Grand Theft Auto III, a game about stealing cars and shooting people in the face. As the PS2 sold and sold, so did the games – in 2004 Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas broke all records in moving 21.3 million copies, of which 17.3 million were for the PS2.

Some technologies serve their purpose and are forgotten. Then there are those so perfectly of the moment that they become woven into the cultural fabric. Examples include the original Volkswagen Beetle, the Sony Walkman, the Apple Macintosh, the indestructible Nokia 3310. To this club we must also add the PS2, which remained in production until 2013. It was only two years ago that Sony announced it was ending its PS2 repair programme. By then, its place in the annals of era-defining tech was assured.

“The most impressive thing about PS2 was that it did have a personality, despite its total ubiquity,” says Welsh. “Maybe it wasn’t as quirky as GameCube or Dreamcast, but one thing Sony has always excelled at is promoting creativity with image-defining in-house games, like Ico. That encouraged others in turn to take risks, and you found all sorts of amazing, off-the-wall stuff on PS2, from Katamari Damacy to Frequency to Rez to Manhunt. These all redefined what games could be in one way or another. The game that really defined the console was Grand Theft Auto III, though. Sony still owes Rockstar a few beers for that one.”

---30---

Why self-quarantine from coronavirus is a privilege only for the rich

by Evie Breese in news

Image: Getty

Are you one of the two million people who are too poor to self-isolate?

There are currently 51 confirmed cases of coronavirus in the UK, up from 39 confirmed yesterday, so there's inevitably been a lot of discussion about the best ways to stop the virus from spreading any further.

In a plan that was released this morning, Britons were warned that up to one in five people could be off work sick at the peak of a coronavirus epidemic. This could have a huge impact on workplaces, and entire industries, across the country.

People are starting to worry about the potential effect two weeks off work could have on their bank balance.

Self-isolation is important.

Something as simple as a trip to the shop by a person with the COVID-19 virus to pick up toilet paper could pass on the virus to elderly people and those with weakened immune systems.To properly self isolate, you should stay at home, ask delivery drivers to leave packages outside the front door, use separate towels to others in the house, and basically stay in your bedroom. And, whatever you do, DON'T go to work.

Some companies offer their employees sick-pay schemes, which is great for them. But what about everyone else?

Some employers don't offer anything more generous than the legal minimum statutory sick pay. This basic pay pack amounts to just £94.25 per week. And you don’t get anything for the first three days off, either.

With the period for self isolation set at 14 days, that could mean a budget of £188.50 to eat, pay bills, pay prescription fees, care for children or other dependents, entertain... And that's assuming that a person on statatuory sick pay doesn't have any dependants.

We’re predicting a lot of overdue rent and, in the worst cases, people might even struggle to feed themselves or buy basic necessities. Once again, poverty has more potential than any disease to kill.

But for some it could be even worse.

While Statutory Sick Pay (SSP) must be paid by employers to their sick employees, not everyone qualifies. Workers must have earned on average at least £118 per week (before tax) in the past 8 weeks before their sick leave to qualify.

With minimum wage for people aged 18 to 21 at just £6.15, a university student would have had to work on average 19 hours per week, for the last 8 weeks, to qualify.

A young mum in her early twenties earning minimum wage at £7.70, would have had to have worked 15 hours per week, and a cafe worker in their mid twenties or above waiting tables as a side hustle – 14 hours on average.

For those working in the gig economy, the situation is similarly bleak. In gig economy jobs, such as food delivery, pay is given per task.

So if you’re too sick to do the gigs, there won't be any pay for you.

Kimberly Hurd from Collective Benefits, an organisation working to extend benefits such as sick pay to self-employed people, told indy100:

Statistics on self-employment are sobering – with over 6M self-employed workers in the UK – 96 per cent without income protection and 93 per cent without critical injury or health cover and often with less than £500 in savings.

Gig and flexible working is here to stay and will account for more than 25 per cent of the workforce in the next five years. While it comes with a large amount of needed flexibility, it also leaves many vulnerable.

Issues like Coronavirus highlight this real and growing issue and a lack of protection. Often we see if a gig worker is out sick for a week or more and can’t work, this causes real financial difficulty for them and their families and the result is a reliance on the welfare state.

For millions of people, two weeks off work is simply not an option, meaning they will be forced to put themselves at risk of infection.

Trade Union Congress (TUC) highlighted this on Twitter in a post that has been shared 1500 times.

Frances O’Grady, General Secretary of the Trade Union Congress, told indy100

The threat of coronavirus shows why sick pay should be a day one right for everybody. It’s not right that millions of UK workers miss out on this protection. The government must ensure everyone gets statutory sick pay regardless of how they earn.
Employers who aren’t paying sick pay from day one risk having staff coming in – especially if they don’t have symptoms.

The TUC are calling on people to sign a petition calling on the UK government to “guarantee sick pay for every worker from day one” which has so far gained over 11,000 signatures.

In this age of austerity and continuous cuts to public services, it’s the poor that suffer the most.

How unsurprising.