Category Archives: Women

Doctors accused of blocking abortions in Northern Ireland despite legalisation

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Patients forced to buy pills online or go overseas for terminations

Women seeking abortions in Northern Ireland are still struggling to access services. Although abortion was legalised more than two months ago, claims persist that healthcare professionals are refusing to treat patients.

A leading reproductive rights group and a doctors’ organisation say that GPs are refusing to refer pregnant women to hospital services so they can access the tablets needed to undergo a medical abortion. They are also aware of midwives and nurses refusing to care for patients before and after the procedure.

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Sexist forum posts hundreds of private images of Australian female journalists and celebrities

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Women whose social media pictures were uploaded to the site say they feel ‘violated’ by intrusion on their privacy

Female journalists say they feel “violated” by a sexist forum that has been posting personal images and lewd comments about women in the Australian media industry for more than a decade.

Hundreds of high-profile journalists and emerging reporters have had their images uploaded onto the forum, which also posts suggestive images of Australian actresses, female sports stars and models.

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‘Many girls have been cut’: how global school closures left children at risk

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Covid-19 lockdown made children vulnerable to abuses including FGM and child marriage say NGOs, as schools in England prepare to reopen

Covid-19 school closures have exposed children around the world to human rights abuses such as forced genital mutilation, early marriage and sexual violence, child protection experts say.

Globally, the World Bank estimates that 1.6 billion children were locked out of education by Covid-19. As schools in England and around the world prepare to reopen this week, NGOs warn that millions of the world’s most vulnerable children may never return to the classroom, and say that after decades fighting for girls’ education the pandemic could cause gender equality in education to be set back decades.

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‘Men don’t trust we’re strong enough’: Somali women push into fish industry

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Selling fish has enabled some to quadruple their usual earnings but sexist attitudes are harder to overcome

Every morning before sunrise, when most residents in the southern coastal city of Kismayo are asleep, Fardowsa Mohamed Ahmed, 32, goes to the beach to purchase fresh fish, which she will sell in the market.

Like most women in this business, she depends on men to catch the fish. Men dominate the fishing sector. It is considered “men’s work” in Somali society. But Ahmed is determined to push her way in.

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‘We are losers in this crisis’: research finds lockdowns reinforcing gender inequality

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Campaign groups warn women across Europe risk being pushed back into traditional roles

Life during the coronavirus lockdown has reinforced gender inequality across Europe with research emphasising that the economic and social consequences of the crisis are far greater for women and threaten to push them back into traditional roles in the home which they will struggle to shake off once it is over.

Throughout the continent, campaign groups are warning that the burdens of the home office and home schooling together with additional household duties and extra cooking, has been unequally carried by women and that improvements made in their lives by the growth in equality over the past decades are in danger of being rolled back by the health crisis.

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MPs bring bill to ban late abortions for cleft lip, cleft palate and club foot

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Cross-party group proposes ending UK abortions after 24 weeks for minor disabilities

Abortion laws in Britain could be changed under cross-party proposals to ban late terminations on the grounds of minor physical abnormalities.

The abortion (cleft lip, cleft palate and club foot) bill, led by the Conservative MP Fiona Bruce and supported by 13 MPs, will be presented in parliament on 3 June.

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Argentina’s abortion campaign launches virtual events to revitalise movement

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Activists seemed on the brink of victory when they were stalled by the pandemic and a historic bill wasn’t formally introduced

Feminists in Argentina like to say: “la lucha está en la calle” — the battle is in the streets.  But with the country under a strict coronavirus lockdown, the women’s movement can no longer flood the streets.

So on Thursday, activists have planned a series of virtual events to mark 15 years of their campaign to legalize abortion – and inject new momentum into a campaign which was stalled by the pandemic, just as it seemed on the brink of victory.

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‘Pink-collar recession’: how the Covid-19 crisis could set back a generation of women

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The unique nature of the pandemic means the economic downturn could impact women for decades

Rebecca Wilkie is used to running a budget. The single mother of two daughters knows what it is to keep one eye on the bank balance. After being stood down as a full-time Qantas flight attendant at the end of March, however, the budget is tighter still. “Life was a struggle for us before the pandemic, to be honest,” she says.

She is managing. But catching up on the mortgage payments after the initial relief ends, and paying for the greater utility bills when they come through, worry her. She’s hoping, and expecting, that after 18 years at the airline, a job will be waiting for her once jobkeeper stops and the recovery begins.

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Gloria Steinem says TV drama of 1970s feminist history ‘ridiculous’

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In interview for Hay festival feminist writer says Mrs America misrepresents equal rights movement

It stars Cate Blanchett and Rose Byrne in a glossy, big-budget TV account of 1970s feminist history but one key player who was there, Gloria Steinem, is withering: it is ridiculous, undermining and just not very good, she said on Friday.

Steinem, arguably the world’s most famous feminist, has revealed she is not a fan of the new Hulu TV show Mrs America, which premiered in the US last month and is coming to BBC2 in the UK later in the year.

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‘Where are the women?’ Outcry over all-male government meeting in Afghanistan

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Tweet showed 12 male political leaders after Ghani promised women would be involved in high-level decision-making

People in Afghanistan protested on social media that no women were present at a high-level government meeting, despite assurances from the president that they would be involved in important decision-making roles.

The outcry followed a tweeted photo of a meeting of 12 political leaders at the presidential palace – all of them men.

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‘We wrap services around women’: Brazil’s innovative domestic violence centre

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With violence against women endemic in the country, new initiatives are desperately needed but slow to arrive

Lucas da Silva* sits in a cell while he waits to hear from the court what will happen to him.

The 33-year-old is not in a prison, but at Casa da Mulher Brasileira (“house of the Brazilian woman”), a centre for survivors of violence in Campo Grande, central Brazil, that is open 24/7.

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Women are on the Covid-19 frontline – we must give them the support they need | Mark Lowcock and Natalia Kanem

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An effective response to the pandemic means tackling the violence and inequality faced by women

After a week in which people in some parts of the world have been given cause for optimism that they may have passed the peak of the pandemic, we have seen how extraordinary actions of individuals can change the trajectory for a whole nation.

Retired doctors putting themselves back on the frontline, nurses making their own face masks, parents voluntarily separated from their children so they can care for the sick.

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Naming of Pinochet’s great-niece as Chile women’s minister sparks outrage

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Macarena Santelices has praised the ‘good side’ of the 1973-90 dictatorship in which over 300 women were raped under torture

Chile’s rightwing president, Sebastián Piñera, has prompted a firestorm of criticism after naming an open supporter of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship as the country’s new minister for women’s rights and gender equality.

Controversy over the appointment of Macarena Santelices – who is also the dictators’s great-niece – has focused on a 2016 interview in which she praised the “good side” of the 1973-90 dictatorship in which more than 3,000 people were murdered or disappeared by security forces and many thousands more imprisoned and tortured.

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Sleazy bosses, exploited barmaids: US cinema finally discovers the left behinds

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From The Assistant to Support the Girls, American cinema is swapping feelgood escapism for gritty unsettling realism. We talk to the women spearheading this new wave

‘I wanted it to be relatable to any woman who’s ever worked in an office,” says Kitty Green of her new film The Assistant. “Everything in the film has been in the press already. But I wanted to take viewers on an emotional journey, so they could empathise with the character.”

The #MeToo saga has been examined to near exhaustion, but The Assistant manages to add something new. Rather than perpetrators or victims, it focuses on a relative bystander: a young office worker at a New York film production company. We follow this character, played by Julia Garner, through her demeaning routine: commuting in before daybreak, photocopying, printing, taking her male co-workers’ lunch orders, clearing up leftover pizza from the meeting room (as the men come in for the next meeting, she is humiliatingly caught with a crust in her mouth).

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Russian author defends gulag-era story as TV series provokes backlash

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Literary star Guzel Yakhina shocked by emotional ‘cabin fever’ response to dramatisation

The Russian novelist Guzel Yakhina had learned to live with the persistent buzz of controversy surrounding her bestselling debut novel, Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes.

Her coming-of-age story of a young woman deported to Siberia during the Stalin-era purges of wealthier peasants, or kulaks, had been picked over for its portrayals of Soviet repressions and national identity in the largely Muslim region of Tatarstan ever since it was published in 2015.

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Three women killed in Spain as coronavirus lockdown sees rise in domestic violence

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A steep drop in police reports indicates isolation may be making it harder to get help

It was 2.30am when Daniel Jiménez was woken by his neighbour’s screams. When he went outside his home in the Los Pajarillos neighbourhood of Valladolid in north-east Spain, he saw a woman being dangled from a third-storey window by her husband. Another neighbour rushed out with mattresses to help break her fall but he was too late. She fell to her death.

Although the circumstances of the killing of the 56-year-old woman are still under investigation, the interior minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, declared it a crime of gender violence, making the woman the third victim of femicide since Spain’s strict lockdown came into force on 14 March.

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Domestic abuse: ‘Women in Herat may survive coronavirus but not lockdown’

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Violence against women is endemic in Afghanistan; with services closed by the pandemic, those working with abused women are terrified for their clients

Every morning Marzia Akbari, a 25-year-old psychologist from the western Afghan city of Herat, wakes up, picks up her phone and starts calling women. Most calls go unanswered. Since Herat was put in lockdown two weeks ago, Akbari’s work as one of Afghanistan’s only healthcare workers helping victims of domestic abuse has ground to a halt and many of the women she was trying to protect have disappeared.

“I’m very scared for them,” she says. “Many women in Herat may survive coronavirus but won’t survive the lockdown.”

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Polish parliament delays decision on new abortion restrictions

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Proposal would ban terminations even on grounds of serious foetal abnormalities

Poland’s parliament has deferred a final decision on a bill that seeks to tighten the country’s already strict abortion legislation.

The bill would outlaw abortion on the grounds of serious foetal abnormalities, one of a small number of exceptions to a near-total ban on abortion currently in place in the country. It has been sent back to a parliamentary committee for further work.

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South Korea’s first feminist party holds out hope of election miracle

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Formation of the Women’s party comes after campaigns to end spy cam porn and rebellions against strict beauty standards in the conservative nation

Two years year after South Korea became the centre of Asia’s #MeToo movement, the country’s first feminist party is hoping to keep women’s issues on the political agenda by winning seats in Wednesday’s national assembly elections.

In a campaign dominated by the government’s response to the coronavirus epidemic, the newly formed Women’s party has warned that South Korea’s poor record on sexual discrimination and violence risked being overlooked.

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Four men jailed in first year since upskirting law was introduced

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Work is still needed to raise awareness about the problem, campaigners say

Four men have been jailed in the year since the upskirting law was introduced in England and Wales, figures show.

Campaigners said the legislation offered a route to justice for victims, but said more work was needed to raise awareness about the seriousness of the issue.

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