Recently, Afghanistan celebrated Girls’ Hygiene Day and for the first time set forth guidelines that encourage young girls to feel empowered and knowledgeable about their bodies. The Menstrual Hygiene Management (MHM) guideline attempts to reach teachers, mothers, and young girls to raise awareness of girl’s hygiene and break prevalent menstruation stigma in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, […]
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Girl Scout who Campaigned to End Child Marriage in New Hampshire Elected as State Legislator
Cassandra Levesque, a 19 year old Girl Scout, was elected to the New Hampshire state legislature Tuesday. Levesque made news a few years prior for successfully lobbying the state to end child marriages as part of her Girl Scout Project. Before Levesque’s campaign, the legal age of marriage in New Hampshire was only 13 years […]
New DeVos Rules on Title IX Will Hurt Survivors
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has proposed harmful new regulations that would make it easier for schools to ignore student survivors of sexual violence and sweep allegations of sexual harassment and assault under the rug. Already, 1 in 5 women and 1 in 16 men will be sexually assaulted in college, and around 1 in 4 […]
Protests Erupt across Ireland after Underwear is used as Evidence of Consent
Women across Ireland are protesting how rape trials conduct after a recent trial used a woman’s underwear as evidence of consent, leading to a man being acquitted of rape. Protesters this week in Ireland, and abroad, are using the hashtag #ThisIsNotConsent and sharing photos of women’s underwear. A social media movement began when people started […]
Almost a Year Later, Sexual Harassment Legislation May Pass
Almost a year after Congress announced plans to pass sexual harassment legislation, Mitch McConnell announced that the legislation can still move forward before 2019. The House passed sexual harassment legislation in February while a weaker version of the bill was passed in the Senate in May. However, the Senate has struggled to negotiate the differences […]
LGBTQ Migrants are the First to Reach US Border
This week LGBTQ members from the migrant caravan were the first to reach the U.S. border in Tijuana, Mexico. LGBTQ members arrived at the border before the rest of the caravan because they were escaping discrimination and harassment from within the caravan itself as well as the dangers members faced traveling through Mexico. While fleeing […]
Election Night 2018 Historic for LGBTQ+ Candidates
A week after the midterm election, Kyrsten Sinema was declared the winner of the Arizona Senate election, making her the first openly bisexual person elected to Congress and Arizona’s first female Senator. After Tuesday’s election, the total number of LGBTQ+ members of Congress is now eleven, the first time that the number has reached double […]
Harsh Anti-Abortion Laws in El Salvador Criminalize Survivors
On Monday, a criminal trial against Imelda Cortez, a 20-year-old woman charged with attempted murder after she gave birth to her abuser’s baby in El Salvador, began. Cortez has been in custody since April 2017 and may face up to 20 years in jail because doctors believe she attempted an abortion. The court ruling is […]
Democrats’ First Legislative Priority is Voting Rights Reform
Democrats announced this week that their first legislative vote will be a sweeping voting reform act, H.R. 1, that Democrats believe will increase public trust in the government and strengthen democratic institutions. The legislation aims to reform redistricting, create automatic voter registration, revive the Voting Rights Act, overturn the Citizen’s United ruling, and expand the […]
The 2018 Gender Gap
The 2018 midterm election had the highest gender gap since 1992, a 23 point difference between men’s and women’s voting preferences, because a majority of women voted for Democrats. While this may not seems like a large increase from the 2016 election’s 22 point gender gap, the numbers are skewed because more men voted for […]
Kavanaugh’s First Abortion Case May be an Indiana Law that Mike Pence Signed
Recently, Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill appealed to the Supreme Court to review a lawsuit against an Indiana anti-abortion law that restricts abortion access as well as enforces regulations on how to dispose fetal tissue. This could be the first case on abortion restrictions that the Supreme Court rules on since Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation, and […]
Scotland Will be the First Country with LGBTGI-Inclusive School Curriculums
Scotland’s government recently accepted 33 recommendations on LGBTQI+ inclusive education and [tackling] LGBTQ+ bullying in schools, created by the Time for Inclusive (TIE) campaign. As a result, Scotland will be the first country in the world to include LGBTQI+ issues and history in school curricula. In a statement, Deputy First Minister John Swinney said, “our […]
Feminist Candidates Find Support in Battleground Districts
A recent poll in eleven battleground districts, including districts in Kentucky, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York, Arizona, and Minnesota, revealed that about half of voters support electing feminist candidates. In Kentucky’s sixth district, 47 percent of voters supported electing more feminist candidates, while more than 50 percent of voters supported feminist candidates in Pennsylvania, […]
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Federal Court Rules Against Immediately Ending DACA
On Thursday, the US court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled against the Trump administration’s efforts to end DACA, a two-year program protecting young immigrants who entered the United States as minors, from deportation. The 3-judge panel unanimously concluded that DACA was not illegal but rather a “permissible exercise of executive discretion.” Moreover, the […]
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Mass Shooting at a California Bar Kills 12 People
12 people died in Thousand Oaks, California last night when a gunman entered the Borderline Bar & Grill and opened fire. Approximately 15 people were injured during the attack and were taken to nearby hospitals. Among the victims killed during the attack was Sheriff Deputy Sergeant Ron Helus, a 29-year-old veteran who was due to […]
Massachusetts Upholds a Law Protecting Transgender Residents
Massachusetts residents yesterday voted to uphold a law passed in 2016 that prohibited discrimination against gender identity in public spaces. This is the first state-wide vote to protect transgender individuals and the measure was upheld with over 67 percent of the vote. In 2016, an emergency law passed that immediately went into effect to outlaw […]
Women Win Across the Country in 2018 Midterms
Women won more seats in Congress yesterday than ever before, with over 110 women elected, including the first Muslim women, first Native American women, and two women in their twenties. The women who were elected include the former Teacher of the Year, small business owners, former military helicopter pilots, activists, a former CIA officer, and […]
Election Day 2018
Today is Election Day in the United States and the first nationwide election since Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. Voters heading to the polls will be able to cast their ballots for their House Representative, ballot measures, local elections and, in some states, their Senator or governor. Early voting numbers predict that the […]
50th Anniversary of Shirley Chisholm’s Election
Today is the 50th anniversary of Shirley Chisholm’s election to Congress as the first African American woman. Chisholm represented Brooklyn, New York in a district that was newly reapportioned and was majority African American and Hispanic. She served seven terms in Congress and ran for president. Shirley Chisholm was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1924 […]
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113 Organizations Denounce Federal Proposals to Redefine Gender
Last week, 113 organizations that work with survivors of sexual violence and advocate for the rights of survivors wrote a letter to the US Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Labor regarding a recent Trump administration proposal to define gender as an “immutable […]