Theresa May says she is “disappointed” an attempt to make upskirting a criminal offence in England and Wales did not progress through Parliament after one of her own MPs blocked it.
Conservatives have criticised Sir Christopher Chope for objecting to the private member’s bill.
If passed, it could see someone who has secretly taken a photo under a victim’s skirt face up to two years in prison.
The PM said she wanted to see it pass soon “with government support”.
Minister for Women, Victoria Atkins, said the government will allocate time for the bill in Parliament to ensure it does not get pushed down the list of private members’ bills, which would mean it could some time to return to the Commons.
Category: Social Equality
Can Moana and Rapunzel make women’s sport pay? – BBC News
At the same time they would pose questions about what it means to be a girl in the modern world, and, using Disney characters and the power of football, examine the concept of “what makes a princess?”
It’s an example of the imaginative steps women’s sport has had to take in a world where it is overshadowed in terms of money and audience by men’s sport.
“We wanted to target more girls to play, and Disney also wanted to reach more girls via their characters,” Marzena Bogdanowicz, head of marketing and commercial for women’s football at the FA, tells me.
via Can Moana and Rapunzel make women’s sport pay? – BBC News
The countries where women have more bank accounts than men – BBC News
There are just six countries in the world where more women than men have bank accounts – Argentina, Georgia, Indonesia, Laos, Mongolia, and the Philippines.
This according to the World Bank’s latest Global Findex report on how adults in more than 140 countries access accounts, make payments, save, borrow and manage risk. More than 500 million adults – or 69% of the adults, up from 51% in 2011 – have a “bank account” at a brick-and-mortar bank or a mobile money provider today.
But women, according to the report, continue to lag behind men: 65% of them have an account compared to 72% of men, a gap of seven percentage points that has remained unchanged since 2011.
via The countries where women have more bank accounts than men – BBC News
Jeff Sessions’s Racist Whims and the Danger Ahead for Victims of Domestic Violence
After arriving in the U.S., A.B. was permitted to seek asylum, but her case has been tied up in the courts for more than four years. In 2016, the Immigration Board of Appeals ruled in her favor, allowing A.B. the right to asylum in the United States as a victim of domestic violence. On Monday, Sessions overturned the decision, writing that most claims “pertaining to domestic violence or gang violence perpetrated by non-governmental actors will not qualify for asylum.”
“The mere fact that a country may have problems effectively policing certain crimes—such as domestic violence or gang violence—or that certain populations are more likely to be victims of crime, cannot itself establish an asylum claim,” he wrote.
via Jeff Sessions’s Racist Whims and the Danger Ahead for Victims of Domestic Violence
Jeff Sessions: Bible Supports Separating Children From Parents
Attorney General Jeff Sessions continues to be pleased with the outcome of his “zero tolerance” immigration policy, which has resulted in the forcible separation of children—some only a few months old—from their parents, who often do not know where they’ve been taken. The psychological repercussions of these forced separations, particularly for extremely young children, are massive. One Honduran woman told CNN that her infant daughter was taken from her in a detention center while she was breastfeeding; a father from Honduras died by suicide in his cell after being separated from his wife and 3-year-old. Due to overcrowding, some minors will evidently be detained in “tent cities,” forced to sleep outdoors, somehow, in a 100-degree desert.
via Jeff Sessions: Bible Supports Separating Children From Parents
To Be an Immigrant in Trump’s America: A Theory of Animals
Immediately, both conservatives and liberals jumped to his defense on the basis of context, because he had previously been talking about the MS-13 gang. These justifications are hollow. Criminals are human; I grew up Catholic, then evangelical, so I can tell you I learned that one from Jesus. It’s also fruitless to analyze the words of a man who speaks in non-sequiturs, whose brain apparently functions at the level of images that remind him of other images. Coming from the person who has said repeatedly that immigrants are rapists and criminals, the “people coming into the country” are the same person. They deserve the same treatment. Animals, all.
I’ve spent the past couple of years writing a book about undocumented immigrants around the United States. I tell the stories of undocumented second-responders after 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy, day laborers on street corners and worker centers, South American housekeepers who came to feminism in middle age. I write about immigration because I think almost everyone who writes about immigrants gets it wrong. I’d know. My family is undocumented. I came to the United States when I was five years old and was undocumented until recently, when I became a permanent resident.
via To Be an Immigrant in Trump’s America: A Theory of Animals
What the Courts Make of ‘Reverse Discrimination’ Complaints
Twenty-year-old University of Melbourne student Isabella Mason must have known that her new dance performance would trigger white people, but the backlash she experienced this week maybe proved a bigger point.
Dubbed “Where We Stand,” the show freely admits audience members of color into the theater, but stops white attendees in the foyer, where they must listen to four dancers talk about white privilege and then sign a large poster titled, “I acknowledge where I stand,” before being allowed into the theater. On top of that, the dance performance simply stops when the number of white people surpasses the number of people of color in the theater — a clever way to push back on an obvious demographic disparity in society.
via What the Courts Make of ‘Reverse Discrimination’ Complaints
Geek Celebrities Can Help Shut Down Vitriolic Fan Behavior
At some point over the past few weeks, actress Kelly Marie Tran, who played Rose Tico in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, deleted all of her Instagram posts for reasons that have not been explained. io9 has reached out to Tran’s representatives for comment about what happened but as of publishing, they’ve not returned our calls. Multiple reports are alleging that it might have been in response to racist, misogynist trolling from the Star Wars fandom, reports themselves based off of an as-yet unverified tweet from a fan account that spread quickly on social media.
Regardless of the specifics reasons for Tran’s disappearance from Instagram, the fact remains that groups of fans targeting specific people for harassment is a very real problem that’s not likely to go away soon unless people get serious about addressing it head-on.
via Geek Celebrities Can Help Shut Down Vitriolic Fan Behavior
Masterpiece Baker Jake Phillips Says “I Don’t Discriminate”
Everyone can relax: Jake Phillips of Masterpiece Cakeshop wants you to know that he does not discriminate, even though he refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple and then went all the way to the Supreme Court to appeal his case after the Colorado Civil Rights Division and the Colorado Court of Appeals found that he had illegally discriminated against the couple. I’m relieved, frankly.
The Denver-based baker spoke with Today’s Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb following the Supreme Court’s 7-2 ruling in his favor.
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Kotb asked Phillips about his response to critics who believe that he is discriminatory and is comparable to businesses that might not have provided services to an interracial couple 50 years ago.“I don’t discriminate against anybody,” said Phillips. “I serve anybody that comes in my shop. I just want to say again: I don’t create cakes for every message that people ask me to create.”
via Masterpiece Baker Jake Phillips Says “I Don’t Discriminate”
Pro-Choice Activists Take Abortion Pills Outside Belfast Courthouse to Protest Draconian Abortion Law
On Thursday, a few days after the Republic of Ireland voted in a referendum to overturn its nearly absolute ban on abortion, pro-choice advocates in Northern Ireland, where abortion is still outlawed under Victorian-era law, staged a bold and creative protest of the oppressive status quo.
The Guardian reports that activists took what they claimed were abortion pills outside court buildings in Belfast, and in front of news cameras. Northern Ireland is the only part of the United Kingdom where abortion is outlawed.