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	Online ‘manosphere’ is moving misogyny to the mainstream by Conor Lennon United Nations News, agencies   Mar. 2025   A decline in democracy and harmful content spread on social media platforms are helping to drive a backlash against feminism, and the growth of misogynistic and retrograde ideas about the roles of men and women and society.   The pushback against gender equality is one of the findings in a major report from UN Women, the UN agency for gender equality, on the progress made so far in advancing women’s rights worldwide.   This latest version of the study, which is updated every five years, comes at a time of great uncertainty, as several donors announce major funding cuts, leading to the disruption of essential services for women worldwide.   The report measures the extent to which the aims of a groundbreaking women’s rights accord adopted in Beijing in 1995. Around a quarter of countries surveyed note a backlash against feminism and gender equality.   However, it is not all bad news: there have been many encouraging signs of progress over the last thirty years, from legal protections for women, to services and support for survivors of domestic abuse and bans on gender-based discrimination in the workplace.   Ahead of the launch of the report, Laura Turquet, the deputy head of the research and data team at UN Women, and Lydia Alpizar, a Costa Rican feminist activist based in Mexico City, spoke to UN News about the reasons for this renewed attack against feminism and what it means for the state of gender relations.   Laura Turquet: What we’re talking about is organised resistance to gains that have been made on gender equality, whether that's preventing the implementation of existing commitments, rolling them back or stopping new laws and policies.   Examples include the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the United States [a US Supreme Court decision that protected the right to abortion] and the decision by several European countries to pull out of the Istanbul Convention [a treaty on gender-based violence]. And elsewhere, from Argentina to Zimbabwe, we’ve seen a defunding of women’s ministries, or their mandates are changed from focusing on gender equality to a broader focus on families and children, which waters down their ability to drive policies forward.   Another element is the targeting of women's rights defenders and activists, women in politics, journalists and trade unionists who dare put their heads above the parapet and speak out on gender equality.   Lydia Alpizar: There most common form of attack is harassment and defamation, including criminalization, building fabricated charges against women's human rights defenders, or even arbitrarily detaining them, turning them into political prisoners.   It can also lead to more lethal forms of violence, such as disappearances and killings. In Mexico and Central America, we have documented 35,000 attacks on and 200 killings of women human rights defenders since 2012.   UN News: Is the situation in your region getting worse?   Lydia Alpizar: Yes. When we started, we didn't have as many killings. Right now, we have an open dictatorship in Nicaragua where there are political prisoners including women, and there are other countries with women’s rights defenders in prison, including Mexico. There are other defenders that are in prison, such as Kenia Hernandez in Mexico, or others who are protecting nature in El Salvador.   We are definitely seeing an increase in attacks on feminists working on gender-based violence, political participation an access to sexual and reproductive health and rights: the highest levels of abuse take place during March, which is women’s month, when most marches and public demonstrations in support of women take place.   UN News: What are the reasons for the increased threats and violence?   Lydia Alpizar: One has to do with the way in which agendas for gender equality and women's rights have been transforming the world.   We have definitely made progress across important areas that are included in the Beijing Declaration, in terms of legislation, policies and cultural transformation, really changing the way in which women are recognized in their public and private lives.   More women are leading movements that are challenging the interest of very powerful actors, so there is a backlash.   UN News: So, the pushback is a response to the progress that is being made?   Laura Turquet: I think that is true to a large extent, but it also goes hand in hand with a decline in the strength of democracies in general. Many countries are experiencing the erosion of key democratic institutions such as freedom of the press, free and fair elections, and the rights of women to speak in public.   They become a target of those who want to return to an imagined past where men and women had much more traditional roles.   It’s also linked to rising inequality. A few people at the top are doing extremely well whilst millions are being left behind. When people feel that they can't access a decent job or a basic standard of living, they look for scapegoats, whether it's migrants, LGBTQ people, or women who are speaking up.   UN News: Social media also seems to be connected, bringing formerly fringe ideas into the mainstream.   Lydia Alpizar: We have seen an increase of these kinds of narratives. Social media is a big platform for the dissemination of misogynistic and sexist ideas and women’s rights defenders are called bad mothers to stigmatize the work that they do and there is a trend of legitimizing violence against them.   Laura Turquet: There has a been a development of a “manosphere,” an online ecosystem where extreme and outdated ideas, particularly about violence against women, but also related to a very narrow kind of idea of masculinity.   But I also want to say that online spaces and social media have been a place where feminists can organize and link up with other kinds of social movement. I think we just have to make sure that those spaces are safe and that we root out misogynist and violent online environments so that women are not targeted in that way.   UN News: On balance, is the world in a better place, when it comes to gender relations?   Lydia Alpizar: Yes, absolutely. In the countries where I work, gender relations have been transformed and the world is a different place for women. Their is hope, but we're concerned about the challenges we face right now.   Laura Turquet: There has been significant progress since 1995. The proportion of women in parliaments has doubled, violence against women is on the political agenda in a way that it wasn’t thirty years ago, and maternal mortality has declined by a third.   But there's still so much to do. We need to make sure that 2025 is the year that we don't back down, that we continue to fight for justice, and we continue to march forward for the rights of women and girls.   http://news.un.org/en/story/2025/06/1164531 http://www.unwomen.org/en/articles/faqs/digital-abuse-trolling-stalking-and-other-forms-of-technology-facilitated-violence-against-women http://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2025/06/normative-advances-on-technology-facilitated-violence-against-women-and-girls http://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2024/10/intensification-of-efforts-to-eliminate-all-forms-of-violence-against-women-report-of-the-secretary-general-2024   http://www.unwomen.org/en/get-involved/international-womens-day http://www.unwomen.org/sites/default/files/2025-03/womens-rights-in-review-30-years-after-beijing-en.pdf http://www.unwomen.org/en/news-stories/feature-story/2025/02/womens-rights-in-2025-hope-resilience-and-the-fight-against-backlash http://www.unwomen.org/en/articles/timeline/never-backing-down-women-march-forward-for-equal-rights http://www.unwomen.org/en/articles/explainer/the-beijing-declaration-and-platform-for-action-at-30-and-why-that-matters-for-gender-equality http://www.unwomen.org/en/news-stories/press-release/2024/10/two-billion-women-and-girls-worldwide-lack-access-to-any-form-of-social-protection-un-women-report-shows   http://equalitynow.org/resource/words-deeds-beijing30-report/ http://www.unicef.org/adolescent-girls-rights http://www.helpage.org/news/social-protection-can-transform-lives-of-older-women/ http://www.unfpa.org/emergencies http://www.unfpa.org/news/explainer-why-investing-women-and-girls-benefits-everyone http://news.un.org/en/story/2025/02/1160631 http://www.unhcr.org/news/press-releases/amid-funding-crunch-unhcr-issues-urgent-call-protect-women-and-girls-surging http://globaltaxjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Final-GDOA-Concept-Note-2025-EN.pdf http://www.ids.ac.uk/news/podcast-strategies-for-countering-gender-backlash http://blog.witness.org/2025/03/technology-facilitated-gender-based-violence/ http://gi-escr.org/en/resources/publications/a-care-led-transition-to-a-sustainable-future http://equalmeasures2030.org/2024-sdg-gender-index/ Visit the related web page
	Sudan: The world’s worst humanitarian crisis by Nicholas Kristof, Denis Mukwege Panzi Foundation, agencies   Mar. 2025   Sudan: Our Silence in the Face of Genocide, by Nicholas Kristof. (NYT)   The world’s worst humanitarian crisis today is probably the web of famine, civil war, mass rape and other atrocities in Sudan, a nightmare that the United States has formally described as genocide.   Many tens of thousands have been killed, 11 million Sudanese have been displaced, the most lethal famine in decades may be underway, and Unicef warns that children as young as 1 year old are being raped.   Yet the Trump administration is now cutting back on humanitarian assistance, aggravating the starvation. And the Trump administration (and the Biden administration before it) has not been willing to call out the United Arab Emirates for having armed a brutal militia called the Rapid Support Forces that — according to survivors of its rampages — is committing massacres and rapes.   Do President Trump and his aides care about suffering in a distant land? I don’t know, but I think when we hear individual stories it may be more difficult for us to turn away.   With refugees pouring over the border into South Sudan, I visited two spots along the Sudan-South Sudan border to ask refugees about conditions in places foreign reporters cannot easily reach.   Musa Ali, 32, was an interior designer in Khartoum who lived a good life until the civil war began two years ago between the Sudanese Army and the Rapid Support Forces.   An army bomb a year ago destroyed his house and forced the amputation of both his legs, confining him to a wheelchair. Then food shortages grew so severe that neighbors began dying of hunger. Musa’s family members in other parts of the country were able to send him money to buy food.   “We would have died of hunger” if relatives elsewhere had not sent money, he told me.   Musa and his wife decided to flee to South Sudan. On the 11-day road journey, they were robbed at checkpoints by soldiers from the Rapid Support Forces, and they saw people killed along the way — mostly men who the militia suspected were supporting the army. Musa and his wife said they saw more than 100 corpses along the road.   Yassin Yakob and Sabah Mohammed, both teachers, also fled recently from the Khartoum area. They took back roads, so they largely avoided checkpoints. But they said that other vehicles also took those back roads — often trucks carrying dozens of refugees — and when the trucks broke down, people in them often starved to death because there was no food to be had.   “People’s bodies were next to the trucks,” Yassin said. “If your truck broke, you died. There was just no food.”   Over the last few years, USAid-supported soup kitchens opened up around the country and saved many lives from famine. But the Trump administration cut funding for those kitchens, called emergency response rooms, and more than 70 percent have already closed, according to Hajooj Kuka, a Sudanese humanitarian worker. He told me that at just one emergency response room, four children had died recently of starvation.   Manal Adam, 30, grew up in the Darfur region in Western Sudan and belongs to an ethnic group targeted in the genocide that began there in 2003; two of her brothers were murdered at the time; she wonders if her mother was raped as well. For a time the assaults subsided, but in the last couple of years the slaughter has resumed.   “It’s like history is repeating itself,” Manal said, and she haltingly recounted how men in Rapid Support Forces uniforms had stopped her on the road, thrown her to the ground and raped her.   After that, she fled to South Sudan with three of her children, hoping to keep them alive. But her husband was elsewhere, and her 9-year-old daughter was with her mother, so she left them behind in her panic. Manal doesn’t know if her husband, mother or daughter are still alive.   Manal is safe in a refugee camp in South Sudan but suffers from pelvic infections from having been raped. And she wilts as she describes her shame as other women point to her and gossip about her.   Multiply Manal by millions and you have a glimpse of the metastasizing crisis in Sudan. Famine is spreading, corpses line some roads and the sons of Darfur genocide rapists are now raping the daughters of women who had been assaulted a generation ago.   Rapid Support Forces have besieged the Zamzam refugee camp in Darfur, with 500,000 desperate, hungry people inside and almost no medical assistance, U.N. officials and aid workers say. In a social media post, the attackers have warned: “Zamzam will turn to ashes.”   I suspect that many Americans regard all this is sad but inevitable, viewing Sudan as a bottomless pit of pain that we can’t do anything about. Yet that’s not right.   I don’t know if we can end the slaughter. But in the early 2000s the West took actions that reduced the death toll, while this time we are worse than passive. Our cutting of humanitarian aid means more children starving, and our silence about the U.A.E. probably means more atrocities.   That’s the wrenching contrast. A generation ago, Americans were outraged by genocide and acted — not always perfectly — to provide aid and pressure governments in ways that saved lives. Now we are pulling back aid and largely silent about the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, and that comes painfully close to complicity.   http://reliefweb.int/report/sudan/sudan-two-years-war-starvation-global-failure-world-must-act-now http://www.nrc.no/news/2025/april/joint-statement---two-years-of-war-starvation-and-global-failure-the-world-must-act-now-for-sudan http://www.interaction.org/blog/addressing-the-humanitarian-crisis-in-sudan-a-call-to-action http://www.fidh.org/en/region/Africa/sudan/sudan-two-years-of-conflict-marred-by-global-failure-to-protect http://www.globalr2p.org/publications/twenty-years-of-the-responsibility-to-protect-and-the-unfulfilled-promise-in-darfur/ http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/04/new-bigger-humanitarian-crisis-in-darfur-but-this-time-no-global-outcry/ http://www.youtube.com/live/pbXvEC34-KU?t=880s http://www.interaction.org/statement/60-ngos-respond-to-terminations-of-life-saving-programs/ http://www.acaps.org/en/thematics/all-topics/us-funding-freeze http://www.icvanetwork.org/90-day-suspension-order-resources/   19 Feb. 2025   Congo is Bleeding. Where is the Outrage, by Dr. Denis Mukwege from the Panzi Foundation.   The world is witnessing a new era of conflict. In Gaza, images of devastation have dominated headlines for more than a year. In Ukraine, nations have rallied to defend sovereignty against aggression, deploying diplomatic interventions, sending military aid and enacting sweeping sanctions with urgency. Yet the war unfolding in the Democratic Republic of Congo remains an afterthought.   A bloody conflict is met with condemnations but no meaningful action. This stark contrast is not just neglect; it is selective justice.   Last month Goma, the largest city in the east of Congo, fell to the M23 rebel group, backed by neighboring Rwanda, as part of the group’s decade-long campaign to control the region’s mineral-rich territory. The assault on Goma resulted in nearly 3,000 deaths in the first week alone and thousands of injuries.   Today hospitals in Goma are overwhelmed, with many patients being treated in makeshift tents to handle the overflow. The blood supply is strained, the cost of food is skyrocketing, and access to water, electricity and the internet is severely limited. The U.N. uncovered that in the chaos, more than 100 female inmates at a prison were raped and then burned alive when the facility caught fire.   Congo has been plagued by war for nearly three decades. Millions of people have been displaced, and rape has consistently been used as a weapon of war. Most estimates state that over six million people have died, making it the deadliest conflict since World War II. But many of us who live in Congo believe that the real number is much higher. And the world remains largely silent.   I am a Congolese doctor. For 30 years, I have repaired the bodies of women brutalized by this war. Today I’m treating the grandchildren of my early patients. At Panzi Hospital and Foundation, the health center and nongovernmental organization I founded in 1999, we have treated over 83,000 survivors of sexual violence. Thousands have arrived pregnant by their attackers. Thirty percent of the sexual violence survivors we see are children.   The patterns of terror are unmistakable: villages burned, families slaughtered, women violated — not as collateral damage but as a calculated weapon of war, designed to instill fear, erase communities and seize control.   Rwanda chose its moment wisely to push farther into Congo. When M23 invaded in 2012, international pressure — particularly from the United States — forced the Rwandan government to withdraw its support. Its occupation of Goma ended in less than two weeks. But today that pressure is absent. While the world and media are fixated on the first days of the Trump administration, Rwanda apparently saw an opportunity to act without consequence.   Experts assembled by the United Nations have detailed Rwanda’s illegal exploitation of Congo’s rare minerals. And now, with global attention focused elsewhere, Rwanda has escalated its aggression — seemingly knowing that no meaningful consequences are likely to follow. (Rwanda has repeatedly denied any direct involvement in Congo.)   My country is home to huge reserves of the minerals essential for modern technology. It produces well over half of the world’s cobalt and contains 60 to 80 percent of the world’s coltan. From smartphones to electric vehicles, modern society is powered by Congolese minerals. For years, M23 has worked to make a business out of Congo’s minerals.   The recent U.N. group of experts’ report on Congo submitted to the Security Council indicates that M23 generates at least $800,000 per month from a tax on coltan production and trade from Rubaya, a major mining site it seized last year.   The U.N., along with multiple states and institutions, says that a significant share of Congo’s minerals is smuggled into Rwanda, which has been widely identified as a key transit hub for illicitly extracted resources from Congo.   Since the resurgence of M23 in 2021, many international bodies, including the European Union, have raised concerns about Rwanda’s support for the group. Yet the European Union recently signed an agreement with Rwanda to support so-called sustainable mineral supply chains, effectively whitewashing the world’s ongoing plunder of Congolese resources.   This is not the first time the world has overlooked violence in Congo. On Oct. 6, 1996, rebel forces entered Lemera Hospital in South Kivu, where I was the medical director, and massacred my colleagues and my patients in their beds. I was spared simply because I was traveling at the time. The 2010 U.N. mapping exercise documented this crime and many others committed from 1993 to 2003, but its examination of ways to end the violence and bring justice has largely been ignored.   The atrocities at Lemera and the impunity that followed marked the beginning of my desire to fight for peace and justice in Congo, as well as my devotion to ensuring that doctors providing lifesaving medical care will never again be at risk under my watch.   History is now repeating itself. After weeks of encircling the region, spreading panic and chaos, last weekend M23 seized control of Bukavu, home to over one million people and the site of Panzi Hospital. Terror and uncertainty grip the population, especially among those who survived past massacres.   How will the world respond to this calculated and systematic offensive? How many lives must be lost before this conflict is finally brought to an end?   The world has the power to act. We must all call on their leaders to take action and deliver justice for the Congolese people. States and international institutions must uphold Congolese sovereignty and place sanctions on Rwanda for its continued support of armed groups in Congo and plundering of Congolese resources.   The inaction must end. Our people deserve justice. Our children deserve a future. And the world must finally decide if the values it claims to uphold apply to all of humanity or only a chosen few.   * Denis Mukwege is the founder of the Panzi Hospital and Foundation and a 2018 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. The guest editorial was published by the New York Times.   http://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/opinion/congo-rwanda-rebels-war.html http://panzifoundation.org/dr-denis-mukwege-call-stop-the-massacres-of-the-congolese-peace-is-possible/ http://www.wfp.org/news/conflict-and-rising-food-prices-drive-congolese-one-worlds-worst-food-crises-according-new-ipc http://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/cholera-and-mpox-cases-increasing-dangerously-drc-aid-cuts-push-health-systems-near   Jan. 2025   In DR Congo, the persistence of colonial dynamics, plundering of resources, corruption, conflicts... contribute to the depoliticization of countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “Such narratives tend to reduce Africa to a simple recipient body of foreign policies,” say researchers Christoph Vogel and Aymar Nyenyezi Bisoka in AfriqueXXI, The Ideas Letter. (Extract):   “The contestation between the Congolese government, multinational corporations and international donors foreshadowing the reform of Congo’s mining legislation.   The country’s previous Mining Code, which dates back to 2002, was inspired by ideas from the World Bank. Resolutely neoliberal, it aimed to attract investors after two devastating transnational wars. It encouraged developing the mining sector through foreign direct investment, joint ventures and generous tax breaks for international mining companies. For the Congolese government, the application of overly favourable conditions was part of a strategy to attract investors in a difficult operating environment, but also to extract rents. In 2018, the Congolese government undertook to reform the 2002 law, making it more advantageous for the Congolese population and the country.   While the context had changed radically in 2018, most foreign mining companies operating in DR Congo opposed the proposed changes. The new law notably proposed removing the “stability clause” in the 2002 law, a hidden tax cap. In other words, companies feared for their fiscal advantages. Indeed, the 2002 law, partly ghost-written by World Bank officials, had identified “instability” as a major risk for the industrial development of the mining sector and inserted this provision.   In 2018, foreign mining companies reacted by expressing their opposition to the removal of this exemption, citing “instability” and the risks associated with foreign direct investment in so-called post-conflict contexts. This also alludes to a more generic stereotype of the DR Congo, describing the country as a “geological scandal” where violence would take precedence over politics – the notion of “conflict minerals” reflects this idea.   Employing this depoliticized imagery, mining companies justify fiscal deregulation as due compensation for the Samaritan act to invest and operate against all odds. Yet, tax exemptions may figure among the central aspects that prevent the population and the country from benefiting from mining.   Under-Mining Development   Foreign mining outfits opposed clauses that could have benefited the DR Congo and the Congolese population, such as increased state participation in existing joint ventures, increased royalties, new obligations to repatriate profits produced abroad, clauses limiting subcontracting to persons and entities legally recognized in the DR Congo and with a Congolese capital base, or a tax on super-profits, provisions through which the Congolese legislature intended to balance fluctuations in the global market.   This new tax for gains would kick in when the price of a “strategic mineral” would experience an unusual rise of more than 25% in comparison to weighted forecasts. Such tax provisions are common elsewhere, but in the DR Congo, foreign mining companies denounced them as protectionist and isolationist, thus going against the aspirations of Congolese miners.   What followed was a tug-of-war between multinationals and the Congolese government, marked by rare public visits by reclusive CEOs weary of shrinking profit margins. This created an impasse—not without displeasure of foreign and Congolese mining barons who continued to operate under the 2002 regulations—that has yet to be resolved. While the industrial copper and cobalt sector operates largely independently of the Congolese population and its workforce, much of the artisanal mining sector, focused on coltan and tin, had just recently undergone a reform that perpetuated colonial patterns of expropriation for access to and control of Congolese resources by creating a monopoly of buyers.   In sum, this reflects the reluctance of external interveners to consider political intentionality as a legitimate and serious expression of agency in Congo. On the contrary, Western-inspired paradigms (transparency or the fight against corruption and poverty) dominate the discourse to the detriment of examining the balance of existing powers, and therefore of understanding the struggles of the weakest part of the game: local populations.   * Christoph Vogel is an investigator and writer specialising in conflict and politics in Central Africa. Dr. Aymar Nyenyezi Bisoka is a lawyer, political scientist and Assistant Professor at the University of Mons in Belgium.   http://afriquexxi.info/In-DR-Congo-a-Western-vision-perpetuates-violence http://www.ipsnews.net/2025/02/african-leaders-challenged-to-unite-against-energy-transition-mineral-oppressors/ http://www.ipinst.org/2024/11/global-leaders-series-featuring-nobel-peace-prize-laureate-denis-mukwege#2 Visit the related web page
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