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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan issued a decree in the early hours of March 20 withdrawing Turkey from the Council of Europe treaty — dubbed the Istanbul Convention — on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence. The convention sets comprehensive standards...
Last year, a report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimated that of the 87,000 women who were intentionally killed in 2017 around the world, more than half — 50,000 — were murdered by intimate partners or family members, mostly in their homes. According to official...
Nearly a year since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, its effects on people’s lives, countries’ economies and health care around the world are becoming clearer. In some Central and Eastern European countries, however, this pandemic has had repercussions in another crucial area: democracy....
The remains of Pinar Gültekin were found in the woodlands in Turkey’s Mugla province on July 21. The 27-year-old economics student was strangled to death in a fit of rage by her ex-boyfriend, who then burned her body. One of many tragic and preventable deaths, Gültekin’s murder sparked...
Mao Zedong once stated that “Women hold up half the sky.” This has been particularly true over the past months with COVID-19 wreaking havoc across the globe. In fact, it is legitimate to claim that during the pandemic, women have held up significantly more than their share of the sky. Anyone...
For an entire year before my novel’s publication date, I braced myself. I’ve never felt this way about a new novel’s birth. But “Seven” — about Sharifa, a 40-year-old woman who returns to India on a marriage-saving trip to research a revered ancestor — was different. Folded into...
Despite incidents of gender-based violence spiraling in Mexico since the introduction of COVID-19 lockdown measures in April 2020, the Mexican government slashed funding to women’s services in August as part of an emergency decree that redirected money to programs it deemed a...
The Senate hearings on Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment to the Supreme Court did not sit well with American feminists. An ultra-conservative judge belonging to an ultra-conservative Catholic faith group vehemently opposed to abortion and anything gay was hardly a candidate one would expect...
Is Johnny Depp mad? Why on earth did he start legal action that could end in the destruction of his professional life? Unless the appeal his legal team promises succeeds, this may be the last we see of Depp. He’ll be an abusive pariah, and Hollywood studios will never offer him another part....
President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) won the 2018 election on a campaign of combating the underlying causes of the social ailments impacting Mexican society. He vowed to fight violence and narcotics trafficking by eliminating its root cause, poverty. His plan was summarized by his tagline,...
In 1994, the United Nations coordinated the first International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), which resulted in the Programme of Action that formally recognized the right to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights (SRHR), including the right to safe abortion...
