The French parliament has approved a groundbreaking law that makes psychological violence an offense as part of a broader range of measures aimed at improving protection of victims of domestic abuse.The law defines mental violence as "repeated acts which could be constituted by words or other machinations, to degrade one's quality of life and cause a change to one's mental or physical state". Opponents of the law argue that "psychological abuse" will be hard to define.
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Newsweek article on why "women will rule the world" in a post-recession economy
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This article describes the rise of female workers and breadwinners following a recession that has disproportionately impacted men. A few interesting facts on the economic power of women:
- American women are responsible for 83 percent of all consumer purchases;
- American women hold 89 percent of U.S. bank accounts and 51 percent of all personal wealth.
Worth more than $5 trillion in consumer spending, the consumer power of American women is larger than the entire Japanese economy. On a global level, women are the biggest emerging market in the history of the planet-more than twice the size of India and China combined. It's a well-known fact that in the United States, women outnumber men in the attainment of college degrees (by 20 percent), as well as graduate and law diplomas; 72 percent of high-school valedictorians were women last year. But it's less well known that the same is true in many developing nations. In Brazil, the United Arab Emirates, and Russia, the vast majority of college graduates are female.
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Op-ed on why sexual violence is not "cultural" (New York Times)
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The author, an aid worker in the Congo, states that the sexual violence in Congo is among the worst on the planet. Her op-ed states: "The U.N. estimates that hundreds of thousands of women have been gang-raped, tortured and held as sexual slaves since the conflict began in 1998. To control territory, militias use rape as their weapon of choice. Still, we in the West too often find it easier to perceive rape as an accepted part of an unfamiliar culture rather than as a tool of war that we could help banish. Too often, the enemy becomes all Congolese men rather than men with guns terrorizing the Congolese people. By casting the chaos and violence as "men vs. women" or dismissing the crisis as "cultural," we do a profound injustice to Congolese men. Rather than help, we send an implicit insult: It's a pity, but, well...it's just who you people are."
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