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THE BELOW
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
Global development is supported by
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
By Jeff Ernst in Tegucigalpa
Thu 27 Jan 2022
<<Women's rights and gender equality.
Honduras: can first female president usher in a new era for women?
Xiomara Castro will be sworn in as the first female president of
Honduras on Thursday, marking the culmination of a remarkable rise to
power that began just over 12 years ago when she led a massive protest
movement in response to the ousting of her husband, former president
Manuel <Mel> Zelaya, in a military-backed coup.
Castro’s resounding victory in the 28 November election has generated
hope for a new era for women in the country with the highest rate of
femicide in Latin America and some of the region’s most draconian laws
with regards to reproductive rights. <In her plan for government she
took us into account,> said Regina Fonseca, director of the Centre for
the Rights of Women in Honduras. <That gives us enormous hope to return
to life.> Activists are optimistic that Castro, of the center-left Libre
party, will not only take actions that help improve conditions for women
in the immediate, but also accelerate broader changes in the country’s
culture. <This small break in the patriarchy that her win represents can
become bigger and bigger, in the sense that it can open even more spaces
for participation in government and political participation in general
for women in the country,> said Carmen Haydée, a human rights lawyer and
representative of the feminist group Luchemos. Among the first order of
business, Castro is expected to undo a prohibition against emergency
contraceptives enacted in the wake of the coup. Honduras is the only
country in Latin America with absolute bans on both abortion and
emergency contraceptives. As a result, women who have been raped have
been forced to seek out emergency contraceptives on the black market.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/jan/26/honduras-first-female-president-xiomara-castro-women
The Guardian
Global development is supported by
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
By Lizzy Davies
Thu 27 Jan 2022
<<‘I’m free at last’: Uganda’s rudest poet on prison, protest and
finding a new voice in Germany.
he first few days of Stella Nyanzi’s new life in Germany have not been
without their challenges, from navigating the TV and internet in a
different language to finding the right school for her three teenagers.
On the second day, the family went shopping for clothes – <thick
jackets, mittens and scarves> – to see them through the fierce Bavarian
winter. For her 14-year-old twins, who have lived their whole lives in
sub-Saharan Africa and who insisted on wearing Crocs with no socks on
the flight over, the sub-zero temperatures were a rude awakening. At the
centre of it all, however, has been deep sense of relief. Nyanzi, a
47-year-old outspoken scholar, poet and human rights advocate whose
irreverent writing about Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni, has seen
her jailed twice, decided enough was enough. She has been accepted on a
writers-in-exile programme run by PEN Germany, and has no intention of
returning to Uganda while the 77-year-old Museveni is in power. And
while there are many concerns about how she and her children are going
to settle into Munich life, the sense of freedom is powering her on.
<Because I’m very much a free-thinking, loud-mouthed, crass woman who
boldly speaks her mind, I think one of the greatest joys is to be able
to criticise Museveni’s dictatorship and not fear for my life,> she
says. <To not have thick-voiced men breathing down my telephone. And to
be threatened online, but to know that the threats won’t reach me, is
really relieving. I know it’s going to be difficult [with regards to]
the practicalities. But, Jesus, the sense of freedom! The freedom from
fear of retribution and reprisal and punishment, simply because one
refuses to only praise the dictatorship, is to die for.> >>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/jan/27/im-free-at-last-ugandas-rudest-poet-stella-nyanzi-on-prison-protest-and-finding-new-voice-in-germany
The Guardian
Rajeev Syal
27 Jan 2022
<<Recorded rapes and sexual offences in England and Wales hit record
high. There were 63,136 rapes recorded in the year to September, ONS
figures show, up 13% from the previous year.
Police forces in England and Wales have recorded the highest number of
rapes and sexual offences over a year, official figures released on
Thursday show. There were 63,136 rapes recorded in the year to
September, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), up 13%
from the previous period (56,119). This was the highest recorded annual
figure to date and included 17,419 offences between July and September –
the highest quarterly figure. The highest number of sexual offences was
also recorded in the 12 months to September (170,973), a 12% increase
compared with 152,620 in the same period the previous year. This was
driven by <noticeable increases since April 2021>, the ONS said. Rape
accounted for 37% of all sexual offences recorded by police.
A sign outside a police station
The ONS said the latest figures may reflect a <number of factors>,
including the <impact of high-profile incidents, media coverage and
campaigns on people’s willingness to report incidents to the police, as
well as a potential increase in the number of victims>, and it urged
caution when interpreting the data. The figures cover the months after
the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard in March.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jan/27/recorded-rapes-and-sexual-offences-in-england-and-wales-hit-record-high
Al Jazeera
By Agnieszka Pikulicka-Wilczewska and Aigerim Turgunbaeva
25 Jan 2022
<<Suicide attempts raise alarm over shaming women in Kyrgyzstan
Prostitution accusations against women working in saunas prompt four
young women to attempt suicide near Bishkek.
Four young women have attempted suicide in a small village of Kara-Balta,
just 50km (31 miles) from Kyrgyzstan’s capital Bishkek. An ambulance
came on time to save them. In a suicide note, one of the young women
wrote that she decided to take such a desperate step on January 19
because of the threats she had been receiving from men that accused her
of prostitution. Those who shamed the women are known. A self-proclaimed
“Committee of the Youth” – a group of young men, gathered in Kara-Balta
earlier that day demanding the closure of the local saunas, where the
women worked as waitresses. In their view, saunas are a place of sin,
where young women sell their bodies.
<We demand the closure of three or four saunas in the city of Kara-Balta.
They are engaged in prostitution. For the sake of the future of girls
and our sisters, we demand that these sinful deeds be stopped. If you do
not take action, then we will!> the men said in a message to the
president they published online.
Bride kidnapping
Women-shaming is nothing new in the conservative majority-Muslim
Kyrgyzstan. The belief that women’s fate is to stay home and bear
children is common, and many claim it to be part of the national
tradition. The practice of bride kidnapping, the infamous <ala kachuu>,
is still carried out. Kyrgyzstan ranked 82nd in 2019 on the United
Nations’ Gender Inequality Index, but over the past several years, women
have become more vocal and begun to fight for their rights. In some
cases, the fight meant organising women’s marches and activism. In more
conservative circles, it has meant getting a job or refusal to get
married. As the conflict between the conservative and liberal forces in
society deepens, shaming has become one of the tools to suppress
liberation of women. Nazira Aitbekova, a well-known Kyrgyz actress, TV
presenter and a mother, fell victim to an online hate campaign after she
posted a revealing picture of herself on Instagram in December. She woke
up the next day to thousands of shaming comments. She then decided to
publish another, even more revealing photo. <For us, Kyrgyz, shame ends
with clothes. You can do anything if you have your clothes on,> she
wrote under the photo.
<Killing a person is not a shame. Neither is beating your wives. It is
not a shame to rape your sons, your daughters, children of relatives. It
is not a shame to rape a person, get up and just leave. It is not a
shame to conceive a child, and then refuse to pay child support. It is
not a shame to gossip, hate and envy. (…) In general, it’s not a shame
to trample humanity, but for some reason it’s a shame to show what
nature has given us!> >>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/1/25/kyrgyzstan-women-harassment
Al Jazeera
By Jeff Abbott
25 Jan 2022
<<Guatemala: Indigenous women celebrate ruling on sexual violence
Indigenous women and supporters welcome court ruling that found
ex-paramilitaries guilty of rape, abuse during conflict.
Guatemala City, Guatemala – Survivors of Guatemala’s decades-long armed
conflict have welcomed a Guatemalan court ruling that found five former
paramilitary patrolmen guilty of raping and sexually abusing Indigenous
women during the war. Judges Yassmin Barrios and Gelvi Sical on Monday
ruled that 36 Indigenous Maya Achi women had been subjected to domestic
slavery, sexual violence and rape during the 36-year conflict, which
pitted the Guatemalan military against leftist forces from 1960 to 1996.
The court sentenced five former members of the so-called <Civil
Self-Defence Patrols> paramilitary group to 30 years in prison for
crimes that took place in the early 1980s. The Indigenous Mayan Achi
women plaintiffs in the case are from villages around the municipality
of Rabinal in Baja Verapaz department, about 176km (109 miles) from the
capital, Guatemala City. They spent years demanding justice for crimes
committed during the conflict, which saw the Guatemalan government and
military mobilise paramilitaries in their fight against leftist fighters
in rural communities – and said this week’s ruling is a key step in the
path to justice. “I feel happy,” Pedrina Lopez, a 51-year-old Indigenous
Maya Achi survivor and one of the plaintiffs in the case, told Al
Jazeera outside the court in Guatemala City before the sentences were
handed down. Lopez was only 12 when she was taken and raped by the
paramilitary patrolmen in her village in the early 1980s. <We did it,>
she said, about the ruling. <We do not want what happened to us to ever
happen again.>
Fight for justice
Lopez and the other women involved in the case faced an uphill battle in
their quest for justice. The court’s decision came 11 years after they
first began to organise to seek justice. That was when lawyers in
Rabinal began to find evidence of sexual violence through local women’s
accounts of what had happened. The court did not accept the case on
multiple occasions, and in 2019, the accused were set free after Judge
Claudette Dominguez ruled that she <did not believe> the testimonies.
But the case advanced after the judiciary was changed upon appeal. The
Indigenous women had lived with their trauma for decades – even after
the Guatemalan government and leftist forces from the Guatemalan
National Revolutionary Unity signed a peace deal in December 1996 to end
the fighting. When Guatemala’s armed conflict came to an end with the
signing of that peace accord, more than 200,000 people were dead, 45,000
were disappeared and more than one million had been internally and
externally displaced. A United Nations-backed truth commission found
that Indigenous Mayans accounted for 83 percent of the victims, while
the Guatemalan military was responsible for 93 percent of all human
rights violations. <The pain never ended then, nor did it end with the
peace agreements,> said Melissa Gonzalez, a psychologist from Rabinal
who worked with the women involved in the case. <Forty years have passed
since those events, and yet they continue to suffer accusations [against
them], and they continue to suffer discrimination,> she told Al Jazeera.
<[The sentence] brings closure for them. A closure that lets them say
that justice was done. It brings relief to their hearts, to their minds.
They can look to heaven and tell their deceased [that] justice was done
for their ancestors.> >>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/1/25/guatemala-indigenous-women-celebrate-ruling-sexual-violence
The Guardian
Damien Gayle
24 Jan 2022
<<Met apologises to woman for ‘sexist, derogatory’ language in
strip-search.
The Metropolitan police have apologised and paid compensation to an
academic for “sexist, derogatory and unacceptable language” used by
officers about her when she was strip-searched.
“What’s that smell? Oh, it’s her knickers,” officers at a north-east
London police station said to each other after Dr Konstancja Duff was
held down on the floor and her clothes cut off. “Is she rank?” another
said.
The Met apologised to Duff, an assistant professor of philosophy at the
University of Nottingham, after CCTV video capturing the officers’
conversations was disclosed to her as part of a civil action against the
force. Insp Andy O’Donnell, of the Met’s directorate of professional
standards, told her: <I would like to take this opportunity to sincerely
and unreservedly apologise for the sexist, derogatory and unacceptable
language used about you and for any upset and distress this may have
caused. I hope that settlement of this claim and this recognition of the
impact of what happened that day will enable you to put this incident
behind you.> Duff said: <In every detail the footage backed up what I
had said in my statements for years and years.> Officers had claimed
they had acted with professionalism, strip-searching her for her own
safety because she would not give them her name. <There was such a
barrage of misinformation that they put out that I actually, even though
I was there and I knew that it was false, had almost started to doubt
myself,> she said. <It was such an effective gaslighting>: ‘We were just
concerned for your mental health, that was why we had to – for your own
good – forcibly strip you naked and mash you up.’ <It was so obviously
not what they were doing at the time. They were doing it as punishment,
they were doing it as intimidation, they wanted to soften me up and get
my details.> >>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jan/24/met-apologises-to-academic-for-sexist-derogatory-language
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