Achieving equality under the law

Article by Adam Green, freelance journalist

The UN is warning of an increasingly organised pushback against gender equality and a global regression in women’s rights. Legal and justice systems have been complicit; in the United States and Poland, court cases were recently responsible for significant rollbacks of women’s sexual and reproductive rights. At the University of Birmingham Law School, Professor Meghan Campbell is working to expose where the law falls short and to unlock ways of changing it.

“If you ask people on an individual level, they think we should all be treated equally,” says Professor Campbell. “But at the macro level, people are very suspicious of equality. There’s rising hatred and anger based on a suspicion that equal rights for women are going to jeopardise traditional institutions, like the family.”

This sentiment is gaining traction around the world. In the US, politicians are advocating for rollbacks of women’s rights in the name of family values, and European far-right groups are drawing on similar ideas. Women’s rights have also become a divisive issue in elections in countries with growing anti-feminist movements, including South Korea. In the UK, 47% of people – and a majority of men – say women’s equality has gone “far enough”.

This reflects, in part, a failure to recognise how historical inequalities have become embedded in modern law. Professor Campbell, a world expert on international human rights and the impact of poverty on women’s equality, seeks to challenge structural problems within the judiciary and constitution that can constrain legal progress. “Inequality is not always the result of explicitly discriminatory attitudes,” she says. “Often, it is embedded in the structures and systems that societies have inherited, designed during a time when women were not part of public life.”

Unpacking the legacy of austerity

Professor Campbell’s work is revealing the subtle but powerful influence of poverty on women’s equality. Austerity in the UK following the financial crisis of 2008 has taken a disproportionate toll on women, and many of its effects persist today. “At the beginning of austerity, politicians said, ‘We’re all going to bear the brunt equally. We all have to pull up our socks. We’re all in this together’,” says Professor Campbell. “But, if you look at the evidence, certain groups bore the cost more than others: disabled people, women, children, older people.”

Indeed, since 2010, the annual losses for these vulnerable groups due to cuts to social security amount to thousands of pounds:

The UK Supreme Court has accepted that welfare reforms measures, which were brought in as part of the austerity package, have been indirectly discriminatory against women. However, it ruled that these inequalities were justified in pursuit of redressing the economic deficit and securing the economic wellbeing of the country. Professor Campbell cites this as an example of how apparently neutral legal and policy structures can perpetuate poverty and inequality. “The way the courts have dealt with austerity has ignored why it happened, and deemed it beyond the law’s scope to deal with,” she says. “Those political choices perpetuated inequalities that got encoded into law and eroded women’s equal legal rights.”

The Universal Credit cap offers an instructive example of how indirect discrimination works. It is a neutral rule that applies to the amount of benefits a person can claim. Yet 72% of the households affected by the cap are lone parents, and 85% of lone parents are women, meaning it is mostly women who are burdened by the cap. Benefit caps may also contribute to economic dependence, forcing women to remain with abusive partners to avoid losing financial support. “The state claims that the benefit rules are to incentivise people to go into paid work, but this ignores the fact that many women are taking care of their children at home,” says Professor Campbell. “This is not conceptualised as valuable enough work to activate your entitlement to state support.”

Educational empowerment

Access to education is another crucial component of equal rights. In international human rights law, access to comprehensive sexuality education is recognised as important to fulfilling a range of children’s rights, including the rights to life, education, health and equality, as well as the right to be free from violence. UN treaty bodies have stressed that these rights can be undermined when age-appropriate, comprehensive sex education is not provided.

Research has linked comprehensive sex education with lower rates of adolescent pregnancy, greater empowerment among young people, and safer, more equal relationships. Yet a growing right-wing backlash against progressive approaches to sex, gender and equality has threatened access to this education. In Florida, for example, the Department of Education has sought to restrict teaching about consent, contraception, and sexually transmitted diseases. Conservative movements are backing similar measures elsewhere. The “Don’t Mess with My Kids” movement, founded in Peru, has spread to countries including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico, opposing comprehensive sexuality and gender-equality education.

Lawyers around the world have challenged such restrictions on a human rights basis, with courts taking action to prevent the implementation of anti-sex-education laws in Mexico and Brazil. Landmark cases in Sierra Leone and Tanzania have also challenged bans preventing pregnant adolescents and young mothers from returning to school.

Professor Campbell has contributed to this international effort, working as an independent consultant for the Council of Europe on comprehensive sex education. She conducted a feasibility study on age-appropriate comprehensive sexuality education to strengthen responses for preventing and combating violence, and helped to develop a draft recommendation on age-appropriate comprehensive sexuality education that was recently passed by the the Council of Europe Committee of Ministers. “This is a landmark as it is one of the first legal instruments dedicated to comprehensive sexuality education,” she says.

Rights in reality

Legal change can be slow, and legal processes daunting. But through years of research and advocacy, Professor Campbell has seen her work reflected in changes beyond the courtroom. “The impacts of our work are not always direct, but you start to see your arguments mirrored in the law in ways you never thought it would,” she says. “You see in many ways how it changes things, and how important it is to bring in an equality lens to lots of life’s questions.”

Those impacts can extend beyond the cases she works on. Through the RightsUp podcast, Professor Campbell brings human rights analysis to a non-specialist audience through conversations with experts, including the chairperson of the UN Working Group on Discrimination Against Women to discuss gender apartheid following the Taliban’s return to power. Comparing legal cases and strategies across jurisdictions reveals both the different ways inequality is produced through law and the possibilities for challenging it.

The international outlook is reinforced by the diverse legal environment at Birmingham Law School. “I feel privileged to be able to work with so many colleagues who come to law with the same questions as me, like how law has been part of creating inequalities, and how it can be repurposed to break these inequalities and create more social justice,” Professor Campbell says. “Being able to bounce ideas around with people in formal and informal ways really enriches the process of producing research.”

In a moment when gender equality appears to be moving backwards, should we panic? “We want to believe that women’s equality rights are linear, but there have historically been moments of upswing and backswing,” says Professor Campbell. Through education, collaboration and a commitment to upholding human rights principles, she believes progress remains possible. “We’re working to reshape the conversation to say that equality is a positive for everybody, not just something that accelerates for a few people and leaves others behind,” she says.