Category Archives: Women’s rights and gender equality

‘Terrible days ahead’: Afghan women fear the return of the Taliban

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After 20 years of liberty, female education is once again threatened by hardline Islamists

Outside a college from which their mothers were banned, the women waited for friends finishing exams they fear will be some of the last they can take. “The Americans are leaving,” said Basireh Heydari, a Herat University student. “We have terrible days ahead with the Taliban. I’m worried they won’t let me leave the house, let alone what I’m doing now.”

The Biden administration’s decision to withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan by 11 September will bring an end to the US’s longest war. With Nato allies such as Germany already announcing on Wednesday that they will follow Washington’s lead and exit the country, Afghans fear an intensification of fighting between the national government and the Taliban, who were ousted by the US-led intervention two decades ago.

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‘Marry your rapist’ laws in 20 countries still allow perpetrators to escape justice

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Critical UN report says the legislation is ‘deeply wrong’, subjugates women and shifts the burden of guilt on to the victim

Twenty countries still allow rapists to marry their victims to escape criminal prosecution, according to the UN’s annual state of world population report.

Russia, Thailand and Venezuela are among the countries that allow men to have rape convictions overturned if they marry the women or girls they have assaulted.

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‘I won’t allow myself to be broken’: Russia’s Eurovision candidate Manizha takes on ‘the haters’

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The singer’s fight against domestic violence and homophobia and her body-positive posts on Instagram have led to a torrent of abuse – some from very powerful people

Russia’s 2021 Eurovision candidate breezes into a conference room, Channel One documentary film crew in tow, offering a simple tea of mint leaves brewed in hot water. “On days like today, I want something calming,” Manizha says, pouring two cups, as a boom mic hovers over us. No pressure.

The Tajikistan-born singer, who will perform her feminist ballad Russian Woman next month at the much-loved, much-mocked song contest in Rotterdam, is the target of a fiery conservative backlash for her foreign roots and her lyrics attacking female stereotypes.

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‘We’re treated as children,’ Qatari women tell rights group

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Gulf state’s male guardian rules deny women right to wed, travel, work or to make decisions about their children, report says

Women in Qatar are living under a system of “deep discrimination” – dependent on men for permission to marry, travel, pursue higher education or make decisions about their own children, according to a new report.

Opaque rules on male guardianship leave women without basic freedoms, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW), which has analysed for the first time the way the system works in practice.

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‘Ugliest crime’: Outcry in Sudan over lack of justice for killing of teenage girl

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Death of Samah el-Hadi, allegedly shot by her father, has led to outpouring of women sharing own stories of domestic violence

Thousands of people have signed a petition urging the Sudanese government to take action against a man released without charge by police after his 13-year-old daughter was shot dead.

Samah el-Hadi was shot three times and run over by a car, reports said. Neighbours have taken to social media to blame her father, who was briefly questioned by the authorities but released after telling them Samah had taken her own life. No postmortem was carried out on the girl’s body.

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‘Just write STOP’: the teenager helping Polish women flee abuse

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Schoolgirl’s fake cosmetics site helps hundreds of women as domestic violence rises during Covid

In April 2020, weeks after Poland went into its first Covid-19 lockdown, Krysia Paszko, a 17-year-old high school pupil, watched a TV report about Europe’s surge in domestic violence cases, which had increased by up to 60% on 2019, according to the World Health Organization. Poland’s largest women’s rights centre, Centrum Praw Kobiet (CPK), had reported a 50% increase in calls to its domestic violence hotline in March.

Learning from the report that France had implemented a scheme in pharmacies that women could use to report domestic violence using the codewords “Mask 19”, Paszko had an idea. With help from a graphic designer friend, she created a Facebook page for a fictitious cosmetics company.

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‘Judith never came home’: deadly fate of ‘disappeared’ women in Peru

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Policeman accused of sex trafficking, while 12,000 women and girls vanish in ‘shadow pandemic’

Judith Machaca was last seen on her way home from work in her home town of Tacna in southern Peru. The environmental engineering student had been working part-time at a mobile phone shop and would always send a message if she was going to be late.

The last text message from her phone was sent at 11pm on 28 November and the next day her distraught father reported the 20-year-old’s disappearance to the police. They sent him away, saying that she was probably with a boyfriend and would show up soon enough.

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Kamala Harris addresses the UN: ‘The status of women is the status of democracy’ – video

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Kamala Harris spoke about democracy and its connection with women's equality in her debut address to the UN as US vice-president. 'This year, in considering the status of women, especially the participation of women in decision making, we must also consider the status of democracy,' Harris told the 65th session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women. 'It is a means to establish peace and shared prosperity. It should ensure every citizen, regardless of gender, has an equal voice'

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‘Music is my life’: ban on schoolgirls singing in Afghanistan met with protest

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Government appears to backtrack on decree after women take to social media to sing in defiance under #IAmMySong hashtag

Afghanistan’s Ministry of Education appears to be backtracking on a decision to impose a nationwide singing ban on schoolgirls.

In a letter to school boards last week, which was leaked to the media, Kabul’s Education Department said girls aged 12 and above would no longer be able to sing at public events, unless the events were attended solely by women. The letter also stipulated that girls couldn’t be trained by a male music teacher.

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El Salvador abortion laws on trial in case of woman jailed after miscarriage

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Demands for justice for Manuela, who died of cancer during 30-year sentence, taken to international court in country first

When Manuela, a 33-year-old mother of two from rural El Salvador, had a miscarriage in 2008, she did what most women would do: she went to hospital.

There she was handcuffed to her hospital bed, accused of having an abortion, and charged with aggravated homicide.

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Malawi police ordered to pay damages to women who say officers raped them

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Milestone ruling follows campaign for justice after township violence in wake of 2019 presidential elections

The supreme court of Malawi has ordered that police authorities pay compensation to 18 women allegedly raped by officers during post-election violence two years ago.

The decision is seen as a milestone development in women’s rights in the country.

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To protect women from violence today, we must secure justice for victims in the past | FW de Klerk

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South Africa’s former president calls for the pandemic to be a turning point in strengthening the rule of law and empowering survivors

Violence and sexual assault have surged across the globe since the onset of Covid-19, in what the UN has called a “shadow pandemic”. Even before the pandemic, one in three women experienced physical or sexual assault globally, the World Health Organization reported this week.

In Africa, the impact has been particularly acute. In the first half of 2020, a rise in reported cases prompted Liberia’s President Weah to declare rape and all forms of gender-based violence a national emergency.

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Quarter of women and girls have been abused by a partner, says WHO

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Largest such study finds domestic violence experienced by one-in-four teenage girls with worst levels faced by women in their 30s

One in four women and girls around the world have been physically or sexually assaulted by a husband or male partner, according to the largest study yet of the prevalence of violence against women.

The report, conducted by the World Health Organization (WHO) and UN partners, found that domestic violence started young, with a quarter of 15- to 19-year-old girls and young women estimated to have been abused at least once in their lives. The highest rates were found to be among 30- to 39-year-olds.

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Covid childcare crisis reversing decades of women’s economic progress – report

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Calls for recovery plans to address unequal burden of looking after children to advance equality and ‘because it makes fiscal sense’

The childcare crisis is at a “tipping point”, threatening to reverse decades of women’s economic progress, according to a new report published on Monday.

The report warned that the female-dominated childcare sector risked collapse, as coronavirus lockdowns and rising poverty levels had led to a “steep drop” in demand for formal and informal services.

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‘I’d like to join Pixar one day’: meet Afghanistan’s first female animator

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Born under Taliban rule, Sara Barackzay studied abroad and now hopes to start her own school

A woman in traditional dress breaks open the bars of a prison. A young child dances, oblivious to a backdrop of tanks and explosions. The drawings by Afghanistan’s first professional female animation artist, Sara Barackzay, reflect the struggles of her young life.

Barackzay, who lost her hearing as a child, left Afghanistan to study in Turkey, but has returned with the hope of starting a specialist school for animation arts.

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Guilt and fury: how Covid brought mothers to breaking point

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The pandemic exposed gender inequality, shattering the fragile jigsaw of support that allowed women with children to work. Radical action is necessary to prevent women’s rights backsliding a generation

“It is so hard, I cannot describe it.”

“I burned out, completely.”

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Pro-choice protests in Warsaw and Myanmar coup: 20 photos on human rights this week

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A roundup of the best photography on struggles for human rights and freedoms, from Algeria to Uganda

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Malawi MPs debate bill to liberalise abortion laws as churches oppose

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Law would widen strict rules in country where thousands suffer complications from unsafe terminations

A bill to liberalise Malawi’s abortion laws will be debated by MPs today in the face of opposition from faith groups.

If passed, the termination of pregnancy bill would allow abortions when a woman’s mental or physical health is in danger, in cases of rape and incest, and when there are serious foetal abnormalities.

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Reporting on WTO’s first female head ‘sexist and racist’, say African UN leaders

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Coverage of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala criticised by group who say such attitudes ‘discourage women from taking on leadership positions’

Senior African leaders at the UN have criticised the “sexist and racist” language used in coverage of the appointment of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala as the new president of the World Trade Organization.

Okonjo-Iweala, a graduate of Harvard University, was confirmed as the new head of the WTO last week, making her the first woman and the first African to lead the organisation.

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