MPs speak out in parliament and demonstrators take to streets over killing of 27-year-old vet
Outrage has continued to grow in India over the gang-rape and murder of a 27-year-old woman, with protesters taking to the streets and politicians calling for the offenders to be “lynched”.
Demonstrations spread to cities including Delhi, Bengaluru and Kolkata and MPs spoke out in parliament following the discovery last week of the woman’s burned body in Hyderabad.
Continue reading...The scrutiny of the Briton’s sex life at her killer’s trial was just one of the proceedings’ many disturbing elements
Violence against women is one of New Zealand’s most significant and pressing social issues. Every day police respond to hundreds of family violence incidents, and women continue to die as a result of men’s violence. In December 2018 New Zealand recognised the severity of a specific offence – strangulation – and implemented legislative reform to address its pervasiveness. Five arrests for strangulation were reported a day in February 2019 . I mention all of this because of the Grace Millane murder trial.
On 21 December 2018 she was strangled to death while visiting New Zealand. Her body was later found in a suitcase, buried, in the Waitakere ranges in Auckland. The man accused of her murder claimed her death was the result of consensual rough sex that had “gone wrong”. After a three-week trial, a jury of five men and seven women found him guilty of murder after less than six hours of deliberation.
Continue reading...UK lawyers and activists demand action as researchers find tenfold rise in usage
Senior lawyers and women’s organisations have condemned the increasing use of “rough sex gone wrong” as a courtroom defence to the murder of women and called for a change to the law in the UK.
In the wake of the conviction of British backpacker Grace Millane’s killer in New Zealand, researchers have revealed a tenfold rise over the past two decades in the number of times similar claims have been made in UK courts.
Continue reading...Social workers claim teachers and local officials are implicated, and believe thousands more children may have been targeted
A paedophile ring involved in the abuse of at least 546 boys from six schools has been discovered in Afghanistan’s Logar province.
Some of the victims of the abuse have since been murdered according to the campaigners who first discovered videos of abuse posted to a Facebook page.
Continue reading...Full bench of seven judges will decide on Cardinal Pell’s appeal, likely to be heard in 2020
Cardinal George Pell will have a final chance to overturn his conviction on historical child sexual abuse offences after the high court in Canberra agreed to hear appeal arguments in a special full court sitting.
A date for the appeal hearing is yet to be set but it is likely to be early in 2020, by the full bench of seven judges. Led by the high-profile silk Bret Walker SC, Pell’s legal team will argue that the majority of judges in Victoria’s court of appeal erred by finding in August that jurors were not unreasonable to believe the testimony of Pell’s victim.
Continue reading...Star accuses Christophe Ruggia of abuse when she was making her first film aged 12
The acclaimed French actor Adèle Haenel has alleged she was sexually harassed from the age of 12 by the director who made her first film.
Haenel, 30, who has won a string of awards for her work, including two French Oscars, said she was subjected to “permanent sexual harassment” by Christophe Ruggia from the age of 12 to 15 when she was making and promoting her debut 2002 film, The Devils, in which she played a girl with autism.
Continue reading...Award-winning documentary Rising Silence preserves the testimony of some of the 200,000 women abducted during the country’s war of independence
In 1971, during the nine-month war that gave Bangladesh its independence from then West Pakistan, four sisters – Amina, Maleka, Mukhlesa and Budhi Begum – were abducted by Pakistani soldiers and local collaborators. They were among the more than 200,000 women held in rape camps and were detained for two and a half months.
“Twenty-two of us would lie like corpses in that room,” says Maleka as she explains how her elder sister Buhdi, “unable to bear the pain”, died before they were released.
Continue reading...E Jean Carroll, the widely respected New York journalist who alleges Donald Trump raped her in the Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s, is suing the president for defamation after he ridiculed her claim on the grounds she was “not my type”.
Related: Trump must hand over tax returns, US appeals court rules – live
Continue reading...Farrow’s book Catch and Kill describes Harvey Weinstein’s efforts to silence alleged victims and put Farrow himself off the story
The combination of rage, threats, professional promises and vulnerability that Harvey Weinstein used to secure the silence of women he allegedly sexually attacked is described in a newly disclosed interview between one of his accusers and Ronan Farrow, the journalist who exposed the Hollywood mogul.
In his new book Catch and Kill chronicling his investigation into Weinstein, Farrow relates for the first time details of his conversation with a longtime former employee of the movie producer, Alexandra Canosa.
Continue reading...UK lawyers say more women are coming forward, but are police and prosecutors ready?
The clearest impact of the #MeToo movement on the British justice system has been a sharp rise in the number of complaints made to police of rape and sexual assault over the past two years.
That surge, however, has coincided with a chaotic response by police and prosecutors, who have been engulfed in problems over disclosure and allegations they have refined their approach to the crime in order to improve conviction rates, although this has been denied by the Crown Prosecution Service.
Continue reading...Woman, 19, to go on trial after revoking claim she was raped by 12 Israeli tourists
Human rights and feminist groups are calling for Cypriot authorities to drop the case against a British teenager accused of falsely claiming she was raped by 12 Israeli tourists in a hotel room.
The 19-year-old, who reported the alleged assault almost three months ago but was then arrested after revoking her criminal complaint, is due to go on trial on Tuesday on a charge of public mischief. She has pleaded not guilty to fabricating the accusation of rape, but could be imprisoned for up to a year if found guilty.
Continue reading...As reports of sexual harassment on the London underground soar, studies say the issue is the number-one safety risk facing girls and women worldwide
It’s 8am at Oxford Circus tube station and the Central line platforms are teeming with people. Stony-faced business types, rucksack-touting tourists and yawning schoolchildren jostle for space in the rush-hour crush.
But among the crowds of commuters is another group waiting to board the train – a covert patrol of plainclothed officers looking to catch sexual predators in the act.
Continue reading...I’ve been shocked and disgusted by what some men have done. I’ve also seen how complicated atonement and forgiveness are
Warning: This story contains discussion and description of sexual abuse, assault, and trauma.
When Jay first came into the program, he was asked – as all members were – to share his offense with the group. He said he’d had sex with his teenage stepdaughter.
“She was very attractive,” he said. “Mature for her age. We kind of fell into it.”
Continue reading...US rapper alleges that a photographer exposed himself and attempted to coerce her into sex
US rapper Cardi B has detailed a sexual assault she experienced during a magazine photoshoot.
Speaking to TV and radio host Angie Martinez, she said: “I went to shoot for this magazine and the photographer, he was trying to get close to me like, ‘Yeah, you want to get in this magazine?’ Then he pulled his dick out. I was so fucking mad … You know what’s crazy? I told the magazine owner and he just looked at me like, ‘So? And?’”
Continue reading...After she was assaulted while unconscious, Miller’s life split in two. She became known as ‘Emily Doe’ – and her assailant served just three months in prison. Now she’s ready to tell the world who she really is
It has been just over three weeks since Chanel Miller allowed her name to become public and the 27-year-old is still trying to adjust. For a while, it seemed as if everyone she had ever known was going to email. “Hi! We were in bio-chem class together, how are you doing?!” she’d read. Or: “Hey, I always knew you’d write a book!” She smiles at the bleak comedy of a situation which no one, least of all Miller herself, knows quite how to handle. At some point in the emails, every sender would jettison the pleasantries and make the awkward turn towards saying: “I’m sorry.”
Around midnight on 17 January 2015, Miller was spotted by two students at Stanford University being sexually assaulted by a third student as she lay unconscious on the ground behind some bins. She was 22, a recent graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara, working in her first job at a tech firm and living with her parents in Palo Alto. Earlier that evening she had, on a whim, agreed to accompany her younger sister to a fraternity party at Stanford University, a 10-minute drive from the house. By the early hours of the morning, Miller was in a hospital having her vagina and anus swabbed by police doctors – and 19-year-old Brock Turner was in custody.
Continue reading...Campaigners say incidents are still underreported and more must be done to stop attackers
Sexual assaults reported on the tube have soared by 42% in the last four years, new figures show.
Attacks recorded on the London Underground leapt from 844 in 2015-16 to 1,206 in 2018-19, according to analysis by the PA news agency.
Continue reading...‘Feminist emergency’ demonstrations follow series of high-profile rape cases
Protesters will take to the streets of more than 250 towns and cities across Spain on Friday to declare a “feminist emergency” after a series of high-profile rape cases and a summer in which 19 women were murdered by current or former partners.
Organisers are aiming to “turn the night purple” – the colour of the feminist movement – to raise the alarm and protest against apathy, indifference and a lack of attention from politicians and the media.
Continue reading...New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern’s credentials at home and abroad as a new kind of leader all hang on her next move
It’s just shy of a year ago that Jacinda Ardern stood in the UN general assembly and spoke in support of the #MeToo movement. There was spontaneous applause from the floor for that small part of a much longer speech – it felt like a significant moment.
The New Zealand leader’s trip to New York attracted the usual grumbles here at home – those who could not quite get their head around the very idea of a 38-year-old unmarried woman as prime minister carped about her decision to take her three-month-old daughter along – but the result was the blossoming of an international media love affair. Baby Neve’s appearance at the back of the UN chamber was just the icing on the cake.
Continue reading...Ex-model is one of three women accusing the model scout and friend of Jeffrey Epstein
Thysia Huisman had just turned 18 when, late one evening in September 1991, she arrived before the door of an imposing apartment building on avenue Hoche in central Paris carrying a small backpack and three photographs from her portfolio.
A young would-be model from Leiden in the Netherlands, she was impressed, but also alarmed. “It was very grand,” she says. “A vast, grand apartment, right by the Arc de Triomphe. Fancy furniture, paintings on the walls. But it was his home.”
Continue reading...Judge sentences Jaymes Todd to a non-parole period of 35 years for crimes described as crimes as ‘sadistic’ and ‘categorically evil’
Eurydice Dixon’s father said he hoped the man who raped and killed his daughter “gets better,” shortly after the killer was sentenced to to life in prison with a minimum non-parole period of 35 years.
Jaymes Todd stalked Dixon, 22, for more than an hour before attacking her as she walked through Princes Park following a comedy gig on 12 June last year.
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