The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
Chris Hedges -
BOSTON—“Fifty Shades of Grey,” the book and the movie, is a celebration of the sadism that dominates nearly every aspect of American culture and lies at the core of pornography and global capitalism. It glorifies our dehumanization of women. It champions a world devoid of compassion, empathy and love. It eroticizes hypermasculine power that carries out the abuse, degradation, humiliation and torture of women whose personalities have been removed, whose only desire is to...
Gillian Schutte -
Women’s bodies have been the locale of war since the inception of patriarchy - a misogynistic trend that saw the female body become the site of restraint, control and oppression. Thus the female body has largely become a meme of violence, suffering and exploitation rather than joy, pleasure and autonomy.
Much of this violence is centred on the vagina from which all human life is conceived.
Rape is an excruciatingly cruel male practice fuelled by a horrible concoction of masculine...
Richard Pithouse -
In December last year Jyoti Singh Pandey, a student on the cusp of her adult life, stepped into a bus in Delhi. She was with a friend. They had been to see the film version of the Life of Pi and were on the way home. And then, without warning, their passage through the night suddenly dropped out of the flow of ordinary life and into hell.
The bus went off the expected route, the doors were closed and Jyoti's friend was beaten unconscious by the six men in the bus. In what sounds like...
Anna Majavu -
A recent Supreme Court of Appeal judgment has undermined the plight of incest victims who keep quiet about their ordeals after being threatened with death or given tokens by their abusive father figures.
In this recent judgment, Supreme Court of appeal judge Jeremiah Shongwe - with judges Lex Mpati, Carole Lewis, Belinda van Heerden and Nathan Erasmus concurring - reduced a rapist's life sentence to 15 years. The Limpopo High Court had earlier sentenced Edson Ndou to the mandatory...
Laura Carlsen -
After curving through miles of Quebec’s countryside, the road to Montebello arrives at an enormous log cabin along the Ottawa River. Busloads of women pull up, from Rwanda, Colombia, the Congo, Mexico, Bosnia, Burma—women who think they can change the world.
The plan isn’t to change the whole world. Just the most violent and despicable parts, parts that many of them—too many—have experienced firsthand. They carry with them experiences they seek to erase forever,...
