Women’s prisons could be shut and converted to house male inmates to ease overcrowding – Mirror Online |UK
Women’s prisons could be closed and converted to accommodate male inmates under longer term plans to tackle the overcrowding crisis.
Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood is expected to announce emergency measures within days as the country runs out of available cells in male jails. Tens of thousands of prisoners could be released early to create capacity after the Tories failed to build adequate places.
Under one proposal put forward to the government, enough female prisoners could be let out early to free up an entire prison, which could then be turned into one for men. The Mirror understands the idea is not part of the immediate plans to be announced this week, but may be considered as a solution in the medium term.
Women make up a much smaller proportion of the prison population, with 3,657 in jail compared to 83,796 men. There are 12 women’s prisons out of 117 in total in England and Wales. More than half (58%) of prison sentences given to women in 2022 were for less than six months. Short sentences can derail people’s lives, with jobs and houses lost and mums separated from their kids. They are also seen as largely ineffective with reoffending rates high.
EXCLUSIVE DETAILS: German Trans-Identified Male Sues McDonald’s After Being Denied Access to Women’s Changing Room
A trans-identified male and former drag queen residing in Berlin is currently involved in litigation against McDonald’s after alleging he was denied access to the changing room intended for female employees. Kylie Divon, 27, also known as Keil Li, is seeking financial compensation for “discrimination” after a Muslim woman and colleague told him to leave the women’s changing room, citing his male genitalia as a cause for her concern.
Alice Munro’s daughter reveals abuse by her stepfather.
In 1976, nine-year-old Andrea Skinner, spent the summer at the home of her mother—Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro—in Ontario.
According to the now 58-year-old, as she slept in her bed one night while her mother was away, her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, climbed into the bed alongside her, and sexually assaulted her.
Munro died from Alzheimer’s Disease in May this year, aged 92. Two months after her death, Skinner wrote about the rape in an essay written for the Toronto Star.
In the essay, Skinner claims she eventually told her mother about the abuse, but the award-winning author chose to remain married to her daughter’s abuser, even after he admitted it was true.
Skinner was 25 when she wrote to Munro in 1996 to disclose the abuse.
But Skinner described her mother’s response as “incredulous” and “as if she had learned of an infidelity”.
“She said that she had been ‘told too late,’ she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children, and make up for the failings of men,” Skinner wrote.
“She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her.”
While Fremlin admitted to the assault, he described it as a “sexual adventure”, calling the then-nine-year-old little girl a “home-wrecker”.
Despite her mother’s response, Skinner maintained a relationship with her mother until she had children of her own, and told Munro that Fremlin could never be around the children. The pair fell out and never reconciled.
In 2005, Fremlin received two years’ probation after pleading guilty in Canadian court to assaulting Skinner.
Although Skinner wrote in the essay that she was satisfied with the legal outcome, she wanted her story to be told, about both Fremlin and her mother.
“The fact that my mother, confronted with the truth of what had happened, chose to stay with, and protect, my abuser.”
Source: Alice Munro’s daughter reveals abuse by her stepfather.
You’re A Man (original song) – YouTube
‘Do you like this position?’: The workplace rife with shocking sexual harassment
A Herald investigation has found sexual harassment of female staff is rife, but is often buried or ignored within NSW Corrective Services, the arm of the state government’s Department of Communities and Justice that’s responsible for running prisons.
Yet despite years of reports and data showing there have been significant sexual misconduct problems in at least 14 of Corrective Service’s work sites, it failed to implement key policies to stop it, forcing the workplace safety regulator to step in.
SafeWork NSW issued six improvement notices to Corrective Services between October 2023 and March this year warning that the department’s response to sexual misconduct was deficient across a host of measures and was putting workers at risk.
Staff from the Herald spoke to people who told their stories on the condition of anonymity to preserve their jobs and protect themselves from retribution. They say they have been enduring harassment for years, but have been too scared to report it, or their reports have not been acted upon.
They are speaking up now after a Special Commission of Inquiry into a staff member, Wayne Astill, who was convicted of raping 14 female inmates over five years, found a toxic culture of cover-up within the organisation and exposed myriad procedural failures (he is appealing against his convictions).
In a 2022 case, corrections officer Glenn Anthony Ash was convicted in Bathurst Local Court of 11 offences against colleagues at a Central West prison, including sexually touching without consent, carrying out a sexual act on another without consent, and assault with an act of indecency.
The incidents included asking colleagues to touch his penis, rubbing their backs and necks despite being told to stop, and masturbating in one complainant’s office. He also asked a complainant to “rearrange him” while unzipping his pants.
The Ash case prompted an independent review of the centre at which he worked, which led to misconduct proceedings against three more staff members. The results of the review have not been made public.
[T]he women who spoke to the Herald said in most cases the victims do not come forward, either because they feared retribution from the “boys’ club” or because if they did, no action was taken. The male officers protected each other.
“I know if I report anything it backfires on me,” said a different woman, who has had multiple experiences of serious harassment over her career. “We’re surrounded by toxicity. Colleagues are often more toxic than inmates. You have a false sense of security, you think if someone is wearing blue they have a strong sense of morals. But they don’t.”
The Herald approached Corrections Minister Anoulack Chanthivong for comment, but he did not provide any.
Source: 12ft
Register Here – IFLN event: A feminist approach to litigation and legal advocacy internationally – City University Law School
IFLN event: A feminist approach to litigation and legal advocacy internationally
Wed 17 Jul 2024 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM
City University Law School, EC1V 0HB
What can we learn from lawyers in different countries and jurisdictions about their strategies to tackle male violence against women?
Join us on 17 July 2024 for the first hybrid International Feminist Legal Network event.
During the event we will discuss local, regional, national and international approaches on issues such as:
- Femicide and suicide resulting from domestic abuse
- Challenging criminalisation of survivors of male violence
- Challenging men’s fightback through the family courts and the use of parental alienation
- Police perpetrated abuse
- Violence against women framed as torture
- Legal representation for victims in the criminal justice system and challenging anonymity for perpetrators
- Using litigation as a tool for change
- The impact of strategic litigation and how to enhance it
Lawyers from around the world will attend in person or online including from the Philippines, South Africa, United States and elsewhere.
International timings for the event are:
05:00-12:00 Lima, Bogota, New York
10:00-17:00 London
11:00-18:00 Madrid, Johannesburg
12:00-19:00 Athens, Helsinki, Nairobi
14:00-21:00 Lahore, Tashkent
14:30-21:30 New Delhi
17:00-00:00 Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Beijing
18:00-01:00 Seoul, Tokyo
19:00-02:00 Sydney, Melbourne
Please note this event is aimed at lawyers, legal NGOs and legal academics.
Surrogacy Act and Status of Children Act | NSW Government
What’s this about?
The Department of Communities and Justice is seeking feedback from people in the community to help decide if changes to the law are needed to better protect children’s rights and support all types of families.
This includes:
- families with LGBTIQA+ members
- families who use special medical procedures to have children
- families with children born through surrogacy.
The laws under review:
Get more information by downloading the Discussion Paper.
Contents of submissions may be made public. If you would like your submission to remain confidential, please let us know when making your submission.
Have your say
Have your say by Friday 2 August 2024.
Source: Surrogacy Act and Status of Children Act | NSW Government
Teenage boys are being ‘bombarded’ with misogynist content online. It’s making its way into the classroom – ABC News
News stories about the rise of misogynistic behaviour in schools are inescapable at the moment. Female teachers and students are facing harassment and sexual abuse in classrooms across the country.
It’s a trend that has risen in the dark shadow of social media personality Andrew Tate and other anti-feminist or anti-women content influencers in the so-called ‘manosphere’, and it’s pushing some female teachers to breaking point.
News stories about the rise of misogynistic behaviour in schools are inescapable at the moment. Female teachers and students are facing harassment and sexual abuse in classrooms across the country.
It’s a trend that has risen in the dark shadow of social media personality Andrew Tate and other anti-feminist or anti-women content influencers in the so-called ‘manosphere’, and it’s pushing some female teachers to breaking point.
As part of her research at Monash University, Dr Westcott spoke to 30 female teachers from across Australia and from all sectors including independent, faith-based and government schools. She says teachers are facing a rise in misogynistic behaviour.
“There was also a level of sexism and sexual harassment that teachers were experiencing that they hadn’t previously. For some women, it was constant and unrelenting in nearly every class that they taught,” Dr Westcott says.
“One woman reported to us that a student said to her, ‘Miss, your boobs look really good today’. A male student spat in his teacher’s water bottle. As well as gendered slurs like, ‘Why are the girls here? They don’t need an education. They can just make an OnlyFans account’.
Gender affirmative guidelines just an echo chamber: expert |The Australian
Dr Cass, a former president of the UK’s Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, participated in a panel live from the UK on Tuesday night, which was hosted by Australian psychiatrist Phillip Morris, the president of the National Association of Practising Psychiatrists, one of the first bodies to call for caution on experimental medical treatments and greater wholistic psychotherapy for young people with gender distress.
Dr Cass criticised the activist World Professional Association for Transgender Healthcare for essentially suppressing evidence that the standards of care it devised were not evidence-based and showed no proof of alleviating the distress of children.
These standards are followed by most of Australia’s major children’s hospitals that all frequently prescribe puberty blockers and hormone treatments to children and teenagers. Dr Cass noted in her independent report handed down in April that has been “highly influential in directing international practice, although its guidelines were found by the University of York’s appraisal to lack developmental rigour and transparency”. The Cass report included an appraisal by the University of York that analysed international gender affirmative care guidelines, including those of the Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne. The review found its guidelines similarly lacked rigour and independence.
“The evidence base is weak … international guidelines have for the most part not followed standard evidence-based approaches,” Dr Cass told the Australian seminar. “And it has influenced most other international guidelines. There is a sort of echo chamber of sort of copying and pasting off each other. The only guidelines that have taken an independent and evidence based approach are the Swedish and the Finnish guidelines.”
All of Australia’s children’s hospitals including most of the country’s state health ministers have rejected the relevance of Dr Cass’s report to Australia for reasons that appear spurious given the fact that Dr Cass’s report examined gender affirming care models internationally, and that the deep research carried out by the independent review into puberty blockers is clearly relevant beyond the UK.
Source: Gender affirmative guidelines just an echo chamber: expert