Women's law project

[ItsAllGoingToBeFine]

There's been a suggestion on twitter that a "Women's Law Project" would be a good idea. A central body that women can support, that would take on important strategic cases - like the fox killers Good Law project but for women.

The legal feminist collective are looking at it:

twitter.com/SydneyAllMoore/status/1390343543869394946?s=19

This seems like a great, and much needed project and I would certainly dig for this if it happened.

I thought I should start a thread so that they can see the sort of support they would have.

Donate. Support. Volunteer. Anything. Whatever they need.

This sounds like a great idea, I would donate on a regular basis. Somewhere that can be signposted to any woman or girl as a first point of call.

Many women who experience discrimination because of gender ID politics may lack the knowledge posters on this board and indeed it may be the first time they've come up against it. So to have so somewhere they can turn to with real expertise would be very valuable.

I’d support it too. I was thinking about all the small, essential organisations - like Wight-DASH - who are vulnerable to be targeted by extreme activists, especially after the ruling against Ann Sinnott last week. There is a zero chance that people won’t start waving this in women’s faces and claiming, however wrongly, that it means refuges, lesbian groups, women’s groups ‘can’t’ be single sex. A resource that could provide form letters with legal citations, and then additional advice (cheaper to produce then for one firm because the research is already done and the expertise is there) would be brilliant, and might become essential. Like safer schools or transgender trend but able to represent all sorts of organisations. A Women’s Advice Bureau! Or, I don’t know, a Women’s Social and Political Union. The first thing it would need to do would be to use its own advice to repel boarders, of course.

Yes. Me too.

It’s trivial I suppose or ‘typical frivolous femaling’ maybe according to some but I can’t help but think of Bug’s Life and how even when the grasshoppers are bigger and stronger, and how they have the ants running in circles to supply them, so busy they can’t think or act in their own interests.

When the ants take a moment, see clearly, stick together, organise and unite - they can prevail.

We may seem small and insignificant to certain people but women are the backbone of society. We feed, care for and support those around us.

I suspect if we can unite and form a cohesive strategy, that we will be unstoppable, not only by sheer numbers, but also because society cannot truly function without the cooperation of women.

Wasn’t there a study somewhere that suggested the ‘savings’ of lowering our pension age were completely wiped out by the ensuing rising cost of (previously unpaid) care we would have done if retiring at the lower age?

We can do this.

We can.

And we must.

Brilliant idea. Don't have a lot but would set up a direct debit for this project.

Isn't this what the Centre for Women's Justice is about?

It would just be a duplication and spreading our meagre resources more thinly by splitting them between two similar groups.

I'm very much in.

Count me in.

The Centre for Women's Justice is focussed on justice for female victims of violence/ domestic violence. It's a charity and it has a very specific remit which doesn't fit with the kind of legal battles we have ahead of us.

CfWJ is currently focused on that because they are small and underfunded and have to prioritise.

It would be ridiculous and counter productive to start a parrallel organisation.

They are using the courts to set precedents because campaigning doesn't work, because women dont count.

It would be divisive to set up a competitive organisation.

First step would be to find out if CfWJ would want a wider remit if the money was there.

I agree we need to find a way to draw the current expertise and energy together. There are too many small parallel groups now running and I think this risks duplication of effort and dissipation of resources.

Agree it sounds an excellent first step to see if CfWJ would want a wider remit. They are already set up.

Employing a barrister or solicitor I think would be very expensive and not necessarily the right focus for funds. But could be 'bought in' when a case is identified that does need to go to court. It could act as a 'triage' to filter out hopeless cases but push forward those that have a good chance of winning.

I think it'd be good to see if the cfwj would be able to widen their remit.

@stumbledin

CfWJ is currently focused on that because they are small and underfunded and have to prioritise.

It would be ridiculous and counter productive to start a parrallel organisation.

They are using the courts to set precedents because campaigning doesn't work, because women dont count.

It would be divisive to set up a competitive organisation.

First step would be to find out if CfWJ would want a wider remit if the money was there.

Just because they are really good at the aspects of law required in their specific area doesn't mean that they are necessarily the best vehicle to tackle the major law reform required here. Not sure whether law reform would count as a charity, either.

No disrespect to them. Different organisations, different purposes.

@PronounssheRa

This sounds really interesting. Women have shown they can financially support legal action.

This really jumped out at me as showing how you can't just focus on one part of feminism - not that I'm suggesting that this isn't an important area of focus.

The fact that there's a consideration that women couldn't fund something like this (while men could) really shows how necessary it is to ensure women have equal opportunities for well paid employment (including affordable childcare), protection from discrimination while in employment, for traditionally female jobs to be paid at the same levels as equivalent traditionally male jobs, a reliable way of ensuring that absent fathers don't financially neglect their children, etc

If women don't have the same access to money, we can never have a fair fight for an equal part in a society that has been set up by men over hundreds of years.

I realise this won't be news to most of you, but I'm quite new to this and the more I read, the more things start going "ping" in my head.

I’d donate to that

I don’t see the problem with multiple groups (hopefully) operating in this space? Women’s issues span the range of legal issues obviously. You’d always need the very best fine detail oriented legal specialists experienced in the specific area of each case to win it. Collaborations with experts in other legal areas can still happen where needed?

I hope academic lawyers studying law and law schools training new lawyers run courses and publish new research around women’s issues and legal specialisms too.

A yes from me. And they can have the monthly DD I've recently stopped paying to the Women's Equality Party and to the Good Law Project.

I’m in.

Yes I'd donate

They can have my labour party membership DD! And my partners! It would be great to have a single, central legal organisation through which to push back on the alarming resurgence of misogyny.

And really they need to set it up ASAP before someone cynically grabs the idea in order to make sure the term "woman" also includes some males. I'm looking at you, Vagina Museum.

You don’t necessarily need lawyers to do much of the ground work like information gathering provided there is someone overseeing.
Yes this is definitely true, and much cheaper! But how best to turn it from some ideas on mumsnet and twitter into an actual project? I suppose the first thing is to talk to some of the gc lawyers who work in relevant areas of law.

I saw this. GRARG discussed the idea at a meeting:

gcritical.org/2021/05/15/grarg-meeting-13th-may-2021/

From the site
"The Female Law Project/Women’s Law
There has been a lot of talk on social media about the need for a formal group that would operate to provide help and advice to women who wish to challenge law/policy around issues of the sex/gender conflation. We agree that this would be a really helpful project with the potential for significant impact and want to give our full support to any bigger and better placed group who is willing to take it on. We envisage it would require a Director on a salary which could be funded by membership subscriptions. It would enable a speedy and co-ordinated response to any potential unlawful or discriminatory activity and could provide support and signposting. For cases which are serious enough to require an application for court, the project could assist with fund raising via a dedicated crowd funding platform.

If no other group is interested in taking this further, then we will meet again in June and decide what steps we can take to make this a reality. Any comments or proposals, please contact me @SVPhillimore"

There are other projects on the same blog post too.