Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-10-28-Speech-4-014"
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"en.20041028.2.4-014"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, you have depicted for us the situation ten years on from this House’s adoption of the report on combating poverty among women in Europe, and have taken stock of it; I have to say that we have achieved a fair bit, and a lot has happened in Europe. One might say that, at the Beijing World Conference on Women, Europe stood out as a beacon of women’s rights. We have always spearheaded them, and thus it is particularly painful that we have been unable to bring about any decisive reduction in the gap between the poor and the well-off in Europe.
I see poverty as having a woman’s face, and the facts make it apparent to all that there is still much to do to change that situation. Women still make up the majority in the groups at risk: the long-term unemployed, the lone parents and the impoverished elderly. It is particularly painful and tragic that children are at particularly high risk of poverty in our prosperous society, and let me just say that I was therefore particularly outraged by Mr Buttiglione’s discriminatory remarks about mothers who bring up children on their own. That is something we must not put up with nor allow to go unchallenged.
It is in education that the gender gap becomes glaringly apparent. A reading of UNESCO’s figures reveals that the lack of education is one of the key factors forcing women into poverty. Another factor in Europe is that we women are employed under insecure conditions; there is also the exceptionally high incidence of violence in these social groups. Maternal mortality is on the rise, and the lives of women living in poverty are at particular risk. Women are also especially hard hit by the epidemic of HIV and Aids, currently representing the majority of those newly infected worldwide. All these aspects we have to take into account and redouble our efforts to deal with them. The economic losses resulting from them are enormous, and so, when implementing the Lisbon strategy, and on the points to which the Commissioner referred, we should really press the point home that the key element underpinning the European social model is, in the final analysis, women’s development and support for them, and that we in Europe really do have the most generous resources for further empowering women and thereby making European society more human.
We on the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality demand that these points be incorporated in future major projects on the European social model, in the Progress programme, in the Structural Funds and in the new employment guidelines. The Constitutional Treaty provides us with good instruments for this purpose; let us make it come alive and, by means of gender mainstreaming, give women pride of place in our deliberations."@en1
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