Cindy Erazo was accused of aggravated homicide after an obstetric emergency
A woman sentenced to 30 years in jail after a stillbirth that was judged to be her fault has been released from jail in El Salvador.
Cindy Erazo, 29, from San Salvador, was granted conditional freedom on Wednesday after six years in jail.
Continue reading...Analysis of stories across six countries including UK found fewer than a fifth of experts quoted on the pandemic were women
Women’s voices have been “worryingly marginalised” in reporting of the coronavirus, partly due to the war-like framing of the pandemic, according to a report analysing stories across six countries.
Each woman’s voice in news coverage of the crisis is “drowned out” by at least three men, it said.
Continue reading...Message from the US embassy comes during long-postponed direct talks between the government and the Taliban
The United States has warned women in Afghanistan that they are at increased risk of attack by extremist groups.
The US embassy in Kabul warned on Thursday that “extremist organisations continue to plan attacks against a variety of targets […], including a heightened risk of attacks targeting female government and civilian workers, including teachers, human rights activists, office workers, and government employees.”
Continue reading...‘Leisure is a feminist issue’ says Surabhi Yadav, whose photography project captures carefree moments of women around her
When Surabhi Yadav’s mother, Basanti, died Yadav realised she had never really known her. “I knew her as my mother, but nothing else,” she says. “I asked one of her friend’s how she remembered her and she told me: ‘She was the funniest and goofiest in our group.’ Those were not words I associated with my mother. I thought of her as a very serious person.”
Her father was the “funny one”, she thought, although her mother never appreciated his humour. “Now, as an adult, I understand that part of it is that my father’s jokes were often sexist, often at her expense.”
Continue reading...Feminists seize human rights office to force President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to tackle grim toll of rape and murder
As Mexicans prepared to mark Independence Day celebrations on 15 September, a different kind of commemoration was held at the headquarters of the country’s human rights commission (CNDH).
Under a fluttering purple anarchy flag, women in black balaclavas lined the upstairs balconies of the 19th-century building – and speaker after speaker expressed their fury at the country’s crisis of violence against women.
Continue reading...Girls in Uttar Pradesh targeted in assaults aiming to reinforce caste and gender hierarchies, say activists
A spate of brutal rapes and murders of young girls in a single district of India over the past month has provoked outrage and exposed the ongoing use of sexual violence as a tool of oppression and revenge against lower caste communities.
Over the past month, the Lakhimpur Kheri district of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh has witnessed four incidents of girls being raped and brutally murdered. At least two of the girls were Dalits, the lowest caste in the Hindu system of social hierarchy, who were previously referred to as “untouchables” and cast out from society.
Continue reading...A polarising US election, a global pandemic, the rise of cancel culture: what does the queen of dystopian fiction make of 2020 so far?
Margaret Atwood is smiling, waving a green copy of her book The Testaments at me, while I wave a black one back at her. High-cheekboned, pale-skinned, her curly grey hair like a corona, she’s wearing a jewel-green blouse that makes her eyes glitter. Behind her stretches her large, comfy, slightly darkened sitting room in Toronto, with books and wall hangings and a whirring fan. Atwood gleams out of my screen, bright in all senses.
She is talking about being a grouch. She tells me she turns down a lot of interview requests, “and then I get a reputation as being very grumpy and hard to deal with. But who cares?” Grumpy seems wrong to me. I had been warned that Atwood was scary – super-sharp and impatient – but she’s not like that either. She is unsentimental, clear, sure of her facts and opinions, but she also has a light, mischievous quality. She says my name as though constantly on the verge of teasing me.
Continue reading...Under current system a female captain, for example, is called Frau Hauptmann – Mrs Captain
Germany is considering introducing feminine forms for military ranks, according to reports, 20 years after women gained the right to join the Bundeswehr.
The army has resisted using the feminine form even after women gained the right to join in 2000. A female captain in the Bundeswehr is addressed as Frau Hauptmann, the equivalent of “Mrs Captain”.
Continue reading...From kick-ass screen roles to award-winning theatre and TV ones, with a curious sideline in nuns, the Yorkshire-born actor’s class and spirit earned her a magnificent career
When Diana Rigg made her Broadway debut in 1971, the theatre programme Playbill introduced her in terms that established the wide range of work and appeal that still marked her career at her death today, five decades later, at the age of 82.
The then-31-year-old Yorkshirewoman, theatregoers were told, was “a highly established star of the theatre, motion pictures and films in England” who had recently “become popular in the United States as the glamorous Emma Peel in The Avengers television series and as the leading lady in the latest James Bond film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”.
Continue reading...Reviled by Playboy, her 1976 study of 3,500 women challenged male assumptions about sex
The pioneering feminist Shere Hite, known for her research on female sexuality, has died at the age of 77. She was best known for The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality, which has sold more than 50m copies since publication in 1976.
Based on the views of 3,500 women, it challenged male assumptions about sex by revealing that many women were not stimulated by sexual penetration. It also encouraged women to take control of their sex lives. It was dismissed as “anti-male” and dubbed the Hate Report by Playboy.
Continue reading...Five women affected by child marriage tell their stories – and of their struggles to protect others
Twelve million girls are married every year before they reach 18, according to UN estimates. And in its first set of global statistics on child marriage rates among boys, the UN found one in 30 young men were married as children.
Advances have been made, however. Ending child marriage by 2030 is a target in the UN’s set of sustainable development goals, and many countries have launched strategies to stop the practice. But progress is slow and likely to be badly affected by the coronavirus pandemic as closed schools and financial pressures take their toll on families. In April, the United Nations Population Fund predicted that an additional 13 million children could be married over the next decade because of disruption to programmes.
Continue reading...Child marriage in the country has increased during coronavirus – and now a newly-tabled bill would allow children as young as 10 to marry
Fardowsa Salat Mohamed was 15 when her cousin asked her parents for her hand in marriage. Her father did not hesitate to say yes. When Mohamed objected, her father asked her to choose between “a curse and a blessing”.
“That was not a choice for me, I was basically forced,” she says. “No girl would ever choose to be cursed by her parents so I had to accept the marriage,”
Continue reading...Venice film festival jury chief backs Berlin event’s move towards gender-neutral prizes
The Hollywood star Cate Blanchett has said she would rather be called an actor than an actress.
The Australian, who is heading the jury at the Venice film festival, gave her backing to Berlin festival’s controversial decision last week to do away with gendered prizes and only give a best actor award.
Continue reading...This common condition can lead to relationship breakdown and unnecessary surgery. So why is treatment still so poor and underfunded?
I was just a few weeks into a new relationship when the pain started. Whenever my boyfriend and I started to have penetrative sex, it felt as if there were razor blades inside me. At first I laughed it off, but soon I became terrified of intercourse. My body would freeze with fear as my clothes came off. By the time we said: “I love you,” even kissing made me feel anxious. I would spend entire day trips and holidays with him worrying about the pain.
When I first went to my GP, the advice I got was to “try and relax”. It was about as helpful as telling someone having a panic attack to “just chill out”. Without a real solution, I started to question whether I was imagining the pain. Or if maybe, somehow, I was to blame for it. My boyfriend was kind and supportive but I felt I was letting him down. Some days, I would feel so ashamed that it was hard to think about anything else. Other days, I’d feel an overwhelming sense of loss for the carefree woman I had been.
Continue reading...For years, the founder of the Everyday Sexism project has had vile abuse heaped upon her. But that still didn’t prepare her for what she found in the toxic world of online misogyny
Laura Bates founded the Everyday Sexism project in 2012, when she was 25, inviting women on social media to detail sexist encounters they’d had. Two years later, she published the book of the same name, curating a document that was horrifying but unsurprising. It should have been shocking but nobody was shocked. Six years on, we meet in King’s Cross, in London, where the cafe has separated the tables with Perspex, so I have a flash-forward to a dystopian near-future where one of us is in prison for feminist activism (obviously her, I decided, ruefully). She is as passionate and determined as I have ever seen her (I have met and interviewed her a few times before), yet somehow more cautious, for reasons that become clear.
Bates was surprised by certain elements of the Everyday Sexism project, like how many of the accounts came from girls in their mid-teens (she had expected more responses to be from women working in offices), but not the phenomenon of sexist harassment itself, which she knew was “hidden in plain sight. It was an invisible problem and this was very much trying to make it visible.” In doing so, Bates seeded an idea that would be proved again and again in the following years, in more and more vivid ways. From the #MeToo movement to Black Lives Matter, the inflection point for resisting injustice is not when one crusader saves the day, but when everybody is emboldened to speak out at once. Bates comes back to this repeatedly, and not, I think, for reasons of modesty. It was never, she insists, about her.
Continue reading...Gendarmes’ request for topless sunbathers to cover up on south coast prompts outcry
France’s interior minister has defended the “precious” right to sunbathe topless on beaches, after police asked a group of women to cover up on the southern coast.
French gendarmes patrolling a beach in Mediterranean seaside town Sainte-Marie-la-Mer last week asked a group of topless sunbathers to cover up in response to a complaint from a family, the local gendarmerie said in a statement on Facebook.
Continue reading...Ruling is result of lawsuit filed over deaths in childbirth of two women due to staff negligence and lack of facilities
Health rights activists in Uganda have welcomed a landmark court ruling that the government should increase its health budget to ensure women receive decent maternal healthcare services.
The ruling is the result of a lawsuit filed in 2011 over the deaths in childbirth of two women – Jennifer Anguko and Sylvia Nalubowa – in a public health facility.
Continue reading...New study shows preference for a son is highest in north of country with Uttar Pradesh having highest deficit in female births
An estimated 6.8 million fewer female births will be recorded across India by 2030 because of the persistent use of selective abortions, researchers estimate.
Academics from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia projected the sex ratio at birth in 29 Indian states and union territories, covering almost the entire population, taking into account each state’s desired sex ratio at birth and the population’s fertility rates.
Continue reading...Employer aims to remove stigma in a nation where menstruation is still taboo to some
Indian food delivery company Zomato has said it will give female employees up to 10 days of “period leave” a year, as part of an effort to combat what it said was stigma around the issue.
Zomato is the most high-profile organisation to institute the policy in India, a country where menstruation is still taboo to some.
Continue reading...Ryu Ho-jeong, 28, says she wore colourful outfit to challenge male dominance in parliament
South Korea is again confronting its outdated attitudes towards women in the workplace after a female MP was criticised for attending a parliamentary session in a colourful dress.
Ryu Ho-jeong, who at 28 is the youngest member of the country’s national assembly, drew condemnation and praise after she was photographed in the national assembly chamber in what local media described as a red minidress earlier this week.
Continue reading...