Tag Archives: Domestic Abuse

Millions of US Women at Risk After ‘Regressive’ Attack on Abortion Rights by Supreme Court: UN Experts

Abortion bans in 14 U.S. states since the 2022 Dobbs decision “have made abortion services largely inaccessible and denied women and girls their fundamental human rights to comprehensive healthcare including sexual and reproductive health.”

By Jon Queally. Published 6-4-2023 by Common Dreams

Abortion Rights Rally in response to Supreme Court Roe vs Wade Reversal Decision at Washington Square Park in NYC on Friday evening, 24 June 2022. Photo: Elvert Barnes/flickr/CC

High-level experts with the United Nations have issued a joint statement condemning the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling last year that reversed decades of legal precedent protecting abortion rights for women.

“The regressive position taken by the US Supreme Court in June 2022, by essentially dismantling 50 years of precedent protecting the right to abortion in the country, puts millions of women and girls at serious risk,” said the 13 experts, all appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council, on Friday.

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Polls: Four Weeks of Protest Have Radically Altered American Views on Police

American voters now support sweeping changes to policing; 83 percent want a ban on racial profiling, 92 percent want police to be required to wear body cameras and White Americans’ concern over police violence has increased by 50 percent since 2019.

By Alan Macleod  Published 6-19-2020 by MintPress News

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Just four weeks of protest have radically altered Americans’ views on the police and what their role in society should be. Once almost exclusively the domain of activist groups, moves to comprehensively change, defund or even abolish the police are rapidly gaining momentum with the public.

new study published this week by Data for Progress shows that voters overwhelmingly (58 percent to 24 percent) support the creation of a new agency of first responders to deal with problems in the community – an agency that would explicitly undermine the police’s purview. The public would like to see the service, whose agents would resemble social workers more than police officers, take over a great number of situations police currently deal with, including mental health crises, drug addiction problems (including overdoses), and issues regarding homelessness. Significant numbers of people want to see the new agency tackle issues like spousal abuse and all non-violent crimes as well. “For elected officials looking to strengthen their communities and take action in the face of mass protest on police brutality, creating a non police first-responder agency proves to be a popular option that deserves their attention,” the report concludes. Continue reading

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Propaganda and Islam: What You’re Not Being Told

The truth about Muslims and Islam.

By Justin King.  Published 6-21-2014 by The Anti-Media

Image: braveandboldthinking

Propaganda is the wheel by which the government steers the bus of a nation; typically driving it into war or off the cliff of humanity. It is amazing to see how many people who are otherwise rational human beings will blindly follow the herd on the matter of how subhuman a perceived national enemy is.

Some western media wonderfully paints Islam as a death cult bent on world domination. Continue reading

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Call Katie Hill’s “Scandal” What It Is: Sexual Assault

The Congresswoman resigned after having an affair with a campaign aide, but she’s also a crime victim, and those two facts don’t cancel each other out.

By . Published 10-31-2019 by YES! Magazine

Katie Hill speaking with attendees at the 2019 California Democratic Party State Convention at the George R. Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California. Photo: Gage Skidmore/flickr

 

“Someone asked me to write about Katie Hill,” I told my husband over dinner this week.

“Oh,” he said, “the woman who had the relationship with her staffer?”

“The woman who was sexually assaulted,” I said. Continue reading

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Central American women fleeing violence experience more trauma after seeking asylum

File 20190422 1403 n0tfpz.jpg?ixlib=rb 1.1

Many of these female asylum-seekers have already been abused before they cross the border.AP Photo/Gregory Bull

Laurie C. Heffron, St. Edward’s University

The number of Central American women who make difficult, often harrowing, journeys to the United States to flee domestic and gang violence is rising.

I’m a social science researcher and a social worker who has interviewed hundreds of women after they were detained by immigration authorities for my research about the relationship between violence against women and migration. I find that most female asylum seekers experience trauma, abuse and violence before they cross the U.S. border seeking asylum. Continue reading

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‘Shame on this President:’ With Shutdown, Trump Cuts Off Funds for ‘Vital Services and Protections’ for Women Who Face Abuse

“This shutdown is directly impacting the safety and lives of women and families across the country.”

By Julia Conley, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published 12-24-2018

Photo: Fem 2.0

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) was among those condemning the government shutdown’s impacts on the safety of women and families, as funding for the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) expired at midnight on Friday as the shutdown went into effect.

Along with nearly 400,000 federal employees who face a furlough thanks to President Donald Trump’s decision to shut down the federal government, programs that support women who have survived violence may now face funding shortages due to the turmoil on Capitol Hill. Congress’s failure to negotiate a spending bill over the weekend left programs that rely on the law without federal funding until at least Thursday, when lawmakers reconvene. Continue reading

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‘Mark of Shame on All Our Societies’: UN Finds More Women Killed by Domestic Violence Than Any Other Crime

50,000 women around the world were killed by family members or intimate partners in 2017

By Julia Conley, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published 11-26-2018

A U.N. study found that violence perpetrated by family members or intimate partners is the leading cause of death for women worldwide. (Photo: CMY Kane/Flickr/cc)

In a quarter of the world’s countries, no laws exist protecting women and girls from what a new United Nations study says is the crime most likely to kill them: violence perpetrated by their intimate partners and family members.

Marking the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime on Sunday released a global study on homicide, focusing on gender-related killings, and revealed that out of 87,000 women who were murdered around the world in 2017, 58 percent of them were killed by family members or partners. Continue reading

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Building “Feminism for the 99 Percent,” Women’s Strike Will Take Many Forms

‘March 8th will be the beginning of a new international feminist movement’

By Deirdre Fulton, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published 3-2-2017

“We halt our work to highlight just how meager, how lackluster, and how dysfunctional the world would be without us.” (Image: Women’s March)

Whether by walking off the job or boycotting “unseen” labor, women and allies around the world next week will stand up and speak out to say: Women’s rights are human rights.

Coinciding with International Women’s Day, the March 8 day of action is being promoted in solidarity by those who organized January’s Women’s March as well as a grassroots movement known as the International Women’s Strike (IWS). While both groups acknowledge that the election of President Donald Trump makes their call more urgent, their overlapping visions look beyond one administration—and reach further back into the past. Continue reading

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Integrity? What Integrity?

One of the stories that our media likes to cover instead of covering news that really affects the human race reared its head again this last weekend. Yes, the incident known as Deflategate was back in the news, to the unspoken sighs of relief from media outlets all over the country who were suddenly freed of maybe having to run a story about something that mattered.

Yesterday, the penalties for those involved were announced by the NFL. They include Tom Brady getting a four game suspension, two team employees being suspended indefinitely and the team being fined a million dollars as well as losing draft picks.

There was the usual blathering from league spokesmen about how the people involved “compromised the integrity of the league and the game.” We would like to ask the league what integrity they’re talking about.

Ray Rice 2012. "Ray Rice 2012" by 1ravenscowboysnflfan - Own work. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Ray Rice 2012. “Ray Rice 2012” by 1ravenscowboysnflfan – Own work. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

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A tribute to Joan Kagezi: the murder of a human rights defender

Joan Kagezi was a lead prosecutor in high profile cases in Uganda, including against a former LRA commander and those accused of terrorism. She was shot dead in front of her children last month.

Joan Kagezi. Photo via Facebook

Joan Kagezi. Photo via Facebook

By Brigid Inder. Published April 25, 2015 by openDemocracy

On 30 March, at around 7.30pm, Joan Kagezi, Senior Principal State Attorney in Uganda, was murdered by unidentified assailants, who opened fire on her while she was driving home from work.

In the most ordinary of circumstances, Joan had stopped at a fruit stall on her way home when she was shot twice by gunmen on a motorcycle.  Three of her four children were in the car with Joan at the time of the attack and witnessed the brutal murder of their mother.

Joan was head of the Directorate of Public Prosecution’s (DPP) war crimes and anti-terrorism division and in this capacity she was, at the time of her death, the lead Prosecutor in a high profile terrorism case, involving suspects in the 2010 terrorist bombings in Kampala. The case was strong and Joan was formidable. Continue reading

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