What’s Current: France’s gender equality minister proposes criminalizing street harassment

Photo: Stop Street Harassment/Facebook

France’s gender equality minister, Marlene Schiappa, proposes making sexual harassment on the street a criminal offence and imposing instant fines on perpetrators. Currently, sexual harassment laws only apply to the workplace and harassment of minors.

Women are more likely to experience negative consequences of natural disasters like Hurricane Harvey. In the wake of disaster, women are more vulnerable to sexual assault and domestic violence and are, on average, more likely to be killed than men. Professor Rachel E. Luft explains:

“Every stage of disaster — preparation, impact, recovery — happens in ways that reinforce our raced, classed, and gendered experiences… It’s not as simple as some people being more competent or resilient to survive disaster. It’s that those people have often been structurally enabled to have more resources to work with… Women, and especially women of colour, are overwhelmingly tasked personally and professionally with caring for children, the elderly and people with disabilities. So even the simple decision about whether to evacuate in advance of a disaster often means being responsible for multiple people. This isn’t a deficit in women; it’s an extra responsibility that makes personal survival decisions and the resources to support them much more difficult.”

Children’s book publisher apologizes for puberty book that says breasts exist to make girls “look grown-up and attractive.”

Here’s the full, sickening list of Floyd Mayweather’s crimes against women.

The MTV Video Music Awards got rid of male and female categories for its awards this year. The result was that men outnumbered women as both nominees and award-winners.

Susan Cox

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