From Pakistan to Chile, women in their millions filled the streets, demanding that we be able to control our bodies and our lives. Women came out in Iraq and Kyrgyzstan, Turkey and Peru, the Philippines and Malaysia. In some places, they risked beatings by masked men. In others, they demanded an end to femicide—the millennia-old reality that women in this world are murdered daily simply because they are women. IN 1975 THE FUTURE WAS FEMALE This year’s celebrations were especially militant. It’s been 45 years since the United Nations declared 1975 the International Women’s Year and sponsored its first international conference on women in Mexico City. Similar conferences followed at five-year intervals, culminating in a 1995 Beijing conference, producing a platform that has in many ways guided international feminism ever since. Beijing was a quarter of a century ago, but this year, women around the world seemed to have had enough. On March 9, Mexican women staged a 24-hour strike, un día...

  In early April, Rekha Sharma, chairperson of the National Commission for Women, drew attention to the disturbing phenomenon of a reported increase in violence against women during the first phase of the nationwide lockdown in India. Even as the period of lockdown in India came to be extended, increase in domestic violence continued to be reported from India and across the world. National dailies in India, apart from the New York Times, the Guardian and others have tracked some of these developments, reporting on the spurt in incidents and women’s frantic calls to helplines. News reports have pointed to the added stress of being locked in with abusers, and being cut off from support groups while being confined at home in times of social distancing. The issue flagged merits serious attention from all concerned, be it the media or activists and, more so, from agencies of the state, charged with formulating and implementing policies to stem the tide of this violence. There is also a ...

Around the world, as cities have gone into lockdown to stop the spread of coronavirus, the mass efforts to save lives have put one vulnerable group more at risk. Women and children who live with domestic violence have no escape from their abusers during quarantine, and from Brazil to Germany, Italy to China, activists and survivors say they are already seeing an alarming rise in abuse. In Hubei province, the heart of the initial coronavirus outbreak, domestic violence reports to police more than tripled in one county alone during the lockdown in February, from 47 last year to 162 this year, activists told local media. “The epidemic has had a huge impact on domestic violence,” Wan Fei, a retired police officer who founded a charity campaigning against abuse, told Sixth Tone website. “According to our statistics, 90% of the causes of violence [in this period] are related to the Covid-19 epidemic.” It is a pattern being repeated globally. In Brazil a state-run drop-in centre has already s...