Discussion of All Things Political

KATHMANDU, Nepal (WOMENSENEWS)--Sapana Bishwokarma, 26, has no answer when asked about the father of the 2-year-old boy who plays beside her.

She says her body trembles with fear each time she recalls her son's father. Tears trickle down her cheeks.

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If events of the last few months have sent any sort of message to women in America it's this: if you're raped or sexually assaulted, justice won't be on your side. MORE

The Vatican has recalled its ambassador to Ireland following a report on the Catholic Church's handling of child abuse by priests that sparked government outrage.

Father Ciro Benedettini, a Vatican spokesman, said on Monday that Giuseppe Leanza, the archbishop and apostolic nuncio of Ireland, had been ordered to return from Dublin for consultations.

The Vatican acknowledged that the recall of an ambassador was a measure rarely adopted by the Holy See, underlining the "seriousness of the situation".

The principal aim was for direct discussions to prepare the Holy See's official response but the measure "does not exclude some degree of surprise and disappointment at certain excessive reactions", Benedettini told reporters.

Wave of scandals

The publication of the report into more than a decade of sex abuse by priests in the diocese of Cloyne in southern Ireland triggered a blistering attack on the Vatican by Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny that was widely hailed.

Leanza is being recalled to discuss the impact of the Cloyne report, which accused Church authorities of covering up the sexual abuse of children by priests as recently as 2009.

The Cloyne case is only the latest in a series of abuse scandals for the Catholic Church in Ireland that were first exposed in a 2009 report detailing hundreds of cases of sexual abuse of children by priests going back decades.

Last week, the Irish parliament passed a motion denouncing the Vatican's role in "undermining child protection frameworks" following the publication of the report.MORE

Ireland's prime minister has launched an unprecedented attack on theVatican, accusing it of downplaying the rape and torture of Irish children by clerical sex abusers.

Enda Kenny said in parliament that the Cloyne report, released on 13 July, had exposed the Vatican's attempt to frustrate the inquiry into child sex abuse.

During a debate on the fallout from the Cloyne findings, the taoiseach said the report had illuminated the dysfunction and elitism still dominant in the Vatican.

Kenny told the Dáil on Wednesday that Rome seemed more interested in upholding the church's power and reputation than confronting the abuse of Irish children by its priests and religious orders.

The Vatican's attitude to investigations in Cloyne, which covers County Cork, was the "polar opposite of the radicalism, the humility and the compassion that the church had been founded on", he said.

Kenny said the rape and torture of children had been downplayed or "managed" to uphold the institution's power and reputation.

The all-party motion being debated in the Dáil "deplores the Vatican's intervention which contributed to the undermining of child protectionframeworks and guidelines of the Irish state and the Irish bishops".

One of the most damning findings of the Cloyne report was that the diocese failed to report nine out of 15 complaints made against priests, which "very clearly should have been reported".

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NEW YORK, (WOMENSENEWS)--This was the week when Casey Anthony was found not guilty of murdering her daughter in the explosive case in Florida and the New York hotel housekeeper struggled to keep alive a case of sexual assault against former IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss Khan. If anyone considers these signs of women finding high-powered access to the legal justice system, UN Women offered a rebuttal this week, finding that women all too often drop charges and bow out of legal recourse efforts.

In its July 6 report, "Progress of the World's Women in Pursuit of Justice," the new super women's agency at the United Nations--which consolidated existing agencies and launched in February under former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet--probes the limits of local, national and international law in serving women and offers 10 recommendations.

One area of concentration is the problem of long "legal chains" or cases that involve numerous steps, delays and mounting costs that lead women to drop such efforts as enforcing property rights or protecting themselves from domestic violence.

Authors found that women in developed and developing countries alike face this hurdle.
In Gauteng Province in South Africa, for instance, a lengthy, expensive legal process coincides with an extremely low conviction rate--4 percent--for reported rapes. That echoes a 2009 survey of four European countries, where conviction rates fall as low as 5 percent.

Another example came from this week's news run when the Associated Press reported July 7 that hundreds of Ugandan women protested the second postponement of two lawsuits brought by families of women who died giving birth, reflecting the judicial system's inability to intercede on behalf of maternal health.

To expedite women's law suits, UN Women's authors recommend "one stop shops" currently found in South Africa--known as Thuthuzela Care Centers--that have reduced trial completion time to seven months from a national average of two years and are being replicated in countries such as Chile and Ethiopia.MORE

Rosemary Gonzalez was murdered in 2009, the victim of a war that ended in 1996. One day, 17-year-old Rosemary said good-bye to her mother Betty, walked out of their small house on the outskirts of Guatemala City and was never seen alive again.
Rosemary and Betty lived together in the poor neighborhood of Barcenas, under the constant shadow of violence. Across Guatemala, nearly 5,000 women have been killed in the past decade, attacked for the simple fact of being women. The women of Barcenas know well this fear—they live at the epicenter of this crisis.

In Guatemala, generations of women have faced murderous violence, but at its core is war. Now, the same dynamic is emerging in Iraq.
( Some description of rape and murder and torture under the cut. )

The managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was taken off an Air France plane at Kennedy International Airport minutes before it was to take off for Paris on Saturday and arrested in the sexual attack of a maid at a Midtown Manhattan hotel, the authorities said.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, in April. He was arrested Saturday at Kennedy Airport.

Mr. Strauss-Kahn, 62, who was widely expected to become the Socialist candidate for the French presidency, was apprehended by detectives of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in the first class section of the jetliner, and immediately turned over to detectives from the Midtown South Precinct, which covers the part of Manhattan where the hotel is, officials said.

The New York Police Department took Mr. Strauss-Kahn into custody, where he was “being questioned in connection with the sexual assault of a hotel chambermaid earlier this afternoon,” Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne, the department’s chief spokesman, said Saturday evening.

A spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney’s office said Mr. Strauss-Kahn had not yet been, “formally charged,” in the case, and was not expected to be arraigned before a judge until later in the evening.MORE

As a nonwhite women journalist, I recognise that I occupied a strange space when covering international stories. Without ever being told so explicitly by my employers, I knew that my "value" was lower than that of my white female colleagues. And while things have changed in the past decade with increasing number of nonwhite women reporters working for mainstream media, many of the experiences and issues I mention here have not drastically changed as long as one works for a western media outlet. In frankest of terms, this means that I always recognised that I made less of a story than my American or European colleagues would (For those who question it, compare the media inches granted to Logan vs the temporary detentions of Sonia Verma the Indo-Canadian reporter or Al Jazeera's Sherine Tadros in Egypt). This knowledge informed the risks I took as well as the professional decisions I made.

At the same time, I and other nonwhite reporters can access people and places that many "western" journalists can not, regardless of gender. And that is an advantage that few media outlets can ignore, especially as the power balance shifts away from the traditionally western centres of power.

Perhaps, to reference Toni Morrison, it is the privilege of whiteness (or lack thereof). I confess that I have used it to my advantage, as have many other women journalists from Latin America, Africa, Asia. I also have to admit that it has worked to my disadvantage, although more at institutional rather than human/individual levels.MORE