What’s Current: Gambia bans female genital mutilation

Yahya Jammeh announces ban on FGM. (Image: Seyllou/AFP/Getty Images)
Yahya Jammeh announces ban on FGM. (Image: Seyllou/AFP/Getty Images)

Gambia has announced it will ban female genital mutilation, a practice that affects three-quarters of women in the west African country. President, Yahya Jammeh, said, last night, that the ban would come into effect immediately.

Male white supremacists shoot five Black Lives Matter activists protesting Jamar Clark’s killing in Minneapolis.

“My white neighbor thought I was breaking into my own apartment. 19 cops showed up.” Cops harassed and recklessly pointed guns at a woman of colour because her apartment is in a primarily white neighbourhood.

University of British Columbia’s sex assault complaints are covered by the CBC’s Fifth Estate in an investigative documentary. You can watch School of Secrets online now.

The Hunting Ground filmmakers highlight the way in which sexual assault is treated differently from other crimes: “Were you drunk when you claim the television was stolen?”

Prime target: How serial killers prey on Indigenous women. Dawn Lavell-Harvard, president of the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC) says serial killers in urban centers target Indigenous women, confident that they will be able to get away with it. The Globe and Mail reports:

“About one-fifth of Canada’s known female serial-homicide victims since 1980 were indigenous, according to a Globe analysis of convictions in an American researcher’s international database; just 4 per cent of the overall Canadian female population is indigenous.”

Susan Cox

Susan Cox is a feminist writer and academic living in the United States. She teaches in Philosophy.