Twitter trolls and payday loans: Stella Creasy, MP

From facing down Twitter trolls to challenging payday loan companies, Walthamstow MP Stella Creasy is fast becoming one of the UK’s most recognisable and engaging politicians. Rachel Salmon speaks to her about protecting online spaces and getting more people involved in politics.

As a former youth worker and social researcher, Stella blends political campaigning with volunteering to engage people and get things done. Before the Twitter abuse incident she was best known for her leading role in the Sharkstoppers campaign, which aims to get the government to cap the interest payday loan companies can charge. The Competition Commission is now investigating the industry.

But Stella has not stopped there. Walthamstow, like the rest of East London, is changing fast. The success of the Olympics is bringing in more wealthy residents, but unemployment is still persistently high. Earlier this year Stella started thinking about the effects of benefit changes, increases in the cost of living and rising rents and house prices would have on her poorer constituents and devised ‘Seven for the Stow’.

Stella asks her constituents to devote seven days a year to help deal with the effects of austerity. There are now two hundred volunteers supporting eight projects including a night shelter, community kitchen, food banks and housing campaigns.

‘I’ve always been passionate about involvement and participation. For me it’s not just about voting. I think parties of all colours over the last 50 or 60 years have been struggling not just to recruit people but to turn them into activists. I wrote my entire PhD on it. I’m not a customer complaints desk, I’m not here to get cross on people’s behalf – I want to change the world, so that means I have to get people involved in what I do.’

Two weeks ago Stella Creasy stepped in on Twitter to defend journalist Caroline Criado-Perez who, after leading a campaign to get Jane Austen on the ten-pound note and writing about it for Libertine, was receiving as many as 50 abusive tweets an hour. Immediately, Stella found herself subjected to similar abuse and equally at a loss as to how to curb internet bullying.

‘You have to remember that all of this is illegal offline. We are not talking about people sending offensive or near the knuckle tweets, we are talking about people receiving direct threats. That is an attack, as far as I am concerned.

‘I’ve asked [the companies] to publish data about the number of complaints they get, as obviously everyone is concerned that suddenly everyone will be flagging everyone’s tweets.

Since the incident, Twitter has promised to install a report button in each tweet, but Stella thinks they and other social media companies need to install a panic button, where users can raise the alarm about abuse without having to flag every single incident. She also wants companies to look for high volumes of messages with key words and investigate when there is cause for concern.

‘I believe in the wisdom of the crowd. I genuinely think the public on the whole are decent people who want their online spaces to be fun and interesting and lively. But if people do commit illegal acts like threatening people with rape and death and bomb threats – threats that we have all had now – we need a way where once you have hit the panic button there is an assessment process. That seems to be different than just saying we’ll wait until we get a lot of abuse reports and think about what we do about them.”

Stella says the police and law enforcement services must be more cyber-aware, but it is the abusers not the technology that need to be curbed.

‘It is a mistake to think that this is about Twitter or about technology. This is a very old-fashioned crime – hatred of women – that just takes a new form as it appears online. If Twitter didn’t exist people would find another outlet for their hatred of women. We have to deal with the different places where this is expressed not just the technology alone.

Some of the best responses to this have been online, whether it’s the Everyday Sexism campaign or using #takebacktwitter and saying ‘actually I don’t want this space to be used in this way’. It’s starting to have an impact because it has stopped – we’ve had a couple of days now without threats.”

Stella has long been known for her enthusiasm for social media; she has over 37,000 Twitter followers, writes a blog and produces a weekly e-newsletter where she shares her views on topical issues, local public service announcements and listings and informs her constituents where she will be in the coming week. But the events of the past few weeks have made her think about how she uses online spaces.

‘I’m a politician – I get abuse all the time. It’s not particularly nice and I wouldn’t say it is ever acceptable, but I deal with it in different ways. Sometimes I send people kittens to calm them down. Sometimes I call their behaviour and say, ‘why would you speak to me like that?’ Sometimes you’ll see me saying ‘I’m not going to talk to you anymore’. That is very different from someone sending you threats saying “I’m going to be at your house, I’m going to rape you, I’m going to bomb you, you can’t leave, I know where you live”.

Stella was elected MP for Walthamstow in East London in 2010, and she is already Shadow Home Office Minister for Crime Prevention.  Ironically, violence against women and online crime were already part of her brief as part of the One Billion Rising campaign.

‘I’ve had debates where male MPs have been incredibly dismissive and patronising to me as the only woman speaking in the room. When you are having a debate on cyber crime which is not a [gender-related] issue and you have somebody opposite you calling you passionate or emotional or hysterical then you want to say, “no, sorry”.

‘There are very real concerns about cuts to services and the way they will disproportionately impact on women, but some of it is about changing cultures. How can we get people making [violence against women] a priority and talking about it? We can all stand up and say an environment where 51 per cent of the population is being routinely denigrated is not one where we can all flourish.”

@stellacreasy
workingforwalthamstow.org.uk

Story published on Libertine, 21 August 2013

Taking the intimidation out of buying art

Artspace is a global online art gallery boasting high value artworks from renowned galleries including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim and the Barbican.  In just over two years, the site has amassed a community of over 200,000 collectors worldwide and sales have raised $1.5 million dollars for non-profit organisations.  Rachel Salmon spoke to co-founder Catherine Levene about her experience as a digital entrepreneur and the challenges of online curation.

How does Artspace differ from other art sites?

I really believe that anybody who is promoting art and exposing art to a broader audience is doing a good thing, but we are the only platform that you can transact on, and buy this calibre of art from museums, galleries and cultural institutions.

How did you persuade so many prestigious galleries and artists to work with you?

Myself and my business partner had a lot of trusted relationships in the art world.  Over time [Artspace] has become a place major galleries and institutions want to be, because they are in good company.

I think we have created a contextual environment that makes sense for them; we are really respectful of their brands [and] we have an editorial team that writes about their programming, the artists and the galleries.

How do you select the artists you work with?

We are not a platform where anybody can come up and sell their work.  We’re a curated platform working with what we believe to be the best contemporary artists and the most promising rising stars in the art world, of which there are very many! I’m sure we miss some, but we try to do our best to promote what we believe to be really important artists.

In many cases museums and non-profit organisations already have artwork to sell.  We have discovered a treasure trove donated by artists for the sole purpose of supporting their favourite organisation – from Saul Levitt to Louise Bourgeois, Dan Flavin, Richard Serra – major, major artists. It’s just too expensive for each institution to set up a site that can garner that audience, so it’s great to not just sell the work, but promote the museums and non profits’ missions

You have raised $1.5 million for charitable organisations.  How did you do that?

Every work sold on Artspace goes back to either an artist, a museum, a cultural institution or a gallery.  

We are success-based, so we take a commission on what we sell, but the lion’s share goes to our partners.

So, for example, our partners in the United States range from cultural institutions like the Metropolitan Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Lincoln Centre for the Arts, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, to non profit organisations like Charity Water, which does important things to support the environment, to other nonprofits who have art to sell to support their organisations.

We came here [to London] and said ‘we want to help’. London is our second biggest market. We know that a lot of institutions are always looking for new sources of funding because government support for the arts has declined, so we signed up several who are now selling art on our platform.

So it’s a better way of selling art, for them, than an auction?

A lot of the work is not appropriate to sell in an auction format; many auctions are focused on a particular price point. You don’t have to wait for an auction.  It’s always up online and you are exposing it to a wider audience base.

There are relatively few people who can walk into an auction house and bid for artworks. There are 25 million households in the US alone who buy works of art, let alone the rest of the world, and they are not buying from auction houses. [The site has also now launched an auction platform, however.]

How does your clientele differ from the traditional art market?

I think it’s a combination of existing collectors, who buy from us because they are finding such a treasure trove of work they didn’t know existed, [and new collectors].

Even if you are an existing collector you can’t be in 12 places at once. You can’t be in London and New 

York and Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro and Reykjavik, all of where we have art galleries selling work at the same time.   Not everyone can travel to every single art fair.  So it’s a platform not constrained by four walls, it’s not constrained by geography or hours of operation.

We also believe that we are expanding the market of people who are buying contemporary fine art.  We know there is a very large market of art enthusiasts who have the means, the interest and the capacity to collect art, but who don’t for whatever reason because it could be intimidating, they haven’t spent the time educating themselves, they don’t feel comfortable walking into an art gallery, or they are busy during the day. We also believe the next generation of collectors will expect to buy at least some portion of their art online.

What sort of art do you like collecting?

I look at my site every day and I covet so much of what’s on there.

I started collecting in my twenties and the only thing I could afford to buy at the time were limited edition prints that I would buy from non-profit outfits. I bought a Ross Bleckner photograph for $100 from a non profit organisation he supports called ACRIA, which works with people living with HIV and AIDS.  Over time, as I got into my career and had the capacity to buy more I just decided to continue.  But even with the interest and capacity, [I struggled] finding the time to educate myself.

You have an online magazine to educate people about art and help people research the market.  Is buying art a bit like investing?

It’s interesting the way people feel about art and living with art.  For the same price as a pair of [designer] shoes, the emotional attachment happens to be stronger, therefore it’s a much more considered purchase. So we are trying to help people to educate themselves and give them the capacity to buy more work wherever it exists. It could be in their local community or in another country, and also to take the intimidation factor out of the process.

Art is the last of the luxury goods categories to be transformed by the internet.  People often say to me, and I feel it too, that art today is where fashion was six or seven years ago, when people said ‘women are just not going to buy high-end couture online’. Fast forward to today and it is the largest online retail category.

You advise web start-ups, what advice would you give to someone setting up a web business?

I think to have a lot of passion for what you do.  It is an all-consuming enterprise.  I think it’s really important to surround yourself with a group of advisers you can trust, and who are diverse.  Running web businesses requires technological knowledge, vertical knowledge, depending on the kind of business you are trying to set up, and business knowledge as well.

I have a wonderful group of advisors and investors that I can count on to help us and I think that is really critical.

Starting your own business is a really fun and passionate enterprise. I am so encouraged by seeing a young group of women entrepreneurs who are starting their own businesses.  Particularly online, women are over 50 per cent of the buying power, so it is obvious that [more of these] businesses should be run by women.

artspace.com

Story published in Libertine, 15 August 2013

Defending people facing poverty

Show respect to benefits claimants and the unemployed.

Respect for Benefits Claimants and the Unemployed aims to bring together groups of claimants campaigning against cuts and combat the negative stories that appear all too regularly in most of the press about them.

Its Facebook page shares news about claimants who are being penalised as a result of government cuts, like 57-year-old Veronica Kenning from Birmingham who is dying of cancer, and who faces eviction from her home because she cannot pay the £23.57 demanded by the council.

Or Irene Lockett, 52, from Kirkby, Merseyside, who was awarded the Carer of the Year title at Croxteth Park Nursing Home where she worked, has fostered several youngsters over the years and gave up work as a carer when she had a heart attack. She could not pay the docked extra £23.24 per week docked under new welfare rules.

In the first month of the tax year on Merseyside alone, more than 14,000 people fell into arrears – 6,000 for the first time.

Nationally, at least 660,000 of society’s most vulnerable families have been hit by the under-occupation penalty with tenants forced to make up 14 per cent of their rent for one extra bedroom and 25 per cent for two.

It has a link to news that The United Nations Development Programme, which has just published the Human Development Report, said last week: “The United Kingdom, unfortunately, has an exceptionally high degree of inequality.”

The report shows that the poorest 40 per cent of Britons share a lower proportion of the national wealth – 14.6 per cent – than in any other Western country.

This is only marginally better than in Russia, the only industrialised nation, east or west, to have a worse record. Measurements of the gap between rich and poor tell a similar story. The richest fifth of Britons enjoy, on average, incomes 10 times as high as the poorest fifth.”

Britain ties for the worst performance by this yardstick among Western nations with Australia – and is, says the report, exactly the same as in Nigeria, much worse than in Jamaica, Ghana or the Ivory Coast and twice as bad as in Sri Lanka or Ethiopia.

Respect for Benefits Claimants and the Unemployed also collects facts and figures, like data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in 2009 that shows that the poorest 10 per cent of households pay 47 per cent of their income in tax, a higher percentage than any other group.

And campaign updates, such as Caerphilly Against the Bedroom Tax, which presented a 2,000-signature petition to a council meeting on 23 July; and information about co-ordinated demonstrations, such a day of action against the Bedroom Tax.

The group takes inspiration from the National Unemployed Workers Movement founded by Wal Hannington in 1918, which went on to organise the infamous hunger marches of the 1920s and 30s.

The Facebook page says that Respect for Benefits Claimants and the Unemployed campaigns for political change to address injustice and persecution of benefit claimants, continuing to build alliances with trade unions and progressive organisations around the world.

All this reminds me of the early days of the Anti Poll Tax movement. Lots of small, localised campaigns petitioning councils, turning up at courts to stop them issuing warrants, gathering outside the houses of non-payers to stop the bailiffs.

The Anti Poll Tax movement saw off Thatcher – let’s hope this movement has the same effect on this government.

Story published on Women's Views on News, 6 August 2013

Woman in landmark zero hours case

Donations needed to support former shop worker in tribunal claim over unfair treatment of casual workers. 

Last month the Sports Direct group announced that it was awarding its staff an average of 12,000 shares each. But the part-time staff, the majority of the workforce, were – and are – not eligible for this Bonus Share Scheme. 

Part-time staff at SportsDirect.com are also denied paid annual leave, sick pay and other bonuses available to full-time staff. 

The campaigning organisation 38 Degrees is seeking donations to enable a former shop worker to take her ex-employer, SportsDirect.com, to an industrial tribunal over claims of less favourable treatment of part time staff. 

Zahera Gabriel-Abraham, 30, from South-West London, started working at the Croydon Sportsdirect.com  store in October 2012 as a part-time sales assistant. 

Ms Gabriel-Abraham claims she should have been treated no less favourably than the full-time staff. Sportsdirect.com employs 23,000 staff, 20,000 of whom are part-time, and termed ‘casual’ workers, so they have no guaranteed working hours. 

These contracts have become known as zero hours contracts. And this case follows mounting concern over the growing use of zero hours contracts.

 WVoN recently reported that zero hours contracts were increasingly being used in female-dominated industries like care and retail. 

Under zero hours contracts workers receive no guaranteed paid working hours, and there have been reports of workers on zero hours contracts being sent home during slack periods and receiving no payment for expenses like work-related travel, training and uniforms. 

Elizabeth George, a barrister in the employment team of law firm Leigh Day, who is acting for Ms Gabriel-Abraham, said: “We are not arguing that employers cannot have genuine flexible contracts, but the contract under which Ms Gabriel-Abraham worked, and which all SportDirect.com’s 20,000 part-time employees appear to be working, has no flexibility at all for those people who sign them. 

“There was no practical difference between the obligations put on my client by the company and those placed on full-time staff. 

“Casual workers traditionally supplement an employer’s salaried staff, to be called upon when cover is needed or demand is high. 

“In return for not having the security of knowing when you might work you have the benefit of being able to choose when you work. 

“Without that choice you are not a casual worker you are just a worker with no job security.” 

“The “casual” part-time employees in this case are employees in the conventional sense and denying them their paid holidays, sick pay and bonuses is unlawful.” 

David Babbs, executive director of 38 Degrees, said: “Big businesses must be held to account and zero hours contracts must not be used as a justification to abuse employees’ rights. 

“We want to help make sure employees’ rights are respected, and these contracts are not used as another means to maximise profit at the expense of hard-working people.” 

To donate, click here

Story published in Women's Views on News, 13 August 2013

Female students hit by austerity

Report finds cuts in education, benefits and support services may deter women from further and higher education. 

A new report by the National Union of Students (NUS) called Cut to the Quick has outlined the impact of government cuts and reforms on female students. 

The report quotes research from the House of Commons Library which concluded that 73 per cent of the savings identified in the 2011 Autumn 

Financial Statement came from women’s pockets, and that subsequent budgets and policies have failed to redress this imbalance. 

The report also outlines the way cuts to wider services such as benefits and Surestart Children’s Centres will stop women from entering and staying in further and higher education. It quotes the chief executive of the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education, NIACE, who describes the situation as a ‘car crash’ for lone parents and mothers at home with children who do not receive active benefits and who will be priced out of a return to the labour market through education. 

In further education anyone over 24 taking a Level 3 qualification, equivalent to ‘A’ Level, or above will have to pay fees and take out a loan to cover them if they can’t afford to pay from 2013. 

The NUS believes this measure will hit women returning to education after having children, or those who missed out at school. 

Over 70 per cent of those taking access to higher education courses for example, are women. But students taking the Access Course at Bournemouth and Poole College, for example, have been warned that fees will rise from £750 to £3,750  in 2013, following the removal of a £3,000 government subsidy. In 2010 the majority of students in higher education – 57 per cent – were women And in 2010 the government announced that from 2012, it would lift the cap on tuition fees so they could increase from £3,000 to as much as £9,000. 

The average fee for a higher education course was £8,354 in the academic year 2012-13, according to the report. Cut to the Quick quotes the Equality and Human Rights Commission report Sex and Power, which claims that women take longer to pay their loans back due to the gender pay gap. 

Women are also likely to be more wary about taking on large amounts of debt than men, according to research from Universities UK.  

Student parents are also one of the most debt averse groups. And despite leaving education with better qualifications, women’s incomes tend to dip after they have children. 

And female apprentices are more likely to be taking courses that lead to low paying jobs than their male counterparts; nine out of ten childcare and hairdressing apprentices are women, only one in 30 in construction and engineering are women.

 Female apprentices earn on average 21 per cent less than males. This is greater than the overall gender pay gap. 

The report points out that the government is choosing to invest heavily in large physical infrastructure projects, rather than social initiatives, as a way of getting out of the recession, but which will provide highly paid jobs for men rather than women. 

According to the report, the government has tended to cut funding for arts and social science studies courses, where over two thirds of the students are women, and protect subjects like engineering and computer science, where over four fifths of the students are male. 

These cuts may lead to larger class sizes and a declining in quality of the arts courses. And even when women do graduate in science and technology-related subjects, they find it harder to gain employment in their chosen field. 

Under a third of female science and technology graduates of working age are employed in science, engineering and technology related jobs, compared with a half of men, according to figures from WISE, which promotes women’s participation in science, engineering and technology jobs. 

The NUS warns that in a bid to save money some educational institutions may try to cut student services. 

The report contains an account of a successful campaign by Goldsmiths Student Union against the closure of the college nursery. Cuts to police services may affect street safety and cuts to women’s refuges may curtail a woman’s ability to seek help after a violence attack.

 The NUS cites the Ministry of Justice’s own Equality Impact Assessment for the Legal Aid Bill which found the removal of Legal Aid will affect over 350,000 women, who will lose their right to financial support, particularly in cases relating to housing, benefits, debt and family.

 The report points out that under the Public Sector Equality Duty public institutions are required to consider the impact of cuts on equality, and that campaigners have successfully challenged organisations that have failed to carry out these assessments thoroughly enough. 

But the NUS is now concerned that the government’s recent announcement that there will be a review of the Equality Duty will limit women’s ability to fight cuts and defend services. 

Cut to the Quick not only provides a wealth of data and concrete examples of the disproportionate impact of the cuts on female students and women generally, but it is a useful campaigning tool, providing case studies and examples of successes, such as the NUS’s successful campaign against cuts to the Care to Learn funding. It also lists useful organisations and resources.

Story published on Women's Views on News, 15 August 2013

New DPP announced and she's a woman

Alison Saunders takes over as Director of Public Prosecutions later this year.

Last week the Crown Prosecution Service announced that Alison Saunders would be the new Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), and will take over from Keir Starmer in November.

She will be the head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), responsible for deciding whether or not to prosecute people for crimes and what the charges should be.

She is the second woman to hold the job.

According to the Guardian, Saunders is one of the most experienced prosecutors in the country.  She has worked on some of the most high-profile cases, such as the retrial of Stephen Lawrence’s killers and the successful conviction of David Mulcahy, the ‘railway rapist’, who was convicted of a series of rapes and murders in the 1980s.

In 2011 she and her staff kept the courts open day and night to prosecute suspects following the London riots.  She was awarded a CBE in 2012.

Saunders joined the CPS in 1986 when it was first formed after spending time advising underwriters at Lloyds of London, which she described as ‘a bit boring’.

She spent time at the CPS policy unit, where she developed expertise in child victims and child witnesses, as well as a stint at its Serious Crimes Unit which deals with offences like people trafficking and drug running.

She is currently head of the Crown Prosecution Service in London.

Saunders has strongly-held views about rape. In an interview for the Guardian last year she said she was frustrated by how many rape trials end in acquittals and said society was lagging behind the legal system when it came to its view of women.

She and her colleagues have done a lot of work to challenge myths and stereotypes about rape within the CPS, but in an interview with the Guardian last year she acknowledged that there was still a lot of work to be done with juries.

“We have had consultant psychiatrists to talk to us about things like – you cannot expect a rape victim to break down in tears, you cannot expect them to tell the story straight.

“You can see how some members of the jury can come along with preconceived ideas. They might still subscribe to the myths and stereotypes that we have all had a go at busting,” she said.

Story published on Women's Views on News, 1 August 2013