IRELAND
Government must act on women’s equality issues, rally told


David Young
Sat, 5 March 2022

People take part in a National Women’s Council of Ireland rally outside Leinster house in Dublin (Niall Carson/PA) (PA Wire)

A rally in Dublin has heard calls for government action to accelerate progress on women’s equality issues in Ireland.

Hundreds of people attended the “No Woman Left Behind” demonstration outside Leinster House.

The rally was organised by the National Women’s Council (NWC) of Ireland ahead of International Women’s Day on Tuesday.

Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald speaks at a National Women’s Council of Ireland rally outside Leinster House in Dublin (Niall Carson/PA) (PA Wire)


The crowd heard calls for decisive action to tackle violence against women, as well as demands for more to be done to improve provision of childcare and and access to abortion services.

Particular challenges faced by one-parent families and traveller, migrant, trans and disabled women were also highlighted.

Access to state housing was also cited as a major problem.

Addressing the crowds from the platform, NWC director Orla O’Connor said: “It’s an important day for all of us to be here. Today is the day that we want our voices to be heard and it’s time for the government to listen and to take action on the issues affecting our lives.”

She added: “You have told us loud and clear that the key issues affecting women’s equality are not advancing and progress is much, much too slow.”

People take part in the Dublin demonstration (Niall Carson/PA) (PA Wire)

The lead up to the event attracted controversy after it emerged that Government ministers were not on the list of political speakers invited to address the rally.

Organisers defended the move, arguing the event was an opportunity for the Government to listen to the messages being delivered by women.

Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald was among opposition politicians who did speak at the rally.

She told the event: “We demand the right to decent work, to fair pay, to equal pay, we demand the right to live and raise our families without constant choices to be made between heating the room and feeding a hungry mouth, the right to learn and grow, to explore every horizon, to reach for very dream, we demand the right to be free, to be ourselves, without fear, without apology and without humiliation – the right to live a full and free life together.

“The political system can choose to listen or not, they may choose to look the other way but be very clear sisters – the old Ireland is gone and change is coming.”

Labour TD Ivana Bacik addresses the rally (Niall Carson/PA) (PA Wire)

Ms McDonald also expressed solidarity with the women of Ukraine amid the ongoing war.

“The scenes of horror that we witness daily are matched only by the expressions of incredible courage and bravery as civilians go toe to toe with the Russian aggressor,” she said.

Labour TD Ivana Bacik also used the rally to voice support for Ukraine.

“In a peaceful Dublin city centre I know all our thoughts and all our solidarity are with the women, children and people of Ukraine as they endure the brutal bombardment and assault from Russian troops and Russian forces,” she said.

“At this, their darkest hour, we stand with them and we condemn this appalling and brutal invasion.”

PATRIARCHY IS FEMICIDE
Male violence against women is about so much more than toxic masculinity

Sonia Sodha
Sun, 6 March 2022

Photograph: Ian West/PA

The murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer a year ago prompted a wave of national shock. Her brutal abduction, rape and killing pierced the public consciousness to such a degree that feminist campaigners wondered if this tragedy might move us from seeing violence as something society has to live with to something that can be significantly reduced.

Today, those hopes look misplaced. A single statistic shows how little has changed: since Sarah’s murder, at least 125 women have been killed by men. Some, like Sabina Nessa, were murdered in a public place by a man they didn’t know; many more behind closed doors, often by their partners. The question, after having read report after report, is why, for all the never agains and pledges to do more, have we failed so badly to reduce violence?

Any analysis of violence has to begin with the stark difference between the sexes. The vast majority of violence is committed by men – more than four-fifths of violent crime and an even greater proportion of sex offences. While men are also more likely to be victims of violent crime, women are overwhelmingly more likely to be victims of severe domestic abuse. (One of the reasons single-sex spaces have become the norm in prisons, hospital wards and refuges: it is a simple rule of thumb to safeguard against male violence.)

Interestingly, the difference in physical aggression between the average man and the average women is moderate – to put it in context, about a quarter as significant as average sex differences in height. The big difference comes at the extremes of the distribution: there are many more very violent men than women.

What underpins this difference? In animals, scientists have found a clear link between testosterone levels and male aggression. But this is not replicated in humans, leading experts to believe that the complex interaction between genetic and environmental factors – the way children are socialised – plays a much greater role


A UK project has shed the feminist attachment to the idea that the key to reducing violence is teaching men to be better

And there are noticeable differences in the way boys and girls are socialised. Children’s worlds are infused with harmful gender stereotypes – the idea that girls are sweet and boys are tough – in everything from behaviour expectations to their toys and clothes. There are some school-based programmes that try to tackle damaging masculine stereotypes, which draw on evidence of the effectiveness of peer-based programmes to tackle bullying in encouraging friends to call each other out on unhealthy behaviour towards girls. It can only be a good thing to challenge the stereotypes that are corrosive to boys and girls.

Perpetrator programmes for violent men have also run with this idea of reprogramming masculinity. That makes sense when you consider that, a few decades ago, the only people interested in reducing domestic violence were grassroots feminists who understood male violence primarily as a symptom of patriarchy: the age-old structural power imbalance between men and women that socially constructed itself out of differences between the sexes. They developed the Duluth model, named after the Minnesota city where it was conceived in the 1980s, which included a curriculum that aimed to educate the patriarchy out of perpetrators.

It is used widely today in the US, the UK and Australia, but evidence of its effectiveness is equivocal at best. That is not altogether surprising: the idea that attending a weekly support group will transform lifelong patterns of violent behaviour for most men seems far-fetched.

The difference between the sexes is a vital starting point for understanding violence, but cannot be the endpoint. Just as important are differences between men: why are some more violent than others? Some will have the kinds of personality disorders that mean they are incapable of feeling empathy. But longitudinal research finds that adverse childhood experiences – such as parental or domestic abuse, having a father in prison or growing up around alcohol or substance abuse – are associated with poorer outcomes in adulthood for boys and girls and one of those outcomes for some boys is a greater propensity to violence.

Yet the services that exist to support children with trauma have been cut to the bone over the past decade. It is not to excuse adult violence to say that some perpetrators have been resoundingly failed as children.

This difference between men has also been elided when it comes to perpetrator programmes. One of the most effective is a UK project called Drive, developed by two domestic abuse charities. It has shed once and for all the feminist attachment to the idea that the key to reducing serious violence is teaching men to be better. It works with the highest-risk domestic abusers. They are all assigned a case manager, who can help them access the support they need, such as housing or mental health services.

But it also functions as a surveillance system for dangerous men: they are monitored on an ongoing basis and case managers bring in other agencies such as the police and social services to disrupt their violent behaviour. The results are stunning: an 82% and 88% sustained drop in physical and sexual abuse respectively. But just 1% of serious domestic abuse perpetrators get funnelled into targeted interventions. If we were serious about reducing violence, we would be channelling money into a national rollout of this programme in the same way we spend vast sums on counter-terrorism.


Long-standing research shows that alcohol restrictions produce beneficial health outcomes and reduce violence

This idea that we need to disrupt rather than try to fix dangerous men has other implications. There is longstanding research that shows that alcohol restrictions – policies such as minimum pricing, limits on sales of strong alcohol in violence hotspots and timing restrictions – produce not only a range of beneficial health outcomes, but reduce violence. Of course they are a superficial lever and there is much they don’t address, but they reduce harm. Which raises the question: why don’t we use them more?

I ended up in a different place than I imagined I would when I embarked on a new documentary for Radio 4. Of course, you cannot understand violence without understanding differences between the sexes, but male violence is about much more than toxic masculinity. And we need to put the same effort into disrupting violent men from killing their partners as we do in stopping them from committing dreadful acts of terrorism.

• Sonia Sodha is an Observer columnist

AUSTRALIA

‘We will not be silent’: prominent women press Morrison government for violence and harassment reform

Katharine Murphy and Daniel Hurst
Sat, 5 March 2022

Grace Tame
Australian activist

Prominent women, including the former Australian of the year Grace Tame and the former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins, are launching a fresh call for the Morrison government to implement significant policies to protect women and children from violence, harassment and discrimination.

On the eve of International Women’s Day, the new coalition – which includes Christine Holgate, Lucy Turnbull, the former Liberal MP Julia Banks, as well as the film-maker and Indigenous advocate Larissa Behrendt, the youth advocate Yasmin Poole, the president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, Michele O’Neil, the businesswoman Wendy McCarthy, the consent activist Chanel Contos, the Paralympic gold medalist Madison de Rozario, and The Parenthood’s Georgie Dent – has launched a social media campaign to press for reforms.

Related: NSW to revisit economic gender disparity in the wake of Grace Tame and Brittany Higgins

The high-powered group is calling on the government to implement the central recommendation of the Respect@Work report – imposing a positive duty on employers to safeguard their staff from sexual harassment.

In addition, the call is for 10 days paid family and domestic violence leave, full implementation of the National Plan for First Nations Women and Girls, ensuring effective employment programs for women with disability, enacting stronger and consistent child sexual assault laws, and legislative measures to address the gender pay gap.

The group is also seeking the provision of free, accessible and quality early childhood education and care, expansion of paid parental leave, and embedding respectful relationships and consent education in schools, universities, workplaces and homes.

In a new video message fronted by members of the coalition, the women make it clear they want to continue the momentum of 2021 – an extraordinary year where thousands of Australian women and their allies took part in public demonstrations triggered by a #MeToo moment in the Australian parliament.

In February, Scott Morrison, along with other political leaders, apologised for the “terrible things” that happened in parliament workplaces and acknowledged a culture of bullying, abuse, harassment “and in some cases even violence” built up over decades.

Morrison’s apology followed a landmark review by Australia’s sex discrimination commissioner, Kate Jenkins, in 2021 into federal parliament’s culture.

The Jenkins review, which recommended a significant overhaul of the workplace culture, found one in three staffers interviewed had been sexually harassed. That inquiry was constituted after Higgins, a former government adviser, alleged she was raped by a colleague after hours in a Parliament House ministerial office in March 2019.

The new social media campaign video opens with Tame, a survivor of sexual assault, declaring: “Australia – we need to talk”.

The women note that 2021 “wasn’t the first year that women in Australia were harassed or unsafe or ignored or disrespected”.

“It wasn’t even the first year that women spoke up about these things. But in 2021 more Australians started to listen to women of different ages, occupations and beliefs, who stood up and spoke out, exposing discrimination, harassment, sexism, disrespect and intimidation,” they say. “And the more people listened, the more familiar the story became”.

In a joint statement, members of the coalition noted one in five Australian women would be sexually assaulted or raped in her lifetime, and one in three women would encounter workplace sexual harassment.

Brittany Higgins triggered parliament’s #MeToo reckoning. 

Photograph: Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images

Poole, Plan International’s national ambassador and advocate for girls’ rights, noted: “If you’re a First Nations woman, a woman of colour, have a disability or identify as LGBTIQ+, those statistics are even worse.”
Morrison governments announces funding

Separately, the Morrison government announced on Sunday it would spend $189m over five years on strengthening prevention and early intervention efforts in family, domestic and sexual violence.

The pledge includes $104m over five years for the primary prevention organisation Our Watch, which will help it to drive change in the corporate sector and raise awareness about gendered violence.

The minister for women, Marise Payne, said Our Watch would also develop safety programmes for use in Tafes, universities, the media, workplaces and sports organisations.

“Our Watch will also boost its efforts in prevention for LGBTIQA+ Australians, Australians with disability and migrant women and develop further resources to educate young people about consent,” Payne said.

The government will fund two new campaigns to run across mass media channels, including television, cinema, social media and bus stops.

One of the campaigns will be adapted from Scotland’s “Don’t Be That Guy” initiative and will ask men to consider “how they can hold each other to account because sexual violence should not be considered a women’s problem to solve”.

The other government-funded campaign will target young people 12 and older and their parents.

The minister for women’s safety, Anne Ruston, said new research showed while almost nine in 10 Australians polled agreed “adults should talk to young people more about the topic of consent”, almost half of Australians were confused about the issue of sexual consent. That led them to actively avoid the topic.

“Today we are also making the announcement to fund a survey of secondary school-age students so that we can understand what are the issues that they are confronted with as they make their journey through life and to make sure that they have a better understanding of consent,” Ruston said.

Related: Grace Tame and Brittany Higgins: nine key moments from the sellout press club event

The Australian Human Rights Commission will develop the survey in partnership with coalition member Contos, who is the founder of Teach Us Consent.

Ruston said the government was committed to making Australia “a country where everybody lives free from fear of violence and free from violence”.

Patty Kinnersly, the chief executive of Our Watch, said the organisation was seeing “record demand for our support and services in universities, workplaces and sporting clubs and organisations” and community sentiment was changing.

“We are now talking about consent, we are now talking about violence against women being in the public domain, we are now giving people in the community to be bystanders and not let the sexist joke go past,” Kinnersly said.

The numbers that expose the horrifying extent of the UK’s rape crisis: The government is failing women

Women carry placards during the London Reclaim the Night march, protesting against sexual violence, and violence against women and girls. 

(Hollie Adams/Getty Images)

Matilda Long
19 February 2022

In June 2021, the government apologised to rape victims.

Launching an "end to end" review of how cases of sexual assault and violence are handled, ministers said they were "deeply ashamed" of the way survivors had been failed and let down.

The then justice secretary Robert Buckland acknowledged "systemic failings" meant victims, most of whom are women, were not seeing justice, and pledged that he "would not rest until real improvements are made."

As part of the rape review, the government promised a "reversal of the trends of the last five years", pledging to return the number of cases prosecuted to the levels seen in 2016/17.

Despite these promises, the latest data shows that little has improved for victims, with experts warning that "the picture for how rape is treated in the criminal justice system remains the same".

The scale of the issue is huge, with analysis of official statistics suggesting that hundreds of thousands of women were raped last year. However, a lack of confidence in the system means that only a small proportion of victims come forward.

Yahoo News UK has analysed the latest data, finding that the justice system is showing no signs of improving.
Reported rapes higher than ever

The number of rapes and sexual assaults recorded by police in England and Wales are at a record high, according to the latest data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Some 170,973 sexual offences were recorded by police in the year to September 2021, 63,136 of which were rape.

This represents a 12% year-on-year increase in the the number of recorded sexual offences.

Recorded rapes in England and Wales are at a record high (Yahoo News UK/Flourish/ONS)

According to the ONS, there are multiple likely factors behind the the increase, including an increase in the number of victims, as well as the impact of high-profile incidents, such as the rape and murder of Sarah Everard at the hands of serving Metropolitan Police officer Wayne Couzens.

Such incidents can encourage members of the public to come forward and report crimes they have experienced.

The ONS cautions that the figures are by no means a true representation of the scale of the problem, with data suggesting that fewer than one in six victims of rape or assault by penetration report the crime to the police. This suggests that more than 350,000 people were raped in England and Wales last year.

And, for the victims who do come forward, more often than not their bravery is not rewarded.
Almost all rape reports do not result in a charge

On the same day the ONS released its record figures, Home Office statistics revealed the proportion of reported rapes leading to a charge is lower than ever.

In the year to September 2021, fewer than one in 75 of reported rapes led to a charge.

Less than one in 75 reported rapes lead to a charge in 2021 (Yahoo News UK/Flourish/Home Office)

The proportion dropped from 9.7% in 2016 to 1.3% in 2021, the lowest figure ever recorded.

Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper called the latest figures "truly appalling".

"Shocking crime figures out today show the rape prosecution rate has got even worse." she said.

"The Conservative government is completely failing to tackle violence against women and girls."

Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper called the latest Home Office figures on rape prosecutions "truly appalling". (PA Images)

The woeful numbers of prosecutions for rape prompted the victims' commissioner to say that rape has been "effectively decriminalised".

In her 2019/20 report, Dame Vera warned: "We are enabling persistent predatory sex offenders to go on to reoffend in the knowledge that they are highly unlikely to be held to account."

Since she wrote the report, the prosecution rate has dropped further.

Furthermore, Home Office data shows that a large proportion of cases are being dropped because the victim withdraws their support.

This, according to Dame Vera, is often because "they cannot face the unwarranted and unacceptable intrusion into their privacy".

The rape review included promises to make the process of reporting a rape less traumatic for victims, such as ending the practice of the "digital strip search" of all their communication, and returning their phone within 24 hours.

Despite this, in 2021, two in five rape offences (42%) were closed because the victim did not support further police action.

Victims withdrew their support in almost half of rape cases in the year to September 2021 (Yahoo News UK/Flourish/Home Office)

The rape review pledged to bring prosecutions and conviction numbers back to levels recorded in 2016.

The latest data from the CPS shows that, while there have been small increases in the overall numbers since 2020, these are far below the level needed to meet the government's own targets.

Rape prosecutions and convictions are far below 2016 levels

 (Yahoo News UK/Flourish/CPS)

The true extent of rape

While police recorded cases of rape make for concerning reading, research by the ONS suggests these represent just 17% of rapes taking place, due to victims' reluctance to come forward.

The most recent Crime Survey for England and Wales found that fewer than one in six victims reported the assault to the police.



Boris Johnson says he cannot guarantee Rape Review targets to improve prosecution and conviction rates will be met by 2024

Boris Johnson has said he cannot guarantee that targets to improve rape prosecution and conviction rates set out in the government's Rape Review will be met.

An ONS spokesperson said: "Sexual offences are often hidden crimes that are not reported to the police.

"Therefore, data held by the police can only provide a partial picture of the actual level of crime experienced.

And, while younger women were more likely to be a victim of rape or sexual assault, they were less likely to report the crime.

Some 12.9% of women aged 16 to 19 experienced sexual assault in the year to March 2020 

(Yahoo News UK/Flourish/ONS)

In for the year ending March 2020, 12.9% of women aged 16 to 19 reported being a victim of sexual assault, and 2.7% reported being raped.

However, just 10% of 16 to 19-year-olds reported their assault to the police, compared with 27% of 35 to 44-year-olds.

The reasons cited by women for not reporting their crimes reveal a deep mistrust in the police to properly handle their case.

Asked their reasons for not reporting to the police, a shocking 25.2% said they didn't think officers would believe them.

Some 38.7% said they didn't think the police could help, and 14.9% thought the police would not be sympathetic.

Almost a third of women who were raped, 30.9%, didn't tell anyone at all, with 45.6% citing embarrassment, and 24.8% saying they didn't think anyone would believe them.

Since this research was conducted, women's mistrust in police has worsened.

In a poll conducted after the rape, kidnap and murder of Sarah Everard by serving Met Police officer Wayne Couzens, nearly have of women said they had lost trust in the police.

The case of Sarah Everard, who was kidnapped, raped and murdered by serving police officer Wayne Couzens, has damaged women's trust in policing, polls show

 (PA Images)

Rebecca Hitchen, Head of Policy and Campaigns at the End Violence Against Women Coalition (EVAW), said: “Our justice system is broken and failing women. Despite continuous promises to improve and targets to meet, the system is completely stagnant when it comes to rape. Likewise, the alarming downward trajectory in charging, prosecuting and convicting in cases of domestic abuse requires urgent and serious attention.

"We can’t talk about rebuilding women’s trust in the police and justice system while there is no tangible positive change to the things that matter – seeing justice and getting the specialist support survivors need.

"Almost one year on from the public outcry following Sarah Everard’s murder, very little if anything has changed in the response to violence against women. Once again we’re calling on the government and CPS to give this deeply unjust issue the attention it warrants, demonstrate strong leadership and ensure proper accountability.”

A government spokesperson told Yahoo News UK: “We are committed to restoring faith in the justice system for rape victims.

"We are recruiting 20,000 police officers and more Independent Sexual Violence Advisors while consulting on a Victims’ Law – delivering on our commitment to transform our entire response to rape.”

"We are also sparing rape victims the stress of testifying in court, making investigations less intrusive for victims and have introduced new justice scorecards to hold justice agencies to account."

Caring roles block career advancement for three in five women

Donna Ferguson
Sat, 5 March 2022

Photograph: Maskot/Getty Images

Research shows as many as 50% of ethnic minority carers say responsibilities hold them back from finding new positions

Three out of five women say their caring responsibilities for children and other vulnerable or elderly relatives are preventing them from applying for a new job or promotion, while only one in five men say the same, according to new research.

The poll of 5,444 people by Ipsos Mori and the charity Business in the Community (BITC) found that nearly half the workforce are combining paid work and care. Almost three in 10 adults have left or considered leaving a job because of difficulties in balancing work and care. The latter was particularly true of women.

The majority of those with care responsibilities in the UK are parents looking after children under the age of 18, but 36% of carers are responsible for an adult of working age or older.

Those from a black, Asian, mixed race or other ethnically diverse background were significantly more likely to say they have caring responsibilities than those from a white background. As many as 50% of carers from an ethnic minority say their caring responsibilities are holding them back from applying for promotions or new positions at work, compared to 39% of white carers.

BITC Gender Equality campaign director Charlotte Woodworth said the results showed the disconnect between what workers – particularly women and people from ethnic minority backgrounds – need from employers and what they experience in the labour market. “There’s a lot of competing ideas about how we should try to improve the lot of women, how we should try and create a more levelled-up society. This report tells us very clearly how significantly workplace policies and workplace cultures are undermining those efforts,” she said.

Workers on low incomes are among the most badly treated. While some 75% of those earning £26,000 or more said they felt supported by their employer to manage their caring responsibilities for children, this dropped to just one in two people earning less than that amount.

The research shows nearly one in 10 carers are “sandwich carers”, meaning they have caring responsibilities for both a child and an adult.

Instead of expecting women, for example, to somehow juggle it all, workplaces need to change, Woodworth says: “It’s very clear that some groups are much more dramatically affected than others, and have a much harder time than others, but it’s not about problematising those groups, it’s about the workplace shifting its expectations, its norms, its cultures to better reflect the needs of the people who are trying to engage with it.”

The charity wants the government and employers to offer new fathers more ring-fenced, paid time off to look after their children when they are born, so that childcare responsibilities can be shared more equally between couples from the start of a child’s life.

The research found that even among women who identify as joint carers, 52% say they do “more than my fair share”, in comparison to 10% of men. One in three men admit they do “less than my fair share”, in comparison to 4% of women. Women are also significantly more likely than men to say their day job has been interrupted because of caring responsibilities, with many women saying they do more than their fair share because their partner’s working pattern or culture is unsupportive of work and care.

She hopes employers and the government will see the pandemic as a watershed moment. “The pandemic was bad for a lot of people with care responsibilities, and it was particularly bad on the gendered front. When lockdown happened, women were more likely to be furloughed and working mothers were more likely to lose their jobs than working fathers.”

But at the same time, she says, the pandemic made everyone more aware of the challenges faced by working carers. “It did have the effect of making people more aware of how hard it is to combine paid work with care, and it challenged and debunked a lot of old-fashioned ideas around what effective and productive work looks like.”

Scientists probe how everyday pollutants can harm unborn babies - from clothing to cleaning products

Zaina Alibhai
Fri, 4 March 2022

((AFP))

The impact everyday pollutants have on the development of unborn children will be investigated in a major new study.

Previous research has shown the harm air pollution can have on the growth and size of foetuses, as well as the link to premature births.

Scientists at Swansea University will focus their efforts on outdoor pollutants and traffic fumes as well as indoor pollutants such as wood burning stoves, cleaning products and cooking for the study.

It will be the first to track how the function of different organs, such as the lungs and brain, is impacted by pollution leading ultimately to poor health in childhood.

Biological samples will be taken from various pregnant volunteers at various times throughout their pregnancy, with scientists to then analyse the effects of airborne material.

They will be taken from the nasal cavity, peripheral and umbilical cord blood, placenta and sperm.

The samples will then be exposed to PM2.5 - a cocktail of chemical and biological contaminants including house dust, volatile organic compounds and chemicals found in cleaning products.

As well as this, they will also be exposed to other airborne materials such as pollen and viruses.

Scientists will also measure the exposure to natural pollutants within the homes of pregnant women, how the women respond to the environment and then follow the health of their children as they grow up.

Professor Cathy Thornton, Professor of Human Immunology at Swansea University, said: “Our UK wide collaboration will be the first to explore how pregnant women might respond differently to air pollution as a way of understanding the health consequences for their children.

“Alongside this we will work with pregnant women and their families, the wider public, local and national government as well as businesses to monitor indoor and outdoor air pollution exposures of pregnant women and relate these to later health outcomes of the child.

“This ambitious approach is intended to inform policy and the development of interventions including the development of simple tools to quickly monitor the success of an intervention.

The four-year project has received £3.4 million funding from the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) through a programme which aims to increase multidisciplinary research in key areas of air quality including human health.

Professor Sir Stephen Holgate, UKRI’s Clean Air Champion, said: “Poor air quality affects millions of lives, but the impact of pollutants indoors is little understood.

“Funding research in this area is a key priority of UK Research and Innovation. By sharing our findings with local and national government, business, charities and the public, we hope this research will reduce the ill-effects of pregnancy air pollution exposures on child health.”

Rising temperatures put women and girls in danger. 

Pregnancy drives risk even higher.

Morgan McFall-Johnsen
Sat, 5 March 2022

Rising temperatures put women and girls in danger. Pregnancy drives risk even higher.


Women collect water from a stream outside the village of Tsemera in Ethiopia's northern Amhara region, February 13, 2016.

Katy Migiro/Reuters


Women and girls face unique risks as the climate crisis deepens, according to a new UN report.


Water scarcity can lead to increased violence against women and girls, who are often responsible for fetching water.


Pregnancy adds further risk. Extreme heat is associated with more preterm births and stillbirths.

Roughly half of people on the planet are at heightened risk from climate change, a grim report published this week by the United Nations revealed. Women and girls, along with pregnant people and the fetuses they carry, face greater health and safety issues from rising temperatures than men.

"All women are at increased risk," Rupa Basu, chief of air and climate epidemiology at the California Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, who was not involved in the report, told Insider.

Women and girls are both more likely than men to die in extreme weather events, more at risk of domestic and sexual violence in the aftermath, and more likely to suffer food insecurity, according to the report. When pregnant, such catastrophes can lead to serious complications.

Liz Foster, who is 38 weeks pregnant, talks to her son at a fountain at Yards Park in Washington, on June 21, 2012.Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo


"Women are more exposed, and this is because we see that climate change exacerbates existing inequalities so much," Marlene Achoki, who co-leads global policy on climate justice for the humanitarian organization CARE, told Insider.

Men often have control over critical resources like food and water, while women tend to have less credit and mobility to help them adapt to new extremes, according to the report.

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recruited hundreds of scientists to summarize years of research for its sixth climate assessment. The first working group shared its findings last year, focusing on the physical changes to our planet. Monday's publication, from the second working group, examines how those changes will affect ecosystems and human lives.

The report projects that extreme weather — floods, droughts, and heat waves — will become more frequent and more severe in the coming decades, driving food and water shortages across the globe. To protect women, girls, and pregnant people, governments must start preparing for these disasters, and their health outcomes, now.

"I'm happy to see that pregnant women and women and girls are included in this report," Basu said, adding, "For so long, they were kind of just missed as being a high-risk population."
Women trek miles in extreme heat and face violence to fetch water

Women carry water jerrycans on their heads in Kilifi county, Kenya, on February 16, 2022.Baz Ratner/Reuters

In places where drinking water doesn't come from a tap, women and girls trek out of town to collect water, according to the IPCC report. During droughts, they often have to walk to more distant water sites, putting them at risk of heat stroke, as well as gender-based violence.

Aditi Mukherji, who led the water chapter of the new IPCC report, said where she lives in India, women have to walk long distances for water. Achoki said she's seen the same thing in Kenya.

"When I travel to the northern part of our country, that is at the edge of the border, it is so hot. Just one step when I land down to the airstrip and I feel like going back to the plane," Achoki told Insider.

In this heat, she said, women and girls sometimes walk as far as 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) to fetch water. When they reach it, long lines often await them. In the process, they face an increased risk of injuries, encounters with dangerous animals, and sexual abuse, such as demand for sexual favors in exchange for water, according to the IPCC report.

A woman collects grain at a camp for internally displaced people in Adadle district in the Somali region, Ethiopia, on January 22, 2022.Claire Nevill/World Food Programme/Reuters

Increased access to water, like local community taps, wells, and better water-storage facilities could help protect women and girls as droughts grow more prolonged and severe. The challenge is getting governments and organizations to pay for those fixes.

"It's not as if the solutions are new or anything. It's often about lack of finance," Mukerheji told Insider.
Risks rise during pregnancy: 'You feel a little helpless in a way'

Summer Weeks, 23, who is pregnant, shades her eyes from the sun in a remote area of the Bodaway Chapter in the Navajo Nation outside of Gap, Arizona, on September 14, 2020.

Stephanie Keith/Reuters

Basu usually runs cold — she'll find herself shivering on warm, sunny days in Oakland, California. But that changed when she got pregnant. Suddenly she would heat up and break out in a sweat, while everyone around her seemed perfectly comfortable.

"I just couldn't regulate my body temperature," she said.

She had studied how heat affects high-risk populations, like older people, but she didn't expect to be one of them anytime soon.

"I was kind of feeling like, 'Oh, I get it now. I can feel it,'" she said. "You feel a little helpless in a way."

Basu's experience made her wonder if pregnant people, too, were uniquely vulnerable to extreme heat.

A pregnant woman wears a mask during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.Charles Krupa/AP Photo

Soon she led an analysis of nearly 60,000 births across 16 California counties, comparing birth outcomes with weekly averages of apparent temperature (which accounts for humidity) from the parents' residential zip codes. She found that an increase of 10 degrees Fahrenheit was associated with 8.6% more preterm births. The study was published in the American Journal of Epidemiology in 2010.

Since then, further studies have found similar relationships between temperature increases or heat waves and a rise in preterm births or stillbirths.

"Only in the last decade do we have any data at all to support the association between heat and adverse birth outcomes," Basu said.

Several studies cited in the IPCC report suggest that extreme heat, airborne particulates like those carried in wildfire smoke, and water-related illnesses are linked to higher rates of miscarriage, stillbirth, low birth weight, and preterm birth.

A pregnant mother receives the COVID-19 vaccine at a maternity clinic in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on Aug. 24, 2021.

(Photo by Ajith Perera/Xinhua via Getty Images)

Still, heat advisories often leave pregnant people out of their recommendations for vulnerable populations. Similar to older or immunocompromised people, Basu said, pregnant people may need to take extra precautions — keeping cool and inactive on hot days, or staying indoors with an air filter when wildfire smoke adds moderate levels of particulate matter to the air.

"I keep coming back to the same point, to not just look at the general population and see what's happening, but then to look at the really high-risk, most vulnerable populations and also consider them," Basu said, adding, "I think that's often missed, and then we're not really getting the whole picture."

Scientists discover why the Andes are rising up as glaciers melt

Rob Waugh
·Contributor
Tue, 1 March 2022

The mountains of Patagonia are 'growing' (Ben Tiger)

The glaciers on the Andes mountain range are melting quickly at some of the fastest rates on the planet but scientists have been confused as to why the ground beneath them is rising up rapidly too - until now.

When glaciers melt, a tremendous weight is lifted from the ground that once supported them.

The newly unburdened earth rebounds and rises - but in Patagonia, it’s happening to an extreme level.

Geologists have discovered a link between recent ice mass loss, rapid rock uplift and a gap between tectonic plates that underlie Patagonia, using a seismic study of the Patagonian Andes.

The Andes has some of the steepest peaks in the world. (Getty)

Read more: Melting snow in Himalayas drives growth of green sea slime visible from space

Hannah Mark, a former Steve Fossett postdoctoral fellow in earth and planetary sciences at Washington University said: "Variations in the size of glaciers, as they grow and shrink, combined with the mantle structure that we've imaged in this study are driving rapid and spatially variable uplift in this region.”

The seismic data shows how a gap in the down-going tectonic plate about 60 miles beneath Patagonia has enabled hotter, less viscous mantle material to flow underneath South America.

Above this gap, the icefields have been shrinking, removing weight that previously caused the continent to flex downward.

These conditions are driving many of the recent changes that have been observed in Patagonia, including the rapid uplift in certain areas once covered by ice.

Read more: Why economists worry that reversing climate change is hopeless

Guanaco in Chilean Patagonia. (Getty)

Read more: A 1988 warning about climate change was mostly right

Seismologist Douglas Wiens, Robert S. Brookings Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences, said: "Low viscosities mean that the mantle responds to deglaciation on the time scale of tens of years, rather than thousands of years, as we observe in Canada for example.

“This explains why GPS has measured large uplift due to the loss of ice mass.

"Another significant thing is that the viscosity is higher beneath the southern part of the Southern Patagonia Icefield compared to the Northern Patagonia Icefield, which helps to explain why uplift rates vary from north to south.”

Geologists see evidence of this combination of ice mass changes and uplift in places all over the world.

There's no turning back.

Wiens first visited Patagonia more than 25 years ago. He said that he is shocked by changes that he has observed in his lifetime.

"The beautiful glaciers are being reduced in size," Wiens said.

"Over the coming decades, the ice fronts will recede higher up the mountains and farther into the interior, potentially making them more difficult to visit. I can easily see that the glaciers have shrunk since I first visited this area in 1996."

Should it take a war to show that sport and politics are forever linked?

Jonathan Liew
Sun, 6 March 2022

Photograph: Thomas Lovelock for OIS/AP

For years, Big Sport has said they should be kept separate. Now, events in Ukraine have shown that it was wrong

‘Happy Thursday everyone!” the official Uefa Europa League account tweeted on the morning of 24 February, looking ahead to another crucial round of matches in Europe’s second most prestigious men’s football competition. Alas, not everyone was in quite as festive a mood. For, just a few hours earlier, Russian artillery had moved into Ukraine bringing up the curtain on a bloody and avoidable war in mainland Europe.

It’s easy to forget it now, amid the breathtaking speed with which the world of sport has closed ranks against Russia, but in the hours and days after the fighting started Uefa on Twitter was hardly the only sports authority to monumentally fail to read the room. For example, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) eventually banned Russia from the Paralympic Winter Games but only after first announcing an unsatisfactory compromise in which Russian athletes would have been allowed to compete in neutral colours. Fifa only kicked the Russians out of this year’s World Cup qualifying after other European teams made it clear they were not prepared to play them.

This is, after all, how Big Sport has instinctively operated: cautiously, conservatively, with a moral cowardice that runs as deep as its avarice. With empty gestures and weasel words. Only when the scale of global outrage became apparent, only when it became obvious that any entity associated with Russia was at risk of suffering grievous, perhaps terminal reputational damage, did many governing bodies take decisive action. “There go my people,” the French revolutionary Alexandre Ledru-Rollin is said to have remarked. “I must find out where they are going so I can lead them.”

This is not a particularly new phenomenon. In 1939, the IOC was looking for a new venue for the 1940 Winter Olympics after Japan’s military aggression meant it had to relinquish hosting rights (voluntarily, rather than after any significant pressure). Hitler’s invasion of Poland soon forced the IOC to cancel the Games entirely, having first reassigned them to the charming ski resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Nazi Germany.

However, even in this digital age, it is possible to feel vaguely stunned at the speed with which the landscape of sport has now changed. The men’s Champions League final has been stripped from St Petersburg and handed to Paris. Manchester United have ended their commercial partnership with Aeroflot. Russian teams – and in some cases individual athletes – have been banned across sport, from athletics to cycling, rugby union to Formula One. It is inconceivable that Russia will be allowed to host any major sporting event for many years.

Individuals whose wealth and power were widely assumed to be impregnable have been forced to leave the stage

Most shocking of all, individuals whose wealth and power were widely assumed to be impregnable have been forced from the stage. Roman Abramovich has announced his intention to sell Chelsea FC, sensing the threat of sanctions in the UK. The Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov has stepped down as president of the International Fencing Federation and his sponsorship of Everton FC has been suspended. Even Vladimir Putin has been punished, with the International Judo Federation stripping him of the honorary presidency he has held since 2008.

Other cases are more complex. Was it right for Russian F1 driver Nikita Mazepin to be ejected from the British Grand Prix then see his Haas team contract terminated? Should individual Russian athletes be punished unless they condemn the invasion of Ukraine? Will Ivan Drago have to be censored out of the Rocky movies? In part, this is the tragedy of autocracy: the state and the individual begin to bleed into each other to the extent that it is difficult to separate them. Whether you are a billionaire oligarch, a film-maker reliant on state funding or an athlete benefiting from a centralised performance programme, it is virtually impossible to thrive in Russia without becoming entangled with the regime in some form.

But the wider lesson here is one that goes well beyond Russia and well beyond this war. For years, we have been told by the world’s sporting bodies, many of its athletes and the majority of its autocratic regimes that sport can and should be kept separate from politics. Now we realise why they were so intent on touting and maintaining this fiction. For those invested in the smooth running of international sport, either as a vehicle for commercial growth, personal enrichment or soft power, politics means questions and moral dilemmas. It means independent thought, scrutiny and oversight. It means exercising a conscience. It means change.

Now, as it turns out, an entire country can be wiped from the sporting map almost overnight if the will is there to do it. And for political reasons, rather than anything it has done on the field of play. This was possible all along! Why, then, was Russia allowed to host the 2018 Fifa World Cup? Why was the genocidal regime in China rewarded with this year’s Winter Olympics? Why have abusive governments in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia been allowed to own football clubs and cycling teams? Why is this year’s World Cup in Qatar?

The past week has been an eye-opener in many ways. Athletes leading the call to action. Public opinion forcing governing bodies into U-turns. People beginning to rethink the entire relationship between elite sport, money and power. Maybe this is just a fleeting illusion of solidarity in the jaws of a terrible human catastrophe. But if things really are going to change, this is how it starts.

• Jonathan Liew is a Guardian sports writer

On the frontline of Liberia's fight to save the pangolin

A white-bellied pangolin which was rescued from local animal traffickers. - Copyright Isaac Kasamani AFP

By Doloresz Katanich with AFP • Updated: 06/03/2022 - 09:09

Conservationists in Liberia are determined to stop the generations-old tradition of hunting pangolins, which are vulnerable to extinction due to illegal poaching.

Clutching a single-barrelled rifle in lush northern Liberia, Emmanuel says his 10 children were able to get an education thanks to his gun.

He regularly ignores the ban on hunting bushmeat and earns most of his cash catching pangolins and monkeys in the surrounding jungle.

In the dry season, Emmanuel waits for dark and then hikes into the forest with his rifle and machete.

A hunter poses for a portrait with his long barrel hunting gun on the outskirts of Bopolu on November 15, 2021

John Wessels/AFP

Pangolins, scale-covered insect-eating mammals that are typically the size of a full-grown cat, are mostly active at night, snuffling through deadwood for ants and termites.

The species is under threat worldwide but remains a delicacy in the impoverished West African country.

Their scales - made of keratin, like human nails - are also prized by consumers in Asia for their supposed medicinal properties.

"We kill it, we eat it," says Emmanuel, in a village in Gbarpolu County, five-hours drive north of the capital Monrovia along pitted dirt roads.

"Then the scales, we sell it," says the hunter. "There's no other option".

Pangolins are disappearing worldwide

A 2020 study by the US Agency for International Development estimated that between 650,000 and 8.5 million pangolins were removed from the wild between 2009 and 2020.

The population is declining worldwide due to deforestation, bushmeat consumption, and the scales trade.

A man displays a packet of Pangolin scales, ready to be sold on the outskirts of Bopolu on November 14, 2021.

John Wessels/AFP

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), seizures of pangolin scales have increased tenfold since 2014, suggesting a booming global trade.
Efforts to stamp out illegal poaching in Liberia

Pangolins are believed to be the most trafficked animal in the world and Liberia is one of the main origin countries. Over 40 per cent of the country is covered in rainforest and governance is weak. The country is also still recovering from brutal civil wars from 1989 to 2003, and from the 2014-16 Ebola crisis.

With conservationists sounding the alarm, Liberia's government banned the unlicensed hunting of protected species in 2016, imposing up to six months in prison or a maximum €4,500 ($5,000) fine.

But the government is up against the dual forces of tradition and poverty as it tries to reduce poaching of these vulnerable animals.