We are warriors E-Book

Corina Giacomello

• Herausgeber: Council of Europe
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 127

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Women who use drugs reflect on parental drug use, their paths of consumption and access to services

After an initial publication on children whose parents use drugs in 2022, the Pompidou Group has continued research on this topic as part of an ongoing effort to give visibility to these children and to develop proposals for creating or strengthening services that both protect children and support families. It also intertwines with the effort of the Pompidou Group to integrate a gender dimension into drug policies in Europe.

This volume contains testimonies from 110 women who use drugs, in 11 different countries: Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Malta, Mexico, North Macedonia, Romania and Switzerland, and who participated in individual or collective interviews about their parental drug use, their paths of consumption and how they access services, including the barriers and facilitators encountered. Their involvement through providing valuable information on gender-responsive, drugrelated policies is appreciated and their contribution is recognised.

The Children and families affected by parental drug use series comprises four volumes:
Volume I Children whose parents use drugs – Promising practices and recommendations
Volume II We are warriors – Women who use drugs reflect on parental drug use, their paths of consumption and access to services
Volume III Listen to the silence of the child – Children share their experiences and proposals on the impact of drug use in the family
Volume IV Children and parents affected by drug use – An overview of programmes and actions for comprehensive and non-stigmatising services and care

Leseprobe

 

We are warriors

 

Women who use drugs reflect

on parental drug use, their paths

of consumption and access to services

 

Children and families affected

by parental drug use –

Volume II

 

Corina Giacomello

Consultant,

Pompidou Group

Professor,

Autonomous University of Chiapas, Mexico

Contents

Click here to see the whole table of contents, or go on the « Table of contents » option of your eReader.

Acknowledgements

The author of this report, Corina Giacomello, wishes to acknowledge Florence Mabileau, Deputy to the Pompidou Group Executive Secretary, for her leadership, and the support of the Permanent Correspondents of the countries participating in this project: Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Malta, Mexico, North Macedonia, Romania and Switzerland.

This study was possible thanks to the informed and voluntary participation of 110 women, who, in nine different countries, participated in individual or collective interviews. Their voice is the pillar and the purpose of this work, which aims at listening to women and fostering their involvement in gender-responsive, drug-related policies.

Our gratitude also goes to those services and people who contributed to this report by facilitating, carrying out, transcribing and translating the interviews with women. Their names appear in Appendix I of this report.

Special recognition goes to the following people who kindly agreed to act as readers of the preliminary version of this study and contributed their knowledge and empathy to its improvement: Sharon Arpa, Monica Barzanti, Katia Bolelli, Michela Canevascini, Paola Milani and Marguerite Woods.

About the author

Dr Corina Giacomello is a consultant to the Pompidou Group. In this role, she conducted the research for, and is the author of, the 2022 publication Children whose parents use drugs – Promising practices and recommendations.

Dr Giacomello is an associate professor at the Autonomous University of Chiapas, Mexico. She is an academic and international consultant with expertise in gender studies, children’s rights, criminal justice and prison systems and drug policies. She has more than 15 years of experience in advocacy-oriented research and development of legal, judicial and public policy proposals at the national and international level.

Her lines of research include women deprived of their liberty, adolescents in conflict with the law, children with incarcerated parents and women who use drugs. She has published extensively on these topics.

Preface

The Pompidou Group provides a multidisciplinary forum at the wider European level where it is possible for policy makers, professionals and researchers to exchange experiences and information on drug use and drug trafficking. Formed at the suggestion of French President Georges Pompidou in 1971, it became a Council of Europe enlarged partial agreement in 1980 open to countries outside the Council of Europe.

On 16 June 2021, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe adopted the revised Pompidou Group’s statute, which extends the group’s mandate to include addictive behaviours related to licit substances (such as alcohol or tobacco) and new forms of addictions (such as internet gambling and gaming). The new mandate focuses on human rights, while reaffirming the need for a multidisciplinary approach to addressing the drug challenge, which can only be tackled effectively if policy, practice and science are linked.

To better reflect both its identity as a Council of Europe entity and its broadened mandate, the group changed its official name from the Co-operation Group to Combat Drug Abuse and Illicit Drug Trafficking to the Council of Europe International Co-operation Group on Drugs and Addiction. In 2023, it encompasses 41 countries out of 46 member states of the Council of Europe, Mexico, Morocco and Israel, as well as the European Commission.

The year 2021 marked the launch of a new project concerning children whose parents use drugs, with a publication in 2022: Children whose parents use drugs – Promising practices and recommendations.

This project was proposed in response to the invitation to the Pompidou Group secretariat to contribute to the discussions on the Council of Europe Strategy for the Rights of the Child for the period 2022 to 2027.

This strategy, adopted in 2022, includes in its objective “Equal opportunities and social inclusion for all children”: “Mapping, analysing and providing guidance on the situation of children suffering from addictive behaviours and children of parents using drugs”.

In 2022, the project on children whose parents use drugs continued with threefold research: i. qualitative research based on interviews with children whose parents use drugs and with women who use drugs; ii. collection and analysis of actions and programmes targeted at people who use drugs and their families; and iii. analysis of children growing up in families affected by drug dependence and other conditions of vulnerability.

The results are also included in two other volumes: Listen to the silence of the child – Children share their experiences and proposals on the impact of drug use in the family, with interviews from Greece, Malta, Mexico, Romania and Switzerland; and Children and parents affected by drug use – An overview of programmes and actions for comprehensive and non-stigmatising services and care.

This volume is based upon the generous and informed participation of 110 women who agreed to be interviewed and share their personal experiences. It includes their insights and recommendations on the impact of parental drug use during childhood on their life and subsequent drug use. It also explores the barriers and facilitators to accessing services and how to improve services’ response both to women who use drugs and to children with parents who use drugs.

It is part of an ongoing effort by the Pompidou Group of the Council of Europe to give visibility to children with parents or other primary caregivers who are affected by drug dependence and to develop proposals that aim at creating or strengthening services that both protect children and support families. It also intertwines with the pioneering and continuous effort of the Pompidou Group to integrate a gender dimension into drug policies in Europe.

Chapter 1 Introduction

” You think it’s hard being in recovery? Try and be a woman in recovery, you’re so much more vulnerable.

You are not only powerless over substances, you’re powerless over everything in your life. You’re powerless over whose bed you wake up in. You’re powerless over the company you keep. You’re powerless over everything. You’ve lost your power of choice. It’s because the substance has the power. The choice is gone. As a woman, definitely you have more vulnerability. You must have a thick skin and you are playing the actress, so you are trying to be as tough as you possibly can, but it’s all just a bit sad.

(Shiv, Ireland)

Shiv lives in Ireland. She is 35 years old and has a daughter who was 6 months old at the time of the interview (June 2022), and who lives with her and her father (who is also in recovery). Shiv is one of the women who generously participated in this study on women who use drugs. We are warriors takes its name from the intervention in a focus group of a woman, Leti, who in her early sixties decided to overcome the consequences of growing up in a family affected by severe drinking problems, of repeated sexual abuse and of living for years with an alcoholic former husband, by attending a women-only discussion group at CESAMAC,1 in the heart of Mexico City centre.

This study is built on the generous and informed participation of 110 women who agreed to be interviewed and share their personal experiences. It includes their insights and recommendations on the impact of parental drug use during childhood on their lives and subsequent drug use (66 % of women reported situations of dependent or problematic drug use in the family); the barriers and facilitators to accessing services; and how to improve services’response to women who use drugs, including to children with parents who use drugs.

The term “women” is used to include all those persons who identify themselves with it. It is not necessarily meant to reflect people whose gender identity aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth.

The term “drug use” adopted here does not refer to all forms of drug use, but only to drug use disorders based on the definition provided by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)’s International Standards for the Treatment of Drug Use Disorders (WHO/UNODC 2020: 4).2 The identification of women as suffering from harmful dependent drug use is based on their own description of their history of taking substances, as something that affects their daily life and relationships, their self-care, their “power of choice”, as well as, in the case of those who are mothers (89 % of the interviewees), the care and custody of their children.

“Drugs” and “substances” are used interchangeably to comprise the controlled drugs under the three United Nations conventions (UNODC 2013), as well as alcohol, tobacco and prescribed medicines. In the case of one interviewee, the parental addiction problem referred to is gambling.

We are warriors is part of an ongoing effort by the Pompidou Group of the Council of Europe to give visibility to children with parents or other primary caregivers affected by drug dependence and to develop proposals that aim at creating or strengthening services that both protect children and support families. It also intertwines with the pioneering and continuous effort of the Pompidou Group to integrate a gender dimension into drug policies in Europe, which can be reviewed in its last publication on this topic: Implementing a gender approach in drug policies: prevention, treatment and criminal justice. A handbook for practitioners and decision makers (Mutatayi et al. 2022).

Since November 2020 the Pompidou Group has been collecting and analysing national and local programmes targeted at children living in families with multiple vulnerabilities, including drug dependence, under the umbrella of the project “Children Whose Parents Use Drugs”. This is a human rights-oriented initiative which responds to the Pompidou Group’s mission of integrating human rights in drug policy.

Children whose parents use drugs started as a response to the Council of Europe invitation to the Pompidou Group to provide input to the elaboration of the Strategy for the Rights of the Child (2022-2027). Due to the collaborative and enthusiastic participation of 16 countries,3 between November 2020 and December 2021, the Pompidou Group developed a dedicated web page,4 two reports (Pompidou Group 2021a and 2021b) and an ISBN publication (Giacomello 2022) on the topic of children whose parents use drugs. As a result of the Pompidou Group’s work, children whose parents use drugs are explicitly identified in the above-mentioned strategy (Council of Europe 2022), which outlines the action “2.2.6 Mapping, analysing and providing guidance on the situation of children suffering from addictive behaviours and children of parents using drugs”.

The publication Children whose parents use drugs is based on the contributions of more than a hundred experts from national institutions, national and local non-profit organisations, academia, as well as nine women in Italy living in two residential communities for people who use drugs. It identifies concrete issues and develops operational proposals, which are divided into four thematic areas, each one framed within the report’s findings and containing concrete actions.

Thematic topic 1 – Countries need to develop integrated strategies to cover all children at the national and local level.

Thematic topic 2 – Countries could review the treatment demand indicator (TDI)5 and the current norms and practices of information gathering and sharing.

Thematic topic 3 –Countries and substance treatment services should engage in active practices aimed at including children whose parents use drugs, encourage referral and provide information to social and child protection services.

Thematic topic 4 – Countries should actively engage in analysing their current availability and quality of substance treatment services as well as services targeting women who are victims and survivors of violence and their children.

With regard to women and children, in both thematic areas 1 and 4, the Pompidou Group highlights the need to enable spaces of participation for children whose parents use drugs and for women affected by drug dependence. This is to ensure that women and children’s opinions are heard and taken into account and have a direct impact on the services that address their needs directly or indirectly, in fulfilment of human rights standards and their inclusion in drug-related policies. The right of children to be heard and for their opinions to be taken into account is enshrined in Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. It is one of the pillars of the current paradigm of children’s rights and is tightly linked to the right of children to protection and provision. As outlined in the Council of Europe’s handbook on children’s participation entitled “Listen – Act – Change”, participation is both a child’s human right and an expression of democracy:

Children’s participation brings many benefits to individuals and society. But beyond that, it is important to acknowledge that hearing children’s voices and taking their views into account is not optional. It is both a child’s human right and an expression of democracy. It is therefore high time to step up the implementation of children’s participation rights. (Council of Europe 2020: 7)

Furthermore, according to the handbook, participation does not contradict protection; on the contrary, it is both a right and an obligation, as well as a means and an end.

By listening to women who use drugs, as service users and stakeholders, countries and services can inform themselves on how to reduce stigma and barriers for women to access treatment, thereby widening gender-responsive interventions and better providing care and protection to women and their children. Guidance and policy can be found in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, particularly Goal 5 – Gender Equality, Target 3.5 – Strengthen the prevention and treatment of substance abuse, including narcotic drug abuse and harmful use of alcohol and Target 16.2 –End abuse, exploitation, trafficking and all forms of violence against and torture of children. The following is also relevant: the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) Resolution 61/11 Promoting non-stigmatizing attitudes to ensure the availability of, access to and delivery of health, care and social services for drug users (CND 2018). This resolution echoes CND Resolution 59/5 Mainstreaming a gender perspective in drug-related policies and programmes (CND 2016):

3 3. Takes note of the important role that women and girls play in addressing the various aspects of the world drug problem, and encourages their contributions to the development and implementation of national drug-related policies and programmes.

The third phase of the project (February to December 2022) was designed with the double purpose of continuing to collect and follow up ongoing and new actions developed by the participating countries at the national and local level and, at the same time, to listen to women and children. This complemented the information provided by services and set the basis for more comprehensive proposals that take into account the views of the different stakeholders.

Through three rounds of consultation, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Malta, Mexico, North Macedonia, Romania and Switzerland shared existing or new practices and programmes in children’s services and drug treatment that observed and took into account the double impact of parental drug use and services on these vulnerable children and their families. The results are described in the report Children and parents affected by drug use – An overview of programmes and actions for comprehensive and non-stigmatising services and care.