Our weekly round-up of must-read stories you might have missed. In focus this week: The economic integration of women has actually declined in Morocco; In Syria, regime soldiers are said to be sexually violating women and men from the opposition; Bee numbers have declined significantly in many countries with no clear explanation as to why.
Morocco’s Gender-Equality Laws Fail to Improve Situation – April 2, 2013
In the last 10 years, Morocco has witnessed two divergent trends relating to economic equality between women and men. On one end, the country has enacted laws affirming parity in the labor market between men and women, and it ratified the international Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. The prime minister also issued a directive, the first of its kind since 2001, exhorting the promotion of women to high-level positions in public office. The Labor Law devoted many clauses to reducing wage and job discrimination based on gender, especially in the private sector. In 2011, the new constitution introduced universal parity principles, and it lifted the remaining reservations standing in the way of empowering women within the framework of the Millennium Development Goals…
Syria Has a Massive Rape Crisis – April 3, 2013
One day in the fall of 2012, Syrian government troops brought a young Free Syrian Army soldier’s fiancée, sisters, mother, and female neighbors to the Syrian prison in which he was being held. One by one, he said, they were raped in front of him. The 18-year-old had been an FSA soldier for less than a month when he was picked up. Crying uncontrollably as he recounted his torture while in detention to a psychiatrist named Yassar Kanawati, he said he suffers from a spinal injury inflicted by his captors. The other men detained with him were all raped, he told the doctor. When Kanawati asked if he, too, was raped, he went silent. Although most coverage of the Syrian civil war tends to focus on the fighting between the two sides, this war, like most, has a more insidious dimension: rape has been reportedly used widely as a tool of control, intimidation, and humiliation throughout the conflict. And its effects, while not always fatal, are creating a nation of traumatized survivors — everyone from the direct victims of the attacks to their children, who may have witnessed or been otherwise affected by what has been perpetrated on their relatives…
Ban pesticides linked to bee deaths, say MPs – April 5, 2013
The UK government should suspend the use of a number of pesticides linked to the deaths of bees, a committee of MPs has said. Members of the Commons Environmental Audit Committee are calling for a moratorium on the use of sprays containing neonicotinoids. Britain has refused to back an EU ban on these chemicals saying their impact on bees is unclear. But MPs say this is an “extraordinarily complacent” approach. Wild species such as honey bees are said by researchers to be responsible for pollinating around one-third of the world’s crop production. In their report, MPs say that two-thirds of these species have suffered population declines in the UK. They argue that a “growing body of peer-reviewed research” points the finger at a group of pesticides called neonicotinoids…
