This series was started in July 2013. At that time groups were fairly new at Daily Kos. Tara TSW and I had met at Netroots Nation in San Jose, both of us talking to Kaili Joy Gray, who had left Daily Kos, telling her how we missed her series here called This Week in the War on Women. Realizing that such a series could get depressing so neither Tara nor I were not willing to take it on, but it occurred to me that it would be less depressing if we made it a group so no one person had to gather the news every week. So this group was born.
But that was a long time ago, and there are many new writers here at Daily Kos who write important diaries on women’s issues who may not have heard of us. At the same time, in recent months the same four or five people have been writing the weekly diary. So I am reaching out to those writers — come join us. This is a frightening time, with the overturning of Roe v Wade only one sign of the dangers we all face. This group continues to be a place we can support each other, and we would welcome new members both as readers and writers.
In the News
Abortion
The radical right continues to devise more and more extreme abortion bans.
The Idaho Republican party has included a “no exceptions” plank in its platform this year.
thehill.com/…
While the rest of us try to figure out how to get around them.
From Guttmacher, a look at how to deal with data on women who travel for abortions, which has been necessary for more and more women for years before Dobbs:
These new estimates of travel for abortion care also allow us to calculate the number and rate of abortions obtained by residents of each US state. Abortions by state of residence and abortions by state of occurrence can both be used to track trends in abortion incidence, access and provision; they differ, however, in what they are trying to measure and the purposes they should be used for.
Abortions by state of occurrence are abortions provided in a given state, whether to residents of that state or to people who traveled to that state for care. In contrast, abortions by state of residence are abortions obtained by residents of a given state, regardless of where they took place. Both of these numbers are often presented as rates: the number of abortions relative to the population of residents who could experience pregnancy (e.g., the number of abortions per 1,000 resident women aged 15–44 in each state).
www.guttmacher.org/...
And more and more women are needing to learn to manage their own medication abortions, even in states with bans:
This process, often called “self-sourced medication abortion,” refers to an individual finding or sourcing medications to induce an abortion on their own, without going through their primary care provider, OB-GYN or other clinic like Planned Parenthood. Globally, abortion pills might be found without prescriptions at neighborhood pharmacies or by accessing local community networks. In the U.S., even prior to the fall of Roe v. Wade, someone could order abortion pills online.
theconversation.com/...
Violence Against Women
Another reason to get police out of schools (not that it’s any surprise):
In 2014, Dothan, Alabama police officer Lanice Bonds pleaded guilty to having sex with a 16-year-old student from Dothan High School, where he worked as a school resource officer (SRO) for over six years. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Three years later, at the same school, another resource officer, Adrian Folmar, was arrested for engaging in a sex act with a 17-year-old student. As investigations progressed, another victim was found, and this time, she was 14 years old.
Bonds and Folmar appear to be part of a wider pattern of school resource officers being removed from their positions due to sexual misconduct. In late 2021, an anonymous source reached out to DAME with data collected from local news reports. Within that data alone, which DAME fact-checked, at least 440 school children have been sexually abused by school police at their school in the last 20 years. After consulting experts in the field and assessing the accuracy of this small sample size, DAME concludes that incidents of police sexual misconduct in schools are likely underreported.
www.damemagazine.com/...
And in Great Britain, one of very few countries that allows military enlistment at age 16:
There was a tenfold rise in the number of reports of minors being subjected to sexual assaults and rape, from 1 in 2015 to 10 last year, Freedom of Information requests from think tank Child Rights International Network (CRIN) show. Over the past year, this number increased almost fivefold. In this year’s figures, 47 teenagers under 18 have been identified by military police as victims of sexual assault and rape, including 37 girls and 10 boys, UK Defence Minister Leo Docherty told Parliament. There are only 240 girls of this age currently signed up - there were 290 during the period of the attacks - meaning more than 1 in 10 girls enlisted has said they have been assaulted.
For Inspiration
This is not new, but it’s worth looking at again.
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As always, thanks to the WoW crew, this week including TaraTSW, JGraham, mettle fatigue, SandraLLAP, Angmar.