The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : ``Single women face discrimination''

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Dec 14, 2006
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

``Single women face discrimination''

Staff Reporter

CHENNAI : Single mothers make great efforts to help their children complete schooling in the face of harassment from family, neighbours and employers, a survey of single women in the city's slums has found.

The category of single women includes the widowed, destitute and the unmarried, said K.R. Renuga, Executive Director of the Centre for Women's Development and Research, at a conference on the rights of single women here on Monday.

"We first encountered the problems of single women while working with the tsunami-affected. In the 13 kuppams we worked in, 543 women were single and excluded from all the benefits the government offered. The explanation was that they were not tax payers," she said.

To examine the problems of the underprivileged single women, the Centre surveyed the city slums and counted upwards of 2500 single women, of whom 500 were selected for the study. It has also confirmed the National Sample Survey's estimate that about one-tenth of household are headed by single women.

Some of these women live in fear. One mentioned going to bed late and waking up early to watch out for drunken neighbours trying to force their way in. "The women are not sympathetic either. They sometimes accuse me of calling them or of tempting them to behave like this by remaining unmarried," she said.

The cultural violence inflicted on them was visible in the way the group of women chosen to light the kuthuvilakku refused the task, Ms. Renuga said. They described themselves as castaways and refused to participate in the act and had to be convinced with great difficulty, Ms. Renuga said.

The event marked the culmination of a street theatre campaign for the rights of single women conducted in Zone 10, in areas like Mylapore, Adyar, Thiruvanmiyur, Taramani, Besant Nagar and Indira Nagar, between International Human Rights Day and International Day for Violence against Women.

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