WMC Women Under Siege
Measuring self-worth in units of male approval: Marriage in India
While women’s rights in India have begun to make news this year, we are barely off the starting line yet. The news includes domestic and international outrage over the gang rapes of strangers, but these make up a very small percentage of the sexual attacks in the country. In India, more than 90 percent of rapes are committed by people known to the victim, according to a 2012 report by India’s National Crime Records Bureau.
WMC Women Under Siege
What we know about sexualized violence in Syria (video)
While the Geneva II talks about peace in Syria gear up to begin on January 22, I thought I’d put our latest numbers and information on sexualized violence in Syria up here for you to see. I recently laid out what we know about this at a talk at the Heirich Böll Foundation in Berlin, embedded below.
WMC Women Under Siege
Why are we still surprised that Egypt’s women are not free?
Egyptians often tout their country as a beacon of culture, liberalism, and Muslim modesty in the Middle East. But in terms of freedoms for women, a recent study on how people in Muslim countries prefer women to dress in public showed that Egypt is significantly more conservative than its Arab neighbors.
WMC Women Under Siege
New report details ongoing sexualized violence in Burma
On November 27, 2012, a 26-year-old woman was gang-raped by seven Burmese soldiers. When the woman’s husband returned home, the soldiers threatened to kill him. “Even if you tell other people, there is no one who will take action,” they said. “We have the authority to rape women.”
WMC FBomb
Feminism Has Changed Me: Claiming My Black Latina Identity
Throughout the last few weeks, I have been introduced to a powerful movement called feminism. I have never been as inspired and motivated to use my voice than I am right now. The more that I have been...
WMC Women Under Siege
Why has it become normal to dehumanize women in India?
Two years ago, on New Year’s Eve, a girl was molested on the streets of Delhi in front of a crowd. The video went viral—as did the spectacle of a mob of men falling upon the woman and the police thrashing the rabid mob with lathis (batons) like a pack of dogs.
WMC News & Features
Global Feminism in One Place? It’s Possible!
An innovative new project is giving feminists worldwide the tools to be visible, connected, and more powerful.
WMC Women Under Siege
10 ways women are criminalized for being brutalized—as seen in a single story
On December 30, The Wall Street Journal ran a story about Lalasa Devi, a woman in her mid-30s who is part of India’s “untouchable” cast. Devi says a man raped her one night nine months ago and that she has seen no justice since. I’ve rarely read a case that speaks as clearly as this one does to why women don’t report rape.
WMC Women Under Siege
Silent slaves: Stories of human trafficking in India
In a women’s ward in a New Delhi hospital lies a frail 15-year-old girl. Her face and head are bandaged, leaving visible only a bruised blue-black eye and swollen lips. Burn marks and scabs extend down her neck to her whole body, and a strange stench surrounds her.
WMC Women Under Siege
December 23, 2013 International,
Violence against women
2013 #MustReads on WMC’s Women Under Siege
We started off the year with a call to end the “culture of rape in 2013,” leading to a widely used hashtag offering ideas as to how at #2013EndRape. From there, we looked at the big picture of violence—why it’s so widespread and continues unabated, who it affects and how it is measured—in a number of pieces including...
WMC Women Under Siege
December 18, 2013 | Reem Abdel-Razek |
Disability,
International,
Violence against women,
WMC Loreen Arbus Journalism Program
Did not wearing a veil lead to an acid attack in Egypt?
A few weeks ago I received a message from a friend in Cairo about a horrible attack on her sister, Esraa Mohamed. Esraa was walking in her own neighborhood at 3 p.m. when she realized she was being followed by a well-dressed, respectable looking stranger. He said, “I am not harassing you but don’t forget to wipe off your pants.”
WMC Women Under Siege
What does it mean when women perpetrate gang rapes?
When I research rape in war, particularly gang rape, three thoughts prevail: First, the repeated illustration that rape is the expression of dominance, a vicious and complex way of ensuring that certain people and institutions function and thrive; second, that sexualized violence is not inevitable; and third, that women in the world experience life the way that imprisoned men do.
WMC Women Under Siege
Global study of survivors of gender-based violence confirms our worst fears
In the aftermath of the widely publicized sexual assaults in India, local and international experts have focused on the environment in which impunity, victim-blaming, and under-reporting have allowed these crimes to persist. The attention has forced Indians to examine how police, medical examiners, and members of the public treat sexual assault survivors.
WMC News & Features
December 11, 2013 | Robin Morgan |
International
The Major News Story Nobody’s Running
A new policy proposal to the UN threatens to undo decades of progress in the fight against prostitution. Robin Morgan asks: Why isn’t this considered news?
WMC Women Under Siege
In CAR, ‘If they saw a woman they wanted, they just took her’
Natacha Indzabingui is one of thousands of women hiding in the bush in the Central African Republic. The 32-year-old told me that when armed men attacked her village, “everyone tried to escape. Those who couldn’t were attacked. If they saw a woman they wanted, they just took her. If she had a child, it was just thrown to the side.” Thirty people were abducted that day, Indzabingui said, including 12 women and girls, some as young as 7.
WMC Women Under Siege
The Index: Sexualized Violence at Home
Percent of women worldwide who have experienced either intimate partner violence or non-partner sexualized violence in their lifetime: 35. Perpetrators of rape of women since age 18 that are men (as a percent): 100
WMC Women Under Siege
When conflict came to Burma’s Rohingya, women were forced to do something unexpected
The roles of family and society, dictated by culture and history, often disintegrate in the presence of conflict. And the Rohingya people, already one of the most persecuted ethnic minorities in the world, were no exception after last year’s violence in Burma.
WMC Women Under Siege
When we focus on rape, what do we miss?
It’s been 20 years since the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women. Despite this, it doesn’t seem like the Western mainstream media have figured out how to represent more than a narrow definition of the types of violence women experience during conflict. Too often the focus is only on rape and other forms of sexualized violence.
WMC Women Under Siege
Taking away their guns: A move toward protecting women and girls?
Rape turns bodies into weapons. But in many cases, literal weapons facilitate the act itself. As one Congolese woman told Amnesty International in 2011: “A guy with a machete in a village can rape one woman. Two guys with a machine gun can rape the whole village.” Guns not only facilitate rape but also heighten its danger. With guns, women are shot in the vaginas, leading to death or debilitating injuries such as fistula. With guns, and other weapons, rape “is often used as a predecessor to murder.”
WMC Women Under Siege
November 14, 2013 | Kishalay Bhattacharjee |
Disability,
International,
Violence against women,
WMC Loreen Arbus Journalism Program
Of the thousands of unreported, ignored stories in India, here’s one
Despite the outrage at violence against women that spread through India this past year, thousands of women and children continue to be victims of rape, trafficking, and other forms of sexualized violence. The stories of these women and children go unreported and are largely ignored by global campaigns against violence. But one of the worst and most brutal cases has been that of Soni Sori.
WMC Women Under Siege
10 wars to watch (and that the media ignore)
Bloodshed, famine, rape, internal displacement. There are truly few things as awful as the reality of living through modern warfare. The horror, suffering, and pain caused by war are acutely felt on an individual level. Often though, that pain is endured quietly, out of view, while the media focuses on bombs falling and guns firing.
WMC Women Under Siege
November 08, 2013 International,
Violence against women
Women under siege (and on the Web) this week
Our roundup of what's happening around the world and around the Web when it comes to women, war, and sexualized violence this week.
WMC FBomb
A Feminist Wave of Fury
I'm not walking 'before' Anybody.
I'm not here to parade my body,
Or prance and flit about.
Cause under all the prettiness,
There beats an Amazon heart.
To wear what We want.
To do what We dream.
To...
WMC Women Under Siege
U.S. steps up protection of women in war
One of the first things that happens when war breaks out is that the rule of law crumbles. Women become targets of violence—whether through rape or sexual exploitation as food and other resources quickly become scarce. This can have critical consequences not only for the women themselves, but for the escalation of the war.
WMC Live
WMC Live #58: Holly Near, Ilyse Hogue, Maysoon Zayid. (Original Airdate 11/2/2013)
Robin gives an exclusive update on Saudi women defying the driving ban, and takes on the attempted revival of the Men’s Movement. Guests: NARAL Pro-Choice America’s Ilyse Hogue; Palestinian comic Maysoon Zayid; and singer-activist Holly Near.
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