| |
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
CLICK HERE ON HOW TO READ
THE BELOW
The Guardian
31 Oct 2021
<<Opinion
Rape and sexual assault
How was Larry Nassar able to get away with his terrible crimes?
Deborah Tuerkheimer
Nassar’s victims came forward to parents, coaches, doctors,
psychologists, USA Gymnastics and local police – and were dismissed as
less credible
than Nassar’s preposterous claims of medical justification.
s new accounts of unchecked serial sexual abuse surface almost daily,
the horrific story of Larry Nassar continues to unfold. Recently the US
Department of Justice announced that it will revisit its decision not to
prosecute the FBI agents who botched the handling of sexual abuse
allegations against Nassar, the former Olympic gymnastics team doctor
who pleaded guilty in 2018 and is now serving an effective life
sentence. The Justice Department’s willingness to reconsider charging
the FBI agents follows on the heels of last month’s Senate Judiciary
Committee hearing, in which elite gymnasts offered searing testimony
about Nassar’s abuse and its aftermath – namely, a widespread
governmental failure to respond to the athletes’ allegations.
This failure was devastating, not only to the young women dismissed but
also to those who would suffer Nassar’s continuing abuse. Between July
2015, when the accusations came to the attention of the FBI, and
September 2016, when an Indianapolis Star report surfaced the abuse,
Nassar
molested at least 40 girls and women. A blistering report from the DOJ’s
Office of the Inspector General outlines the many ways that the FBI
agents fell short. Yet the FBI alone was hardly alone in their utter
disregard for the victims. Holding the agents responsible for their
lapses – important though accountability is – should not obscure this
reality. As Simone Biles told the committee, <To be clear, I blame Larry
Nassar, and I also blame an entire system that enabled and perpetuated
his abuse.> Consider that Nassar’s victims came forward repeatedly
during the years he was molesting them. They reported to parents, to
coaches, to doctors, to psychologists, and to USA Gymnastics. Each time,
the accusations were dismissed as less believable than Nassar’s claim of
medical justification, however preposterous. By the time the FBI failed
the young women, they had already been dismissed time and time again. In
fact, the FBI wasn’t even the first law enforcement agency to side with
Nassar over his victims.
Over a decade earlier, Nassar came to the attention of local police
officers. In 2004, Brianne Randall, a high school athlete in Meridian
Township,
Michigan, made an appointment with her mother to see Nassar, who was
then a prominent osteopathic physician and athletic trainer. They wanted
help with Randall’s scoliosis. On the first visit, with her mother in
the room, Nassar performed a series of routine tests. On the second
visit, without her mother there, the examination was entirely different.
According to Randall, Nassar began the exam by massaging Randall’s
spine. From there, he pulled her underwear to the side and began
<pressing on the outer area all along her vagina.> He then tried to put
his finger in her vagina (unsuccessfully because she was wearing a
tampon). He continued massaging her vagina for about 20 minutes before
reaching under her gown and placing his hands on her breasts, <rubbing
around> and <squeezing> while she lay on her stomach. After telling her
that he wanted to see her once a week for an hour a visit, Nassar asked
Randall for a hug. He had not worn gloves during the exam.
Randall felt <scared> and <uncomfortable,> and she promptly told her
mother about what Nassar had done. The next day, Randall and her mother
walked into the police station to lodge a complaint.
About a week after the police interviewed Randall, they spoke with
Nassar. Notes of this conversation are brief. Nassar claimed he was
performing a procedure to relieve Randall’s lower back pain, and it
required him to <touch> and <palpate> the region near her vulva. He
described the technique as the Sacrotuberous Ligament Release and told
the investigating detective that <this technique has been published in
medical journals and training tapes instructing the same are available
to physicians throughout the United States.> Nassar provided the
detective with a 26-page PowerPoint presentation that accompanied the
report. >>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/31/how-was-larry-nassar-able-to-get-away-with-his-terrible-crimes
Al Jazeera
By Deborah Davies and Al Jazeera Investigative Unit
26 Oct 2021
<<EXCLUSIVE
News
Glasgow University accused of failing to recognise misconduct.
Students and staff have accused the university of failing to protect
them from misconduct by a former lecturer.
Students and early-career staff have accused Glasgow University of
failing to properly protect them against misconduct by a former
lecturer, including from alleged <grooming> and sexual harassment, Al
Jazeera’s Investigative Unit has found.
Speaking to Al Jazeera, six women made allegations of misconduct over
the behaviour of Ian Shaw, who was a lecturer in the geography
department at Glasgow University before he left to teach at Leeds
University in 2020. He denies all wrongdoing.
Esther, who along with the other women Al Jazeera spoke to asked for her
surname to be withheld, said she was finishing her PhD at an English
university when she met Shaw at a conference in 2018. He praised her
research and tried to persuade her to move to Glasgow so he could mentor
her future career. She alleges Shaw proceeded to increase the intensity
of his contact with her to the point where it became grooming and sexual
harassment.<It [was] intellectual, then emotional, then became sexual>,
she said.
But she says Glasgow University failed to take her allegations
seriously. The Glasgow story is one part of Degrees of Abuse, a two year
investigation by Al Jazeera’s Investigations Unit (I-Unit), which
reveals how British universities, including Oxford, Cambridge, Glasgow,
and Warwick deal with complaints of sexual harassment, sexist, drunken
behaviour, and coercive control.
Last week, Al Jazeera revealed how two Oxford professors have been
accused of abusing their position of authority with sexist and drunken
conduct.
As part of the investigation, Al Jazeera also filed Freedom of
Information requests with more than 100 universities in the UK,
revealing that the vast majority of sexual complaints cases were not
investigated.
Do you have information on wrongdoing or want to share another tip?
Contact Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit on +974 5080 0207 (WhatsApp/Signal),
or find other ways to reach out on our Tips page.
‘Amazing eyes’
Esther told Al Jazeera that Shaw began to send her increasingly personal
messages, including <You were in my head and dreams last night> and
commenting on her <amazing eyes>.
He made similar compliments to a junior departmental colleague, Emma,
saying <Your eyes are so piercing, I feel you can see my ancestors>.
Emma told Al Jazeera: <I remember thinking either this guy is the most
sweetest caring person I’ve ever met and I’ve made the best friend for
life, or he’s in love with me.>
Several of Shaw’s students said that unlike other lecturers, Shaw held
long meetings in his office with the door closed and sometimes locked,
which he said was for privacy but made them feel increasingly
uncomfortable. One student, supervised by Shaw for her PhD, said: <I
felt very much like a sexualised object in that room. And I had to play
that role in order to succeed.>
Another student said the conversations would typically move quickly from
discussing her academic work to Shaw talking about his personal life,
including his mental health and his marriage.
A third student, who was struggling with her work and her home situation
says that over a period of months, Shaw turned their teaching
relationship into something more intimate and sinister. <It became an
emotional dependency>, she said, <he wanted to be seen as a protector
but it was a control thing>.
Anna Bull is among the leading academics in the UK researching sexual
misconduct in higher education. In early 2021 she wrote a report on
<grooming and boundary-blurring behaviours by academic staff>. It was
based on accounts from students in universities across the UK.
She told Al Jazeera that university policies on ethical behaviour rarely
make specific mention of crossing boundaries or grooming as being
unacceptable. While she will not comment on individual cases, she told
Al Jazeera that crossing boundaries or grooming would mean turning the
professional teaching and learning relationship into an intimate,
personal relationship through their inappropriate behaviour, disclosures
or questions.
<Certainly, in my research, students have used the word ‘grooming’
themselves; [for example] if their lecturer might be telling a student
that they are special and talented. And then there’s the absolutely
classic one, starting to disclose material about their personal life or
their sex life,> she said.
‘Not taken seriously’
Four women registered complaints about Shaw’s behaviour with Glasgow
University’s Senate office – the university’s senior academic body –
which
assigned academics from other departments, alongside Human Resources
staff, to investigate the cases.
Three women accused him of sexual harassment. They included Esther, who
filed a complaint in 2019 after Shaw suggested she sleep on his hotel
room floor at a conference, go away together to work on a project, and
offered to read her application for a job at Glasgow University in
advance,
when he was on the hiring committee.
<He scared me at that point,> Esther said. <I thought that if I’d got a
job based on this situation, I would never be free of him.>
Glasgow University handled the complaints separately. In July 2020, the
university replied to Esther and said it had identified <some serious
concerns and recommendations to address these>. The reply contained the
same language as that sent to another student.
However the university did not give either women any further details.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/26/glasgow-university-accused-of-failing-to-protect-against-misconduct
Al Jazeera
29 Oct 2021
<<Tunisia’s #MeToo: Landmark sexual harassment case kicks off.
Landmark case that helped galvanise Tunisia’s #MeToo movement involves
legislator charged with sexual harassment.
A landmark case that helped galvanise Tunisia’s #MeToo movement reached
court this week, involving a legislator charged with sexual harassment
and public indecency.
Feminist activists held a small protest outside the court in Nabeul, south of the capital Tunis, chanting and waving placards that read <My
body is not a public space>. The activists sported T-shirts and badges
bearing the hashtag of their movement #EnaZeda, #MeToo in the Tunisian
dialect.
In 2019, a schoolgirl posted photos on social media of parliament member
Zouhair Makhlouf, of the Qalb Tounes party, allegedly performing a
sexual act in his car outside her high school.
Makhlouf’s case was one of the flashpoints in 2019 that prompted
thousands of Tunisians to share their personal experiences of sexual
assault and harassment online. The #EnaZeda Facebook page currently has
more than 90,000 likes, and is updated daily.
But no high-profile figures have faced prosecution for alleged sexual
wrongdoing – until now.
Makhlouf avoided prosecution at the time due to his parliamentary
immunity. In July, President Kais Saied froze the Tunisian parliament
and lifted political immunity for MPs, as well as taking on sweeping
executive and legislative powers.
With his immunity revoked, Makhlouf was summoned to face his first
hearing on Thursday,
Makhlouf, who denies all charges, did not appear at the hearing. In an
interview with The Associated Press at a local hospital, Makhlouf said
that his mother had taken ill and he could not attend because he was the
only one in the family with a car who could take her to the clinic.
Activist Sara Medini said campaigners had come to the court protest <in
solidarity> with the victim, as well as to denounce the length of time
it took for Makhlouf’s legal proceedings to begin.
<Now it’s already more than two years and no decision was taken, there
has been no step forward,> she said. <It is time to say no to impunity.
We must denounce this phenomenon of harassment and rape.>
Sarra Ben Said, the executive director of feminist group Aswat Nissa who
originally administrated and monitored the #EnaZeda social media groups,
noted that Makhlouf <had substantial power in the region where he’s
being put on trial. We wanted to tell women that whatever powers your
aggressor uses against you or has on you, you can always seek justice
and retribution.> >>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/29/tunisia-me-too-landmark-sexual-harassment-case-kicks-off
The Guardian
29 Oct 2021
Global development is supported by
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Dan Collyns in Lima
<<Women's rights and gender equality.
Bolivia: fate of 11-year-old girl raped by family member sparks abortion
debate.
Religious groups seek to force girl to give birth as intervention of the
Catholic church questioned.
The fate of an 11-year-old girl who became pregnant after being raped by
a family member has unleashed a fierce debate between human rights
activists and the Catholic church in Bolivia, as religious groups seek
to force her to complete the pregnancy and give birth.
The girl was impregnated after being repeatedly raped and suffering
other sexual abuse by the father of her stepfather in the town of
Yapacaní, in Bolivia’s eastern Santa Cruz region.
The girl was living with her sisters and 61-year-old step-grandfather,
who is now in jail for the crime, because her parents were in La Paz
working.
The case has thrown into sharp relief the gaping holes in the state’s
protection for women and girls in Bolivia, which has one of highest
levels of inter-familiar sexual violence and abuse in Latin America, and
what some activists call a culture of rape.
The intervention of the Catholic church is also being severely
questioned, after religious groups contacted the mother of the victim
and persuaded her to oppose the termination of the pregnancy, a move
which has prompted legal action by the Bolivian human rights ombudsman’s
office.
<The girl didn’t even know what it meant to be pregnant; she told her
cousin that she felt something moving inside her tummy. Her cousin told
her mother – the girl’s aunt – who reported it to the police,> said Ana
Paola García, the executive director of La Casa de la Mujer, a Bolivian
women’s rights NGO.
The girl was taken to the Percy Boland Women’s hospital in the city of
Santa Cruz where, by law, as an underage rape victim she was due to have
the pregnancy terminated last Friday. A 2014 constitutional ruling made
interrupting a pregnancy legal in the case of rape without the need to
obtain a court order, García said.
But the child’s mother, accompanied by a woman claiming to be a lawyer
for the church, intervened, saying the girl had changed her mind, García
said. The girl was removed from hospital and taken to a centre for
adolescent mothers.
<There is evidently manipulation by the Catholic church which has
practically kidnapped the girl and silenced the mother,> García said. <They
are violating her human rights.>
<She is being obliged to continue with a pregnancy which puts her life
at risk,> she added.
Susana Inch, a spokesperson for the Bolivian Bishops Conference, told
local media on Wednesday: “We have the ethical and legal obligation to
protect the life of the baby, both lives must be protected.”
In a statement the archdiocese of Santa Cruz said <one crime does not
solve another crime>, offering free lodging and attention for the girl
and the unborn child.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/oct/29/bolivia-11-year-old-girl-rape-catholic-church
Note from Gino d'Artali: That's why I've always been an atheist!
The Guardian
By Leland Cecco
29 Oct 2021
<<New minister takes helm as Canadian military engulfed by sexual
misconduct crisis.
Seven generals have so far been implicated in the billowing scandal –
can institutional change be effected?
For nearly a year, Canada’s military has been engulfed in crisis, as one
senior officer after another has come under investigation over
allegations of sexual misconduct or cover-up. So far, seven generals
have been implicated in the snowballing scandal, which has undermined
both public trust in the institution and morale within the ranks – and
highlighted a lack of transparency over how the military handles
allegations of sexual assault.
On Tuesday, the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, removed the defence
minister, Harjit Sajjan, during a cabinet unveiling, replacing him with
Anita Anand, the former procurement minister. Sajjan had served as
defence minister for six years, but his tenure was marred by criticism
that his office failed to fully address sexual harassment in the
military.
The scandal erupted in February when the former chief of defence staff
Jonathan Vance was accused of sexual misconduct.
Vance was later charged with obstruction of justice, but not sexual
misconduct. But soon after, his replacement – an admiral who had pledged
to stamp out sexual assault in the armed forces – was investigated by
military police.
Then, in October, Maj Gen Peter Dawe was dropped from a review of the
military’s response to sexual misconduct after it emerged that he had
once provided a character reference for a soldier convicted of sexual
assault.
And last week, Lt Gen Steven Whelan – who a replaced senior officer
accused of sexual assault – was himself put under investigation for
sexual misconduct. Whelan was only relieved from his post after
reporting by the Globe and Mail sparked outcry.
<We’re dealing with an institution where trust is the main commodity for
the institution to function. Investigations against some of the most
senior leadership can seriously impact that trust,> said Charlotte
Duval-Lantoine, a fellow at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute who
specializes in leadership and gender integration in the military.
The fact that the allegations are all historical means complainants have
shown greater willingness to come forward, said Leah West, a professor
of international relations at Carleton University. But the challenge now
facing the military is to balance transparency with the ability to
thoroughly investigate the accusations.
<The Canadian forces got itself into this mess by turning a blind eye
for so long. These historical sexual assault complaints never get
investigated. That’s the root of the problem,> said West, also a combat
veteran.
In recent years, the military has publicly acknowledged both a culture
that bred abuse and assault, and a longstanding failure to root it out.
<Highly sexual behaviour, largely targeting women for the purpose of
amusement, was just so routine and regularized, that first it wasn’t
even identified as problematic,> said West, herself a survivor of sexual
assault in the military. <And if you did raise the issue as problematic,
you were very likely told that you were being too sensitive.>
West remains cautiously optimistic that institutional change is possible,
in part because that work is being led by mid-level leadership – where
women now occupy a number of key roles.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/29/canada-sexual-misconduct-military-scandal
The Guardian
28 Oct 2021
By Lucy Campbell
<<Army chief ‘appalled’ by British soldiers’ alleged role in killing of
Kenyan woman.
Agnes Wanjiru’s body was found in Nanyuki, Kenya, in 2012, behind room
where soldiers had stayed.
The head of the army has said he is <appalled> by allegations that
British soldiers may have been involved in the killing of a Kenyan woman.
Gen Mark Carleton-Smith said he was determined to work with the
authorities to establish the facts in the killing of Agnes Wanjiru.
The body of Wanjiru, who was 21, was found in a septic tank at the Lions
Court hotel in the town of Nanyuki, close to the Batuk (British Army
Training Unit Kenya) camp, two months after she disappeared in March
2012. She had been stabbed, Kenyan investigators later concluded.
In a statement shared on Twitter, Carleton-Smith said: <I am sure you
are all as appalled as I am at the recent allegations surrounding the
murder of Agnes Wanjiru in Nanyuki, Kenya, in 2012. I want you to know I
am determined we support the appropriate authorities to establish the
facts of the issue as quickly as possible.>
However, he did not say whether that should include an investigation by
the Royal Military Police.
The defence secretary, Ben Wallace, has said he is waiting on a request
from Kenya for assistance in finding Wanjiru’s killer. A defence source
told the PA news agency: <The defence secretary has been impatient with
the pace of this, and has directed full cooperation. He has worked with
the military police and Kenyans to ensure their investigation is not
impeded.>
The Sunday Times reported that a soldier accused of the murder has been
named by his comrades after he allegedly confessed to the killing and
that another soldier reported the killing to senior officers at the
time, but the military took no action.
Labour has called on the government to investigate any possible <cover-up>.
The shadow defence secretary, John Healey, described the killing of
Wanjiru as <dreadful> and called on ministers to act on <reports of
grave failings by the British military exposed in this case>.
He added: <There’s been no MoD-led investigation of the soldiers
involved and no inquiry into why the MoD failed to respond when Kenyan
detectives asked for help. Nine years on, justice must now be done for
Agnes and her family.>
Wanjiru dropped out of high school and later became a sex worker to look
after her baby. She was last seen by witnesses on the night of 31 March
2012 walking out of a Nanyuki bar accompanied by two British soldiers.
Her body was later discovered behind a room where the soldiers had
stayed, with missing body parts and a stabbing injury.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/oct/28/army-chief-appalled-british-soldiers-alleged-role-killing-of-kenyan-woman-agnes-wanjiru
The Guardian
by Rachel Hall
28 Oct 2021
<<Danyal Hussein jailed for 35 years for murdering sisters in London
park.
Teenager was convicted in July of murdering Nicole Smallman, 27, and
Bibaa Henry, 46, in June 2020.
A teenager who murdered two sisters in a London park has been given two
concurrent 35-year jail sentences at the Old Bailey. Danyal Hussein, 19,
killed Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman in a random attack which he
believed would act as a <sacrifice> to a demon named <the mighty king
Lucifuge Rofocale> to enable him to win the lottery.
Handing out the 35-year minimum term on Thursday, Mrs Justice Whipple
told Hussein: <You committed these vicious attacks. You did it to kill.
You did it for money and a misguided pursuit of power. <This was a
calculated and deliberate course of conduct, planned and carried out
with precision.
Bizarre though the pact with the devil may appear to others, this was
your belief system, your own commitment to the murder of innocent women.
No family should have to endure this.>
Whipple said she was unable to hand out a whole-life sentence because
Hussein was under 21. She said the usual minimum term would be 37 years
for crimes of this severity, but that she had reduced it because of
Hussein’s age – he had only turned 18 three weeks before committing the
crime – and his autism spectrum disorder diagnosis, which she said could
“make you a person who could struggle in prison more than others”.
She decided, however, not to consider evidence of an undiagnosed
personality disorder or psychopathy identified in a psychiatric report
as a mitigating factor, or to delay sentencing while these were further
examined, because Hussein had refused to comply with the evaluation.
Whipple said he would only become eligible for release after a minimum
of 35 years, and that this would only happen <if at that point you are
no longer a danger for the public>.
Hussein had declined to give evidence in his trial, claiming he was not
responsible for the killings or for writing the pact.
The sisters were visiting Fryent country park in Wembley for a small
party on 6 June 2020 to celebrate Henry’s birthday when they were
murdered. The sisters had stayed in the park celebrating until the early
hours of the morning.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/oct/28/danyal-hussein-jailed-for-35-years-for-murdering-sisters-in-london-park
Al Jazeera
27 Oct 2021
<<From: Witness
Radio silence: The cost of uncovering the truth in Mexico
Carmen Aristegui is a well-known Mexican journalist who refuses to be
intimidated by powerful and corrupt forces.
In Mexico, presenter Carmen Aristegui will not be silenced.
She is one of the few reporters in the country who has the courage to
speak the truth. As a result, millions listen as she unveils a
corruption scandal involving the then-President Enrique Pena Nieto – a
story that gets her fired in 2015.
So begins her fight for the freedom of the press. Aristegui decides to
set up her own online news platform with a team of investigative
journalists. They navigate the poisonous Mexican media landscape,
refusing to be intimidated.>>
Click here to watch the video:
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/witness/2021/10/27/radio-silence-the-cost-of-uncovering-the-truth-in-mexico
Al Jazeera
27 Oct 2021
By Chisom Peter Job
<<Women's Rights
‘Letting women decide’: Activists hail Benin abortion vote
Before October 20, abortion was allowed only in specific circumstances;
but now, Benin has legalised the practice with the aim of ending unsafe
practices.
Littoral, Benin – One afternoon in September 2018, Fatima Ismail found
out she was pregnant after a friend told her to do a test. Aged 21 and
fearful of what people would think, Ismail decided to get an abortion.
<It’s simple, I wasn’t ready for a child, and the father wasn’t either,>
she recalled. <I went to the hospital for another test, and after the
doctor confirmed that I indeed was pregnant, I asked ‘for a second
option’.>
The doctor at the hospital in Benin’s port city of Cotonou immediately
understood what she meant and shook his head. <He told me abortion
wasn’t an option because he could lose his licence as it was illegal,>
Ismail said.
Although there is no official data on unwanted pregnancies in Benin,
activists say women such as Ismail are forced to keep pregnancies
because of the inaccessibility to safe abortions. The health ministry
estimates that complications from unsafe abortion cause about 20 percent
of maternal deaths. For Ismail, that was a “major reason” why she
decided to keep her pregnancy. <I had a friend who died after visiting a
quack to get an abortion,> she said. <So the thought of that happening
to me forced me to keep it. I didn’t want to die like her.>
Landmark vote
Until last week, access to abortion in Benin was legally allowed only if
the pregnancy endangered the life of the pregnant woman, was a result of
rape, or an incestuous relationship. But in a landmark move on October
20, following a long parliamentary session, the majority of the
country’s lawmakers voted to legalise abortion.
Lawyer Dele Ahounou said under the new legislation, women are allowed to
have an abortion in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy if it is going to
cause a material situation, moral distress, affect their education or
professional lives.
<In short, this law puts the power of having an abortion on the person
who is pregnant,> Ahounou explained.
Women’s rights activists hailed the parliament’s move.
<This has always been the case: Letting women make decisions for
themselves,> Tiwa Tope, a 21-year-old activist, said. <We don’t want a
doctor to determine if an individual should get an abortion, or for
anyone who isn’t pregnant to dictate what people should or shouldn’t
do.>
Amnesty International says that worldwide, an estimated one in four
pregnancies every year ends in abortion. Criminalising abortion only
makes it less safe, it adds.
Still, with laws that continue to restrict access to safe abortion –
which the World Health Organization describes as the attainment of the
highest possible level of sexual and reproductive care – women and girls
will continue to seek out ways to abort a pregnancy in ways that are not
up to medical standards.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/27/activists-hail-new-benin-law-abortion
and 3 more articles/links published by Al Jazeera:
Inside Nigeria’s illegal backstreet abortion clinics
Protesters demand abortion rights across Latin America
US prepares for Supreme Court showdown on abortion rights
The links are active on the above page.
The Guardian
27 Oct 2021
Vikram Dodd Police and crime correspondent
<<Serving Met police officer charged with rape.
PC Adam Zaman, 28, was off duty when alleged rape occurred on Sunday
evening, say police.
A serving Metropolitan police officer has been charged with rape, which
allegedly took place last weekend at a hotel in the City of London.
The Met named the officer as PC Adam Zaman, 28, and said the alleged
rape of a woman took place on Sunday evening while Zaman was off duty.
He was arrested the following day after a complaint to police.
The Met said the alleged attack took place in the part of London covered
by the City of London force. Zaman is from Romford in east London.
The Met said the officer had been remanded in custody and would appear
at Westminster magistrates court on Wednesday afternoon. Zaman has been
suspended from duty and the police watchdog has been informed.
In a statement, the Met said: <The Met’s directorate of professional
standards has been informed and PC Zaman has been suspended. The matter
has been referred to the Independent Office for Police Conduct.>
Zaman is based in the east area command unit, covering the east of
London. He was charged on Wednesday after an investigation by the City
of London police.
The news that a serving Met officer has been charged with rape comes as
Britain’s biggest force tries to improve the level of confidence women
have in it after the murder of Sarah Everard. The Met accepts trust has
been eroded after the case of a former Met officer, Wayne Couzens, who
was convicted of Everard’s kidnap, rape and murder in September. After
his sentencing the Met announced a review by Lady Louise Casey.
Announcing that review, the Met commissioner, Cressida Dick, said: <We
recognise the grave levels of public concern following the kidnap, rape
and murder of Sarah Everard and other deeply troubling incidents and
allegations. I have said that we know a precious bond has been broken.>
The government has also announced its own inquiry.
After the news of Zaman being charged, DCS Paul Trevers, the policing
commander for the east area command unit, said: <I recognise that the
public will be concerned to hear that a serving police officer has been
charged with such a serious offence. We absolutely share that concern.
We acted swiftly when this allegation was reported to us and have fully
supported what continues to be a thorough investigation by detectives
from the City of London police. Specialist support is being provided to
the complainant. PC Zaman has now been charged and it is important that
criminal proceedings are allowed to take their course. Nothing should be
said or reported which could put the integrity of those proceedings at
risk.> >>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/oct/27/serving-met-police-officer-charged-with
The Guardian
26 Oct 2021
Jessica Elgot and Linda Geddes
<<Pregnant women are being turned away from UK Covid vaccine clinics,
experts warn.
Members of JCVI say focus on those who have not had any jabs must take
precedence over efforts to increase booster uptake.
Pregnant women are being turned away from Covid vaccine clinics despite
clinical advice, experts have warned as they urged ministers to ramp up
efforts to reach unvaccinated groups.
Members of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI)
told the Guardian that efforts to increase booster jab uptake will not
be sufficient to prevent more deaths and hospitalisations, and that
ministers must prioritise reaching those who have had no jabs. In
particular they urged a focus on pregnant women as only about 15% in the
UK have been fully vaccinated. Among all over-12s, the figure is 79%.
On Tuesday the NHS said pregnant women should never be turned away from
clinics and said vaccines could save the lives of women and their babies.
New data from Oxford University’s MBRRACE-UK study on maternal health,
seen by the Guardian, shows that at least 13 pregnant women died with
Covid between July and September this year, with 85% of them believed to
have been unvaccinated. The figure is higher than in the first and
second waves of the pandemic, when nine and 11 pregnant women died but
when jabs were not available.
Prof Marian Knight, the lead for the MBRRACE-UK programme, said there
was still no joined-up messaging across the health service. <Women are
being turned away from clinics and now there are some trusts offering it
as part of the maternity service, but it is not universal so there are
still barriers,> she said. >>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/26/pregnant-women-are-being-turned-away-from-covid-vaccine-clinics-experts-warn
Al Jazeera
26 Oct 2021
Opinions
The Third World Women’s Alliance: Lessons for today
US imperialism rages on, but it still has not killed the magic of
solidarity.
Belen Fernandez
Contributing editor at Jacobin Magazine
Note from Gino d'Artali
It's a long read but more than worth your time.
Read it here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/10/26/the-third-world-womens-alliance-lessons-for-today
The Guardian
24 Oct 2021
Patrick Wintour Diplomatic editor
<<Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s husband on second hunger strike in effort to
free her
Richard Ratcliffe seeks to persuade Foreign Office to do more to secure
wife’s release from prison in Iran.
The husband of the jailed British-Iranian dual national Nazanin
Zaghari-Ratcliffe has gone on hunger strike for a second time in an
attempt to persuade the UK foreign secretary to do more to bring his
wife back from detention in Iran. His hunger strike is to take place
outside the Foreign Office in London.
Richard Ratcliffe took the radical step in desperation after the Iranian
authorities said earlier this month that Nazanin had lost her appeal
against a second prison sentence. She will return to jail for another
year, and then subject to a travel ban for a further year after that.>>
Read here what happened to Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe earlier:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/16/iranian-court-upholds-new-jail-term-for-nazanin-zaghari-ratcliffe
and The Guardian article today:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/oct/24/nazanin-zaghari-ratcliffes-husband-on-second-hunger-strike-in-effort-to-free-her
The Guardian
22 Oct 2021
<<Rights and freedom
Global development
More than 30,000 Polish women sought illegal or foreign abortions since
law change last year
Tens of thousands have travelled to other European countries including
England for legal terminations since near-total ban, campaigners say.
Rights and freedom is supported by
Humanity United
Rosie Swash
At least 34,000 women in Poland are known to have sought abortions
illegally or abroad since the country introduced a near total ban on
terminations a year ago. According to Abortion Without Borders (AWB), an
organisation that helps women access safe abortion services, more than
1,000 Polish women have sought second-trimester abortions in foreign
clinics since the country passed draconian new laws.
AWB said its figures are likely to just be a snapshot of the true number
of Polish women seeking illegal or foreign abortions in the past year.
NGOs have estimated that 80 to 200,000 women a year sought illegal
abortions under Poland’s old abortion laws, which still tightly
restricted the conditions under which women could seek terminations.
On 22 October last year, Poland’s constitutional court ruled that
abortions in cases of foetal defects were unconstitutional and that
terminations would be allowed only in cases of rape, incest, or if the
mother’s health was at risk, which made up only about 2% of legal
terminations at the time of the ruling. The law came into effect in
January 2021.
In the past year, at least 460 Polish women seeking second-trimester
abortions travelled to England, according to AWB, where terminations can
be carried out up to 24 weeks, and beyond that in exceptional
circumstances. The charity says it has helped women travel from Poland
to Belgium, Germany, Spain and the Czech Republic to access legal
abortions.
Of those who sought its services in the 12 months since the legislation
was announced, AWB says at least 18,000 women were helped by its
affiliate group Women Help Women, an organisation that facilitates
postal access to abortion pills.
The figures were released in the same week as a report by Human Rights
Watch, including evidence from 14 other organisations, including Amnesty
International and International Federation for Human Rights, said women
and girls in Poland are facing “incalculable harm” due to the new
abortion legislation.
<The constitutional tribunal ruling is causing incalculable harm –
especially to those who are poor, live in rural areas, or are
marginalised,> said Urszula Grycuk, international advocacy coordinator
at the Federation for Women and Family Planning (Federa) in Poland, one
of the groups that contributed to the report.
Mara Clarke, the founder of AWB, told the Guardian: <We’re seeing more
women [access our services] with foetal abnormality since the law
changed. We’re hearing from our service users that the severity of
foetal abnormality is being downplayed by doctors and that in some cases
doctors are wilfully delaying diagnosis [so that women find it more
difficult to access an abortion].>
Abortion has always been tightly controlled in Poland, and was banned
until 1932, when the law changed to allow legal abortion for medical
reasons or in cases of rape or incest.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/oct/22/more-than-30000-polish-women-sought-or-foreign-abortions-since-law-change-last-year
The Guardian
21 Oct 2021
<<Opinion
Sexual harassment
Young women are sick of being told to stick together and watch their
drinks
Gaby Hinsliff
When a night out involves the risk of getting ‘spiked’, it’s male
violence that’s the problem.
A young woman, out for a night’s clubbing, suddenly feels the room begin
to spin.
She blacks out and wakes up feeling terrible, with only vague memories
of the night before and a mysterious throbbing pain in the back of her
hand. And then, on closer inspection, she finds a pinprick in the skin.
She thinks she remembers a sharp scratch, like an injection, before
everything went blank.
It sounds like the stuff of urban myth, the kind of gap-year horror
story that starts in a remote backstreet bar in South America and ends
in the victim supposedly waking up missing a kidney. Yet reports of
so-called “spiking by needle” – young women on a night out allegedly
being injected by unseen strangers with something that knocks them out –
are being taken seriously by police in cities including Nottingham,
Edinburgh and Glasgow. Heartbreakingly, there have been reports of
nervous women going out in thick, needle-proof jeans and leather
jackets. However rare these incidents may turn out to be, they fit a
pattern of behaviour that for many feels horribly familiar.
Once upon a time, the idea of spiking drinks – slipping drugs or extra
shots of alcohol into a glass while the victim’s back was turned,
rendering them vulnerable to a would-be rapist or thief – seemed
outlandish too. But a BBC investigation in 2019 uncovered 2,600 reports
of drink-spiking to police in England and Wales over the previous four
years, and now the return of nightlife post-lockdown seems to be
bringing old fears out of the woodwork.
Nottinghamshire police have recorded 44 reported spiking incidents since
September, 12 of them involving “something sharp’’. Student unions
nationwide are collecting accounts of suspected drink-tampering, with
reported incidents in Sheffield, Norwich, and Canterbury. After enduring
months of cancelled music festivals and shuttered bars, this year’s
freshers deserve to be out having the time of their lives. But for some,
socialising is now edged with anxiety.
A stranger’s hand unceremoniously shoved up your skirt on a night out
has become almost routine for young women. Street harassment – not just
catcalling but crude propositioning and being followed by men who may
get aggressive if rejected – is normalised. Young women are sick of
being told to stick together, or to watch their drinks, when the problem
is male violence, not female vigilance. Why should they tie themselves
in ever more anxious knots trying to stay safe, while the perpetrators
carry on regardless? What depresses many older women, meanwhile, is that,
if anything, this kind of everyday harassment seems to have got worse –
creepier and more aggressive – over the years, even as the world opens
up for younger women in so many ways.
Bad things have, of course, always happened in nightclubs or at parties.
Some men have always taken advantage of women who are out of it. But
Generation X didn’t go out at night worrying that someone might poison
us. Nobody had to offer us lids for our drinks, as they do our daughters.
The misogyny we encountered was raw and open, but there’s something so
darkly insidious about the idea of furtively doping women into
submission.
One of the more disturbing aspects of the spiking-by-needle allegations
is that injecting a drug is likely to have a much more dramatic effect
than getting someone to swallow it unwittingly, making it harder to
smuggle a woman out past the bouncers by pretending she’s merely drunk.
Is this really about a desire to humiliate and frighten women, rather
than to sexually assault them? Do some men get their kicks simply from
making a woman pass out in front of them, as if they had been choked by
an invisible hand? Young women are sometimes mocked for being anxious,
fragile snowflakes. But given the pressures some of them are under, they
seem positively warrior-like to me.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/21/young-women-drinks-night-out-spiked-male-violence
Al Jazeera
21 Oct 2021
<<Minnesota ex-cop resentenced to 57 months for killing woman.
Mohamed Noor claims he feared for his safety and that of his police
partner when he shot the unarmed woman.
A former Minneapolis police officer has been resentenced to 57 months in
jail in the shooting death of an unarmed woman in 2017 after his initial
conviction was overturned last month.
Mohamed Noor, 35, was resentenced on Thursday to the maximum amount of
jail time possible. His lawyers had sought the minimum 41 months
available under sentencing guidelines, arguing the former officer had
been a <model prisoner>.
Noor had been sentenced to 12.5 years in jail in 2019 for his role in
shooting Justine Ruszczyk Damond, 40, who had called the police to
report hearing a possible rape happening behind her house.
In her decision, Minnesota District Judge Kathryn Quaintance noted that
Noor fired <across the nose> of his partner in the squad car on the
night of July 15, 2017, when residents of a nearby house were
entertaining on their porch. Noor fired his gun at Damond, a dual
US-Australian citizen, from the passenger seat as she approached the
police vehicle, killing her.
<These factors of endangering the public make your crime of manslaughter
appropriate for high end of the guidelines,> the judge told Noor. He had
been on the job for less than two years when the shooting happened.
Noor testified during his trial that he fired towards Damond from the
passenger seat of the vehicle after hearing a loud noise that prompted
him to fear for himself and his police partner. State investigators said
Noor and his partner, Matthew Harrity, had not turned on their body
cameras on the night of the killing and squad car video did not capture
the shooting.
In 2019, a jury acquitted Noor of second-degree murder but convicted him
of third-degree <depraved-mind murder> and second-degree manslaughter.
The killing lead Damond’s family to file a lawsuit against Noor and the
city of Minneapolis, which eventually agreed to pay a settlement worth
$20m. >>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/21/minnesota-ex-cop-resentenced-to-57-months-for-killing-australian
Al Jazeera
21 Oct 2021
<<From: 101 East
Why are so many Indian sugarcane cutters removing their wombs?
We investigate the fate of India’s female sugarcane workers and ask why
so many are having invasive surgery.
India is the world’s largest sugar producer and, each year, one million
workers harvest the sugarcane fields.
Families travel far from home to live in rough camps by the fields,
where they work long days under the hot sun, with only one day off a
month.
But a strange phenomenon is appearing among the female workers; they
complain of severe abdominal pains and acute tiredness. This has led to
one in every three having her womb removed.
101 East investigates why these women are being persuaded to have
invasive surgery and what is behind their pain.>>
Watch the video here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/101-east/2021/10/21/why-are-so-many-indian-sugarcane-cutters-removing-their-wombs
Al Jazeera
21 Oct 2021
<<Women's Rights
Benin’s parliament votes to legalise abortion.
Under the new law, women can terminate a pregnancy within the first
three months under certain conditions.
Parliamentarians in Benin have voted to legalise abortion in the West
African country, where it was already authorised under very restricted
conditions.
Under the new law, passed late on Wednesday, women can terminate a
pregnancy within the first three months if it is likely to <aggravate or
cause material, educational, professional or moral distress,
incompatible with the woman or the unborn child’s interest>.
Previously, abortion was authorised if pursing the pregnancy <threatened
the life of the mother>, was <the result of a rape or incest> or when
<the unborn child has a particularly severe affection>.
After a heated debate in the parliament, with some legislators strongly
opposed to legalising abortion further, the amendment finally passed.
Several countries in Africa have total bans on abortion, including
Congo-Brazzaville, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Egypt,
Guinea-Bissau and Senegal.
<In Benin, nearly 200 women die each year as the result of abortion
complications,> said Minister of Health Benjamin Hounkpatin in a
statement on Thursday. <This measure will be a relief for many women who
face undesired pregnancies, and are forced to put their lives in danger
with botched abortions,> he added.
The minister said that complications from abortions were the cause of 20
percent of maternal deaths in the country.
<It is because of this public health threat that the government has
taken its responsibilities by submitting a text that lawmakers have
passed,> said Hounkpatin. He said the new measure’s <unique goal> was to
<save human lives> and that <voluntary termination of pregnancies will
remain a last resort>.
The influential Episcopal Conference of Benin said it was <highly
preoccupied by the proposed law to legalise abortions>.
<Abortion not only destroys the life of the foetus but also that of the
mother, in many aspects,> the religious group said in a statement.
Abortion laws vary wildly around the world, but only a minority of
countries have outright bans.
Women from Europe, North America and Oceania benefit from the most
liberal legislation, in some cases acquired only recently.
New Zealand, for example, only decriminalised abortion in March 2020. Up
to then, it was punishable with a 14-year prison term.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/21/benins-parliament-votes-to-legalise-abortion
Al Jazeera
21 Oct 2021
<<From: Fault Lines
Unrelinquished: When America’s gun laws fail abuse victims
In an exclusive investigation, Fault Lines and Reveal expose how US gun
laws have failed to prevent domestic abusers from killing their
partners.
In Tucson, Arizona, Jazmine Willock was murdered by her partner in 2018.
He was prohibited from having a firearm because of a prior domestic
violence conviction, but he carried one anyway.
In Jacksonville, Florida in 2017, Ashlee Rucker’s boyfriend killed her
and seriously injured her sister, Lisa, using a gun. As a convicted
felon, he should never have had one.
Under US law, people convicted of felonies and certain domestic violence
crimes are barred from having guns. But these laws are largely
unenforced. Offenders are rarely ordered to surrender their firearms,
and domestic violence victims have paid the price.
Fault Lines follows Jennifer Gollan, a reporter with Reveal from the
Center for Investigative Reporting, as she investigates gaps in the
system that allow domestic abusers to keep their guns – with deadly
consequences.>>
Watch the video here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/fault-lines/2021/10/20/unrelinquished-when-americas-gun-laws-fail-abuse-victims
Al Jazeera
20 Oct 2021
Al Jazeera
20 Oct 2021
By Makua Adimora
<<A year on, women still picking up pieces from #EndSARS protests.
Female demonstrators arrested during last year’s protests against police
brutality in Nigeria remain traumatised while waiting for justice to
prevail.
Lagos, Nigeria – On a hot October afternoon last year, Felicia Okpara
left home to attend a job interview in Surulere, just a short distance
away from where a crowd of peaceful #EndSARS demonstrators had gathered.
Moved by the defiant spirit and camaraderie among the youth protesting
against police brutality, the 27-year-old, after her interview, decided
to join in. Little did she know that that would later turn into the most
traumatising day of her life.
<There was so much chaos going on: police shoot-outs; SARS were shooting;
gunshots everywhere. People were running for safety, I was also running
for safety,> she recounted to Al Jazeera.
While in a corner hiding for safety, Okpara took out her phone to record
the violent events taking place. However, she was abruptly stopped by a
plainclothes police officer who demanded she stop filming and hand over
her device.
When she refused, he initiated her arrest. <One other policeman came
[over] and held me and they [both] dragged me across [the street] to the
police station. Other policemen were gathered at the gate and that was
where the intense beating started,> Okpara said. She and some other
arrested protesters were dragged into the Area C station, where the
beating continued.
That was on October 12, 2020, just days into the #EndSARS protests where
young Nigerians assembled in unison to demand the abolition of the
Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), a unit notorious for alleged abuses,
illegal detention, profiling and even extrajudicial killings.
According to Amnesty International, people between the ages of 17 and 30
were most at risk of arrest, torture or extortion by the unit’s officers.
<Young men with dreadlocks, ripped jeans, tattoos, flashy cars or
expensive gadgets are frequently targeted by SARS,> it said in a June
2020 report.
Mobilised through online platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, the
youth-led protests rocked the nation for days. The demonstrations forced
the government to disband SARS on October 11, but protesters refused to
let up as they demanded more governmental reforms. The protests came to
an abrupt end after October 20, when soldiers opened fire at a peaceful
crowd at the Lekki tollgate in Lagos, in an incident that Amnesty says
killed at least 10 people.
Throughout that period, the youth led many efforts to organise and
fundraise the movement. But perhaps the most distinctive characteristic
of the protest was the prominence of young women in steering and
sustaining the mobilisation. <Even if men would think they are the sole
focus of police brutality, women were still affected by it in very
distinct ways,> said Tami Makinde, a Nigerian female journalist who
extensively covered the protests. <If anything, we were inspired [to
come out] by our lived realities of being women and existing in a
patriarchal society.>
As such, women were an integral part of the protests. Like their male
counterparts, women such as Okpara trooped out en masse to lend their
voices to the cause. <[Police brutality] is something that happens to
everybody, whether you’re a woman or man,> she explained. <At the
protest grounds, there were so many ladies. Most of them are mothers or
sisters to [sons and] brothers who probably have dreadlocks, so if women
[kept] quiet about this, it [was] definitely going to affect them. A lot
of women were also being arrested [by the police].>
This is a sentiment 22-year-old Treasure Nduka, a protester in Lagos,
shares. <It felt powerful because the word ‘woman’ has been easily
associated with fragility and that’s why prehistorically they’ve made
women always take the backseat when it [comes] to certain things. But
seeing women take charge and seeing as the majority of us were the
driving force behind the protest it felt like a shift in history and it
was so beautiful,> Nduka told Al Jazeera.
Like Okpara, Nduka joined the women who came out in droves to challenge
injustice – but that is not all these two women have in common. Nduka
was also among the female demonstrators who were arrested and underwent
the same treatment during the protests.
<They beat us and they asked us to remove our bra, they checked our
pants and searched us,> she recounted. <I was too shocked to realise
what was happening. You know when you have an out-of-body experience?
But like in a bad way? That’s what it was like. I was just like, ‘Is
this happening to me?'>
Both women were kept in the same cell after being assaulted and taunted
by the police officers. <When I was arrested, a lot of things went
through my mind, because no one even knew where I was,> Okpara tearfully
recalled.
<We were being beaten up; the policewomen, especially, they were the
worst. They beat me to a point I lost control of my body and peed on
myself. What they were looking for was my phone, because they felt I had
evidence of the police brutality that was ongoing, so they were just
trying to snatch my phone from me. I kept begging and pleading with them
but they didn’t even answer. The more you plead with them, the more they
hit you.> Al Jazeera reached out to the public relations officer of the
police force for a comment but he responded, saying, “I was not in the
state last year during the protest so [I’m] not in the position to give
the comment. While they were detained, a video of both women being
dragged across the street by the police went viral on social media, as
thousands of users spread the word of their arrest and clamoured for
their release. The uproar alerted Femi Gbajabiamila, speaker of the
House of Representatives, who facilitated their release later that night.
More than a year later, the women are still reeling from the
psychological trauma of their ordeal.
<At first I had nightmares,> Nduka said. <And for a while, the sound of
bangers startled me. I remember pushing all the feelings behind and not
wanting to deal with the emotions because I didn’t want to be a victim.
I tried to stay off social media because nothing felt right. Until one
day, I had a panic attack recounting the whole event. It felt like I was
being hit all over again. I had to take a shower to cool off.>
In one of the few concessions made by the government to demonstrators,
the National Executive Council authorised state governments to set up
panels to investigate decades of abuse by SARS officials. The majority
of the panels have since been discontinued. Okpara had been attending
these panel hearings judiciously, in hopes of attaining some form of
justice.>>
Please do read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/20/a-year-on-women-still-picking-up-pieces-from-endsars-protests
Comment by Gino d'Artali: Thats why I so often call the police of the
justice departements 'co-predators'.
And do read this article publisched in Aljazeera
<<OPINION
Opinions
#EndSARS one year on: Who’s bold enough to rebel?
The #EndSARS protests were a true revolutionary moment for young
Nigerians. But can they keep the revolution going?
Makua Adimora
Nigerian journalist and editor
Published On 20 Oct 2021
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/10/20/endsars-one-year-one-whos-bold-enough-to-rebel
The Guardian
19 Oct 2021
<<Opinion
Women
Bravo, supreme court: we do need rules to stop men interrupting women
Eleanor Margolis
The US is trying to stop female judges and attorneys being interrupted
by male counterparts. Sounds all too familiar.
Along with various inalienable rights and governing principles, the
tendency for men to talk over women has now been officially recognised
by the US supreme court. Newly introduced rules to the structure of oral
arguments are in place to address the issue of male justices and
attorneys (extremely regularly) interrupting their female colleagues.
These measures were discussed last week by Sonia Sotomayor, who had the
honour of being the most interrupted supreme court justice in the 2019
term. And they show that, far from being a mere everyday annoyance,
“mansplaining” (or the ideologically adjacent “manterrupting”) can
interfere with democracy. And the fact that, as a woman, you can be a
literal supreme court justice and still get shouted down like someone’s
little sister isn’t exactly encouraging.
For women, the experience of your whole side of a conversation being
limited to short bursts – <But … >, <Yes, and … >, <Can I just … > – is
all too familiar. A 2014 study at George Washington University even
found that, when speaking to women, men interrupt 33% more often than
when
speaking to other men.
But what does this constant interrupting look like outside of the
rarefied confines of the judicial branch of US government? Here’s a
nicely mundane example. I’m out for lunch with my partner, and we stop
at a food truck. You know the type, overpriced <street food> that you
have to hurriedly eat standing up, outside. Personally, I can’t get
enough of them. My partner, who has coeliac disease, asks if a
particular item on the menu is gluten-free.
The food truck guy – a bearded Jack Black lookalike – says that, no, as
it contains mustard, it also contains gluten. All mustard – according to
him – is thickened with wheat flour. My partner, who has been checking
ingredient lists meticulously for coming on two decades, knows this not
to be true.
Tentatively (she’s the non-confrontational sort), she corrects him. But
no, Jack Black without the charisma disagrees. Suddenly this guy has a
PhD in glutenology from the University of Mustard.
As Dr Food Truck rants about his credentials and expertise, my partner’s
expression falls. Ordering food is often an ordeal for her, as people
have
either never heard of coeliac disease, or mistakenly think they know
everything about it. What’s more, this guy is telling her that if she’s
had mustard before, she’s <probably fine>. She – who was late diagnosed
and spent her entire childhood in severe intestinal pain – tries to get
a word in edgeways, but is steamrollered by someone clearly used to
talking at women, uninterrupted. So I (the semi-confrontational sort)
chime in. Not raising my voice, and keeping my tone as neutral as
possible, I tell him that maybe, as an actual, certified coeliac, my
partner knows what she’s talking about. Dr Food Truck tells me to <calm
down>.
Women reading this will probably recognise it as a classic example of
mansplaining. This, of course, is a term that has been in popular use
(particularly online) since around 2009, and was named one of the New
York Times’ words of the year in 2010. And it’s something women are on
the receiving end of every time they’re interrupted and talked over by
men who – on the basis of being men – believe they know better. And
there’s little more simultaneously satisfying and galling than when some
guy tries to get into it on Twitter with a woman talking about – say –
The Matrix, and she turns out to be Lilly Wachowski, one of the film’s
directors. Wachowski, in fact, has corrected men (including Elon Musk) a
number of times on social media, on their deeply misogynistic
interpretation of “red pilling” – a key element of the film. And many of
these individuals have continued to argue with her, knowing that she and
her sister, Lana, literally invented the entire concept.
Similarly, there have been several occasions on which men have tried to
explain my own articles to me. In fact, if a man doesn’t see this, and
then tries to mansplain mansplaining to me, I’ll be genuinely surprised.
Or there was the time a male GP told me the pain I was in was <probably
psychosomatic>, and then – unprompted – explained what he meant by <psychosomatic>.
Usually I’m prepared to let medical professionals (male or otherwise)
explain whatever they like to me. But being hit with <your symptoms are
fake, and I’m going to convey this to you as if you were a child>
is, in my humble womanly opinion, beyond the pale. What do you even say
in such an instance? Still beats me. What I’ve learned as a woman is
that if someone isn’t interested in your point of view, the dialogue is
doomed from the get-go. We’re too often better off screaming into the
void rather than trying to engage.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/19/supreme-court-men-interrupting-women
Al Jazeera
19 Oct 2021
<<Colombia ‘responsible for kidnap, attack and rape of journalist’.
Inter-American Court of Human Rights issues ruling holding Colombia’s
govt responsible for kidnap, torture and rape of journalist Jineth
Bedoya in
2000.
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has issued a ruling holding
Colombia’s government responsible for the kidnap, torture and rape of a
journalist by paramilitary groups in 2000.
Jineth Bedoya, a reporter at the time for the El Espectador newspaper,
was investigating a weapons smuggling ring when she was abducted and
assaulted by far-right militia members.
The paramilitaries, some of whom have since been convicted, were among
the forces that fought left-wing militias in Colombia until their
official
demobilisation in 2006.
The ruling on Monday said the attacks against Bedoya <could not have
been carried out without the consent and collaboration of the [Colombian]
State, or at least with its tolerance>.
The court, an autonomous body of the Organization of American States,
added that the state’s further failure to investigate threats against
Bedoya in the wake of the attack violated her <rights to judicial
guarantees, judicial protection and equality before the law>.
While three paramilitary leaders were later convicted for their roles in
the abduction and attack, the court also ordered Colombia to <punish
those
remaining responsible for the acts of violence> and called for other
measures, including the creation of a training programme for public
officials and security forces focused on violence against women.
Bedoya, now 47, hailed the decision, saying she had faced two decades of
<persecution, intimidation and constant threats> while seeking justice
for the attack, in which she was tortured and raped for 16 hours before
being left naked on the side of the road.
<October 18, 2021 goes down in history as the day when a struggle that
began with an individual crime has led to the vindication of the rights
of
thousands of women who have been victims of sexual violence and of women
journalists who leave a part of their lives in their work,> tweeted
Bedoya, who was awarded the UNESCO World Press Freedom Prize last year.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/19/court-colombia-responsible-for-attack-rape-of-journalist
Al Jazeera
19 Oct 2021
By Deborah Davies and Al Jazeera Investigative Unit
<<Oxford professors abused position with sexist and drunken conduct.
Al Jazeera investigation reveals how some of Britain’s top universities
fail to protect students from sexual misconduct.
Prominent British universities are not dealing with complaints of sexual
harassment effectively, appearing more prepared to dismiss them than
punish the perpetrators, according to evidence gathered during a
two-year investigation. The investigation, Degrees of Abuse, by Al
Jazeera’s Investigations Unit (I-Unit) reveals how British universities,
including Oxford, Cambridge, Glasgow, and Warwick deal with complaints
of sexual harassment, sexist, drunken behaviour, and coercive control.
Al Jazeera identified two professors at University of Oxford who fellow
academics and students say have abused their position of authority with
sexist and drunken behaviour.
It also revealed that the university, where the two teach, fails to
protect female students from sexual harassment.
‘Personal reputation as a sexual predator’
One of the professors, Andy Orchard, teaches Anglo Saxon at Oxford,
ranked top of the world’s best universities for the sixth year running
this year.
One of his predecessors was J R R Tolkien, who held the same position
when he wrote the Hobbit and much of Lord of the Rings.
Orchard’s teaching career started at Oxford’s academic rival, the
University of Cambridge. And that is where two women, now both highly
respected academics, encountered him in the 1990’s.
<His academic reputation was high, his personal reputation was as an
alcoholic and a sexual predator>, says Professor Catherine Karkov, chair
of Art History at Leeds University.
<He held meetings in the pub rather than in his office. So he was drunk
many times for meetings.>
Professor Ananya Kabir, now professor of English Literature at Kings
College, London, chose Cambridge for her PhD precisely so she could be
supervised by Orchard, who had a brilliant reputation as a scholar of
the medieval era.
She says her view of him changed completely after a fellow postgraduate
confided that she was in a sexual relationship with Orchard and
terrified of the consequences if she ended it.
<There was a primal fear. The repercussions were unspecified and
therefore nightmarish. It’s an entirely unequal power relationship. Your
PhD is your whole world,> says Kabir.
This power dynamic was very apparent in the I-Unit’s investigation
across UK universities. There was a fraught relationship between female
postgraduate students and their male supervisors, gatekeepers to future
careers for women in academia.
Kabir and Karkov say they reported their concerns about Orchard’s affair
and his drinking to senior academics but Cambridge University took no
action.
Do you have information on wrongdoing or want to share another tip?
Contact Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit on +974 5080 0207 (WhatsApp/Signal),
or find other ways to reach out on our Tips page.
In 2000, Orchard moved to Canada, to a more senior role at the
University of Toronto.
There too, there were complaints about him. <He seemed very drunk. He
cornered me on a staircase>, says Professor Alex Gillespie. <Then it got
sexualized, he said: ‘I’m going to fire one last shot of testosterone
across your bow,’ It felt like a threat>.
At the time, she was a young academic, too frightened of career
reprisals to speak out. Today as vice president and principal at
TorontoUniversity,
Professor Gillespie is a powerful voice, <I no longer want to be
complicit in this damaging silence>, she told Al Jazeera.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/19/oxford-professors-abused-position-with-sexist-and-drunken-conduct
Al Jazeera
26 Nov 2020
<<Violence against women intensified since coronavirus outbreak: UN.
Many women continue to feel trapped with their abusers as lockdowns
resume in some countries around the world.
Women around the world on Wednesday marked International Day for the
Elimination of Violence against Women, highlighting how lockdowns due to
the coronavirus pandemic have left many trapped with their abusers and
exposed to greater danger.
The United Nations said since the outbreak of COVID-19, all types of
violence against women and girls, particularly domestic violence, had
intensified, with shelters at capacity and helplines in some places
seeing a five-fold increase in calls.
<Men’s violence against women is also a pandemic – one that pre-dates
the virus and will outlive it. It too needs our global, coordinated
response and enforceable protocols. It too affects vast populations of
all ages,> said UN Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka in a
statement.
Last year, 243 million women and girls experienced sexual or physical
violence from their partner. This year, reports of increased domestic
violence, cyberbullying, child marriages, sexual harassment and sexual
violence have flooded in, she added.
In the Turkish city of Istanbul, several hundred people gathered to
protest against domestic violence against women.
One woman taking part, who declined to give her name, said: <The law
does not protect women as it should. We are here to make our voice heard.
There are femicides happening almost every day in this country but
people who are committing the crime are walking free.>
In Italy, protesters gathered outside Parliament bearing banners reading
<If they touch one [of us], they touch all> and <Women are not toys>.
Italy went through one of the world’s strictest lockdowns between March
and May and last month introduced new restrictions.
Its quarantine is creating conditions for increased murders of women by
family members in the same home, according to a study by the Italian
Economic and Social Research Institute.
<We have witnessed an increase in domestic violence during confinement
measures,> said protester Serena Freddi. <This shows the home is still a
place of conflict and violence for women.>
Spain held a minute’s silence for murdered women on Wednesday and in
Portugal, the OMA observatory, which monitors femicide, said so far in
2020 30 women had been murdered, half of them victims of domestic
violence. The country’s Interior Minister Eduardo Cabrita said there was
a 6 percent drop in the number of complaints about violence in the first
10 months of 2020 from a year ago, which he said was a worrying sign
that women were struggled to access help during lockdown.
The government launched a video campaign called #ISurvived, which warns
of the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and hopes to spread the
word about the support available to victims of domestic violence.
In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel said in her weekly podcast, <statistically,
every 45 minutes a woman in our country is attacked by her current or
former partner. These are the cruel facts. Every single case tells a
horrible story…We must never look the other way when girls or women are
threatened with violence or attacked.>>
Source Al Jazeera
and on the same page read related articles/click on the links:
From: The Stream
Why are women raped with impunity in Bangladesh?
Protesters demand that attackers face justice for rape and sexual
assault.
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/11/26/women-around-the-world-decry-domestic-violence-amid-pandemic
The Guardian
17 October 2021
<<Opinion
Feminism
Don’t write off radical feminism – it’s always been ahead of its time
Finn Mackay
The revolutionary social justice movement of the 1970s still has answers
today.
Feminism is often portrayed as a dinosaur rudely dying right in the way
of progressive change. Younger people today are much more fluent in
their
understandings of sex, gender and sexuality. There are more terms
available than ever before to describe identity categories (Facebook has
more than 50 different choices for gender alone). Indeed, research has
found pupils in UK secondary schools using more than 23 different labels
for gender identity. In this climate, feminism, a movement led by the
experiences of one identity, has become seen as backward, trapped in the
past. Added to this are misconceptions that radical feminism in
particular is uniquely transphobic, with the label of “terf”, or
trans-exclusionary radical feminist, applied to anyone expressing trans
exclusionary views, regardless of their politics or whether they are
even a feminist at all.
In fact, far from being behind the curve or opposed to such changes,
radical feminism was ahead of its time. The radical feminists of the
1970s were some of the first to take seriously the gender and sexuality
debates currently raging through our society. Many of them looked
forward to a gender- fluid world of polyamorous and pansexual
relationships, where social roles were no longer defined by people’s
sexed characteristics at birth. Their work helped to secure structural
equality for women, more expansive definitions of the family and greater
freedom of expression for gender and sexual identities that cut against
the grain of heterosexuality.
A key tenet of radical feminism has always been the rejection of
biological essentialism – the belief in innate, biological sex roles.
The end goal of feminist revolution, said Shulamith Firestone, author of
The Dialectic of Sex, must be <not just the elimination of male
privilege but of the sex
distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no
longer matter culturally>. As the radical feminist, poet and artist Kate
Millett wrote in her classic 1970 text Sexual Politics, <whatever the
‘real’ differences between the sexes may be, we are not likely to know
them until the sexes are treated differently, that is alike. And this is
very far from being the case at present.>
The work of radical feminists put gender under the microscope, including
masculinity. This was highly controversial at the time, and still is.
They were among the first to study why masculinity is defined through
violence, and how it might be changed. Far from promoting a war of the
sexes, radical feminists had an even more radical message: women and
men, all of us, however we define, are all human beings, and together
are capable of growth and humanity. In 1970s Britain, feminists went
beyond theorising what family life might look like without the nuclear
model, and started buildingit themselves. They established lesbian
communes, ran self-insemination classes and organised networks of gay
men to become sperm donors and co- parents. Some raised children
collectively. In doing so, they created egalitarian communities freed
from the pressure of gender roles.
These second wave feminists started the first refuges and rape crisis
centres; occupied the courts of sexist judges; burned down sex shops;
launched campaigns against the institution of marriage and wore badges
urging the destruction of the nuclear family. This was happening long
before people started using terms such as chosen family or queer kinship.
Their movement was united with other social justice movements: for Black
power, for the environment, for peace and anti-militarism. Perhaps it is
because of their radicalism, and the potential of the cultural change
they were involved in starting, that such a backlash ensued to stop them.
Unfortunately homophobia, and perhaps lesbophobia specifically, is still
a powerful deterrent to women’s engagement with feminism, and, from
early on, radical feminism was picked as the cautionary tale, of the
certain spinsterhood and rejection that would follow from taking
feminism too far.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/17/radical-feminism-social-justice
Al Jazeera
17 Oct 2021
<<Inside Nigeria’s unregulated human egg industry.
In the booming fertility business, young women face unfavourable
conditions and undergo multiple egg donations at the risk of their
health.
By Mariam Adetona
Listen to this story:
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2021/10/17/inside-nigerias-unregulated-human-egg-industry
The Guardian
16 Oct 2021
<<The Week in Patriarchy
Feminism
Policing pregnancy while corporate drug pushers go free shows warped
values.
Arwa Mahdawi
A system that can put a young woman away for four years for suffering a
miscarriage should make your blood boil.
A miscarriage of justice
Brittney Poolaw is going to prison for having a miscarriage. Last week
the 21-year-old Oklahoma woman was convicted of manslaughter in the
first
degree after losing her baby at 17 weeks. She’s already spent a year and
a half in jail – one of the most dangerous places to be during the
pandemic
– awaiting trial because she couldn’t afford the $20,000 bond. Now,
after a one-day trial, she’s facing four years in state prison.
It is impossible to say with certainty what caused Poolaw’s miscarriage.
The autopsy report reportedly showed the fetus tested positive for drugs
including methamphetamine, however it also found a congenital
abnormality, placental abruption and an infection. The medical
examiner’s report
could not identify the use of drugs as the direct cause of the
miscarriage; nor could any expert witnesses at the trial. Still, a lack
of definitive
evidence didn’t stop the prosecution from arguing that Poolaw’s drug use
caused the miscarriage and she should be locked up for it.
This case should make your blood boil for several reasons. First, it’s a
reminder that freedom can be incredibly expensive. Poolaw wouldn’t have
spent the last 18 months in jail if she’d had money to pay her bond. And
if she had the money to pay for a top-class legal team I very much doubt
that she’d be going to prison now. Just look at the billionaire Sackler
family, the owners of Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of the
prescription painkiller OxyContin. Last year Purdue Pharma pleaded
guilty in federal court to three criminal charges related to pushing
sales of the narcotic, which has fuelled an opioid crisis that has
killed more than 500,000 Americans. And how much jail time did they get?
Zero, of course. Not one member of the Sackler family will spend a
minute in jail for their role in an opioid epidemic that has killed half
a million Americans. Poolaw, to reiterate, spent 18 months in jail
before even going to trial. She’s going to prison for four years because
her unborn baby died for reasons no one can entirely explain.
Poolaw isn’t the first woman in the US to be held criminally accountable
for losing a pregnancy. A complex web of laws – many of them anti-drug
laws – across the US are used to police pregnancy; there are more than
1,200 documented cases of women being arrested because of their
pregnancy outcomes since 1973, when Roe v Wade legalized abortion. In
2019, for example, a 25-year-old California woman, Chelsea Cheyenne
Becker, was charged with murder over the death of her stillborn baby
after methamphetamine was found in the fetus’s system. In the same year,
Marshae Jones, a black mother, was charged with manslaughter in Alabama
for losing her fetus after being shot in the stomach five times.
According to the police Jones started the fight with the woman who shot
her, so was responsible for the death.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/16/policing-pregnancy-miscarriage-corporate-drug-pushers-go-free
Al Jazeera
16 Oct 2021
<<Iranian court upholds new jail term for Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.
The Iranian British woman was handed a new one-year jail sentence after
spending five years in prison.
An Iranian court has upheld a verdict sentencing Nazanin
Zaghari-Ratcliffe to another year in prison in Tehran, prolonging a
detention that began in 2016. The appeals court upheld a verdict issued
in April, her lawyer Hojjat Kermani told The Associated Press news
agency on Saturday. Iranian state media did not immediately acknowledge
the ruling issued after a closed-door hearing. The 43-year-old Iranian
British woman was found guilty of spreading <propaganda against the
establishment> when she participated in a protest in front of the
Iranian embassy in London in 2009.
The court also upheld a one-year ban on travel abroad, meaning she
cannot leave Iran to join her husband and six-year-old daughter for
nearly two years. Kermani said his client was <concerned> about the
appeals court decision.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested at the Tehran airport in April 2016 as
she was returning home in Britain after visiting her family and handed a
five-year jail sentence for plotting the overthrow of Iran’s government.
Her previous sentence ended in March 2021, raising hopes of her return
to the United Kingdom. She was instead immediately ordered back into
court to face new charges. Since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic,
she has been temporarily freed, with movements restricted to her parents’
Tehran home. Zaghari-Ratcliffe was working for the Thomson Reuters
Foundation at the time of her arrest. Her family and the charity, a
subsidiary of the Reuters news agency, have denied the charges. Rights
groups have accused Tehran of using the dual-national as a bargaining
chip for money and influence in negotiations with the West.
Iran, which does not recognise dual nationalities, has denied the
accusations.>>
SOURCE: AL JAZEERA AND NEWS AGENCIES
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/16/iranian-court-upholds-new-jail-term-for-nazanin-zaghari-ratcliffe
HLN (The latest news)
15-10-21
Robby Dierickx
<Perpetrator, we'll cut your dick off>: with these protest signs, women
in Ixelles show how angry they are after a rape case in cafe
ELSENE. In Ixelles last night, some 1,300 people took part in a march
after it became known that a bartender had drugged and raped at least 17
women Those present mainly wanted to encourage the victims and demanded
justice, so the messages on their plates did not lie.>>
Copyright HLN
The original article was translated from Dutch to English by Gino
d'Artali
VRT NEWS - Flemisch (online) newspaper
Oct 14 2021
Sarah Van Genechten
<<More than a thousand women protest for more safety in Brussels after
possible rapes
More than a thousand demonstrators, most of them women, have gathered in
the student district of the Brussels municipality of Ixelles . They
demand more security and make a stand against sexual violence. The
reason for the women's march is a bartender from two student cafes who
allegedly drugged and raped several women. The prosecutor's office has
launched an investigation into the case.
We are strong and angry and radical feminists.
The Brussels public prosecutor has launched an investigation into the
case and confirms that it has received several complaints from different
women in recent months. It is now investigating whether there is a link
between those files and whether there is one or more perpetrators.
Fear and disbelief
<We were in the Waff ourselves last week and the story of those girls
went around. That is simply not possible anymore>, says one of the
demonstrators. <It's terrifying to know that something can be put in
your drink, if you just order something from a bartender. Without you
having asked for it, without being aware of it>, another woman also
joins the demonstration.
Young students, who have just started their studies in Brussels, are
clearly concerned about their safety. <We also want to go out safely in
this neighborhood. We are just new here and we want to feel safe here.
That is very important to us>, so it sounds.
<I'm still scared to walk around,> another woman testified. <When I go
to friends, when I go out, I always think about how to get home. With
whom? Will I get home safely? Will it be dark or not? That's always on
my mind.>
Mayor wants to mediate
Going out with fear cannot and should not be the intention. Mayor
Christos Doulkeridis of Ixelles (Ecolo-Green) says he has a plan ready
to make nightlife in his municipality safer. He mainly wants to mediate
between the women and the cafe owners. <We are taking measures in the
sense that we oblige the sector to make commitments.>
Doulkeridis also emphasizes that he has been working on the fight
against sexual violence throughout his term of office. <Sexual violence
is extremely serious and must be tackled as a matter of priority.> The
mayor has no information about the legal investigation.
Copyright VRT NEWS
The original article was translated from Dutch to English by Gino
d'Artali
Al Jazeera
By Michael Standaert
15 Oct 2021
<<Women in China are waiting for meaningful #MeToo reforms.
Chinese companies seen to fall short on addressing sexual misconduct
face online backlash and possible talent loss, say activists.
Shenzhen, China – China’s corporate leaders and government institutions
are failing to meaningfully implement or enforce policies to reduce
sexual assault, harassment and to increase gender equality, activists
say, despite a recent surge in women coming forward in China to tell
their #MeToo stories.
The failure not only leaves many women wondering when these issues will
be taken seriously, say lawyers and activists. It risks the reputations
of companies embroiled in scandal, and the ability of firms to attract
well-educated women who are increasingly vital to competitiveness as
China’s economy becomes more oriented towards services.
Personally, I haven’t heard of companies introducing new policies to
address these issues, a prominent women’s rights activist told Al
Jazeera on the condition of anonymity. <All these companies have reacted
rather passively to these cases.>
The lacklustre reaction of companies linked to sexual assault or
harassment cases, combined with the downplaying and even outright
blaming of
women by state-run media, along with a lack of transparency related to
court hearings and police investigations, will continue forcing Chinese
women to turn to social media to bring attention to their plight, say
activists.
E-commerce giant Alibaba, ride-hailing behemoth Didi, and liquor giant
Moutai have all had women employees recently come forward on social
media to reveal incidents of sexual assault. Since many of the cases
involved heavy drinking at Chinese business dinners, the main reaction
has been to blame drinking culture itself rather than any underlying
misogyny or gender assumptions that led to the incidents.
While Alibaba, Moutai, IQiyi – China’s version of Netflix, online portal
Sina, and others have been responsive in rolling out new corporate
drinking
policies in the wake of the scandals, there appears to be little effort
to seriously address gender inequality and the underlying conditions
that led to the assaults, say activists.
Companies that are seen to be falling short have faced an online
backlash.
Moutai landed in the middle of an online firestorm over its reaction to
a #MeToo incident reported in July. In that case, the company issued a
statement saying it was “shocked and indignant” to learn of an incident
in which a male employee took a room card from a hotel front desk and
entered a female employee’s room after a night of drinking.
But reports later revealed that while the male employee was arrested
when the incident happened, the female employee was fired after the case
was brought forward.
A comment from a user on microblogging site Weibo who goes by the handle
A Little Bit of Lemon Honey reflected the broader outrage: <‘Shocked’
and ‘Indignant’? Sorry, I can’t see how you feel that way. But what I
can see is that when things went south, you went to every length to
minimize the impact and even found an excuse to fire the girl involved.?>
High-profile #MeToo cases involving celebrities have also highlighted a
lack of transparency and a stone-footed initial response by police. The
outing of Canadian-Chinese actor Kris Wu in July over alleged rape, and
his arrest later, as well as the loss of a sexual harassment court case
in September by Zhou Xiaoxuan against well-known CCTV broadcaster Zhu
Jun are two cases in point.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/10/15/women-in-china-are-waiting-for-meaningful-metoo-reforms
The Guardian
Associated Press
15 Oct 2021
<<Biden administration to ask supreme court to halt Texas abortion ban.
Government will ask court to reverse appeals court decision leaving in
place the law that all but bans abortions in the state.
The Biden administration said Friday it will turn next to the US supreme
court its attempt to halt a Texas law that has banned most abortions
since September.
The move by the justice department comes after an appeals court on
Thursday night left in place the law known as Senate Bill 8, which bans
abortions once fetal cardiac activity is detected, usually around six
weeks. That is before many women know they are pregnant.
Justice department spokesman Anthony Coley says the federal government
will ask the supreme court to reverse that decision.
The Texas law is the nation’s biggest curb to abortion in nearly 50
years. Last month, the supreme court allowed the law to take effect but
did so
without ruling on whether it is constitutional.
More details soon …>>
Al Jazeera
By Ali MC
15 Oct 2021
<<How Melbourne’s lockdown exposed the city’s ‘gender gap’.
Education and childcare have fallen largely to women who are also
struggling financially or at risk of violence in the home amid lockdowns.
Melbourne, Australia – When the world’s longest lockdown began in her
hometown in March 2020, Shemsiya Waritu knew she was in for a challenge.
With her husband overseas, she would need to manage the burden not only
of work and daily home duties for four children but homeschooling too.
An Oromo woman from Ethiopia with little schooling herself and few
formal English literacy skills, she told Al Jazeera she was <actually
nervous>.
<I don’t have the skills to teach them,> she said. <Even if I had the
skills to support them, I wouldn’t be able to support them because I
have to do other duties.>
Shemsiya, who has lived in Melbourne since 1995, told Al Jazeera she
reflected on her roots in a large family with busy, hard-working parents,
in
which it is each child’s responsibility to look after the sibling
younger than them.
<So then I just said to myself, ‘How did we survive as an African?’
‘What sort of help did we get when we had to do our homework?’ I’m going
to
make sure each of them help each other.>
She encouraged each of her Australian-born children to help the next
youngest with their schooling and homework.
<Back home we have to do so because it is our responsibility – that is
how we support our parents. Because they would be out there trying to
provide for us. So our responsibility [as children] is to look after
each other. We have to babysit each other, no question.>
While Shemsiya acknowledges that she was fortunate to receive assistance
from the school, she also said that the experience of homeschooling
without adequate literacy and computer skills was one shared by many in
the African Australian community.
<When I had that panic I thought of so many families – especially new
arrivals – who don’t speak English to even say to the teachers’ yes I
need help in these areas’,> she told Al Jazeera.
She adds that, while she is married and was fortunate to have the
support of her husband once he returned, for many single mothers in the
migrant community, the challenges were compounded.
<I can’t imagine what many families had to go through.>
Gender gaps laid bare
Shemsiya is one of thousands of women in Melbourne, Australia’s
second-biggest city, who have been under immense pressure through a
series of six lockdowns which will have extended to a cumulative 267
days by the time it begins to lift on October 26.
The restrictions – some of the toughest in the world – have included
protracted school closures, a 9pm curfew and a requirement that people
stay
within 5km (3 miles) of their home in the one hour a day during which
they were allowed out for exercise.
All businesses have closed apart from grocery stores and other essential
services, and care facilities such as childcare have also been shut
down.
This has meant that all homeschooling and preschool childcare has had to
take place in the confines of the home, within a strict and tightly
controlled environment of social isolation.
Tanja Kovac, CEO of Gender Equity Victoria, told Al Jazeera that while
the experience of lockdown affected all Victorians, <the impacts have
been
gendered across the board>.She says that not only has there been
enormous pressures on mothers but also on industries that employ a high
ratio of women – with female- dominant businesses such as salons,
childcare, hairdressers and beauty parlours forced to shut.
<It’s meant that [women have] lost jobs, they’ve had challenges
financially within their homes, they’ve needed dependency on government
subsidies and support,> said Kovac.
Conversely, male-dominated industries such as construction have
primarily remained open, even when there has been evidence of high rates
of
COVID-19 transmission. A two-week closure and vaccine mandate imposed on
builders last month led to violent protests.
The pressure on what Kovac describes as the <deeply feminised> essential
service workforce of nurses, elderly care and educators has also been
amplified during the pandemic.
<COVID-19 has exposed massive gender gaps within society,> Kovac said. <One
of the biggest ways that it did that was it clearly demonstrated that a
huge part of our essential service workforce is made up of women and
that most of those roles are significantly underpaid.>
Kovac – whose organisation recently released a report documenting the
experiences of migrant and refugee women – says the pressures on the
women in those communities have been even greater.
<Many migrant and refugee women did not qualify for government subsidies
because they were excluded for visa and other reasons from accessing
that support,> Kovac told Al Jazeera. <Many of them were left behind and
left in very perilous financial positions.>
There were also additional lockdown restrictions on public housing
flats, with some complexes sealed off.
The singling out of certain residential areas, which are largely home to
migrants and refugees, not only increased the pressure on those living
there but was seized on by Australia’s right-wing politicians. Pauline
Hanson, who leads the One Nation party, attacked the people living in
the affected tower blocks as <alcoholics> and <drug addicts> who should
have learned to speak English before coming to Australia.
Need for diversity
The lockdowns were found by the Victorian Ombudsman to be a breach of
human rights. Debra Parkinson, manager of Gender and Disaster Australia,
says that her studies into natural disasters – including Australian
bushfires – reveal that the effect of such incidents on women is often
more extreme than for men.
This includes an increase in domestic violence, in which the stresses of
job loss, increased unemployment, poverty, and drug and alcohol abuse
<have a flow-on effect to violence towards women.>
While violence against women has increased worldwide during the pandemic,
Parkinson says Melbourne’s protracted lockdown meant that women were
made more vulnerable by potentially being shut in the house with a
perpetrator of violence.
<And those usual supports they might have had – like extended family or
neighbours, or even formal supports – have been really affected by COVID,>
she said.
But the experience of the pandemic – considered to be a natural disaster
– presents an opportunity to learn and make changes in disaster
responses for the future.
<We need to have more diverse voices there [including] women and LGBTIQ
people taking those decision-making, visible, roles,> Parkinson said.
<Actually involving those people in the decision making. And I’m not
just talking about women, but talking about women with gendered
expertise.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/15/australia-women-lockdown
Al Jazeera
15 Oct 2021
<<Kenyan police arrest husband of slain runner Agnes Tirop.
Ibrahim Kipkemoi Rotich was apprehended in the city of Mombasa after
manhunt.
Police in Kenya have arrested the husband of record-breaking runner
Agnes Tirop after she was stabbed to death, in a case that has shocked
the
country and the world of athletics. The 25-year-old two-time world
champion bronze medallist was found on Wednesday morning lying on a bed
at her home in the town of Iten, with stab wounds in the neck and
abdomen, local media reported.
The National Police Service said on Thursday that her husband, Ibrahim
Kipkemoi Rotich, was arrested in the coastal city of Mombasa.
The police had been hunting for Rotich since Wednesday after his family
reported that he had called in crying and asking for God’s forgiveness
for
something he had done, the Associated Press news agency quoted Tom
Makori, Elgeyo Marakwet county police chief, as saying.
The Directorate of Criminal Investigation said in a Twitter post that
Rotich was arrested after he “slammed his gateway vehicle into a lorry,
at Athi River, along Mombasa road, as he desperately escaped [our]
dragnet”.
<The suspect is currently being grilled by detectives at Changamwe
police station, for more details into the murder, before being arraigned
to answer to murder charges, it added.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/15/tirop-murder-police-hunt-suspected-husband-on-the-run
The Guardian
Oct 14 2021
Opinion
<<Gabby Petito
Gabby Petito died of strangulation. Far too many other women have, too.
Moira Donegan
This may not have been the first such incident Petito experienced. Half
of all domestic violence victims are strangled at some point during the
course of their abuse. Most women who are strangled by their husbands or
boyfriends don’t cooperate with law enforcement. Because strangulation,
when it doesn’t kill, frequently causes traumatic brain injuries, these
women sometimes can’t speak in a way that seems plausible to the police.
Their testimonies aren’t always clear or consistent; they may
misremember timelines, change details on repeated telling, or feel
unsure about crucial bits of information. In many cases, a strangulation
victim also won’t cooperate with the police because to do so would
likely anger the man who strangled her. And he has already shown what
he’s willing to do to enforce his will.
Gabby Petito was killed by strangulation, according to the Wyoming
coroner who examined her body after it was found in Grand Teton national
park on 19 September. The police, along with a small army of internet
sleuths who seized upon the case after news of Petito’s disappearance
broke last month, are now looking for her boyfriend, Brian Laundrie, who
was the last to see the 22-year-old alive. He returned from the road
trip they had taken together alone, driving Gabby’s van and refusing to
say anything about her whereabouts. Laundrie has since fled police and
disappeared into a vast nature preserve in Florida.
It is important to clarify that Petito was strangled, not choked. In
common parlance, the act of putting your hands around a woman’s neck and
squeezing is often called choking. But medical experts and domestic
violence advocates prefer the word strangulation. The reasons for the
distinction are both technical and moral. In strictly semantic terms,
choking and strangulation are different things. Choking refers to when
an obstruction of the windpipe occurs inside the throat – for instance,
when a piece of food gets stuck. Strangulation is the term for when the
pressure is applied on the neck from the outside. Using the term
strangulation also has greater political valence: it keeps the focus on
the perpetrator. Someone can choke by accident.
Strangulation is intentional.
Though victims and perpetrators appear among all kinds of people, the
dynamics of strangulation are deeply gendered. A large majority of
people who are strangled are women; nearly all of those who strangle
them are men. Usually, the victim and perpetrator are current or former
romantic partners.
Aside from rape and sexual assault, few acts of violence have such a
reliably gendered breakdown. Statistically, it is possible that the
strangulation that killed Petito was not the first such incident she had
experienced. Half of all domestic violence victims are strangled at some
point during the course of their abuse, according to the gender violence
expert Rachel Louise Snyder. Often, they’re strangled repeatedly.
According to one study, 43% of women who are murdered by their intimate
partners had been strangled by them in the past year. Once a woman has
been strangled by her partner, the likelihood that he will strangle her
again rises tenfold. The likelihood that he will murder her rises nearly
eightfold.
Because strangulation is a sign of increasing violence in an abusive
relationship, and because the act of strangulation is so physically
dangerous for the victim, it is usually the last escalation that the
abuser makes before he kills her. According to the psychologist Sylvia
Vella, who has worked with the San Diego police’s domestic violence
unit, women who have been strangled by their partners even once are in a
position of acute emergency.
<Statistically, we know that once the hands are on the neck, the very
next step is homicide,> Vella has said. <They don’t go backwards.>
Beyond its acute physical danger, strangulation also carries a dark
symbolic power. As a form of abuse, strangulation is often accompanied
by a
phenomenon called coercive control, a totalizing but not necessarily
physically violent exercise of power by an abusive man over his victim.
In coercive control situations, a woman’s freedoms will be eroded and
her actions dictated by her male partner through surveillance and
monitoring, isolation from friends and family, and a regime of
humiliations, intimidations, and threats meant to keep her in line. In
strangulation, an abuser extends this power over his victim to such
intimate and essential a function as her next breath.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/14/gabby-petito-wyoming-strangulation-domestic-violence
The Guardian
Josh Halliday North of England correspondent
14 Oct 2021
<<Police commissioner accused of victim blaming after Everard case
resigns.
Tory Philip Allott caused outrage in wake of the murder by saying women
‘need to be streetwise’.
A Conservative police commissioner accused of victim-blaming in the wake
of the murder of Sarah Everard has resigned after being told there was a
<catastrophic lack of confidence> in his position. Philip Allott, who
oversees North Yorkshire police and the region’s fire service, was
criticised after he said women <need to be streetwise> about powers of
arrest and should <just learn a bit about that legal process> in case
they were approached by officers. He made the remarks in a radio
interview after the sentencing of Everard’s killer, the Metropolitan
police officer Wayne Couzens, who used his handcuffs and warrant card to
abduct the 33-year-old from a south London street. In an extraordinary
meeting of North Yorkshire’s police, fire and crime panel on Thursday,
Allott admitted making a <major mistake> in a <car-crash> radio
interview but he refused repeatedly to resign despite a unanimous vote
of no confidence from the 11-member panel.
However, three hours after the meeting he announced his intention to
quit, meaning a byelection will now take place. He said: “I had hoped I
could rebuild trust, to restore confidence. I was pleased that so many
victims’ groups had accepted that I was genuinely sorry and were willing
to work with me to help me in the mammoth task I had ahead.
<Following this morning’s meeting of the police and crime panel it seems
clear to me that the task will be exceptionally difficult, if it is
possible at all. It would take a long time and a lot of resources of my
office and the many groups who do excellent work supporting victims.
This is time victims do not have.>
Allott had faced a growing chorus of criticism since his comments 13
days ago, including from Boris Johnson, Priti Patel and Keir Starmer.
Demands for his resignation grew this week when colleagues accused him
of making <sexist and misogynistic> comments to female staff –
allegations that he denies.
The details of these alleged remarks have not been made public and
Allott said they had been leaked <to damage my credibility>.
The majority of his 32-strong team signed a letter urging him to quit,
saying they were <shocked> and <dismayed> by his comments. They said his
response to the criticism had been <dismissive and completely devoid of
emotional intelligence or empathy, approaching disregard, for the human
impact his words have had.> >>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/oct/14/tory-police-commissioner-accused-victim-blaming-refuses-resign-sarah-everard
Al Jazeera
14 Oct 2021
From 101 EAST
<<Horror at Home: China’s Domestic Violence Crisis.
101 East investigates how a quarter of women across China suffer
domestic violence.
In China, millions of women are victims of domestic violence, with an
estimated one case every eight seconds. Women who have had their eyes
gouged out, been punched, kicked and emotionally abused by their
partners are now speaking out. Shocking cases are also surfacing on the
internet, bringing national attention to the issue.
China has introduced a new anti-domestic violence law, but critics argue
that the debate around women’s abuse is often censored. Activists say it
is a battle with traditional Confucian values which instil outdated
views of women.
101 East investigates the violence endured by Chinese women at home.>>
Watch a video here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/101-east/2021/10/14/horror-at-home-chinas-domestic-violence-crisis
Al Jazeera
14 Oct 2021
<<Indian man gets double life sentence for killing wife using cobra.
Man convicted for murdering wife by making a cobra bite her while she
was sleeping handed the rare punishment by Kerala court.
An Indian man who used a cobra and a viper to murder his wife has been
handed a double life sentence in what prosecutors have called the <rarest
of rare> cases. Sooraj Kumar, 28, set loose a highly venomous Russell’s
viper snake on his wife Uthra that left her in hospital for almost two
months, prosecutors in the southern Kerala state said. While she
recovered at her parents’ house, he obtained a cobra from a snake
handler and threw it at his sleeping wife. Its poisonous bite killed the
25-year-old woman in May 2020. Kumar was arrested from his home last
year after Uthra’s parents raised suspicions, alleging that their
daughter was being harassed for more dowry. The woman’s parents said
Kumar tried to take control of her property after the death. On Monday,
a court in Kerala’s Kollam district held Kumar guilty of murder and
poisoning his wife, and of making an earlier attempt to kill her using a
Russell’s viper.
Judge M Manoj sentenced the convict on Wednesday to two consecutive life
sentences, but did not accept the prosecution demand for capital
punishment considering his age and opportunity to reform, local media
reported.
‘Diabolic plan’
Kumar pleaded not guilty but police said his phone records showed he was
in touch with snake handlers and had watched snake videos on the
internet before the killing. Kumar stayed in the room with Uthra after
the cobra bit her and went about his morning routine the next day when
alerted by the woman’s mother, prosecutors said.
<The mode of execution and the diabolic plan of the accused to murder
Uthra, his wife who was bedridden, makes it [the case] fall into the
category of rarest of rare,> said the public prosecutor, who had sought
the death penalty. Snake handler Vava Suresh said it was possible that
Kumar had <inflicted pain on the reptile to provoke it to bite>, the
Hindustan Times newspaper quoted him as saying.
Uthra was from an affluent family but her husband, a bank worker, was
not well off. Their marriage involved a big dowry including a new car
and
500,000 rupees (about $6,640). According to media reports, Kumar’s
family was charged with conspiracy after some of Uthra’s gold was found
buried near his home days after the murder.
India’s Supreme Court recently warned about a trend of snakebite murders
as it denied bail to a woman and her “lover” accused of using a cobra to
kill her mother-in-law in the northern state of Rajasthan in 2019.
The biggest challenge in the Kerala case was to prove that the snakebite
was homicidal, prosecutor G Mohanraj said, adding that the court was
presented with a test that showed the difference between natural and
induced bite marks.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/14/india-kerala-man-double-life-sentence-killing-wife-cobra-viper
Al Jazeera
14 Oct 2021
Dylan Baddour
<<Shock, disbelief, panic: Living under the Texas abortion ban.
New law banning abortions after six weeks of pregnancy fuels desperate
scramble to find and provide abortion services.
Austin, Texas – When Trisha* discovered she was pregnant in May of last
year, the nearest abortion provider was more than 482km (300 miles) away
in Fort Worth, Texas. The 27-year-old told Al Jazeera she didn’t feel
comfortable discussing her options with anyone in her conservative
hometown or
family – so at almost eight weeks pregnant, she drove herself to the
abortion clinic.
After spending $150 in gas to get to Fort Worth, she cried alone in the
parking lot of a Whole Woman’s Health building before walking in to seek
the procedure.
<It breaks my heart to know that there are people in both my community
and my family that would dehumanise women for seeking out these services
without knowing the circumstances,> she said. <There are other people
who are in a place of fear and uncertainty without privilege and
resources to find a way out.>
Now, after Texas passed the United States’s most restrictive abortion
law, Trisha said she may have had to make a different choice had the
legislation been on the books when she needed an abortion. <Between
having to spend even more money to travel out of state and get a hotel
room, plus recruiting someone to go with me, I may have tried to induce
at home,> she said. ‘I panicked’
The Texas legislature passed Senate Bill 8 in May, with supporters
calling it a <measure to protect the lives of the unborn>. Many
advocates of
reproductive rights assumed the law would be blocked in the courts as
similar legislation had been in the past. But the US Supreme Court
declined to act in August, and in October a court injunction that paused
the law was swiftly overturned after Texas appealed for it to be
reinstated.
That means the legislation, which effectively bans abortions after six
weeks of pregnancy and allows any citizen to sue anyone who provides or
helps with abortion services, is in effect. Still, the broad ban on
abortion services hasn’t stopped patients from seeking help.
Many still show up at clinics, assuming the media exaggerated or that
they misunderstood the law, said Marva Sadler, director of clinical
operations at Whole Woman’s Health, an abortion provider that operates
four clinics across Texas.
But the clinics, bound by the new law, are forced to turn people away. <They
come in with a glimmer of hope that we can help them,> Sadler told Al
Jazeera. <There’s a moment of shock, of disbelief that this is really a
thing – then a moment of panic over what to do next.>
A similar feeling struck Jessy Lieck, a 30-year-old law student in
Lubbock, Texas. <Once SB8 went into effect I panicked, as I’m sure a lot
of people did,> said Lieck. <If my birth control fails or if I’m raped
and it’s past six weeks, I’m going to be forced to carry a rapist’s
child, which is incredibly traumatic.>
For years, Lieck has sought tubal ligation surgery to prevent pregnancy,
but even that operation is hard to obtain in Texas, where doctors told
her
they preferred to operate on older women who already had children. Faced
with SB8, her search became urgent. She found a doctor who approved the
procedure, scheduled for early December.
<I recognise the privilege that I have with good health insurance
through my university, financial stability, and access to educational
resources,> she said. <Others aren’t so fortunate.>
Series of laws
SB8 is just the latest Texas law restricting access to abortion.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/14/shock-disbelief-panic-living-under-texas-abortion-ban
Note by Gino d'Artali: the below article is a too
long story for me to quote from but I still recoment to read it:
The Guardian
13 Oct 2021
Dan Sabbagh Defence and security editor
Read it here:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/13/uk-colluding-torture-leaving-women-children-syria-camps
and one should keep in mind that many Western women were lurred to go
with Syrian men to Syria and abandoned there by them or died as a IS
'soldier' fighting US troops or especially the Kurdisch troops i.e. the
Peschmerga. (
http://www.cryfreedom.net/peshmerga.htm
)
The Guardian
<<Opinion
Women
My hope for a more open discussion of women’s and trans rights is fading
Susanna Rustin
After years of polarisation, there seemed to be some progress towards
balancing the views of trans activists and gender-critical feminists.
Now
rhetoric is escalating again. I would like to suggest that the response
to last week’s protests against philosophy professor Kathleen Stock at
the
University of Sussex could mark a turning point in the argument over
women’s and trans rights that has become one of the most contentious
political topics. After activists put up posters calling for her to be
fired, and displayed a <Stock Out> sign on campus, the university’s
vice-chancellor was among the prominent voices who spoke out in her
defence.
But although this is tempting, especially to a gender-critical feminist
like me who shares Stock’s perspective, it would be foolish. That’s
because the gap dividing the protesters’ views from those of leading
politicians is not very large. This might sound over-the-top. Neither
Keir Starmer nor any other leader has called for women to be sacked
because they don’t share trans activists’ objectives, such as the law
reform known as self-ID, which enables people to change their legal sex
without a medical diagnosis.
But Starmer’s recent comments on the Andrew Marr Show, along with
remarks by the new Green party co-leader Carla Denyer, make it clear
that they too believe that gender-critical feminists’ ideas are beyond
the pale. Asked by Marr whether it is transphobic to say that only women
have a cervix, a reference to a comment made by Labour MP Rosie Duffield
last year, Starmer replied: <It is something that shouldn’t be said. It
is not right.> Not only does Starmer disagree with Duffield’s use of the
word <woman to refer to biological sex rather than gender identity; he
thinks women who hold such views should keep quiet. Denyer, meanwhile,
called the gender-critical gay and lesbian rights charity LGB Alliance a
<hate group>.
Such illiberalism is all the more disappointing because after years of
polarisation I had become hopeful that a more open discussion about sex
and
gender might start. This optimism was mainly due to a recent court case.
For a year and a half until this summer, anyone who wanted to denounce a
gender-critical feminist only had to reach for the words of Judge James
Tayler. At an employment tribunal in 2019, he ruled that the
gender-critical belief held by Maya Forstater was <incompatible with the
human rights of others>, <absolutist> and <not worthy of respect>. But
in June this year a higher court overruled him when it decided that the
belief – summarised by Mr Justice Chowdhury as a belief that <biological
sex is real, important, immutable and not to be conflated with gender
identity> – is protected as a philosophical belief in UK law.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/13/discussion-women-trans-rights-feminists
The Guardian
Associated Press
15 Oct 2021
<<Biden administration to ask supreme court to halt Texas abortion ban.
Government will ask court to reverse appeals court decision leaving in
place the law that all but bans abortions in the state.
The Biden administration said Friday it will turn next to the US supreme
court its attempt to halt a Texas law that has banned most abortions
since September.
The move by the justice department comes after an appeals court on
Thursday night left in place the law known as Senate Bill 8, which bans
abortions once fetal cardiac activity is detected, usually around six
weeks. That is before many women know they are pregnant.
Justice department spokesman Anthony Coley says the federal government
will ask the supreme court to reverse that decision.
The Texas law is the nation’s biggest curb to abortion in nearly 50
years. Last month, the supreme court allowed the law to take effect but
did so without ruling on whether it is constitutional.
More details soon …>>
Al Jazeera
By Ali MC
15 Oct 2021
<<How Melbourne’s lockdown exposed the city’s ‘gender gap’.
Education and childcare have fallen largely to women who are also
struggling financially or at risk of violence in the home amid lockdowns.
Melbourne, Australia – When the world’s longest lockdown began in her
hometown in March 2020, Shemsiya Waritu knew she was in for a challenge.
With her husband overseas, she would need to manage the burden not only
of work and daily home duties for four children but homeschooling too.
An Oromo woman from Ethiopia with little schooling herself and few
formal English literacy skills, she told Al Jazeera she was <actually
nervous>.
<I don’t have the skills to teach them,> she said. <Even if I had the
skills to support them, I wouldn’t be able to support them because I
have to do other duties.>
Shemsiya, who has lived in Melbourne since 1995, told Al Jazeera she
reflected on her roots in a large family with busy, hard-working parents,
in
which it is each child’s responsibility to look after the sibling
younger than them.
<So then I just said to myself, ‘How did we survive as an African?’
‘What sort of help did we get when we had to do our homework?’ I’m going
to
make sure each of them help each other.>
She encouraged each of her Australian-born children to help the next
youngest with their schooling and homework.
<Back home we have to do so because it is our responsibility – that is
how we support our parents. Because they would be out there trying to
provide for us. So our responsibility [as children] is to look after
each other. We have to babysit each other, no question.>
While Shemsiya acknowledges that she was fortunate to receive assistance
from the school, she also said that the experience of homeschooling
without adequate literacy and computer skills was one shared by many in
the African Australian community.
<When I had that panic I thought of so many families – especially new
arrivals – who don’t speak English to even say to the teachers’ yes I
need help in these areas’,> she told Al Jazeera.
She adds that, while she is married and was fortunate to have the
support of her husband once he returned, for many single mothers in the
migrant community, the challenges were compounded.
<I can’t imagine what many families had to go through.>
Gender gaps laid bare
Shemsiya is one of thousands of women in Melbourne, Australia’s
second-biggest city, who have been under immense pressure through a
series of six lockdowns which will have extended to a cumulative 267
days by the time it begins to lift on October 26.
The restrictions – some of the toughest in the world – have included
protracted school closures, a 9pm curfew and a requirement that people
stay
within 5km (3 miles) of their home in the one hour a day during which
they were allowed out for exercise.
All businesses have closed apart from grocery stores and other essential
services, and care facilities such as childcare have also been shut
down.
This has meant that all homeschooling and preschool childcare has had to
take place in the confines of the home, within a strict and tightly
controlled environment of social isolation.
Tanja Kovac, CEO of Gender Equity Victoria, told Al Jazeera that while
the experience of lockdown affected all Victorians, <the impacts have
been
gendered across the board>.
She says that not only has there been enormous pressures on mothers but
also on industries that employ a high ratio of women – with female-
dominant businesses such as salons, childcare, hairdressers and beauty
parlours forced to shut.
<It’s meant that [women have] lost jobs, they’ve had challenges
financially within their homes, they’ve needed dependency on government
subsidies and support,> said Kovac.
Conversely, male-dominated industries such as construction have
primarily remained open, even when there has been evidence of high rates
of
COVID-19 transmission. A two-week closure and vaccine mandate imposed on
builders last month led to violent protests.
The pressure on what Kovac describes as the <deeply feminised> essential
service workforce of nurses, elderly care and educators has also been
amplified during the pandemic.
<COVID-19 has exposed massive gender gaps within society,> Kovac said. <One
of the biggest ways that it did that was it clearly demonstrated that a
huge part of our essential service workforce is made up of women and
that most of those roles are significantly underpaid.>
Kovac – whose organisation recently released a report documenting the
experiences of migrant and refugee women – says the pressures on the
women in those communities have been even greater.
<Many migrant and refugee women did not qualify for government subsidies
because they were excluded for visa and other reasons from accessing
that support,> Kovac told Al Jazeera. <Many of them were left behind and
left in very perilous financial positions.>
There were also additional lockdown restrictions on public housing
flats, with some complexes sealed off.
The singling out of certain residential areas, which are largely home to
migrants and refugees, not only increased the pressure on those living
there
but was seized on by Australia’s right-wing politicians. Pauline Hanson,
who leads the One Nation party, attacked the people living in the
affected
tower blocks as <alcoholics> and <drug addicts> who should have learned
to speak English before coming to Australia.
Need for diversity
The lockdowns were found by the Victorian Ombudsman to be a breach of
human rights. Debra Parkinson, manager of Gender and Disaster Australia,
says that her studies into natural disasters – including Australian
bushfires – reveal that the effect of such incidents on women is often
more extreme than for men.
This includes an increase in domestic violence, in which the stresses of
job loss, increased unemployment, poverty, and drug and alcohol abuse
<have a flow-on effect to violence towards women.>
While violence against women has increased worldwide during the pandemic,
Parkinson says Melbourne’s protracted lockdown meant that women were
made more vulnerable by potentially being shut in the house with a
perpetrator of violence.
<And those usual supports they might have had – like extended family or
neighbours, or even formal supports – have been really affected by COVID,>
she said.
But the experience of the pandemic – considered to be a natural disaster
– presents an opportunity to learn and make changes in disaster
responses for the future.
<We need to have more diverse voices there [including] women and LGBTIQ
people taking those decision-making, visible, roles,> Parkinson said.
<Actually involving those people in the decision making. And I’m not
just talking about women, but talking about women with gendered
expertise.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/15/australia-women-lockdown
Al Jazeera
15 Oct 2021
<<Kenyan police arrest husband of slain runner Agnes Tirop.
Ibrahim Kipkemoi Rotich was apprehended in the city of Mombasa after
manhunt.
Police in Kenya have arrested the husband of record-breaking runner
Agnes Tirop after she was stabbed to death, in a case that has shocked
the
country and the world of athletics. The 25-year-old two-time world
champion bronze medallist was found on Wednesday morning lying on a bed
at her home in the town of Iten, with stab wounds in the neck and
abdomen, local media reported.
The National Police Service said on Thursday that her husband, Ibrahim
Kipkemoi Rotich, was arrested in the coastal city of Mombasa.
The police had been hunting for Rotich since Wednesday after his family
reported that he had called in crying and asking for God’s forgiveness
for
something he had done, the Associated Press news agency quoted Tom
Makori, Elgeyo Marakwet county police chief, as saying.
The Directorate of Criminal Investigation said in a Twitter post that
Rotich was arrested after he “slammed his gateway vehicle into a lorry,
at Athi River, along Mombasa road, as he desperately escaped [our]
dragnet”.
<The suspect is currently being grilled by detectives at Changamwe
police station, for more details into the murder, before being arraigned
to answer to murder charges, it added.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/15/tirop-murder-police-hunt-suspected-husband-on-the-run
The Guardian
Oct 14 2021
Opinion
<<Gabby Petito
Gabby Petito died of strangulation. Far too many other women have, too.
Moira Donegan
This may not have been the first such incident Petito experienced. Half
of all domestic violence victims are strangled at some point during the
course of their abuse. Most women who are strangled by their husbands or
boyfriends don’t cooperate with law enforcement. Because strangulation,
when it doesn’t kill, frequently causes traumatic brain injuries, these
women sometimes can’t speak in a way that seems plausible to the police.
Their testimonies aren’t always clear or consistent; they may
misremember timelines, change details on repeated telling, or feel
unsure about crucial bits of information. In many cases, a strangulation
victim also won’t cooperate with the police because to do so would
likely anger the man who strangled her. And he has already shown what
he’s willing to do to enforce his will.
Gabby Petito was killed by strangulation, according to the Wyoming
coroner who examined her body after it was found in Grand Teton national
park on 19 September. The police, along with a small army of internet
sleuths who seized upon the case after news of Petito’s disappearance
broke last month, are now looking for her boyfriend, Brian Laundrie, who
was the last to see the 22-year-old alive. He returned from the road
trip they had taken together alone, driving Gabby’s van and refusing to
say anything about her whereabouts. Laundrie has since fled police and
disappeared into a vast nature preserve in Florida.
It is important to clarify that Petito was strangled, not choked. In
common parlance, the act of putting your hands around a woman’s neck and
squeezing is often called choking. But medical experts and domestic
violence advocates prefer the word strangulation. The reasons for the
distinction are both technical and moral. In strictly semantic terms,
choking and strangulation are different things. Choking refers to when
an obstruction of the windpipe occurs inside the throat – for instance,
when a piece of food gets stuck. Strangulation is the term for when the
pressure is applied on the neck from the outside. Using the term
strangulation also has greater political valence: it keeps the focus on
the perpetrator. Someone can choke by accident.
Strangulation is intentional.
Though victims and perpetrators appear among all kinds of people, the
dynamics of strangulation are deeply gendered. A large majority of
people who are strangled are women; nearly all of those who strangle
them are men. Usually, the victim and perpetrator are current or former
romantic partners. Aside from rape and sexual assault, few acts of
violence have such a reliably gendered breakdown. Statistically, it is
possible that the strangulation that killed Petito was not the first
such incident she had experienced. Half of all domestic violence victims
are strangled at some point during the course of their abuse, according
to the gender violence expert Rachel Louise Snyder. Often, they’re
strangled repeatedly.
According to one study, 43% of women who are murdered by their intimate
partners had been strangled by them in the past year. Once a woman has
been strangled by her partner, the likelihood that he will strangle her
again rises tenfold. The likelihood that he will murder her rises nearly
eightfold. Because strangulation is a sign of increasing violence in an
abusive relationship, and because the act of strangulation is so
physically dangerous for the victim, it is usually the last escalation
that the abuser makes before he kills her. According to the psychologist
Sylvia Vella, who has worked with the San Diego police’s domestic
violence unit, women who have been strangled by their partners even once
are in a position of acute emergency. <Statistically, we know that once
the hands are on the neck, the very next step is homicide,> Vella has
said. <They don’t go backwards.>
Beyond its acute physical danger, strangulation also carries a dark
symbolic power. As a form of abuse, strangulation is often accompanied
by a
phenomenon called coercive control, a totalizing but not necessarily
physically violent exercise of power by an abusive man over his victim.
In coercive control situations, a woman’s freedoms will be eroded and
her actions dictated by her male partner through surveillance and
monitoring, isolation from friends and family, and a regime of
humiliations, intimidations, and threats meant to keep her in line. In
strangulation, an abuser extends this power over his victim to such
intimate and essential a function as her next breath.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/14/gabby-petito-wyoming-strangulation-domestic-violence
The Guardian
Josh Halliday North of England correspondent
14 Oct 2021
<<Police commissioner accused of victim blaming after Everard case
resigns.
Tory Philip Allott caused outrage in wake of the murder by saying women
‘need to be streetwise’.
A Conservative police commissioner accused of victim-blaming in the wake
of the murder of Sarah Everard has resigned after being told there was a
<catastrophic lack of confidence> in his position. Philip Allott, who
oversees North Yorkshire police and the region’s fire service, was
criticised after he said women <need to be streetwise> about powers of
arrest and should <just learn a bit about that legal process> in case
they were approached by officers. He made the remarks in a radio
interview after the sentencing of Everard’s killer, the Metropolitan
police officer Wayne Couzens, who used his handcuffs and warrant card to
abduct the 33-year-old from a south London street. In an extraordinary
meeting of North Yorkshire’s police, fire and crime panel on Thursday,
Allott admitted making a <major mistake> in a <car-crash> radio
interview but he refused repeatedly to resign despite a unanimous vote
of no confidence from the 11-member panel.
However, three hours after the meeting he announced his intention to
quit, meaning a byelection will now take place. He said: “I had hoped I
could rebuild trust, to restore confidence. I was pleased that so many
victims’ groups had accepted that I was genuinely sorry and were willing
to work with me to help me in the mammoth task I had ahead.
<Following this morning’s meeting of the police and crime panel it seems
clear to me that the task will be exceptionally difficult, if it is
possible at all. It would take a long time and a lot of resources of my
office and the many groups who do excellent work supporting victims.
This is time victims do not have.> Allott had faced a growing chorus of
criticism since his comments 13 days ago, including from Boris Johnson,
Priti Patel and Keir Starmer. Demands for his resignation grew this week
when colleagues accused him of making <sexist and misogynistic> comments
to female staff – allegations that he denies.
The details of these alleged remarks have not been made public and
Allott said they had been leaked <to damage my credibility>.
The majority of his 32-strong team signed a letter urging him to quit,
saying they were <shocked> and <dismayed> by his comments. They said his
response to the criticism had been <dismissive and completely devoid of
emotional intelligence or empathy, approaching disregard, for the human
impact his words have had.> >>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/oct/14/tory-police-commissioner-accused-victim-blaming-refuses-resign-sarah-everard
Al Jazeera
14 Oct 2021
From 101 EAST
<<Horror at Home: China’s Domestic Violence Crisis.
101 East investigates how a quarter of women across China suffer
domestic violence.
In China, millions of women are victims of domestic violence, with an
estimated one case every eight seconds. Women who have had their eyes
gouged out, been punched, kicked and emotionally abused by their
partners are now speaking out. Shocking cases are also surfacing on the
internet, bringing national attention to the issue.
China has introduced a new anti-domestic violence law, but critics argue
that the debate around women’s abuse is often censored. Activists say it
is a battle with traditional Confucian values which instil outdated
views of women.
101 East investigates the violence endured by Chinese women at home.>>
Watch a video here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/101-east/2021/10/14/horror-at-home-chinas-domestic-violence-crisis
Al Jazeera
14 Oct 2021
<<Indian man gets double life sentence for killing wife using cobra.
Man convicted for murdering wife by making a cobra bite her while she
was sleeping handed the rare punishment by Kerala court.
An Indian man who used a cobra and a viper to murder his wife has been
handed a double life sentence in what prosecutors have called the <rarest
of rare> cases. Sooraj Kumar, 28, set loose a highly venomous Russell’s
viper snake on his wife Uthra that left her in hospital for almost two
months, prosecutors in the southern Kerala state said. While she
recovered at her parents’ house, he obtained a cobra from a snake
handler and threw it at his sleeping wife. Its poisonous bite killed the
25-year-old woman in May 2020. Kumar was arrested from his home last
year after Uthra’s parents raised suspicions, alleging that their
daughter was being harassed for more dowry. The woman’s parents said
Kumar tried to take control of her property after the death. On Monday,
a court in Kerala’s Kollam district held Kumar guilty of murder and
poisoning his wife, and of making an earlier attempt to kill her using a
Russell’s viper.
Judge M Manoj sentenced the convict on Wednesday to two consecutive life
sentences, but did not accept the prosecution demand for capital
punishment considering his age and opportunity to reform, local media
reported.
‘Diabolic plan’
Kumar pleaded not guilty but police said his phone records showed he was
in touch with snake handlers and had watched snake videos on the
internet before the killing. Kumar stayed in the room with Uthra after
the cobra bit her and went about his morning routine the next day when
alerted by the woman’s mother, prosecutors said.
<The mode of execution and the diabolic plan of the accused to murder
Uthra, his wife who was bedridden, makes it [the case] fall into the
category of rarest of rare,> said the public prosecutor, who had sought
the death penalty. Snake handler Vava Suresh said it was possible that
Kumar had <inflicted pain on the reptile to provoke it to bite>, the
Hindustan Times newspaper quoted him as saying.
Uthra was from an affluent family but her husband, a bank worker, was
not well off. Their marriage involved a big dowry including a new car
and
500,000 rupees (about $6,640). According to media reports, Kumar’s
family was charged with conspiracy after some of Uthra’s gold was found
buried near his home days after the murder.
India’s Supreme Court recently warned about a trend of snakebite murders
as it denied bail to a woman and her “lover” accused of using a cobra to
kill her mother-in-law in the northern state of Rajasthan in 2019.
The biggest challenge in the Kerala case was to prove that the snakebite
was homicidal, prosecutor G Mohanraj said, adding that the court was
presented with a test that showed the difference between natural and
induced bite marks.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/14/india-kerala-man-double-life-sentence-killing-wife-cobra-viper
Al Jazeera
14 Oct 2021
Dylan Baddour
<<Shock, disbelief, panic: Living under the Texas abortion ban.
New law banning abortions after six weeks of pregnancy fuels desperate
scramble to find and provide abortion services.
Austin, Texas – When Trisha* discovered she was pregnant in May of last
year, the nearest abortion provider was more than 482km (300 miles) away
in Fort Worth, Texas. The 27-year-old told Al Jazeera she didn’t feel
comfortable discussing her options with anyone in her conservative
hometown or family – so at almost eight weeks pregnant, she drove
herself to the abortion clinic.
After spending $150 in gas to get to Fort Worth, she cried alone in the
parking lot of a Whole Woman’s Health building before walking in to seek
the procedure.
<It breaks my heart to know that there are people in both my community
and my family that would dehumanise women for seeking out these services
without knowing the circumstances,> she said. <There are other people
who are in a place of fear and uncertainty without privilege and
resources to find a way out.>
Now, after Texas passed the United States’s most restrictive abortion
law, Trisha said she may have had to make a different choice had the
legislation been on the books when she needed an abortion. <Between
having to spend even more money to travel out of state and get a hotel
room, plus recruiting someone to go with me, I may have tried to induce
at home,> she said. ‘I panicked’
The Texas legislature passed Senate Bill 8 in May, with supporters
calling it a <measure to protect the lives of the unborn>. Many
advocates of
reproductive rights assumed the law would be blocked in the courts as
similar legislation had been in the past. But the US Supreme Court
declined to act in August, and in October a court injunction that paused
the law was swiftly overturned after Texas appealed for it to be
reinstated.
That means the legislation, which effectively bans abortions after six
weeks of pregnancy and allows any citizen to sue anyone who provides or
helps with abortion services, is in effect. Still, the broad ban on
abortion services hasn’t stopped patients from seeking help.
Many still show up at clinics, assuming the media exaggerated or that
they misunderstood the law, said Marva Sadler, director of clinical
operations at Whole Woman’s Health, an abortion provider that operates
four clinics across Texas.
But the clinics, bound by the new law, are forced to turn people away. <They
come in with a glimmer of hope that we can help them,> Sadler told Al
Jazeera. <There’s a moment of shock, of disbelief that this is really a
thing – then a moment of panic over what to do next.>
A similar feeling struck Jessy Lieck, a 30-year-old law student in
Lubbock, Texas. <Once SB8 went into effect I panicked, as I’m sure a lot
of people did,> said Lieck. <If my birth control fails or if I’m raped
and it’s past six weeks, I’m going to be forced to carry a rapist’s
child, which is incredibly traumatic.>
For years, Lieck has sought tubal ligation surgery to prevent pregnancy,
but even that operation is hard to obtain in Texas, where doctors told
her
they preferred to operate on older women who already had children. Faced
with SB8, her search became urgent. She found a doctor who approved the
procedure, scheduled for early December.
<I recognise the privilege that I have with good health insurance
through my university, financial stability, and access to educational
resources,> she said. <Others aren’t so fortunate.>
Series of laws
SB8 is just the latest Texas law restricting access to abortion.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/14/shock-disbelief-panic-living-under-texas-abortion-ban
Al Jazeera
13 Oct 2021
By Suchitra
<<Dalit, tribal women among worst victims of India’s hunger crisis.
While more than 60 percent of Indian women are anaemic as they eat last
and the least, rising hunger levels hit the marginalised most.
Kalahandi, India – On September 3, Ranjita Majhi, a 33-year-old Kui
speaking Khond woman in the eastern Indian state of Odisha, gave birth
to a
baby boy. She was elated as she had taken a 30,000 rupees ($400) loan
for the delivery. Since she was severely anaemic, her health
complications prevented a normal delivery.
As a result, Majhi had to travel 60km (37 miles) to a government
hospital in Bhawanipatna district, where she had a caesarean section.
All was well in the Majhi household for four days. But then the child
died.
<I don’t know how to repay my loans, now the child for whom I took the
loan is also not with me. They said they do not even know how he died,>
she told Al Jazeera, wiping her tears. Bhawanipatna’s district hospital
doctors claim they also do not know how the child died.
But activist Roshnara Mohanty from Ekta Parishad NGO hints at
malnutrition. She says access to forest is prime for tribal women and
prevents them from being intergenerationally malnourished. In 2009,
Majhi left her Rampur village in Kalahandi to move to Madanpur Rampur
town. She and her husband belong to the Kui-speaking Khond tribe, but
were landless.
With decreasing access to forest, they migrated to the town in search of
livelihood opportunities and started working as casual labourers. Her
husband started working in a small eatery while she became a domestic
worker.
COVID lockdown worsened the crisis
In 2020, India’s COVID-19 lockdown resulted in a tremendous collapse of
livelihoods, causing an epidemic that India has been trying to fight off
for decades: hunger.
Majhi’s husband, like countless other marginalised folks, lost his job
in May this year while a devastating second COVID wave was at its peak.
While 50 percent of the households in rural India were forced to reduce
the number of meals ever since the lockdown was imposed as part of an
immediate adjustment for food security, about 68 percent of the
households reduced the number of items in their meals, according to a
study by the People’s Archive of Rural India.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/13/india-dalit-tribal-women-malnutrition-hunger-crists-pandemic
Al Jazeera
2 Oct 2021
<<Tens of thousands of women have marched across cities in the United
States to protest increasing restrictions on abortion.
The 660 demonstrations around the US on Saturday, including on the steps
of the Supreme Court in Washington DC, were largely sparked by a Texas
law that bans abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. The measure, which
went into effect last month, is the most restrictive in the country.
In Washington, DC, protesters filled the streets surrounding the Supreme
Court, shouting: “My body, my choice,” and cheering loudly to the beat
of drums. They carried signs that said: <Mind your own uterus>, <I love
someone who had an abortion> and <Abortion is a personal choice, not a
legal debate.>
Some wore T-shirts reading simply <1973>, a reference to the landmark
Roe v Wade decision, which made abortion legal for generations of
American women.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/2/women-march-across-us-in-support-of-abortion-rights
Al Jazeera
By William Roberts
12 Oct 2021
<<US prepares for Supreme Court showdown on abortion rights.
US Supreme Court is poised to hear case challenging Roe v Wade, setting
up a ‘critical’ moment on access to abortion.
Washington, DC – In 1962, Barbara Lee was a 16-year-old student at San
Fernando High School in Los Angeles, California. She was the only Black
girl on the cheerleading squad and an aspiring pianist who attended a
Catholic church and earned top grades. But when she missed her period
and
realised she might be pregnant, all of that suddenly was at risk.
<I was confused, afraid and unsure, not knowing if I was pregnant or not.
I didn’t know what to do,> Lee, now aged 75 and a prominent member of
the US House of Representatives, recalled during a recent hearing in
Congress.
Lee’s experience came just over 10 years before the United States
Supreme Court legalised abortion nationwide in its landmark 1973
decision,
Roe v Wade. It was a time when many women and girls were forced to take
risky measures if they wanted to terminate their pregnancies. Lee said
her mother sent her to El Paso, Texas, in the care of a close friend who
shepherded her to a <back-alley> clinic in Mexico to have an abortion.
<I felt embarrassed and thought if anyone found out, my life would be
destroyed,> she recalled.
Now, decades later, women’s rights advocates in the US say hard-fought
abortion rights are at risk, as the nation’s top court is set to hear a
Mississippi abortion case that could challenge Roe v Wade. With a
conservative majority, the US Supreme Court could be on the verge of
overturning that historic decision – a prospect putting abortion at the
centre of US politics and spurring mass protests across the country.
<We cannot and will not return to those days before Roe,> Lee said.
Conservative justices
There is no federal law guaranteeing a right to an abortion in the US.
Instead, Supreme Court rulings starting with Roe v Wade sharply limit
how
states can regulate the procedure. That decision essentially holds that
states cannot ban abortions before a fetus becomes viable outside the
womb or at about 24 weeks. But the makeup of the nine-member high court
has changed decisively with the appointment of three conservative
justices under former President Donald Trump.
The shift started at the end of President Barack Obama’s term in 2016,
when conservative Justice Antonin Scalia died suddenly and Republicans
in the US Senate refused to confirm Obama’s nominee to the court,
arguing it was too close to the upcoming presidential election, which
Trump won.
Under Trump’s tenure, three conservative justices joined the court: Neil
Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. The latter, Coney
Barrett, was controversially appointed just days before the 2020
election that Trump lost to President Joe Biden, and she replaced
feminist icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg. That swung the court from a 5-4
centrist majority to a 6-3 conservative one. Barrett’s appointment was
the culmination of a long drive by anti-abortion advocates to place
conservatives who would overturn Roe v Wade on the federal judicial
bench.
Now, anti-abortion activists are hopeful the court will act, said
Mallory Quigley, vice president at the Susan B Anthony List, a group
that opposes
abortion.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/12/us-prepares-for-supreme-court-showdown-on-abortion-rights
The Guardian
11 Oct 2021
Global development is supported by
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Jo Griffin
<<Women's rights and gender equality.
Bolsonaro blocks free tampons and pads for disadvantaged women in Brazil.
Campaigners say president’s veto is ‘absurd and inhumane’ in country
where period poverty keeps one in four girls out of school.
President Jair Bolsonaro’s decision to block a plan to distribute free
sanitary pads and tampons to disadvantaged girls and women has been met
with outrage in Brazil, where period poverty is estimated to keep one in
four girls out of school.
Bolsonaro vetoed part of a bill that would have given sanitary products
at no charge to groups including homeless people, prisoners and teenage
girls at state schools. It was expected to benefit 5.6 million women and
was part of a bigger package of laws to promote menstrual health, which
has been approved by legislators.
Tabata Amaral, of the Brazilian Socialist party (PSB) and one of 34
cross-party federal deputies who co-authored the bill, said the
president had
shown his <contempt for the dignity of vulnerable women> by vetoing the
plan last week.
<Bolsonaro says this project is ‘against the public interest’ – I say
that what is against the public interest is that girls lose around six
weeks of
school a year because they are menstruating,> Amaral told the Guardian.
She was among politicians and other groups outraged by justifications
given for the veto – including that giving free sanitary products to
poor girls
and women would <favour a certain group>. Many expressed their anger
using the hashtag #LivreParaMenstruar (free to menstruate).
Jacqueline Moraes, vice-governor of the south-eastern state of Espírito
Santo, tweeted: <Is it ‘a privilege’ for a poor woman to have the right
to a
tampon? No! It’s social policy, public health!>
<The veto is absurd and inhumane,> said Rozana Barroso, president of the
Brazilian Union of Secondary Students (UBES). <Many students are
prevented from studying because they stop attending school due to not
having a sanitary pad.
Have you ever imagined using paper, newspaper or breadcrumbs to contain
menstruation? This is a harsh reality, especially among young people. In
the midst of the pandemic and worsening social inequality this situation
has got even worse.>
In May, a report by the UN children’s fund, Unicef, and population fund,
UNFPA, found that 713,000 girls in Brazil live without access to a
bathroom; about 4 million girls don’t have adequate hygiene facilities
at school, such as sanitary pads and soap, and at least 200,000 girls
lack even the minimum hygiene facilities at school, such as bathrooms.
Amaral disputed the government’s claim that the source of the 84m reais
(£11m) a year to cover the plan was unclear, saying it had been
specified it would be funded by the health ministry and national
penitentiary fund. She is leading the campaign to overturn the veto.
She noted that the health ministry has to pay for costly treatments and
surgeries resulting from complications after women use items such as
towels and old clothes during their period. Half of Brazilian women
reported resorting to such alternatives, she said.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/oct/11/bolsonaro-blocks-free-tampons-and-pads-for-disadvantaged-women-in-brazil
The Guardian
Julie Bindel
10 Oct 2021
<<The Observer
Pornography
How do we talk to teens about sex in a world of porn?
Teenage boys’ easy access to violent sexual images is creating a crisis
for them – and for women, argues the anti-porn campaigner.
Violence against women is never far from the news, but currently it is
high on the agenda – and porn features again and again as a factor. From
the murder of Sarah Everard to the paltry sentence handed down to Sam
Pybus, the latest man to use the so-called “rough sex defence”, it seems
the world is riven with misogyny. Sarah’s killer Wayne Couzens was
attracted to <brutal sexual pornography>, the court heard during his
trial. Pybus – who was sentenced to four years and eight months last
month for manslaughter after strangling a vulnerable woman during sex –
was also known to use violent porn. Tackling porn culture is clearly a
key part of tackling sexual violence towards women. I have campaigned to
end the sex trade for decades, and am well aware of its role in the
sexual exploitation of women.
Last weekend, the very first virtual international conference about how
to teach sex education from a feminist perspective and a porn-critical
lens took place. Taking On Porn: Developing Resilience and Resistance
through Sex Education was organised by Culture Reframed, a US-based NGO
founded by the academic and anti-porn activist Gail Dines. Part of it
focused on how to help parents to have conversations with their children
about what Dines calls the <public health crisis of the digital age>.
Inspired partly by demand from the UK educational world, the conference
is responding to concerns from many parents about <pro-porn> programmes
running in some schools since relationship and sex education became
mandatory in September 2020.
Dines points to one teacher guide that puts forward the argument, <Porn
is entertainment, like a film, not a ‘how to’ guide. However, that
doesn’t
mean people can’t learn things from porn they might not learn in other
places. Just as movies can sometimes contain valuable insights, so can
porn.>
In this guide, porn consumption is likened to having a sweet tooth: <Porn
is a bit like a chocolate cake, it’s nice to enjoy it every now and then
but if you have it for lunch every day it’s no longer a treat and
becomes the norm, then you’re just in a cycle of eating chocolate cake
because you’re too
busy eating it to make anything else.>
But, as Dines points out, today’s online content is nothing like the now
defunct Playboy magazine. In short, it has become more sadistic and
extreme.
One influential study found that about 90% of the most commonly viewed
heterosexual porn scenes contained aggression and violence towards
women and girls. Online pornography has become the primary form of sex
education for young people, and the average age for kids to start
accessing it is 11. Porn
sites get more visits each month than Amazon, Twitter and Netflix
combined.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/oct/10/how-do-we-talk-to-teens-about-sex-in-a-world-of-porn
The Guardian
Alexandra Topping
10 Oct 2021
<<Sexual harassment.
Harvey Weinstein PA says abusers still have the legal power to silence
victims.
Outrage ensued when Zelda Perkins revealed her non-disclosure agreement
in 2017 but the expected reforms never came.
In the weeks after she first broke her non-disclosure agreement Zelda
Perkins, Harvey Weinstein’s former personal assistant, felt dizzy with
optimism.
After an appearance on Newsnight in 2017, in which she spoke publicly
about the oppressive non-disclosure agreement (NDA) she had been
silenced by as a 24-year-old two decades earlier, Perkins found herself
feted in parliament. The end of the use of NDAs as a means to cover up
abuse was, she thought, in sight. Four years later, on the anniversary
that Weinstein’s crimes were finally exposed, that optimism has been all
but extinguished.
<Legally, nothing has changed, nothing. The regulators have not changed
the rules since 1998,> she says.
She argues that the use of NDAs, a contract in which the parties agree
to not discuss any issues relating to a disagreement normally in return
for a settlement, remains rife in matters from building disagreements to
sexual harassment in the workplace.
And while there has been a <societal shift>, she fears all she has done
is <highlight the loophole>, and as a result lawyers are using more
obfuscation and threatening tactics to impose NDAs.
<The government has spent a huge amount of money on this already,> she
says. <But since Theresa May’s cabinet was dissolved, all of that work,
all of it, has been ignored. It did appear that things were changing but,
actually, we’re now in a more dangerous position than ever.>
She accuses the government of failing to change a broken system, and
fears women now pushing for a whole system change to tackle violence
against women could be similarly disappointed.
<Everything that’s going on at the moment to me is just ripples coming
from the same place, which is a systematic problem,> she says. <We have
to be careful that we don’t get a false sense of confidence. All the
shouting, all this pointing out the problems doesn’t actually make the
change where it needs to be made – at the heart of the system.>
While Perkins welcomed the wave of outrage around Weinstein that brought
Tarana Burke’s #MeToo movement to a wider audience, she is frustrated
that it took a <white monster> to make people listen – which she argues
has parallels to the current focus on Couzens.
<That minimises the problem,> she says.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/10/harvey-weinstein-pa-says-abusers-still-have-the-legal-power-to-silence-victims
The Guardian
Reuters from Rome
9 Oct 2021
<<Nancy Pelosi meets Pope Francis in Rome as abortion debate swirls in
US.
Catholic Pelosi, who has urged judges to block new Texas law, has come
under fire from some US bishops over abortion rights support.
Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, met Pope
Francis in Rome on Saturday. A Catholic, Pelosi has come under criticism
from some bishops in the US for her support for abortion rights.
Her meeting with Francis took place several weeks before Joe Biden is
expected to meet the pope while the president is in Rome for talks
between
leaders of the G20 group of major economies. Biden, the second Catholic
US president, has said he is personally opposed to abortion but, as a
politician, cannot impose his views. Pelosi, who has five children, has
said she supports a woman’s right to choose.
Biden’s administration and Pelosi have urged judges to block a new Texas
law which bars abortions from six weeks, saying it is unconstitutional.
The ban was temporarily reinstated on Friday by a conservative-leaning
appeals court.
The Catholic church teaches that human life begins at the moment of
conception and Biden and Pelosi have been criticized by conservative
Catholic media and US conservative bishops, some of whom say neither
should be allowed to receive communion.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/oct/09/nancy-pelosi-pope-francis-abortion-rights
Al Jazeera
Nida Kirmani
8 Oct 2021
<<The past few months have been harrowing for Pakistani women
There appears to have been a surge in violence against women, but in
truth it is nothing new. It is just that we are more aware of it now and
more women are fighting back.
The last few months have been particularly harrowing for Pakistani women.
From the horrific case of 27-year-old Noor Muqaddam, who was brutally
tortured and beheaded in the nation’s capital on July 21, to that of
Ayesha Ikram, a TikTok creator, who was harassed and groped on the
country’s Independence Day by more than 400 men on the grounds of one of
the country’s major national monuments, the Minar-e-Pakistan in Lahore –
it feels as if violence against women has reached epidemic proportions.
Many are even calling it a <femicide> to draw attention to the scale of
the problem and its systemic nature. But gender-based violence in the
country is not new. According to the 2017-2018 Pakistan Demographic and
Health Survey, 28 percent of women aged 15 to 49 had experienced
intimate partner violence in their lifetimes. This is a slight decrease
from 32 percent of the women reported to have experienced physical
violence at the hands of their partners in the 2012-2013 survey. But
given that domestic violence is an issue shrouded in secrecy and shame,
both sets of figures are likely a gross under-estimation. One suspects
that it feels like there is a surge in violence because cases are
getting more attention. Mainstream media is more attuned to the issue,
and it is also being highlighted and discussed on social media
platforms.
These conversations have created heightened awareness among young women
in particular, who are becoming increasingly vocal about their rights.
The vast majority of these women belong to the educated, urban middle
and upper classes.
This is just the latest in the long history of the struggle against
gender-based violence in Pakistan.
In the past, particular cases have drawn national as well international
attention, leading to collective action by rights activists.
One such case was that of 28-year-old Samia Sarwar, whose murder was
arranged by her family in 1999. She had been seeking a divorce from her
violent husband, a decision her family did not support because it would
have <dishonoured> the family name. She was shot dead in the offices of
Hina Jilani, a well-respected Supreme Court lawyer and human rights
activist. Sarwar had been there for a pre-arranged meeting with her
mother to receive the divorce papers.
Her murder started a national conversation about honour killings.
Women’s rights activists, including Jilani and her sister Asma Jahangir,
also a renowned human rights lawyer and activist, highlighted it to
advocate for an end to gender-based violence.
But there were counter-protests from religious conservatives arguing
that Sarwar’s feminist lawyers had no business interfering in a question
of <family honour>. To this day, the perpetrators have not been brought
to justice.
Another well-documented case is that of Mukhtaran Mai, who was
gang-raped in June 2002 by four men in Meerwala village in southern
Punjab’s Muzaffargarh district. Mai was raped on the orders of a village
council as <punishment> for her younger brother’s alleged illegitimate
relationship with a woman from a rival tribe.
Social media
Female education rates are gradually on the rise in Pakistan, with the
rate of female secondary education rising from 28.6 percent in 2011 to
34.2 percent in 2021. There is now a new generation of young educated
women who have the awareness and confidence to demand their rights.
Additionally, as technology and social media have become more accessible,
news of cases has started to spread more widely and at a much greater
speed. As of this year, almost 27.5 percent of the country’s population
has access to the internet, mostly through their mobile phones. While
this is much less than the global average of 60.9 percent, it is still
significant for a country of 223 million.
Despite the fact that the country only has 2.1 million Twitter users, a
relatively low percent, tweets are often featured by media outlets and
are used to further discussions.
The state has also identified social media as a possible threat to
Pakistan’s national image. Fawad Chaudhry, the country’s information
minister, recently alleged that Indian and Afghan accounts were <falsely>
creating the impression that Pakistan is <unsafe for women>, which he
argued is part of an international conspiracy to malign the country.
With social media playing a key role in taking the conversation forward,
women also face constant threats and harassment on these channels.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/10/8/violence-against-women-in-pakistan-is-not-new-but-it-must-stop
Al Jazeera
8 Oct 2021
<<Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov win 2021 Nobel Peace Prize.
Journalists from the Philippines and Russia hailed ‘for their efforts to
safeguard freedom of expression’.
Journalists Maria Ressa, of the Philippines, and Dmitry Muratov, of
Russia, have won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, recognised <for their
efforts to safeguard freedom of expression>, which the prize-giving
committee described as being under threat worldwide
The two were given the prestigious award <for their courageous fight for
freedom of expression in the Philippines and Russia,> Berit
Reiss-Andersen, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said on Friday.
<At the same time, they are representatives of all journalists who stand
up for this ideal in a world in which democracy and freedom of the press
face increasingly adverse conditions,> she told a news conference in
Norway’s capital, Oslo.
The prize is the first for journalists since German Carl von Ossietzky
won it in 1935 for revealing his country’s secret post-war rearmament
programme.
<Free, independent and fact-based journalism serves to protect against
abuse of power, lies and war propaganda,> Reiss-Andersen said.
Ressa, who founded investigative journalism website Rappler, has focused
much of her work on Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s controversial
and violent war on drugs. She and Rappler <have also documented how
social media is being used to spread fake news, harass opponents and
manipulate public discourse,> the Nobel committee noted.
<I’m a little shocked. It’s really emotional,> Ressa said after learning
of the award.
<Journalism has never been as important as it is today,> she said,
adding that journalists had <lost our gatekeeping powers to technology
platforms> and called for nations to come together to stop the rise of
misinformation.
She also said that despite her news website being under <the possibility
of shutdown on a daily basis> she continues striving for fact-finding
journalism.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/8/nobel-peace-prize-2021
Al Jazeera
8 Oct 2021
<<Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov win 2021 Nobel Peace Prize.
Journalists from the Philippines and Russia hailed ‘for their efforts to
safeguard freedom of expression’.
Journalists Maria Ressa, of the Philippines, and Dmitry Muratov, of
Russia, have won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, recognised <for their
efforts to safeguard freedom of expression>, which the prize-giving
committee described as being under threat worldwide
The two were given the prestigious award <for their courageous fight for
freedom of expression in the Philippines and Russia,> Berit
Reiss-Andersen, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said on Friday.
<At the same time, they are representatives of all journalists who stand
up for this ideal in a world in which democracy and freedom of the press
face increasingly adverse conditions,> she told a news conference in
Norway’s capital, Oslo.
The prize is the first for journalists since German Carl von Ossietzky
won it in 1935 for revealing his country’s secret post-war rearmament
programme.
<Free, independent and fact-based journalism serves to protect against
abuse of power, lies and war propaganda,> Reiss-Andersen said.
Ressa, who founded investigative journalism website Rappler, has focused
much of her work on Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s controversial
and violent war on drugs. She and Rappler <have also documented how
social media is being used to spread fake news, harass opponents and
manipulate public discourse,> the Nobel committee noted.
<I’m a little shocked. It’s really emotional,> Ressa said after learning
of the award.
<Journalism has never been as important as it is today,> she said,
adding that journalists had <lost our gatekeeping powers to technology
platforms> and called for nations to come together to stop the rise of
misinformation.
She also said that despite her news website being under <the possibility
of shutdown on a daily basis> she continues striving for fact-finding
journalism.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/8/nobel-peace-prize-2021
The
Guardian
Sam Jones
7 Oct 2021
<<A family and an LGBT collective in south-east Spain are demanding
answers and an apology after a 19-year-old gay woman who visited a
gynaecologist over a menstrual condition was diagnosed with <homosexuality>.
On Monday the woman went to an appointment at the Reina Sofía hospital
in the city of Murcia. After being examined she was given a piece of
paper that included the line: <Current illness: homosexual.> The woman’s
mother told the online paper elDiario.es that the gynaecologist had
asked her daughter whether he could include her sexual orientation in
his report, and that she had consented – despite her surprise – as she
thought at the time it might be relevant.
<At first, I thought it was funny, but it just isn’t,> said the patient.
The mother and daughter brought the matter to the attention of the local
LGBT collective, Galactyco, which has lodged a formal complaint with
Murcia’s regional government, the regional health ministry, and the
regional health service.
<The World Health Organization removed homosexuality from the list of
mental illnesses in 1990, and yet, 31 years on, there are still some
professionals in Murcia’s health service who view sexual orientation as
an illness,> Galactyco said in a statement.
The collective said it was seeking an explanation and an apology, adding
that the regional authorities had ignored the patient’s legal rights. It
also said the case was far from an isolated incident.
<Our association has received countless reports of degrading treatment
because of sexual or gender orientation,> the statement said.
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/07/outrage-after-gay-woman-diagnosed-at-spanish-hospital-with-homosexuality
The Guardian
Sirin Kale
7 Oct 2021
<<Cathkin Braes country park, in south Glasgow, is beautiful. You can
see the city and, behind it, the mountains. Clara (not her real name), a
35-year-old community worker from Glasgow, went there in March to enjoy
the view from her campervan. As she relaxed, she looked over and saw a
car parked beside her, with the passenger window rolled down. A man was
staring at her, and masturbating. He clearly relished her visible fright.
<That is what was turning him on,> Clara said. <His head was nearly out
of the passenger window, staring at me.>
Because she was in a campervan, it wasn’t easy to get away quickly:
Clara had to get out to fold away some seats. “I decided to jump out,”
she says, “and when I looked at him, he was wiping ejaculation off his
dashboard and looking at me.” She took a photograph of his car
numberplate and drove away. But the man realised what she had done and
gave chase. For 15 minutes, he tailed her through the streets of Glasgow.
Frightened for her life, Clara drove to a police station, but the man
turned off before she arrived.
The same day, Clara reported the incident to Police Scotland. The
officer asked Clara if she saw the man’s penis, and when she said no,
but that she was certain he was masturbating, the officer said there was
nothing they could do. <I told him: ‘My concern is that he grows in
confidence with this behaviour and he starts approaching women. Can you
not at least do a door knock? I have his registration.’> The police
officer refused. <I thought: ‘What the fuck? How are they not taking
this seriously? Especially after Sarah Everard.’>
Recent weeks have seen renewed focus on the crime of indecent exposure,
after the sentencing of the Metropolitan police officer Wayne Couzens
for Everard’s kidnap, rape and murder. Couzens, it has been subsequently
reported, had a history of indecent exposure. In 2015, a woman reported
him for indecent exposure to Kent police; the force is now under
investigation for its response to the allegation. Couzens has also been
accused of twice exposing himself to staff at a McDonald’s drive-thru,
again in Kent, just days before he attacked Everard. Staff provided
police with Couzens’s car registration number, but it appears that no
action was taken. Flashing, or to use its proper name, indecent exposure,
is a crime punishable by a maximum two-year jail sentence. And yet so
often it is dismissed as a matter of scant consequence; an unpleasant
but inconsequential offence, committed by the mac-wearing pervert of
popular myth. Canvassing women for this article, I was struck by how few
hadn’t been flashed. Women had been flashed when they were children
outside school, on public transport, from parked cars, in Topshop as
13-year olds, in the stairwells of multistorey car parks, and cycle
lanes, and busy motorways. And parks, so many parks, usually by
inveterate offenders who were known to police, who took no action.
Guardian analysis of Office for National Statistics (ONS) and Ministry
of Justice data for England and Wales revealed that 10,775 indecent
exposure cases were logged by police in 2020, but just 594 suspects were
taken to court. The true figures are likely to be much higher. “The vast
majority of women, if you talk to them, will remember an experience of
being flashed,” says Dr Fiona Vera-Gray of Durham University, an expert
on sexual violence and street harassment. <But most never report being
flashed because they’re never sure if they will be blamed, or if people
will think it’s their fault.>
When women do tell the police, they are can be met with apathy,
condescension, or even outright scorn. <Honestly,> says Taali Kwaten,
25, who works in events and as an LGBTQA+ community organiser, <the
police’s response was more upsetting than the actual flashing. They
belittled it. They kept making jokes, and trying to be funny about it.>
Kwaten, who is gender-fluid femme (meaning that they identify as both
genders, but present as feminine) and uses both they and she pronouns,
was walking in Arnos Park, north London, in April this year when they
saw a man masturbating in some bushes.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/07/indecent-exposure-flashing-sarah-everard-police-response
The Guardian
7 Oct 2021
Helen Davidson in Taipei
<<‘Instead I am the criminal’: China’s MeToo figure speaks out after
case fails.
Even if her appeal against sexual harassment verdict is unsuccessful,
Xianzi is proud that more women now feel they can share their
experiences.
Sitting inside a Beijing courthouse late at night last month, Zhou
Xiaoxuan and her lawyers came to a quick decision. Their years-long
effort to seek justice for her alleged sexual harassment by one of the
country’s most popular celebrities was clearly not going to go their way.
In a short statement the court ruled she had tendered insufficient
evidence.
On Weibo she wrote to her supporters with a list of criticisms of the
judgment and process. <Failure is not shameful, and I am honoured to
have stood with you together in the past three years … Thank you very
much, everyone, I will definitely appeal.>
The next day her social media accounts were shut down.
<It’s like the only ones who can speak are the other side,> she tells
the Guardian, through a translator. <It’s the same feeling from 2014
[the year of the alleged assault]: people telling you that you are not
important and you should shut up. Like I’m not someone who lost their
case in the sexual harassment case, but instead I am the criminal.>
It’s a few weeks after that long day in court, and the furore around
this young woman who never planned to be famous is starting to ebb. Cut
off from communication with her supporters and planning her next move,
Zhou – widely known by her nickname Xianzi – speaks with determination.
In the seven years since the alleged incident and three since she went
public with her claims, Xianzi, now 28, pushes back on the descriptor
she’s been given – the face of China’s #MeToo movement. But years later
she does feel a <responsibility> now, to continue. <I cannot even
imagine how we were all insistent for so long,> she says.
<For others the fact that we lost the case is very frustrating, but for
me, this is the result of every single person doing all they can do and
making all the effort. This is a miracle.>
From shame to protest
Xianzi didn’t plan on her accusations going viral. In mid-2018, as many
women in China began sharing their own #MeToo stories online, she saw
that a close friend had posted her own story to WeChat.
<Back then, we still had those strong feelings of shame,> she says. <I
told her that I thought she was very brave and I hoped to write an
article too, to stay with her and support her and share the shame. Just
to let her know that what she wrote was not in vain.>
But Xianzi’s 3,000 character long essay about Zhu Jun, a famous state
broadcasting host and member of China’s political advisory body, was
never going to go unnoticed, even as censors went to work on the flood
of stories online. Her post, and a subsequent one, spread like wildfire
across China’s social media.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/07/instead-i-am-the-criminal-chinas-metoo-figure-speaks-out-after-case-fails
The Guardian
07 Oct 2021
Today in Focus
<<Can women trust the police?
In the aftermath of the sentencing of Sarah Everard’s killer, women’s
trust in the police has collapsed. Can anything be done to restore it?
Is misogyny endemic in British policing? And is there a risk that such
an appalling crime could happen again? How to listen to podcasts:
everything you need to know
Presented by Rachel Humphreys; produced by Hannah Moore and Rudi Zygadlo;
executive producers Elizabeth Cassin, Phil Maynard and Archie Bland
Thu 7 Oct 2021 03.00 BST
Zoe Billingham spent more than a decade as an investigator of police
misconduct across England and Wales. Last week, on her last day as
senior inspector at Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, Wayne
Couzens was sentenced to a whole-life term for the kidnap, rape and
murder of Sarah Everard. The trial revealed that Couzens, a former
Metropolitan police officer, used his police ID and handcuffs to deceive
Everard on the night of her disappearance. Now the Met is facing serious
questions: how was he allowed to continue serving despite having been
accused of indecent exposure? Why was an officer with the nickname “the
rapist” not under more scrutiny? And does his case reveal broader
cultural issues within the force?
In her role as a police watchdog, Billingham spent much of her career
looking at the structural failings that critics say can leave the public
– and especially women – vulnerable. In this episode she tells Rachel
Humphreys what police leaders need to do to fix the problem. And she
warns that without serious reform, a case like Everard’s could happen
again.>>
Listen to the Topic here:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2021/oct/07/can-women-trust-the-police-podcast
The Guardian
The staff and agencies
7 Oct 2021
<<US judge temporarily blocks Texas’ near-total abortion ban in blow to
contentious law
Judge excoriates ‘unprecedented scheme’ to deny women abortion right as
law faces uncertain future.
A US federal judge has temporarily blocked the near-total ban on
abortion in Texas, dealing the first legal blow against the contentious
law and throwing its future into uncertainty. The law, known as Senate
Bill 8, banned most abortions in the nation’s second-most populous state
and, until now, had withstood a wave of early challenges.
Wednesday’s ruling, which stems from a challenge brought by the Biden
administration, will prevent the state from enforcing the
Republican-backed law while litigation over its legality continues. But
even with the law on hold, abortion services in Texas may not instantly
resume because doctors still fear that they could be sued without a more
permanent legal decision.
<Tonight’s ruling is an important step forward toward restoring the
constitutional rights of women across the state of Texas,> White House
press secretary Jen Psaki said in statement late on Wednesday. <The
fight has only just begun, both in Texas and in many states across this
country where women’s rights are currently under attack.>
Texas officials are likely to seek a swift reversal from the fifth US
circuit court of appeals, which previously allowed the restrictions to
take effect.
The law, signed by Republican governor Greg Abbott in May, prohibits
abortions once cardiac activity is detected, which is usually around six
weeks, before someone can even know they are pregnant. To enforce the
law, Texas deputized private citizens to file lawsuits against violators,
and has entitled them to at least $10,000 in damages if successful.
The lawsuit was brought by the Biden administration, which has said the
restrictions were enacted in defiance of the US constitution. The Biden
administration argued that Texas has waged an attack on the
constitutional right to abortion.
<A state may not ban abortions at six weeks. Texas knew this, but it
wanted a six-week ban anyway, so the state resorted to an unprecedented
scheme of vigilante justice that was designed to scare abortion
providers and others who might help women exercise their constitutional
rights,> said Brian Netter, justice department attorney, to the federal
court on Friday.
In a 113-page opinion, judge Robert Pitman took Texas to task over the
law, saying Republicans lawmakers had “contrived an unprecedented and
transparent statutory scheme” to deny patients their constitutional
right to an abortion.
<From the moment SB8 went into effect, women have been unlawfully
prevented from exercising control over their lives in ways that are
protected by the constitution,> wrote Pitman, who was appointed to the
bench by Barack Obama.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/oct/06/texas-abortion-ban-temporary-block-us-judge
The Guardian
6 Oct 2021
Vikram Dodd Police and crime correspondent
<<A campaigner whose photograph during her arrest became the defining
image of the vigil for Sarah Everard has said she felt afraid after
about 50 police officers and security guards then “liked” her profile on
the Tinder dating app. Patsy Stevenson, 28, says she viewed the
approaches as intimidatory by officers who knew she was fearful of the
police after being bundled to the ground.
The Metropolitan police say they are making inquiries, want to offer
support to Stevenson and will consider if any officers may have
committed misconduct. It comes with the Met in crisis after the
sentencing last week of Wayne Couzens to a whole life sentence when
details of the extent of his crimes emerged. Last March, Couzens, then a
Met officer, abused his police powers, equipment and training, to trick
Everard into getting into a car, where handcuffed she was driven away to
be raped, murdered and her body burned as he tried to hide his crimes.
Over a week later, after Couzens had been charged with the murder, a
scheduled vigil on Clapham Common, south London, close to where Everard
was kidnapped, was cancelled because of pandemic lockdown restrictions.
But a crowd, comprised largely of women, still gathered to pay their
respects to Everard and protest over male violence against women.
Stevenson was handcuffed and later fined. She is suing the Met over her
treatment. She told the BBC about 50 police officers and security guards
had liked her profile on Tinder: <They were all in uniform on their
profiles or it said ‘I’m a police officer’.
<It is almost like an intimidation thing, saying, ‘Look we can see you’,
and that, to me, is terrifying.'>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/oct/06/fifty-police-officers-contacted-woman-arrested-at-sarah-everard-vigil-on-tinder
Al Jazeera
5 Oct 2021
<<Workers' Rights.
Indian shop workers – most of them
women – win the right to sit. Tamil Nadu becomes second Indian state to
enshrine the ‘right to sit’ in law, citing health risks for retail
workers, who are mostly women. On her feet at work for 10 hours a day,
Indian shop assistant S Lakshmi* walks painfully home at the end of her
shift to nurse her aching legs and swollen ankles. But relief may be in
sight. Last month, Tamil Nadu became the second Indian state to enshrine
retail staff’s <right to sit> in law, ordering store owners to provide
seating and let employees take the weight off their feet whenever
possible during the working day. <Until now, the only solace during
these long shifts would be the 20-minute lunch break and the few seconds
we would lean against the shelves to support our aching feet,> said
Lakshmi, 40, who has worked in the same clothing store for a
decade.<Even sitting on the floor if there were no customers wasn’t
allowed,> she added. India’s fast-growing retail segment is a pillar of
the economy – accounting for 10 percent of gross domestic product (GDP)
and 8 percent of jobs, according to Invest India, the country’s
investment promotion arm. In southern states, including Tamil Nadu, big
family-run chains dominate the jewellery, sari and clothing sectors and
hire women from lower-middle-class homes to serve their mainly female
clientele. Tamil Nadu’s neighbour state, Kerala, brought in a similar
law in 2018 following protests by sales staff in textile shops, and
labour rights campaigners said the new legal amendment to protect
workers’ health was welcome though overdue. <This has been a
long-pending demand,> said M Dhanalakshmi, Tamil Nadu state convener of
the Working Women’s Coordination Committee, a wing of the Centre of
Indian Trade Unions.
<From the time they board the bus to get to work until they return home
after a 12- or 14-hour shift, they barely sit. There are health issues
like varicose veins that they grapple with and work under constant
stress. This rule is long overdue.> >>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/5/india-tamil-nadu-shop-workers-women-win-right-to-chair
Al Jazeera
from The stream
4 oct 2021
On Yemi Aladi, Nigerian singer
<<Why nothing will stop Yemi Alade.
Note from Gino d'Artali: I cannot quote
the text without breaking the law so best is if you visit this page:
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/the-stream/2021/10/3/why-nothing-will-stop-yemi-alade
Al Jazeera
4 Oct 2021
<<As women’s safety concerns mount, UK
officer charged with rape.
David Carrick, 46, is based in the same branch of the Metropolitan
Police service as Sarah Everard’s murderer.
A police officer in the United Kingdom
based in the same unit as Sarah Everard’s killer has been charged with
rape, a development which comes as concerns mount over women’s safety in
the country. David Carrick, 46, was charged by police on Sunday
following his arrest a day earlier, London’s Metropolitan Police (Met)
service said in a statement. Carrick, who serves in the Met’s
Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection Command, was off-duty at the
time in Hertfordshire, a county bordering the capital. He was suspended
by the Metropolitan Police following his arrest and remanded in custody
after appearing in court on Monday. Carrick is accused of one count of
rape following an alleged attack on a woman on the night of September 4,
2020. He is expected to appear in court again on November 1. Carrick’s
case comes after Wayne Couzens was last week sentenced to life
imprisonment without parole for the kidnap, rape and murder of Everard
in March. Couzens was part of the Met’s elite diplomatic protection unit
at the time of her killing. He was dismissed in July after pleading
guilty to her murder. At Couzens’ two-day sentencing, London’s Central
Criminal Court heard how he had abducted Everard after falsely arresting
her on the pretext of breaking COVID-19 lockdown rules. Couzens later
raped and killed Everard, before burning her body. Everard’s case
shocked the UK and led to a national conversation over women’s safety.
Women, critics and campaigners have called for major reforms in how
police officers are vetted and how crimes against women are dealt with.
Some have also called for Met chief Cressida Dick to resign.
Speaking about Sunday’s rape charge,
Dick said she was <deeply concerned> by the development. <I fully
recognise the public will be very concerned too,> she said in a
statement. <Criminal proceedings must now take their course so I am
unable to comment any further at this stage.> Her comments came after
the Met took the extraordinary step in the wake of Couzens’ sentencing
of advising the public to flag down a bus or, as a last resort, run away
from a police officer if they suspect him of behaving unlawfully.
Critics denounced the advice as tone deaf.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/4/uk-police-officer-charged-with-rape
The Guardian
Global development is supported by
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Lucy Sherriff for the Fuller Project
04 Oct 2021
<<‘No fish means no food’: how Yurok
women are fighting for their tribe’s nutritional health. Klamath River
salmon populations are dwindling, so Yurok mothers are working to
restore the river and reclaim Indigenous food sovereignty. Keeping
salmon in her children’s diet is <an entire job>, says Georgiana Gensaw,
a Yurok Tribe member and mother of four in Klamath Glen, California, a
community whose only easily accessible food store is a fried chicken
shop attached to a gas station a few miles away. The nearest grocery
store, Safeway in Crescent City, lies 24 miles away along a stretch of
road frequently plagued by landslides and toppled redwoods –
last summer it was closed for 20 hours
a day after a washout – making queues to get through the roadworks up to
five hours long. As a lifelong reservation resident, Gensaw recalls when
fresh food was abundant. <I grew up with fish patties, rice and fish,
noodles and fish, salmon sandwiches, dried fish,> she remembers fondly.
<We never understood how lucky we were, that it was going to go away.>
The Yurok reservation where Gensaw lives sits on a remote strip of land
that snakes shoulder to shoulder with the final 44 miles of the Klamath
River along the misty northern California coast. In 2001, drought
descended on the Klamath Basin, the watershed that feeds the river. Due
to a history of water mismanagement in the basin, combined with a
historic drought, the river is sick – and the Yurok are too.
The salmon they have long depended on
as dietary staple and cultural cornerstone have become scarce. Combined
with the lack of food sovereignty, that scarcity has prompted the need
to fight for their main sources of nutrition and for their very way of
life, they say. Yurok women, traditionally their tribe’s caregivers and
food providers, bear the brunt of the food and health crisis while
leading the fight for cultural preservation. <The situation has gotten
so bad that I don’t even know what kind of loss to compare it to.
Because there’s no replacing salmon,> Gensaw says, her voice breaking. <My
babies were meant to eat Klamath River salmon.> In a community whose
median income is $11,000, with unemployment rates as high as 80%, with
approximately 35% living below the poverty line and most of the
population in a food desert, the result is a serious impact on their
nutrition sources and health. A 2019 University of California-Berkeley
study of Native communities in the Klamath Basin found <91.89 percent of
households suffering from some level of food insecurity and over half
experiencing very low food security>.
Food sovereignty – the right to healthy
and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and
sustainable methods – is linked to Yurok Tribe members’ rights and
cultural identity as well as their nutrition and health. The tribe’s
general counsel, Amy Cordalis, finds being a Yurok woman provides her a
particular vantage point from which to hold the US government
accountable on this issue to ensure her people’s health and way of life.
<I translate between Yurok cultural values and this colonized American
law,> Cordalis, who has been part of her tribe’s legal team since 2014,
told the Fuller Project. <You can’t exercise the right to eat your
traditional foods if there are no traditional foods,> says Cordalis, a
mother of two and lifelong fisherwoman. <So the fight for a clean,
healthy river is inextricably tied to the ability to exercise food
sovereignty.> Earlier this year, a fish kill of enormous magnitude left
70% of juvenile salmon dead, according to Yurok biologists. Tribal
scientists later found the deadly pathogen Ceratonova shasta, which
spreads when water quality is low and fish are stressed, present in 97%
of the fish they captured. The Yurok, who usually run a commercial
fishery to bring in much-needed income, have had their fishing rights
severely curtailed to protect the remaining salmon population.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/oct/04/salmon-klamath-river-yurok-women-nutrition-health
Al Jazeera
3 Oct 2021
<<Qatar wraps up legislative polls, no
women candidates elected.
Female candidates disappointed in polls where turnout for the election
of 30 members of the 45-seat Shura Council was at 63.5 percent.
The results of Qatar’s first
legislative council election have been announced, with none of the 26
female candidates winning at the polls. Qatari citizens voted on
Saturday in the Gulf Arab state’s first legislative elections for
two-thirds of the advisory Shura Council, a process that has stirred
domestic debate about electoral inclusion and citizenship. The Shura
Council has legislative authority and approves general state policies
and the budget but has no say in the setting of defence, security,
economic and investment policy for the small but wealthy gas producer,
which bans political parties. Turnout for the election of 30 members of
the 45-seat body was 63.5 percent, the interior ministry said in a
statement on Sunday. The emir will continue to appoint the remaining 15
Council members.
Results showed none of the women who
were part of the polls was elected, disappointing candidates who had
wanted to lend a voice for women and other Qataris in the country’s
political process. <To have all men is not the vision of Qatar,> said
Aisha Hamam al-Jasim, 59, a nursing manager who ran in the capital
Doha’s Markhiya district. She urged Qatari women to start <voicing what
they believe in> and vote for strong women candidates in the future.
Several female candidates had been seeking to improve the integration
into Qatari society of children of Qatari mothers married to foreigners
who, like in other Gulf states, cannot pass their Qatari nationality to
their children.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/3/qatar-first-legislative-polls-no-women
The Guardian
3 Oct 2021
<<Opinion
Sarah Everard
You can’t opt in and out of taking
violence against women seriously
by Catherine Bennett
Sarah Everard’s murder has highlighted
the inconsistencies in the provision of safe spaces. fter the
heartbreaking family statements and accounts of Sarah Everard’s abduction and murder,
it seemed unlikely a judicial summing up could exacerbate the distress.
But somehow the judge achieved it. Everard was, Lord Justice Fulford said,
<a wholly blameless victim>. Ah. The other sort – the woman who
contributes to her own death at the hands of a pitiless stranger – evidently
lives on in the mind of the senior judiciary. Forty years after the
police and prosecution virtue-rated victims of the mass murderer Peter Sutcliffe, the
criminal justice system applauds a female victim who lives up to the
highest patriarchal standards. Sir Michael Havers said at Sutcliffe’s trial that
<perhaps the saddest part of the case> was that <the last six attacks
were on totally respectable women>. After Sutcliffe’s death last year, West
Yorkshire police apologised for similar ugliness. But even in the 1970s
women seem to have been spared the suggestion that some police officers
were well disposed, personally, towards the murderer. Turning to the mitigating arguments,
Fulford acknowledged of Couzens that <some of his colleagues have spoken
supportively of him>. We already knew that Couzens’s nickname, as a
serving officer, was <the rapist>. We learned months ago that he had
been reported for indecent exposure in 2015, then for twice repeating this
offence days before the murder, remaining in his job. But only thanks to
the judge did we discover that even after he was known to have kidnapped and
killed, the depraved Couzens – with his prostitutes and violent
pornography – enjoyed support from colleagues.
Are they among the officers now being
investigated?
There’s little reason, given recent
police statements, to hope so. After months during which the
Metropolitan police could have enhanced safeguarding, addressed risks and even
been ready with a self-lacerating review, all it could contribute after
the trial were lines about wrong ’uns and lessons learned, its own great shock
and sadness and the correct procedure for women needing to distinguish
between arrest and abduction. The kindest thing that can be said about
Cressida Dick, given the evidence of employee mistreatment of women
tolerated in police forces, is that this misogyny is so entrenched as to have
defied any attempts she may have made to expunge it.
Female ex-officers have been speaking
about the difficulty of reporting male misbehaviour, including domestic
abuse, in this male-dominated culture and about the likely pariah status for
women who try. As in March, when women gathering to mourn Sarah Everard
were set upon by male officers, this harrowing case has aroused collective
concern. Again, men remind other men, using the hashtag #shewasonlywalkinghome,
what it must be like for a young woman to be always glancing
behind her, recrossing the road, carrying keys in her fist. Again,
there’s an appalled interest, for all the world as if it had been long hidden, in the decades
of harassment that begin for women in puberty and cease only with middle
age or police instructions (unmodified since Sutcliffe’s murders
in Leeds) to stay off the streets when especially dangerous men are at
large.David Lammy, the shadow justice
secretary, was among the prominent men tweeting their abhorrence:
<Enough is enough. We need to treat violence against women and girls as seriously as
terrorism.> Sometimes, you gather, it’s acceptable
to discuss endemic male violence against women and girls and sometimes
it’s not. Just before the Everard verdict, Lammy had angrily dismissed
women exercised by this very subject as <dinosaurs>. Women who value
women-only spaces – where they feel safe from male violence – he
characterised as <hoarding rights>. Lammy, along with some Labour
colleagues, simultaneously denounces male violence, then, taking
victim-blaming to as yet unprecedented levels, is furious with any women concerned about
losing the few places that individuals he depicts as terrorists can’t
access.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/03/which-bit-of-women-need-safe-places-dont-men-understand
Al Jazeera
3 oct 2021
<<In Pictures
Gallery
A great-grandmother keeps an Indian
martial art alive
Meenakshi Amma, 78, has been a driving
force in the revival of kalaripayattu in India. Deftly parrying her son with a bamboo
cane, Meenakshi Amma’s prowess at Kalari – thought to be India’s oldest
martial art – belies her 78 years. The great-grandmother in Kerala,
southern India, has been a driving force in the revival of
Kalarippayattu – as the ancient practice is also known – and in encouraging girls to take it up. <I started Kalari when I was seven. I
am still practising, learning and teaching,> said the matriarch of the
Kadathanad Kalari Sangham school, founded by her late husband in 1949.<When you open the newspapers, you only
see news of violence against women. When women learn this martial art,
they feel physically and mentally strong and it makes them
confident to work and travel alone.>Kalari, which contains elements of
dance and yoga, can involve weapons such as swords, shields and staffs.
Reputedly 3,000 years old and mentioned in ancient Hindu scriptures, it remains
infused with religion in the present day. India’s British colonial
rulers banned the practice in 1804 but it survived underground before a revival
in the early 20th century and after independence in 1947. Now it is recognised as a sport and
practised all over India. Inside Meenakshi’s Kalari hall, her
bare-chested son Sanjeev Kumar, a lungi tied around his waist, puts barefoot pupils, boys
and girls alike, through their paces on the ochre-red earth floor. <It’s a form of poetry,> said civil
engineer Alaka S Kumar, 29, daughter of Sanjeev. <I am going to teach
Kalari, with my brother. We have to take over. Otherwise, it is gone.>>
Read and view some more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/10/3/photos-great-grandmother-keeps-indian-martial-art-alive
The Guardian
3 Oct 2021
Aubrey Allegretti
<<Sarah Everard killer Wayne Couzens
worked as parliamentary guard.
Questions mount over vetting of former
Met officer, who had access to Houses of Commons and Lords.
The Metropolitan police officer who
raped and murdered Sarah Everard guarded parliament five times, it has
emerged, as a senior Conservative criticised the force for appearing to
have <overlooked> warning signs about his behaviour. Wayne Couzens, 48,
worked in the parliamentary and diplomatic protection command and
finished a shift guarding the US embassy hours before he carried out a
false arrest of Everard on 3 March and abducted her. His access to Westminster
has only just come to light after the Met said he worked on the
parliamentary estate used by MPs and ministers five times between February
and July 2020. Couzens had a pass granting him access to all areas of
the Commons and Lords, according to the Sunday Times, which also reported
that the Commons Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, had demanded a meeting with the
Met commissioner, Cressida Dick, over Couzens’ vetting. <I have asked the Met to meet me
urgently to discuss how this person could have been deemed suitable for
deployment here,> Hoyle said. <Further, I will be seeking reassurance that at
no time was anyone on the parliamentary estate put at risk. The security
of members and staff has always been my number one priority, so I want to
know how this man could ever have crossed the parliamentary threshold.> Hoyle said he was <sickened by the
depravity> of Couzens and heartbroken for Everard’s family.Some MPs, including Labour’s former
acting leader Harriet Harman, have called for Dick to resign weeks after
her contract was extended. Boris Johnson has said she should remain in post.Oliver Dowden, the co-chair of the
Conservative party, said the attack on Everard was <deeply, deeply
disturbing>. He added there were <kind of warning signals that appear to have
been overlooked> and that it was right Dick <properly investigates
that>. He added: <I think we need to let her get on with that job first.>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/oct/03/sarah-everard-killer-wayne-couzens-worked-as-parliamentary-guard
Al Jazeera
2 Oct 2021
<<Tens of thousands of women march for
abortion rights in US.
American women fear more states could
roll back abortion rights after Texas imposes a near-total ban on the
procedure.
Tens of thousands of women have marched
across cities in the United States to protest increasing restrictions on
abortion. The 660 demonstrations around the US on Saturday, including on
the steps of the Supreme Court in Washington DC, were largely sparked by
a Texas law that bans abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. The
measure, which went into effect last month, is the most restrictive in
the country. In Washington, DC, protesters filled the streets surrounding the
Supreme Court, shouting: <My body, my choice,> and cheering loudly to
the beat of drums. They carried signs that said: <Mind
your own uterus>, <I love someone who had an abortion>and <Abortion is a
personal choice, not a legal debate.> Some wore T-shirts reading simply
<1973>, a reference to the landmark Roe v Wade decision, which made
abortion legal for generations of American women. <No matter where you live, no matter
where you are, this moment is dark,> Alexis McGill Johnson, president of
Planned Parenthood, told the crowd at the Rally for Abortion Justice in
Washington, DC. She spoke of women who have been forced
to drive for many hours across state lines – sometimes multiple state
lines – to end pregnancies since the Texas law went into effect.
<No matter where you are, this fight is
at your doorstep right now,> McGill Johnson said. <This moment is dark,
but that is why we are here.>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/2/women-march-across-us-in-support-of-abortion-rights
(which includes a viideo)
and read these related Al Jazeera
articles (links):
Protesters demand abortion rights
across Latin America
China restricts abortions for
‘non-medical purposes’
Chile takes ‘first step’ towards
decriminalising abortion
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/2/women-march-across-us-in-support-of-abortion-rights
Al Jazeera
2 Oct 2021
Amitoy Singh
<<A year on, India Dalit rape victim’s
family waits for justice.
The family of a 19-year-old Dalit girl,
who was gang-raped and murdered, says the hope for justice is fading as
the case drags on.
Hathras, India – The gang rape and
murder of a 19-year-old Dalit girl in a village in the north Indian
state of Uttar Pradesh last September had caused a public outcry and weeks of protests.
But a year on, the family of the victim has told Al Jazeera that their
hopes for justice are fading as the case has dragged on. Of the 104 witnesses
only 15 have deposed in the court so far, said Seema Kushwaha, the
victim’s lawyer. The case made it to global media
headlines after the body of the girl was cremated in Hathras, about
200km (125 miles) from the national capital, New Delhi, in the early hours of
September 30 last year without the family’s consent.
The police were also accused of
initially refusing to register the first information report (FIR or
police compliant) and did little to support the vulnerable family. The family say they
will not immerse the victim’s ashes until the perpetrators are punished.
<We will not perform the last rites before justice is served,> the victim’s
mother, Rama Devi, 50, told Al Jazeera. Immersion of the ashes completes
the Hindu funeral ritual. The slow pace of the legal proceedings
has concerned the family belonging to the Dalit community – the lowest
in India’s Hindu caste hierarchy. <We are poor but we will fight this
till the end. It’s the least we have to do for our child,> the father of
the victim, Om Prakash, 53, told Al Jazeera.
Slow pace of the case
The four accused – Sandeep, Luvkush,
Ravi, and Ramu – are on trial. They are all upper-caste men from the
Thakur community and belong to Boolgarhi, the same village where the
victim’s family lives. Three of the accused are also extended relatives.
The already slow legal process has been hampered by the coronavirus pandemic.The prosecution is yet to conduct its
proceedings – a sign that little has changed despite the unprecedented
national and global outrage after the 2012 Delhi gang rape and murder case.
That case caused countrywide protests and forced the government to enact
stringent rape laws. The case of the Hathras rape victim is
still being heard in the regular district court known for delays. An
astounding 40 million cases are pending in India’s lower courts as of September
2021. The victim’s family lives in fear of retribution as all the
accused belong to the dominant upper-caste Hindus, and they have tried to convince
the villagers, most of whom are upper-caste Hindus, that this case was
an honour killing. Of nearly 250 homes in Boolgarhi
village, only four belong to Dalits, who face social ostracisation. What do you want to do? Get those kids
hanged? said an elder male in the accused’s house located opposite to
the victim’s family. It’s the media that has put them in
jail. Please leave,> he said angrily, refusing to share his name.
‘Home
has become a jail’
The district court has ordered
round-the-clock security for the victim’s family. Entry to and exit from
the victim’s house is monitored by more than 30 personnel from the Central Reserve
Police Force posted there and security cameras installed inside and
outside the house. The victim’s family members have to
seek permission even to buy groceries, while anyone entering the house,
including journalists, has to register themselves.
<We live at home, but home has become a
jail,> said the victim’s elder brother, Satyendra Kumar, 30, who
represents the family in court hearings.
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/2/india-a-year-later-the-rape-case-that-shook-a-nation-forgotten
The Guardian
2 Oct 2021
<<The Week in Patriarchy
Rape and sexual assault
The US criminal justice system is
failing sexual assault survivors. It needs a feminist overhaul
Arwa Mahdawi
A woman in Kansas has had to recount
her rape story to strangers and collect hundreds of signatures to get
the legal system to take her seriously. Could an obscure 19th-century law
change how rape is charged? Here’s a fun fact about consent: once
you say <yes>, you can change your mind! Saying <yes> at the beginning
of a sexual encounter doesn’t mean you give blanket permission for someone
to do whatever the hell they like to you. Consenting to sex with someone
doesn’t mean you automatically consent to being violently choked. I
shouldn’t have to say that, should I? That should be obvious to anyone
with a brain. However, it seems the US legal system, which is supposed to be
at home with complexity, has a problem understanding the fact that
consent isn’t simply a matter of a one-off <yes> or <no>. The latest infuriating
example of this being the case is that of Madison Smith, a former
student at Bethany College in Kansas. Back in 2018, Smith hooked up with a
classmate called Jared Stolzenburg. To begin with, the sex was
consensual. Then, Smith alleges, Stolzenburg started to choke her. <I tried to
initially pull his hands off of my throat, and he squeezed harder every
time,> Smith said in a court hearing reported by the Washington Post. <He would
strangle me for 20 to 30 seconds at a time, and I would begin to lose
consciousness. When he would release his hands from my neck, the only thing I
could do was gasp for air.> She couldn’t, in other words, clearly
announce that she was immediately revoking consent.
Smith reported what happened as a rape.
The county prosecutor, Gregory Benefiel, decided that, actually, it was
an <immature> sexual encounter. Benefiel told Smith’s mother in a
recorded conversation that the case was complex because Smith didn’t
verbally withdraw consent; Smith pointed out that she couldn’t breathe, let alone
speak. Stolzenburg, for his part, has denied raping Smith, and said he
was just trying out a <sexual kink> he’d seen on the internet. <I thought it
would be something to try, and I was stupid to try it,> he told the BBC.
In the end Benefiel did not file a sex charge against Stolzenburg but charged
him with aggravated battery. In 2020 Stolzenburg was sentenced to two
years’ probation and required to pay $793 to a victims’ compensation board.
Unsurprisingly, Smith wasn’t happy with the decision not to file a rape
charge. She wasn’t happy with the fact that the prosecutor was essentially
saying that you can’t be charged with raping someone if you make sure to
shut them up first. What sort of precedent does that set? What sort of
message about consent does that send?
Smith refused to give up. The
traditional legal system had let her down so she turned to a
134-year-old Kansas law that allows citizens to petition for grand juries when they think
prosecutors are neglecting to bring charges. Only six states in the US
have a law like this; it has been used sparingly and this is believed to be the first
instance it has been used in a sex crime charge. The jury can’t decide
whether someone is innocent or guilty; they can just decide whether charges should
be brought. Convening a grand jury isn’t easy: you
need to gather hundreds of signatures in support just to kick the
process off. So Smith had to stand in a hair salon parking lot, tell strangers her
story, and get them to sign a petition. On Wednesday, the grand jury
convened for the first time. The case is being watched closely and could set a
precedent for others to convene grand juries as a way of bringing rape
charges. While it’s not clear what the grand
jury will decide, Smith’s legal battle has drawn attention to the
abysmal way in which the legal system fails sexual assault survivors. In much of the world,
rape is the easiest violent crime to get away with. In the US, only 19%
of reported rapes and sexual assaults lead to arrests; only around 6.5% end
in a conviction.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/02/us-criminal-justice-system-failing-sexual-assault-survivors-feminist-overhaul
The Guardian
2 Oct 2021
Lorenzo Tondo in Naples
<<The mafia killed her mother. Now she
wants to take them on as mayor of Naples.
Alessandra Clemente’s plan to end the
cycle of violence relies on winning over the mothers and wives of the
Camorra mobsters.
On 11 June 1997, a 10-year-old girl
named Alessandra Clemente heard 41 gunshots from an open window at her
home in Naples, as she was waiting for her mother to return for lunch.
When the shooting stopped, she ran to the window and saw her mother,
Silvia, lying in a pool of blood. Alessandra’s little brother stood next
to their mother, wailing. Silvia Clemente was not the assassin’s target,
but, at age thirty nine, she had been killed by a stray bullet. Until that
day, Alessandra had never heard of the organisation that had ended her
mother’s life, and would now begin to shape the rest of hers: the Camorra—the
Napolitan mafia. Twenty-four years later, Alessandra Clemente, now a
34-year-old woman, is running to become the next mayor of Naples. Her
campaign includes other relatives of Mafia victims and the son of a top
Camorra mobster. At each election rally, Clemente recalls the occasion of
her mother’s death.
<I had never heard gunshots before
then, so my first thought was of a car accident,> she said, in a recent
interview. <Only later did I learn that the Camorra had planned to murder a
high-ranking boss.>
That day, seven Mafia assassins took to
the roads of Arenella, a neighbourhood on the Vomero hill, on
motorbikes. A war was raging within the local gangs, and the night before, the group
of hitmen received the order to kill Luigi Cimino, a top mafia boss from
a rival clan. They had received that order 13 times in the last year, and 13
times they failed, as the boss proved an elusive target. They knew, this
time, there could be no mistake. When they saw two of Cimino’s men under
his apartment, they started shooting wildly. Mafia hits are often carried out in
crowded urban areas, with dozens of innocents diving for cover. <When I
looked out the window, I saw that my younger brother, Francesco, was holding
our mother’s hand,> says Ms. Clemente. When the police arrived,
Francesco refused to let go. <I was devastated, but I knew I had to look
after my brother,> Clemente said. <I decided to run for mayor because I
don’t want any more children, like my brother, to live through these
tragedies.> Clemente’s plan to end the cycle of
violence relies on mothers and wives of mobsters. <I grew up with the
idea that someone else was supposed to die in my mother’s place,> she said.
<But over time, I understood that change isn’t born out of hatred, but
through love, and that if I wanted to change things, I would need the help of
mothers of camorristi. These mothers had to become my allies if we
wanted to really achieve success. Mothers and, more generally, women,
within the Camorra, have an almost structured power. They are very, very
influential.’> The rise of women who command positions
within the mafia is an increasingly widespread phenomenon in Italy.
Known as ‘bosses in skirts’, they have replaced their jailed husbands and sons
in mafia hotspots all over the south of Italy. But the real strength of
the Camorra comes from the teenagers. In the suburbs of Naples, crime is seen
as a path to financial success, as well as respect within the community.
Few institutions exist to offer a credible alternative to children in
these neighbourhoods. They are easy targets for mafia recruitment. <‘They are young people who in the
absence of positive role models, find themselves peddling drugs for the
Camorra for 100 euros a day,’> says Clemente, who has served since 2013 as
a local council member focusing on youth policies. ‘<Here we need to
make them and their mothers understand that this easy money is an
illusion. Because, at 23 years old, at best, they will end up in prison
and, at worst, they will be killed.’> As a candidate for Mayor, Clemente is
backed by both moderate left and far left-wing parties. She is not the
favourite, with an estimate of votes ranging between 11% and 22%. At the
moment, the polls give the candidate Gaetano Manfredi, former dean of
the University of Naples Federico II, supported by the Democrat party and the
anti-establishment Five Star movement, a clear advantage.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/02/the-mafia-killed-alessandra-clemente-mother-now-she-wants-to-take-them-on-as-mayor-of-naples
The Guardian
1 Oct 2021
Vikram Dodd Police and crime
correspondent
<<Met officers investigated over
Couzens WhatsApp group are still on duty.
Exclusive: under-fire force places two
police officers on restricted duties, while other forces suspend
officers.
Two Metropolitan police officers
allegedly involved in a chat group that included Wayne Couzens that
swapped alleged misogynistic and racist messages have been left on duty after
being placed under criminal investigation, the Guardian has learned. The
two Met officers are said to have been part of a WhatsApp group involving
constables from three forces that is under investigation after Couzens’s
phone was seized following his arrest for the murder of Sarah Everard
in March. The Met’s decision contrasts with the actions of the other
forces, which decided to suspend their officers – who faced less serious
allegations – removing them from their workplaces while the
investigation continues. Two former police chiefs criticised the
decision, which has emerged as the Met reels from revelations about how
Couzens abused his position to abduct and kill Everard. Sue Fish, a former chief constable of
Nottinghamshire, said: <That beggars belief. It sends the most appalling
message. That clearly demonstrates the Met does not get it … does not get
the seriousness.> The Met said its officers, who are
under investigation, had been placed on restricted duties.
In all, two constables and a former
officer with the Met are under criminal investigation by the Independent
Office for Police Conduct over the message group. Another Met officer is
under investigation for potential disciplinary and gross misconduct
offences, as are an officer with the Norfolk force and one with the Civil Nuclear
constabulary, which Couzens served with until he transferred to the Met
in 2018. Messages on the WhatsApp group
involving police officers included alleged offensive and abusive terms
about women. Messages recovered so far by investigators began in March 2019, two
years before Couzens murdered Everard. Brian Paddick, a former Met
deputy assistant commissioner and now the Liberal Democrats’ home affairs
spokesperson in the House of Lords, said his former force risked
appearing not to take the issues seriously enough. <If I were still in the Met, I would be
looking for every opportunity to reassure women in particular that we
take this very seriously, and that does not appear to be the message the Met is
sending at the moment,> he said. A Norfolk police spokesperson said: <We’re
fully cooperating with the Independent Office for Police Conduct
in the course of their investigation. We can confirm the officer has
been suspended from duty while the allegations are under investigation.>>
>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/oct/01/met-officers-investigated-over-couzens-whatsapp-group-are-still-on-duty
Al Jazeera
1 Oct 2021
By Anu Shukla
<<Spray, alarms, defence classes: UK
women ‘arm up’ after murders.
The shocking killings of Sarah Everard
and Sabina Nessa have prompted a national reckoning on women’s safety in
Britain.
London, United Kingdom – Nadia Mohammad
was busy at work when she heard the news about Sabina Nessa – the
28-year-old teacher who was killed in a south London park while walking to
meet a friend. <I felt shock and disbelief. That could
have been me, it could have been any one of us,> 24-year-old Mohammad, a
dental nurse who lives in the English capital, told Al Jazeera. <It made me realise that I don’t want
to feel defenceless in the face of danger. I want to feel empowered to
fight back. Even if we never know how we might respond in a situation like
that, I just want to train my reflexes so I can defend myself.> Nessa’s
death, on September 17, further heightened fears among British women,
as it came six months after the murder of Sarah Everard. This week, a
court heard that Nessa and the suspect accused of killing her were not known
to one another. Everard’s murderer, who was a serving police officer
when he carried out his crime, also did not know his victim. He was sentenced to
life in prison on Thursday. With public trust in police falling as
concerns over women’s safety mount, some are taking matters into their own hands. <I was planning to restart martial arts
anyway, but what happened to Sabina has pushed me to rejoin now,> said
Mohammad. <I especially like grappling, which is a lot of floor and
defence-related work. I really feel that martial arts training should be
a government-funded thing for people from certain socioeconomic backgrounds, who
can’t afford to pay for private classes. I’m lucky that I can pay for
mine, but not everyone is in this position.> But she is also aware that self-defence
is not a singular solution. <It’s definitely a systemic thing. We
shouldn’t have to feel like we are on the defence all the time. We should be able
to walk and feel safe. But when are we going to ever reach that stage?>
Mohammad said.
<I feel we are in a vicious cycle that
keeps repeating. And this is what needs to be addressed. Words are
meaningless. We need action.> >>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/1/uk
The Guardian
30 Sept 2021
<<The Pacific project
Papua New Guinea
Women in Papua New Guinea are suffering
an epidemic of violence – the government must act
Stephanie McLennan
Last year 15,444 cases of domestic
violence were reported but only 250 people were prosecuted and 100
convicted. Victims deserve better.
Supported by
Judith Nielson Institute
A woman is beaten every 30 seconds in
Papua New Guinea, and more than 1.5 million people experience
gender-based violence in the country each year. On 3 September in Mt Hagen, one
of the country’s largest cities, three men were released from prison
after being accused of murdering a 31-year-old woman, Imelda Tupi Tiamanda.
One of the men was her husband.The magistrate dismissed the charges,
citing a lack of evidence. The decision was made even though police
found the deceased woman’s body wrapped in tarpaulin in the back of her
husband’s vehicle at a police checkpoint, with the other two
co-accused men present, the National reported. When questioned by police,
the husband allegedly confessed to the murder. Between May and June, groups of
men violently attacked at least five women they accused of sorcery. One
of the women was killed.In May, a special parliamentary committee on
gender-based violence convened a three-day inquiry to investigate
measures to prevent violence against women and girls. It heard
gender-based violence had increased due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Ruth
Kissam of the PNG Tribal Foundation says accusations of sorcery may have also
increased. The inquiry found there was lack of support, funding and
coordination from the government to adequately respond to the number of
cases of violence against women and girls Papua New Guinea has each year.
In 2020, 15,444 cases of domestic violence were reported but only 250
people were prosecuted, and fewer than 100 people were convicted. Both
the minister for police, William Gogl Onglo, and the police commissioner,
David Manning, told the inquiry that the police force could not keep
women and children safe. They also said the force did not have enough resources to
ensure thorough investigations took place.
The lack of funding and services has
meant police and the government rely heavily on the work of civil
society, churches and volunteer human rights defenders to fill a growing gap in
services. Human Rights Watch has raised this issue for many years.
The parliamentary inquiry issued a
report in August and made 71 recommendations to the parliament. The
inquiry and its report are a positive and long overdue step in the right
direction. Government funding is urgently needed along with a concrete
plan to carry out the recommendations to ensure that women and girls in Papua
New Guinea can live in safety. The recommendations include providing
adequate resources to carry out the sorcery accusation-related violence
national action plan, funding additional counselling services and
providing adequate resources to the country’s health department to provide family
planning and reproductive health services. The inquiry’s report also
recommends fixing the justice system to ensure better police responses and
investigation of gender-based violence cases, more timely prosecutions,
and survivor-centred court processes. After the committee issued its report,
it met with development partners such as representatives from the UN,
UK, New Zealand, US, Australia and the European Union to discuss partnerships
to end violence against women and girls. Papua New Guinea’s prime
minister, James Marape said at the UN general assembly on 25 September that
his government was working towards implementing the committee’s
recommendations. How the government is planning to do so is still unknown.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2021/oct/01/women-in-papua-new-guinea-are-suffering-an-epidemic-of-violence-the-government-must-act
|
