United Nations says about 400 women die from domestic violence in Kazakhstan each year, but many cases go unreported.
Warning: This article contains details of violent domestic abuse that some may find upsetting.
Kazakhstan’s top court has sentenced a former economy minister to 24 years in prison for torturing and murdering his wife, following a widely watched trial that many saw as a test of the president’s promise to strengthen women’s rights.
Kuandyk Bishimbayev, 44, was found guilty and sentenced by the Supreme Court on Monday.
His trial, which has been broadcast live over the past seven weeks, has been seen as an attempt by authorities to send a message that members of the elite are no longer above the law.
Surveillance footage played during the trial showed Bishimbayev repeatedly punching and kicking his wife, 31-year-old Saltanat Nukenova, and dragging her by her hair, near naked, into the VIP room of a restaurant owned by his family in the country’s largest city, Almaty.
As she lay dying in the suite with no security cameras covered in her blood, Bishimbayev phoned a fortune teller, who assured him his wife would be fine. When an ambulance finally arrived 12 hours later, Nukenova was pronounced dead at the scene.
Videos were also found on Bishimbayev’s mobile phone in which he insulted and humiliated the visibly bruised and bloodied Nukenova in the hours before she lost consciousness on the morning of November 9 last year.
This June 2017 photo provided by Aitbek Amangeldy shows a selfie taken by his sister, Saltanat Nukenova, in Astana [Courtesy of Aitbek Amangeldy via AP]
President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has said he wants to build a fairer society including improved rights for women.
The case has helped rally public support behind a law criminalising domestic violence, which parliament passed last month.
Days after Nukenova’s death, her relatives launched an online petition urging authorities to pass “Saltanat’s Law” to bolster protection for those at risk of domestic violence. When the trial began, more than 5,000 Kazakhs wrote to senators urging for tougher laws on abuse, according to local media reports.
Government data show that one in six women in the Central Asian nation has experienced violence by a male partner.
According to the United Nations, about 400 women die from domestic abuse in the country each year. These figures could be higher as many cases go unreported.
During the trial, Bishimbayev admitted to beating his wife, but said some of her injuries were self-inflicted. He denied torturing or planning to murder her.
He served as the oil-rich nation’s economy minister from May to December 2016.
Bishimbayev was convicted of bribery in 2018 and sentenced to 10 years in prison, but walked free after less than three years thanks to an amnesty and parole.
Kuandyk Bishimbayev, the country’s former economy minister, is escorted into court in Astana, Kazakhstan. [File: The Kazakhstan Supreme Court Press Office Telegram channel via AP]
Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has branded domestic violence a “national crisis” amid an outcry over the rise in the number of killings of women by their intimate partners, and pledged action to tackle the issue, including new funding to help survivors as well as a crackdown on misogynistic online content.
The measures, announced on Wednesday, came after tens of thousands of Australians rallied across the country, including in the cities of Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney and Perth, demanding the government declare the issue a national emergency.
The protests were prompted by a wave of violence that campaign groups say has seen one woman killed every four days this year as a result of domestic violence.
They also followed a stabbing attack in Sydney in April, during which a knife-wielding assailant killed six people at a busy mall.
Five of his victims were women, and police said it was “obvious” that the attacker was targeting women.
Here’s what you need to know about the issue.
How dangerous is Australia for women?
Campaigners called the weekend rallies following a week in which three women were killed, allegedly by men known to them. This included Molly Ticehurst, a 28-year-old mother who authorities say was murdered by her former boyfriend, weeks after he was granted bail following his detention on charges of raping and stalking her.
In total, some 28 women have been killed this year by their current or former partners and members of their family, according to the campaign group Destroy the Joint.
The figure is almost double the number killed in the same period last year, according to public service broadcaster ABC.
Samantha Bricknell, research manager at the Australian Institute of Criminology, told the ABC that recent data suggested an increase in violence against women, with the rate of women killed by an intimate partner increasing by 31 percent from June 2022 to June 2023. Some 34 such murders took place in that period compared with the same period a year earlier, when 26 women were killed.
The increase defied a longer-term downward trend in Australia.
“What we’re really interested to see going forward … is, is this a sustained increase? That’s something that Australia needs to be worried about,” Bricknell told ABC. “More recent data suggests that it is going up, but hopefully we’ll see that that slight uptick turns around and continues to decrease.”
Government statistics also show one in four women in Australia have experienced violence by an intimate partner or family member since the age of 15. While a cause for concern, the figure is lower than in countries such as France, the United Kingdom and the United States. In the latter, more than one in three women have reported experiencing physical and sexual violence by an intimate partner.
What has Albanese said?
Albanese, who joined protesters in Canberra on Sunday, said he took the rallies as a call to action.
“We need to change the culture. We need to change attitudes. We need to change the legal system,” he told the crowd. “We need to change the approach by all governments because it’s not enough to support victims. We need to focus on the perpetrators and focus on prevention.”
Albanese also responded to calls to declare the issue a national emergency, saying such decrees were a short-term legal avenue intended for use in natural disasters. He did however describe domestic violence as a “national crisis” and scheduled an urgent cabinet meeting for Wednesday to discuss the issue. He said violence against women would be the sole agenda item for the meeting.
What kind of action is the government promising?
Following the cabinet meeting, Albanese announced that his government would invest 925 million Australian dollars ($599m) over five years to provide financial support to women and children trying to escape violence.
Those eligible for the Leaving Violence Program will be able to access up to 5,000 Australian dollars ($3,300) in financial support along with referral services, risk assessments and safety planning, a government statement added.
The national cabinet also unveiled new measures to tackle factors that it said exacerbated violence against women, “such as violent online pornography, and misogynistic content targeting children and young people”. These steps will include legislation to ban deepfake pornography and additional funding to pilot age assurance technologies, it said in a statement.
The cabinet also pledged to explore options to improve police responses to high-risk and serial perpetrators.
It added that ministers will meet again in three months to discuss progress.
The announcement follows a decision last week to toss Weinstein’s New York conviction on charges of rape and sexual assault.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has revealed plans to retry United States film producer Harvey Weinstein on charges related to sexual assault, less than a week after a New York court overturned his conviction for rape.
Prosecutors made the announcement at a court hearing on Wednesday. Weinstein, in a wheelchair, was in attendance, as was one of his accusers, actor Jessica Mann.
Weinstein’s case had been a pivotal part of the #MeToo movement, a public awareness campaign designed to expose and stamp out sexual assault and harassment.
More than 80 women stepped forward to accuse Weinstein of crimes and misconduct ranging from rape to groping. The allegations reached a fever pitch around 2017, when the #MeToo movement was at its height.
In 2020, Weinstein was convicted in New York on charges that he raped Mann in a local hotel room in 2013 and forcibly performed oral sex on production assistant Mimi Haley in 2006. Both women have spoken publicly about their experiences in the press.
Weinstein was serving a 23-year sentence when the New York Court of Appeals overturned his sentence on April 25. The four-to-three decision cited the fact that witnesses in the case testified to sexual assaults that had never been proven in court.
Nevertheless, on Wednesday, Manhattan prosecutors sought to underscore the severity of the crimes Weinstein is accused of.
“There was nothing consensual about this conduct,” said prosecutor Nicole Blumberg. “We believe in this case and will be retrying this case.”
Harvey Weinstein’s lawyer, Arthur Aidala, addresses reporters outside Manhattan Criminal Court on May 1 [Mary Altaffer/AP Photo]
Weinstein’s defence team said it welcomed the chance to clear his name. “It’s a new trial. It’s a new day,” said lawyer Arthur Aidala.
He added, “We’re very confident that if he goes to trial, the only words we’ll hear at the end of trial are ‘not guilty’.”
The 72-year-old film producer has maintained his innocence, alleging the sexual encounters were consensual.
Judge Curtis Farber told the court he anticipated scheduling the trial around the US Labour Day holiday, on September 2. But he did not specify an exact date.
Prosecutors had suggested Labour Day as a time when Mann would be available to testify again.
Haley, however, has not yet indicated whether she will participate in the retrial, according to her lawyer Gloria Allred, who added that the public scrutiny in the case was traumatising.
Aidala said Weinstein would return to Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan after the hearing, where he had been sent after his release from New York’s prison system on Friday.
Still, Weinstein is not a free man: He was convicted of a different rape in Los Angeles in 2022 and sentenced to 16 years in prison in California.
Defence and prosecution prepare for retrial of the once-powerful movie producer in a case that was a landmark for the #MeToo movement.
New York’s highest court has overturned disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 conviction for rape and sexual assault, highlighting the challenges of holding powerful men to account.
The Court of Appeals found on Thursday that the landmark trial was unfair because the judge allowed women whose accusations were not part of the charges Weinstein faced to give evidence in court.
Judge Jenny Rivera called for a new trial following the 4-3 decision.
The ruling does not affect a separate 16-year rape sentence handed down in California, so the 72-year-old will remain behind bars.
Bombshell allegations against the Oscar-winning producer broke into the open in 2017 and led to a flood of allegations against other powerful men as women fought back against sexual violence in what became known as the #MeToo movement.
Three years later, a New York court found Weinstein guilty of sexually assaulting former production assistant Miriam Haley in 2006, and raping aspiring actress Jessica Mann in 2013.
He was jailed for 23 years in a case that was considered a landmark for the #MeToo movement.
Following his conviction, a civil trial awarded $17m to dozens of other women who had accused Weinstein of abuse.
Many of his accusers condemned Thursday’s decision, with actress Ashley Judd calling it “an act of institutional betrayal”.
The office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg signalled it planned to put Weinstein back on trial.
Stinging dissent
At a news conference, Weinstein’s lawyer Arthur Aidala called the ruling “a tremendous victory for every criminal defendant in the state of New York” and said Weinstein was ready to testify in his own defence at a retrial.
“He’s been dying to tell his story from day one,” Aidala said. Weinstein has contended that any sexual activity was consensual.
Any retrial would be overseen by a different judge. The term of the judge in the original trial, James Burke, expired at the end of 2022.
In its ruling on Thursday, the state Court of Appeals said the trial court erred in allowing “testimony of uncharged, alleged prior sexual acts” and saying it would permit questions about Weinstein’s “bad behaviour” if he had testified. The producer did not take the stand in his own defence.
In a stinging dissent, Judge Madeline Singas wrote that the court was continuing a “disturbing trend of overturning juries’ guilty verdicts in cases involving sexual violence”. She said the ruling came at “the expense and safety of women”.
In another dissent, Judge Anthony Cannataro wrote that the decision was “endangering decades of progress in this incredibly complex and nuanced area of law” regarding sex crimes after centuries of “deeply patriarchal and misogynistic legal tradition”.
The reversal of Weinstein’s conviction is the second major #MeToo setback in recent years.
In 2021, a court in Pennsylvania threw out Bill Cosby’s conviction on sexual assault and he was freed from prison. The Supreme Court declined to take up the case.
In England, a landmark independent review into gender care services for young people has exposed one of the biggest medical negligence scandals of recent times and vindicated those who have been accused of engaging in malicious “culture wars” and branded as unkind bigots for opposing unnecessary medicalisation of children.
The review, conducted by respected paediatrician Hilary Cass, found that some of the most vulnerable members of society – children presenting with “gender dysphoria” which, in many cases, masks autism, sexual abuse, trauma and confusion over same-sex attraction, among other conditions – have been let down by a lack of research and “remarkably weak” evidence on medical interventions in England’s gender care clinics.
The National Health Service (NHS England) said it commissioned the review, published on April 10, to ensure that “children and young people who are questioning their gender identity or experiencing gender dysphoria receive a high standard of care, that meets their needs, is safe, holistic and effective.”
The review’s intentions, and thus its conclusions, are of course disputed by those who insist that anyone claiming to be transgender must be instantly affirmed – and in the case of a child, given access to puberty blockers.
Puberty blockers – hormones that stop the progress of puberty – have long been at the centre of the dispute over whether medical interventions offered to gender-questioning children are safe and fit for purpose.
In short, Cass has found that puberty blockers do indeed have side effects and negative health implications. Her inquiry concluded that there is, at best, weak evidence that these drugs are safe and beneficial to gender-questioning children, especially in the long term.
Cass told the BBC that the use of puberty blockers to “arrest puberty” started out as a clinical trial, but has been expanded to a wider group of young people before the results of that trial were available.
“It is unusual for us to give a potentially life-changing treatment to young people and not know what happens to them in adulthood, and that’s been a particular problem that we have not had the follow-up into adulthood to know what the results of this are,” she said.
To make sense of this scandal, and understand how the NHS came to offer this experimental treatment to vulnerable children without obtaining meaningful evidence for its safety and efficacy, we must examine how British institutions have been captured by “gender ideology” – the belief that an individual’s internal sense of gender, or “gender identity”, should supersede their sex in all aspects of life and under law.
In 2016, Women and Equalities Minister Maria Miller led an inquiry into transgender equality that strongly recommended that the United Kingdom legally adopt principles of gender self-declaration, which would allow any individual to decide whether they would be considered male or female according to their own “gender identity”.
Miller signed off a report advising a change to the Equality Act which would replace the protected characteristic of “gender reassignment” with “gender identity”. In so doing, she suggested that the inner feeling of “gender” should take precedence over legal sex.
Feminists complained – for us, this was a matter of protecting our hard-won sex-based rights. But Miller dismissed women’s fury about the erosion of single-sex provisions in domestic violence refuges and prisons among other aspects of life as “extraordinary” bigotry.
The feminist resistance to gender ideology and objection to harm it inflicts on women and children, however, did not start with Miller’s misguided inquiry, which ramped up institutional capture.
The first article I ever wrote on the trans issue was published in the Telegraph Magazine in November 2003. It was about those who had undergone “sex change” surgery (the popular parlance of the time).
Researching that article, I discovered that Mermaids (a charity supporting children and teenagers with “gender identity disorder”) had seen a dramatic increase in inquiries since its founding in 1995. “Sex-change” treatment, including puberty blockers, was available to children as young as 14, despite evidence (even then) from the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust that one in four teenagers seeking “gender reassignment” would later change their minds.
Soon after, I wrote about Vancouver Rape Relief (VRR), in Canada. In August 1995, two VRR employees had asked Kimberly Nixon (a trans-identified male) to leave its counsellor training, which prepared attendees to offer face-to-face support to women traumatised as a result of male violence. The following day, Nixon filed a human rights complaint, initiating a lengthy legal battle.
The publication of this article in Guardian Weekend on January 30, 2004, headed “Gender Benders, Beware”, led directly to me being cast out by trans activists.
Invitations to prestigious events were withdrawn. I was shortlisted for awards, only to be un-shortlisted when the organisers found themselves under pressure.
Refusing to bow down to these efforts, I and a small number of other feminists continued to speak out – as did some valiant whistle-blowers. These were people working within gender clinics, horrified by the creeping normalisation of transitioning “gender-distressed” children.
In September 2017, Woman’s Place UK (WPUK) was founded by a group of feminists in response to planned new legislation by Miller, and everything changed as groups of women began to organise. Resistance to gender ideology was now driving feminist activism.
These efforts, however, did not immediately put a stop to institutional capture. There was a spike in the number of children, overwhelmingly girls, presenting with gender dysphoria and being referred to gender clinics, but this did not concern trans activists and their supporters in positions of power. More than 5,000 referrals were made to the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) in London in 2021-22, compared to just 500 hundred a decade earlier. Almost two-thirds of referrals in recent years were teenage girls. Still, people continued to dismiss our concerns over gender ideology and its medicalisation of children as hyperbole and bigotry.
By July 2023, the situation in schools in some parts of the country had become so urgent that concerned parents started to take matters into their own hands.
In the Brighton and Hove area, where a number of children were being allowed to “socially transition” at school, for example, concerned parents set up PSHE Brighton to assess the delivery of Personal, Social, Health, and Economic Education (PSHE) and Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) in local schools.
So far, more than 20 local families contacted them and voiced their worry that their children may be being transitioned “from the classroom to the clinic”.
One such family was 16-year-old Catherine’s.
Catherine is autistic and, in less than two years, has gone from being a feminist and a proud lesbian to identifying as a boy. Now fixated on medical and surgical transition, she appears to have experienced rapid onset gender dysphoria after accessing material from trans-affirming charities like Mermaids online.
Her parents say she forced her school into making a social work referral by self-harming and reporting false information about her family. They explain that they had secured agreement from both Catherine’s headteacher and a private counselling service that social transition would be inappropriate for her before a full assessment of her needs had been carried out. Nevertheless, her parents say that “an unholy alliance of well-meaning teachers and social workers, misguided by potentially unlawful policies, practices, procedures, and training, have led to Catherine transitioning – first socially and then medically”.
Today, Catherine is estranged from both of her parents.
There are many, many more families going through this hell, and many children like Catherine who are exposed to experimental treatments with permanent side effects, as a result of an almost blind acceptance by individuals and institutions of gender ideology.
For years, those of us who tried to put a stop to this have been accused of being bigoted, unkind, and motivated by a dislike of trans people. For years, it has been claimed that it was not feminists and concerned parents, but ideological charities like Mermaids who were doing what is best for “trans children”. Women lost their jobs, reputations and, often, sanity for speaking up against gender ideology, and its medicalisation of vulnerable children. Thankfully, Hilary Cass has finally exposed the truth, proved that it was not us who were being “unkind” but those unnecessarily medicalising children, and brought us one step closer to throwing the harmful delusion that is gender ideology into the dustbin of history.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
Poland has some of the strictest abortion laws in the European Union.
Lawmakers in Poland have begun debating changes to the country’s harsh abortion laws that had grown more restrictive during eight years of conservative nationalist governments.
Liberalising access to abortion has been a central campaign promise of Prime Minister Donald Tusk and his Civic Coalition that emerged victorious in elections in October that saw a high turnout partly due to women’s rights issues.
The country has some of the strictest abortion laws in the European Union, only allowing a woman to have an abortion in cases where the pregnancy has resulted from rape or incest, or if it threatens the life or health of the mother.
Lawmakers are expected to debate multiple bills that have been put forward by coalition groups.
Somehave sought to make abortion legal without limitations until 12 weeks of pregnancy while one bill looks to reinstate the right to abortion in case of foetal abnormalities, which would effectively return Poland to the situation before 2020 – when a constitutional court ruling had banned such procedures – while keeping most current restrictions in place.
The parliament session follows pressure from activist groups and women’s rights campaigners [File: Kacper Pempel/Reuters]
It is widely expected that President Andrzej Duda, a conservative ally of the former right-wing government, will veto any changes to legislation. He vetoed a law last month that would have allowed over-the-counter access to emergency birth control pills for girls and women aged 15 or higher.
Thursday’s parliament session follows pressure from activist groups and women’s rights campaigners, who have staged many rallies over the years against tightening abortion rules.
In March, right-wing parliament speaker Szymon Holownia decided to postpone the debates until after local elections last weekend. This had caused some anger among activists and coalition partners in parliament.
Authorities in Poland have come under increasing pressure over abortion laws after multiple women died in cases linked with abortion complications.
Even legal abortions are often difficult to get in Poland because doctors and hospital administrators are unsure about the rules or refuse to perform terminations based on their own beliefs in the predominantly Catholic country.
In the case of sexual assault, women face the additional stigma of having to publicise the crime by reporting it to the prosecutor’s office to be determined eligible for legal abortions.
In 1864, the territory of Arizona in the United States passed a law that criminalised nearly all abortions.
Arizona was not even a state at the time of the law’s passage. But now, 160 years later, its state Supreme Court has ruled the near-total ban can go into effect in 14 days.
The court’s decision on Tuesday triggers what would be one of the most restrictive state laws to govern abortion access in the US.
Writing for the majority in the four-to-two ruling, Judge John Lopez explained that Arizona’s legislature had never established a right to abortion access in the state.
“We defer, as we are constitutionally obligated to do, to the legislature’s judgement, which is accountable to, and thus reflects, the mutable will of our citizens,” he said.
A previous court decision had blocked the 1864 law from being enforced, but Tuesday’s decision lifts the stay on the law.
Under the 1864 Arizona law, “every person” who participates in conducting an abortion can be held criminally liable and face a minimum sentence of two years in prison. There are no exceptions for cases of rape or incest, although there is an exception when a pregnant person’s life is at risk.
Arizona joins 14 other states with near-complete abortion bans. In 2022, the conservative-dominated US Supreme Court overturned federal protections for abortions, leaving questions of abortion access largely up to individual states.
It is a dark day in Arizona. We are just fourteen days away from one of the most extreme abortion bans in the country.
But my message to Arizona women is this: I won’t rest, and I won’t stop fighting until we have secured the right to abortion.
That is my promise to you.
— Governor Katie Hobbs (@GovernorHobbs) April 9, 2024
The decision spurred alarm among reproductive health advocates, and Democrats were swift to criticise Arizona’s state Supreme Court bench, composed of justices entirely appointed by Republican governors.
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, for instance, condemned the ruling as “unconscionable and an affront to freedom”. She said she would not prosecute any doctor or woman under the “draconian law”.
“Today’s decision to reimpose a law from a time when Arizona wasn’t a state, the Civil War was raging, and women couldn’t even vote will go down in history as a stain on our state,” she said in a statement.
In post on the social media platform X, Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, also a Democrat, called Tuesday “a dark day in Arizona”.
“But my message to Arizona women is this: I won’t rest, and I won’t stop fighting until we have secured the right to abortion. That is my promise to you,” she said.
Planned Parenthood, which provides abortions and other healthcare services, pledged to continue providing abortion services until the law goes into effect.
“Today’s deplorable decision from the state Supreme Court sends Arizona back nearly 150 years,” the group wrote on X. “This ruling will cause long-lasting, detrimental harms for our communities. It strips Arizonans of their bodily autonomy and bans abortion in nearly all scenarios.”
Planned Parenthood had initially challenged the century-old abortion ban in 1971.
Two years later, the US Supreme Court upheld the federal right to abortion in the landmark 1973 Roe v Wade ruling. That paved the way for a judge to side with Planned Parenthood and block the 1864 abortion ban.
But the Roe decision has since been overturned, throwing the right to abortion access in question across the country.
In 2022, then-state Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, challenged the court order that effectively placed the 1864 ban on ice. Planned Parenthood appealed, and when Governor Hobbs and Attorney General Mayes took office in 2023, they declined to continue the state’s attempt to defend the ban.
But that was not the end of the legal push to put the 19th-century ban in place. Pro-abortion rights obstetrician Eric Hazelrigg and Yavapai County Attorney Dennis McGrane stepped in, championing the 1864 ban in the courts with the support of the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal group.
Tuesday’s ruling means the 1864 law will supersede a March 2022 law signed by then-Republican Governor Doug Ducey that banned most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
Abortion on ballot
The decision supercharges an issue that looms large in advance of November’s presidential election: Abortion is set to be a prominent issue on the ballot.
President Joe Biden, a Democrat, has positioned himself as a defender of reproductive health and women’s rights, while his likely Republican challenger, former President Donald Trump, has voiced support for limits on abortion.
While Trump has flirted with support for a federal abortion ban, he said earlier this week that the procedure’s legality should be left up to the states. That, in turn, has stirred the ire of some conservatives, who had hoped he would take a firmer stance against abortion nationwide.
Biden’s campaign has accused the former president of “scrambling” to avoid being held accountable at the ballot box for his abortion stance. Trump has repeatedly highlighted his role in appointing the US Supreme Court justices that overturned Roe v Wade.
Biden beat Trump by just more than 10,000 votes in Arizona in the 2020 election.
In a statement released by the White House on Tuesday, Biden decried the Arizona ban as “extreme and dangerous”.
“This ruling is a result of the extreme agenda of Republican elected officials who are committed to ripping away women’s freedom,” he said.
— Alexis McGill Johnson (@alexismcgill) April 9, 2024
But activists in Arizona are hoping that they can take the issue of abortion access directly to the voters this November.
Organisers say they have gathered enough signatures to add a measure to November’s ballot that would enshrine abortion rights in the state’s constitution. Such referendums have had a perfect success rate in recent elections and have been credited with mobilising Democratic voters.
Other states have likewise seen a tightening of abortion law, with some gearing up for a prospective showdown on November’s ballots.
Florida’s Supreme Court, for instance, upheld a six-week abortion ban in the state last week. Critics, however, say six weeks is too short a period for most people to know if they are pregnant.
But on the same day, the Florida Supreme Court allowed a ballot measure to proceed that would likewise allow voters to decide whether abortion rights should be protected in the state constitution.
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has said the issue of abortion access should be left up to states to decide, eschewing calls from within his party to support a nationwide ban on the procedure in the United States.
In a video posted on his Truth Social platform on Monday, the former US president said he was “proudly the person responsible” for overturning Roe v Wade, the landmark legal precedent that had guaranteed abortion rights on the national level for decades.
The US Supreme Court, bolstered by a 6-3 conservative majority that included several Trump appointees, overturned Roe v Wade in June 2022. That put the question of abortion access largely in the hands of individual states to decide, though some anti-abortion activists have pushed for a nationwide ban to be implemented.
“The states will determine by vote or legislation, or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land,” Trump said in Monday’s video.
“Many states will be different,” he said, adding that, “At the end of the day, this is all about the will of the people.”
Reproductive rights are expected to be a central issue heading into November’s presidential election, which is set to pit Trump against his Democratic Party rival, President Joe Biden.
Biden has made defending access to reproductive healthcare a central plank of his re-election campaign, condemning Trump and Republican Party lawmakers for supporting the end of Roe v Wade.
Conservatives had spent decades trying to overturn the 1973 legal precedent, and several Republican-led US states enacted strict limits on abortion after the Supreme Court’s decision nearly two years ago, in a case known as Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
But abortion has become an Achilles heel for the Republican Party, as polls show abortion bans and restrictions are unpopular and most Americans want to protect access to the procedure.
The Pew Research Center reported in April 2023 — nearly a year after Roe was overturned — that 62 percent of Americans said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, compared with 36 percent who said it should be illegal.
Looking along partisan lines, the survey found that 84 percent of Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 40 percent of Republicans or right-leaning independents said the same.
NEW from @JoeBiden on Trump’s abortion comments >>
“Trump is scrambling. He’s worried that since he’s the one responsible for overturning Roe the voters will hold him accountable in 2024. Well, I have news for Donald. They will. pic.twitter.com/PHSIvITw1z
November’s election is expected to be hard fought, and experts say Trump could risk losing votes in critical swing states if he were to come out strongly in favour of a national abortion ban.
Jeanette Hoffman, a Republican political consultant, told the Reuters news agency that “leaving abortion to the states is [Trump’s] way of punting on the issue”.
“Now that the primary is over, there’s nothing to be gained from proposing a national abortion ban, as he’ll lose support from voters in many swing states,” Hoffman said.
Trump’s comments on Monday drew criticism from anti-abortion groups in the US, however.
Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion group Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America, said the organisation was “deeply disappointed” by Trump’s position.
The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision “clearly allows both states and Congress to act”, she said in a statement. “Saying the issue is ‘back to the states’ cedes the national debate to the Democrats.”
Senator Lindsey Graham, a top Republican and ally of the former president, also said he disagreed with Trump’s stance.
“I will continue to advocate that there should be a national minimum standard limiting abortion at fifteen weeks,” Graham wrote on the social media platform X.
Meanwhile, Biden slammed his predecessor for making “it clear once again today that he is — more than anyone in America — the person responsible for ending Roe v Wade”.
“Trump is scrambling,” Biden said in a statement.
“He’s worried that since he’s the one responsible for overturning Roe the voters will hold him accountable in 2024. Well, I have news for Donald. They will.”
Spring has arrived in Afghanistan, and Afghan children have returned to their schools to begin a new academic year. Girls beyond the 6th grade across much of the country, however, are still unable to pursue an education and remain unsure what the future holds for them.
Two years ago, on a spring day like today, the hopes and dreams of Afghan schoolgirls were crushed by the Taliban’s interim government.
On March 21, 2022, the Taliban promised to reopen all schools in Afghanistan, seemingly ending the temporary ban it had placed on girls attending secondary school since its return to power seven months earlier.
Two days later, while many girls were enthusiastically preparing to return to school, the authorities reversed the decision and restricted girls over the age of 12 from attending state-run schools. In an apparent attempt to soften the blow, the Ministry of Education said the closure would be temporary and schools would be reopened once it put in place policies that would ensure compliance with “principles of Islamic law and Afghan culture”.
Six months later, with no plan in place to reopen secondary schools to girls in the foreseeable future, the government issued a new edict and banned girls and young women in Afghanistan from higher education.
This move prompted countless analysts and experts around the world, including myself, to invite Taliban leaders to rethink their decision. We pointed out that “depriving Afghan women of an education would benefit no one” and these anti-education edicts actually stand against the very foundations of Islam.
Regrettably, the Taliban did not listen. This March, exactly two years after the supposedly temporary ban on girls attending secondary schools and universities, another academic year in Afghanistan began without the presence of women and girls.
The hopes and dreams of teenage girls, who believed the ban on their education was indeed “temporary” and they would return to their classrooms once the conditions were “right”, have likely begun to fade away.
As we enter the last week of Ramadan, it is a good moment to reflect on the importance of not reneging on a promise. Those leaders who claim to execute the Divine Will have the responsibility of fulfilling the promise made to millions of innocent Afghan schoolgirls who find themselves oppressed and deprived of their God-given right to an education.
The Taliban’s stance on this issue defies both worldly and religious logic.
Afghanistan, a post-conflict nation that has just emerged from the jaws of multiple protracted armed conflicts spanning four decades, needs all hands on deck to work towards getting the country out of the economic abyss that it finds itself in.
The Taliban takeover of Kabul in 2021 and the ensuing uncertainty precipitated the exodus of a vast number of Afghan professionals, leading to a brain drain at a very precarious time. The last thing that the nation needed was its new leaders to handicap it further and jettison any prospects of recovery by excluding half the population from participating in education, and thus the recovery efforts.
The exclusion of girls from education also contradicts the Taliban’s aim to build a gender-segregated society.
How can women have dedicated healthcare when no female healthcare workers are trained in the country? According to the World Health Organization, 24 women died each day in Afghanistan from pregnancy or childbirth-related causes in 2020 – one of the highest rates in the entire world.
While this statistic was a significant improvement from the situation in 2001 when the Taliban was last in power, experts fear that the situation is likely to get worse, and the Taliban’s diktats on curtailing women’s education in schools and universities are not helping either.
From the religious perspective, too, the Taliban leaders must realise that they are accountable before Allah SWT for thrusting ignorance upon a generation of girls just so they can claim a perceived localised victory of tradition.
When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan in their previous avatar from 1996 to 2001, the education of women was banned across the nation as were most of the avenues for their employment.
This time, the Taliban gave public assurances that it would do things differently and avoid earlier pitfalls and mistakes. The people of Afghanistan believed it. They put their trust in the Taliban.
This trust, this “Amanah”, is an asset the Taliban should value and not waste away in pursuit of meaningless political gains.
The group that claims to follow the path of Prophet Muhammad (SAW), the Amin, the trustworthy, should not be seen to break the Amanah of the people.
The Taliban’s refusal to allow Afghan women and girls to receive an education is also a strategic mistake that stands in the way of the government’s efforts to gain international acceptance and find reliable partners that would support Afghanistan’s economic and structural development.
The important geostrategic location of Afghanistan has led to it receiving a lot of political attention from major global and regional powers for much of its history. Oftentimes, this translated into protracted conflict and resulted in security issues overshadowing all global discussions and engagement with Afghanistan.
If it is serious about bringing stability to and building a prosperous future for the country, the Taliban must endeavour expand the global interest in Afghanistan beyond security and divert the agenda of global engagement with the country to issues of development.
Such a change would not only create the conditions for international projects and initiatives that would create employment and alleviate the suffering of millions of Afghans living in dire conditions but would also help end the international isolation of Afghanistan and pave the way for its integration into the rest of the world.
By allowing another academic year to pass without resolving the issue, the Interim Government in Kabul is demonstrating a worrying lack of capacity to work out what should have been a straightforward mechanism to create the conditions under which girls would be allowed back to school.
Thus, it is signalling to the international community, including the Muslim World, that it cannot be trusted and is practically putting a block on any development-focused engagement that could put an end to its ongoing isolation.
Any further procrastination on the issue will no doubt reflect negatively locally, regionally, and globally on the Taliban and on their efforts to demonstrate the applicability of political Islam to today’s development challenges.
It is high time for the Taliban to undo this egregious mistake and prove to its own people and the rest of the world that it is a trustworthy leader, and a responsible caretaker of the future mothers and daughters of its nation.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
Young fans of self-styled “manfluencers” like Andrew Tate, currently facing charges including rape in a Romanian court, are increasingly bringing misogynist views into Australian schools, leaving other children, teachers and parents searching for answers.
In response, the Australian government is offering 3.5 million Australian dollars ($2.3m) in grants in a trial aimed at tackling “harmful gender stereotypes perpetuated online”.
The manosphere’s reach into Australian schools has gotten so bad that some Australian teachers are quitting their jobs, according to a recent study published by Monash University in Melbourne.
The Monash researchers found that students were openly expressing “male supremacist” views in class.
One teacher says a student told her “I hate women”, while another said boys as young as 13 were made “sexual moaning noises” in her class.
“People are crying out for what to do,” Naomi Barnes, a senior lecturer in the School of Teacher Education and Leadership at the Queensland University of Technology, told Al Jazeera.
A former teacher who now lectures aspiring teachers, Barnes says that teachers and parents have come to her asking what to do about the ideas peddled by people like Tate, and how to discuss them with their children,
Drawing on her research on how misinformation from bad faith actors spreads, Barnes developed guidelines she’s used in her own classrooms.
But she acknowledges it is not easy.
“Andrew Tate has already given them all the comebacks,” she said, noting how Tate tries to use arguments of free speech in response to critics, even when what is being said is not true, and potentially harmful.
She encourages parents and teachers to be prepared to listen and to try to understand what a child is trying to say.
Young people may be more likely to respond when a conversation is brought up by a trusted adult, Barnes adds, including on questions like what it “means to be a part of a fair and just society”.
In her classrooms, she tries to “open up a space where students feel comfortable to tell me what they’re really thinking”.
Instead of telling students their ideas are wrong, she asks them to explain their thinking.
“Be careful. Think through what you said,” she advises, as well as telling them, “You’ve taken a group of people’s humanity away.”
‘He has your children’
Currently facing charges of rape, human trafficking and being part of an organised crime group, Tate’s particular brand of toxic masculinity has attracted some 9 million followers on X, and billions of views on TikTok and YouTube.
A former kickboxer, Tate gained notoriety after he was removed from the United Kingdom’s version of the Big Brother reality television show after a video showing him attacking a woman emerged. He then turned his attention to social media, where bans from major platforms have done little to dampen his popularity.
“You can listen to 20 hours of Andrew Tate, and not hear anything misogynistic. But his fans listen to hundreds of hours. And these things cohere together into a narrative that he’ll never say in one soundbite,” explained author and senior lecturer Tyson Yunkaporta.
Yunkaporta’s most recent book Right Story, Wrong Story delves into the spread of disinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Speaking to high school students late last year he says he asked them to “put your hands up, who’s into Andrew Tate?”
“Almost all of the boys. And surprisingly, more than half of the girls put their fists in the air [and] cheered,” Yunkaporta told Al Jazeera.
Yunkaporta says the English teachers he spoke to from the school were aware of Tate’s influence.
“English teachers are the best with staying on top of the problematic discourses that infect the world,” he said.
But he noted some of the other teachers had no idea who Tate was.
“He’s in the top five most influential people on the planet right now. And he has your children,” he told them.
But it is not only schools where followers of the manosphere are making themselves known.
Sharna Bremner, the founder of End Rape on Campus Australia, says similar ideas are now “flowing onto university campuses”.
Australian teachers say students are increasingly spreading ‘manosphere’ ideas inside their classes [File: Dan Peled/EPA-EFE]
And Bremner says it’s not just students who are sharing Tate’s views in class.
“It’s something that people are hearing from their classmates or sometimes even from their tutors,” she told Al Jazeera.
Homegrown misogyny
While much of the recent focus has been on Andrew Tate, who is currently awaiting trial in Romania and extradition to the United Kingdom, the ideas he is spreading are hardly new to Australia, which has long struggled with sexism and gendered violence.
“Manfluencers or manosphere-type” influencers “have been around forever”, said Barnes, who thinks Tate will inevitably be replaced by someone else.
In recent years, sexual abuse and domestic violence have attracted significant discussion in Australia, something Bremner attributes to the “Rosie Batty effect”.
Batty became a prominent advocate against domestic violence after her 11-year-old son Luke Batty was murdered by his father. She was named Australian of the Year in 2015.
But the problems have persisted, including in Australia’s parliament where reports of widespread sexism led to protests across the country in 2021 and efforts to address gender inequality in Australia continue to be met with resistance.
Last month, Australian senator Matt Canavan referenced Tate in response to new data on the gender wage gap in Australia. “I’m sick and tired of this bulls***,” Canavan, a member of the Nationals party, told reporters.
“Young men in particular feel like they are now being discriminated against and that’s why they are going to watch the likes of Andrew Tate.”
Minister for Families and Social Services Amanda Rishworth described Canavan’s comments as “dangerous”.
“Linking Australia’s first major report on the gender pay gap to influencers like Andrew Tate who glorify violence against women is unacceptable,” she said.
“By contrast, we’re investing 3.5 million [Australian dollars; $2.28m] to counter harmful gender stereotypes perpetuated online as part of our record funding to address family, domestic and sexual violence,” Rishworth, a member of the centre-left Labor government, added.
Linking Australia’s first major report on the gender pay gap to ‘influencers’ like Andrew Tate who glorify violence against women is unacceptable.
Bremner, whose campaigning has led to recent reforms in how Australian universities address sexual violence, says there are signs of improvement in government funding models.
After years of funding going to “awareness raising” morning teas, she says there is now “greater recognition in Australia of the need for evidence-based programmes”.
But, she says, there’s a long way to go.
“We haven’t yet got to a point where Australia is willing to have the really hard conversations that we need to have on the drivers of gendered violence,” she said.
“I also think there is an enormous amount of backlash, and Andrew Tate is almost the poster boy for that backlash,” she adds.
For Barnes, one place where these conversations should take place is in social studies classes like “civics and citizenship”.
But she notes this is also “one of the most under-resourced subject areas in the whole of the Australian curriculum”.
Barnes says such classes offer opportunities to talk through the “dangerous ideas” teenagers are often drawn to.
She acknowledges she herself regrets the Evangelical Christian preachers she followed in her teenage years.
Drawing on her experiences, Barnes encourages parents and teachers to help children think through what they’re saying fully, and help them find ways to express themselves that do not “render a whole group of people inhuman”.
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