Tag: Women

Teen girls across the U.S. are engulfed in a growing wave of violence and trauma

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The Centers for Disease Control is warning teen girls across the U.S. are engulfed in a, “growing wave of violence and trauma,” as new data shows there has been an increase in rapes and sexual assaults, as well as record levels of depression and hopelessness. The data is from a 2021 CDC survey conducted on 17,000 high school teenagers where nearly a third of teen girls said they had seriously considered suicide — up nearly 60% from a decade ago. At least 13% of them said they had attempted suicide in the past year, while almost 15% of the girls surveyed said they had been sexually assaulted.

Absolutely. So, I always use YouTube as an example. So, when I was a young girl, 12 years old, and I went on YouTube to look up a good workout or a healthy recipe, that one search indicated to the algorithm that it should feed me pro-anorexic content. So, within seconds of watching that video, addictive algorithmic design techniques, such as autoplay, that keeps a video recommended playing — and you don’t have to click anything, and it will send it to you — that led me towards dangerous rabbit holes, feeding me pro-anorexic content, when all I wanted was a healthy recipe.

— source democracynow.org | Feb 20, 2023

Nullius in verba

Waiting for One Dead Woman

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In Ireland, her name was Savita Halappanavar. She was a dentist. Her water broke at 17 weeks, like Amanda Zurawski’s. Doctors in Ireland told her that they could not end her pregnancy because the fetus was protected under Ireland’s Eighth Amendment as long as it still had a heartbeat. She begged for an abortion. Like Zurawski, she developed sepsis. Then she died. She was 31. Her death ignited a political revolution that liberalized Ireland’s abortion laws. Thousands of people rallied in the streets holding banners with Savita’s portrait that read “Never again.” Six years later, Irish voters repealed the Eighth Amendment in a referendum. Under the right circumstances, one death is enough.

I wonder if our dead woman is reading Good Night, Moon to her toddler after a long day at work. I wonder if she is logging into online night classes with her feet in a pair of fuzzy slippers. I wonder if she will rage and weep against the injustice of it all, when she learns that the doctors in her state will not help her unless she becomes almost dead. She may not be a woman at all, but a trans man or a nonbinary person who has already faced medical professionals inclined to discriminate against their very being. In a country where Black women seek abortions at higher rates and die far more commonly from maternal health complications, our dead woman is likely to be Black, and therefore, she is

— source thenation.com | Amy Littlefield | Mar 14, 2023

Nullius in verba

Nearing 4 Years and After 40 Hearings, No Relief for TCS Sexual Harassment Survivor

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A survivor of sexual harassment at the workplace from Chennai, employed at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), said that she had not got justice for nearly four years. Meanwhile, she has accused TCS management of continuing victimisation at the workplace. Kavya* (name changed) filed a case at the Kanchipuram labour court in 2019 against the ruling of the Internal Complaints Committee (ICC) of TCS. She accused the committee of being biased while considering a harassment complaint she had filed against her manager.

— source newsclick.in | 17 Mar 2023

Nullius in verba

A Day of Peace, 1870 Anti-War Mother’s Day Proclamation

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150 years ago, the disastrous human and economic consequences of the American Civil War were becoming increasingly apparent, especially to certain thoughtful wise women who had seen their testosterone-laden loved ones eagerly march off to that “inglorious” war 5 years earlier. Those men and women, as is still the case today, had no idea of the psychological and spiritual devastation that comes from killing fellow humans until it was too late. But the well-hidden truth hit them when they saw their loved ones come home, changed forever. Some came home dead, some were just physically wounded but all were spiritually deadened.

That “patriotic” war basically ended in mutual exhaustion in 1865. The Northern foot-soldiers (who were numerically stronger) did not feel gleeful over the hollow victory” – just relief. Many Civil War-era women, including Howe, had actually willingly participated in the flag-waving fervor that war–mongers and war-profiteers can easily manufacture. Pro-war propaganda has always been directed at poor and working class men who must be duped into doing the soul-damning dirty work of killing and being killed.

Julia Ward Howe, author of the Mother’s Day Proclamation of 1870, was a life-long abolitionist and therefore, early on, she was a supporter of the Union Army’s anti-slavery

— source globalresearch.ca | Gary G. Kohls | 14 May 2017

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Drop Murder Charges Against Domestic Abuse Survivor

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In a remarkable courtroom scene, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg asked a New York judge Monday to dismiss murder charges against Tracy McCarter, who says she acted in self-defense when her estranged husband died from a stab wound in the chest in 2020. Bragg campaigned on a promise to fight to free McCarter of murder charges, though, when elected, advocates say his actions initially fell short. This comes as pressure is growing in New York to end the criminalization of domestic abuse survivors, which happens at a disproportionate rate against Black women. Advocates say 90% of women who are incarcerated in New York have been subjected to domestic violence. McCarter “had done everything we tell domestic abuse survivors to do,” says journalist Victoria Law, who has closely followed McCarter’s case, but the nurse still finds herself “in legal limbo, waiting to see if she can try to start picking up the pieces of her life or if she will be facing trial for murder.”

So, as you said, Tracy McCarter was arrested on March 2nd, 2020, a few weeks before New York went on lockdown because of the coronavirus pandemic. She had done everything that we tell domestic violence survivors to do. She separated herself from her increasingly abusive husband. She moved out. She found her own apartment. She continued working as a nurse — and I

— source democracynow.org | Nov 29, 2022

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What Scientists Are Learning about Women’s Health from Other Female Animals

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Projected on the massive screen behind me onstage, a herd of giraffes rushes across a sweep of savanna. With the video set to loop, the giraffes gallop endlessly, giving me time to slowly lean across the podium and ask my audience: “Did you spot the pregnant giraffes?” I am delivering a plenary lecture at the 2019 Nobel Conference in Stockholm. The theme of that year’s conference was bioinspired medicine—finding solutions in nature to human health problems—and I wanted to call attention to the connections between women and other female animals.

As a cardiologist and evolutionary biologist, I’d been posing this question about the giraffes to medical students in my courses at Harvard University and the University of California, Los Angeles, for years, so I could tell it had landed as planned. I watched the crowd scan the troop of giraffes for evidence of pregnancy—a baby bump, a lagging mother-to-be. I suspected that few, if any, of the assembled scientists and physicians had considered this question when first taking in the scene. That was precisely my point. Given the importance of female health challenges such as pregnancy to the survival of a species—including our own—shouldn’t the realities of female life in the wild be more than an afterthought for doctors and biomedical researchers?

Predators pose a daily threat to survival for all prey species, and they don’t give pregnant animals a pass. Even in their final, heaviest days of pregnancy, females must evade

— source scientificamerican.com | Barbara Natterson-Horowitz | Mar 1, 2023

Nullius in verba

The Worst Abuser You Could Ever Have

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Tracy McCarter did everything that society tells domestic violence survivors to do. She separated from her husband, Jim Murray, and moved on with her life. She continued working full-time as a nurse at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, was enrolled in a master’s program at Columbia University, and was looking forward to celebrating her graduation with her four grown children. In the seven months since she had separated from her husband, she had rented her own apartment in Manhattan and was in the process of buying one in Queens, far enough away from Murray, whose alcoholism had been spiraling out of control, to minimize his intrusions. Although she still loved her husband, McCarter was preparing to enter a new chapter in her life—one in which she would welcome her first grandchild into the world, purchase and renovate a co-op, and advance her career.

But then, more than two years ago, she was forced to put those plans on hold, McCarter told me in the first of several interviews conducted in her apartment, where she is confined not because of the pandemic, but because the Manhattan district attorney’s office is charging her with murder—for Murray’s death. This awful tragedy is actually not that unusual. It’s a bind she shares with many other domestic violence survivors who act in self-defense, only to find themselves ensnared in the legal system.

McCarter, who’s facing a potential prison sentence of 25 years to life, declined to discuss what happened in the moments before police arrived at her apartment on the night of

— source thenation.com | Victoria Law | Jul 18, 2022

Nullius in verba