• A greater amount of information provided through the channels that can reach women more easily (especially elderly women): in markets, nurseries, services of all types, local TV and radio stations.

ORGANISATION
With regard to organisation, global as well as more specific projects are presented:

a) Global proposals:

It is proposed to encourage a policy of agreement with the autonomous Administration, in order to compromise on the delegation of competences and concerns and on the assignment of the resources that are necessary to ensure a greater autonomy to municipal performance, while finding the right and suitable collaboration solutions and the agreement which will allow to improve services and to avoid duplicity o inhibitions that might eventually disfavour citizens in the first place.

b)Specific proposals:
- To favour the involvement of users, both men and women, in the organisation and operation of the services.
- To take advantage of the experiences gathered by the users of the services, when it comes to design such services.
- It would be necessary to attempt to become acquainted with the situation of disabled women, in each district, and to create a network to promote the social involvement of such women.
- There should be a "referent", so as to prevent women users from addressing a different person for each need that might arise: going through a process, a file, etc., time after time.
- That a warm and respectful treatment towards the personal characteristic of the user are considered an important aspect of the service provided.
- Flexible documentary systems should be established, run by specific persons capable of speeding up and improving procedures.

It would be desirable to maintain lengthier and flexible timetables and schedules, so that both women who have a remunerative jobs and those who don't, and men may become involved in the care of the family.

TRANSPORTS AND SPACES.

- An improved adaptation of transports in the areas in which services are located, and also transports adapted to disabled persons and to individuals with limited mobility (disabled persons, elderly persons, and so on).
- Adaptation of public spaces to individuals with limited mobility or to disabled persons.

• To diversify the media on the available resources in the sphere of violence, sexual assaults and harassment.
• It would be convenient to study the types of abusive treatment that disabled women suffer, both physically (aggressions), communication (not allowed to leave home), as psychological abuse (condescending treatment).
• To implement institutional campaign to increase the awareness on violence in general, and on violence suffered by women in particular.
• Awareness courses against corporate violence.
• Implementation of information leaflets describing the rights and services provided in districts and areas visited by women.roadcasting of Information through radio stations and introduction of education units in the schools on this particular issue.
• Finding measures allowing immigrant women that have come to join their family, to fight for their rights in case of ill-treatment or physical abuse, without them having to fear expulsion from the country.
• Measures intended to control and penalise sexist violence, and violence of all kinds, which is constantly seen on television.
• To promote a network of citizens, both men and women, and entrust them with the preparation and drafting of a Manifesto Against Violence and in Favour of Coexistence in Barcelona; this would be applied both in the private and public spheres.

• Creation of specific district services for women including permanent information centres that should be available 24 hours a day. These centres would be run by specialised staff and should incorporate the existing support groups that work from a gender perspective. In addition, in all of the centres there should be individuals capable of communicating in sign language, for deaf persons. It would also be interesting to establish a free assistance telephone.
• Creation of specialised police stations, in every district, including duly trained policewomen, to ensure that these services are closer to women citizens.
• Creation of legal and psychological counselling resources, providing municipal grants so that women may select the legal counsel and therapist of their own choice.
• To encourage of prioritise the networks among women groups and associations, primary care centres, district police, women workers at the shelters and other services involved, in order to exchange strategies for action.
• To ensure freedom to select a court-appointed counsel.
• To ensure that Primary Care Centres (PCC) provide psychological assistance to physically and psychologically abused women.
• Another aspect of domestic violence needs to be considered: that of some children towards elderly people of the mother alone.
• It is necessary to articulate a mechanism to co-ordinate the schools with the institutions within the districts, in order to detect and report abuses (both sexual or physical) suffered by children.

• Creation of shelters providing easy access for disabled women, and to separate shelters able to provide urgent assistance from centres providing treatment and rehabilitation.
• t would be convenient to recall that the European standard on this issue recommends one place for each 10.000 inhabitants, and in the particular case of Barcelona, this would amount to 160 places.
• All of the shelters should have no architectural barriers, so that physically disabled and blind women may benefit from an easy access.
• It is necessary to raise again the issue of the task carried out by the shelters, and to provide these with pedagogic and therapeutic contents.
• It is necessary to formulate measures intended for the assailant, so as to prevent battered women from fleeing their home.
• Judges should issue provisional measures within 24 hours.

• Special attention should be given to immigrant imprisoned women.
• To promote the possibility of providing other alternatives and options, such as community work or reconciliation rather than imprisonment.
• To promote the tutelage of imprisoned individuals, by providing psychological support and a specific support to women with young children, or suffering from drug-addiction, Aids or other disorders and illnesses.
• To promote specific measures to ensure social rehabilitation and the respect for the rights of imprisoned individuals.
• To encourage training and social rehabilitation of imprisoned women..
• To create a shelter that would act as a bridge between the prison and the outer world. This shelter would need to carry out the following tasks:

  - provide a temporary shelter to the former prisoner;
  - act as a meeting point for the inmates and their respective families during regular permisos;
  - be used by the relatives of imprisoned women in the visits that they pay to the prison;
  - provide a multidisciplinary assistance to ensure a progressive social rehabilitation of the former prisoner (access to housing, vocational training, employment, and so on and so forth).

• To provide technical and financial support to the association networks and the organisation working with and devoted to this group of women.

To promote educational and supporting policies to prevent exclusion as well as prostitution, which should include specific actions in certain districts and areas of Barcelona, in order to encourage labour rehabilitation.

• Providing special training plans for the staff of the (municipal) Social Services, to divulge the knowledge on the problems of women with specific needs.

Labour training adapted to the demands of the labour market. Optimising the existing and available resources:

• Professional and personal guidance services are lacking.
  Special courses should be provided, focusing on labour and professional rehabilitation of unemployed women.
• To stimulate the access of women to professions linked to the new technologies. Free courses for training women operators.
• To promote self-employment initiatives for women within the wide field of new professions, and to strengthen specific programmes intended for entrepreneur women.
• Creation of continuous training courses addressing adults, both men and women, relating to labour issues; these courses should offer these the opportunity of recycling.
• To optimise the use of the resources from the European Social Fund and other specific programs aimed at employment for women.
• To distribute and enlarge labour exchange and professions with a future.
• To facilitate training or access to the courses provided by the National Employment Institute.

A vocational training that does not increase labour segregation of women:

• Information on the training opportunities provided by the same services and association in the city.
• To motivate the creation training plans for the labour rehabilitation of disabled or handicapped women.
• The Department of Education, instead of the Department of Social Welfare should run adult training.
• Courses on joint responsibilities and labour rights.

B. Personal growth.

• To foster courses and workshops enabling a socialising self-training, and increased personal autonomy, self-esteem and personal growth, as well as creativity, especially among younger women. The ideal locations to organise these activities are civic centres, cultural associations and non-profit organisations.
• To promote personal and collective autonomy of those women in most extreme situations, while facilitating their involvement -as users- to solve their own problems and difficulties, and avoiding assistance and having to resort to charity, and also by stimulating social volunteering and solidarity as a tool for integration and social cohesion.
• Cultural insertion of all women, and particularly that of immigrant women, which should be encouraged by public institutions. Catalan language courses should be free.
• To facilitate learning the customs of the society, food, schedules and timetables, festivities, celebrations and traditions.
• To create a school as a learning centre for families living with a physically or psychologically disabled or handicapped person.
• Self-knowledge courses for elderly women.
• Self-knowledge and self-awareness courses for professionals working in the field of afflicted and diseased individuals, so that these professionals may confront these situations with a greater degree of efficacy and knowledge of cause.

Training-information courses for parents and other social agents who confront disorders such as anorexia and bulimia.

• Schools for parents providing training, instead of just information.

C. Joint Responsibility.
Training addressing the changes in attitudes and family roles, involving a majority of women from all levels. To work within associations in order to succeed in changing attitudes.

• Training the male population to assume and perform household chores that they fail to perform at present. This training should be supported by citizen's educational campaigns that encourage sharing and joint responsibilities.
• To boost and improve time devoted to leisure.

To encourage and promote specific measures intended to correct the exclusion of women from the labour market, regarding salaries, contracting, unemployment, types of contracts and sexual harassment.

• To stimulate indefinite hiring of women, particularly middle-aged women. In addition, the bargaining of agreements (contracting by public institutions should be an example) should develop strategies to allow the access, permanence and promotion of women within the labour market. To assess the possibility of adopting measures for positive actions.
• From the Town Council, priority should be given to contracts with utility companies that respect equality between men and women in their own workforce.
• To ensure the compliance with the percentage of jobs reserved to disabled or handicapped individuals and that such jobs are fairly distributed between men and women.
• Free recycling and adjustments and continuous vocational training for women on active service and for unemployed women. To further divulge the training programme entitled "Barcelona Activa".
• To ensure that women who benefit from the assistance provided by social services and who collect the so-called "Pirmi" (Minimum wage interdepartmental programme) may become involved in the all of the training provided by Barcelona Activa.
• To distribute work, while abolishing overtime and reducing the working week for everyone.
• To seek tools, such as shares or contributions, to ensure that the labour market displays a balance between men and women in the different sectors and professional categories.
• For women working as household servants, it is necessary to unite efforts through a trade union or an association to enable them to become acquainted with their rights and to fight against abuse, especially in the case of immigrant women.
• To review the operation of Barcelona Activa.
• Information points located in every district, that provide information on jobs available in the European Union.
• Public control of sexual discrimination indicators in Companies.
• Sexual harassment should be regarded as a mode of sexual discrimination.
• It should be compulsory for Companies to guarantee the position of individuals reporting sexual harassment.
• Help should be provided to women who work in sectors with lengthy timetables (shops, hairdresser saloons, ….), with children in school age, so as to cover the time difference between labour hours and school hours, since these jobs imply very low wages.
• To speed up procedures for businesswomen.

• To make work hours more flexible so that men can also assume responsibilities in the household. To negotiate strategies in the collective bargains, that contribute to make it easy for men to become involved in reproductive tasks. Would it be necessary to encourage leaves? Sixteen weeks maternity leaves are too short and the father is only allowed to take the last weeks off. To propose new methods of progressive involvement, with half-day workdays for everyone.
• To negotiate strategies the collective bargains, leading to articulate family leaves and the way in which work time is organised, in order to make family life and employment compatible. Follow up and compliance with European standards.
• To endeavour to find solutions for women for whom it is difficult to leave children, parents, elderly or ill relatives, so that they can start working or follow training courses; spaces or services would need to be provided.
• To extend the term allowed for maternity leave.
  
• It should also be possible for persons who are in charge of elderly or chronically ill people to apply for a reduction in their working hours.
• The tasks fulfilled by housewives should be given a curriculum / resume value: family economy, assistance of ill persons, cooking, looking after children, and so on and so forth.

To make the contribution of women to work and to volunteer work visible:

• The Town Council should prepare a regular survey in order to quantify and measure women's' work in Barcelona, considering both remunerative employment and non-remunerative employment, and to compare this with the resources and services available to women.
• To control the contribution of volunteer work (which is chiefly performed by young people and unemployed women) so that this type of work does not substitute a job.

Review of non-contributive pensions. 100 % of retirement pension for widows.

• Widows' pensions and retirement pensions should be made compatible.
• Housewives should be allowed to pay their National Insurance contribution, just like any other woman worker.
• Aid should be granted to young people when their studies are completed, so that they can leave home.

To turn school into an effective tool to compensate for inequalities, while focusing on diversity and shared education, starting from the nursery.

• Training in joint responsibility from the schools. Education used as a tool to transform conscience.
• To prevent the school, at all levels, from becoming a space when violent and sexist traditional roles are reproduced and repeated (in games, toys, children's tales, teaching material and sports activities).
• Training should be provided to female teenagers and young girls on discrimination and sexism. Conferences providing information should be organised at high schools, both now and after the Congress (ESO Synthesis credits). To encourage reflection and self-awareness in young women by means of workshops and seminars, from high school.
• The Municipal School Council, as the key institution of social involvement, should see to it that a real joint education and a respect for diversity and differences are ensured.
• To promote the removal of sexist traits in the training of municipal schools teachers, in the textbooks that are used, the language used, and so on. The Town Council should press higher institutions in this direction (Generalitat, Central Government, and European Union).
• To provide educational and training areas with School and Professional Orientation Equipments that include criteria against discrimination addressed towards certain professional sectors, in terms of the gender.
• To encourage surveys, works, research and training activities that contribute to alter the segregation and exclusion in terms of gender and that coeducation becomes effective and genuine in all of the educational levels.
• To provide training in high schools on sexuality, from a perspective of freedom and personal autonomy; differences between men's and women's pleasure organs and between the different sexual options that may exist should also be underlined.
• Ideally, sexual education should include information on unwanted pregnancy, abortion and AIDS.
• School/nursery for children aged between 0 and 3 should be free; desirably, it should also be universal.
• The right of young girls to fight discrimination on grounds of gender, at school, should prevail against the father's right to decide on his daughter's religion.
• To promote an education campaign in high schools on anorexia and on how to prevent anorexia and bulimia.

To create a reception centre in teaching institutions so as to facilitate the adaptation of working schedules with school schedules:

• Flexible timetables.

• It is necessary to examine whether the municipal offer reaches all of the women's groups and associations and covers their specific needs.
• To make the sports facilities in the city more profitable in schedules that are especially designed to facilitate women's involvement.
• To promote a network of resources and services in order to facilitate the practice of sports among women.

To promote and emphasise the presence of women in public events organised by city institutions and organisations: speeches, prize-awarding juries, conferences, congresses, exhibitions, major festivities, and so on.

• To promote the knowledge of women in the cultural events organised by the Town Council and other collaborating institutions.
• To recover and strengthen artistic and craft activities created by women as part of the city's cultural heritage.
• To promote, recuperate and stimulate the oral transmission of culture in which women play the leading role.

To break down all of the municipal statistics by genders and to promote the creation of documentary sources on women.

• To support surveys focusing on the role of women in the history and life of the city.
• To promote the creation of documentary funds and funds of other kind in museums, archives and specialised libraries, in order to facilitate research on issues relating to women.
• To incorporate the equal opportunities dimension in the field of theatre, cinema and music promoted by the Town Council.
• To rent under-used public facilities at low prices and for short periods of time, and devote them to organise cultural workshops and other activities.
• To strengthen women's access to culture.

• To favour that elderly women may join relational and leisure networks in order to avoid loneliness. Assistance and help network in collaboration with institutions in order to provide support to lonely women.
• Actions aiming at achieving autonomy and independence without having to depend on the family.
• To promote the forming of associations as a tool to become involved.
• To remove architectural barriers.
• Since the assistance of elderly people, when there is a disabled daughter, usually falls on the latter, it would be necessary to encourage institutions to collaborate in order to help both the elderly people and the disabled woman, so that they could all maintain relationships in their environment.
• To foster, from public initiative, training courses for families on how to take care of elderly people; such courses should be organised at specific times, so as to allow the involvement of all family members.
• It is necessary to supply lifts / elevators and ramps in facilities, so that the elderly can be autonomous; in addition, the safety of sidewalks and streets in the city should be reviewed.
• The network of spaces and municipal centres available to elderly people needs to be improved and this should be co-ordinated with the network of private centres and institutions.
• To consolidate the members' cards of all the old folks' homes.
• To strengthen their existence within the framework of civic centres and other facilities for all of the population, while favouring the intergenerational relationship and avoiding the appearance of segregated and segregrating spaces.
• To encourage the participation and involvement of women in the management tasks of the centres and the activities.
• To nurture volunteering programmes of elderly people as an involvement mechanism to improve the city.
• To continue organising holiday activities, trips and exchanges for the elderly, and organise physical and sports activities, chiefly addressed to financially underprivileged women.
• To divulge general information on the activities organised in the city, as well as information regarding issues that might appeal to elderly people, in the most direct and accessible manner.
• To maintain the "Targeta Rosa"*, to allow the mobility of the elderly within the city. Furthermore, the use of this card should be extended to new private and public services.
  Families including elderly people should be granted priority to access the ground floor of buildings and facilities.
  * "Targeta Rosa"= Discount Travel Card, the use of which is exclusively intended for underprivileged elderly people.
• Elderly persons should not be excluded with reduced pensions, and a home of their own, when it comes to granting assistance at home.
• Separated elderly women should be able to make an appointment for themselves at medicinal and health spas (at the present time, the husband's signature is still requested).

Higher resources should be devoted to quality home assistance and to ensure a strict control:

• It is necessary to ensure habitability and accessibility conditions of elderly persons' homes, by means of infrastructure aids and equipping their households.
• The supplying of home helps should be increased (family workers, assistance at home, telephone alarm service). These services should be extended to underprivileged families with elderly people among their members, who lack sufficient financial and material resources).
• A higher number of public resources should be devoted to quality home help, particularly assistance to elderly people. Cleaning assistance and company should be regarded as a need. This type of assistance should be rendered jointly with families or the volunteers; in addition, it should also involve very little bureaucracy and be provided in a humanised and kind manner.

• To encourage the involvement of elderly women in the managing tasks of the centres.
• The Town Council of Barcelona should own these day-care centres, since the services offered can be better approached to citizens from the districts.
• Creation of protected or shared homes as an alternative to rest homes, in which company and assistance may be provided to elderly people. Special attention should be devoted to suppressing architectural barriers.
• To ensure a strict control of everyday operation of rest homes and access to all those who need them. As long as the competences on rest homes are not delegated, the Town Council should become involved in check-in commissions or else find mechanisms to ensure priority check-ins in emergency situations.
• The Town Council should also implement a strict control on the business licences and on building regulations.
• The Town Council should grant building land to the Generalitat so as to build rest homes and to specify an Action Plan, which would provide the city with the rest homes and facilities for elderly people that Barcelona needs.

Measures intended to ensure an integral care, with both quality and warmth, while including the diversity of women and problems such as: mental health, aids, abortion, dependence on drugs and drug addiction, family planning, sexual education, prostitution, nutrition-related disorders, stress, and so on.

• Reducing the waiting time at doctors' office: - date and time scheduled for the appointment.
• Improving the quality of the assistance, thereby devoting more time to the patient's visit.
• Co-ordination of primary health care with the network of social services, by means of integral home care programmes, which are specifically intended for sectors of the population for whom it is difficult to access the health-care system: elderly women, disabled women, immigrant women.
• To include mental health in Primary Care Centres:
  • assistance provided to couples,
  • psychological therapies: groups, individual, families, etc.
  • Drug addiction and alcoholism.
  • groups for mutual assistance.
• Gynaecological assistance and family planning:
  • quality and warmth,
  • to include family planning services to the standardised network; yet, this should not imply reducing the approaches on grounds of which the above mentioned services were created.
• Specific assistance programmes dealing on the health aspects that affect prostitutes, many of which are young and addicted to drugs.
• Introducing guidelines and protocols for specific and high-quality assistance provided to women over 50.
• Adaptation and accessibility for all: Assistance should not become a torture for those women suffering from a reduced mobility or other disabilities. Hospital beds and bunks should be lower or mobile, and specially designed for these cases. These beds should also incorporate leg-rests to support legs that have no strength in them; mammogram devices should be specially designed, etc.
• Health-care professionals should provide clear and understandable information so that women may make proper decisions regarding their own health.
• Incorporating the WHO recommendations on assistance during childbirth:
  • Bowels do not need to be emptied;
  • It is not necessary to shave the pubic area;
  • Episiotomies should not be systematically carried out;
  • The squatting position is recommended for giving birth (it helps the child to descend)

 

• To promote breastfeeding in obstetrics and paediatrics services. Mothers should have sufficient information and support available in order to choose freely on this issue.
• To acknowledge and promote freedom among women so that they may decide on their own body: it should be for women to decide upon abortion. Furthermore, they should also be entitled to decide on the method and protocol to follow for childbirth, to die with dignity, and on the diagnosis tests that they wish to have carried out, etc.
• Exclusive devotion from public health-care professionals: lengthier examinations and visits, fewer patients per doctor.

Implementing campaigns on health promotion and mutual assistance groups:

• It is necessary to implement educational health programmes, specifically for women, as women, younger women, mothers and elderly women. Such programmes should be co-ordinated by municipal health-care teams, through Primary Care Centres (PCC).
• It is also necessary to promote co-ordinated campaigns between health services and departments, on health prevention and promotion:
  - to advise young women to quit smoking;
  - to prevent gynaecologic cancer.

Control and censure on body cult advertising campaigns:

• Epidemiological follow-up of physical and mental diseases among female population, of newly acquired habits and of the after-effects that these may have (anorexia, bulimia, cancer, etc).
• Specific attention should be devoted to the after-effects that its "double presence" has on society for women's health (productive and reproductive work), with the stress that this implies.
• To promote and support the creation of mutual assistance groups.
• Health education programmes on HIV / AIDS, co-ordinated by Primary Care Centres and civic institutions working on these issues.
• Specific training on HIV / AIDS and lesbianism addressed to professionals working at the Family Planning Centres.
• Availability and speed of diagnostic tests.

To promote the introduction of training and research on issues relating to gender and health, in all the levels of health-care staff training:

• Programmes to prevent and follow-up women's labour health (since this issue reveals differential traits).
• Information on family planning should include natural methods.
• Alternative therapies (such as acupuncture, homeopathy, massage, naturopathy and nutrition) should be included. These would imply a remarkable reduction in the consumption of pharmaceutical drugs.
• Basic dental treatments (oral hygiene, fillings, endodontia) should be included in services provided by the Social Security (National Health System).

Creation and implementation of Health Councils in all of the city districts, involving institutions and consumers and users' associations.

To standardise the presence of children in the different spheres of everyday life:

• Public spaces devoted to activities for children: playgrounds, civic centres and recreation areas.
• Programmes facilitating the incorporation of women with young children to the labour market.
• Service of child-care professionals to assist ill children when the mother is working and may not ask for leave at work.
• To prioritise the granting spaces at the municipal nurseries to women who are the head of single-parent families with young children.
• To promote and facilitate from the Town Hall the standardisation of the presence of mothers and fathers with young boys and girls in different spaces and public activities, in order to facilitate their access and involvement in city life.
• To design policies intended to facilitate the exercise the right of maternity and paternity.
• A greater number of public nurseries is necessary; special attention should be given to timetables and facilities should be granted to all communities (immigrants).
• Support services intended for women who stay at home with the children and foster the formation of self-help groups to palliate the issue of loneliness.
• Economic support should be granted to single mothers who do not have a remunerative job.
• All the nurseries and schools should suppress architectural barriers so that disabled persons could have the same degree or mobility to gain access to them.
• There should be dining rooms in secondary education schools
• Schools providing education at all levels, particularly nurseries and primary education schools, should be encouraged to make their entrance and exit timetables flexible.

An effort is necessary from the Administration to carry out a territorial regrouping of the services: one same territory, same services.

• It is necessary to encourage specific measures regarding the feminisation of poverty by means of integrated actions comprising education services, public health, employment and housing services, among others, in such way that they actually enable a personal and family-oriented development, thus overcoming social exclusion.
• To divulge, spread and endeavour to include women in minimum income insertion programmes (PIRMI) programmes and to strengthen the social and labour inclusion of these women, by providing the indispensable help that they need in order to solve their top priority problems: housing, employment, children, child care.
• To prioritise access to information as one of the resources leading to equal opportunities. This implies adapting information, and the channels thereof, to the needs of the female population that most needs this information.
• To provide specialised and free legal counsel to all women.

Quality public control on the social services provided by both public and private organisations, while establishing the rights and duties of the women users when it comes to making use of the services and the duties that these private services imply:

• To increase the staff working at the social services, therefore creating jobs.
• To ensure a favourable labour situation of the social service workers, both men and women, so as to guarantee the quality of the services provided