18 May 2021 - NPWJ News Digest on FGM & women's rights

Apps promised to revolutionize dating. But for women they’re mostly terrible
The Guardian, 17 May 2021

Dating app companies, which inhabit a multibillion-dollar industry, have been very adept at co-opting feminism in the marketing of their products as “empowering”. Yet they do next to nothing to help women with their very real concerns. In a 2019 survey by ProPublica and Columbia Journalism Investigations of 1,200 women who said they had used an online dating platform in the past 15 years, “more than a third of the women said they were sexually assaulted by someone they had met through a dating app” and “[o]f these women, more than half said they were raped”. These are astronomical figures, and yet somehow still largely left out of the online dating conversation.

The Guardian view on violence against women: focus on the perpetrators
The Guardian, 17 May 2021

A shocking series of murders of women in public places, combined with rising levels of domestic violence and a wave of reports of sexual harassment in schools and colleges, have set alarm bells ringing among all those concerned with the safety of women and girls. Protecting women from male violence, including domestic and sexual violence, has long been among feminists’ main goals – along with political rights and economic independence.

Tanzania helpline calls time on child marriage and abuse
UN News, 15 May 2021

It was 3 o’clock on a Friday afternoon when Grace*, a counsellor at the National Child Helpline in Tanzania, received a call from a concerned teacher in Msalala, a small town in the remote Shinyanga region in the north-west of the East African country. One of her brightest students Eliza*, aged 13, had not gone to school that day following worrying rumours that her parents intended to marry her off. She learned that they had accepted a payment in the form of a bride dowry from the family of the intended groom.