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THE BELOW (updated 12 MAR 2022)
When one hurts or kills a women
one hurts or kills hummanity and is an antrocitie.
Gino d'Artali
and: My mother (1931-1997) always said to me <Mi
figlio, non esistono notizie <vecchie> perche puoi imparare qualcosa da
qualsiasi notizia.> Translated: <My son, there is no such thing as so
called 'old' news because you can learn something from any news.>
Gianna d'Artali
The Guardian
29 Apr 2022
By Daniel Boffey
<<Dutch football pundit’s sexual abuse story on live TV sparks national
outcry.
The Netherlands has been forced again to face questions about attitudes
to sexual violence towards women after one of the country’s most famous
football pundits appeared to admit live on air to assaulting an
unconscious woman with a candle 50 years ago.
Dutch prosecutors opened an investigation after Johan Derksen, 73, made
the comments on Tuesday on the talkshow Today Inside, to the amusement
of presenter Wilfred Genee and fellow pundit René van der Gijp. The
former player, who is one of the Netherlands’ most famous TV
personalities, sought to backtrack on his statement the following day,
claiming the candle had only been placed close to the unnamed woman’s
legs. But he has refused to apologise for the remarks, saying only that
he had been unclear and had told the story of a drunken night five
decades ago <in the wrong tone>. In response to the outcry, Derksen
added: <There is no room for a Johan Derksen in the Netherlands.> A
spokesperson for the Dutch prosectors’ office said the chief prosecutor
in the northern Netherlands service had opened an inquiry. <This
research is aimed at establishing the truth of possible criminal
behaviour that was discussed in that programme>, they said. <We also
call on those involved to tell their story, as far as possible. It is
clear that this is highly unacceptable behaviour that transgresses
boundaries. In addition, the way in which it is talked about in the TV
programme is also particularly hurtful. This can deeply affect victims
of sexual offences even after a long time.> The case comes fast on the
back of claims of widespread sexual abuse on the Dutch version of The
Voice, which has raised questions about attitudes to sexual exploitation
and violence towards women in the country. Two out of three women in the
Netherlands reported that they were harassed on Dutch streets in 2021,
according to figures from the Central Bureau of Statistics.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/29/football-pundit-johan-derksen-dutch-sexual-abuse-story-tv
Al Jazeera
28 Apr 2022
By Chika Uniwge
<<The Nigerian entrepreneur who runs ‘an Amazon for blood’
Temie Giwa-Tubosun’s business uses data and technology to get urgent
blood supplies to hospitals and to save lives.
Temie Giwa-Tubosun had an epiphany 13 years ago when she met an
expectant mother who was about to lose her baby. Giwa-Tubosun was
working as a 22-year-old intern with a health services organisation in
northern Nigeria, doing surveys of rural people seeking care. The family
of the mother-to-be thought she would die in a complicated labour
because the baby was upside down in a twisted breech position. This
wasn’t an unrealistic fear, in a country where one in 22 women perish in
pregnancy, during birth, while undergoing abortions, or afterwards. As
it turned out, the woman got surgery and survived. But her baby didn’t,
and that death shook Giwa-Tubosun deeply. She didn’t leave her hotel
room for four days and barely ate. <I thought it was so unjust that
women could die in childbirth,> she recalls. <That got me hooked on
maternal healthcare.> That incident, as well as the difficult birth of
her own son later on, got her thinking about blood. Giwa-Tubosun had
been contemplating a career that was health related in some way, and she
knew that postpartum haemorrhaging was the leading cause of maternal
mortality in Nigeria, which records nearly eight times the global number
of 211 deaths per 100,000 live births. That is partly because decent
healthcare in Nigeria is elusive to all but the rich; the World Health
Organization (WHO) consistently ranks it among the worst globally. In
2010, Giwa-Tubosun won a fellowship at the WHO in Geneva. She went on to
work on various health projects, including in Uganda and in Minnesota in
the United States. In 2012, she made the leap and founded an NGO known
as the One Percent Project, whose raison d’etre was to educate Nigerians
on blood donations and distribute them better throughout the country.
This led to the creation four years later of LifeBank, a distribution
business that uses data and technology to get urgent blood supplies to
hospitals. It serves as a bridge between donors and clinics.
Giwa-Tubosun’s work has earned her praise across the globe including
from the World Economic Forum, and she has spoken on influential
platforms – such as the TedxEustonSalon – about her vision for tackling
blood shortage on the African continent. Facebook founder Mark
Zuckerberg said after meeting her in 2016 that <If she actually pulls it
off, then she’d show a model that will impact not just Lagos, not just
Nigeria, but countries all around the world.> Giwa-Tubosun is pulling it
off rather well. Working with over 150 accredited blood banks and 142
employees, LifeBank serves over 600 hospitals across Nigeria and has
recently expanded into Kenya, according to Giwa-Tubosun. She says she
has distributed enough blood to save more than 100,000 lives. This
social entrepreneurship is all the more significant considering that
female executives are few and far between in Nigeria – to which
Giwa-Tubosun simply says, <We get to save lives and we get to rescue
people.>
Bikes, trikes and drones.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/4/28/tthe-nigerian-entrepreneur-who-runs-an-amazon-fo
The Guardian
28 Apr 2022
By Sam Levine in Memphis
<<'I’m like Rocky’: my day with Pamela Moses after her charges were
dropped. After prosecutors dropped criminal charges against Moses for
trying to register to vote, I met her in person – and learned what’s
next now that her case is over. Hello, and Happy Thursday,
I’ve been closely following the criminal case against Pamela Moses, who
was sentenced to six years in prison for trying to register to vote, for
the last few months. But on Monday I met her in person for the first
time. We were meeting just days after prosecutors announced they were
dropping criminal charges against her, cancelling a scheduled court
appearance where she was set to find out if they would retry her case.
Even so, Moses insisted that she take me to visit the hulking criminal
courthouse in downtown Memphis, a building simply known by its address,
201 Poplar.
We went through security and walked downstairs into one of the
courthouse’s main waiting areas, where electronic screens on the wall
showed defendant names and where they stood on court dockets for the
day. It was mostly empty, but on a normal day, Moses said, it’s crowded
with Black people waiting to get their cases heard. She walked past a
line of people waiting at a clerk’s office and asked a teller if a judge
she knew was still around – he wasn’t.
We took the elevator up to the seventh floor, which houses the courtroom
where Moses’ case took place. When the doors opened, a sheriff’s deputy
beamed, gave her a hug, and congratulated her on beating the case. <This
man tried to kill me the first time he met me,> Moses said, laughing.
She would later tell me he was one of the officers who took her into
custody when the bail in her voting case was abruptly revoked in
December. Now, she said, they were cool with each other. Back downstairs
we ran into Kenneth Brashier, a lawyer Moses has known for a long time.
He was beaming too and congratulated her. <Usually you have a cigar when
you take a victory lap,> he told her. Moses said she’d take a victory
lap once she changed Tennessee’s law around felon disenfranchisement. It
was raining, so Moses and I spent the rest of the day driving around
Memphis in her car. Waiting to pick up her son Taj from school, we
talked about the case of Crystal Mason, the Texas woman appealing a
five-year prison sentence for casting a provisional ballot while
ineligible in 2016. Moses was stunned to learn Mason’s vote wasn’t even
counted. She walked me through several of the criminal and other legal
cases she’s been involved in, rattling off an encyclopedic knowledge of
judges, lawyers, and other county officials. She’s outspoken and
embraces her reputation as a bit of a troublemaker. <I’m like Rocky
Balboa,> she said at one point with a laugh. When I asked her what would
come next for her now that the voting case was over, she didn’t miss a
beat. <I’m working on getting a man of out of prison who’s been there
for 25 years,> she said. In her yard, she still has a sign up from her
long shot 2019 mayoral campaign. It was that effort that prompted
election officials to start investigating her voting eligibility.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/apr/28/pamela-moses-charges-dropped-fight-to-vote-newsletter
The Guardian
27 Apr 2022
OPINION
Shannon McGuigan
Freelance journalist from West Wales
<<The basic Tory instinct to silence and demean working class women. The
sexist and classist MoS article on Angela Rayner tells us nothing about
the deputy Labour leader, but a lot about those governing our country.
On April 23, one of Britain’s most-read newspapers, The Mail on Sunday (MoS),
published a sexist and classist attack on Angela Rayner, the deputy
leader of the Labour Party. The article, headlined <Tories accuse Angela
Rayner of Basic Instinct ploy to distract Boris>, claimed that Rayner
provocatively crosses and uncrosses her legs in the House of Commons to
put Prime Minister Boris Johnson <off his stride>. The Conservative MPs
anonymously quoted in the article claimed that Rayner used such a tactic
because she could not compete with Johnson’s <Oxford Union debating
training> with her <comprehensive school> education. The article,
illustrated with a photo of Sharon Stone in a scene from the 1992
neo-noir thriller Basic Instinct, also described the exchanges between
Rayner and Johnson at the Commons as <flirty>. Shortly after the
article’s publication, Rayner condemned its <desperate, perverted
smears> in a series of tweets. <The potted biography is given – my
comprehensive education, my experience as a care worker, my family, my
class, my background,> she wrote, <the implication is clear>. She went
on to argue that the article shows the PM and his cheerleaders <clearly
have a big problem with women in public life>. Rayner’s Labour Party
colleagues and countless public figures criticised the <baseless>
article. As other media organisations picked up the story and it became
clear British public opinion was with Rayner, Conservatives also moved
to distance themselves from it. Eventually, Johnson came forward to
declare on Twitter that as much as he disagrees with Rayner on <almost
every political issue> he respects her as a parliamentarian, and
<deplores the misogyny directed at her anonymously>. But Johnson’s words
did little to calm tensions – and not only because his Culture Secretary
Nadine Dorries shared the same tweet just 15 minutes later,
demonstrating that the prime minister’s statement was nothing but a
hollow public relations exercise. Indeed, carefully crafted words copy
and pasted onto the Twitter timelines of prominent politicians cannot
repair the damage done by the sexist and classist rhetoric pushed by a
prominent national newspaper, nor can they change the misogynistic
mindsets of the Conservative MPs quoted in the story.
After all, the MoS story about Rayner’s legs was not an anomaly but a
natural consequence of the systemic misogyny and classism of the
Conservative Party and the media organisations that are friendly to it.
Over the years, countless Conservative MPs, journalists and commentators
have openly and proudly demonstrated their sexism and classism, publicly
making disparaging remarks about women and the working class. MP Jacob
Rees Mogg, for example, once suggested those who lost their lives in the
Grenfell tragedy lacked <common sense> and on another occasion claimed
that women who terminate a pregnancy after rape were committing a
<second wrong>.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/4/27/the-basic-tory-instinct-to-silence-and-demean-working-class-women
Al Jazeera
25 Apr 2022
By Menna El Nady
<<‘You Can’: A way out for abused wives in Upper Egypt
Up to 86 percent of married Egyptian women face spousal abuse,
particularly in Upper Egypt. ‘You Can’ aims to help them.
Engy Raafat, a Coptic Christian mother of three in Upper Egypt’s city of
Assiut, says that when it comes to abusive marriages, she has
experienced and survived it all. So after she finally broke free in
2016, she was determined to help other mistreated wives. <I was slapped
at any time; lived under threatening glares, even in front of my family,
these were followed by physical assaults and reprimands,> the
39-year-old told Al Jazeera. <There was unending emotional manipulation.
I stuck around because I believed it was best for my kids to live as a
family… until my own blood covered my face a week after my mother passed
away. That’s when I made the difficult decision to break free.> It was
not an easy step to take. The Coptic Church permits divorce in very
limited cases.
According to a 2021 report by the Forum for Development and Human Rights
Dialogue, an Egyptian NGO, up to 86 percent of married Egyptian women
face spousal abuse. Yet, many decide not to seek divorce due to the
legal, societal, financial and emotional perils many divorced women
suffer as a result of a discriminatory legal system and society.
Mistreatment of women, especially wives, is even more accepted in Upper
Egypt, said Noura Mohamed, manager of a unit aimed at combating violence
against women at the Centre for Egyptian Women’s Legal Assistance (CEWLA).
<There, beating wives is deemed the husband’s right, often resulting in
permanent injuries,> she said. Upper Egypt is home to a quarter of
Egypt’s 103 million people and roughly 50 percent of its poor, making
job opportunities scarce. Many divorced women, particularly mothers,
struggle to support themselves as their families shun them because of
their stigmatised <divorcee> status. In 2016, Raafat sought to change
this. She founded You Can, an initiative that assists abused wives
legally, financially and mentally to stand up against mis-treatment.
Legal and societal discrimination. According to Raafat, You Can is the
first organisation to offer such support in the Upper Egypt regions of
Assiut, al-Minya, Sohag, Beni Souef and Luxor. Although these districts
are home to a significant Coptic population, she said that roughly 65
percent of women seeking her help are Muslim. <The real challenge for
abused wives is the biased societal norms and legal frameworks that keep
women of all faiths stranded in these destructive relationships,> said
Raafat. “<Patience in the face of injustice will win you a heavenly
crown,’ or ‘Just accept it and live with it. There is no divorce in
Christianity,’ – [these] are widespread comments, discouraging women
from pursuing an exit. But a way out always exists,> she noted. Societal
stigmatisation and discrimination, she explained, add extreme
psychological and emotional strain on abused women, driving many to try
to take their own lives. CEWLA’s Noura agreed, adding that societal
challenges include many landlords refusing to rent their properties to a
divorced woman, and many families insisting that children remain with
the abusive father. <Many women find themselves forced to accept these
abusive relationships,> she said.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/4/25/you-can-a-way-out-for-abused-wives-in-conservative-upper-egypt
The Guardian
21 Apr 2022
By Ed Pilkington
<<Texas mother set for execution – yet evidence suggests she did not
kill her child.
n the evening of 15 February 2007, a team of five police officers in
Cameron county, Texas, began an interrogation of a Mexican American
mother whom they suspected of having murdered her two-year-old child.
Melissa Lucio was in a vulnerable condition. She was pregnant with twins
and in the grip of shock and grief. Just two hours earlier her youngest
child Mariah had been pronounced dead having fallen unconscious. The
officers did not let the suspect’s vulnerabilities get in the way of the
inquisition. Over almost six hours, stretching late into the night, they
applied to Lucio the notorious <Reid Technique> – a controversial
interrogation method that has led to numerous wrongful convictions in
the US. As trained to do under the system, the officers put their faces
within inches of Lucio’s, screaming at her that she <had to know> what
had happened to her child. They had <lots of evidence> that she was to
blame for the death, they said, forcing her to view photographs of the
girl’s lifeless body. Then, as the Reid method dictates, they abruptly
switched tone. They gently reassured her that she could “put this to
rest” if she would only confess to having caused the toddler’s death.
Lucio insisted over 100 times that night that she was innocent. But
after more than five hours of aggressive <maximization> and
<minimization>, as the technique is known, she reached break point. She
began to repeat the phrases that the investigators had effectively
coached her to say. <I don’t know what you want me to say,> she told
them. <I’m responsible for it … I guess I did it.> That coerced
confession was the core evidence presented at Lucio’s subsequent trial.
It was critical to the jury’s guilty verdict, and to the death sentence
that followed. Next Wednesday, pending a last-minute stay, Lucio, 52,
will be executed for a crime that significant evidence suggests she did
not commit. Not only that, but significant evidence also suggests that
the crime for which she will be strapped onto a gurney and injected with
lethal drugs never happened in the first place. A mounting body of
intelligence – much of it never heard at trial, some of it actively
suppressed by prosecutors – points to a very different conclusion.
Mariah was not beaten to death by her mother; she died of internal
injuries from an accidental fall. As the 27 April execution date
approaches, concern that an innocent woman is about to be sent to the
death chamber has reached fever pitch. Strange bedfellows have come
together to call for the execution to be delayed in an eruption of
disquiet that has rarely been witnessed in such intensity in Texas.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/21/texas-woman-death-row-melissa-lucio
Al Jazeera
21 Apr 2022
By Gurvinder Singh
<<Women in India’s West Bengal fight upcoming coal mine
Women are leading a movement to resist government efforts to set up a
coal mine in Birbhum district of West Bengal.
Birbhum, India – Mainomoti Soren, a 42-year-old farmer in Dewanganj
village in eastern India, was one of at least 100 women who clashed with
supporters of a political rally in her village over the government’s
attempts to buy her land to mine the coal buried there. As the police
beat the protesters with sticks last December, Soren, who was two months
pregnant at the time, felt blood oozing down her legs and she fainted.
Villagers rushed her on a motorcycle to a hospital but she had already
lost the baby. <I kept pleading about my pregnancy, but they didn’t
listen and beat me with a stick,> says Soren. Soren is among the
hundreds of women belonging to an Indigenous community who have been
leading since September a fierce battle against the West Bengal
government’s efforts to set up a coal mine in Birbhum district which is
touted to be the second-largest in the world on account of its estimated
coal reserves of 2,102 million tonnes. She is trying to hold on to the 4
acres (1.6 hectares) of land that she owns in Birbhum, about 200km (125
miles) from state capital Kolkata, where she grows paddy and vegetables.
She keeps what she needs to feed her family of four, including her
husband and their two children, and sells the rest, earning about 5,000
rupees ($66) on average a month. With the income barely enough, her
husband works as a daily wage labourer on another farm. <We find it
difficult to eke out our livelihood,> says Soren, adding, <the loss of
land will push us further into poverty.>
Villagers complain that no action has been taken against the errant
policemen involved in the assault on the protesting women. <We were
beaten up in the absence of female police,> Suhagini Soren, another
villager who had joined the protests, told Al Jazeera. <They assaulted
us severely but no action has been taken yet,> she said, showing four
stitches on her hand as a result of the scuffle. Senior police officers,
however, denied any police brutality. <There was a minor scuffle between
the two groups when the rally was being taken out in the village. Police
intervened and pacified both the factions. But there were no reports of
police brutality,> Nagendra Nath Tripathi, Birbhum superintendent of
police, told Al Jazeera. The police were investigating the claims of
brutality, he added. The controversial coal block
The proposed coal project is spread across 18 villages and covers 4,314
households and about 21,000 people in the
Deocha-Panchami-Dewanganj-Harisingha blocks of Birbhum and is commonly
known as Deocha-Panchami coal mining project. Locals mostly farm their
own land or someone else’s and also work as daily wage labourers in
stone quarries and crushers in the area. In September 2018, the federal
government allocated the coal block to the West Bengal government. A
year later, the state government handed over the block to West Bengal
Power Development Corp Ltd (WBPDCL) for extracting coal and generating
power. The government plans to invest 350 million rupees ($4.6m) for
power generation.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/4/21/women-in-indias-west-bengal-fight-upcoming-coal-mine
Al Jazeera
20 Apr 2022
By Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza
Rwandan political figure
<<My story: Being an opposition figure in Rwanda
I spent eight years in prison, five of which were in solitary
confinement, and my ordeal is still far from over.
In 1994, I was in the Netherlands, studying business management and
economy, when a genocide against the Tutsi took place in my home
country, Rwanda. In the space of 100 days, countless people were
massacred in one of the worst episodes of ethnic cleansing in recent
history. I watched the reports of political upheaval, suffering and
death coming from my beloved country in horror. Despite being miles
away, I felt compelled to do something, so I founded a political party
called The United Democratic Forces of Rwanda (FDU-Inkingi). After years
of political activism in the Netherlands, in January 2010, I returned to
Rwanda intending to take on a much more hands-on role in the country’s
politics. I intended to register FDU-Inkingi and run in the upcoming
presidential election against incumbent Paul Kagame. I said goodbye to
my husband and three children at the Amsterdam Airport Schiphol for what
I thought was going to be a very short separation. I even promised my
youngest son, who was due to turn eight later that year, that I would be
back in the Netherlands to celebrate his birthday with him. Of course, I
did not know that I would miss that birthday, and many more thereafter,
due to political persecution. On the day of my return to Rwanda, I
visited the Gisozi Genocide Memorial Centre and gave a speech urging
unity and reconciliation. I criticised the ruling Rwandan Patriotic
Front’s (RPF)’s policies for not being sufficiently inclusive, and
demanded they also recognise and honour all the others who had fallen
victim to violence before, during and after the genocide against the
Tutsi. Just three months later, I was arrested and dragged into a
politically motivated judiciary process that included years of solitary
confinement, relentless smear campaigns and a long, painful separation
from my family.
In 2012, the High Court of Rwanda sentenced me to eight years in prison
for “conspiring against the government by use of war and terrorism” and
“genocide denial”. My speech at the Gisozi Genocide Memorial Centre,
where I called for effective reconciliation, was considered evidence of
genocide denial. After I appealed to the Supreme Court, my sentence was
extended from eight to 15 years.
Immediately upon my imprisonment, I was placed in solitary confinement
in the infamous <1930> maximum-security prison in Kigali, where I
remained for five years. In 2016, I was finally shifted from solitary
confinement and allowed to serve the rest of my sentence along with the
other inmates. But my isolation did not end even then, because prison
authorities started transferring any prisoner who dared to talk to me to
faraway prisons where their relatives could not visit them. The director
of the prison only put an end to these transfers when I pointed out to
her that those prisoners she sent away spoke of me and my plight where
they were transferred. In 2014, while still in solitary confinement, I
filed a claim against the Rwandan government to the African Court on
Human and Peoples’ Rights (AfCHPR). In 2016, just as the AfCHPR was set
to decide on my claim, the government of Rwanda withdrew its declaration
enabling individuals to file complaints with the court. Nonetheless,
having already reviewed my claim, the AfCHPR concluded in 2017 that the
Rwandan government had violated my rights to freedom of expression and
adequate defence. The court also ordered the government to reimburse me
and my family for the material and moral prejudice I suffered during my
prosecution and imprisonment. The government has not executed that court
order to this day.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/4/20/my-story-being-an-opposition-figure-in-rwanda
Al Jazeera
20 Apr 2022
<<Jihan’s Venture: A Businesswoman in Kenya I Documentary | Africa
Direct.>>
Watch the documentary here:
https://theglobalherald.com/news/jihans-venture-a-businesswoman-in-kenya-i-documentary-africa-direct/
The Guardian
19 Apr 2022
<<Opinion/Schools
I moved to an all-girls college to escape my school’s rape culture –
finally I can study in safety.
Anonymous
Until I reached 16, I’d spent my entire education in mixed schools. A
lot of that time was happy: I made friends, learned new skills and
explored subjects that intrigued me. But all of those experiences
happened under a shadow of misogyny – one that was fuelled by a culture
of unwanted sexual advances, rape jokes and crude comments about the
appearance of female teachers and fellow students that was allowed to
exist in classrooms, completely unchecked by staff. I remember one
geography class, where a young trainee was observing our lesson. As she
walked around the room looking at everyone’s work, a group of boys
waited until she was out of earshot to snigger about her behind. <Yeah,
she’s got a phat back, you know,> they laughed. Teachers are naturally
in a position of authority, leadership and safeguarding. But when boys
began to objectify and sexualise teachers – not only elbow-nudging,
gesturing and giggling behind their backs but approaching teachers to
ask things like <Are you single, miss?> before running off – it felt
like the boys had the power rather than the teachers. The very people
who were there to protect us were no longer safe themselves. Slowly, it
became apparent to me that the things I was witnessing on a daily basis
weren’t isolated events but rather belonged to a very sinister culture.
At the beginning of high school, things had been different. Everyone was
new to each other, and the <banter> among the boys was mostly restricted
to football and Fifa, beyond the occasional <make me a sandwich> or
<kitchen slave>. However, as we got older, rape jokes began to creep
into conversations and were met with peals of laughter from other boys.
No class was safe. In business studies, we watched clips from The
Apprentice, and each time a female contestant came on screen, boys would
make phallic gestures or explicit comments. Even something as simple as
an advert featuring a woman was viewed through this tainted, hypersexual
lens. Eventually, my patience ran out and I asked: <Why are you so
sexist?> The angry shouts of <HOW AM I SEXIST, TELL ME, HOW?> that came
in response made me immediately regret my decision. I could feel the
stares boring into the back of my head. And even though I knew I was in
the right, I couldn’t help but feel embarrassed.
Rape victims failed by UK criminal courts are being forced to seek
justice elsewhere.
Charlotte Proudman
Read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/apr/19/uk-courts-rape-civil-prosecution-rates
Other girls who challenged their peers about victim-blaming rape
survivors during consent lessons faced the same response. This left me
feeling hopeless – the lessons had been introduced after a pair of boys
were reported for coercing girls for nude photographs and posting them
on social media. We were at the end of our GCSE course and preparing to
leave school in a few weeks’ time, and yet this was how these
conversations were ending – with fury, disagreement and two boys being
sent to isolation for their comments about rape.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/apr/19/girls-college-rape-culture-teachers
The Guardian
18 Apr 2022
Global development is supported by
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
By Sophie Cousins in Port-au-Prince
<<‘We are fighting the system’: Haiti lawyers taking rape to the courts
In a society riven with poverty and where armed gangs use sexual
violence as a means of control, three women are working for justice.
Every morning, three lawyers navigate the gang-ridden, treacherous roads
of Port-au-Prince to get to work. Of the women’s two priorities of the
day this is the first: to get to and from the office safely. The second
is fighting Haiti’s legal system from inside, trying to win justice for
women who have been raped. Sexual violence linked to armed gangs in
Haiti is not new but the situation has significantly deteriorated since
the assassination of the president last year, which has left the country
in a power vacuum. The Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI) in
Haiti’s capital, a human rights law organisation, set up a rape project
in the wake of the dramatic rise in sexual attacks predominantly on
women in the displacement camps after the 2010 earthquake. The lawyers –
Abigail Derolian, Marie Kattia Dorestant-Lefruy and Gladys Thermezi –
help victims through the legal process, from lodging a statement at the
police station to preparing the case and representing them at trial – if
there is one. Of the 528 cases they’ve worked on since the 2010
earthquake, only 10 have gone to trial. <When you live in a society with
a lot of problems, women and girls always suffer. In such a situation,
gangs use women as weapons of war to get revenge, to show what they’re
capable of,> says Derolian. <We’re not a country that promotes human
rights, particularly women’s rights. Women don’t know that they can live
with dignity, that they can get justice. We have a lot of women who are
raped, and we know that the majority remain silent because they’re
afraid.> An assessment of Haiti by the UN high commission for human
rights in 2021 found gang-related sexual violence was increasing. <Rape
was used as a weapon to humiliate, terrorise and reinforce the control
of gang members over local populations. In some areas, the feeling of
impunity is so pervasive that rapes have been perpetrated in broad
daylight,> it said. Karlyn*, who is being supported by BAI, was attacked
during the day by two men. <I had to resign from my work at a garment
factory and move to the countryside because gang members were looking
for me,> she says. Her case is waiting at the state prosecutor’s office.
In its latest figures published last March, the UN estimates 23% of
married or cohabiting women will be sexually or physically abused by a
partner in their lifetime. Last year, the UN Office for the Coordination
of Humanitarian Affairs said the number of recorded cases in Haiti
increased by 377% in 2020.>>
* Name has been changed.
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/apr/18/haiti-sexual-violence-rape-gangs-victims-women-lawyers
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