What is the reason for this legal limbo we suffer?
As much as we hate it, we start from the point that we are the type of “family that nobody wants”. But not only in Spain, but in the whole western world, and in other latitudes we do not even talk about.
We have been accused of being the black beasts of families (for example, in the United States). Whenever in England and other parts of European countries there are serious social disturbances, we also appear as the guilty ones, for not knowing how to educate our offspring.
All the studies that have been done so far are to say how bad mothers we are and the consequences for our sons. Anglo-Saxon studies that serve as a basis for training in public health degrees (nursing, etc.) in universities in Western countries, including Spain, teach students that the single-parent family has pathological traits, sexual identity problems, lacking a father figure, etc. (I think we all remember the University Jaume I).
What image is given of us as families in the media, movies, television series, etc.? In the best of cases we can be many things: policemen, executives, sweepers… But always appears the subliminal message that due to so many hours of work we neglect the education of our sons and daughters and for that reason they get into problems with drugs, delinquency, etc.
We are not going to talk about urban legends anymore: the supposed pay for being a single mother.
And the last one that has fallen on us with the crisis, the stigmatization of poverty. It seems that a single-parent family is synonymous with extreme poverty.
Well, because of all this:
- We do not want a law to achieve privileges but to achieve equal treatment. However, this equality must take into account a gender bias: more than 90% of these families are supported by a woman. And curiously, we women are the ones with the lowest income and the most difficulties in the world of work (EPA data from 2016).
- We do not want subsidies, but we do want mechanisms that facilitate access to work, and that this work has a living wage, so that we can develop as women and as autonomous families.
- We do not want our books or school supplies to be paid for, but we do want the service of real free access to education up to the age of 16 to be fulfilled.
- We want equality with other families. That is to say, that having sons and daughters and being alone does not become a sin to be purged.
- That the Law of Work and Family Conciliation contemplates us.
- That the Constitutional Court does not hide behind the legislator to say that, as in the Law of Conciliation we were not considered family, who is the TC to correct it.
- That the Treasury does not punish us.
- That the General Council of the Judiciary does not have two different tables for the amounts of alimony (in the one they call single parent is smaller).
- That the orphan’s pensions of the SS are not smaller when the mother in the Family Book is a single mother.
- That the Law of Education contemplates us.
- We do not want to spend another 35 years demanding that our families be made visible in schools..
- We do not want the social marketing that all the political parties, left, right and center, make of our collective.
- We reject the policy of systematically parceling the collective:tax breaks announced with great fanfare by the Government, which according to them would benefit separated, divorced, (but, provided they have two descendants, plus when published in the BOE, had another trap in small print “that the sons and daughters are not entitled to alimony”..
- To make large families for those who have 2 descendants, but… what about those who only have one? To legislate for a part, leaving out the bulk of the collective, seems to us very vile.
- We do not want them to continue playing with our families.
- No more stigmatization of our sons.
- We do not want to be made visible only as chronic poverty.
- Single-parent family does not equal poverty, which does not mean that we do not have difficulties.
- We do not want to continue to be the object of study after study, and that in them we are only the field to be studied.
The role of the associative movement in my opinion must maximize efforts, we must be united and have a clear objective:
We do NOT want to be an object of charity, but an objective of social justice, which is something else.
What can we do?
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