The uncivil “civil war” in Sudan is, in effect a sustained horror carried by two organized .armed forces who had previously served the dictator Bashir who brave civilians had previously forced out. Most attention has been given to the brutality of the RSF and its backing from the UAE (United Arab Emirates). The victims have been mostly women both from rape as strategic weapon of war and from hunger. Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) with a better press and likely as not some sincere soldiers fighting for the greater good of the country, have equally used hunger tactics. The victimisation of women by the SAF at the very moment they forgive and re-integrate some notorious RSF figure, involves charging the poorest women with siding wih the RSF. Many of those charged with treason are women who were too poor to flee to SAF areas after the RSF invaded and occupied their cities and towns. Poverty pushed many to work in markets and sell tea and coffee to RSF fighters to survive, especially those whose male relatives and partners were disappeared or killed. One can imagine the unearned righteousness of the men doing out the punishment of these women.
In chainsaw Milei’s Argentina the killing of young women and protests by women against these horrors continue. Recently the strangled bodies of Agostina Vega aged 14 and Dulce Candia. Aged 17 were found days before women held the 11th annual Not A Single Woman Less march. All this happened in the context of the Milei government’s bit by bit attack on women’s rights. It has cut support for victims of violence against women; refusals to register such crimes as femicide; and in copycat style eliminated the sites of statistics gathering on violences against women. Instead in the face of the high level of non-reporting of such crimes it is looking to introduce severe punishments for false accusations of rape and other violences. Fitting this attitude the newspapers circulated photos of her in dance clothes but not of her going to school.
The Indian state of Andhra Pradesh where the fertility rate has dropped below “re[placement levels” is offering a cash payout to families having a second child and is offering further such incentives to families that have a third and fourth child. The money is barely enough to cover birth and infancy costs but wilfully ignores that it is women who have to bear the sacrifices women take to raise a child. Similar cash payment ‘bribes’ have failed to impress women in China, Japan and South Korea faced with unchanging patriarchal norms. In Andhra Pradesh the political relating of demography and immigration loom large, even though in this case it is internal” involving possible migration from neighbouring states like Bihar, mistrusted by local male politicians.