CNN reported last month:

A United Nations official is headed to the Central African Republic after reports that over 100 women, girls and boys were raped and abused — many by U.N. peacekeepers.

Jane Holl Lute, a senior U.N. official tasked with leading efforts to curb peacekeeper abuse, was en route to the country Wednesday, U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq said.

Allegations of sexual abuse by foreign and local forces have plagued the Central African Republic since the United Nations sent forces to the country two years ago. But they’re still just as shocking as ever.

…

[M]ore than 100 victims said they were sexually abused by U.N. peacekeepers and non-U.N. forces, a U.N. official said Tuesday.

“Tragically, the vast

It’s not always possible to do everything at once. You patch the leak in one place and it pops up in another.

Like trying to figure out this matter of “gender identity” for instance, and how it coheres with nondiscrimination on the basis of sex.

The Obama administration is planning to issue a sweeping directive telling every public school district in the country to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms that match their gender identity.

I’m leaning toward doing away with the whole sex segregation thing when it comes to restrooms and just having neutral rooms with floor-to-ceiling stalls. Privacy for all, and no need to fret about who is what.

Also, HB2 sucks.

But “gender identity” is a … Read the rest

Shaheen Hashmat in the New Statesman on police failures to do anything about “honour” violence.

A review carried out in 2015 by HMIC into the effectiveness of police responses to “honour”-based violence (HBV) found that only three out of the 43 forces across England and Wales are prepared in all essential areas to deal with such crimes. Ten years on from the horrific murder of Banaz Mahmod, who approached the police no less than five times before she was brutally raped, murdered and buried in a back garden in Birmingham, it’s clear that lessons still haven’t been learned.

She says the necessary expertise is no longer an issue.

Detective Sergeant Pal Singh has worked on some of the

A talk next week at Coventry Skeptics in the Pub: Blame the Brain: How Neurononsense joined Psychobabble to Keep Women in Their Place.

Gina Rippon

Wednesday, May 18 at 7:30PM

Twisted Barrel Ale Brewery and Tap House
Unit 5,
Fargo Village,
Far Gosford Street,
Coventry,
CV1 5ED

There is a long history of debate about biological sex differences and their part in determining gender roles, with the ‘biology is destiny’ mantra being used to legitimise imbalances in these roles. The tradition is continuing, with new brain imaging techniques being hailed as sources of evidence of the ‘essential’ differences between men and women, and the concept of ‘hardwiring’ sneaking into popular parlance as a brain-based explanation for all kinds of

To the surprise of no one, Saudi Arabia uses armored vehicles against its own people, the Globe and Mail reports.

Footage analyzed by The Globe and Mail shows Saudi Arabia using armoured vehicles against minority Shia Muslim dissidents in the Mideast country’s Eastern Province, raising serious questions about Riyadh’s tendency to use these military goods against its own citizens.

Copies of the videos, which date from 2012 and 2015, were supplied by Saudi human-rights activists who want Canada to suspend shipments of combat vehicles to Riyadh in a $15-billion deal between Canada and the ruling House of Saud.

The Trudeau government in April approved export permits for the bulk of these vehicle shipments in what Ottawa calls the largest

Another one:

A Sufi Muslim leader has been found hacked to death in Bangladesh in a suspected Islamist killing, police said Saturday, two weeks after the Islamic State group claimed the murder of a liberal professor in the same northwestern district.

Mohammad Shahidullah, 65, had been missing since leaving home on Friday morning before villagers last night found his body in a pool of blood in a mango grove in Rajshahi.

This time it’s a religious person rather than an atheist person, but if it is another Islamist killing, it’s pretty much the same thing – religious fanatics hacking to death anyone who isn’t a religious fanatic in exactly the way they are.

It comes amid a troubling rise

Yesterday on Fresh Air Nancy Fishman, a project director at the Vera Institute, told us about the mess that is the jail system in the US. I knew bits and pieces of what she said but not all of them and not the totality they make.

According to a report by the Vera Institute for Justice, there are more than 3,000 local jails in America, holding more than 730,000 people on any given day. Nancy Fishman, a project director at the Vera Institute, tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross that jails “have impacted a huge number of Americans … many more than are impacted by state prisons.”

The Vera Institute’s report documents that there are almost 12 million admissions

This is a bit of gender-enforcement that I hadn’t heard of before – “gender reveal” ceremonies. Say what?

Slate writer Jessica Winter has a toddler, and stranger’s get worked up about her Gender Status.

“Why do you dress her like a boy?” demanded a man in the jewelry section of H&M while my kid—in a red sweatshirt, jeans, and gray-and-purple sneakers—rummaged through a pile of tassled earrings. The man was trying to be polite, but he also seemed affronted by his own confusion—and affronted by me, I suppose, for causing his confusion. “She looks like a boy!” he insisted, repeatedly. The only response I could think of was the shrugging one I gave: “She looks like herself.”

Girls and … Read the rest

This again. A woman has the unmitigated temerity to have a job as political editor for the BBC – a job that had previously always belonged to a man. Someone draws up a petition to get her fired, and – surprise surprise! – it attracts the usual torrents of sexist abuse. In other news, some grass grew today.

The majority of those signing and supporting the petition expressed concerns about what they saw as biased reporting of the Labour party and its leader Jeremy Corbyn by Kuenssberg. However, some supporters on social media used abusive and sexist language in calling for the BBC’s first female political editor to go.

Of course they did. It is not possible for people … Read the rest

Let’s hark back to May 2011, to a Comment is Free piece by Evan Harris on the religious exemptions to the Equalities Act.

The Guardian has reported on those questioning the wisdom of contracting religious groups to deliver key public services. The government’s “big society” initiative – it still seems too unfocused to call it policy – has, as one of its aims, the transfer of the delivery of some public services to voluntary sector providers on a greater scale than is currently the case.

It was envisaged by both this and the previous government that faith groups would be some of the new providers. It seems unjustified to argue against religious organisations providing public services, as it is

The British Humanist Association reports something I find completely astonishing.

A pupil in Telford has been told that he cannot ride a council-run bus to school along with his classmates because ‘he’s not Catholic’, it has been reported. The bus serves the Holy Trinity Academy in Priorslee, which was opened in 2015 jointly by the local Roman Catholic and Anglican dioceses, and despite the bus being operated by Telford and Wrekin Council, it is not open to children at the school who are either not religious or belong to a minority religion.

What on earth? The boy attends the school and the bus is run by the council (i.e. it’s public) but he can’t ride on it because he’s … Read the rest

Jesus and Mo last week:

The Patreon.… Read the rest

Julie Bindel on the reality of what prostitution does to women:

It seems that everyone has an opinion on prostitution, but few know very much about it. That is certainly what I found in researching my book on the global sex trade. Mythology, rather than informed opinion, rules.

I am told on a regular basis that criminalising any aspect of the sex trade will “force it underground” – something that does not happen for the simple reason that the punters need to find it. I hide my despair at hearing, for the millionth time, that if men cannot access paid sex they will be forced to find a woman to rape, which is tantamount to arguing that men have

The BBC asks: Is it legal to force women to wear high heels at work?

If it is it certainly shouldn’t be. High heels are a form of foot-binding, and forced foot-binding should never be legal. People should be strongly discouraged from binding their own feet, and entirely forbidden to bind or demand the binding of anyone else’s.

A 27-year-old woman working for a City firm in London says she was sent home for refusing to wear high heels. But is this legal, fair or healthy?

Nicola Thorp says she was laughed at when she told her bosses that she didn’t want to wear high heels on her first day as a corporate receptionist.

“I was expected to do

From My Stealthy Freedom:

Her name is Gabriella. She is only two years old. She is a British citizen and went to Iran to visit her grandparents, but her passport was confiscated by the Islamic Republic of Iran after she attempted to return to the UK.

Her mother, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a 37-year-old project manager with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the news agency’s charitable arm, was arrested in early April in Tehran by members of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard at Imam Khomeini airport, where she and her daughter, Gabriella, were about to board a flight back to the UK.

So our question is the following: why has the Islamic republic confiscated a two year-old girl’s passport? Why is she banned

Via @tkingdoll and @ccriadoperez

… Read the rest

One story from the ACLU report:

Jennafer and Jason Norris were shocked to learn in 2014 that Jennafer was pregnant after a rare birth control failure. They had recently moved to Rogers, Arkansas, for Jason’s work, and Jennafer had happily returned to the workforce now that her two children were in school. Jennafer did not realize that her contraception had failed and that she was pregnant until she was eight weeks along and experiencing symptoms of preeclampsia, which she recognized from her first two pregnancies. It was mixed news: Jennafer and Jason were excited to expand their family, but very worried about her health.

The pregnancy was difficult from the start. Jennafer spent six weeks on bedrest, making it

Damn. Honesty compels me to retort to my own angry post about Sister Carol Keehan’s response to the ACLU report. I had the thought of emailing her to ask how it’s possible for Catholic hospitals to do both: to obey the ERD and perform abortions…and by doing that I found she’s not a heartless episcopal mouthpiece. So in all fairness here’s another view of Carol Keehan:

Sister Keehan, who earned a bachelor of science degree in nursing from St. Joseph’s College in Emmitsburg, Md., and a master of science degree in business administration from the University of South Carolina in Columbia, has watched medicine evolve and new policies rise. She has demonstrated unwavering commitment to the mission of providing

Originally a comment by AJ Milne on One man’s narcissism and divisiveness.

A sort of popular nihilism–this ‘everything is broken, so let’s just get it over with and burn it down’ thing–has showed up quite a lot, of late, among those effectively arguing for electing Trump. Been kinda hard to miss. Got one of those in my immediate circle. Quelle surprise.

What’s also kind of hard to miss is:

1) It’s hardly especially dissonant with lines right-wing politicians especially have been selling for decades, now. It’s a pretty standard campaign. Washington is broken. Please elect me to burn it to the ground. A really hardly exotic GOP playbook prepared the ground for Trump, much as some of them insist … Read the rest