Violencia sexual (Continuación)

EuropaUnión Europea,

When the Arab Spring erupted in 2011, Western states optimistically assumed that protests against authoritarian regimes across Northern Africa would result in a democratic "fourth wave". But few could have expected the chain of events that would lead to over 2 million refugees crossing the Mediterranean in open boats, seeking safe haven from their own failed states -- or a series of New Year's flashpoints that intensified a national debate that even drew the attention of a U.S. presidential candidate.

On New Year's Eve, marauding groups of "north-African looking" men reportedly surrounded women in public spaces in the German cities of Cologne, Hamburg and Frankfurt, grabbing their purses, cell phones and intimate body parts.…  Seguir leyendo »

Refugees, sexual harassment and Angela Merkel

EuropaUnión EuropeaPolítica Inmigración,

Chancellor Angela Merkel opened Germany’s doors to a million refugees and migrants last year — three times as many as the rest of the European Union put together. Critics in Germany predicted a popular backlash, and warned that even her own Christian Democratic Party (CDU) would turn against her.

In the case of the CDU, at least, they were dead wrong. At the party’s annual congress on Dec. 15, Merkel’s speech — in which she did not retreat one inch from her frequent assertion that “we can do it” (accept and integrate the refugees) — got a 10-minute standing ovation that brought tears to her eyes.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión Europea, ,

A medida que se han conocido más detalles sobre las agresiones sexuales que decenas de mujeres sufrieron durante el de Fin de Año en Colonia, hay dos palabras que han surgido en los análisis de los medios internacionales: secretismo e histeria. Son, en ambos casos, conceptos que van en contra de la normalidad deseada en toda sociedad y sobre todo de la normalidad tal como se entiende en Alemania. El secretismo proviene de la policía, que durante los primeros días ocultó y minimizó los hechos, reduciéndolos casi a un efecto colateral de la fiesta. La destitución, días después, del jefe de la policía de Colonia situó de nuevo en la dimensión real.…  Seguir leyendo »

L’ONU n’a pas su réagir aux accusations d’abus sexuels commis par des soldats appartenant aux troupes Sangaris de maintien de la paix en Centrafrique. © AFP / ISSOUF SANOGO

InternacionalONU,

La mise en œuvre des droits de l’enfant trébuche au cœur même du système onusien, l’organisation chargée de la promotion des droits humains et de la protection à travers le monde des personnes vulnérables, en particulier des enfants. La lecture du rapport d’enquête indépendant sur les violences et abus sexuels commis par des troupes françaises opérant sous autorisation onusienne en République Centrafricaine montre que l’ONU n’a pas su réagir aux accusations d’abus sexuels commis par des soldats appartenant aux troupes Sangaris de maintien de la paix. L’ONU n’a pas fait mieux que l’Eglise catholique face à ses prêtres pédophiles!

Résistance passive

Ces dernières années, le monde a été témoin de la résistance passive de l’Eglise catholique à réagir face aux sévices sexuels infligés à des enfants par des prêtres assouvissant leurs déviances en profitant de leur rôle de religieux et de la confiance accordée à ce statut.…  Seguir leyendo »

German Wilkommenskultur (welcome culture) survived largely unscathed, caring for refugees and teaching freedom and democracy. Photograph: Felix Huesmann/Demotix/Corbis

EuropaUnión Europea, ,

We still do not know exactly what went on at Cologne’s central station on New Year’s Eve. Police have recorded 379 allegations of violence, 40% of them sexual assaults, with two reports of rape. They have identified 31 suspects, who include at least two Germans, a Serb, an American and 18 asylum seekers from the Middle East and north Africa.

That’s all we know for sure. But the public still hasn’t recovered from the headlines last Monday saying that a crowd of 1,000 refugees had mobbed German women. Since then, some of us have been searching for a source whose testimony we can trust.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión Europea,

On New Year’s Eve, hundreds of men gathered in the plaza at the main train station in Cologne, Germany, groping and robbing scores of women as they passed by. By the end of this week the police had received 170 complaints, including 120 related to sexual assault.

Despite the fact that the attacks occurred in the center of Germany’s fourth-largest city, it took days for the news to surface in the national media. Even stranger, the police seemed to know little about the attacks. No arrests were made, and authorities claimed that nearby surveillance cameras offered little help in identifying suspects.…  Seguir leyendo »

Whac-a-Mole sex slavery

ReflexionesSocial,

There is an old fairground game called Whac-a-Mole. You whack a (fake) mole on the head and drive it down into its hole — and instantly one or more other moles pop up out of other holes. It’s an excellent metaphor for humanity’s inability to abolish sexual slavery.

Late last month, we had the long-overdue full apology by the Japanese government for the enslavement of up to 200,000 young “comfort women” from countries conquered by Japan to provide sexual “comfort” to Japanese soldiers before and during World War II.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government finally ended decades of haggling over the scale of Japan’s crime and the form of words in which it should apologise.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia, , , , ,

After 70 years, the Japanese and South Korean governments finally released a joint statement outlining a bilateral agreement to settle the issue of comfort women, a euphemism for girls and women forced to have sex with Japanese soldiers from the 1930s until the end of World War WII.

The agreement states the Japanese government will offer a one-time final apology and to pay 1 billion yen ($8.3m) to provide care for victims through a foundation.

While there are those who argue that this is a breakthrough for the comfort women movement, the longest running activist movement on sex slavery in modern history, this agreement only deals with one country -- the reconciliation between Japan and South Korea.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesSocial,

Last year, at a global conference on sexual violence during war, many speakers agreed that the best way to deter such crimes was prosecution, and they called for more of it. But prosecutions are not enough. We must work to reduce sexual violence by armed groups during wars — not just act afterward.

First, we have to better understand it. Although rape during war is an ancient crime, it’s only in the last decade that social scientists have begun to study the patterns in which soldiers and rebels rape. The findings may be surprising: It’s not more likely to occur in particular regions, countries with greater gender inequality or during ethnic conflict; men may be victims, and women can be perpetrators.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente PróximoInternacionalTerrorismo Internacional, ,

Nothing prepared me for what I saw and heard when I visited refugees from the conflict with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

As I traveled to Iraq and Syria, and to neighboring countries of Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey to meet with refugees and displaced women, I heard firsthand the horrifying stories of how they have been targeted in this conflict.

I was told, for example, how mothers with babies were separated out by members of ISIL (also known as ISIS) because it is the younger women who they want to take. I heard how these younger women are examined to see if they are virgins, and how the younger and prettier they are, the more likely they are to get taken to ISIL's headquarters in Raqqa.…  Seguir leyendo »

A prostitute waits for a client in her room ina brothel area known as Building in downtown Phnom Penh, Cambodia. (David Paul Morris/For The Washington Post)

MundoAsia, , ,

“You can go Cambodia, Phnom Penh. The place is called Svay Pak. There are many there you can try. Age around 6 to 16. Depending on what u want to do. I find 12 to 14 year olds the best as they are freshest and is becoming a grown up girl soon. Innocent too. and very curious about sex.”

This is a milder excerpt from e-mails sent to an undercover police officer. They came from a Singaporean pedophile named Chan Chun Hong who was planning to visit Svay Pak, Cambodia, to have sex with children.

He had purchased airline tickets for April 2014.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia, , ,

The image of a child sex-trafficking victim that most of us carry in our minds is probably something like the blurry, black-and-white shot taken in 2003 of a 5-year-old girl in a shanty settlement called Svay Pak, just outside Phnom Penh. The girl’s name is Taevy. My organization, International Justice Mission, obtained the undercover footage while investigating the commercial sexual exploitation of children in Cambodia and collaborated with “Dateline NBC” to tell the story.

According to a recent broadcast from CNN’s “Freedom Project,” Cambodia is still ground zero for the child sex trade. The report described Svay Pak’s “big business” of selling prepubescent girls to foreign pedophiles for thousands of dollars.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia, ,

In 1944, 16-year-old Yong Soo Lee of Taegu, Korea, was lured by a friend of hers to meet with an older Japanese man.

The man took the two of them, and three other teenage girls, by train, then ship, to Taiwan. There, the girls were forced into sexual slavery, serving four to five Japanese soldiers every day for a year. Lee suffered beatings and torture, was infected with a venereal disease, was fed paltry amounts of food, faced temperatures so cold that ice formed on her body, and was never allowed outside. Only the end of World War II brought her relief.…  Seguir leyendo »

La reforma del Código Penal

EspañaJusticia, ,

Frente al Derecho penal del Antiguo Régimen, la filosofía penal de la Ilustración -que no agota el Derecho penal democrático, pero sí que constituye, o debería constituir, el límite mínimo de éste- distingue entre Derecho, por una parte, y moral y religión, por otra, y niega que sea legítimo atribuir la condición de delito a lo que no pasa de ser un mero pecado. Y así puede leerse en el Tratado, publicado en 1764, de ese gigante, universalmente reconocido, que fue Cesare Beccaria, lo siguiente: «Hablo sólo de los delitos que provienen de la naturaleza humana y del pacto social, no de los pecados, cuyas penas, aun las temporales, deben arreglarse con otros principios que los de una filosofía limitada».…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia, ,

I remember traveling one day in the local train in Mumbai with my mother, my younger sister and brother.

The compartment was extremely crowded. As we prepared to disembark, I felt my skirt being lifted and someone groping my private parts. It was terrible. I wanted to scream, but my voice would have drowned in the noise of the crowd. I wanted to push the hands away, but my arms were pinned to my body. I wanted to cry but could only think to myself, "Stop it! Please stop touching me."

I was 13 years old.

I never told anyone about that day until recently.…  Seguir leyendo »

What Indians Won’t See

MundoAsia,

I just watched “India’s Daughter,” Leslee Udwin’s documentary about the case of Jyoti Singh, the woman who was gang-raped and fatally injured in New Delhi on Dec. 16, 2012. It features interviews with, among others, one of the men convicted of killing her, who is now on death row; his lawyers; and relatives of both the victim and the rapists.

The documentary has roused much passion and debate in India, and so of course the Indian government has banned it. And at first some of India’s most respected feminists agreed with that decision.

The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting argues the film will incite violence against women.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia,

The day after the Indian government banned the BBC documentary India’s Daughter, on the horrific gang rape and killing of a student in Delhi, a 10,000-strong mob broke into a jail in a town in Assam, dragged out an alleged rapist, beat him to death and hung his body up for public view.

Does this mean that people in India are now so outraged by violence against women that they are seeking rough justice of their own? Sadly, no: the patriarchy and abuse of power that created the conditions for that appalling act in Delhi are alive and flourishing, and indeed are expressed in both this lynching and in some of the more aggressive reactions to the film.…  Seguir leyendo »

George Clooney on Sudan’s Rape of Darfur

MundoÁfrica, , ,

In the early 2000s, a brutal conflict in western Sudan between the government and rebels led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Darfuris, with millions displaced as refugees. In 2004, the United States declared Sudan’s actions a genocide.

After that spike in attention and concern, the world has largely forgotten about Darfur. Unfortunately, the government of Sudan has not.

Because Sudan’s government routinely blocks journalists from going into the Darfur region and severely restricts access for humanitarian workers, any window into life there is limited. The government has hammered the joint peacekeeping mission of the United Nations and African Union into silence about human rights concerns by shutting down the United Nations human rights office in the capital, Khartoum, hampering investigators of alleged human rights abuses and pressuring the peacekeeping force to withdraw.…  Seguir leyendo »

Turkish Men Get Away With Murder

Europa,

Ozgecan Aslan, a 20-year-old college student, was the last person on the minibus traveling across the city of Mersin in southern Turkey on Feb. 11. Instead of taking her home, the driver is accused of veering into the woods and trying to rape her.

When she resisted, he allegedly beat her with an iron bar and stabbed her. Afterward, her hands were cut off in an apparent attempt to hide DNA evidence under her fingernails. The chief suspect’s father and a friend are accused of helping him burn her body.

Ms. Ozgecan’s death rallied crowds of protesters in cities across the country earlier this month.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesSocial

Accusations of sexual abuse against wealthy and powerful men are nothing new. Just recently, British royal Prince Andrew was accused of having sex with an underage girl, former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn is in the news again facing “pimping” charges in France, and new Bill Cosby rape accusations continue to bubble to the surface.

All three men have denied any impropriety, and only Dominique Strauss-Kahn is currently facing criminal charges.

Holding powerful men to account is rife with challenges. Proving sexual assault beyond a reasonable doubt is often legally difficult, especially when an alleged sexual predator is an influential public figure.…  Seguir leyendo »