Icon of hope
Mukhtaran Bibi, now also known as Mukhtaran Mai, was repeatedly gang raped by six men; they did it to punish her family and they didn’t stop until they were convinced she had paid for her brother’s crime. Mukhtaran took up her case with Pakistani courts and sought help from activists in her country and around the world. Only one of her perpetrators was sentenced to life imprisonment, but she continues to fight for the cause of women in her district. Mukhtaran Mai spoke to DW on the occasion of the International Women’s Day, 2012.
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A boon for victims?
Egalcops has been conceived as an online system where women can lodge complaints against harassment. The founder, Deepanshu Tripathi, believes that women would be more comfortable putting in their complaints online rather than going to a police station in India.
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The government is ‘concerned’
The Indian government has announced the ‘Nirbhaya’ fund to improve security for women in the country. The fund was announced following the brutal gang rape of a 23-year-old who succumbed to her wounds. The media refer to this woman as ‘Nirbhaya,’ meaning fearless in Hindi. But is the fund merely eyewash to pacify the seething masses or will it really help in promoting women’s safety? Blogger Vishwadeepak is skeptical.
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A dead man
It was an experience of a lifetime to be able to experience the sensational verdict session of Delwar Hossain Sayedi, an infamous war criminal in Bangladesh. I entered the court building at 9:40 am last Friday with my friend Udisa. We waited outside the court building for security clearance and finally entered the main room by 10:30 a.m. Then we waited for the judge to arrive.
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Shahbag: the mass awakening
Since the past few weeks, the youth in Bangladesh have been protesting against war criminals and demanding justice for the victims of 1971. Bangladeshi blogger Paula Aziz says, the movement is an awakening of the masses.
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Unclean and impure
In the second blog in the series, Dr. Kanchana Lanzet of UN Women discusses the role of caste in promoting bias against women. According to the caste system, women, by nature of their biological processes, are “impure.”
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Ghosts and memories
The lights in the hall grew dim as German writer Sarah Khan began reading an excerpt from her latest book Die Gespenster von Berlin or The Ghosts of Berlin at the Annemarie Schimmel Cultural Institute in Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city.
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