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When one hurts or kills a women
one hurts or kills hummanity and is an antrocitie.
Gino d'Artali
and: My mother (1931-1997) always said to me <Mi
figlio, non esistono notizie <vecchie> perche puoi imparare qualcosa da
qualsiasi notizia.> Translated: <My son, there is no such thing as so
called 'old' news because you can learn something from any news.>
Gianna d'Artali
WELCOME TO PART 7 OF GLOBAL ATROCITIES AGAINST
WOMEN
BUT THIS TIME IT WILL LOOK DIFFERENT BECAUSE AS YOU
MAY KNOW THE TALIBAN SWEPT OVER AFGHANISTAN
AND 'ESTABLISCHED A GOVERNMENT BASED ON
THE SHARIA (ISLAM LAW AS THE TALIBAN INTERPRETE
IT'.)
SO I DECIDED TO CREATE TWO SERIALS, THE ONE YOU
ARE ON NOW (INTERNATIONAL WOMAN'S DAY PART 7 AND:
AFGHANISTANS WOMEN'S RESISTENCE
A few days in August 'till 30 Sept and Sept 1 2021 and
below more days in august
AGAIN YOU ARE HERE: International Women's Day 2021 i.e. Atrocities
against women Part 7
For your
convencience please read me first
Opinion by Gino d'Artali
Indept investigative journalist.
8 Sept 2021
I am almost 24 hours a day reading international articles and
phrases about global athrocities against woman. For example:
<<The report cited testimony from a Syrian woman, Alaa, who was
arrested along with her 25-year-old daughter at a border crossing as
they came back from Lebanon. The two were detained for five days.
<They removed my daughter’s clothes. They handcuffed her and hung
her on the wall. They beat her. She was totally naked. One put his penis
inside her mouth,> the report quoted Alaa as saying.>>
The report is titled <You’re going to your death> by Amnesty
International. A 4-liner in an article from Al Jazeera on 7 Sept 2021.
Now, don't misunderstand me because Al Jazeera is one of the few
television networks based in Qatar. Originally started as an Arabic news
and current affairs channel, Al Jazeera has since grown into a
multi-channel network, internet and specialist TV channels in multiple
languages and multiple regions of the world and especialy also pays a
lot of attention to atrocities against women so the 4-liner in the
article may be short but still, I count them to a co-combatant against
atrocities women. In any case, read the article here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/7/returning-syrian-refugees-face-torture-rape-says-amnesty
Also this: since in Afghanistan the taliban on August 15 2021
took over the power from the USA and without any armed defence I took it
upon me to create a new special as past of Cryfreedom.net titled
Afghanistans Women Resistence. Read more here:
Also, since the taliban took over the international media is
almost completely centered around the taliban's politics if one call it
that, and almost not anymore with articles about global atrocities
against women. Shame on them!
16 Sept 2021
By and by the international media is no longer centered only what
is happening in Afghanistan but re-focused again also about atrocities
against women. Keep it both up I'd say!
Rukhshana Media
15 Sept 2021
<<One month after the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban.
Women are still at home. On the twenty-fourth day of Assad this
year, Afghanistan underwent a transformation. The government of the
country led by Mohammad Ashraf Ghani fell to the Taliban terrorist
group.
The arrival of the Taliban in Kabul and the return of the group
to power coincided with the escape of the President of Afghanistan.
Someone who has said many times, <He beheads, but not the trench.> Now
he has acted contrary to what he told the people, leaving the country's
population of 36 million alone in fear of the Taliban's return.
This month, Afghanistan has been in the spotlight of foreign
media and journalists. The issue of Afghanistan is still at the
forefront of the world's media coverage. The majority of the people of
this country believe that rapid and shocking developments have taken
place in Afghanistan within a month and they are surprised by the return
of the Taliban to power. Among all these events, what is very naked is
the sudden change in the living conditions of Afghan women. The lives of
women in this country have changed unimaginably. Half of Afghanistan's
population now has to stay at home. The majority of women left all their
offices and workplaces and took refuge in their homes just about an hour
before the advent of Saturday, August 15th. With the exception of some
female employees, other female employees of Afghan government
departments have not been allowed to work in accordance with the Islamic
Sharia law imposed by the Taliban in the Ministries of Public Health and
Education.
Women who also worked in private offices,
Women who also worked in private offices, with the exception of a
number of female journalists, are still housewifes.
Lida (a pseudonym), a girl who until a month ago was the
financial manager of a private construction company, is now, in her own
words, <in the corner of the room.> A girl who no longer laughs out
loud, as her mother says. She, who has been protesting for three days in
a row in Kabul, says life has no meaning for her. Because they have
spoken face to face with the Taliban and they do not smell anything of a
life of democracy and a participatory society.>>
Read more here:
https://rukhshana.com/one-month-after-taliban-takeover-women-have-retreated-indoors
Al Jazeera
From: The Stream
August 5 2021
<<What should Pakistan do to end violence against women?
Shocked by the recent gruesome murder of a prominent woman in
Pakistan, activists are pressing authorities to address rising cases of
gender-based violence within the country. Noor Mukadam, a 27-year-old
daughter of a former diplomat, was tortured and beheaded in late July by
an acquaintance for allegedly rejecting his advances. Her death has
reignited calls for reform in Pakistan, a conservative Muslim country
where courts and laws have been accused of favouring perpetrators.
Pakistan has grappled with misogyny for decades. But coronavirus-related
lockdowns are exacerbating the problems women face and have resulted in
a huge spike in domestic violence incidents. Reported cases of slapping,
pushing, kicking and other incidents jumped up to 40 percent in some
parts of the country, according to the Human Rights Commission of
Pakistan (HRCP).
Pakistan also continues to rank near the bottom of global gender
indices when it comes to educational, political and economic
opportunities for women. Some activists cite growing religious extremism
as one reason why the crisis is getting worse.
However, government leaders often downplay the scope of the
problem. In an interview late last month, Prime Minister Imran Khan
said:
<“You look at the situation in Pakistan even now, you look at the
rape cases here, compare it to Western countries, they are minuscule
compared to there. Yes, we have our issues, we have certain cultural
problems, every nation has that. But that comes with cultural evolution,
with education. But as far a women’s dignity goes, respect, I can say
after going all over the world, this society gives more respect and
dignity to women.> >>
Note from Gino d'Artali:
'Yeah right. Read the full article here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/the-streamept
SS/2021/8/5/what-should-pakistan-do-to-end-violence-against-women
Al Jazeera
30 Sept 2021
<<Sarah Everard: UK police officer gets life term for rape,
murder.
Wayne Couzens abducted Sarah Everard on March 3 while she was
walking home from a friend’s house in south London.
A British court has handed the police officer who kidnapped,
raped and murdered Sarah Everard a whole life sentence without parole.
Wayne Couzens, 48, abducted Everard on March 3 while she was
walking home from a friend’s house in south London. He had pleaded
guilty to murder, rape and kidnap.
Thursday’s sentencing at London’s Central Criminal Court means
Couzens, who was part of the Metropolitan Police (MET) service’s elite
diplomatic protection unit at the time of Everard’s killing, will never
be eligible for release from prison. Reading the sentence, Justice
Adrian Fulford described the circumstances of the murder as <grotesque>
and said Couzens had demonstrated <no evidence of genuine contrition>.
He said the seriousness of the case was so <exceptionally high> that it
warranted a whole life order, the most severe punishment available in
the UK.
Fulford said Couzens, who was present in court on Thursday, had
gone <hunting a lone female to kidnap and rape> on the evening of
Everard’s abduction having plotted his crime in <unspeakably> grim
detail beforehand.
<The defendant had planned well in advance … what was to occur
and when he encountered Sarah Everard all that was missing up to that
point was his victim,> he added.
‘Her death leaves a yawning chasm’
On Wednesday, at the outset of Couzens’s two-day sentencing
hearing, the court heard how he had tricked 33-year-old Everard into his
car under the pretext of a false arrest. He accused her of breaking
COVID-19 lockdown rules, then handcuffed and arrested her before driving
her far outside of London. Couzens later raped and killed her. He then
burned Everard’s body.
Everard’s remains were found in woodland in Ashford, Kent, about
60 miles (nearly 100km) southeast of London, a week after she went
missing.
Members of Everard’s family attended the court sessions.
On Wednesday, they spoke of the impact of her death.
<No punishment that you receive will ever compare to the pain and
torture that you have inflicted on us,> her father, Jeremy, told the
court.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/30/uk-police-officer-given-life-jail-term-for-kidnap-rape-murder
Al Jazeera
29 Sept 2021
<<UK officer faked COVID arrest before killing Sarah Everard:
court.
Jailed police officer Wayne Couzens, who has admitted guilt, is
expected to be sentenced on Thursday.
A serving British police officer falsely accused Sarah Everard of
breaking COVID-19 lockdown rules, then handcuffed and arrested her
before kidnapping and murdering the 33-year-old, a court has heard.
Wayne Couzens, 48, abducted Everard on March 3 while she was walking
home from a friend’s house in south London. He has admitted to her
kidnapping, raping and murdering her and is in custody in the United
Kingdom’s top security Belmarsh jail.
At the beginning of a two-day sentencing hearing on Wednesday at
London’s Central Criminal Court, prosecutor Tom Little said Couzens
targeted Everard on the evening of her disappearance. Couzens, who was
part of the London Metropolitan Police’s (MET) elite diplomatic
protection unit at the time, kidnapped her in a <false arrest> by
<handcuffing her and showing his warrant card>, Little said. Couzens
then put her into a rental car he had hired <to kidnap and rape a lone
woman>, he added.
A couple in a passing car witnessed the kidnapping but mistook it
for an arrest by an undercover officer, Little said.
Everard was the victim of <deception, kidnap, rape, strangulation
and fire>, Little said. Couzen burned Everard’s body after killing her.
‘Sickened, angered, devastated
Everard’s body was found in woodland in Ashford, Kent, about 60
miles (97 kilometres) southeast of London, a week after she went
missing.
Her case gripped the UK, triggering a national conversation about
women’s safety on the streets.
A former boyfriend had given evidence that Everard was <savvy and
streetwise> and would not have entered a car with a stranger except <by
force or manipulation>, Little said.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/29/sarah-everard-murdered-after-false-arrest-uk-court-hears
Al Jazeera
29 Sept 2021
<<Romdhane named Tunisia’s first female PM by President Saied.
President Kais Saied appoints Najla Bouden Romdhane as the new
prime minister, nearly two months after his power grab.
Tunisian President Kais Saied has named Najla Bouden Romdhane, a
little-known university engineer who worked with the World Bank, as the
country’s first female prime minister, nearly two months after he seized
most powers in a move his foes call a coup.
Romdhane will take office at a time of national crisis, with the
democratic gains won in a 2011 revolution in doubt and as a major threat
looms over public finances.
Saied dismissed the previous prime minister, suspended Parliament
and assumed wide executive powers in July, and has been under growing
domestic and international pressure to form a new government.Last week
he brushed aside much of the constitution to say he could rule largely
by decree.
He named Romdhane under provisions he announced last week and has
asked her to form a new government quickly, the presidency said on
social media. Saied’s office published a video of him meeting Romdhane
in his office and charging her with presenting a cabinet <in the coming
hours or days>.
He repeatedly emphasised the <historic> nomination of a woman,
calling it <an honour for Tunisia and a homage to Tunisian women>.
Saied said the new government’s main mission would be to <put an
end to the corruption and chaos that have spread throughout many state
institutions>. The new government should respond to the demands and
dignity of Tunisians in all fields, including health, transport and
education, he added.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/29/tunisia-president-picks-romdhane-new-prime-minister
The Guardian
29 Sept 2021
Opinion
Race
The ‘Missing White Woman Syndrome’ still plagues America
Derecka Purnell
<<When the late Gwen Ifill used the phrase <Missing White Woman
Syndrome> at a 2004 journalism conference, she was responding to news
anchor Suzanne Malveaux’s concern that US media outlets had failed to
cover international genocides early on, including Rwanda and Kosovo.
Malvaeux told the diverse crowd: <In 1994, during Rwanda, we were
looking at Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding.> The two figure skaters had
received more coverage than a million genocide victims and survivors.
Ifill playfully interrupted her, mocking newsroom executives: <If it’s a
missing white woman, you’re going to cover that, every day.> The room
welcomed her interjection with resounding applause.
But rather than being celebrated as part of Malveaux’s criticism
of US-centric media, <Missing White Woman Syndrome> has found a life of
its own. Commentators widely use it now to describe the disparity in
media coverage that missing young, conventionally attractive white women
receive over missing Black and brown people. This disparity is real.
Black people constitute 13% of the US population and 31% of missing
persons; 54% of missing persons are white, though they make up 76% of
the population. A 2013 study found that news outlets covered missing
white women significantly more often, and more intensely, than everyone
else. As Charles Blow recently penned: <It is not that these white women
should matter less, but rather that all missing people should matter
equally. Race should not determine how newsroom leaders assign coverage,
especially because those decisions often lead to disproportionate
allocation of government resources, as investigators try to solve the
highest-profile cases.> Advocates and families of color express that the
disparate media coverage signals that their loved ones’ lives don’t
matter as much as the lives of white women, which they believe then
discourages police from pouring resources to pursue the cases.
Disparity and visibility are such fickle things. We can safely
assume that the exorbitant alarms around particular kinds of white women
who go missing and the silence around missing Black and Indigenous women
presents racial, gender, and class equity issues. But what is missing
from the popular disparity discourse surrounding <Missing White Woman
Syndrome> is that cops and cover stories were never meant to rescue our
loved ones, and those of us who make this demand might turn up empty.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/29/the-missing-white-woman-syndrome-still-plagues-america
The Guardian
29 Sept 2021
Tayo Bero
<<If society valued Black women and girls, convicting R Kelly
wouldn’t take so long. For decades, Kelly hid his predatory behavior in
plain sight – and people did nothing. After a six-week trial, R&B
megastar R Kelly has been convicted of nine counts of racketeering and
sex trafficking and now faces decades in jail. Over the course of the
trial, several of Kelly’s victims recounted harrowing testimony of the
abuse they suffered at the singer’s hands, starting when many of them
were just teenagers.
Although a guilty verdict is the best possible outcome in this
horrific situation, I can’t help but think about all the other adults
who failed these Black girls along the way, and how long it took the
justice system to deliver this reckoning. For over two decades, serious
allegations of sexual abuse and inappropriate contact with minors have
followed the Grammy award-winning singer, whose real name is Robert
Sylvester Kelly. Why did no one do anything about it? The answer is
simple and twofold: first, Kelly was a superstar; second, society simply
doesn’t value Black girls’ lives.
When you look closely at the singer’s history, you’ll find a
network of enablers who helped him operate without punishment, and
secured the silence of his victims. All of those people played a role in
leaving those girls at the mercy of a violent, predatory man who was
known as early as 2000 – 21 years ago – to have <had a problem> with
young girls.
From the former tour manager who admitted to paying the bribe
that allowed Kelly to marry the late singer Aaliyah when she was just 15
years old and he was 27, to the assistants who <arranged flights, food
and bathroom breaks for his traveling entourage of young women>, there
were countless adults who either looked the other way, or willfully
aided Kelly’s behavior, all because society sees Black girls as
worthless.
Then there’s the adoring public, who for years refused to accept
that the man who provided the soundtrack to some of our most treasured
memories, was in fact a monster. For decades, Kelly hid his predatory
behavior in plain sight. He referred to himself as the <Pied Piper of
R&B> – a creepily obvious reference to the old German tale of a
mysterious man who lured children away from their homes using music. He
embedded his desires in hypersexualized song lyrics and performances –
including naming an album Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number. In the 2019
bombshell Lifetime documentary Surviving R Kelly, former Chicago
residents recalled seeing Kelly trawling a local high school, hunting
for young girls. Despite all of this, he was able to amass millions of
dollars, produce chart-topping hits and become one of the most
well-known and revered figures in R&B history.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/29/r-kelly-convicting-black-women-girls
The Guardian
28 Sept 2021
<<Anita Hill on sexual harassment and survival: ‘You have to
think: what is my life for?’
Before Christine Blasey Ford and Monica Lewinsky, there was Anita
Hill, shamed for exposing the actions of a powerful man. She explains
how she withstood the tumult
by Nesrine Malik
<<Anita Hill sits so still that, when she is not speaking, I
worry that the screen through which we are talking may have frozen. Yet
despite her lawyerly, academic poise, she exudes warmth: you would feel
safe confiding in her. And that is what people have been doing for the
past 30 years – telling her of their own experiences with sexual
harassment and assault. <I was a symbol of so many people’s
experiences,> she says.
In the pantheon of women shamed for exposing the actions of
high-profile men – before Christine Blasey Ford in 2018 and Monica
Lewinsky in 1998 – there was Anita Hill. In 1991, the US president,
George HW Bush, nominated Clarence Thomas to the supreme court. Senate
hearings for his confirmation were completed without incident, until an
interview of Hill by the FBI was leaked to the press. In it, Hill
accused Thomas of sexual harassment while he was her supervisor in two
separate jobs, at the Department of Education and the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission. Among other claims, Hill said that Thomas
discussed women having sex with animals, and pornographic films
depicting group sex or rape scenes, and described his own sexual prowess
and anatomy. According to Hill, Thomas’s behaviour forced her to resign
from her job.
The Senate hearings reopened, and Hill repeated her claims in a
series of televised sessions. Not only was she not believed, her
character and motivation were impugned by members of the all-white,
all-male Senate committee. The senator Orrin Hatch called her
allegations “contrived” and her motivations suspect as she was working
with <slick lawyers> and interest groups bent on destroying Thomas’s
chances to join the court.
Thomas was confirmed by a slim margin of 52-48. Since then people
have been contacting Hill to tell her what they went through – and she
has chosen to embrace the role.
<I went back to a lot of turmoil – threats to my job and threats
to my life,> says Hill, 65, who since 1999 has been a professor of
social policy, law and women’s studies at Brandeis University in
Massachusetts. “But what I also got was people reaching out to me. I
mean literally thousands of people, and this was before email. I don’t
know what it would have been had there been email or social media. It
occurred to me that I had a duty.” She heard from female victims of
sexual harassment, incest survivors, domestic violence victims and,
increasingly over the years, men.
In her new book, Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender
Violence, Hill expands on all the reasons why gender inequality and
sexual violence exist, why there are still so many of these stories. She
concludes that our legal infrastructures and social hierarchies do not
prioritise these issues, making it easier to assume people are lying or
exaggerating about sexual harassment and assault than to believe they
are telling the truth.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/sep/28/anita-hill-on-sexual-harassment-and-survival-you-have-to-think-what-is-my-life-for
The Guardian
Global development is supported by
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Peter Beaumont
Tue 28 Sep 2021
<<‘Humbled and heartbroken’: WHO finds its Ebola staff abused
women and girls.
Inquiry commissioned by WHO details sexual abuse, including rape
allegations, during DRC outbreak.
The World Health Organization has described itself as
<heartbroken> after an independent inquiry it commissioned said scores
of women and girls were sexually abused by aid workers during the
devastating 2018-2020 Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of
Congo.
The findings were described as <harrowing reading> by the WHO’s
director general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, while its regional
director for Africa, Matshidiso Moeti, said she was <humbled, horrified
and heartbroken>. The commission, which examined about 80 cases of women
and girls aged 13 to 43, identified 21 employees working for the UN
global health body among perpetrators of serious abuses, including a
number of rape allegations. According to the report, the abuse led to 29
pregnancies, with some of the perpetrators insisting the women have
abortions. The report added that the WHO perpetrators included local and
international staff. Western diplomatic sources said four people had
been dismissed and two placed on administrative leave, based on a
closed-door briefing involving WHO that was provided to diplomatic
officials in Geneva on Tuesday.
The report detailed a far-reaching breakdown of responsibilities
for protecting against sexual exploitation and abuse in a health
emergency in an insecure region, largely dominated by male responders.
The investigators found that most victims were <highly
vulnerable>, often younger women in precarious economic situations, with
some of the abusers holding responsibilities for preventing sexual
exploitation and abuse.
<I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what was done to you by people who were
employed by WHO to serve and protect you,> Tedros said. <I’m sorry for
the ongoing suffering that these events must cause. I’m sorry that you
have had to relive them in talking to the commission about your
experiences. Thank you for your courage in doing so.>
The panel released its findings on Tuesday, months after media
reports that senior WHO management had been informed of multiple abuse
claims in 2019 but failed to stop the harassment, and even promoted one
of the managers involved.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/sep/28/humbled-and-heartbroken-who-finds-its-ebola-staff-abused-women-and-girls
Al Jazeera
27 Sept 2021
<<R&B singer R Kelly convicted in sex trafficking trial.
R Kelly faces the possibility of decades in prison for crimes
including violating an anti-sex trafficking US law.
R&B superstar R Kelly has been convicted in a sex trafficking
trial in the United States after decades of avoiding criminal
responsibility for numerous allegations of misconduct with young women
and children. A jury of seven men and five women on Monday found Kelly,
54, guilty of all nine counts, including racketeering, on their second
day of deliberations.
Kelly wore a face mask below black-rimmed glasses and remained
motionless with eyes downcast, as the verdict was read in federal court
in Brooklyn.
Prosecutors alleged that the entourage of managers and aides who
helped Kelly meet girls – and keep them obedient and quiet – amounted to
a criminal enterprise. Two people have been charged with Kelly in a
separate federal case pending in Chicago.
He faces the possibility of decades in prison for crimes,
including violating the Mann Act, an anti-sex trafficking law that
prohibits taking anyone across state lines <<for any immoral purpose>.
Sentencing is scheduled for May 4.
One of Kelly’s lawyers, Deveraux Cannick, said he was
disappointed and hoped to appeal. <I think I’m even more disappointed
the government brought the case in the first place, given all the
inconsistencies,> Cannick said.
Several accusers testified in lurid detail during the trial,
alleging that Kelly subjected them to perverse and sadistic whims when
they were underage. For
years, the public and news media seemed to be more amused than horrified
by allegations of inappropriate relationships with minors, starting with
Kelly’s illegal marriage to the R&B phenom Aaliyah in 1994 when she was
just 15. His records and concert tickets kept selling. Other artists
continued to record his songs, even after he was arrested in 2002 and
accused of making a recording of himself sexually abusing and urinating
on a 14-year-old girl.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/27/rb-singer-r-kelly-convicted-in-sex-trafficking-trial
The Guardian
27 Sept 2021
Phil Maynard and Archie Bland
<<The Pegasus project: hacked in London.
The tragic story of Alaa Al-Siddiq has further exposed the extent
of how powerful Pegasus spyware has been used against human rights
activists even once they have fled their home country. Presented by
Michael Safi with Stephanie Kirchgaessner; sound design by Axel Kacoutié;
executive producers Phil Maynard and Archie Bland Back in July the
Guardian, along with a number of international partners, revealed how a
powerful spyware tool called Pegasus created by an Israeli company and
sold to governments around the world was being used against journalists,
human rights workers and politicians. We had a leak – a database of
50,000 phone numbers – giving clues as to who some of those victims
could be. We spent months trying to match the leaked phone numbers to
real people and one of those matches came in the last weeks of the
investigation: Alaa Al-Siddiq, a dissident from the United Arab
Emirates, who had asylum in London. In June, just before the
investigation was published, she died in a car accident. There was
nothing suspicious about her death but now new evidence has emerged
about an intense campaign to surveil Al-Siddiq, who served as executive
director of ALQST, a non-profit organisation advocating for human rights
in the UAE and wider region.
The Guardian’s Stephanie Kirchgaessner tells Michael Safi that
the case exemplifies a worrying trend for activists such as Al-Siddiq,
who escaped the UAE to live in the relative safety of the UK, but was
never out of the reach of Pegasus spyware. One of Al-Siddiq’s friends
describes the months leading up to her death as she felt increasingly
concerned about the surveillance she knew she was under.
In 2020, shortly after she learned she had been hacked, Al-Siddiq
gave an interview, using a pseudonym, to film-maker Laura Poitras and
researchers at Forensic Architecture, a London-based research group that
has studied NSO Group and how digital infections of civil society often
target networks of collaborators.
Shourideh Molavi, a researcher at Forensic Architecture describes
the powerful surveillance tools as a form of <digital violence> that
should increasingly be viewed alongside other examples of state
violence.
Last week the investigative website Mediapart reported that
traces of Pegasus spyware were found on the mobile phones of at least
five current French cabinet ministers, citing multiple anonymous sources
and a confidential intelligence dossier.> >>
View and listen to the video here:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2021/sep/27/the-pegasus-project-hacked-in-london-podcast
Al Jazeera
By Emily Fishbein and Nu Nu Lusan
27 Sep 2021
<<In western Myanmar, conflict creates new dangers for women.
Sagaing region is a hotbed of resistance to military rule and
women are forced to flee every time soldiers appear.
Khine Thu fled her home in Myanmar’s northwestern Sagaing region
for the first time in June, running into the jungle as soldiers stormed
her village. She has lost count of how many times she has fled since,
but thinks it may now be about 15.
<Whenever we hear soldiers coming, we run,> she said. <We escape
into the forest, and we come back to the village when the soldiers are
gone.>
As armed resistance to the February 1 military coup increases,
the military rulers have responded with violent crackdowns on entire
villages, mirroring a <four-cuts> strategy which it has honed for more
than 60 years in the country’s restive border areas. Since April, the
Sagaing region has been a stronghold of resistance, and also a hotspot
for deadly military incursions. A total of 109 people have been killed
in the region since July, according to a report Myanmar’s National Unity
Government (NUG) submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Council on
September 19.
Among the victims are 73 people from Depayin and Kani townships,
where mass killings were documented by human rights groups and local
media in July. Those killed, including fighters and civilians, were all
men, but as security forces maintain a presence in the area’s villages,
women are living with the consequences of conflict on a daily basis.
This month, the military blocked the internet in 10 townships in the
Sagaing region, including Kani, adding to fears the military could
intensify its attacks.
The violence started in Khine Thu’s village of Satpyarkyin in
Depayin township on June 14, when soldiers opened fire and killed one
person the day after two daughters of a military-appointed administrator
were found dead in a nearby village.
Soldiers returned on July 2; the ensuing clashes left at least 32
local people dead amid indiscriminate shelling and small arms fire,
according to the NUG’s report, while the media outlet Myanmar Now
reported that 10,000 people from eleven villages fled their homes.
The People’s Defence Force (PDF) in Depayin said on its Facebook
page that 26 of its members were killed in the incident and that the
military had fired heavy weapons onto fleeing villagers, while the
state-run Global New Light of Myanmar reported that “armed terrorists”
had “ambushed” security forces, killing one soldier and injuring six
before retreating after security forces retaliated. Khine Thu, who, like
the other women Al Jazeera spoke to, asked to use a pseudonym for fear
of reprisals, said soldiers have since been in and out and that she and
other villagers were always ready to run. Even when soldiers are gone,
the village remains quiet, and shops and markets have closed. Hiding in
the forest for days or weeks at a time, the villagers find it difficult
to meet their basic needs, she said.
<We couldn’t get drinking water in some places,> she explained.
<Some days, we had only one meal, and sometimes, only rice with salt and
oil or fish paste. I feel really depressed, and sometimes I don’t even
want to live any more.>
Aye Chan, another local resident, said locals lacked access to
medicine and were relying on plants and herbs to treat their ailments.
She and Khine Thu have stopped their work as hired farmhands
because of the danger. <We cannot live in peace. We cannot work. We are
just depending on other people’s donations and running around seeking
safety whenever [soldiers] come,> said Aye Chan. <The presence of
soldiers in our village affects us physically and mentally. We cannot
eat or sleep well.>
Women at risk
The military has used force and widespread arrests to crack down
on mass protests and a civil disobedience movement, which began days
after it seized power from the elected government led by Aung San Suu
Kyi. Since then, security forces have killed more than 1,100 people and
arrested more than 8,200, according to the rights group Assistance
Association for Political Prisoners (Burma) or the AAPP, which has been
tracking the military’s abuses.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/27/in-western-myanmar-conflict-creates-new-dangers-for-women
Al Jazeera
26 Sept 2021
Catherine Rottenberg
Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of
Nottingham
<<Just six months after Sarah Everard was kidnapped, raped and
murdered in the UK by an off-duty police officer, Gabriella Petito’s
disappearance while travelling with her fiancé in the US and her
now-confirmed death made international headlines. The Everard and Petito
stories, though very different, have compounded the sense that
gender-based violence threatens women everywhere. Then, a week or so
after the Petito case gained media visibility, yet another woman’s
violent death was reported in the UK, that of Sabina Nessa, a
28-year-old teacher who was walking to a nearby pub from her home in
South London.
The Nessa case has intensified local fear that women are unsafe
on the streets of London. But this fear is a global one. It is nothing
less than a reaction to the other pandemic – gender-based violence –
that plagues our society, and that COVID-19 has merely exacerbated.
Visibility for some
Between March 2021 and September 2021, many women have gone
missing or been murdered around the world. Yet we do not even know the
names or the circumstances of most of them – even those in the UK or the
US – because their stories have not made national or international
headlines.
So why do some stories make the news while others do not?
Feminist media scholars have long pointed out that the race, class, and
age of victims of gender-related violence play a crucial role in
determining whether stories become newsworthy as well as how they are
framed; namely, whether the victims are portrayed as <innocent> or,
conversely, shamed and blamed.
The families of victims whose stories have gone unheeded know
this only too well. In a recent Washington Post article, they decried
the silence surrounding the deaths of their loved ones. They insist that
Gabriella Petito’s case has received such widespread international media
attention precisely because she was white, middle-class and photogenic.
Whereas their loved ones’ disappearances – women of colour, poor women,
trans women – have gone publicly unremarked, at best.
Grievable lives
This differential media coverage, however, merely reflects a
wider societal truth: Some people’s lives are deemed more grievable and,
consequently, their deaths generate a public outpouring of sorrow. Other
lives, as feminist philosopher Judith Butler has taught us, are
considered less worthy.
We live, she says, in a society in which the distribution of
liveable lives is profoundly unequal, and only those who are recognised
as <mattering> become grievable in the wider social and public sense.
This also helps explain the power of the hashtag #SayHerName,
which began as part of a campaign to raise awareness of the number of
Black women and girls who have been killed by law enforcement officers
in the US. It is now being used in relation to Sabina Nessa’s murder.
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/9/26/sabina-nessas-murder-and-the-grivability-of-womens-lives
The Guardian
26 Sept 2021
Opinion
Sonia Sodha
Feminism
<<‘White feminists’ are under attack from other women. There can
only be one winner – men.
Undermining female solidarity serves only to strengthen the grip
of the patriarchy.
Blaming women for the ills of the world might appear an odd
feminist call to action. But an idea gaining traction is that the “white
feminism” dominant in the United States and the UK is not only a driving
force of societal racism, but responsible for a host of other bad
things, from the war on terror to the hypersexualisation of women in
popular culture, to the dreadful abuses of power we see in international
aid. It’s part of a growing tendency on the left to look for scapegoats
at the cost of building the solidarity needed for social change.
This is not to downplay the extent of racial inequalities in the
UK, the way they affect women of colour and the structural racism that
lies behind them. But it’s quite a jump to move from the observation
that women are no more immune to racism than men to holding the feminist
movement accountable for the plight of women of colour around the world.
A new book, Against White Feminism, by Rafia Zakaria, makes precisely
this case. To stack up the argument, she stereotypes feminism beyond
recognition as a shallow, consumerist and exclusionary movement
dominated by selfish white women who care little about scrutinising the
male violence perpetrated by white men.
Feminism is a broad movement: look for it and you’ll find
superficial strands. But to reduce feminism to this alone is to ignore
the British tradition of radical grassroots feminism that has brought
women of all colours and classes together in the fight against
patriarchal male violence.
In one of the best-known examples, Justice for Women and Southall
Black Sisters worked together from the early 1990s to get long prison
sentences overturned for women driven to kill their abusive partners
following the most dreadful prolonged abuse.
In the case of Kiranjit Ahluwalia, Southall Black Sisters led
with Justice for Women standing alongside. <It brought women – black and
white, young and old, professionals and survivors – together in a
wonderful moment of unity to highlight injustice and change things for
the better,> says Pragna Patel, a founding member of Southall Black
Sisters. <There were differences, but it was only through solidarity
with each other that we could create change. The black feminist
tradition has challenged feminism’s blind spots around race and class
not in the interests of separatism, but to strengthen our collective
movement.> The women’s refuge movement provides similar examples.
Attacks on white feminism are the product of a broader divide in
the anti-racist movement about the best route to social change. Is it by
making well-intentioned people who are unwittingly complicit in
replicating inequalities feel guilt and shame for their <white
privilege>? Or by inviting them to feel a shared sense of injustice in a
way that emphasises common belonging to a movement, without glossing
over difference? Feminists such as Zakaria fall into the former camp.
But guilt and shame can make solidarity harder, not easier, to build.
The mainstream anti-racist left has a bad track record of hanging
out to dry women of colour challenging misogyny within their
communities, for fear of upsetting cultural sensitivities. Examples
abound: the Newsnight investigation that revealed several Muslim female
councillors who have experienced pressure not to stand from Asian Labour
party members, which prompted the Muslim Women’s Network to call for an
inquiry into systemic misogyny in the party that was met with
overwhelming silence; the smears the MP Naz Shah has faced from local
Asian men in her party; the negative response to the anti-FGM activist
Nimco Ali from her local Labour party. The white privilege discourse
makes this more not less likely, because it makes people more scared of
being culturally insensitive.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/26/white-feminists-are-under-attack-from-other-women-here-can-only-be-one-winner--men
The Guardian
26 Sept 2021
Josh Halliday
<<Man arrested over killing of London schoolteacher Sabina Nessa.
Police say they are questioning 36-year-old on suspicion of
murder in ‘significant development’.
Detectives are questioning a 36-year-old man on suspicion of the
murder of the London schoolteacher Sabina Nessa, in what they called a
<significant development> in the case. The man was arrested at 3am on
Sunday at an address in East Sussex and was taken into police custody.
He is the third man arrested over the killing. DCI Neil John, of the
Metropolitan police’s specialist crime command, said: <Sabina’s family
have been informed of this significant development and they continue to
be supported by specialist officers.>
Nessa, 28, is suspected to have been killed as she made what
should have been a five-minute journey on foot to a pub from her home at
about 8.30pm on Friday last week. She was found dead the following day
in Cater Park in Kidbrooke, south-east London, where on Friday about 500
mourners held a candlelit vigil in her memory. The killing has reignited
concerns about the level of danger women face in Britain.
Two men previously arrested by homicide detectives – a
38-year-old man and a man in his 40s – were released under
investigation.
Detectives have until the early hours of Thursday morning to
question the latest suspect, before deciding whether to charge him or
release him under investigation.
The arrest on Sunday came 48 hours after police appealed for help
to trace a man captured on CCTV images taken near where Nessa was found
dead. Scotland Yard would not confirm if the suspect was the man in the
footage, but it is understood investigators are no longer seeking him.
The man in the CCTV images was filmed on the night of the killing
carrying what is thought to be a reflective red item. Detectives have
said the man may have been trying to conceal the item up his sleeve but
that police retained an open mind as to whether it was used in the
killing.
A 12-second video released by the Met shows the balding man
wearing a black hooded coat and grey jeans looking over his shoulder and
pulling at his hood as he walks down a footpath. Police said they were
content that neither of the two men previously arrested featured in the
CCTV footage.
Nessa’s sister, Jebina Yasmin Islam, issued a statement on Friday
evening before a rally at the East London Mosque – one of many vigils
that took place across the country.
<There are no words to describe how we are feeling as a family at
the moment,” she said. “We did not expect that something like [this]
would ever happen to us. I urge everyone to walk on busy streets when
walking home from work, school or a friend’s homes. Please keep safe.>
>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/sep/26/man-arrested-over-killing-of-teacher-sabina-nessa
Al Jazeera
26 Sept 2021
<<Women win majority of seats in Iceland’s election
Voters elect 33 women to parliament, up from 24 in the last
election.
Iceland’s national election has, for the first time, seen more
women than men elected to a European parliament. Final results on Sunday
also showed the country’s ruling left-right coalition strengthening its
majority.
Opinion polls had earlier forecast the coalition would fall short
of a majority but a surge in support for the centre-right Progressive
Party, which won five more seats than in 2017, pushed its total count to
37 seats in the 63-seat parliament Althingi, according to state
broadcaster RUV.
Voters elected 33 women to parliament, up from 24 in the last
election. Iceland was ranked the most gender-equal country in the world
for the 12th year running in a World Economic Forum (WEF) report
released in March. As of last year, only three other countries – Rwanda,
Cuba and the United Arab Emirates – had more women than men in
parliament, according to data compiled by the World Bank. In Europe,
Sweden and Finland have 47 percent and 46 percent women in parliament
respectively.
Unlike some other countries, Iceland does not have legal quotas
on female representation in parliament, though some parties do require a
minimum number of candidates to be women.
Iceland’s current government, which consists of Prime Minister
Katrin Jakobsdottir’s Left-Green Movement, the conservative Independence
Party and the centrist-agrarian Progressive Party, said before the
election that they would negotiate continued cooperation if they held
their majority.
President Gudni Johannesson said he would not hand a mandate to
form a new government to any party but would await coalition talks among
the three parties.
<Now the ball is in the hands of the sitting government,> he told
the Visir newspaper.
The conservative Independence Party again became the biggest in
parliament with nearly a quarter of the votes and 16 seats, unchanged
from the last election.
Party leader and former Prime Minister Bjarni Benediktsson said
he was optimistic that the three parties could form a coalition and he
would not demand to lead a new government, RUV reported.
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/26/women-candidates-win-majority-of-seats-in-icelandic-election
Al Jazeera
25 Sept 2021
<<Features
Child Rights
By Farai Matiashe
Taekwondo: Ending child marriage in Zimbabwe, one kick at a time.
The martial art is a welcome refuge for teenage girls hoping to
escape the widespread practice of child marriage.
Epworth, Zimbabwe – Growing up in Epworth, a densely populated
suburb southeast of Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, 17-year-old Lisa
Nyambupu would see many of her friends getting married at a young age.
It was a future she also expected for herself – until she stepped on a
taekwondo mat for the first time. <All along I thought there was nothing
wrong about getting married early,> said Nyambupu, who in 2019 decided
to join a taekwondo training class offered by another girl her age,
Natsiraishe Maritsa. <It was at this forum where I learned that it is
actually a bad practice which must not be encouraged.>
She has never looked back.
<Taekwondo gives me hope,> said Nyambupu, who competes in the
45-50kg weight class. <I learn discipline, self-defence and the art
pushes me to strive in life.>
Born in a family of five, Nyambupu said lack of financial support
forced her to drop out of school aged 13 following the death of her
father.
<He was the breadwinner and my mother could not pay my school
fees,> she said.
A 2019 report by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on
Zimbabwe said school dropouts and those from poor households were more
likely to get married before reaching 18 years – the legal marriage age
in the country – as compared with those who continue to higher
education.
*Nyasha Tomeni, 43, still recalls the emotional abuse she went
through at the hands of her in-laws when she got married aged 17.
<When my parents found that I was pregnant they forced me to
elope. My in-laws did not want me to get married to their son. They
could not give me food and they called me derogatory names,> said Tomeni.
‘Proving them wrong’
Another report published by UNICEF in 2019 said that about one in
three (34 percent) of women between the ages of 20 and 24 were first
married or in union before the age of 18. Child rights campaigners have
warned child marriage cases have risen due to the coronavirus pandemic,
which has pushed more families into poverty and kept girls out of school
for a longer period. In a report last year, international charity Save
the Children said an estimated 500,000 more girls were at risk of being
forced into child marriages worldwide, as a result of the economic
effects of COVID-19.
This marked a four percent year on year increase, reversing the
progress made to reduce early marriage over the previous 25 years.
It was the widespread prevalence of the practice that prompted
taekwondo ace Maritsa to launch in 2018 the Vulnerable Underaged
People’s Auditorium initiative. Since then, the teenager has trained
dozens of girls and survivors of child marriages
<Most of my friends were married before 18 years. The future of
these girls was robbed while I was watching,” she said. “Some were
married off by their parents and guardians. I want to change this,> she
added.
<Of course, one should get married after 18 years,> continued
Maritsa, the third born in a family of five girls. <But even after
reaching the legal age, there is no need to hurry. What is important for
the girls is to achieve their dreams such as having a sustainable source
of income generation.>
Inspired by her father Richard Maritsa, who practised kyokushin,
a full-contact martial art, the teenager delved into the world of
martial arts aged five. Later on, she focused on taekwondo and has gone
on to compete at national tournaments, winning several accolades.
<Taekwondo is male-dominated. Many people believe that girls
cannot survive the pain involved in taekwondo. We are proving them
wrong,> she said.
‘Laws are letting us down’
Zimbabwe’s 2013 constitution prohibits boys and girls below the
age of 18 from marriage, but the country’s marriage laws do not abide by
that, resulting in Zimbabwe having no legislation that explicitly
outlaws child marriages. Despite the constitutional court outlawing a
section in the Marriage Act in 2016 which allowed teenagers to get
married before their 18th birthday, the practice remains widespread.
An amendment to the Marriage Bill introduced in 2017 seeks to
align the inconsistencies in the current marriage legislation to the
constitution.
Fadzai Ruzive, a legal practitioner with Women and Law in
Southern Africa, said they were eagerly waiting for the bill to be
signed into law because it clearly criminalises child marriages.
<The Constitution states that a person can marry at the age of
18. The Criminal Law (Codification and Reform) Act states that at 16
years a person can consent to sex. The Marriage Act sets the marriage
age at 16 years. So, when we have laws that are not in alignment with
the Constitution it creates a lot of problems. The laws are letting us
down,> she said.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2021/9/25/taekwondo-brings-hope-to-zimbabwes-teenage-girls
The Guardian
25 Sept 2021
<<Opinion
Gabby Petito
Gabby Petito’s death is tragic. But I wish missing women of color
got this much attention.
By Akin Olla
Considerable resources were dedicated to finding Petito’s body.
Yet Indigenous people in Wyoming are more likely to disappear and to be
killed, and their cases are barely noticed. The apparent murder of
22-year-old Gabrielle “Gabby” Petito has been a consistent part of the
American news cycle since she disappeared on 11 September. Her YouTube
presence and participation in the Instagram #vanlife subculture, which
involves young people travelling around the country living aesthetically
appealing lives in vans and converted buses, provided plenty of content
for internet detectives on sites like TikTok and Reddit to consume. Her
story is heart-wrenching, especially after police footage has emerged of
Petito and her fiance Brian Laundrie, who is now a <person of interest>
in her death, having a domestic crisis.
But the story also feels eerily familiar – so familiar, in fact,
that there is a term for it: <missing white woman syndrome>. White
women, particularly conventionally attractive middle- or upper-class
white women, tend to receive disproportionate media coverage when they
go missing. Petito’s case is tragic, but the media attention it has
attracted replicates a systemic pattern.
Gabby Petito deserves justice; there is no doubt about that. Her
death was ruled a homicide by a Wyoming coroner on 21 September, a few
days after her body was discovered. She’d been missing for weeks after a
roadtrip with her fiance, who returned from the trip without her and
soon went missing himself. Her story quickly went viral on social media
outlets: a Reddit forum created to track her case has accumulated more
than 119,000 members at time of writing, and TikTok videos featuring her
have received over 200m views.
The media joined in this explosion of attention, and public
officials soon followed. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis declared online
that he has directed all state agencies to assist with the search for
Laundrie, who is on the run. I hope they catch him. According to 2019
numbers, however, there are well over a thousand other missing persons
in Florida alone. Media attention influences how politicians and law
enforcement agencies allocate resources, and it is concerning when
policy priorities are so clearly weighted toward victims of certain
racial identities and social classes.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/25/gabby-petito-death-missing-black-indigenous-women-attention
The Guardian
26 Sept 2021
Opinion by Moira Donegan
US politics
<<Two disbarred lawyers sued a Texas doctor who performed an
abortion. Flustered ‘pro-lifers’ are backpedaling.
Anti-choice groups are embarrassed that their draconian law is
being enforced the way it was designed.
In an essay published in the Washington Post last Saturday, the
doctor announced that he performed an abortion on a woman who was past
six weeks of gestation, the limit imposed by Texas’s new abortion ban,
SB8. The doctor wrote that he felt morally obliged to perform the
procedure, his worldview shaped by his years in obstetric practice
having conversations with patients who revealed that they were
terminating their pregnancies because they couldn’t afford more kids,
because they had been raped, because they were with abusive partners, or
because they wanted to pursue other dreams. He wrote, too, of beginning
his practice in 1972, the year before Roe v Wade, the last time an
outright ban on abortion was in effect in his state. <At the hospital
that year, I saw three teenagers die from illegal abortions,> Dr Braid
wrote. <One I will never forget. When she came into the ER, her vaginal
cavity was packed with rags. She died a few days later from massive
organ failure, caused by a septic infection.> Dr Braid reasoned that to
avoid such needless deaths, he had a <duty of care> to the woman whose
newly illegal abortion he performed.
He was promptly sued. Two complaints – both from men living out
of state – were filed against Dr Braid on Monday morning. One, a
rambling, weird document, comes from a convicted felon and disbarred
former attorney named Oscar Stilley, who is serving a prison term on
house arrest in Arkansas. That complaint, which Stilley seems to have
written himself, makes multiple references to Dr Braid’s conduct
regarding “bastards” and his supposed belief in a god referred to by the
Hebrew name <Elohim.> Stilley, who has said he does not personally
oppose abortion, feels strongly that “if there’s money to be had, it’s
going to go in Oscar’s pocket.”
The second lawsuit is from a man named Felipe Gomez of Illinois,
another disbarred lawyer, who labels himself <pro-choice plaintiff>, and
whose complaint asks only that SB8 be overturned. These test cases,
strange and off-putting as they are, now represent the best chance for
SB8 to be vacated, and for abortion rights to be returned to Texans – at
least for now. It didn’t have to be this way. When a conservative state
passes an abortion ban – as they do with some regularity – state
employees are usually tasked with enforcing the law, those employees are
named as defendants in lawsuits brought by pro-choice groups, and the
law is blocked from going into effect by courts that declare it
unconstitutional before any real patients are denied abortion care. But
Texas’s SB8 was designed to elide this normal process of judicial
review, with a novel enforcement mechanism that bars state agents from
acting to enforce the law. Instead, the law can only be enforced by
private civil suits against people suspected of facilitating abortions –
lawsuits, that is, like the ones filed by Stilley and Gomez.
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/26/texas-doctor-abortion-sued-pro-lifers-backpedaling
The Guardian
26 Sept 2021
Opinion by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett
<<Abortion
It’s not just the right who can admit feeling uncomfortable about
ending a pregnancy. By allowing women space to talk about difficult
abortions, we may be able to improve access to them.
Like many people, I’ve been thinking about the women in Texas, a
US state that is now in the business of forced births. When you consider
how pregnancy is dated from the first day of a woman’s last period, its
newly imposed six-week limit on abortion essentially amounts to a ban,
leaving such a tiny window for a woman to arrange a termination. As well
as being horrified by this cynical assault on human rights, I find
myself once again counting my lucky stars that I live in England, a
country that – unlike many others, including Northern Ireland, where
women are still being forced to travel due to a postcode lottery – has
access to safe, legal abortion free of charge.
For as long as the assault on women’s reproductive rights
continues around the world, it feels taboo to talk about abortion in any
other way. It is a privilege to be able to make an appointment, take the
pills (if it is early enough), and get on with our lives. But what has
become difficult to acknowledge is that for some women, even a legal,
safe abortion can be a traumatic experience. This is a story that we
have surrendered to the right, when it is an experience that deserves to
be heard and could even serve to strengthen the case for better access.
An intensely traumatic abortion is the theme of Larger Than an
Orange by Lucy Burns. This is not a story about a woman who has an
abortion and feels nothing but relief, then moves on, hardly giving it a
second thought. It is the diary of an abortion and its aftermath, which
sees the narrator alone in her grief and her pain, telling people about
it compulsively and scrolling through anti-abortion memes on the
internet. It somehow manages to both truthfully convey the trauma of one
woman’s abortion while also being resolutely pro-choice. It’s quite a
balance, in these polarised times.
In conveying the gulf between politics and personal experience,
Larger Than an Orange provides us with vital nuance, and articulates
emotions that feel unspoken, even to women. <So many of my women friends
have said, ‘I knew this to be true, it had to be true, but I have never
heard anyone say it before.’ Which is mad,> Burns tell me of their
reaction to the book. (As for her male friends, many of them had no idea
what abortion even involved.) Like Burns, I believe that what lies
behind this silence is fear.
<We are fortunate enough to be able to have safe legal abortions
in England. So people don’t want to talk about all the bad sides,
because they’re worried that, when access feels so precarious, it will
just be taken away from them.>
I wonder if they also worry that too much candour might frighten
other women, particularly younger ones. In the film Saint Frances, a
woman has an abortion and bleeds for almost all the rest of the film,
and for much of it refuses to admit – much to the frustration of the man
she slept with – that she has any feelings about it at all. It feels
radical, and new, and belongs in a similar space to Larger Than an
Orange: a space of complex feelings and grey areas, coexisting with a
powerful message about the importance of safe and legal abortion. A
space that, though Saint Frances is an American film, I’m unsure the US
is fully ready for, being as it is still bogged down in emotive,
religious arguments about when life begins. (It is notable that Burns’s
book has not yet found a US publisher.)>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/26/right-ending-pregnancy-women-abortions-access
Women's Media Center
Emily Wilson
24 Sept 2021
<<New Documentary Spotlights a Remarkable Woman Imam.
As a young Muslim girl growing up in Berlin in the ‘70s, Seyran
Ates decided at an early age that she wanted to challenge the patriarchy
within Islam and society in general. She noticed the difference in the
way she and her brothers were treated, and how they were allowed to go
out and play while she needed to stay at home. Ates didn’t reject Islam
— rather she decided to work to change it from within, and now she’s a
lawyer and the imam of the Ibn Rushd-Goethe mosque in Berlin, which she
established in 2017. Due to numerous death threats (she’s been shot and
been the target of two fatwas), Ates has constant police protection. A
new documentary, Seyran Ates: Sex, Revolution and Islam, shows Ates’
work at the mosque, where women and men worship together, there’s an
LGBTQ youth group, and Ates encourages discussion and debate. It also
tells some of Ates’ personal stories — the movie opens with her reading
some of the emails she has received containing death and rape threats,
and she talks about being shot in the neck and shoulder when she was a
counselor at a women’s shelter. We see her police escorts. The film also
tells the story of her nephew, who started getting radicalized online
but with Ates’ help came out as gay and became active in the mosque. We
accompany Ates as she travels around the world working for human rights,
going to Madrid, for example, for the anniversary of the 2004 bombings
at 10 train stations that killed 193 people, and visiting traditional
female imams in China, who are shocked that in the Berlin mosque, women
often go without head coverings.
After the September 11 attacks in the U.S., Oslo-based Turkish
Norwegian filmmaker Nefise Özkal Lorentzen, who sees herself as doing
“gender activism through films,” thought about leaving her faith,
feeling it no longer had room for her. But her gay Muslim friends felt
differently. Lorentzen wanted to try and understand how they felt about
Islam, and she made a trio of controversial films to explore how being a
feminist and gay could fit with being a Muslim, as well as one about the
patriarchy: Gender Me, A Balloon for Allah, and ManIslam.
Lorentzen then planned to make a film about female imams. Her
mother sent her an article about Ates, telling Lorentzen she needed to
talk to her if she wanted to make a good film. The filmmaker went to
Berlin to meet Ates. She was struck by the singularity of Ates’ vision,
her determination, and how she stood out from other leaders. She decided
to make a film focused on Ates.
Lorentzen says she felt a connection to Ates almost immediately.
Ates experienced that as well, saying it feels as though they’ve known
each other forever. Ates said she and the filmmaker believe in working
for social change — but they want to have fun too. She says she’s glad
she chose Lorentzen to make this film.
<More than 40 people wanted to do a documentary about this new
mosque and our visions and ideas and what we’re doing and what is
contemporary Islam,> Ates said on a video call from Berlin with
Lorentzen in Oslo. <We had a lot of media interest worldwide, but when
Nefise wrote me and sent me links to her movies, I realized, ‘Oh, she’s
great. Maybe she can understand our vision and our dreams, and maybe she
can feel the spirituality,’ and it worked. It was like she’s an old
friend of mine, and I’ve known her for centuries.> >>
Read more here:
https://womensmediacenter.com/news-features/new-documentary-spotlights-a-remarkable-woman-imam
Al Jazeera
24 Sept 2021
<<US House passes bill to secure abortion rights for women.
Legislative drive to codify precedent of Roe v Wade gains
momentum in Congress but still faces Republican opposition.
The United States House of Representatives on Friday approved a
proposed law that would guarantee women’s right to an abortion
throughout the United States. The bill, which would override new laws in
Texas and other Republican-led states restricting abortions, passed the
House by a vote of 218-211 but faces opposition from Republicans in the
US Senate. For decades, women in the US have had access to abortion
services under a 1973 landmark US Supreme Court ruling in the case of
Roe v Wade. But the judicial precedent is under attack and potentially
at risk of being overturned by a new conservative majority on the court.
In proposing the new law, Democrats in Congress aim to create the
right to an abortion in federal law, which Congress has not previously
done. That would make it very difficult for the courts and states to
legally restrict women’s access to abortion.
The new Texas law, which already is being challenged in the
courts, seeks to ban abortions after a foetal heartbeat is detectable,
which occurs at about six weeks – often before a woman knows she is
pregnant.
It allows private citizens to file suits against anyone who <aids
or abets> an abortion and if successful, be awarded a minimum of
$10,000. The law went into effect on September 1.
<We’re going to see an uprising like we’ve never seen before if
we do not codify this law that has been passed in the House now, and
we’re going to call upon our Senate colleagues to do that,>
Representative Jackie Speier, a Democratic lawmaker and champion for the
proposed bill, said on MSNBC after the vote. President Joe Biden
supports the House bill and has called the Texas law an <unprecedented
assault> on women’s reproductive rights in the US. The Justice
Department has filed a lawsuit to block the Texas law.
<We are going to stand together unified and fight for women’s
constitutional rights to make decisions about their own body,> Vice
President Kamala Harris, the first woman vice president in US history,
said on ABC’s The View talk show on Friday.
The nine-member US Supreme Court now has a 6-3 conservative
majority following the appointments by former President Donald Trump of
three conservative justices believed to favour reversing Roe v Wade to
the court. The court rejected an emergency request to block the law. A
Florida lawmaker has introduced similar legislation to the Texas ban.
Abortion opponents hailed the law as a possible model for banning
the procedure elsewhere.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/24/us-house-approves-proposal-to-secure-abortion-rights-for-women
Al Jazeera
24 Sept 2021
<<Miscarriage of Justice: A fight for women’s rights in El
Salvador.
The empowering story of Teodora Vasquez who was imprisoned for 10
years under El Salvador’s strict abortion law.
Teodora Vasquez was convicted of aggravated homicide in 2008
after being accused of aborting her baby. She was sentenced to 30 years
in prison even though she says she had a stillbirth.
This film follows Teodora’s story from Ilopango women’s prison as
she appeals her conviction in the courts through to her release 10 years
later, after which she travels around the world to advocate for women’s
rights.
Her story is set against the backdrop of the Salvadoran
government’s 2018 review of its strict abortion laws.
Click here to watch the film , Spanisch spoken/English subtitled,
:
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/witness/2021/9/24/miscarriage-of-justice-a-fight-for-womens-rights-in-el-salvador
Al Jazeera
24 Sept 2021
David Child
<<Sabina Nessa: London murder reignites fears over women’s
safety.
Campaigners say authorities must tackle ‘root causes of male
violence against women’ in the wake of a 28-year-old teacher’s killing.
London, United Kingdom – The murder of a 28-year-old teacher in a
London park has reignited a national conversation over women’s safety,
six months after the death of Sarah Everard, who was killed by a police
officer, topped the United Kingdom’s political agenda.
Sabina Nessa, a primary school teacher, was killed a week ago on
the evening of September 17 while walking in Cator Park in Kidbrooke, an
area in the capital’s southeastern Borough of Greenwich.
It is understood that she was on her way to meet a friend at a
bar less than a 10-minute walk away from her home on Astell Road when
she was attacked at about 8:30pm, according to London’s Metropolitan
Police Service (Met). Her body was found by police officers in Cator
Park the following afternoon, nearly 24 hours later, close to a local
community centre. A post-mortem carried out on Monday proved
inconclusive.
On Thursday, a 38-year-old man was arrested in London on
suspicion of murder. He remains in custody.
Police have also released images of another man they wish to
speak to in connection with the case. Officers have appealed for any
witnesses or individuals with information of the incident to contact
them. <We know the community are rightly shocked by this murder – as are
we – and we are using every resource available to us to find the
individual responsible,> Joe Garrity, the detective inspector leading
the Met’s investigation, said in a statement.
‘Epidemic of violence’
As the Met’s probe continues, calls are growing for authorities
to tackle what campaigners say is an <epidemic of violence towards women
in the UK>.
Emma Kay, co-founder of WalkSafe, a free mobile app aimed at
safeguarding women in public spaces, said many women have been killed by
men in the UK since March, when Everard’s murder by a Met officer
shocked the nation.
Everard was 33. Wayne Couzens, 48, has pleaded guilty to
murdering her and will be sentenced on September 29. So far this year,
at least 108 women in the UK have been killed by men, or in instances
where a man is the principal suspect, according to Counting Dead Women,
a group that tracks femicide in the country. <Enough is enough,> Kay
told Al Jazeera. <UK women are calling for action. We must be able to
walk home safely and live without violence in our own homes.>
Kay said <a police and court system that protects women> was
needed, as well as “concrete safety initiatives” such as improved CCTV
and a free or subsidised transport system.
Andrea Simon, director of the End Violence Against Women
Coalition (EVAW), said it was <devastating> that little had been done to
address male violence against women despite widespread demands for
action after the Everard tragedy.
The criminal justice system was too slow in responding to
violence against women, she said, and routinely fails to prosecute rape
and domestic abuse cases.She also said support services should be
granted more funding.
<We must not risk viewing these murders as isolated incidents.
Violence against women is so deeply normalised that women must
constantly carry out personal safety work – assessing our surroundings,
researching the safest route, carrying keys in our hands and sharing our
location with friends,> Simon told Al Jazeera.
<We need an approach that addresses the root causes of male
violence against women and the attitudes that minimise and tolerate
abuse.> >>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/24/london-murder-reignites-uk-debate-about-womens-safety
The Guardian
23 Sept 2021
Alexandra Topping and agencies
<<Woman with Down’s syndrome loses UK abortion law case.
Heidi Crowter has argued allowing terminations up to birth if
foetus has Down’s syndrome is discriminatory.
A woman with Down’s syndrome who took Sajid Javid to court over
the UK’s abortion law has lost her case in the high court.
Heidi Crowter, who brought the case alongside Máire Lea-Wilson,
whose son Aidan has Down’s syndrome, and a child with Down’s syndrome
identified only as A, had argued that allowing pregnancy terminations up
to birth if the foetus has Down’s syndrome is discriminatory and
stigmatises disabled people. They challenged the Department of Health
and Social Care over the Abortion Act 1967, which sets a 24-week time
limit for abortions unless there is <substantial risk> of the child
being <seriously handicapped>. At a two-day hearing in July they argued
it interfered with the right to respect for private life in article 8(1)
of the European convention on human rights (ECHR), including the
decision to become or not to become a parent and <rights to dignity,
autonomy and personal development of all three claimants>.
But in a ruling on Thursday [pdf] their case was dismissed by two
senior judges, who ruled that the legislation was not unlawful and aimed
to strike a balance between the rights of the unborn child and of women.
Lord Justice Singh and Mrs Justice Lieven said: <The issues which
have given rise to this claim are highly sensitive and sometimes
controversial. They generate strong feelings, on all sides of the
debate, including sincere differences of view about ethical and
religious matters. This court cannot enter into those controversies; it
must decide the case only in accordance with the law.>
Crowter said it was a <sad> day but vowed to keep on fighting.
Speaking alongside her husband, James Carter, outside the Royal Courts
of Justice, she said: <The judges might not think it discriminates
against me, the government might not think it discriminates against me,
but I’m telling you that I do feel discriminated against and the verdict
doesn’t change how I and thousands in the Down’s syndrome community
feel.>
During the hearing Jason Coppel QC, representing the claimants,
told the high court Down’s syndrome was the single largest justification
for <late-term abortions> under the Abortion Act.
The judges said the evidence they had heard <powerfully> showed
that there were families who positively wished to have a child even if
they would have severe disabilities, but not every family would react
that way.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/23/woman-with-downs-syndrome-loses-uk-abortion-law-case
The Guardian
Jamie Grierson Jessica Murray and Sarah Marsh
23 Sept 2021
<<‘London streets are safe for women,’ say Met after Sabina Nessa
killing. Killer of primary school teacher, 28, is still at large, say
police
Scotland Yard has said London’s streets are safe for women as it
investigates whether a primary school teacher was killed by a stranger
who is still at large. Sabina Nessa, 28, is suspected to have been
murdered as she walked through Cator Park in south-east London, on what
should have been a five-minute journey to a pub from her nearby home, at
about 8.30pm last Friday.
Her body was found near the OneSpace community centre in the park
off Kidbrooke Park Road, Greenwich, at 5.30pm on Saturday by a member of
the public.
What we know about Sabina Nessa's murder.
Speaking from the crime scene, DCS Trevor Lawry, of the
Metropolitan police, said London’s streets <are safe for women>,
although he was unable to rule out that Nessa’s killer could strike
again. Her killing, which follows the high-profile murders of Sarah
Everard and the sisters Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry, has once more
prompted debate over the safety of women and girls on Britain’s streets.
Lawry said he was <keeping a completely open mind> on the motives
of the attacker but was concerned that they were still on the loose.
Asked whether the Met was worried that the killer could attack
someone else, he said: <We have lines of inquiry that we’re pursuing at
the moment. It’s always a concern that it may happen, but that’s not
something that we have any intelligence on at this time.>
Asked whether he believed a stranger was behind the attack, Lawry
added: <That’s definitely a line of inquiry that we’re looking at.> He
went on: <The streets are safe for women, I’d like to reassure the
public around that, I’d like to make sure that people are free to walk
around free from fear and my officers will make sure that that can take
place.>
Nessa is understood to have been heading towards the Depot bar in
Pegler Square, Kidbrooke Village, when she was attacked. A postmortem
examination, carried out on Monday into the cause of death, was
inconclusive.
A man in his 40s who was arrested on suspicion of murder has been
released under further investigation.
DI Joe Garrity, who is leading the murder inquiry, said:
<Sabina’s journey should have taken just over five minutes but she never
made it to her destination. We know the community is rightly shocked by
this murder – as are we – and we are using every resource available to
us to find the individual responsible.>
Nessa was raised in Sandy, Bedfordshire, and attended the
University of Bedfordshire to study for her postgraduate certificate in
education (PGCE).
A few doors down from the Nessa family home in Sandy, a neighbour,
Carol Ball, said the whole street was in shock following the news. <What
can you say? I spoke to her dad and he’s in a daze,> the 76-year-old
said. <I’ve known her since she was just a little girl. She was lovely,
so well-mannered and well brought up, all the girls were. They all did
well at school and with their driving.> >>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/sep/23/sabina-nessa-thought-killed-on-way-meet-friend-say-police
Al Jazeera
21 Sept 2021
<<HRW slams Kenya’s response to surge in gender-based violence.
Kenya failed to provide support amid a spike in violence against
women and girls during the COVID-19 pandemic, HRW says.
Human Rights Watch has decried the Kenyan government’s response
to a surge in gender-based violence (GBV) that took place throughout the
coronavirus pandemic, specifically during periods of lockdown. In a new
report released on Tuesday, the US-based rights group claimed the
government failed to ensure that health, economic and social support
services were available to women amid restrictions that affected their
mobility.
In doing so, HRW said the Kenyan government actually facilitated
an increase in GBV. The report says there was a staggering 301 percent
increase in calls reporting violence against women and girls in the
first two weeks of the lockdown between March and April 2020.
While previous studies have shown that cases of GBV increase
during health emergencies, the Kenyan government should have <expected
and planned for a similar uptick during the COVID-19 health emergency>,
HRW said.
Other research on sexual violence and GBV has also showed that
Kenya’s current government structures and policies are “inadequate to
respond effectively to violence against women and girls” during such
emergencies, it added.
The report is based on 26 interviews conducted between June 2020
and February 2021 – 13 of whom were survivors of GBV.
The group documented various forms of violence against women and
girls – including sexual abuse, beatings, being thrown out of the home,
being forced to marry, and being forced to undergo female genital
mutilation (FGM).
According to the report, many of the abuses happened <in the
home> and attackers were <close family members including husbands, but
other abuses happened in the communities perpetuated by neighbours>. The
girls interviewed said they experienced ongoing sexual harassment from
men in their communities, some of whom “lured them” with gifts of food
or sanitary pads.
In one case, Juliet, a 16-year-old girl living in an informal
settlement in Nairobi, was held captive for four days by a man who
sexually assaulted her, HRW said. She was eventually rescued by
neighbours and cared for in a safe house in Nairobi. Despite already
having high levels of violence, there is a <clear trend> of increased
violence against women and girls in Kenya, HRW said.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/21/hrw-kenya-response-surge-gender-based-violence-covid
Al Jazeera
20 Sept 2021
Belen Fernandez
Contributing editor at Jacobin Magazine.
<<It is time to abort Texas’s abortion law – and much more.
The anti-abortion legislation in Texas is an extension of
homegrown American fanaticism.
On September 1, the state of Texas implemented Senate Bill 8
(SB8) banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, including in cases
of rape and incest. Given that most women are not even aware they are
pregnant at six weeks, SB8 amounts to a near-total abortion ban. It is
the most restrictive such law in the entire United States, where the
Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 Roe vs Wade ruling ostensibly offers
constitutional protections for abortion rights.
In addition to being criminally invasive, the Texas law is
totally unhinged. For starters, its enforcement is delegated not to
agents of the state but rather to individual citizens who stand to win
$10,000 or more by bringing lawsuits against doctors, abortion clinic
staff, Uber drivers, and any other witting or unwitting accomplices to
abortions performed after the six-week cutoff. Plaintiffs need not be
from Texas nor have any relation to the defendants. Presumably, SB8 will
not only encourage run-of-the-mill American religious zealots to further
unleash their inner policemen but also incentivise assorted other
demographics to capitalise on efforts to dismantle the semblance of
women’s rights that has been attained under patriarchal capitalism. As
NPR notes, the Texas Right to Life organisation has already <set up what
it calls a ‘whistleblower’ website where people can submit anonymous
tips about anyone they believe to be violating the law>.
While the Justice Department has sued the state of Texas over
SB8’s alleged unconstitutionality, the US Supreme Court has refused to
block the law. Reuters reported that <in an unsigned explanation, the
court’s majority said the Texas law’s unusual construction – leaving
enforcement to individuals bringing lawsuits – limited its ability to
act>. The moral of the story, it seems, is that it does not matter if a
law is legal or not as long as it is being enforced by private citizens
rather than the people who are supposed to enforce laws.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/9/20/it-is-time-to-abort-texass-abortion-law-and-much
The Guardian
19 Sept 2021
Martin Pengelly in New York
<<Texas doctor protests abortion law by admitting he carried out
procedure.
Alan Braid writes column for Washington Post.
Texas law shows fragility of women’s rights, say activists.
Protesting a Texas law which outlaws abortion after six weeks of
pregnancy and empowers citizens to sue providers and anyone who helps
them, a San Antonio doctor said he had provided an abortion beyond the
new legal limit.
Cecile Richards, former president of Planned Parenthood, said
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was ‘a trailblazer’.
Cecile Richards marks a year since RBG death with abortion rights
battle cry.
<I am taking a personal risk,> Alan Braid wrote for the
Washington Post. <But it’s something I believe in strongly.
<… I have daughters, granddaughters and nieces. I believe
abortion is an essential part of healthcare. I have spent the last 50
years treating and helping patients. I can’t just sit back and watch us
return to 1972.>
That was the year before Roe v Wade, the supreme court ruling
which guaranteed abortion rights.
The court is now dominated by conservatives, after Republicans
installed three justices under Donald Trump. Using an emergency “shadow
docket” ruling, the court allowed the Texas law to stand. Many observers
expect it to fully overturn Roe in another case, from Mississippi.
Saturday was the one-year anniversary of the death of the liberal
justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a key moment in the abortion battle.
Ginsburg was succeeded by Amy Coney Barrett, a devout Catholic.
Marking the anniversary, Cecile Richards, a former head of
Planned Parenthood, told the Associated Press: <We are in a post-Roe
world … all it takes is a Republican governor and a Republican
legislature. Your state could be exactly the same.>
Braid said he began work in Texas in a pre-Roe world, starting a
residency in obstetrics and gynecology at a hospital in San Antonio in
July 1972.
<At the time, abortion was effectively illegal in Texas – unless
a psychologist certified a woman was suicidal. If the woman had money,
we’d refer her to clinics in Colorado, California or New York. The rest
were on their own. Some traveled across the border to Mexico.>
That year, he said, he saw <three teenagers die from illegal
abortions>.
<One I will never forget. When she came into the ER, her vaginal
cavity was packed with rags. She died a few days later from massive
organ failure, caused by a septic infection.>
The Texas law, SB8, went into effect this month. Braid said his
clinics are represented by the Center for Reproductive Rights in a
federal lawsuit seeking to stop the law.
Braid said women who come to his clinic often say why they need
an abortion.
<They’re finishing school or they already have three children,
they’re in an abusive relationship, or it’s just not time. A majority
are mothers. Most are between 18 and 30. Many are struggling
financially.>
An architect of the Texas bill, former state solicitor general
Jonathan Mitchell, has said women who want to avoid unwanted pregnancy
can simply say no to sex.
Braid wrote: <Several times a month, a woman confides that she is
having the abortion because she has been raped. Sometimes, she reports
it to the police; more often, she doesn’t>. <Texas’s new law makes no
exception for rape or incest.>
Describing how women must again be referred out of state, Braid
wrote: <For me, it’s 1972 all over again. And that is why, on the
morning of 6 September, I provided an abortion to a woman who, though
still in her first trimester, was beyond the state’s new limit. I acted
because I had a duty of care to this patient, as I do for all patients,
and because she has a fundamental right to receive this care.> >>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/19/texas-doctor-abortion-law-washington-post-supreme-court
Al Jazeera
16 Sept 2021
<<Attacks on Eritrean refugees in Tigray ‘clear war crimes’: HRW.
Eritrean soldiers and Ethiopian rebel fighters raped and killed
refugees in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, Human Rights Watch says.
Eritrean soldiers and Tigrayan militias raped, detained and
killed Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia’s northern region of Tigray in
attacks that amounted to <clear war crimes>, an international rights
watchdog has said.
Human Rights Watch’s report on Thursday contained detailed
attacks around two camps in Tigray, where local forces have battled the
Ethiopian government and their Eritrean allies since November in a
conflict that has rocked the Horn of Africa region.
Tens of thousands of Eritrean refugees live in Tigray, a
mountainous and poor province of about five million people.
<The horrific killings, rapes, and looting against Eritrean
refugees in Tigray are clear war crimes,> said Laetitia Bader, the Horn
of Africa director at Human Rights Watch (HRW), whose work drew on
interviews with 28 refugees and other sources, including satellite
imagery.
Eritrea’s minister of information did not immediately return
calls seeking comment, but Eritrea has previously denied atrocities and
said their forces have not attacked civilians.
A spokesman for the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) said
formal, uniformed Tigrayan forces had only recently moved into the area
and that it was possible abuses were committed by local militias.
<It is mostly the last month or so that our forces moved into
those areas. There was a huge Eritrean army presence there,> Getachew
Reda told the Reuters news agency. <If there were vigilante groups
acting in the heat of the moment I cannot rule that out.>
International investigators were welcome to visit the area, he
said.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/16/ethiopia-attacks-eritrean-refugees-tigray-war-crimes-hrw
Al Jazeera
15 Sept 2021
<<UN withdraws Gabon peacekeepers from CAR over sex abuse claims.
Gabonese defence ministry says a number of ‘exceptionally serious
acts that go against military ethics and the honour of the armed forces’
reported in recent weeks.
Gabon’s defence ministry has said the United Nations will
withdraw the country’s 450-strong peacekeeping contingent from the
Central African Republic (CAR) over sexual abuse allegations.
<In recent weeks, exceptionally serious acts that go against
military ethics and the honour of the armed forces, committed by certain
elements in the Gabonese battalions … have been reported,> the ministry
said in a statement sent to the AFP news agency on Wednesday.
<Following many cases of alleged sexual exploitation and abuse
that are being processed, the United Nations today decided to withdraw
the Gabonese contingent from MINUSCA>, the UN mission in the CAR, and
<an investigation has been opened by Gabon,> the statement read.
Al Jazeera’s Nicolas Haque, who has extensively covered the
allegations of sexual abuse against the Blue Helmets that has tarnished
their reputation globally, said the lawyer representing the victims
described the news as “a small victory – but it’s not enough”.
<What she wants to see is prosecution of those involved in cases
of sexual abuse happening in the CAR itself,> he added.
<As for the UN conventions, the soldiers involved in the
allegations of sexual abuse are not prosecuted in the country where the
crimes are committed but rather in their home country. That’s why we saw
Gabonese prosecutors in [the CAR’s capital] Bangui for the last two
years, investigating soldiers of that nation under the supervision of
the UN.>
One of the world’s poorest countries, CAR has been chronically
unstable since it gained independence from France in 1960.
It is currently suffering from the aftermath of a brutal civil
conflict that erupted in 2013 after a coup against then-President
Francois Bozize.
MINUSCA was deployed by the UN in April 2014 to end the conflict
pitting the Seleka coalition of armed groups that overthrew Bozize
against militias supporting him. The conflict has dramatically reduced
in intensity but MINUSCA has 15,000 personnel in the country, of whom
14,000 are in uniform.
Their main mission is to protect civilians.
Allegations of sexual crimes involving peacekeepers have been
recurrent, and while some contingents have been withdrawn in the past,
no investigations have resulted in convictions to date, at least
publicly.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/15/un-withdraws-gabon-peacekeepers-from-car-over-sex-abuse-claims
Women's Media Center
SEPTEMBER 14, 2021 | Lakshmi Gandhi | FEMINISM
<<A Teen Girl Starts a Feminist Movement in Michelle Quach’s <Not
Here To Be Liked>
As the title of Michelle Quach’s debut novel, Not Here To Be
Liked, suggests, not everyone is going to immediately connect to Eliza
Quan, the main character. In fact, the book’s back cover warns readers
that the story they are about to read contains an “unlikeable female
character.”
<There’s been a lot of discussion about unlikeable female
characters in general and I personally wanted to give [creating one] a
shot because I think unlikable characters are more realistic,> Quach
told the FBomb. Eliza Quan’s world is shattered when, after working her
whole high school career toward one day becoming editor-in-chief of the
school paper, a charismatic star athlete, Len, is elected to the
position because he <seems more like a leader.> When Eliza writes a
scathing editorial about sexism and the expectations placed on teen
girls, the essay quickly goes viral and sets off a mini-feminist
movement at their school. But when Eliza begins liking Len as a person,
things become even more complicated for both her and the budding
movement. Not Here To Be Liked hits shelves on September 14. We had the
chance to talk to Quach about her debut novel, the weirdness of going
viral, and how teens can speak out against injustice when they see it.
How did you get the idea for a book about the election of a high
school paper’s editor-in-chief? Did you write for the paper when you
were in school?
Read Michele Quach's answer to this and other questions here:
https://womensmediacenter.com/fbomb/a-teen-girl-starts-a-feminist-movement-in-michelle-quachs-not-here-to-be-liked
Women's Media Centre
Lakshmi Gandhi
Sept 14 2021
<<A Teen Girl Starts a Feminist Movement in Michelle Quach’s <Not
Here To Be Liked>
As the title of Michelle Quach’s debut novel, Not Here To Be
Liked, suggests, not everyone is going to immediately connect to Eliza
Quan, the main character. In fact, the book’s back cover warns readers
that the story they are about to read contains an “unlikeable female
character.”
<There’s been a lot of discussion about unlikeable female
characters in general and I personally wanted to give [creating one] a
shot because I think unlikable characters are more realistic,> Quach
told the FBomb.
Eliza Quan’s world is shattered when, after working her whole
high school career toward one day becoming editor-in-chief of the school
paper, a charismatic star athlete, Len, is elected to the position
because he <seems more like a leader.> When Eliza writes a scathing
editorial about sexism and the expectations placed on teen girls, the
essay quickly goes viral and sets off a mini-feminist movement at their
school. But when Eliza begins liking Len as a person, things become even
more complicated for both her and the budding movement.
Not Here To Be Liked hits shelves on September 14. We had the
chance to talk to Quach about her debut novel, the weirdness of going
viral, and how teens can speak out against injustice when they see it.
How did you get the idea for a book about the election of a high
school paper’s editor-in-chief? Did you write for the paper when you
were in school?
Yes, I was on the paper in high school, and also while I was in
college, so I borrowed elements from those experiences for the book. For
example, moments like the election of editor-in-chief as described in
this book didn’t happen when I was in high school, but it did happen on
my college paper. So the book was a blend of all those experiences.
When Eliza first wrote her editorial about sexism at the school
newspaper, she never intended for it to be printed at all, let alone
have it become a viral sensation. She also isn’t prepared for the
attention she and the piece receive because of it. Why did you want to
explore that in this book?
I wanted to explore this because I just saw, especially in the
social justice space, how well-meaning things will blow up really fast
and then how things can turn just as easily. I thought that was a very
interesting phenomenon. I wanted to explore that in terms of the more
microcosts [to going viral.] Obviously this story is confined to her
school, so I wanted to take this small world and then explore what would
happen.
It is also interesting to see how Eliza and her mom (who is a
Chinese-Vietnamese immigrant) view what happened very differently. Why
did you want to include that divide between the mother and daughter in
this book?
I wanted to include that dynamic because I think it’s realistic,
especially in a family with that sort of divide culturally and
generationally. It’s interesting because the mom in this book is in many
ways a strong female role model. But she doesn’t have the language or
interest really to talk about feminism in the way that Eliza is talking
about feminism.>>
Read more here:
https://womensmediacenter.com/fbomb/a-teen-girl-starts-a-feminist-movement-in-michelle-quachs-not-here-to-be-liked
The Guardian
11 Sept 2021
Richard Luscombe
<<Salesforce offers to help staff leave Texas as abortion law
takes effect.
Software company sends message to workforce addressing access to
reproductive healthcare.
The cloud-based software giant Salesforce is offering to help
relocate employees out of Texas following the state’s enactment of its
extreme new abortion law. Referring to the <incredibly personal issues>
that the law creates, a message to the company’s entire workforce sent
late on Friday said any employee and their family wishing to move
elsewhere would receive assistance.
<Ohana if you want to move we’ll help you exit TX. Your choice,>
the Salesforce chief executive, Marc Benioff, said in a tweet featuring
a CNBC article about the offer, and using a term common in Hawaii for
<family>.
In its message to workers, Salesforce, which is headquartered in
California, did not directly mention Texas, where about 2,000 of its
56,000 global workers are based, or take a stance on the law. But its
intention was clear.
<These are incredibly personal issues that directly impact many
of us – especially women,> it said.
<We recognize and respect that we all have deeply held and
different perspectives. As a company, we stand with all of our women at
Salesforce and everywhere. If you have concerns about access to
reproductive healthcare in your state, Salesforce will help relocate you
and members of your immediate family.> The company’s offer appears to be
part of a growing corporate backlash against the Texas law, which took
effect on 1 September when the US supreme court refused to block it.
On Thursday, the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, announced
that the justice department was suing Texas over the <unconstitutional>
law that bans abortions after the detection of embryonic cardiac
activity, at around six weeks, and allows private citizens to pursue
legal action against anybody who assists a woman in getting an abortion.
The ride-share companies Lyft and Uber have both said they will pay the
legal costs of any drivers sued for transporting women to or from
procedures. Meanwhile, Match Group, which owns the dating app Tinder,
and its rival Bumble, which is also based in Texas, have set up funds
for employees seeking abortions out of state.
<The company generally does not take political stands unless it
is relevant to our business. But in this instance, I personally, as a
woman in Texas, could not keep silent,> the Match chief executive, Shar
Dubey, said in a memo to workers.
Salesforce, which was founded in 1999 by the former Oracle
executive Benioff and partners as one of the first web-based software
service providers, has a reputation for looking after its workers. In
2020 it was ranked in the top 10 US companies for employee satisfaction
in a Forbes survey.
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/11/salesforce-texas-abortion-law
Al Jazeera
<<From: The Stream
Bonus Edition: Somalia hunger, Afghanistan’s women, life in Gaza
On Friday, September 10 at 19:30 GMT:
In this bonus edition of The Stream, we go behind the scenes to
talk about the growing hunger crisis in Somalia, to hear personal
stories from Gaza and we have a special interview with the CEO of Women
for Women International from our Instagram Live series.>>
Click here to watch the video:
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/the-stream/2021/9/10/bonus-edition-somalia-hunger-afghanistans-women-life-in-gaza
The Guardian
10 July 2021
Tom Phillips in Brasília and Flávia Milhorance in Rio de Janeiro
<<Indigenous warrior women take fight to save ancestral lands to
Brazilian capital.
Jair Bolsonaro is backing a legal move to open up large tracts of
indigenous territory to commercial exploitation that tribal members call
an ‘extermination effort’.
More than 5,000 indigenous women have marched through Brazil’s
capital to denounce the historic assault on native lands they say is
unfolding under the country’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro.
Female representatives of more than 170 of Brazil’s 300-plus
tribes have gathered in Brasília in recent days to oppose highly
controversial attempts to strip back indigenous land rights and open
their territories to mining operations and agribusiness. On Friday
morning those guerreiras (warriors) trooped south from their encampment
wearing bright-coloured headdresses made from the feathers of parrots
and macaws and clutching banners condemning growing anti-indigenous
violence under Bolsonaro’s <genocidal administration>.
Two demonstrators clasped an effigy of the embattled Brazilian
leader whose presidential sash bore the words: <Fora Bolsonaro!> (Bolsonaro
out!).
“What they want is to take away our land,” said Alessandra Korap,
an activist from the Amazon’s Munduruku people, deploring a slew of
political initiatives she claimed threatened indigenous lands and lives.
Foremost among those threats is the <marco temporal> or <time
frame> argument: a legal challenge to indigenous land rights that is
currently being considered by the supreme court. Opponents say that, if
successful, the suit – which Bolsonaro has championed as a way of
stopping Brazil being <handed over to the Indians> – would nullify all
indigenous claims to land they were not physically occupying when
Brazil’s constitution was enacted on 5 October 1988.
Speaking at the protest camp, organized the Articulation of
Indigenous Peoples of Brazil, Korap said a ruling in favour of the
thesis would effectively legalise the theft of indigenous land.
<The time frame thesis indicates that we have only existed since
5 October 1988. But this isn’t true. The whole of Brazil is indigenous
territory – all of it. Unfortunately, it has been taken away, bit by bit
– and now they want to take away those pieces that were left for us,>
she said.
As well as Bolsonaro, under whose administration deforestation
has soared, the legal challenge is backed by congress’s powerful
ruralist caucus, whose members are simultaneously pushing a bill which
would have a similar impact. That measure, known as PL490, would
restrict indigenous land claims and permit infrastructure building and
the commercial exploitation of native forests, without requiring
indigenous occupants to be consulted.
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/10/indigenous-warrior-women-brazil-ancestral-lands-protest
Al Jazeera
9 Sept 2021
<<$3m deal reached in rough arrest of Colorado woman with
dementia.
US police officer pushed Karen Garner suspected of shoplifting
against hood of his car and fractured her arm, suit claims.
Then-Officer Austin Hopp arrested Karen Garner, 73, after she
left a store without paying for $14 worth of items in Loveland,
Colorado, about 80 kilometres (50 miles) north of Denver in June 2020.
Police body camera video shows that after she turned away from
him, he grabbed her arm and pushed her to the ground. She was still
holding the wildflowers she had been picking as she walked through a
field. A federal lawsuit that Garner filed claimed he dislocated her
shoulder and fractured her arm. Hopp pushed Garner against the hood of
his car, she tried to turn around and repeated that she was trying to go
home. He then slammed her back against the car and forced her bent left
arm up near her head, holding it, saying, <Are you finished? Are you
finished? We don’t play this game.>
The civil money settlement is one of a number of legal
settlements reached between US cities and victims of police violence
which has become a focus for local authorities and activists nationwide
following the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.
Former officer Hopp and another officer who responded to help him
both face criminal charges for assault, a rare consequence for police in
the US because of the legal doctrine of <qualified immunity> which
protects police in most instances.
In June, former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was
sentenced to 22.5 years in prison for the murder of George Floyd whose
death had triggered the US protests. Sweeping police reform proposals
are stalled in the US Congress.
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/9/3m-deal-reached-in-rough-arrest-of-woman-with-dementia
Al Jazeera
9 Sept 2021
By Ali M Latifi
<<Taliban accused of torturing journalists for covering protests.
Reports show the armed group being violent and intimidating
journalists, despite their free-press pledge.
Kabul, Afghanistan – Taliban fighters have been accused of
beating and detaining journalists for covering protests in the Afghan
capital Kabul, raising questions over the group’s promises on media
freedom. Two reporters for the Etilaatroz newspaper – Taqi Daryabi and
Nematullah Naqdi – were detained by the Taliban while covering a women’s
protest in the west of Kabul on Wednesday morning.
Two other journalists from the newspaper – Aber Shaygan and
Lutfali Sultani – rushed to the police station along with the newspaper
editor, Kadhim Karimi, to inquire about the whereabouts of their
colleagues.
But the moment they reached the police station, they say, Taliban
fighters pushed and slapped them and confiscated all their belongings,
including mobile phones. <Karimi barely finished his sentence, when one
of the Taliban slapped him and told him to get lost,> Shaygan told Al
Jazeera, adding that as soon as they introduced themselves as
journalists, the Taliban treated them with disdain.
Torture in holding cell
The three men were taken into a small holding cell with 15 people
in it, two of whom were reporters with Reuters and Turkey’s Anadolu
Agency, Shaygan said. It was while they were in holding that the three
heard reports of the disturbing abuse suffered by Daryabi, 22, and Naqdi,
28, who were being held in separate rooms. Two other journalists from
the newspaper – Aber Shaygan and Lutfali Sultani – rushed to the police
station along with the newspaper editor, Kadhim Karimi, to inquire about
the whereabouts of their colleagues. But the moment they reached the
police station, they say, Taliban fighters pushed and slapped them and
confiscated all their belongings, including mobile phones.
The three men were taken into a small holding cell with 15 people
in it, two of whom were reporters with Reuters and Turkey’s Anadolu
Agency, Shaygan said.
It was while they were in holding that the three heard reports of
the disturbing abuse suffered by Daryabi, 22, and Naqdi, 28, who were
being held in separate rooms. <We could hear their screams and cries
through the walls,> the cellmates said of the piercing cries. <The
cellmates had even heard the sounds of women crying from pain.>
Pictures posted by the newspaper online filled in the rest of the
story. They showed clear physical evidence of the floggings and beatings
with cables both men were subject to. Daryabi’s lower back, upper legs,
and face were covered with deep red lesions. Naqdi’s left arm, upper
back, upper legs, and face were also covered in red welts. <They were
beaten so bad, they couldn’t walk. They were hit with guns, they were
kicked, they were whipped with cables, they were slapped,> Shaygan said.
He said the violence was so brutal that Naqdi and Daryabi had lost
consciousness from the pain.
But it was not just journalists who seemed to meet this fate.
Shaygan said a male protester was escorted into their cell by Taliban
guards, clearly looking as if he too had been abused.
<He could barely walk, one of the other cellmates had to get up
and help him in,> said Shaygan.
Stern warning
Though all five men were released after several hours in
detention, Shaygan said they were issued a stern warning from a Taliban
official before leaving: <What these protesters were doing is illegal
and by covering such things, you all broke the law. We will let you go
this time, but next time you won’t be let out so easily.
At the time, protests were not outlawed but, within hours, the
Taliban issued a decree saying any protests, along with their slogans,
must be approved 24 hours prior by the Ministry of Justice.
Those claims of illegality by the official struck Shaygan and his
colleagues as going directly against statements the Taliban have made
about freedom of the press in their <Islamic Emirate>. >>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/9/talibans-violence-against-women-reporters-intensifies
The Guardian
8 Sept 2021
Humanity United
Zahra Joya for Rukhshana Media
<<‘They came for my daughter’: Afghan single mothers face losing
children under Taliban.
Life for single mothers in Afghanistan has always been marred by
stigma and poverty. Now with the Taliban in control, what few
protections they had have disappeared.
The day after Mazar-i-Sharif, the provincial capital of Balkh
province, fell to the Taliban on 14 August, gunmen came for Raihana’s*
six-year-old daughter. Widowed when her husband was murdered by Taliban
forces in 2020, Raihana had been raising her child as a single mother.
After her husband’s death she had fought her in-laws for custody of her
daughter and won, thanks to the rights she had under Afghan civil law –
which state that single women can keep their children if they can
provide for them financially. Now, with her city in Taliban hands,
Raihana was alone.
<The day after the fall of Mazar-i-Sharif, my brother in-law
showed up at my father’s house, where I lived, with Taliban fighters
demanding to give them my daughter,> Raihana told the Guardian. Raihana
was lucky. She and her daughter were not at home when the armed men
arrived. As soon as she heard, she took her child and fled
Mazar-i-Sharif for Kabul.
<They wanted to take my daughter away from me,> she said. <We hid
in flour sacks in the back of a truck and when the driver found us we
begged him to take us to Kabul.>
Once in the Afghan capital, Raihana went from embassy to embassy
seeking help. Eventually her sister, who lives in the UK, was able to
get them both on a flight out of Afghanistan to safety. They are now in
Manchester.
<I managed to leave Afghanistan after so much hardship. I’m so
happy that my daughter is with me,> Raihana says. <I thank the UK
government.>
Life for single mothers in Afghanistan has always been marred by
stigma, poverty and marginalisation. Now with the Taliban in control,
what few protections they had have disappeared and their situation is
increasingly desperate.
Yalda, a 28-year-old, single mother of three, is in hiding in
Kabul as her ex-husband hunts for her children.
<My ex-husband is a member of the Taliban now and is trying to
take my children away,> she said. <My father’s house is surrounded.
They’re constantly harassing them, looking for me and my children. He
wants to use any opportunity he gets.>
Yalda* says she was terrorised by her husband for years. <My
father arranged the marriage when I was only 14 years old. I didn’t know
anything about being married – I was still a child myself,> she says.
Soon afterwards Yalda fell pregnant and she had two more children
in the years that followed. She also discovered that her husband was a
member of the Taliban. She says their marriage was one of violence and
abuse.
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/sep/08/they-came-for-my-daughter-afghan-single-mothers-face-losing-children-under-taliban
The Guardian
8 Sept 2021
Wu Yue, Christopher Cherry and Katie Lamborn
<<China's accidental feminist icon: 'I left my abusive husband
for a life on the road' – video.
56-year-old Su Min decided to leave her abusive relationship and
embark on an open-ended solo road trip. In China, where women are
frequently expected to serve the role of a dutiful housewife and support
their husbands, her decision to strike out on her own could be seen as
controversial. But after she began live-streaming her journey and her
struggles, she became a Chinese internet sensation with online fans
sending her donations to fund her new life. Su has become an accidental
feminist icon, inspiring other women to leave behind restrictive gender
expectations for a life of adventure.
Watch the video here:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2021/sep/08/chinas-accidental-feminist-icon-i-left-my-abusive-husband-for-a-life-on-the-road-video
Al Jazeera
7 Sept 2021
<<Mexico Supreme Court says criminalising abortion
unconstitutional.
‘This is a historic step,’ Supreme Court justice says of ruling
hailed as a major victory for women’s rights.
Mexico’s Supreme Court has ruled that it is unconstitutional to
penalise abortion, a major victory for women’s health and reproductive
rights that comes amid a <green wave> of abortion decriminalisation in
Latin America. The Mexican court’s decision on Tuesday follows moves to
decriminalise abortion at the state level, although most of the country
still has tough laws in place against women terminating their pregnancy
early.
<This is a historic step for the rights of women,> said Supreme
Court Justice Luis Maria Aguilar.
The court unanimously annulled several provisions of a law from
Coahuila – a state on the border with the US state of Texas – that had
made abortion a criminal act, and its decision will immediately only
affect the northern border state.
But it established <obligatory criteria for all of the country’s
judges>, compelling them to act the same way in similar cases, said
Supreme Court President Arturo Zaldivar. The decision came amid a wave
of abortion rights victories in Latin America, including in Argentina,
where the Senate late last year voted to legalise elective abortions
until the 14th week of pregnancy.
Ecuador in April legalised abortion in cases of rape, while
women’s rights advocates in other countries in the region – where the
Catholic Church continues to wield a strong influence – are pushing to
loosen restrictive abortion laws, as well. But several US states have
recently taken steps to restrict women’s access to abortion,
particularly Texas, which last week enacted the strictest anti-abortion
law in the country after the US Supreme Court declined to intervene.
Civil and immigrant rights groups have denounced the Texas law, which
bans abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.
They say Black women and other minorities, as well as women in
low-income communities, will be hardest hit by the prohibition – and at
least one group, the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and
Legal Services (RAICES), has said it will not abide by the legislation.
<RAICES assisted and gave financial support to immigrants seeking
abortion in Texas for years, and will continue to do so – no matter
what,> RAICES CEO and President Jonathan Ryan said in a statement last
week.
Meanwhile, the Mexican ruling on Tuesday opens the door to the
possibility for the release of women incarcerated for having had
abortions. It could also lead to US women in states such as Texas
deciding to travel south of the border to terminate their pregnancies.
Mexican reproductive rights group GIRE hailed the court’s
decision as <a historic move> >>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/7/mexico-supreme-court-says-criminalising-abortion-unconstitutional
and 3 more related articles:
Ecuador at critical crossroads in push for abortion rights
The struggle to secure access to abortion in Argentina goes on
The mental health cost of Poland’s abortion ban
Al Jazeera
By Anuja
8 Sep 2021
<<India: 25 years on, Women’s Reservation Bill still not a
reality.
India ranks 148th in a list of 193 countries based on the
percentage of elected women representatives in their national
parliaments.
New Delhi, India – <This is a special day in the history of our
country…>
These were the opening remarks of a debate that took place on
September 12, 1996, in the Lok Sabha, the Indian parliament’s lower
house.
On the agenda was the introduction of a constitutional amendment
bill that sought to reserve one-third of seats for women in the Lok
Sabha and state legislative assemblies. Similar versions of the bill
were introduced later in 1998, 1999, and 2008, but all four lapsed with
the dissolution of those governments. Twenty-five years after it was
first introduced in parliament, the Women’s Reservation Bill continues
to languish and is yet to become a reality. Political leaders and
experts say that while the initial delay was due to concerns over the
issue of intersectionality, at the heart of the delays is the
unwillingness to share power and fear of losing bastions of electoral
support. An analysis by New Delhi-based Association for Democratic
Reforms (ADR) shows that female representatives make up less than 15
percent in Lok Sabha and the legislative assemblies, based on the
results of the last state elections. Studies and experts agree that a
lack of political participation by women has an impact on policy framing
and diversity in decision making.
Globally, India ranks 148th in a list of 193 countries based on
the percentage of elected women representatives in their national
parliaments, as of June this year. The same data shows that while the
global average for <lower chamber or unicameral> is 25.8 percent, India
stands at 14.4 percent with 78 out of 543 Lok Sabha representatives
elected in 2019 being women, the highest number to date. India’s
parliament is bicameral and female members make up 11.6 percent of the
upper house or Rajya Sabha.
Long wait
In those 25 years, each time the bill came up for discussion or
passage, the Indian parliament saw high drama and hostile resistance.
From objectionable comments about women to physical scuffles and
ill-tempered debates – the bill has seen it all.
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/8/25-years-india-women-reservation-bill-elected-bodies-gender
and 4 links to these articles:
Dalit women confront discrimination on Indian village councils
Indian female politicians face online abuse: Study
How Indian women contributed to the suffrage movement
The solitude of female politicians in South Asia
Al Jazeera
7 Sept 2021
<<Aid groups warn of ‘impending humanitarian crisis’ in
Afghanistan.
Call for funding as thousands of health centres and NGOs face
closure affecting millions of Afghans.
International aid agencies have raised the alarm about an
<impending humanitarian crisis> in Afghanistan, with medical charity
Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF) saying the
country’s vulnerable healthcare system was facing a <potential
collapse>.
On Monday, the United Nations appealed for almost $200m in extra
funding for life-saving aid in Afghanistan after the Taliban’s takeover
last month resulted in the exodus of aid workers and subsequent funding
cut. <Basic services in Afghanistan are collapsing and food and other
life-saving aid is about to run out,> said OCHA spokesman Jens Laerke on
Monday.
Martine Flokstra from the MSF said an already dire situation in
Afghanistan’s hospitals has become worse since the Taliban’s march on
Kabul on August 15 triggered a collapse of the West-backed government.
She said medics have not received salaries in months and health
centres are running out of medicines amid an increase in the number of
patients coming to facilities. <So potential collapse of the healthcare
system is one of our major concerns,> she told Al Jazeera.
<Sirens are sounding,> Al Jazeera’s Charlotte Bellis, reporting
from Kabul, said about SOS being sent out by aid agencies such as World
Health Organization (WHO), MSF, Afghan Red Crescent and Red Cross.
The WHO has warned that Afghanistan was becoming increasingly
desperate and that a pause in the country’s wellness projects has left
millions of Afghans at risk of losing essential medical care. <WHO has
said that 90 percent of their clinics will close imminently,> Bellis
said, adding that last year they treated millions of people through
their 2,300 health clinics spread across the country.
Continue to provide assistance
The UN humanitarian agency OCHA said the extra sum meant a total
of $606m in aid was now needed for Afghanistan until the end of the
year, as the country has been cut off from the international financial
institutions and its foreign reserves frozen by the US.
Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Monday
that they will continue to provide assistance despite sanctions on the
Taliban. <We are determined with the international community to continue
to provide the Afghans with humanitarian assistance. We can and will do
that working through partners and NGOs such as the United Nations as
sanctions remain in place on Afghanistan,> he said at a news conference
in the Qatari capital Doha.
Al Jazeera’s Bellis said donor countries are trying to find ways
to send aid through different aid agencies.
<It is a complicated picture in Afghanistan. It is a vulnerable
country, but it has always relied on international aid and donors and a
lot of that money isn’t coming because of sanctions on the Taliban,> she
said.
UN meet over Afghan issue
The Afghan situation will be discussed next Monday at a
ministerial meeting in Geneva hosted by UN chief Antonio Guterres. The
country, now under the control of the Taliban after 20 years of war, is
facing a <looming humanitarian catastrophe>, Guterres’s spokesman
Stephane Dujarric warned last week announcing the conference. OCHA
voiced hope that countries would pledge generously at the conference,
saying $606m was needed to provide critical food and livelihood
assistance to nearly 11 million people, and essential health services to
3.4 million. The funds would also go towards treatment for acute
malnutrition for more than a million children and women, water,
sanitation and hygiene interventions, and protection of children and
survivors of gender-based violence.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/7/un-ramps-up-afghan-aid-appeal-as-catastrophe-looms
The Guardian
6 Sept 2021
Interview by Henry Yates
<<Skunk Anansie: how we made Weak.
‘It was a vulnerable moment that turned into a moment of
strength. It was basically me saying: I am never going to be hit by
anyone ever again’.
Skin, vocals/co-writer
Weak was written about an experience I’d had a few years earlier.
I was dating a guy I shouldn’t have been going out with in the first
place: he was older, he wanted to get married and all these things, but
he didn’t ask me, he just decided. Back then, I was so meek and mild. My
friends would say: <Your boyfriend is so controlling. You have to stick
up for yourself.>
I wanted to enter a dance competition but my boyfriend said:
<You’re not going.> I told him: <I can do what I want.> So he drove me
to some desolate car park and punched me right in the face. Then he did
it again. I was so shocked and angry, I didn’t even feel the pain. I
went into survival mode. Driving home, I jumped out at a traffic lights
and ran. But I was standing at a bus stop when he pulled up and dragged
me into the car. Nobody said or did a thing.
Once we got to his house, he started weeping, saying: <I’ll never
do it again.> I could see my whole life in front of me, like, a
housewife with five million kids. And then to be a battered wife as
well? No fucking way. The relationship, from that second, was over. I
remember feeling scared but also quite strong, because I knew I would
never put myself in a position like that again.
One night, years later, during preproduction for our debut album
Paranoid & Sunburnt, I was practising chords on the acoustic guitar I’d
bought with my record deal money. Just playing E minor, D and C, over
and over. Then I started singing along: <Lost in time, I can’t count the
words.> Weak is a song about being vulnerable but strong and brave at
the same time. The chorus – “Weak as I am, no tears for you” – is like I
was crying, but not for him. I was basically saying: <I am never going
to be hit by anyone ever again.>
The whole song is those three chords, with a fourth in the
chorus. When I took it to the band, I told them: <I’ve got this B-side.>
But we all worked on it, and put in the middle-eight, and that’s how the
song was born. The boys gave Weak its groove, sexiness and power. So it
was a vulnerable moment that turned into a moment of strength.
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/sep/06/skunk-anansie-how-we-made-weak
The Guardian
3 Sept 2021
Global development is supported by
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Chika Mefor-Nwachukwu
<<Having watched a woman and her baby die needlessly after being
refused admission to a hospital over a lack of money, Liyatu Ayuba
wanted to never let it happen again. The 62-year-old is one of Nigeria’s
nearly 3 million internally displaced people (IDPs) – driven out of
their homes by the violence of the Boko Haram Islamist militants. Ayuba
fled Gwoza in the north-eastern state of Borno in 2011 with her family.
After her husband was killed by Boko Haram and her teenage son badly
wounded, she went to the makeshift Durumi 1 IDP camp, in Nigeria’s
capital, Abuja, where about 500 families live. <Two days after arriving
in the camp, a pregnant woman became ill. She was suffering from
eclampsia,> says Ayuba. The woman had trekked for two weeks from
Cameroon, her first stop of refuge from Boko Haram, before being brought
to Durumi 1.
<We took her to a government-owned hospital, which asked us for
150,000 naira [£265]. Even when we told them that we were IDPs and had
no such money, they insisted. The woman and the baby died,> says Ayuba.
Early in the conflict, the Nigerian government allowed the camp’s
residents to access public hospitals. But with the nearest hospital
almost 10 miles away, many of the impoverished residents could not
afford to get there and, as camps grew more crowded, the government put
pressure on IDPs to return home, by cutting off their access to public
health services. Ayuba had spent years watching her grandmother deliver
babies as their village’s traditional birth attendant and she took on
the task of becoming the camp’s only midwife, though untrained
medically.
Since then, Ayuba has helped deliver 118 babies, becoming known
in the camp as the <woman leader> and, for the mothers she helped, a
saviour.
<We do not have enough money to go to the hospital. Having the
‘woman leader’ means we can deliver our babies for free. Who else can we
run to when we are in labour? But with her clinic so close to us, we can
just walk down, have our babies and return home,> says Hafsat Ahmed, one
of Ayuba’s patients.
Another, Deborah Daniel, says Ayuba came to her home to deliver
her baby, now seven months old, because she could not get to the clinic.
According to 2019 World Health Organization figures, Nigeria
accounts for about 20% of the world’s maternal deaths, with more than
600,000 recorded between 2005 and 2015, and 900,000 maternity near-miss
cases. A 2020 study attributed the exceptionally high maternal and
neonatal mortality rate to delays in finding healthcare.
For roughly 1.17 million IDP women, of whom 510,555 were
adolescent girls of reproductive age in 2016, these delays are
multiplied. A 2020 report by the Center for Reproductive Rights, a
global legal advocacy group, said most women in Durumi camp gave birth
in their tents and that often those who sought care at a health clinic
in the city were detained there for not paying fees. In one incident,
the report said, the body of a woman who died in the clinic was not
released until fellow IDPs raised the money to pay the bill.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/sep/03/nigerias-idp-camp-midwife-bringing-joy-to-mothers-left-behind-by-state
Al Jazeera
3 Sept 2021
By Faisal Fareed
<<Indian girls write to Modi demanding marriage age be raised to
21.
Hundreds of girls write to Indian PM, who himself promised last
year to review the minimum age of marriage for women.
New Delhi, India – Sonam Kumari left her house in the eastern
Indian state of Bihar after her parents began to plan her marriage last
year.
The 19-year-old resident of the state capital, Patna, tried hard
to convince her parents to allow her to continue her studies and delay
the marriage.
When her requests did not get any positive response, she decided
to leave her house and move to Gurugram city in the northern state of
Haryana, 1,100km (683 miles) away. Currently pursuing her college
education through distance mode, Sonam has also joined a job to meet her
expenses.
<I wanted to study but my parents did not listen. I was left with
no choice but to leave the house,> she told Al Jazeera. Though she was
far away from her parents, the pressure to marry had not exactly eased.
Last month, Sonam decided to write a letter to Prime Minister Narendra
Modi, urging him to increase the marriage age for girls to 21, like it
is for the boys, <so that we can complete our studies>.
Sonam’s story sparked a silent movement in Haryana, which at 879
(females against 1,000 males) has one of the worst sex ratios among the
Indian states. Hundreds of girls from the state have written similar
letters to Modi, who himself promised last year to review the minimum
age for marriage for women during his independence day speech.
Currently, the minimum age of consent for marriage is 18 and 21
years for women and men, respectively, which is also prescribed in the
Special Marriage Act, 1954 and Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006.
In June last year, the government formed a committee <to ensure that the
daughters are no longer suffering from malnutrition and they are married
off at the right age>, Modi said in his August 15, 2020 speech.
According to Indian media reports, the committee submitted its
report in January this year, but no decision on raising the marriage age
of women has been taken by the government yet. In such a scenario, girls
in Haryana continue to write to Modi, with nearly 800 letters sent to
his office so far. Their main concern: they want to complete their
studies before marrying.
<At 18 years, the girl hardly completes her school and at the age
of 21, she completes her graduation. Obviously being a graduate, she has
more options for a better job or if she wants to start something for her
own,> Priyakshi Jakhar, a resident of Haryana’s Hisar district, told Al
Jazeera.
In their letters, most of the girls have cited their experiences,
while some have even penned a poem supporting their cause.
Anju from Haryana’s Palwal district is a postgraduate in law and
is now preparing to join the judicial services.
<It has been my personal experience. My cousin was married at an
early age. She had just completed her Class X. The relationship did not
work out, she got pregnant and delivered a baby. Now she is separated
and has nowhere to go. I think if she had completed her education, she
would have been better settled,> Anju told Al Jazeera.
Mubashira, a native of Muslim-dominated Mewat in Haryana,
completed her bachelor’s degree in education from New Delhi’s Jamia
Millia Islamia university. She is now teaching young girls in her home
district. Mubashira was instrumental in spreading the word about the
letter campaign and got several girls to write to Modi on the issue. <I
teach young girls and after a year of their college studies or so, they
are married. Once married, their studies are disrupted,> she told Al
Jazeera.
<They cannot even manage their households at this age. Several
health issues during pregnancies are also common. We should allow the
girls to mature, complete their studies, and when she is mentally
prepared, then only marry her.>
Tabassum Muskan, a law student from Mewat, says she loves to play
cricket and wants to pursue it as a career. She has also written to Modi,
demanding marriage age be raised.
<We should give girls a chance. Just see how they are excelling
in various fields and bringing laurels to the country,> she told Al
Jazeera.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/3/indian-girls-write-to-modi-demanding-marriage-age-be-raised-to-21
The Guardian
2 Sept 2021
Shefali Luthra for the 19th
<<After the Texas abortion ban, clinics in nearby states brace
for demand.
Texas-based patients put pressure on clinics in other states –
and demands on abortion funds.
Originally published by the 19th.
With the vast majority of abortions now illegal in Texas, clinics
in nearby states are already reporting increases in demand as patients
prepare to travel hundreds of miles to safely, legally terminate a
pregnancy.
The Texas ban prohibits abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, a
point at which few people realize they’ve conceived and before most
abortions take place. Clinics in Texas have stopped scheduling
abortion-related visits for people who are more than six weeks pregnant.
As a result, clinics in Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas and New Mexico
are either expecting or are already starting to receive calls from
Texas-based patients now forced to leave the state to end their
pregnancies – likely stretching those clinics’ already thin resources.
Many patients will travel hundreds of miles: the law has increased the
average one-way driving distance for a Texan seeking an abortion from 12
miles to 248, per analyses by the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks
reproductive health policy. The law also adds to the likelihood that
someone traveling for care would need to find overnight lodging,
potentially adding an additional cost.
Neighboring Louisiana has strict restrictions on the procedure,
and many clinics are without power in the wake of Hurricane Ida.
Abortion funds – which provide money for people who cannot afford an
abortion or don’t have the resources to travel – are also preparing for
increased demand.
<We’re planning on a large increase [in calls] starting late this
week and next week,> said Joan Lamunyon Sanford, who heads the New
Mexico Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, which provides
financial support for people who travel to the state for abortions. <We
are doing very assertive targeted fundraising, so that we have the
resources we need. We’ve never had to turn anyone down because of
finances, and we don’t want to have to do that.>
But the often-fragile abortion clinic infrastructure in
neighboring states probably will not be able to care for all of them.
Many clinics and providers are already fully booked just caring for the
people who live in their states, and abortion funds are already
struggling to support everyone who seeks their aid. Providers and
advocates worry that people with lower incomes and greater distances to
travel will ultimately fall through the cracks, leading them to carry
unwanted pregnancies to term or attempt to terminate their pregnancies
at home, which is often dangerous.
We’ve never had to turn anyone down because of finances, and we
don’t want to have to do that
Joan Lamunyon Sanford
Still, providers say they expect the surge in demand, already
evident, to grow even further.
Trust Women, an abortion-providing clinic with outposts in both
Oklahoma City and Wichita, is already seeing the effect. They started
fielding calls from Texas-based patients even before the six-week ban
took effect. The Oklahoma City-based clinic, which is more than 100
miles from the state’s border with Texas, had, as of 31 August, already
scheduled abortion-related visits for about 40 people from Texas,
according to spokesperson Zack Gingrich-Gaylord.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/02/as-texas-patients-prepare-to-travel-hundreds-of-miles-for-abortion-access-out-of-state-clinics-brace-for-surge
Read also The Guardian's article publisched online on 2 Sept
2021:
<<Texas now has abortion ‘bounty hunters’: read Sotomayor’s
scathing legal dissent.
Sonia Sotomayor
Justice Sotomayor wrote a blistering dissent on the US supreme
court failing to block an extreme Texas abortion law. We are
republishing it here:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/02/sonia-sotomayor-dissent-texas-abortion-ban-law-supreme-court
Women's Media Center
Sept 1 2021
<<A New Way to Combat High School Sexual Harassment and Assault.
Nearly half of students in grades 7–12 report facing sexual
harassment. More than 11% of all students experience rape or sexual
assault. Approximately two-thirds of college students experience sexual
harassment. The first time I remember experiencing any form of sexual
harassment was at my school bus stop in seventh grade. I stood waiting
for the bus to come with a group of friends, chatting about upcoming
tests and homework from the night before. Suddenly, an older man
strolled up to me and said something that will forever be etched in my
memory: <You’re pretty. I want to f*** you hard.> I felt targeted. I
felt violated. If someone hadn’t been there to tell him to get away, I
fear something worse would have happened to me. Around five years have
passed since that incident, but I still think about it constantly. As a
biracial (half Korean, half white) teenage girl, I often feel even more
at risk, especially with the rise in AAPI hate within the past few
months.
Asian American women are far too often oversexualized, painted as
<exotic> and <submissive.> The shooting rampage that occurred in Atlanta
in March is a prime example. Of those murdered, four women were of
Korean descent, and two of Chinese heritage. The shooter, Robert Long,
claimed he was motivated to act violently because of his self-proclaimed
<sex addiction.> He sought to eliminate the objects of his sexual
temptations: Asian women.
This sexual objectification needs to end.
Throughout my years of schooling, I have received a very limited
education about sexual harassment. Consent was talked about briefly in
my eighth-grade science class, and my health teacher presented a short
unit on sexual violence during my freshman year. Since then, no teacher
has even mentioned it. In fact, they almost seem scared to talk about
what they deem to be a ,touchy subject.>
But the harsh reality is that sexual violence is very real and
very common. I knew something within the education system needed to
change.
So, when I first heard about Stop Sexual Assault in Schools (SSAIS),
a nonprofit working to “proactively address the epidemic of traumatic
sexual harassment impacting our nation’s students,” according to the
SSAIS website, I was immediately intrigued. I joined as a volunteer and
got started right away.>>
Read more here:
https://womensmediacenter.com/fbomb/a-new-way-to-combat-high-school-sexual-harassment-and-assault
Al Jazeera
1 Sept 2021
By Amandas Ong
<<Excluded: How women suffer from digital poverty in the UK.
Women in ethnic minority communities are most likely to suffer
the economic and social disadvantages that this brings.
Until the first wave of COVID-19 hit the United Kingdom last
year, Karon, who prefers not to give her full name, only ever made
limited use of the internet. The last time there had been a functioning
computer in her South London home, her husband was still alive: that was
in 2016. The final years of his life were punishing on the family. He
had been made redundant from his job as a digital map librarian for a
chartered surveyor, when Karon was pregnant with their daughter, Sian,
in 2009. She would find him hunched over the keyboard, tapping away in
his search for a new job.
<I mostly used the computer to store family photos, but not much
else. We’d been talking about getting a new one before he died,> Karon,
52, says. This plan never came to fruition, however, as most of her time
was consumed by the staggering trials that lay ahead of her in her
untimely bereavement.
Karon had worked as a teaching assistant at several primary
schools and nurseries. Suddenly, she was also the main carer for Sian,
now 11, who was born with a rare neurodevelopmental disorder that causes
severe motor and speech impairment. Even with state-provided childcare
support coming out of her tax credits, things were difficult for the two
of them. For 18 months after her husband’s death, Karon continued to
work, but the strain of finding the childcare that Sian needed while she
was away from home started to take its toll and she was forced to give
up work for a time.
In March 2020, when Karon was working again, schools across the
UK went into lockdown as a preventative measure against the spread of
COVID. As Sian’s teachers began sending out homework that could be
accessed through the school’s website, Karon panicked. <I said, ‘I’ve
got no laptop’. Sian had been without schoolwork for two weeks. I was
making little books for her from scratch to buy time, simple phonic
exercises so she could practise the alphabet.> Her husband’s old laptop
had long stopped working by this point, although they did still have
access to the internet at their home.
A neighbour who heard about her problem offered to help print out
Sian’s assignments for her until a solution could be found. Alerted to
Karon’s predicament by a pastoral manager at the school, the headteacher
dropped by their home personally with a laptop belonging to the school,
telling her that she could keep it indefinitely. <He’s a miracle worker,
Mr Taylor,> Karon says.
Karon’s experience of digital exclusion is far from uncommon in
the UK. According to the Office for National Statistics’ most recent
figures, 59 percent of <internet non-users> in 2020 (or 1.97 million
people) in the country were women. This is a segment of the population
that has never gone online. A further 1.5 million women had not used the
internet for at least three months at the time that the survey was
conducted. Despite an overall surge in internet usage driven out of
necessity by the pandemic, women have continued to lag behind men in
terms of online access – a trend that has persisted since 2013. When it
comes to technological competency, there is a similar gender divide. In
2018, women made up 61 percent of 4.3 million UK adults who were found
to have no basic digital skills at all.>>
Read more here (long story):
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2021/9/1/excluded-how-women-suffer-from-digital-poverty-in-the-uk
Al Jazeera
1 Sept 2021
<<US Supreme Court mum, allowing Texas 6-week abortion ban.
The law took effect in Texas at midnight in what advocates say is
a major backslide in abortion access rights.
A law in Texas banning abortions after six weeks of pregnancy has
taken effect as the US Supreme Court did not act on an emergency request
by pro-abortion rights groups to block the measure.
Abortion rights advocates say the law represents the most
dramatic restrictions since the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe V Wade
decision, which legalised abortion across the country in 1973.
The Texas law, which was signed by Republican Governor Gregg
Abbott in May after passing the state’s Republican-controlled
legislature, would prohibit 85 percent of abortions previously conducted
in the state, advocates say. They have argued that women commonly do not
know they are pregnant at that point – when a heartbeat is first
detectable.
At least 12 other states have enacted bans on abortion early in
pregnancy, but all have been blocked from going into effect.
Planned Parenthood and other women’s health providers, doctors,
and clergy members challenged the law in federal court in Austin in
July, contending it violated the constitutional right to an abortion.
In a tweet, Planned Parenthood vowed: <We aren’t backing down and
we are still fighting>.
<Everyone deserves access to abortion,> the group said.
Democratic Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley tweeted: <Abortion care
is a human right.> >>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/1/us-supreme-court-mum-allowing-texas-6-week-abortion-ban
and 3 more Al Jazeera links to related articles on the same page
AND GOOD NEWS HERE:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/6/us-attorney-general-vows-to-protect-abortion-clinics-in-texas
Al Jazeera
31 August 2021
<<Outcry in Ivory Coast over televised ‘rape demonstration’
NCI TV channel says presenter suspended amid nationwide backlash
over scene with man using mannequin to simulate rape.
A TV channel in Ivory Coast has apologised after broadcasting a
show in which a man presented as a former rapist explained how he
assaulted his victims, using a mannequin for the demonstration.
The programme, broadcast at prime time on Monday by the private
Nouvelle Chaine Ivorienne (NCI) channel, caused a nationwide outcry,
including a petition signed by 30,000 people demanding that the
presenters be punished.
The show saw host Yves de M’Bella hand his guest a mannequin,
laughing, helping him lay it on the ground and asking him to explain in
detail how he raped his victims.
At the end of this <demonstration,> the man was invited to give
women <advice> to avoid being raped.
<Please tell me I’m dreaming,> Priss’K, an Ivorian rapper, wrote
on Facebook.
<It’s disgusting, unacceptable, disrespectful, especially towards
women,> she wrote. <Rape is so degrading and dehumanising for the
victim.>
TV channel apology
The petition, addressed to the country’s media regulator and the
ministries of communication and youth, called for the show to be
cancelled and for <its presenting team, headed by Yves de M’Bella, to be
sanctioned>.
NCI’s management apologised on Tuesday, saying it was committed
<to respecting human rights and in particular those of women>, and
expressing its <solidarity with women who are victims of violence and
abuse of all kinds>.
Taking responsibility <for this serious and regrettable mistake>,
NCI said De M’Bella had been suspended and the contested episode of the
show would not be rebroadcast. In June, an NGO called CPDEFM, which
campaigns for the rights of children, women and minorities, found, after
an in-depth probe, that in the space of two years, 416 women had been
killed in Abidjan alone. It also identified 2,000 cases of violence
against women, including 1,290 marriages of girls aged less than 18 and
1,121 rapes.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/8/31/outcry-in-ivory-coast-over-televised-rape-demonstration
Al Jazeera
30 August 2021
Ali M Latifi
<<Kabul families say children killed in US drone attack.
Ten people from a Kabul neighbourhood killed in US drone attack –
Washington claims ISKP fighters were the target.
Kabul, Afghanistan – The Ahmadi and Nejrabi families had packed
all their belongings, waiting for word to be escorted to Kabul airport
and eventually moved to the United States, but the message Washington
sent instead was a rocket into their homes in a Kabul neighbourhood.
The Sunday afternoon drone attack, which the US claimed was
conducted on an Islamic State in Khorasan Province, ISKP (ISIS-K)
target, killed 10 members of the families, ranging from two to 40 years
old.
Aimal Ahmadi, whose nieces and nephews were among those killed,
is still in disbelief. Like others in the neighbourhood, he is incensed
that his brother and nephews and nieces were never recognised in the
media as what they were, a family going about their life.
For hours, he and the rest of the surviving family had to listen
to Afghan and international media refer to their loved ones, whose
remains they had to gather with their own hands, simply as suspected
ISKP targets.
<They were innocent, helpless children,> Ahmadi says of the
majority of the victims, including two-year-old Malika. Had he not gone
out to buy groceries, Ahmadi himself could have very easily been one of
the victims.
He says his brother, 40-year-old engineer Zemarai, had just
arrived home from work. Because the families were expecting to go to the
US, Zemarai asked one of his sons to park the car inside the two-floor
house. He wanted his older boys to practice driving before they arrived
in the US.
Several of the children quickly packed into the car, wanting to
take the short ride from the street to the garden of the family home.
<When the car had come to a stop, that’s when the rocket hit,>
Aimal told Al Jazeera.
Walls stained red with blood
What happened next was an all-too-common scene of mayhem in
Afghanistan as frantic relatives and neighbours ran to the scene. Some
brought water, hoping to douse the flames that had spread from the
Toyota sedan the children had packed into to an SUV parked nearby.
<It’s very symbolic that US operations in Afghanistan started
with drone strikes and ended with drone strikes. It seems they’ve
learned nothing in 20 years>.
Emran Feroz, an Afghan journalist
Neighbours speaking to Al Jazeera said the house, where little
boys and girls had been playing a few minutes prior, turned into a
<horror scene>. They described human flesh stuck to the walls. Bones
fallen into the bushes. Walls stained red with blood. Shattered glass
everywhere.
Talking about one of the younger boys, Farzad, a neighbour said:
<We only found his legs.>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/8/30/an-afghan-family-killed-by-a-us-airstrike-in-kabul
Al Jazeera
29 August 2021
<<India: Four charged with rape, murder of nine-year-old girl.
Child was allegedly sexually assaulted by a priest and three
workers after she went to a crematorium to fetch water.
A priest and three other men were charged with the gang rape and
murder of a so-called <lower-caste> nine-year-old girl, Indian police
said, in a case that sparked days of protests in the capital, New Delhi.
The girl was allegedly assaulted by the priest, 53, and three
workers on August 1 after she went into a crematorium to ask for water.
The four men, who have been in custody since they were arrested
in early August, face the death penalty.
The girl’s mother earlier told police the men called her to the
crematorium and said her daughter had been electrocuted. They said if
she reported the incident to police, doctors conducting an autopsy would
remove her child’s organs and sell them.
Her daughter’s body was then cremated before some locals
intervened and pulled the charred remains from the pyre.
A 400-page charge sheet from Delhi Police cited <scientific,
technical and other evidence> and witness testimony after the accused
were charged, the government said in a statement late Saturday.
Making the charges within 30 days of the alleged incident
reflected <zero tolerance> of crimes against women and girls in the
nation of 1.3 billion people, it said.
India is considered one of the most dangerous places in the world
to be a woman. Home ministry data from last year said a woman is raped
every 15 minutes in the South Asian country. But large numbers of sexual
assaults are believed to go unreported.
Despite India’s stringent anti-rape laws, activists and feminists
say the situation on the ground has not improved.
A report published by the National Dalit Movement for Justice in
September last year said close to 400,000 incidents of violence were
reported between 2009 and 2018, a six-percent increase from the previous
decade.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/8/29/four-charged-with-rape-murder-of-nine-year-old-indian-girl
and on the same page an Al Jazeera link to an article to a
similar case.
Al Jazeera
30 August 2021
Malia Bouattia
Malia Bouattia is an activist and former President of the
National Union of Students
<<This year’s Olympics were widely hailed as the most progressive
instalment of the event in its 125-year history. Early media coverage in
the lead-up to the games focused on the fact that almost half of the
participants were women – a first for the international event since its
inception in 1896 in Athens, Greece.
However, the headlines were soon replaced by coverage of the
German women gymnasts’ somewhat radical choice of sportswear, which
sought to challenge the expected bikini-cut leotards. The team captured
global media attention when they wore long-sleeved, long-legged unitards,
which one of the participants said was intended to <show that every
woman, everybody, should decide what to wear>. They were hailed for
defying the norms of the often revealing uniforms women athletes are
expected to wear, and that some feel <uncomfortable or even sexualised>
in.
While the action taken by the German athletes was symbolically
important, the conversations surrounding the initiative, the gymnasts’
intentions, and their impact have felt quite limited to the small world
of Olympic sports. This has been a missed opportunity to expand the
public conversation on the issue, especially for Germany, which has been
targeting women’s choice of dress for many years.
For over 15 years, German Muslim women have been fighting against
systematic attempts by local authorities and the federal state to
dictate what they can and cannot wear in public. It would have only made
sense to bring this long struggle to the attention of the German public
and have an honest discussion about how all women deserve the right to
choose what they wear.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/8/30/the-struggle-for-womens-free-choice-of-dress-in-germany
The Guardian
31 August 2021
Akhtar Mohammad Makoii in Islamabad
<<‘People are broken’: Afghans describe first day under full
Taliban control.
Citizens tell of ‘absolute feeling of depression’ after last
American troops left country overnight.
Arifa Ahmadi* started her first day under full Taliban control by
burning her jeans and any other clothes that the Taliban would be likely
to disapprove of as the nation woke up to a new era after the last
American troops left the country overnight.
Ahmadi is a part of the generation that has grown up during the
past 20 years and enjoyed freedom, education and employment under a
government backed by the west – but lost her job after the Taliban took
over the country.
'I tried a lot to get a job in a customs office in Farah and I
got that. I celebrated it with my friends. I invited them to my home. We
were very happy,”'Ahmadi told the Guardian. 'But I lost it only after
three weeks. Many of women were asked by the Taliban to leave the
office. As I looked at the situation, I didn’t even try to go back.'
She added: 'A man with a long beard is sitting on my chair now.'
The Taliban have so far been at pains to show a more conciliatory
face to the world, with none of the harsh public punishments and
outright bans on public entertainment that characterised their previous
time in power before 2001.
But Ahmadi left Farah after the Taliban overran the city and has
been living in Kabul since then, hoping to leave the country through a
foreign company.
'I have been crying since this morning. My brother went out and
bought me a burqa, I burned my jeans today. I was crying and burning
them, I burned my hopes with them. Nothing will make me happy any more.
I am just waiting for my death, I do not want this life any more,'
Ahmadi said.
'Since the Taliban took Farah, all these days I was feeling like
I’m falling, and today I felt like crashing to the ground and dying. I
have no feeling now, I am a dead girl now. Everything finished for me
this morning, and also for all the people in the city. You can see
nobody laughing outside. An absolute feeling of depression is all over
the city.'>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/31/people-are-broken-afghans-describe-first-day-under-full-taliban-control
The Guardian
31 August 2021
Daniel Boffey in Brussels
<<Germany warns EU against setting target of Afghan refugees.
Interior minister says ‘pull-effect’ could risk sparking fresh
European migration crisis.
Germany has warned fellow EU governments against following the
UK’s lead in setting a target number of refugees from Afghanistan to be
resettled in the union, claiming it will act as a pull-factor.
Horst Seehofer, the German interior minister, said that despite
the reluctance of countries such as Austria there should be a common EU
asylum policy but that the union should not risk a new migration
crisis.>>
Read more here:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/31/germany-warns-eu-against-setting-target-of-afghan-refugees
Al Jazeera
From: The Stream
August 5 2021
<<What should Pakistan do to end violence against women?
Shocked by the recent gruesome murder of a prominent woman in
Pakistan, activists are pressing authorities to address rising cases of
gender-based violence within the country. Noor Mukadam, a 27-year-old
daughter of a former diplomat, was tortured and beheaded in late July by
an acquaintance for allegedly rejecting his advances. Her death has
reignited calls for reform in Pakistan, a conservative Muslim country
where courts and laws have been accused of favouring perpetrators.
Pakistan has grappled with misogyny for decades. But coronavirus-related
lockdowns are exacerbating the problems women face and have resulted in
a huge spike in domestic violence incidents. Reported cases of slapping,
pushing, kicking and other incidents jumped up to 40 percent in some
parts of the country, according to the Human Rights Commission of
Pakistan (HRCP).
Pakistan also continues to rank near the bottom of global gender
indices when it comes to educational, political and economic
opportunities for women. Some activists cite growing religious extremism
as one reason why the crisis is getting worse.
However, government leaders often downplay the scope of the
problem. In an interview late last month, Prime Minister Imran Khan
said:
<“You look at the situation in Pakistan even now, you look at the
rape cases here, compare it to Western countries, they are minuscule
compared to there. Yes, we have our issues, we have certain cultural
problems, every nation has that. But that comes with cultural evolution,
with education. But as far a women’s dignity goes, respect, I can say
after going all over the world, this society gives more respect and
dignity to women.>>>
Note from Gino d'Artali:
'Yeah right. Read the full article here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/the-stream/2021/8/5/what-should-pakistan-do-to-end-violence-against-women
Al Jazeera
26 May 2021
By Julia Zulver and Kiran Stallone
<<The mothers on the front line of Colombia’s mass protests.
Madres de Primera Linea put their own bodies between police and
protesters to prevent escalations of violence in Bogota.
Bogota, Colombia – The ,madres. arrive before evening falls.
Wearing construction helmets and bandanas over their faces, and
clutching makeshift plywood shields, they join a boisterous crowd of
protesters at Portal de Las Americas, a bus station in southwest Bogota
and one of the epicentres of Colombia’s ongoing national strike.
The women, who have dubbed themselves Madres de Primera Linea
(Mothers on the Front Line), are here to put their own bodies between
police and protesters – and prevent escalations of violence.
<We came together as neighbours and friends because we saw how
hard they (anti-riot police) were fighting against our young people,
including underage kids,> Alias La Flaca, a 23-year-old mother of two
and member of the group who did not want her real name used for fear of
retribution, told Al Jazeera. <We are all single mothers, heads of our
households: If we don’t stand up for them, who is going to do it?>
Protest movement
Nationwide strikes since April 28 have paralysed Colombia, with
demonstrators originally taking to the streets against a proposed tax
reform.
While the tax plan was later withdrawn by the government,
protesters are now demanding health, educational, and police reforms.
The protests have shown no sign of stopping, and police and armed forces
continue to respond with lethal violence.
The group of 10 mothers, friends from a nearby neighbourhood in
south Bogota, stepped forward in mid-May to protect protesters
expressing their discontent in the face of the ESMAD, Colombia’s
anti-riot police.
The women are not biologically related to the young people on the
front line. Rather, they see themselves in a symbolic role: <We all feel
like we are family,> said La Flaca, who recently lost her job due to
layoffs in the context of the national strike.
Every day, the mothers go to Portal de Las Americas, which
protesters have renamed Portal de la Resistencia (<Resistance Portal>)
and where they have established what they call a humanitarian zone.
In the early afternoon, the space has a festive feeling;
protesters set up games and activities for children, engage in
performances, and cook huge pots of soup.
<We are part of the first line of defence,> said La Flaca, her
face covered with a white bandana and dark glasses to protect her
identity. <We never attack; we wait until they attack us. We stand with
the protesters to make sure that nothing happens to them, that they
don’t take them away and disappear them.>
Police violence
Rights groups and the United Nations have raised concerns about
the use of force to quell the continuing protests across Colombia.
Many have already been killed in the unrest. Human rights
organisation Temblores said at least 43 people have been killed to date,
and it has registered 2,905 total cases of police violence.
In an interview with The New York Times, Colombian President Ivan
Duque said he did not consider police violence to be a “systemic” issue,
although he did admit abuses of force by some officers. Duque also said
he did not see the need for <significant> police reforms in Colombia.
Johana, a 36-year-old member of the Madres de Primera Linea who
gave only her first name, said she has been tear-gassed during the
protests. <The burning sensation of gas in your eyes, it’s unbearable,”
she said. “The gas makes you feel like you’re drowning.>
The mothers have very few resources and rely on donations to keep
themselves safe. Their shields, helmets and goggles were donated by a
feminist human rights group and they have also received water, vinegar,
and bicarbonate to offset the impact of the tear gas.
Young protesters like Alias El Pantera said that they appreciate
the presence of the mothers during confrontations with the police.
<Every night at around 8pm, they attack us, and the mamitas are always
with us,> said the 17-year-old, who told Al Jazeera that he dropped out
of school because the fees were too high.
He has been at the forefront of the protests every day since they
began, alongside other protesters and the mothers. <We protect the
mothers and they protect us. We are all united here,> El Pantera said.<<
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/5/26/mothers-on-the-front-line-of-colombias-ongoing-protests
Al Jazeera
16 June 2021
<<Simone Biles blasts USA Gymnastics, FBI for allowing sex abuse.
US star gymnasts berate institutions overseen by Congress for
failing to investigate years of abuses.
United States Olympic gymnast Simone Biles blasted USA Gymnastics
and the FBI for standing by while team doctor Larry Nassar assaulted her
and hundreds of other athletes in the largest sexual abuse case in the
history of American sports.
<We have been failed and we deserve answers,> Biles said in blunt
and tearful testimony at a US Senate public hearing on Wednesday where
she appeared with three other athletes, Aly Raisman, McKayla Maroney and
Maggie Nichols.
<It really feels like the FBI turned a blind eye to us,> said
Biles, who placed additional blame at the feet of legislators who have
oversight over congressionally chartered US Olympic governing bodies.
Maroney echoed Biles’s accusations, recounting how she told <my
entire story of abuse to the FBI in the summer of 2015. Not only did the
FBI not report my abuse, but when they eventually documented my report,
17 months later, they made entirely false claims about what I said.>
When she recounted abuse that had happened in 2011 at the world
championships in Tokyo, where she said Nassar gave her a sleeping pill
and then got <on top of me, molesting me for hours,> she tearfully told
an FBI agent over the phone.
The FBI agent then asked her “Is that all?” – an answer, she told
the Senate committee, that “was one of the worst moments in this entire
process for me”.
Biles said she chose to testify <so that no little girl must
endure what I, the athletes at this table, and the countless others who
needlessly suffered under Nassar’s guise of medical treatment for which
we continue to endure today.>
<We suffered and continue to suffer, because no one at FBI, USAG,
or the USOPC did what was necessary to protect us,> Biles said.
Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz issued a
119-page report in July detailing errors by law enforcement officers
that allowed Nassar’s abuse to continue for months. Nassar was convicted
in 2017 and 2018 of sex crimes and is serving up to 175 years in prison.
FBI Director Chris Wray told the Senate panel that the actions of
the agents who botched the investigation are inexcusable, and he
announced that one of the agents “no longer works for the bureau in any
capacity.”
<I’m deeply and profoundly sorry,> Wray said. Wray faced sharp
questioning from senators about why FBI agents who botched the probe
were never prosecuted for their misconduct.
<The actions and inactions of the FBI employees detailed in (the
Inspector General’s) report are totally unacceptable,> Wray said. <These
individuals betrayed the core duty that they have of protecting people.
They failed to protect young women and girls from abuse.> >>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/15/simone-biles-blasts-usa-gymnastics-fbi-for-allowing-sex-abuse
Al Jazeera
26 Mar 2021
By Tyra Bosnic
<< <Warrior women together’: Mothers of the Black trans family.
Chicago activist LaSaia Wade is combating systemic inequality in
the LGBTQ community by following in her role model Valerie Spencer’s
footsteps.
LaSaia Wade likes to say she is the culmination of every person
who has walked before her, beside her and will continue to carve a path
long after her.
<I am because we are> is her guiding principle, a translation of
ubuntu philosophy that defines the human experience as being part of a
collective. This thousands-year-old ethos originating from sub-Saharan
Africa has been invoked by politicians, activists and
theorists. Today, 33-year-old Wade uses the mantra to define the
ever-growing families she belongs in.
In her home office in Chicago, surrounded by monitors and with
her six-month-old baby cooing off-screen during a Zoom call, Wade
imagines the future: she and her fiance are at the heads of a long table
and every seat in between them is filled. Young and old, biological
relatives and found family are joined as one, all of their stories
inextricably linked to each other.
<I will not be able to eat without you. You will not be able to
breathe without me. It’s something that me and my fiance talk about a
lot. We are happy to have a child. We are happy to build our own
family,> Wade says, her voice softening as she describes what she wants
for her future. <Our dream is to be able, in our 60s and 70s at the tip
of the table, [to] say ‘I am because we are.’>
Wade’s definition of family extends beyond her immediate circle.
As an Afro-Latina transgender woman, she sees herself as one of many
matriarchs that support generations of LGBTQ people.
<I am a mother to a community that has no mothers,> Wade says.
<But I have yet to be recognised as an elder, nor will I place that
title on me just yet, because I’m a new biological mother. I’m literally
[learning] to really understand what it looks like to be a mother … and
catering that into the work that I do looks completely different.>
Wade has had a number of role models who have taught her not only
about motherhood but the kaleidoscopic experiences of being a woman. Her
tone turns serious as she reflects on the lessons her mothers have
imparted to her. Marea Wade, her biological mother, taught her how to be
a woman and Valerie Spencer <taught me how to be a happy trans woman>,
Wade says.
She first met Spencer some eight to 10 years ago, neither woman
could remember exactly when, at a speaking engagement in Memphis,
Tennessee, that hosted transgender women renowned for their activism
across the country.
Wade remembers her excitement at being surrounded by her elders.
Spencer walked up to her to tell her she was gorgeous and ask her if she
was hungry.
<What I remember is we had so much fun. Often the warriors are
fighting in their own silos, and we don’t get to be warrior women
together,> Spencer says from her home in Los Angeles, California.
A therapist, minister and activist for nearly 30 years,
54-year-old Spencer delivers each word as if she is holding a sermon.>>
Read more here:
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2021/3/26/warrior-women-together-mothers-of-the-black-trans-family
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