April 25, 2012
Female genital mutilation surgery (FGM) is still being offered in the UK, despite being illegal. This thought horrifies me. Investigators from the Sunday Times report that doctors have offered to do the procedure on girls as young as ten. They also reportedly video taped a doctor, a dentist and an alternative medical practitioner offering to ...
Tags: Africa,
Britain,
clitoris,
crime,
doctor,
female genital mutilation,
FGM,
human rights,
mutilation,
race,
racism,
surgery,
UK,
vagina,
vulva,
Waris Dirie,
women's rights
April 12, 2012
Women are being sterilized without their permission or knowledge in Uzbekistan as the result of a secret government policy to keep statistics for maternal and infant death artificially low. Uzbekistan is a small dictatorship in Central Asia and has recently gained strategic importance to countries involved in the conflict in Afghanistan (including the US) as ...
April 2, 2012
Jailers can strip-search anyone who is being arrested, no matter how minor the crime, according to a Supreme Court ruling Monday. If you get caught driving without a license, walking your dog without a leash, or being drunk in public, you can be stripped naked and searched before taken to jail. Even if police have ...
Tags: civil rights,
crime,
criminal justice,
human rights,
judge,
justice,
law,
police,
privacy,
sexual assault,
strip search,
Supreme Court,
unreasonable searches
February 16, 2012
Protecting animals? Hurting humans? Or both? These are the serious questions we must ask ourselves after viewing PETA’s new shocking ad campaign, Boyfriend Went Vegan and Knocked the Bottom Out of Me (BWVAKTBOOM). In the video, a woman walks the streets wearing a neck brace, no pants, and looking forlorn after her vegan boyfriend has rough sex ...
Tags: Advertising Standards Association,
animal cruelty,
animal rights,
animals,
ASA,
battered women,
Boyfriend Went Vegan,
BWVAKTBOOM,
charity,
controversial ads,
domestic violence,
glorifying violence,
human rights,
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals,
PETA,
shock factor,
vegan,
veganism,
violence,
violence against women,
Women's Memorial March
February 10, 2012
Today there was a win for people with disabilities when the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that a disabled victim of alleged sexual assault will get a second trial. The woman’s original testimony, about alleged assault when she was 19 from her step-father in 2004, was dismissed because she couldn’t describe what an oath was ...
February 7, 2012
A woman in PEI was fired only one hour after telling her boss she was pregnant. They, of course, claimed they were going to fire her anyway for other reasons and that they had discussed this with other staff. They said it was just bad timing, but she didn’t believe it and took them to ...
February 2, 2012
Four men in South Africa have been sentenced for the murder of a 19-year-old lesbian woman. She was stabbed and stoned to death in 2006. The court found that the girl was targeted due to her sexual orientation. Cases like this sadly are not uncommon in South Africa. The Human Rights Watch claimed that ...
January 16, 2012
An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity. ~ Martin Luther King Jr.
December 28, 2011
After suffering abuse, humiliation and abject degradation at the hands of Egypt’s interim military rulers, an Egyptian civilian court has finally ruled an end to virginity tests on female detainees. The practice of making women strip and spread their legs to determine their sexual status has been defended by the Egyptian army. One official said ...
Tags: abuse,
army,
ban,
Cairo,
civil rights,
criminal,
danger,
debasement,
detainees,
Egypt,
human rights,
humiliation,
illegal,
justice,
law,
military,
perpetrators,
power,
protestor,
protests,
rape,
Samira Ibrahim,
sexual status,
Tahrir Square,
victim,
victimized,
violation,
virginity tests,
women's rights
December 13, 2011
A UN inquiry was announced today investigating the huge number of Aboriginal women that have gone missing in Canada. According to The Native Women’s Association of Canada more than 600 women have gone missing or been murdered since 1990 and this is a direct violation of the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms ...
Tags: aboriginal women,
Canada,
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women,
human rights,
missing women,
murder,
native women,
Native Women's Association of Canada,
racism,
UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women,
UN inquiry,
UN Women,
women's rights