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News of interest

Chally

From The Hindu, Meira Kumar, the first woman speaker of the Indian lower house, Lok Sabha, gave an address at Shreemati Nathibai Damodar Thackersey Women’s University; check it out. In the same nation, from The Times of India, here’s a piece about taking a gendered lens to the state of Rajasthan.

The UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women is, as of 1 January, known as UN Women.

“This is a time of great promise,” said UN Women Executive Director Michelle Bachelet, formerly President of Chile. “We have a historic opportunity to accelerate the achievement of what champions of gender equality have worked towards for years.”

Joan Smith at The Independent responds to the “don’t want to get raped, ladies? stay indoors” attitude cropping up, as ever, following on from the murder of Joanna Yeates in the UK. How about telling men, not women, to stay indoors?

From the AFP, Two-thirds of Morocco women face violence: study:

Out of nine million women aged 18 to 64 years old, nearly six million were subjected to violent acts during the twelve months that preceded the study conducted between June 2009 and January 2010, the paper said.

The study included both physical and psychological violence.

5 thoughts on News of interest

  1. Morocco is supposed to be one of the more women-friendly Muslim states among north Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.

    “[2004] reforms [to the family code, or Moudawana] give women the right to divorce and protect them from the traditional practice of repudiation, whereby husbands could dissolve marriages nearly at will.

    Spurred by a home-grown women’s movement, supported by Morocco’s king and denounced by Islamists, Morocco’s revamped family law has been held up as a model by feminists throughout the Muslim world”

    I would not be surprised if that’s a factor into the government’s willingness to even do this study and expect an accurate outcome.

  3. Heh. Interesting news from India indeed! The political party that (when in power in Rajasthan) successfully thwarted its own administration’s case against the burning alive of an 18 year old widow, is now raising concerns about the rise in atrocities against women in the same State? Just to put this in perspective, the Chief Minister of the BJP-ruled State at the time told women’s rights activists to “let women prove how powerful they are by becoming Goddesses” ie. burning themselves on the funeral pyre of their husbands. Talk about hypocrisy.

  4. as a quick note, the name of the university is ‘Shreemati Nathibai Damodar Thackersey Women’s University’, since K. Sankaranarayanan is actually the name of its governor! (Though, yeah, that sentence was pretty unparsable.)

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