Beauty pageant winner suing Miss World competition after being disqualified for being a mother

‘It was humiliating and insulting for me,’ says model

A beauty pageant winner is taking legal action against Miss World after being disqualified from the competition for being a mother.

Veronika Didusenko, 24, won Miss Ukraine in 2017 but had her crown taken away from her when organisers found out she had a five-year-old son.

Had Didusenko retained her title, she would have gone on to represent her country at Miss World, which takes place on 14 December.

But the mother-of-one lost her crown after just five days and was told by organisers that she was no longer an eligible competitor in the global pageant.

The pageant rules, which were set out in 1951, state that contestants and winners “must not be married or have given birth to children”.

Didusenko has revealed that she noticed the rule on her application form, but had been encouraged to enter by organisers and did so anyway.

The model has since described the experience as “humiliating and insulting”.

“I felt so bad because it’s not just my story, it’s the story of thousands of women around the world who maybe want to take part but I don’t have the possibility to enter because they are mothers,” she told BBC Newsbeat.

“Why should a woman be excluded from entering, just because she’s a mother? It doesn’t make any sense. Being a mum doesn’t have any implication on my ability to be professional or be a successful model or do my job.”

Didusenko announced that she would be taking legal action against Miss World on Instagram, explaining that the step “marks the new phase in our joint fight for justice”.

Miss World is a UK registered company, and Didusenko argues that its policies towards mothers goes against the Equality Act 2010, which stipulates that it is illegal to discriminate against certain protected characteristics, including marriage, maternity and sex.

“We say that under the #EqualityAct 2010 the entry policy operated by #MissWorld is discriminatory on various grounds, namely marital status, and pregnancy and maternity,” Didusenko wrote in her caption.

The model clarified that she doesn’t want her crown back, but that her intention is to change the rules that she says are a “systemic, widespread and international policy that results in discrimination on large scale across many countries”.

Julia Morley, CEO of the Miss World Organisation, has previously said that changing that pageant rules is complex.

“When you’re trying to get a worldwide organisation to agree, you have to look to everyone and they vote as to what is acceptable,” she said on Good Morning Britain when Didusenko was stripped of her title.

“Whatever I feel or whatever Europe feels is one thing, what the rest of the world may feel when they’ve got to look at their various religions and various things.

“If you can understand we don’t just have our own feelings, we have to consider others. So what we try to do is get a balance.”

Meanwhile, Angie Beasley, director of the Miss England competition said it might be difficult for pageant winners with children to split their time between parental duties and those that come with their title.

“It is both unfair on the child and her family to take the mother away from home for the year whilst she travels the globe helping charity causes for children,” she told ITV in 2014 after a woman was disqualified from Miss England for being a mother.

“It raises issues about who would take care of the child/children whose mother was fortunate to win,” Beasley added.