“The truth is, ‘Ngiyesaba’ – I’m shit scared” – Rape and Traumatic Recall

This form of violation is perpetrated with the explicit intention of ‘curing’ the lesbian of her
love for other women. Although many heterosexual survivors of rape attest to the stated intentions of their assailants as punitive (they have done something wrong, and thus ‘deserve’ rape), survivors of ‘curative rape’ make it clear that their attackers were interested in humiliating and punishing them for their choice of sexual identity and lifestyle and in ‘transforming’ them – by coercion – into heterosexual women.

Haiti: No Doctor Available

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Tweet In writing this piece I searched the internet for definitions of ‘access’ and came up with a range of gobbledygook that really says nothing.  So I came up with my own simple definition in relation to healthcare for poor and low income women.    It has to be free or minimal cost;  it has [...]

Reducing rape to everyday speech

Tweet From Feminists SA – Rape as slang - or a banal misogyny   Almost everyday, I hear something that disturbs me; the use of rape casually, as a slang, mostly by males, on social media and in conversations. “Rape” is used either negatively to represent damage (“That chemistry exam raped me”) or positively, representing triumph [...]

Haiti – Making it easier to prosecute rapists but will this make it easier to report rape?

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How well this will work remains to be seen. There are millions of Haitian women who fall completely outside the radar of the courts, the government, local and international NGOs and any other official body. There also seems to be a focus on violence in camps but violence also takes place in established neighbourhoods such as Jalouzi and Cite Soleil. And women are often too fearful to report sexual violence especially when the perpetrator is someone they know – family member, neighbor, co-worker. Legal reforms are needed and a step in the right direction but there has to be education and rape centers opened in all the neighborhoods – if women do not have access to support then they the violators will remain free.

The Week on Sunday (weekly)

Tweet Ayiti Kale Je – Haiti Grassroots Watch – Haïti Veedor – English The workers’ comments were backed up by a recent report from “Better Work,” an agency of the UN’s International Labor Organization, which found that half of the 22 assembly factories in the capital region were “in non-compliance” as far as working conditions [...]

Gendercide

Ova the poetry of  Bernedette Muthien

Tweet From Bernedette Muthien gendercide it took a full week of straitjacketing generations of genocidal femicidal trauma for the clay dam wall to explode and flood me in torrents of collective grief a poet with no words a lifelong activist struck dumb i choke on love for the dead thousands of beautiful women and children a [...]

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