21 July 2020 - NPWJ News Digest on FGM & women's rights

Articles

Indonesia vows to end practice of bride kidnapping
BBC, 21 Jul 2020

Indonesian officials are vowing to end the controversial custom of bride kidnapping on the remote island of Sumba, after videos of women being abducted sparked a national debate about the practice.

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Chileans warn pandemic exploited to compromise women's rights
Al Jazeera, 19 Jul 2020

The coronavirus pandemic is being used to reduce civil liberties, feminist groups in Chile and Russia, who say women's rights are especially at risk, have warned.

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Girls put ‘at risk’ as cash to help end FGM in Britain is reduced by 84%
The Guardian, 19 Jul 2020

Funding to tackle female genital mutilation, an issue championed by former prime minister Theresa May, has been reduced by 84% since 2015 according to new figures that suggest her successor Boris Johnson has changed priorities. The money allocated to help stamp out FGM in the UK has fallen from £2,718,000 for the year to April 2016, shortly after May outlined her ambition to stop the practice, to £432,000 for the 12 months to April 2020.

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Kenya: Study Shows FGM, Early Marriages on the Rise in West Pokot
All Africa, 16 Jul 2020

More than 60 per cent of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) cases in West Pokot County go unreported, a new study shows. The research conducted in the past six months by Kapenguria Theatre Group - a community-based organisation - says the girls are then denied education by being married off by their families.

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HRC Urged to Address Women’s Rights Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic
Human Rights Watch, 14 Jul 2020

Human Rights Watch is deeply concerned by the ways in which the Covid-19 crisis is impacting women and girls and how governments’ responses either acknowledge or exacerbate that. Outbreaks of disease often have gendered impacts. Human Rights Watch found that the 2014 Ebola virus disease outbreak and the 2015-2016 outbreak of the mosquito-borne Zika virus in Brazil had particularly harmful impacts on women and girls born of and unfortunately reinforcing longstanding gender inequity.

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