The one-year-old Women and Family Development Ministry headed by Shahrizat Abdul Jalil came under heavy attack as Malaysians observed International Womens Day today.

The performance of the Women and Family Development Ministry shows its lack of capacity to actually implement plans and programmes aimed at improving womens position in society, said DAPs national women executive committee chairperson Chong Eng.

The ministry appears to be more interested in getting political mileage instead of putting real work into tackling problems faced by women as a whole, she added.

Chong Eng, who is also MP for Bukit Mertajam, accused the ministry of ignoring the calls of women organisations to launch a public campaign themed Violence against Women and embarking instead on a Women against Violence drive.

She said that this has diluted the reality that women are victims of violence and unrealistically portraying women as being capable of fighting against violence.

Chong Eng also called on the government to show greater political will in implementing policies and programmes in the bid to generate gender sensitivity and equality.

The government is still unwilling to legislate on anti-sexual harassment laws even though it recognises the problem of sexual harassment in the workplace. [For instance] women make up the majority of electronic assembly factories but they are banned from forming unions, she pointed out.

Moreover, she chided the government for failing to actually implement the much-talked-about childcare facilities for employees and flexible working hours for working mothers and its unwillingness to extend maternity leave from 60 days to 90 days even though this is recommended by the International Labour Organisation.

I would like to stress that we should improve our competitiveness by increasing efficiency and productivity and not through cutting costs by neglecting workers welfare, Chong Eng added.

Sexual harassment

Womens Aid Organisation of Malaysia (WAO) stressed in no uncertain terms that freedom from violence and equal treatment are two fundamental human rights of women.

Jaclyn Kee, the groups communications officer, said her organisation will this year focus on violence against women in the workplace, namely sexual harassment and foreign domestic worker abuse.

In a survey conducted by Womens Development Collective and All Womens Action Society, 92.8 percent of women have been victims of some form of sexual harassment on the job.

Studies have shown that it has real implications on productivity, efficiency and employee turnover, and can also result in stress related physical injuries in the victims... [it could] have severe consequences to the victims sense of safety, self-worth and confidence, she added.

The plight of foreign domestic workers must also be addressed, said WAO.

They face multiple discrimination as women and as foreigners in the country [but] xenophobic responses to the violence impedes the protection of their rights as employees. [They] are perceived to be culturally inferior with negative values and the propensity to harm our families.

Kee said that no race was superior to another and that foreign domestic workers must not be seen as economic entities with no human rights.

The lack of legal safeguard encourages severe physical, psychological and economical abuse, and when a foreign domestic worker is beaten, raped or cheated, she will find that she has very little recourse to justice, she said.

She called on the public to extend their compassion and respect for human rights to foreign domestic workers, and urged the government to formulate and implement a standard employment contract between employers and foreign domestic workers to safeguard their rights as employees.

[In the words of United Nations Secretary General, Kofi Annan], the achievement of womens rights is not the responsibility of women alone  it is the responsibility of us all, she added.

Rape victims

Meanwhile, human rights group Amnesty International lamented that despite worldwide progress in promoting womens rights, no country in the world has been able to prevent discrimination of women.

In no country are they politically, socially and economically equal to men, said Joseph Paul, chairperson of the coordinating committee for AI in Malaysia,

Paul pointed out that the International Womens Day should serve as a sober reminder of the thousands of women and girls who are either killed or injured each year in deliberate acts of violence worldwide.

[We call] on the Malaysian government to fulfill their human rights obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (Cedaw), by taking steps to break the cycle of violence against women, he said in a press statement.

Paul also drew urgent attention to the plight of rape victims who, despite the Domestic Violence Act and other pertinent policies, are still accorded questionable protection in the eyes of the law.