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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
Al Jazeera
10 Jan 2022
<<‘Auction’ of India’s Muslim women shows tech weaponised for abuse.
Technologies such as deepfake and tracking used to harass women as
victims struggle to be taken seriously or get justice.
Six months ago, pilot Hana Khan saw her picture on an app that appeared
to be <auctioning> dozens of Muslim women in India. The app was quickly
taken down, no one was charged, and the issue shelved – until a similar
app popped up on New Year’s Day.
Khan was not on the new app called Bulli Bai – a slur for Muslim women –
that was hawking activists, journalists, an actor, politicians and Nobel
Laureate Malala Yousafzai as maids. Amid growing outrage, the app was
taken down, and four suspects were arrested last week. The fake auctions
that were shared widely on social media are just the latest examples of
how technology is being used – often with ease, speed and little expense
– to put women at risk through online abuse, theft of privacy or sexual
exploitation.
For Muslim women in India who are often abused online, it is an everyday
risk, even as they use social media to call out hatred and
discrimination against their minority community. <When I saw my picture
on the app, my world shook. I was upset and angry that someone could do
this to me, and I became angrier as I realised this nameless person was
getting away with it,> said Khan, who filed a police complaint against
the first app, Sulli Deals, another pejorative term for Muslim women. <This
time, I felt so much dread and despair that it was happening again to my
friends, to Muslim women like me. I don’t know how to make it stop,>
Khan, a commercial pilot in her 30s, told the Thomson Reuters
Foundation. Mumbai police said they were investigating whether the Bulli
Bai app was <part of a larger conspiracy>. A spokesperson for GitHub,
which hosted both apps, said it had “longstanding policies against
content and conduct involving harassment, discrimination, and inciting
violence.
<We suspended a user account following the investigation of reports of
such activity, all of which violate our policies.> >>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/1/10/india-bulli-bai-app-auction-muslim-women-tech-weaponised-abuse
And other related articles (links) on the same page.
The Guardian
Haroon Janjua in Islamabad
7 Jan 2022
<<Women's rights and gender equality
First female judge nominated for Pakistan’s supreme court
Move to appoint Justice Ayesha Malik, who banned virginity tests for
rape survivors, described as ‘defining moment’ for the country.
Pakistan’s top judicial commission has nominated a female judge to the
supreme court for the first time in the country’s history. The move to
pave the way for Justice Ayesha Malik to join the court has been widely
praised by lawyers and civil society activists as a defining moment in
the struggle for gender equality in Pakistan.
The parliamentary secretary for law and justice, Maleeka Bokhari, called
it a <shattering of the glass ceiling>.
<An important and defining moment in our country as a brilliant lawyer
and decorated judge has become Pakistan’s first female SC [supreme
court] judge,> Bokhari, a junior minister of the ruling Tehreek-e-Insaf
party, wrote on Twitter. The 55-year-old’s appointment has been
supported by the chief justice of Pakistan, Gulzar Ahmed, and now goes
to a parliamentary panel for confirmation. The decision has not been
without opposition, with one group of lawyers threatening to strike if
Malik joined the supreme court bench. The nine-member commission turned
down her appointment to the court last year, but this time the decision
of the panel of judges was five votes to four in her favour.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/jan/07/first-female-judge-nominated-for-pakistans-supreme-court
Al Jazeera
7 Jan 2022
<<Alleged creator of app ‘selling’ Muslim women arrested in India
Engineering student, 20, is suspected to be behind ‘Bulli Bai’ app that
put more than 100 Muslim women ‘on sale’.
India’s police say they have arrested a 20-year-old man they suspect
created an online app that shared pictures of Muslim women for a virtual
<auction>, as an investigation into the case of religious hatred widens.
An open-source app on the Microsoft-owned Github platform called <Bulli
Bai> – a derogatory term to describe Muslim women – had shared pictures
of dozens of women without their consent before it was taken down a week
ago.
K P S Malhotra, a police official in the capital, New Delhi, on Thursday
said his team had arrested Niraj Bishnoi, a 20-year-old engineering
student, from Jorhat in the northeastern state of Assam after a probe
that involved the state-run Computer Emergency Response Team. <He is the
person who had created the Bulli Bai app on Github. He had also created
the Twitter handle @bullibai_ and other handles,> Malhotra said.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/1/7/india-police-arrest-alleged-creator-bulli-bai-app-muslim-women
And previous related articles publisched by Al Jazeera with links to it
on the same page
Al Jazeera
5 Jan 2022
<<India police make arrests in online ‘auction’ of Muslim women
Woman, 19, suspected to be the main accused among three arrested by
Mumbai police over app that put more than 100 women ‘on sale’.
Police in India say they have arrested three suspects in an
investigation into an online app that shared pictures of more than a
hundred Muslim women for an <auction> in another case of hatred towards
the minority community. In recent days, several Indian Muslim women said
on social media that their pictures had been used without consent to
create an open-source app on the Microsoft-owned open software
development platform, GitHub.
The app was called <Bulli Bai>, a derogatory term to describe Muslim
women. The cybercrime division of Mumbai Police on Wednesday morning
arrested Mayank Rawal, 21, from the northern state of Uttarakhand, the
Press Trust of India news agency reported.
Rawal is the third person to be arrested in the case after Vishal Kumar,
a 21-year-old engineering student, and Shweta Singh, an 19-year-old
woman suspected by the police to be the main accused.
Kumar was arrested in the southern tech hub of Bengaluru, Mumbai police
officials said on Tuesday, while Singh was picked up from Uttarakhand.
In a police complaint filed on Sunday, Ismat Ara, a New Delhi-based
journalist targeted by the app for online <auction>.<The said GitHub is
violent, threatening and intending to create a feeling of fear and shame
in my mind, as well as in the minds of women in general, and the Muslim
community whose women are being targeted in this hateful manner,> said
the complaint, which Ara posted on social media. Last Saturday, India’s
Information Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said GitHub had
confirmed blocking the user who created <Bulli Bai> app.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/1/5/india-police-arrests-bulli-bai-online-auction-muslim-women
The Guardian
Denis Campbell Health policy
4 Jan 2022
<<Women 32% more likely to die after operation by male surgeon, study
reveals.
Women who are operated on by a male surgeon are much more likely to die,
experience complications and be readmitted to hospital than when a woman
performs the procedure, research reveals.
Women are 15% more liable to suffer a bad outcome, and 32% more likely
to die, when a man rather than a woman carries out the surgery,
according to a study of 1.3 million patients. The findings have sparked
a debate about the fact that surgery in the UK remains a hugely
male-dominated area of medicine and claims that <implicit sex biases>
among male surgeons may help explain why women are at such greater risk
when they have an operation. <In our 1.3 million patient sample
involving nearly 3,000 surgeons we found that female patients treated by
male surgeons had 15% greater odds of worse outcomes than female
patients treated by female surgeons,> said Dr Angela Jerath, an
associate professor and clinical epidemiologist at the University of
Toronto in Canada and a co-author of the findings.<This result has
real-world medical consequences for female patients and manifests itself
in more complications, readmissions to hospital and death for females
compared with males. We have demonstrated in our paper that we are
failing some female patients and that some are unnecessarily falling
through the cracks with adverse, and sometimes fatal, consequences.> The
findings have been published in the medical journal JAMA Surgery.
Jerath added: <These results are concerning because there should be no
sex difference in patient outcomes regardless of the surgeon’s sex>. On
a macro level the results are troubling. When a female surgeon operates,
patient outcomes are generally better, particularly for women, even
after adjusting for differences in chronic health status, age and other
factors, when undergoing the same procedures. Jerath and her colleagues
analysed the records of 1,320,108 patients in Ontario who underwent 21
common surgical procedures performed by 2,937 surgeons between 2007 and
2019. They ranged from hip and knee replacements and weight loss surgery
to removal of an appendix or gall bladder and more complicated
operations such as a heart bypass, aneurysm repair and brain surgery.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jan/04/women-more-likely-die-operation-male-surgeon-study
Opinion by Gino d'Artali: This proves again that there are predetarors
everywhere!
Al Jazeera
2 Jan 2022
<<New Dutch government to have record number of women
An unprecedented 14 of the 29 ministers and secretaries of state will be
women, including 10 of the 20 ministers.>>
Read all here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/1/2/new-dutch-government-to-have-record-number-of-women
Note by Gino d'Artali: My quote may be short but indeed this article
proves that women, politically active, are on the rise worldwide.
Al Jazeera
By Srishti Jaswal
2 Jan 2022
<<Bulli Bai: India’s Muslim women again listed on app for ‘auction’
The app, now taken down, displayed more than 100 women ‘for sale as
maids’, with victims saying they have little hope of action by police.
New Delhi, India – On January 1, Quratulain Rehbar, a journalist from
Indian-administered Kashmir, woke up to see herself listed for an
<online auction>. Her photograph was sourced without her permission and
uploaded on an app for <sale>.
She was not alone.
Photographs of more than 100 Muslim women, including prominent actress
Shabana Azmi, wife of a sitting judge of Delhi High Court, multiple
journalists, activists and politicians were displayed on the app for
auction as <Bulli Bai> of the day. Even Fatima Nafees, 65-year-old
mother of disappeared student Najeeb Ahmed, and Pakistani Nobel laureate
Malala Yousafzai were not spared by the perpetrators behind the app.
After last July’s <Sulli Deals>, in which nearly 80 Muslim women were
put up <for sale>, <Bulli Bai> was the second such attempt in less than
a year. Both ‘Bulli’ and ‘Sulli’ are derogatory words used for Muslim
women in local slang. However, this time the Punjabi language was used
in the <‘Bulli Bai’ interface along with English,> journalist Mohammad
Zubair, who works for fact-checking website AltNews, told Al Jazeera.
Rehbar, who had previously reported on the <Sulli Deals> auction in July
last year, told Al Jazeera she was shocked to see her photograph on the
app.
<When I saw my photograph, my throat got heavy, I had goosebumps on my
arms and I was numb. It was shocking and humiliating,> she said.
While there was no real sale involved, the online application – created
on Microsoft-owned open software development site GitHub – was,
according to Rehbar, intended <to degrade and humiliate vocal Muslim
women>. The app was taken down on Saturday, with victims saying the
interface of the GitHub extension on <Bulli Bai> was strikingly similar
to the one used by <Sulli Deals>.
By Saturday evening, dozens of other Muslim women began posting their
shock and outrage on social media after seeing their photographs and
details on the app.
Among them was Ismat Ara, a journalist in the capital, New Delhi.
Ara filed a complaint on Saturday with the Delhi Police against <unknown
people> for harassing and insulting Muslim women on social media <using
doctored pictures in unacceptable and lewd context>.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/1/2/bulli-bai-muslim-women-auction-online-india
Read also a related article publisched by Al Jazeera:
Sulli Deals: Indian Muslim women offered for sale in ‘auction’
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/7/12/sulli-deals-a-virtual-auction-of-indian-muslim-women
The Guardian
31 Dec 2021
Global development is supported by
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Emmanuel Akinwotu
<<Death of young woman after FGM revives calls for ban in Sierra Leone.
Maseray Sei, 21, was found dead after undergoing the procedure in a
centuries-old ritual carried out by a secret society for women.
The death of a young woman in Sierra Leone, almost immediately after
undergoing female genital mutilation, has sparked outrage and revived
calls to end the practice.
The body of 21-year-old Maseray Sei was found on 20 December at Nyandeni
village in Bonthe district, southern Sierra Leone, a day after the FGM
took place. Sei’s family said that after the procedure the mother of two
boys complained of a migraine and was in pain, with complications from
FGM thought to be the cause, according to activists working on the case.
The family are now pressing for a postmortem. Sei’s body was found in a
<Bondo bush>, the enclosure of a house belonging to the centuries-old
secret women’s Bondo society, common across largely rural Sierra Leone,
where FGM often takes place.
Sierra Leone has one of the highest rates of FGM in the world, with nine
out of 10 women and girls aged between 15 and 49 affected, according to
Unicef. Despite restrictions on secret societies since the Ebola
outbreak in 2014, and particularly on their initiation rites, of which
FGM is often a part, the practice remains legal in Sierra Leone, with
politicians accused of making statements backing FGM and of funding
Bondo houses. The societies are important cultural institutions, rooted
in ancient rituals believed to protect communities against evil and
guide adolescent girls to womanhood. After Sei’s death, police arrested
a number of soweis – senior society members who do the cutting in FGM –
as well as a village chief in the Bonthe district, responsible for
regulating the secret societies. Rugiatu Turay, an activist and former
deputy minister for gender in Sierra Leone, said the case was another
shocking example of the toll of FGM on women.
<It’s a tragic case and, in a way, shows how many more people like her
have died or are suffering, because the majority of cases are
unreported,> she said. Turay chairs a coalition of 21 national groups
fighting FGM which is now putting pressure on the authorities to carry
out the postmortem.
<It’s the next important step for us to get clarity in this case,> she
said.
Senesie Amara, an activist working with Sei’s family, said relatives
reported she was in good health the day before the FGM.
<She went to fetch wood and water for her aunt, she was physically fine
on 18 December. That night she slept at the Bondo house, and that was
when things got bad,> Amara said.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/dec/31/death-of-young-woman-after-fgm-revives-calls-for-ban-in-sierra-leone
Al Jazeera
29 Dec 2021
Zoe Osborne
<<The year I broke my trauma bond: Leaving an abusive relationship
Women are raised with the narrative that the ‘beauty’ can change the
‘beast’. But real life is not a fairy tale.
<He got up and he put his fist to my face and he said: ‘You say that
word one more f*****g time.'> I knew that he was going to start punching
me after that.> Andrea’s voice floats over the phone, incredibly strong
in spite of the topic we are discussing. The next day after the incident
she took her two dogs and two cats, and whatever she could fit into a
suitcase, and left her husband for good, she said, running and hiding
for weeks until she could serve him with a restraining order. Now,
nearly three months later, she has begun to rebuild herself and her
life.
The pity card
Andrea met John, whose name has been changed for his privacy, at a house
party in rural Florida, in the US, back in 2009. She had been living and
working in New York City until the recession hit in 2008 and she moved
to Florida to stay with her father. The area they lived in was
<economically depressed>, she said. There were few opportunities, even
for those with a degree, and she was lonely, an outsider in the
community. She remembers being <almost hypnotised> when she first saw
John. <He was just staring at me and he had the bluest eyes, and he just
could not take his eyes off me,> she said. <And then he started to talk
to me like nobody else was in the room, and it was almost like… this is
the moment I knew that he was the one for me.>Their first date was at a
<really smokey white-trash pool hall>, she remembers, <but we had a good
time… we spent the weekend together… and it was fun because I felt like
I was hearing him and healing him.> This was the most intriguing thing
about John, Andrea said, the fact that he appeared to need saving. <He
just made himself out to be such a victim from his previous girlfriend,>
she said.
Looking back, she sees this as a serious red flag – if a potential
partner calls all their exes <crazy>, she said, you know <there’s one
common denominator>. We are not shown healthy examples of men …
Especially in the context of romance movies and books.
Another red flag she missed at the time was how John kept invalidating
her own experiences. <His problems were always worse. He would always
interrupt me and not [care] about what I had to say about anything
because I’m a woman,> she said. <Anything I’d say didn’t matter.>
Andrea’s friend Kate, also a survivor of a violently abusive
relationship, says she <kept feeling weird> about Andrea’s connection
with John. <Initially, [Andrea] had not really been looking for anything
and he kind of just quickly swept her off her feet in a way that was
alarming to me,> she said. We are taught that we, the <beauty>, can
change the <beast>, she said.
<We are not shown healthy examples of men. Can you think of any?
Especially in the context of romance movies and books.>
Kate says that in her own experience the biggest test in a new
relationship is how the other person responds to being told <no>.
<If they can’t handle it, if they say one mean thing to you… get out and
save yourself,> she said. But it can be easy to brush off seemingly
small red flags like this, she said, perhaps because <we all are willing
to justify little things… ‘Maybe they had a bad day.'>
<And also these men unravel slowly – often in secret – and make you
second-guess what happened,> she said, <You don’t have backup.>
‘I was not allowed to disagree with him’>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2021/12/29/the-year-i-broke-my-trauma-bond-leaving-an-abusive-relationship
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