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...

  It is well established by now that the deadly coronavirus is anything but a “great equalizer.” Instead, large swaths of the population are confronting threats — both to their physical and their financial well-being — that if left unchecked could deepen existing divides. Take the gender gap. Before the pandemic struck, women already faced a century-long wait to reach parity with men, a daunting prospect that now risks becoming further out of reach if the economic disparities unleashed by the crisis are ignored. As the health emergency abates, governments, big business and investors have the opportunity to refocus their attention on previous goals, such as aiming to reach gender equality. Women are particularly exposed to this crisis. They are on the frontlines of the fight against the virus itself, making up 70% of global healthcare workers and as much as 95% of long-term care workers, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). But not only are ...

  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 ...

Barely 24 hours after the remains of the 19-year-old-Dalit woman were consigned to flames by the police in Uttar Pradesh’s Hathras without the consent of the family, another sexual assault and death of a 22-year-old Dalit woman has surfaced from Balrampur in the same state. Reflective of widely pervasive casteist mindsets, these brutal sexual assaults against Dalit women are being framed as isolated incidents of crime rather than atrocities which are the outcome of systemic and deep-rooted casteism and misogyny. It is important to acknowledge that there are several intersecting factors such as identities, institutions and hierarchies that result in this kind of structural violence. Women are not a homogenous group and are differentially impacted by forces of caste, class, religion, ethnicity, race, among others. The social location of Dalit women at the lowest rung of caste, class and gender hierarchies results in them facing multiple forms of discrimination and targeted violence. We h...

  A rape is reported every 15 minutes in India. In the last two months more than 25 rapes made headlines, of this some were reported as heinous acts of violence and gang rapes, mostly from the state of Uttar Pradesh, where the girl was strangled, her tongue was cut, or she was raped and her body was thrown away.  The Hathras gang rape case has left the nation shocked, not just by the brutality of it but with the grim reminder how deep rooted and rampant caste based violence is in the country. Women are asking, why does India fail its daughters every single day? Women are neither safe at home (India has no laws against marital rape and domestic violence cases are on the rise), nor on the streets. A Thomson Reuters Poll 2018 called India the most unsafe country in the world. Women reported nearly 34,000 rapes in 2018 (these were reported, every day many go unreported). Of these, over 85 per cent led to charges, and 27 per cent to convictions, according to the National Crime Bure...

The 19-year-old woman, whose death in a Delhi hospital two weeks after she was brutally gangraped sparked protests and anguish, was cremated near her home in Hathras in the dead of the night early Wednesday with her family alleging they were forced by local police to conduct the last rites. “The cremation was done around 2.30-3 in the morning,” her father told PTI, a day after the young woman, grievously injured when she was allegedly gangraped by four upper caste men, gave up the battle for life. As political leaders and activists voiced their protest on social media and other platforms over the manner in which the funeral was conducted, local police said it was carried out as per the wishes of the family. In the moments preceding the cremation, the Dalit teen’s brother told PTI, “Police have forcibly taken the body and my father along with them for cremation. When my father reached Hathras (from New Delhi), he was immediately taken (to the crematorium) by the police.” Prime Minister ...