The 17-page document produced by the latest global gathering here on women’s rights leaves open what appears to be a long-term fight between conservative and progressive factions within the Commission on the Status of Women. “It’s turning into a battle ground over women’s rights and that was not the original intention of the Commission on [...]
A few weeks ago, there were news reports that six Spanish tourists were raped and robbed in the famous Mexican city of Acapulco. The Spanish women were residents of Mexico and decided to take a vacation along with another Mexican woman and six men. The Mexican woman was not raped, and the six men were [...]
Sihem Badi, Tunisia’s minister of women’s affairs, admits there’s something wrong, at this date, in talking about the country’s first public shelter for victims of domestic violence. “We’re late,” she says. “Look at Morocco. They have tens of shelters for women. Here it’s the civil society who used to deal with victims and it’s the [...]
Yesterday the UK House of Commons voted overwhelmingly to pass the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill, which would give gay and lesbian couples the same marriage rights as heterosexuals. Since 2004, British same-sex couples have been allowed to enter into civil partnerships, giving them the same property, tax and welfare benefits as heterosexual married couples. However, same-sex partnerships were not [...]
Fire makes her scared. Hunger keeps her going. Musamat Nasrin Akhtar Tisha arrived in Dhaka to follow “the garment dream,” as she calls it. “I came to Dhaka to work in the garment factories. There is little work for girls in the villages. There is more money in the city,” said the 17-year-old with bright [...]
Only 30 percent of the girls in the world attend secondary school. In developing countries, one in seven girls is married off before age 15, and worldwide girls as young as 11 are forced to work as prostitutes. These harrowing numbers are what drove director Richard Robbins and a team of former ABC News journalists [...]
It’s called Killing With Kindness: Haiti, International Aid and NGOs (Rutgers University Press), but anthropologist Mark Schuller’s ethnographic study of foreign aid in Haiti before and after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck in 2010 depicts something closer to killing with disregard. Schuller’s book is primarily set between 2003 and 2005, around the time when a coup [...]
On November 29, 1952, a handful of women set out to create a different kind of world. These women—from eight family planning organizations representing the Netherlands, Hong Kong, India, Singapore, West Germany, Sweden, United Kingdom and the United States—believed that empowering women to control their own bodies was essential to creating healthy families and sustainable [...]
Her epitaph should read, simply, without any personal reference: India hates women. For I can think of no greater way to do her honor, the 23-year-old victim of a particularly grisly gang rape who died, after a battle for life that lasted nearly two weeks, in a Singapore hospital in the early hours of December [...]
South Korea has elected its first woman president, Park Geun-hye, in a closely fought election. Taking the presidency by a narrow 3.5 percent margin, the conservative Saenuri party’s Park will be moving back into the presidential house she called home as a young girl. Park’s father was Park Chung-hee, a polarizing figure in Korean politics [...]
