Will this UN intervention end the Tory government’s ‘medieval’ ‘rape clause’?
![[Image: SNP.]](https://voxpoliticalonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/160522-UN-investigates-rape-clause-SNP.jpg)
[Image: SNP.]
So they see nothing wrong in humiliating mothers with a condition that they must prove they were raped if they want to receive child tax credits for more than two children.
Ms Thewliss met Lord Freud, the minister of state for welfare reform, last week, and then said: “This Government clearly does not appreciate that the majority of rapes happen within abusive relationships, and that pushing women to claim could place them and their children in a very dangerous position.
“During the course of the meeting, Lord Freud suggested that women should ‘just flee’, without appreciating how incredibly difficult that can be.”
Of course not. It doesn’t affect their lives so it is of no interest to them.
Perhaps they’ll pay more attention now the UN is interested and they have something to lose.
The government’s decision to limit a family’s child tax credits to two children, unless a further child is the result of rape, has been referred to a United Nations panel.
A complaint by the SNP MP Alison Thewliss to the UN will be examined by its official committee on the rights of the child, before hearings on the impact of Britain’s welfare policies next week.
At the evidence sessions, a UK government delegation will have to explain how its recent welfare reforms conform to its UN obligations on child poverty.
In a letter to Thewliss, the UN said the complaint had been brought to the attention of the committee, as it monitors how the UK complies with the convention on the rights of the child. The SNP is particularly concerned that women whose third child is conceived after rape will have to offer proof of the crime in order to qualify for an exemption to the two-child tax credit rule.
As part of George Osborne’s drive to cut £12bn from the annual welfare bill, last year’s budget included an announcement that child tax credits would only be paid for the first two children in each family, from April next year.
The government has made an exception for children conceived through rape – though it is yet to say what policies it will put in place to process this exemption.
Source: UN asks government to explain two-child cap on child tax credits | Politics | The Guardian
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Goody – one step closer to getting this regime and it’s backers dragged into the International Criminal Court and locked up, where they belong.
It runs in the family. David Freud’s grandfather Sigmund was disconnected from reality, sexually obsessed and had very peculiar ideas about women. He died a cocaine addict. Clement was not exactly the man on the Clapham omnibus, either.
This is welcome, but why in the light of Human Rights legal action against Russia’s aircraft loss implication, has none ‘yet’ been brought against the UK, for ‘Peoples Right To Life’ re welfare reform. Is the UK government dodging such action?
Where can women flee when domestic violence shelters are being closed due to funding cuts? And housing benefit cuts have affected payments for emergency housing or indeed any housing?
Rape exception is a handful of people. Affecting more is those who already have three kids – if you had the third in 2007, before the crash, then lost your job and now rely on Child Benefit to help you keep all three – that youngest is only 10 – is the next 15 years keep (remembering that the kid’ll get no help until he’s 25) supposed to come out of fresh air?