WMC Women Under Siege
Forgotten girls: How one child in Yemen is drawing attention to underage marriage
Eight million people and counting have watched a video featuring an 11-year-old Yemeni girl named Nada al-Ahdal. From what looks like the seat of a car, she talks about why she left home because, she says, her parents tried to marry her off. Al-Ahdal talks about the “innocence of children” and the consequences—including suicide—of being force-married to an older man at such a young age.
WMC Women Under Siege
Sexual assaults, victim-blaming continues in Peace Corps
On November 21, 2011, President Barack Obama signed into law the Kate Puzey Peace Corps Volunteer Protection Act. The act aims to reform Peace Corps’ policies and procedures for preventing and responding to sexual assault. Its passage was intended to end the epidemic of sexual assault against Peace Corps volunteers and endemic culture of victim-blaming in the agency. But the success of the Kate Puzey Act is threatened by the Peace Corps’ use of outdated, victim-blaming definitions of sexual assault.
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Attention People With Body Parts
My name is Lexie and I am the Founder and Creative Director of Attention: People With Body Parts, an international body-positive initiative with an emphasis on book-making, letter-writing, and collabo...
WMC Women Under Siege
'Survival sex': How NGOs and peacekeepers exploit women in war
It’s easy to associate rape with the Democratic Republic of Congo, a region torn by conflict since 1996. Dubbed the “rape capital of the world,” the country sees four women raped every five minutes, according to a 2011 study published by the American Journal of Public Health.
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All I Want Is Equality
All I want is equality.
Because yes, that is what feminism is all about. Equality for women. No, we feminists are not asking for better treatment under the law for women. Anyone who does is not truly...
WMC Women Under Siege
Creating heaven 'in a place called hell’: DRC activist responds to US tabloid
Sometimes I read something that makes the movement of the world, the very air in the room, freeze to a stop. That’s what happened recently when I read a letter written by an activist in the Democratic Republic of Congo named Neema Namadamu. I read it once, then I read it again. Instead of describing why it had such a profound effect on me, I’m pasting it in full below.
WMC Women Under Siege
The topsy-turvy world of men who oppose anti-violence campaigns
At the start of this year, my friend and WMC’s Women Under Siege director, Lauren Wolfe, started a Twitter hashtag, #2013EndRape, to highlight the epidemic of sexualized violence against women. While the hashtag has seen success, one of the unintended consequences has been its trolling and attacks on it by various “Men’s Rights Activists.”
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Why I Shared my Abortion Story With North Carolina Law Makers
My voice was trembling when I spoke the words “I decided to choose abortion.” I was telling my personal story and expressing my opposition of House Bill 695, a bill that would shut down all but one ab...
WMC Women Under Siege
Hope for a better life leads to torture for Ethiopians
When there’s not an acute famine in the Horn of Africa, the media tends to leave the misery in that part of the world unreported. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t heard much about Ethiopia specifically in awhile, minus a few international journalist friends mentioning that there is a migration problem for women who are seeking better lives in the Arab peninsula. As of this morning though, I can’t pretend to ignore what’s going on in the region any longer.
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July 12, 2013 | Julie Zeilinger |
Feminism,
Free Speech,
Gender-based violence,
Media,
Science and tech,
Violence against women
Saturday Vids: Jaclyn Friedman On Hate Speech On Facebook
Last month, awesome feminist activists Jaclyn Friedman of Women, Action and the Media (WAM!), author/activist Soraya Chemaly and Laura Bates of the The Everyday Sexism Project launched a campaign to e...
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Innocence Lost
Life never passed more slowly than it did when I cried behind the football stands. Like a movie, the crowds cheered while I bowed my head in defeat, the music roared while my smile was muted. Small to...
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Moving On From The Past
The summer after my freshman year of high school, I was sexually abused, harassed and almost raped. I do not want to go into how -- it’s just not something I want to relive. I told my mom when I was a...
WMC Women Under Siege
No, war doesn’t have to mean rape
Almost every day, readers write to tell us that women will always be targeted in conflict. Rape, they say, is just a natural part of war, and there’s no way to stop it. Yet research shows that this isn’t actually the case.
WMC News & Features
Action Alert & Interview Transcript: Saudi Activist Women Facing Jail for Bringing Abused Woman Food
Two Saudi women’s rights activists, Wajeha Al-Huwaider and Fawzia Al-Oyouni, have been sentenced to 10 months in prison plus a two-year travel ban thereafter—for “encouraging" a French Canadian woman "to defy" her allegedly abusive Saudi husband.
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The Congresswoman v. The General
Lt. Gen. David H. Huntoon, Jr. has not had the best of luck in the past two weeks. Seven days following the results of an investigation by the Pentagon that the West Point Superintendent "improperly u...
WMC Women Under Siege
Rape accounts still surface from India’s partition 65 years on
War stories are often framed by convenient lines, two clear-cut sides, campaigns and directives. Partition in India reads very differently. In the aftermath of the 1947 declaration of Indian independence, the roughly drawn new state boundaries triggered what may have been the biggest migration in human history.
WMC Women Under Siege
'Take your portion': A victim speaks out about rape in Syria
Alma Abdulrahman is lying gaunt and unable to move anything below her diaphragm in a hospital bed in Amman. Some bedsores have become so deep she’s having surgery tomorrow. Screws hold together her upper vertebrae, and cigarette burns pock her right shoulder. Her voice fades in and out, hoarse from either weakness or morphine.
WMC Women Under Siege
The G8’s PR strategy on rape in conflict
On the same day in April that I listened to the harrowing stories of Syrian women over endless glasses of tea in Jordan’s Zaatari refugee camp, leaders of the world’s eight richest countries promised to take action against rape as a weapon of war. But the high-profile statement failed to offer a deadline, measurable metric, or concrete plan for a single recommendation it put forward.
WMC Women Under Siege
Nicaraguan women could be forced into mediation with their attackers
In June 2012, a Nicaraguan law aimed at protecting women from gender-based violence took effect. Called Law 779, it “stipulates that the state and its institutions have a duty to guarantee the physical, psychic, moral, sexual, patrimonial, and economic integrity of women,” Inter Press Service reports. But since last year, the law has been jeopardized by opponents, including the vice president of the country’s Supreme Court.
WMC Women Under Siege
Inching forward against military sexual assault
U.S. legislators voted Wednesday to help stanch the overwhelming problem of sexualized violence in the armed forces, Reuters reports. The idea is to make it easier for victims of sexualized violence to come forward while decreasing the threat of retaliation from superiors in the chain of command.
WMC Women Under Siege
Mali conflict is latest to employ forced marriage as tool of war
Saran Keïta Diakité painted a dismal reality for women in Mali in a speech she gave to the UN Security Council in April. “They carry out a form of ‘marriage’ so that, at night, you can be treated as a sexual slave,” Diakité said. “During the day, you are there to serve tea to the men and attend to their every need. This is why I always say that what’s happened in Mali is unprecedented."
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I Will Not Be Scared Off The Streets
So, the other day, I was walking downtown on my own (or as I like to say, "independently"), and this guy in a truck hooted at me while I passed the Shell gas station. I shrunk a little, turned around,...
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May 31, 2013 | Julie Zeilinger |
Feminism,
Gender-based violence,
Media,
Misogyny,
Violence against women
Saturday Vids: Victims of Acid Attacks
[TRIGGER WARNING: VIOLENT IMAGES]
According to Stop Acid Attacks, acid attacks are "a prevalent way for a man to inflict revenge on a woman, who has either turned down his interest or insulted him so...
WMC Women Under Siege
Tracking a rumor: Is there a sugar factory in Syria being used as a rape house?
We were seated on a scratchy nylon mat with “UNHCR” written all over it. Children with the same beautiful, olive-complexioned face stared big-eyed at me from every corner of the furniture-less room, and their mother cried as she talked about the many massacres her family had fled in Homs five months previously.
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Forced Prostitution During World War II
I recently read an article posted on Yahoo News about prostitution during World War II in Japan. Prostitution is a difficult and controversial subject for feminists, but what most can agree on is tha...