Monthly Archives

June 2024

“As the page of history is turning, you are standing on the right side of it”; Iran’s Supreme Leader says in a letter ©

by Narges Mohammadi June 11, 2024

The great Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, wrote a letter to the students who support the Palestinian people in the universities of the United States of America, and this message was accompanied by significant responses.

Jahanbanou News Agency spoke with one of the active students of Qom regarding the letter of Iran’s Supreme Leader to students who support the Palestinian people in American universities, to check the goals of this action..

In this regard, some active university students in Iran, in search of better visibility of feedback through the pages of American and European universities on social media, gathered the ID of number of students and by inviting plus cooperating with their friends, the text of the letter or a part of it was posted on their Instagram platform; and so, they put on a great symbolic performance, which in this way a cycle of re-reading the letter was launched.

One of the important goals of this work, in addition to better visibility of the letter, is to communicate with students abroad in the next stage.

Click here to read Ayatollah Khamenei’s letter to the brave students of United States of America.

The clip below is a performance where active members of Qom’s University student movement read this letter to their peers in America and Europe.

June 11, 2024 0 comment

Asia Women Pioneers

Words of Iran’s 8th president’s widow for the first time after the helicopter accident©

by Narges Mohammadi June 10, 2024

In a ceremony of commemoration of the great authorities that passed away in the helicopter accident in Iran, Dr. Jamila Alamolhoda a great Iranian scholar and the widow of President Raesi had a speech.

We have bought her speech below, but before that lets get to know this great lady more.

Jamila-Sadat Alamolhoda born in 1965, commonly known as Jamila Alamolhoda , is an Iranian writer and scholar. She is married to Ebrahim Raisi, who was the President of Iran from 1983 until he died in a helicopter crash in 2024.

Alamolhoda received her doctorate in the field of philosophy of education from Tarbiat Modarres University in 2001. She became a member of the faculty of the Department of Leadership and Educational Development of the School of Educational Sciences and Psychology of Shahid Beheshti University and is now an associate professor. She teaches courses such as philosophy of higher education, anthropology in Islam, teaching methods, theoretical foundations of educational management, philosophical schools and educational views in the doctoral course of Shahid Beheshti University.

Alamolhoda was the director of the Humanities Research Institute. She founded the Institute of Fundamental Studies of Science and Technology of Shahid Beheshti University in 2013 and is its director. This research institute has the task of presenting science and technology policy models based on understanding and evaluating the epistemological and social aspects of science and technology. In March 2020, she was appointed as the secretary of the “Council for the Transformation and Renovation of the Educational System of the Country” by the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution.

A video of Alamolhoda speech at an international conference in which she tried to speak in English despite not being fluent in it was released by the media in 2017.

Alamolhoda was appointed member of the executive board for faculty recruitment at Tehran University in May 2023.

Alamolhoda is the eldest daughter of Ahmad Alamolhoda, the Friday prayer leader in Mashhad and a member of the Assembly of Experts. In 1983 at the age of 18, she married Ebrahim Raisi. The couple had two daughters, one of whom has a PhD in sociology from the University of Tehran and the other a BSc in physics from Sharif University of Technology.

June 10, 2024 0 comment

Asia Women Pioneers

A look over the reputation of female volunteers in Iran’s 14th presidential election©

by Narges Mohammadi June 9, 2024

During the registration days of the 14th presidential election, four women registered to run for Iran’s presidency.

The deadline for candidates to register for this election, which started on the morning of Thursday, May 30^th , ended on the evening of Monday, June 3^rd .

According to the announcement made by the spokesperson of Iran’s election headquarters, 80 people have been nominated in this election; from figures with a history of president and speaker of the parliament, to former and current ministers and members of the parliament. The names of four women can be seen among the people who have registered for the elections.

Due to the existence of the condition of “political male” in the set of conditions set for the president, the presence of women in this arena, regardless of the existing necessities and requirements, has always faced interpretive challenges regarding this expression; That being a “man” is defined in terms of “gender” on the basis of which only men have the possibility to volunteer and enter this field, or that it has another meaning that does not block the possibility of women’s presence, at least in the past, and provides a platform that they also find the possibility of acting in this field based on the qualification criteria.

Zohre Elahian, Raafat Bayat, Hajar Chenarani and Hamida Zarabadi are women who have registered for the 14th presidential election.

Azam Taleghani and Zahra Shojaei were also registered in the previous rounds of the presidential elections, but they did not have the opportunity to be exposed to the people’s choice due to the lack of approval by Iran’s Guardian Council. But the women registered for the upcoming elections have all entered this campaign with a history of representation in the parliament.

Zohre Elahian

Zohre Elahian, with a medical education, has the experience of representing the 8th and 11th term of Tehran. On Saturday, June 1^st , she registered her name as a presidential candidate by attending the country’s election headquarters.

Elahian, who failed to qualify for the 12th Parliament in the March 1^st elections, is running for the presidency with the slogan “healthy government, healthy economy, healthy society”. She has also put transparency and the fight against corruption at the top of her work.

Hamida Zarabadi

Hamida Zarabadi, the reformist representative of Qazvin in the 10th term, also registered in the 14th presidential elections.

She, who had appeared in the Ministry of Interior with a different cover from her representative period, presented her plan to reform the approach of domestic politics by giving priority to all-round development, fighting against all forms of corruption, freedom of information and support for free and independent media and the free activity of parties. Independent organizations and trade unions have stated and promised to use all worthy men and women of any orientation, ethnicity and social class in her cabinet.

Hajar Chenarani

Hajar Chenarani, the representative of Neishabur in the 10th and 11th parliaments, also announced her readiness to take the post of president by registering in the elections.

Considering her performance in the past, Chenarani is confident that she can form a revolutionary government based on national reconciliation. She believes that we have women as worthy as men in the society. Therefore, it has come to the field so that women can make more demands.

Raafat Bayat

Raafat Bayat, representative of Zanjan in the 7th Parliament of Iran, was the fourth female candidate and the last person who reached Fatemi Street in Tehran within the last minutes before the doors of the Ministry of Interior were closed, and she registered in the 14th presidential election.

Bayat studied sociology and was responsible for mobilizing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for 3 years during the Iran & Iraq war.

She has been politically active since he was a student and is proud to be with the Imam in Nofal Loshato. She considers herself a child of the revolution and an impersonator of the Imam and claims that she volunteered because she saw that the country’s human resources, including women, were not being used as they should be.

Bayat says that by using our facilities without the need for government assistance and by amending the disturbing laws, we can use an important part of the country’s national income in the best way to improve conditions.

The registration of candidates for the 14th term of the presidential election started at 8:00 am on Thursday, May 30^th , 2024, and ended at 18:00 last day, June 3^rd , and finally, 80 candidates registered out of 278 applicants to the election headquarters located in the Ministry of Interior. they did

According to the previous announcement of the Ministry of Interior, after the announcement of the names, the candidates have 15 days to advertise and finally the voting for the presidential election will be held on June 28^th 2024.

IRNA News Agency

June 9, 2024 0 comment

Politics South America

A woman could be Mexico’s next leader. Millions of others continue in shadows as domestic workers

by Narges Mohammadi June 8, 2024

Alejo, 43, touches her face up with makeup on a Tuesday morning, and steps out of her tiny apartment on the fringes of Mexico City. She walks until the cracked gravel outside her home turns into cobblestones, and the campaign posters coating small concrete buildings are replaced with the spotless walls of gated communities of the city’s upper class.

It’s here where Alejo has quietly worked cleaning the homes and raising the children of wealthier Mexicans for 26 years.

Alejo is among approximately 2.5 million Mexicans — largely women — who serve as domestic workers in the Latin American nation, a profession that has come to encapsulate gender and class divisions long permeating Mexico.

Women like her play a fundamental role in Mexican society, picking up the burden of domestic labor as a growing number of women professionals enter the workforce. Despite reforms under the current government, many domestic workers continue to face low pay, abuse by employers, long hours and unstable working conditions some equate to “modern slavery.”

Now, as Mexico is on its way to elect its first female president, women like her who feel forgotten by their government hope that having a female leader might shift the balance in their favor.

“I’ve never voted all these years, because it’s always the same for us whoever wins. … When have they ever listened to us, why would I give them my vote?” Alejo said. “I have hope that at least by having a woman, maybe things will be different.”

Still, as two female politicians — former Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum and former senator Xochitl Gálvez — are leading the race to the June 2 presidential election, it’s unclear how much it will shift the realities of working women in the country.

Born to a poor family in the central Mexican state of Puebla, Alejo dropped out of school at age 14 because her parents had no money to pay for her to continue studying. Instead, she and two of her sisters each moved to Mexico City to do one of the few jobs available to them as lower class women: domestic work.

Women in Mexico, like much of Latin America, work in informal jobs — tasks like selling things on the street without a fixed contract or benefits — in rates greater than their male counterparts, something experts following the topic attribute to misogyny in their cultures.

Like many young women coming to the city, Alejo began working as a live-in nanny, sleeping in a small room in the house of the family she worked for.

“It’s like you’re a mother. The kids would call me ‘mama’,” she said. “Their children were born and I would bathe them, care for them, do everything from the moment I awoke to the moment they slept.”

While some domestic workers live separately from families, many more live with families and work weeks, if not months, without breaks. They’re isolated from family and friends, in a custom that roots back to slavery, said Rachel Randall, a Latin American Studies researcher at the Queen Mary University of London.

“In a region like Latin America and the Caribbean, the history of slavery and colonialism continues to weigh on relationships to domestic workers even today in terms of class, race and gender dynamics,” she said.

Alejo said the demands, combined with the low pay of domestic work, led her not to build a family or have children herself. Others told The Associated Press they were fired from their positions after they fell ill and asked for help and time off from the family they’ve worked with for years.

Carolina Solana de Dios, 47, said she started working as a live-in nanny when she was 15 to escape an abusive household. While she feels free from the abuse and knows her job is important, she added: “When you work in someone else’s house, your life isn’t your own.”

At the same time, their help is essential for working women like 49-year-old Claudia Rodríguez, as they continue to fight to enter professional spaces historically dominated by men. Rodríguez, a single mother and owner of an IT company, said she’s had to work twice as hard to get half as far as male counterparts.

In Mexico and much of Latin America, a gap has long divided men and women in the workplace. In 2005, 80% of men were either employed or looking for jobs, compared to 40% of women, Mexican government data shows.

That gap has slowly closed over time, and at the end of 2023, 76% of men were active in the workforce, compared to 47% of women. Large gaps in salary and leadership roles still exist.

Born in a town two hours from Mexico City, Rodríguez fled an abusive father with her mother and siblings, taking refuge in the capital. After watching her mother toil away selling food on the streets and any other job to pay rent, Rodríguez decided from an early age she didn’t want to follow the same path.

Instead of pursuing her dream of professionally dancing, she began selling computers when she was 16.

“I didn’t want to make the same sacrifice that she was making for me,” she said. “So I began to work and study.”

She spent years clawing her way up in the IT industry despite sexual harassment and “men slamming doors in our faces.” But when she married and had children, she said, she would often have to do all the housework in addition to running her own business.

Caregiving can shift the trajectory of a woman’s career in Mexico, making it harder for them to reach higher level professional positions, according to a 2023 survey from the Mexican Institute for Competition. While more than half the women in Mexico say they’ve had to pause their careers to care for children, only one in five men reported the same.

When her husband left her for another woman six years ago, hiring a live-in domestic worker was the only thing she could do to stay afloat.

Today, she and her nanny, Irma, both wake up at 5 a.m., one making lunch for her two daughters while the other drops them off at school. While it’s hard to keep up, now, at least she can breathe.

“She is part of our family,” she said. “In the case of women in business, we couldn’t take it all on alone simply because it’s far too much that society expects of you.”

Despite the load, a historic number of women in the socially conservative country are taking up leadership and political roles. Between 2005 and 2021, the gap between men and women in roles of government and international entities slimmed by more than 25%, according to government data.

That’s in part due to a decades-long push by authorities for greater representation in politics, including laws that require political parties to have half of their congressional candidates be women. Since 2018, Mexico’s Congress has had a 50-50 gender split, and the number of female governors has shot up.

While neither presidential candidate has spoken explicitly about domestic workers, both Sheinbaum and Gálvez have proposed addressing soaring violence against women in Mexico and working to close the country’s gender pay gap.

“In our government, women won’t just be recognized for having a woman president, we’re going to take action for women,” frontrunner Sheinbaum said in a speech on International Women’s Day.

But Norma Palacios, head of the country’s domestic workers union, known as SINACTRAHO, said many of the social advances seen in recent years haven’t trickled down to poorer classes of working women, least of all domestic workers.

In 2019, the government of President Andrés Manuel López Abrader passed landmark legislation granting domestic workers basic rights like paid leave, limits on working hours and access to health insurance paid by employers.

But failures by the government to enforce those rules has left women “unprotected” and locked in a “dynamic of power inequality,” Palacios said.

“Nothing has changed, and (domestic workers) continue to face informal working conditions, in precarious work, with low salaries facing violence and discrimination, even if on paper we should have more labor rights,” Palacios said.

Neither Alejo, the domestic worker, nor Rodríguez, the single mother, say they particularly identify with either candidate on the ballot, though they both plan to vote. While both say having a woman leading the country would be a step forward, the women — long disillusioned by Mexican politics — still see the leaders as more of the same.

They echo other analysts who say that having a woman on the ballot doesn’t necessarily mean they will make gender issues a priority. Still, they and Palacios, the head of the domestic workers union, hope it will mark a longer-term shift.

“It’s still a woman who is going to be at the head of a country — a sexist country, a country of inequality, a country of violence against women, a country of femicides,” Palacios said.

Meanwhile, workers like Alejo continue down a shaky path as they struggle to push for their own rights.

Alejo is among the 98% of the 2.5 million domestic workers who have yet to enroll in health insurance, according to SINACTRAHO data. She and many others fear that asking for their new rights to be respected would end in them being fired.

Alejo, who long worked as a live-in nanny, eventually moved into her own small apartment alone in a poorer area of the city. After years of low pay and one case of sexual abuse, the 43-year-old said she finally works with a family that pays her a fair wage and respects her.

Still, as she summons up the courage to ask the family to pay for her health insurance, she adds that she knows they see her as replaceable.

“They don’t like that you ask for things,” she said. “It’s not easy finding work, and if you need to work, you end up accepting whatever they give you.”

Source: ABC News

June 8, 2024 0 comment

Central America Community

The Gender Pay Gap Is a Culture Problem

by Narges Mohammadi June 8, 2024

A journalist and novelist offers her perspective on the American family, culture, politics and the way we live now.

American women made significant progress toward closing the gender pay gap in the second half of the 20^th century, but that gap has barely budged over the past two decades. In 2022, according to Pew Research, “American women typically earned 82 cents for every dollar earned by men. That was about the same as in 2002, when they earned 80 cents to the dollar.”

In a country where women are now a (slight) majority of the college-educated labor force and the annual earnings median for college degree holders is 55 percent more than that of those with high school diplomas, the stickiness of this gap is frustrating. While there are several factors at play, one of the key contributors to the gap is what’s known as the motherhood penalty and the corresponding fatherhood premium: Women’s pay decreases when they have children, while men’s pay increases.

This dynamic isn’t just an American phenomenon. “In general, women don’t recover. They don’t catch back up to men, even many years after first childbirth,” said Henrik Kleven, the lead author of a 2023 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, “The Child Penalty Atlas,” in which he and his co-authors, Camille Landais and Gabriel Leite-Mariante, reviewed wage gap data from 134 countries. “Now, that basic pattern is true essentially everywhere, but the quantitative magnitudes of the effects vary greatly across countries,” he told me recently

Source: New York Times

June 8, 2024 0 comment

Culture Europe

The Real Feminism

by Narges Mohammadi June 8, 2024

“Every Monday I meet with a group of female friends in a London restaurant. We sit at a table near the window and discuss our lives.

We have many things in common. We are all in our mid-50s and highly educated career women. But there is a vacuum in our lives. We are all single and childless.

I increasingly feel, as do many of my intimates, that feminism has failed our generation. I grew up with its beliefs. No, strike that. I was force-fed them.

By the age of 13, Christmas presents from my Women’s Lib aunt were books by Gloria Steinem and Simone de Beauvoir, considered the mother of modern feminism. (My aunt was one of those militants who had famously disrupted the 1970 Miss World contest).

My peers and I watched Mary Poppins, idolizing the determinedly single nanny (never noticing the occasional sadness behind her eyes), and sympathizing with suffragette Mrs. Banks, while wondering why she didn’t leave her dullard of a husband.

The feminism I was spoon-fed in my youth made the error of telling members of my sex to behave and think like men“, writes Petronella Wyatt.

Our heroine was Margaret Thatcher, who, though she would have denied it, was a feminist de facto. In one of those encounters that make life instructive, I met Lady Thatcher at my late father’s house (my father was the politician Woodrow Wyatt) when I was 15. She was our first woman prime minister and, after our introduction, she began to address me on the subject of life.

The gist of her address would have been greeted with hosannas by every feminist of the age: in summation, a woman’s career superseded by far her relations with the opposite sex. (Her own union might well have been to a cipher as opposed to a husband. Indeed, when the Thatcher’s dined with us, Denis withdrew to the drawing room with the women).

At my private school, St Paul’s, we children of Thatcher were similarly educated out of marriage and femininity.

One of my unmarried school friends recalls: ‘My teachers made me feel as if marriage was shameful. My English mistress once teased me for looking at a bridal magazine, but then she was an arch feminist who demonized men.’

We both recall being told that ‘Paulinas do not cook, they think’. This is all very well when you are young and aspire to greatness, but not all girls grow up to be executives or high court judges, something that feminism perilously forgot to tell us.

Historically, the feminist argument had its points. In the old days, when members of my sex were bound first to their fathers and then to their husbands, they led unenviable lives. If a woman had a good education, however, she could make a comfortable living and remain independent of male approbation. When the desire for marriage and children overwhelmed her, she would almost certainly lose her job.

The world has now changed in a way the early feminists would find incomprehensible. I sometimes think, and so do my friends, that the West has outgrown the feminist philosophy, and that it has become pernicious.

Where, for instance, does it leave women like us, when we have reached our mid-50s, and find ourselves alone?

One of the chief causes of unhappiness is the feeling that one is unloved, whereas companionship and the feeling of being loved promotes happiness more than anything else.

One in ten British women in their 50s has never married and lives alone, which is neither pleasant nor healthy.

My friend Sally, a lovely 55-year-old with eyes the color of Eau de Nil, once said to me: ‘I constantly feel unwanted as a woman because feminism taught us that the traditional female was a stereotype invented by men to keep us down. Accordingly, I was anti-men to the point of driving them away. Now, I’m paying for this.’

According to a recent study by an American medical institute, loneliness is the leading cause of depression among middle-aged females. I should know, as I recently fell prey to the unforgiving maw of mental illness. Many of my single friends suffer from depression, springing from a solitary existence that would be eschewed by a race of alley cats.

Moreover, there are the economic factors involved. It is a truism that two incomes are better than one, and many of the unattached women I know work in low to middle-paid professions.

A university professor chum bemoans ‘as a single woman, it has been increasingly difficult to pay the bills with no assistance from a partner. For every J K Rowling, there are millions of women who get by on a pittance.

When America’s richest and most beautiful women trusted acid-penned Truman Capote with their most intimate secrets, he exposed every salacious detail. But PETRONELLA WYATT heard the stories first hand – so what really happened?

‘Feminism kept drumming into my head that financial independence was the ideal, but in practice it doesn’t happen unless you are managing a hedge fund or are able to write best-selling novels.’

Equally depressingly, many single women feel they have failed at life. Far from empowering us, feminism has made us insecure. ‘My career has stalled, I’ve never married and I feel worthless as a person,’ observes my pretty 53-year-old friend Rachel.

General self-confidence comes more than anything else from being accustomed to receiving love, particularly from the opposite sex. The woman with a husband and children accepts their affection as a law of nature, but it is of great importance to her mental health and success.

Yet of all the institutions that have come down to us from the past, none is so derailed by feminism as the family. Many women with feminist ideals feel parenthood is a far heavier burden than their grandmothers did, due to long working hours and the vilification of the housewife. Is it any wonder that the birth rate has declined?

Says another of my Monday group: ‘I was conditioned to have no encumbrances, particularly children. Or at least to wait until I was established in my career, but now I’m too old and that boat has sailed.’

Recently, after my depression became debilitating, I had a 20-year-old student living in my home. After a week of acquaintanceship, it dawned on me that the notion of not marrying and giving birth before the age of 30 was anathema to her, and she rejected it completely.

In short, she wanted to conduct her life like a woman. ‘Yes, I believe in women’s rights,’ she ruminated, ‘but I don’t believe in the militant feminism my mother grew up with. It went too far.’ Out of the mouths of babes.

The feminism I was spoon-fed in my youth made the error of telling members of my sex to behave and think like men. This error was a grave one, and women like me are paying for it, like gamblers in a casino that has been fixed.

It’s time for a cultural reset. It may be too late for me and my friends, but feminism should not be allowed to ruin the lives of future generations as well.

Source: Daily Mail

June 8, 2024 0 comment

Central America Health

Australia’s medicine shortage risks leaving menopausal women without options

by Narges Mohammadi June 8, 2024

The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) lists more than 420 medicines are in short supply, and cites temporary local-level disruptions and COVID-19 as the causes.

Among these medicines, several are treatments used by women to manage menopausal symptoms. One in particular, the HRT patch, has eight of its nine brands in short supply and the remaining one is not available on the Pharmaceutical Benefit Scheme (PBS).

The patches are used by some perimenopausal, menopausal and postmenopausal women to help manage some of the more intrusive symptoms of hormonal fluctuations, such as hot flashes and night sweats, according to the University of Melbourne. The patches applied to the skin like a sticker that delivers oestrogen, specifically the type called oestradiol, directly into the bloodstream.

Most patches last from three days to a week, but without them, menopausal symptoms can return within a matter of hours or days. Other problems with suddenly stopping the hormone include bone loss, hot flashes, insomnia, headaches, mood swings, fatigue, aches and pain, among more symptoms.

The patches can also be used as feminizing’s hormone therapy for gender affirmation.

The medicine has seen a resurgence in popularity among the two million women in Australia that have recently undergone menopause after a 2019 Lancet paper dispelled myths that the HRT patch causes breast cancer.

Amid the HRT patch shortage, the TGA has released advice telling Australian women to speak to their doctor about alternative options if they’re having difficulty getting their regular medicine. Prescribers are told to consider Australia’s shortages when initiating new patients onto HRT patches.

Experts call for greater government action

“Medicine shortages are becoming more of a problem in Australia, and we need to see a comprehensive strategy from government about how to prevent shortages and how to manage them better when they do occur,” said Professor Jennifer Martin, president of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians (RACP), in a statement on Thursday.

A report from 2020 by the Institute for Integrated Economic Research Australia had warned that: “Australia imports over 90 per cent of medicines and is at the end of a very long global supply chain making the nation vulnerable to supply chain disruptions.”

“Every day that goes by without a strategy to stop, prevent, and manage medicine shortages, we are leaving patients stranded,” said Professor Martin.

Other medicines currently in short supply in Australia include Ritalin to treat ADHD, antibiotic Benzathine Penicillin for upper respiratory tract infections, antidepressant fluoxetine and Ozempic which is approved by the TGA for lowering blood sugar in adults with type 2 diabetes.

Ordine, a morphine oral liquid used to manage severe pain, has been unavailable in Australia since February this year and isn’t expected to be back in supply until late August.

Source: Women’s Agenda

June 8, 2024 0 comment

Asia Politics

Scarred by war, Myanmar children ‘cannot have the life they used to have’

by Narges Mohammadi June 7, 2024

Ever since she witnessed a Myanmar military air strike on her school in February, kindergarten teacher Mi Hser has been haunted by the memory.

The day started like any other at the school in Daw Si Ei village in the southeastern Karenni State’s Demoso township. Children tossed around a football, while others played and shared snacks until the morning bell. Gathered outside for their weekly assembly, the 170 students listened as their teachers spoke. There was a buzzing overhead – a military drone – but neither Mi Hser nor anyone else took much notice.

The village had been living with war ever since the February 2021 military coup led to widespread nonviolent protests and then an armed uprising. Like other parts of the country, Karenni State – also known as Kayah State – has endured relentless clashes between the military and resistance forces, as well as brutal military attacks on civilians.

Still, Mi Hser’s village was about 27km (17 miles) from the nearest active conflict zone, and she believed that she and her students would be safe. But later that morning, as she stepped outside with her 11-month-old son during a break between classes, a fighter jet roared overhead. A fellow teacher pulled her back inside moments before a deafening explosion shook the building. Mi Hser saw rubble falling around her, and then everything went blank.

When she regained her bearings, a student was lying in a bunker, their head bleeding, and a teacher was holding another student who was barely conscious. In total, four boys were dead, the youngest just 12, while 40 more students were injured. Although Mi Hser had just seconds to react, she blames herself for not doing enough.

“I failed in my duty to protect the students,” Mi Hser told Al Jazeera a month later.

Since the attack, she has been incapacitated by fear, which keeps her from returning to the school to pick up her belongings from her classroom, and she has been struggling to sleep. “My eyes are wide open and my ears are listening for jet fighters or drones,” she said. “Even the sound of a cat jumping on the metal roof frightens me.”

She and other survivors of military attacks in Karenni, who were interviewed in person in February and early March, have been given pseudonyms to reduce the risk of retaliation by the military.

Prolonged insecurity

In the three years since Myanmar erupted into heavy fighting between the military and anti-coup forces, the military has also retaliated against civilians with air strikes, shelling, other types of killings and arson – actions that United Nations-appointed human rights investigators have said amount to war crimes.

The crisis in Karenni and across Myanmar has only intensified since anti-coup fighters launched a renewed offensive against the military late last year. Earlier this month, the UN said the number of people forcibly displaced across Myanmar had surpassed 3 million, of whom nearly one-third were located in Myanmar’s southeast, including Karenni State.

The situation in Myanmar had “morphed into a never-ending nightmare” which is inflicting “unbearable levels of suffering and cruelty” on people in the country, the UN’s human rights office said in March. It found that the military was responsible for the deaths of at least 4,600 civilians since the coup, including 659 women and 490 children.

The attack on the school in Daw Si Ei village was not an isolated incident. The same day, the military also bombed a school in nearby Loi Nan Hpa village, killing the owner of a rice mill next door.

Both of the schools had operated under the civilian government the military generals removed from power, but had shut down after the coup due to a Civil Disobedience Movement, which included widespread student and teacher strikes. Like thousands of other schools across the country, the institutions later reopened under the leadership of community volunteers including government teachers who had joined the strikes.

The military has targeted such schools as well as other public services operating outside of its control. In September 2022, it bombed a school in the Sagaing region, killing 11 children. A month later, soldiers beheaded a volunteer teacher in the Magway region and impaled his head on the school gates.

Living under prolonged armed conflict and physical insecurity can wreak havoc on the mental health of individuals, families and communities, according to Nouf Bazaz, a clinical professor at Loyola University Maryland who focuses on trauma, grief and loss among survivors of armed conflict.

“The more prolonged the conflict, the more that social relations and institutions that we depend on for healing and connection erode,” she said. “Especially for children, trauma experienced during key developmental phases can alter the very structures of our neurological systems that are quite literally how we connect to the world.”

While targeted mental health and psychosocial support can help mitigate the impact of the kind of horrific events now taking place in Myanmar, such services are extremely limited in Karenni State, says Monica, a clinical psychiatrist who serves as a team leader for a remote mental health support programme under the National Unity Government (NUG), an administration established by the elected lawmakers the generals removed in the coup.

Although her organisation is doing what it can to train local doctors, nurses and volunteer workers, Monica adds that the coup exacerbated what was already a significant gap between mental health needs and services in Myanmar, leaving even remote mental health service provision difficult to provide in conflict-riven areas like Karenni State.

“It’s very hard for grassroots people in Karenni to access telehealth services due to the internet shutdowns by the Myanmar military,” she said.

‘Still alive in my mind’

In Daw Si Ei village, Mi Hser is not the only one suffering. Weeks later, her seven-year-old daughter was still walking in her sleep, and Mi Hser had to hold her son, now just more than a year old, through the night to soothe his screaming.

Children in the village are now startled by the noise of a car engine and few have gone back to school. Mi Hser worried that it may be impossible for the village to recover. “All the happiness has disappeared and children don’t smile the way they used to… They’re not as active,” she said. “The children cannot have the life they used to have.”

It is a feeling shared by Mi Htoo Htoo, whose son was killed in the attack, just two weeks before his 14th birthday. Weeks later, Mi Htoo Htoo, who is also using a pseudonym, still found herself calling out for him unconsciously. “He’s still alive in my mind,” she told Al Jazeera through tears.

Although the last time she saw her son, he was in a casket with an injury to his head, Mi Htoo Htoo tries to remember him in his Sunday church clothes, or talking about the aeroplane he planned to design, which ran on water rather than jet fuel.

The attack that killed her son also haunts Mi Htoo Htoo every hour of the day, and has left her in a perpetual state of anxiety. “Whenever I hear a fighter jet, my body trembles with fear and I feel like I’m completely drained,” she said.

She added that her surviving three children were also scared to leave the house, even for the music class at their church that they used to enjoy, and her 11-year-old was struggling to fall asleep.

Despite her pain, Mi Htoo Htoi tries to maintain her composure. “I need to take care of my other three children so that they can be educated and serve the family, community and country,” she said.

‘Terrified’

Monica, the clinical psychiatrist serving under the NUG, expressed concerns about the wider impact of the conflict on Myanmar’s young generation, who are likely to carry the trauma with them into adulthood. “Their mental health has a huge impact on our society,” she said.

About 50km (31 miles) east of Daw Si Ei village, in the town of Shadaw, residents are also traumatised. The area has seen intense fighting between the military and Karenni resistance forces since November 2023, leaving the military increasingly on the defensive. Then, just the day before the attacks in Daw Si Ei and Loi Nan Hpa villages, a military helicopter touched down in Shadaw, dropping off about 60 soldiers, according to witnesses and media reports.

Naw Kaw Lay, 45, was on her rice paddy farm with her husband and two children at the time, and saw the helicopter from about 200 metres (219 yards) away. “I thought I was about to die and was absolutely terrified,” said Naw Kaw Lay, who hid with her family at the base of a rocky slope for the next five hours, and who has also been given a pseudonym.

They returned home that evening to find that soldiers had ransacked their house and looted their valuables. But the worst news came the next day, when they learned that resistance forces had found the bodies of three women from the village, one of whom was pregnant and two of whom had disabilities, along with the bodies of three children, aged three, five and seven. According to family members of the victims, all of them had been hiding in nearby paddy fields when they were abducted.

The Karenni Human Rights Group, a local documentation and advocacy organisation, has attributed the killings to the Myanmar military.

Following the incident, Naw Kaw Lay fled into the forest where she and other civilians, mostly women and children, took shelter in tents made of bamboo and tarpaulin. Two weeks later, her sleep remained disturbed and she was living in constant fear. “I still feel like my mind is detached from my body and I can’t concentrate,” she said.

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA

June 7, 2024 0 comment

Central America Health

Texas doctor who said nine-year-old’s can safely give birth appointed to maternal mortality committee

by Narges Mohammadi June 6, 2024

One of the US’s leading anti-abortion activists has been appointed to a Texas health committee tasked with reviewing maternal deaths.

The move worries reproductive justice advocates who say the state’s abortion ban – among the strictest in the US – has placed pregnant women’s lives in jeopardy. The appointment could undermine the committee’s ability to accurately examine the impact of the law on deaths during and in the immediate aftermath of pregnancy, they say.

“This appointment speaks volumes about how seriously certain state leaders are taking the issue of maternal mortality,” said Kamyon Conner, executive director of the Texas Equal Access Fund, an abortion assistance group that advocates for reproductive health equity. “It is another sign that the state is more interested in furthering their anti-abortion agenda than protecting the lives of pregnant Texans.”

Dr Ingrid Skop, a San Antonio-based OB-GYN, has long been vocal about her views on abortion.

Skop serves as vice-president and director of medical affairs for the national anti-abortion research group Charlotte Lozier Institute and is a member of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

She is also a plaintiff in a US supreme court lawsuit seeking to revoke the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the key abortion drug mifepristone, which she argues is “dangerous” despite years of evidence showing the drug is safe. She has authored a number of research papers that were ultimately retracted for misleading errors.

Skop – who has called the supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade “a victory in the battle but not the end of the war” – has argued in favor of forcing rape and incest victims as young as nine or 10 to carry pregnancies to term. “If she is developed enough to be menstruating and become pregnant and reach sexual maturity, she can safely give birth to a baby,” Skop told the House oversight committee in 2021. Pregnancy at such a young age is shown to carry significant health risks, including pre-eclampsia and infections.

In Texas, Skop has repeatedly testified at the legislature and in court in support of state abortion bans, most recently in a hearing opposing abortion care for Kate Cox, a Dallas woman who petitioned a judge for emergency access after receiving a lethal fetal diagnosis.

Texas has seen a number of instances of pregnant women being denied emergency abortions, despite, in some cases, life-threatening pregnancy complications. Studies have shown that some patients are being forced to wait at “death’s door” before doctors, who face criminal penalties under the state’s ban, intervene. But Skop has argued that the problem rests with the judgment of individual physicians, not the law itself.

Contrary to the arguments of many experts, Skop believes that abortion bans not only will not lead to an increase in maternal deaths, but may actually help reduce those rates. She calls the link between abortion restrictions and risks to maternal mortality “fallacious”.

Maternal mortality rates in Texas – among the worst in the US – more than doubled between 1999 and 2019. Skop told the Houston Chronicle the state’s high rate of maternal death “deserves rigorous discourse”.

“There are complex reasons for these statistics, including chronic illnesses, poverty and difficulty obtaining prenatal care, and I have long been motivated to identify ways women’s care can be improved,” said Skop. “For over 30 years, I have advocated for both of my patients, a pregnant woman and her unborn child, just like the overwhelming majority of OB-GYNs who don’t perform elective abortions.”

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists questioned Skop’s appointment, saying it was “crucial” that maternal review committee members be informed by “data, not ideology”. Her bias is relevant because abortion, they note, is inherently tied to maternal health.

“We believe that all members of the MMRC should be unbiased, free of conflicts of interest, and focused on the appropriate standards of care when evaluating maternal mortality and morbidity in Texas, which were already at unacceptably high levels even before Texas passed its abortion bans and restrictions,” said ACOG in a statement.

“Bias against abortion has already led to compromised analysis and, ultimately, dangerously flawed data,” said ACOG, citing three research papers critical of abortion that Skop co-authored. The studies were ultimately retracted by the academic publisher for “unjustified or incorrect factual assumptions”, as well as errors and misleading presentations of the data that showed a “lack of scientific rigor and invalidate the authors’ conclusions in whole or in part”.

Skop did not respond to a request from the Guardian for comment.

The 23-member Texas maternal mortality and review committee, created in 2013 amid a maternal healthcare crisis, gathers data on pregnancy-related deaths.

The committee’s latest report showed that 90% of maternal deaths in the state were probably preventable. It is now reviewing pregnancy-related deaths from 2020 and plans to examine the impact of state abortion laws on maternal health in the coming years.

Nakeenya Wilson, who nearly lost her life giving birth in Texas, sat on the committee as an outspoken community advocate, pushing for the release of data when the state health commissioner delayed publication of the report in 2022. As a voice for people of color, Wilson championed the stories of black women, who are disproportionately affected by maternal mortality rates both nationally and in Texas.

After legislation in 2023 eliminated her “community advocate” role, Wilson applied to a different role on the committee, but did not get the job.

While Skop’s role is meant for a rural community member, she has spent her career working in San Antonio, a major Texas city. Skop, who is one of seven new appointees, will begin her six-year term on 1 June.

“As a black mother who went through a traumatic pregnancy first-hand, I think I provided that necessary lived experience and could represent my community well,” Wilson said. “We need to ask, what community is [Skop] representing?”

Source: The Guardian

June 6, 2024 0 comment

Australia and Oceania Society

Victims, families, communities – domestic violence has a price the entire nation pays for

by Narges Mohammadi June 5, 2024

“It was like a strategic plan that I was a part of, and I was just the puppet.” Jane* was in an abusive relationship for years.

Over many years of her marriage, Jane’s partner would control aspects of her life so much that she became a shell of her former self. “I couldn’t make choices for myself, movements were controlled,” she told News Breakfast.

“I lost who I was as a person.” “I was at the state of walking on eggshells and questioning … is it OK if I make a choice?” And she always thought she couldn’t, for fear she would get in trouble with her husband.

Coercive control is a sinister type of abuse that can take many forms. “I remember sitting over my computer … [and] I was told, ‘let’s access your MyGov.'”

Jane’s partner had coaxed out details about her private government services account.

Unbeknownst to Jane, he had also changed her security questions. Her ex-partner stood over shoulder as Jane tried to fill in her password and her private answers – but none were working.

As she sat there, getting anxious by the second, her partner stood there mocking her. “He was going, ‘oh, you don’t know the answer to that?’ … my ex had set it up, he had taken control of it.”

Years ago, Jane escaped the relationship. But the scars from that time remain. “You don’t go into a relationship thinking … it’s going to end, it’s going to be bad,” she said. “I had big dreams for the future.”

But by the end, she was constantly worrying about escaping her abuser.

“You’re prevented from reaching out for help … to the point where you’re scared of it, because if they find out that you are seeking help, what’s going to happen? “It was a really scary, scary time.”

Escaping financial abuse

Unfortunately, Jane’s story is not an uncommon one.

“More now than ever, with the cost-of-living crisis and the rise of awareness in community around coercive control and financial abuse, we’re seeing women come to the Zahra Foundation in very similar situations, requiring support,” Kelly-Ann Tansley told News Breakfast.

She is the CEO of the Zahra Foundation, an Adelaide not-for-profit that provides financial counselling and education to victim-survivors of domestic violence and coercive control.

“Financially, a lot of women who connect with us find that they’re in quite significant debt or their credit rating has been impacted because he’s taken out debt within her name,” Ms. Tansley said.

Financial abuse through technology is on the rise – and one of her tips is to not share personal information easily.

“It’s often too easy for a perpetrator to fraudulently use a victim’s details to take out a bank loan, to increase credit on a credit card, to draw down on a mortgage.”

The organisation helps women rebuild their lives after fleeing from abusive relationships and provides them with support to do so safely.

It is a service Jane used to get back on her feet after leaving her ex-husband.

“When I finally left, I realised the enormity of where I was and how little I had,” Jane said.

The cost to Australians

Family, domestic and sexual violence costs victim-survivors greatly – and it also costs Australia billions of dollars each year.

A 2015-16 report from the Department of Social Services/KPMG estimated the national cost of domestic violence – taking into consideration aspects including pain suffered by victims, defaulting on debts and administration – at $21.7 billion.

Adjusted for inflation in today’s financial climate, that would be $32.8 billion.

“It’s not just around how much impact it has to the individuals or the groups [involved, but] the spread that has out into the taxpayer,” independent financial commentator Evan Lucas told News Breakfast.

“A lot of this actually ends up in government services and health services.”

Importantly, KPMG noted that four groups of women were underestimated in the figures – Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, women with disability, pregnant women and women who are homeless. Accounting for these women may add another $4 billion.

“When you are fleeing a violent relationship, the catch with it is that there is a financial element that is huge,” he said.

The data shows almost a quarter of women end up returning to the violent relationship, with 14 per cent of that quarter having nowhere else to go.

Three-quarters are forced to move out of the home they shared with the separated partner, leaving behind assets and either a joint house or a house not in their name at all.

“They are basically choosing between poverty and violence.”

Mr. Lucas said most women in these situations find themselves on some form of welfare support payment – especially when children are involved, and former partners fail to pay child support.

“That [$32 billion figure is] probably under, because it doesn’t take into account the individual cost that women are missing out on from financial violence that comes this way.”

Meanwhile, major banking institutions are continuing to intercept transactions from perpetrators containing abusive messages, in a lesser known form of financial abuse.

“The abuser is transferring one cent, but in that transfer, they can put a description … so they are using the transfer of funds as a messaging service to get around AVOs, et cetera.”

Jane told News Breakfast she is in a much better position now after finding support.

“I went and got counselling straight away … therapy, and things which I still constantly do,” she said.

“I could look back at the past and recognize what I went through, which then gave me a road forward.”

Source: ABC News

June 5, 2024 0 comment

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