What’s Current: One in 16 U.S. women say first sexual experience was ‘forced’

  • The first sexual experience for one in 16 U.S. women was rape in their early teens, according to a study which showed a correlation between experiences of sexual violence in youth and a long-lasting impact on health.
  • Indonesia’s parliament raised the minimum age at which women can marry to 19 in an effort to curb child marriage. Indonesia is among the 10 countries with the highest number of child brides in the world.
  •  British Columbia has ended a child welfare practice known as “birth alerts,” intended to allow hospital staff to flag potentially threatening situations, but that were primarily used against Indigenous women.
  • Thousands of children are being targeted by pedophiles and coerced into filming themselves, a Sunday Telegraph investigation reveals. Monitors who search the internet for child pornography report more than 100 new webcam videos daily, predominantly featuring girls aged between 11 and 13.
  • New research shows women may not be diagnosed with autism as frequently as men because they are better at masking signs of the condition. Hannah Hayward, a researcherat King’s College London, says:

“We find that for a lot of females, their autistic traits are not being picked up or recognized in the same way that males have been at school. This is because we’re trying to fit their diagnosis through the same molds as males, but often they don’t fit that criteria because their presentation is slightly different.”

Genevieve Gluck

Genevieve Gluck is a writer and advocate for women's sex-based rights and creator of Women's Voices, an audio library dedicated to bringing awareness to feminist texts and speeches.