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	In the US, 1 in 5 Women experience sex assault on college campuses by Time, Buzzfeed, agencies USA   June 2016   A US Senator has decried a California judge''s decision to sentence a college athlete to just six months in jail for rape, while signatures on an online petition calling for the judge''s removal has passed 500,000.   Stanford University swimming star Brock Turner was found guilty of three counts of sexual assault of an unconscious woman. He only stopped his attack when two cyclists intervened.   The woman''s emotional court statement recounting the assault and its impact on her life has gone viral on social media attracting 10 million views.   Many have denounced the sentence by Santa Clara County Judge Aaron Persky as a "slap on the wrist".   "Six months for someone who viciously attacked a woman, especially after she was so brave to come forward, is outrageous," US Senator Barbara Boxer said in a statement.   "This six-month sentence was a slap on the wrist and doesn''t communicate that there are severe consequences for violating women regardless of where it occurs," Santa Clara deputy district attorney Alaleh Kianerci told news agencies.   The woman who was attacked has also expressed her disappointment with the light sentence, telling US media outlet Buzzfeed she hoped the case would "wake people up".   "I want the judge to know that he ignited a tiny fire. If anything, this is a reason for all of us to speak even louder."   In January 2015, the woman went to a party with her sister at a university fraternity and woke up in a hospital having been raped. She learned the graphic details of her attack through news reports, including that she was found "behind a dumpster".   Her victim impact statement, read out in court, was published online and received international coverage.   "I wanted to take off my body like a jacket and leave it at the hospital with everything else," she said in her statement.   Asked for a comment on the controversy over his ruling, Santa Clara Superior Court spokesman Joseph Macaluso said Judge Persky was prohibited from commenting on the case because there may be an appeal. The victim''s name has not been released to the public.   The uproar over the sentence is part of growing outrage in the US, where 1 in 5 Women experience sex assault on college campuses, the New York Times, reported on September 21, 2015.   http://time.com/4359265/stanford-brock-allen-turner-judge-recall/ http://bzfd.it/2s38xqk http://act.weareultraviolet.org/sign/stanford_judgeperskyrecall/ http://rainn.org/news/97-every-100-rapists-receive-no-punishment-rainn-analysis-shows Visit the related web page
	The Forgotten Refugees by Michelle Chen The Nation   With tragic photos of bodies on beaches surfacing in the news, the refugee crisis seems to be concentrated at the borders of Europe and the United States. But the desperate exiles who have fled to the West actually represent a minority who have managed to make it across borders. Most of the world’s refugees are not even officially labeled as such by international standards.   From New Orleans to Bangladesh, millions of people have been forced out of their homes without crossing an international border. They’re labeled “internally displaced people,” and international humanitarian laws grant them virtually no protection, despite the fact that they often live under worse conditions than global refugees.   Globally and internally displaced populations overlap heavily, but the plight of “IDPs” is often overlooked because they are rarely counted. Fresh research by the International Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC) attempts to track this massive, floating demographic by curating international and national data sets: More than 40 million people were internally displaced as of late 2016, with three-quarters of them having fled home in the past year. The chief causes were environmental disasters such as storms and floods, while conflicts and violence triggered about 7 million forced migrations.   Violence-driven internal migration is concentrated in war-torn countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with about 920,000 displacements, followed by Afghanistan, with 652,000. But below the media radar, internal communal violence has displaced many communities—even in relatively “stable” countries like India and the Philippines, where conflict displaced more than 800,000 people combined. (Nonetheless, the overall rate of displacement is more intense when viewed in the context of DRC and Afghanistan’s relatively smaller populations.)   The emerging data on IDP flows expose how international humanitarian law offers only a partial solution to a global displacement crisis that transcends nation-state boundaries.   Refugee law emerged as a political response to modern warfare, as a way to provide temporary relief to victims of turmoil and political repression. While international refugees are afforded certain legal protections (like the right to claim asylum in the court system of their host country, or to access humanitarian aid like emergency shelter and medical care), IDPs are generally subject to domestic laws, and often live under oppressive regimes with policies that forced them to migrate in the first place.   A lack of relief at home is a key factor that drives international refugee migration, whether inside a given region or from Global South to North. Moreover, the IDMC notes, “the exact push and pull factors that explain how someone who is an IDP one day can become a refugee, an asylum seeker or an international migrant the next are still unclear.”   The crisis will deepen as climate-change destabilizes environments and livelihoods, as the IDMP acknowledges: “Increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events and environmental degradation will increase displacement risk further.” Intersecting with spiking violence and entrenched inequality, environment-related social stressors and public-health crises will aggravate insecurity and resource competition. It could also breed even more conflict, as appears to be happening in the rapidly desertifying Middle East.   The link between violence and scarcity is illustrated today in the Horn of Africa, where intersecting stressors are spurring “recurring droughts, poor access to basic services and infrastructure, lack of livelihood options and ongoing conflict and insecurity,” leaving “highly vulnerable and exposed people with no other option but to move.” Famines in Somalia and territorial battles in rural Brazil show the impossibility of disentangling “man-made” and “natural” violence in regions that become simultaneously ecologically and socially uninhabitable.   Despite the fact that the internal displacement crisis is even larger than its global counterpart in numerical and humanitarian terms, the plight of IDPs remains shamefully neglected.   The needs of specific subgroups of IDPs exacerbate the humanitarian challenge. Women may be especially disadvantaged in mass evictions, because of political disenfranchisement and discriminatory property laws. Indigenous and minority groups face heightened risk in land-rights clashes, and the poverty linked to their social marginalization leaves them more exposed to environmental disasters.   In Colombia, a country plagued by climate change and civil war, Afro-Colombian and indigenous people make up three-quarters of victims of mass-displacement events, even though they constitute less than a fifth of the total population. As with environmental disaster, discrimination exacerbates the effects of displacement.   In reality, the chaotic refugee camps dotting the Mediterranean are the far edge of the refugee crisis. In many cases, the poorest and most traumatized cannot afford or survive the farthest-ranging smuggling routes, and the worst-off are forced to stay close to home. For example, the bulk of Syrian refugees now languish in camps just outside the border or in Turkey.   In extremely violent contexts, IDPs are forced to bounce across regions, surrounded by chaos. In Afghanistan, which shares porous (if hostile) borders with Iran and Pakistan, decades of global and civil war have meant that displacement is often permanent. Whether populations migrate to Europe or stay in the next province, much of the country has endured displacements across generations, constraining the government’s capacity to rebuild. A 2016 survey of Afghan refugees who entered through Greece revealed that one in four “were first or second generation refugees who had never lived in Afghanistan.”   Despite the fact that the internal-displacement crisis is even larger than the refugee crisis in numerical and humanitarian terms, the plight of IDPs remains shamefully neglected.   Yet every year this nation-sized diaspora grows, while borders harden and suffering deepens both within disaster-stricken societies and refugee-host countries. It is up to international institutions to prevent refugee crises by developing protections for the people adrift in the purgatory of humanitarian law. Whether inside or outside their home country’s borders, the displaced are a global responsibility.   http://www.internal-displacement.org/global-report/grid2017/ Visit the related web page
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