Independent publisher Panoma Press has marked the first day of London Book Fair with the unveiling of its exciting new female-only imprint ‘Lioness’, promising to help empower more female writers from all walks of life.

Lioness has one clear mission, to make a change through the ideas and words of its female authors. Filling the world with their passions, authors will explore some of the most vibrant and urgent issues on the planet, including social justice, sexual abuse (#MeToo), gender and racial equality, spirituality, sexuality, climate change, politics, and much more. This inspiring collection of books will include practical guides, memoirs, and new ways of thinking about the issues that are most important to women of the world. It is a collection from women who ROAR!

Mindy Gibbins-Klein is the owner of independent publishing company Panoma Press, which launched back in 2007 and has been publishing books every year since, many of which have become category bestsellers. Panoma Press is proud to announce Lioness and are delighted to welcome Elana Sztokman to run this new venture. The list will comprise a collection of books written for and by women and will be managed by Elana Sztokman, an award-winning author, and leading Jewish feminist, thinker, educator and activist.

Having authored or co-authored eight books and over one hundred articles, Mindy is acutely aware of the opportunity that publishing provides for women to stand up, express their views, share their experience and be heard. Whilst she has always ensured that Panoma Press provided the perfect outlet for women to publish their books, she felt the time was right to create a specialist imprint with a sole focus on female empowerment.

“We have always believed that everyone should have the opportunity to create a legacy through a book, because it is the most personal, private and thoughtful gift anyone can give to the world. Lioness has been created to help channel even more energy into female writers, who are still in the minority. We plan to share the work of some of the most inspiring, innovative and thought-provoking females on the planet, who have some really amazing stories to tell,” explains Mindy and Elana.

Lioness has unveiled its first book release Masala Mamas: Recipes and stories from Indian women changing their communities through food and love, a full colour vegetarian and kosher cookbook by 16 women who live in the Kalwa slum in Mumbai, India.

Bdaily News

More than 2,500 people have died because failed development in villages heightens gender inequality and tensions, experts say
Men circled the three women, their fists wrapped around thick iron pipes and wooden sticks. The women huddled on the ground at the center of their village in the western Indian state of Gujarat and whimpered as the crowd gathered. Two young men had died in the village, and the women were being called dakan, the Gujarati word for witch. They were accused of feasting on the young men’s souls.

Madhuben clutched her right upper arm. She had taken three blows from one of the pipes and was sure her bones were broken. Her sisters-in-law, Susilaben and Kamlaben, covered their heads as wood and metal pounded their backs. (The names of women targeted by witch hunts have been changed in this story, to minimize the risk of further assault or of jeopardizing pending legal cases.)

The attack on the trio, in Gujarat in 2014, was one of thousands of witch hunts that take place in India. More than 2,500 Indians have been chased, tortured and killed in such hunts between 2000 and 2016, according to India’s National Crime Records Bureau. Activists and journalists say the number is much higher, because most states don’t list witchcraft as a motive of murder. Witch hunts primarily target women and exploit India’s caste system and culture of patriarchy. Men who brand women as dakan capitalize on deeply rooted superstitions and systems built on misogyny and patriarchy to lay blame on females. The accusations of sorcery are used to oust women from valuable land that men covet, in a region where flawed development plans have produced agricultural failures, say sociologists who study violence in India. Witches are also convenient explanations for rising infant mortality rates and deaths from malaria, typhoid and cholera.

A few states have adopted anti–witch hunting laws, but Gujarat is not one of them. Women there are using their own resources to fighti back. At ANANDI, a Gujarati nonprofit that supports vulnerable communities, women sit in a circle on the floor and share samosas and stories. “We protect each other. It’s how we find strength,” one of them says. The women are learning the law, demanding a desk in the local police station so they can advocate for women who walk in to report violence, and they are pushing for witch hunting to be outlawed.

In December 2017 Susilaben and her sister-in-law, Madhuben, who were beaten during the witch hunt four years ago, sat on the dirt floor inside a friend’s house, talking to me. It has been three years since the attack and the sisters-in-law say it is not safe to discuss the witch hunt in their own home because they still live with the men who called them dakan and beat them. Madhuben’s cheeks are hollow, the whites of her eyes visible. “I am scared in my own home,” she says. “Too scared to eat. I faint with fear. What kind of way is this to live?”

The violence and accusations against Madhuben, Susilaben and their sister-in-law began in 2012. That year the three women found their male relatives routinely defecating in the plot of land where the sisters grew corn, lentils and peas. Almost half of India’s households lack a toilet, according to the 2011 census, and many of those people defecate in the open. Of the 1.7 million people around the world who die each year because of a lack of sanitation and access to clean toilets, 600,000 live in India.

Women share their stories about witch hunts at ANANDI, a Gujarat non-profit group that supports vulnerable women. Credit: Seema Yasmin
The sisters-in-law were upset with their male relatives’ using their crops as a toilet. “I said to them, ‘This is where we grow food. How are we supposed to deal with [human excrement] here?’” Susilaben says. This challenge to men in a culture where women are expected to be silent subordinates infuriated her family, she recalls. The men did not stop defecating on the land. Instead they turned on the women, beat them and ran them out of their home for 10 days.

The situation worsened a year or so later, when two young men in their home became ill. One developed renal failure, the other cancer. Poor access to health care in the region meant the family was forced to take out loans and travel to neighboring towns for medical help. Money was scarce and stress was high. When the young men died, the sisters-in-law were accused of eating their souls and causing their premature deaths. And then the remaining men began a campaign to take their land.

The plot where the women grew vegetables was fertile and in a prime location, at a four-way road junction in the village. That was the spot where they were beaten. Male relatives forced the sisters-in-law to sign a document saying they would hand over land ownership to the men. “We had no choice but to sign,” Susilaben says. “They said they would kill us if we didn’t give them our land.” The farming land is now a series of roadside stores selling slippers, stationery, car parts and clothes.

Battles over land and property are common starts to witch hunts, says Soma Chaudhuri, a sociologist at Michigan State University who studies gender violence in India. Chaudhuri says witch hunts and beatings provide an outlet for men living in poverty to vent frustrations over their own lack of power. “These rural communities are so marginalized and so oppressed, and they have no political resources and no avenues of protest. So what do people do when they’re very frustrated? You look to your surroundings for an easy scapegoat. Women are that scapegoat.” Long-standing cultural traditions of patriarchy, where men are supposed to control family resources, make women who may have inherited their own land easy targets, Chaudhuri says. With those patriarchal values comes misogyny and denigration of women, she adds.

In Gujarat worsening inequalities between urban and rural communities may be another triggering factor, experts say. Gujarat is lauded by the government as one of India’s most developed states. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, led by prime minister Narendra Modi, formerly Gujarat’s chief minister, has even run on the slogan: “I am development, I am Gujarat.” The image that politicians push is of a modernizing region that has moved past issues of gender inequality and bias.

In the villages where Susilaben and her sisters-in-law live in eastern Gujarat’s Dahod District the reality is vastly different, says Kiran Desai, a professor at Veer Narmad South Gujarat University’s Center for Social Studies. Whereas the government can point to highways and hospitals in cities, Desai says, infant mortality in rural areas is rising, air quality is worsening and agricultural conditions are deteriorating. According to the National Family Health Survey, fewer children are immunized and more children under the age of five years are malnourished and severely underweight in Dahod compared with the national average. “It’s an illusion, this Gujarat model of development,” Desai says. “What we’re actually seeing is inequality rising because the model boosted manufacturing in the cities while neglecting agriculture in the villages.” Chaudhuri argues the model completely excludes the communities where many of the women targeted in witch hunts reside, places like Dahod where poverty and sickness boil over into frustration and violence toward women. “The witch hunt is the final expression of frustration.”

Even in the cities, Desai points out, the economic changes have “had an impact on household gender dynamics.” For instance, when the state’s urban textile mills began closing in the 1980s, men were left unemployed and women, who made a living selling vegetables or sewing clothes, became the breadwinners. Chaudhuri has interviewed many of the former mill workers and found the unemployed men retained control of their wives’ finances, and that alcoholism and violence against women increased in the wake of the mill closures.

WOMEN SUPPORTING WOMEN
After Susilaben and her sisters-in-law were attacked as witches, they looked for help at ANANDI, and discovered they were not the only women in Dahod suffering accusations of sorcery. Another woman, Ranjuben, was there, and said she had been accused of being a dakan when a one-year-old girl in her village died. “She was sick for a long time, a year I think. But they said, ‘You ate her,’ and a mob came to beat me,” she recalls. Still another woman, Ushaben, said she was named as a witch when she asked a man to repay a loan.

The women meet regularly at ANANDI’s regional office in Dahod District. One morning last month 15 women sat in a circle on chadors they had draped over the floor. They shared samosas and sang songs about the violence they suffer from men. “Who can I tell about my pain?” sang one woman. Those in the circle responded, singing that they would listen and help.

The group of women work as on-call responders to gender violence. On a visit to a nearby village where a recently widowed woman had been accused of being a dakan, one of the group told her: “Remember our number. Teach the number to your children. If anyone hurts you, call us. We will come and we will even bring the police.”

The women travel from village to village using songs and plays to get the attention of locals while warning village women about the early symptoms of malaria and cholera, teaching them which foods to feed a weaning child, and reminding them that accusations of witchcraft should be reported to the police. “The police don’t write dakan in the [first information report] but we go to the police station and we tell them, ‘This woman was beaten in a witch hunt. Write dakan in your report,’” one member of the group says. She adds that accurate reporting will shed light on the extent of the problem. The organization is pushing the state to enact laws that punish men for branding women dakan.

Susilaben and her two sisters-in-law are taking their case to the courts with the help of ANANDI. They hope to challenge the men who took their land and accused them of witchcraft. In addition to the land grab, the sisters say, the men found a holy man who agreed with the dakan charge and insisted the women pay 30,000 rupees to their male relatives. The sisters-in-law took out a loan to pay the money.

At the morning meeting in ANANDI’s Dahod office, after samosas and masala chai tea are passed around the circle, one woman asks: “Does this kind of thing happen to women elsewhere?” Somebody mentions witch trials in Salem, Mass., in the late 1600s as well as continuing domestic violence in the West. “Yes, it does,” an ANANDI staffer responds. “One way or another, women are under attack everywhere.”

Women apply for most Islamic divorces in Australia, but imams often refuse to grant them. Muslim leaders have condemned domestic violence, though some still teach that husbands can control their wives.

The first time Noor* visited the Board of Imams Victoria, in Melbourne’s Coburg North, to apply for an Islamic divorce, she took with her an audio recording she had secretly made during one of her husband’s violent outbursts.

“It was of one night when he was screaming and yelling at me in front of the children,” said Noor, a Muslim who wore a niqab during her decades-long marriage.

“He was verbally abusing me, smashing doors, ripping up sheets, putting down me and my family … I taped it thinking no one would believe me.”

Once inside the building, a glass-fronted office space wedged between an electrical store and a denture clinic on a sleepy stretch of Sydney Road, Noor sat down nervously before a panel of five male imams and carefully recounted the years of physical, emotional and financial abuse she had suffered at the hands of her husband, who had recently breached the intervention order she had taken out against him.

He often criticised and yelled at her in front of the kids, she told ABC News, for petty reasons — for example, if she didn’t prepare food to his liking.

And he beat her, she said, when she confronted him about his escalating financial abuse.

For a long time, she believed his violence was her fault. “I would think it was reasonable”, she said, “because I thought I’d done something wrong, and I deserved it.”

He also repeatedly threatened to take another wife, which hurt and distressed Noor, not only because they were already struggling financially.

“I’m allowed to marry four women,” he told her. “You have to change your Western mentality.”

Now he was refusing to grant her a religious divorce.

Muslims in Australia may have a civil divorce, but if they do not also obtain a religious divorce, they are considered still married in Islamic law — and in the eyes of their community.

Getting an Islamic divorce, however, can be a difficult and protracted process, especially for women, who face stricter requirements for initiating divorce than men, depending on the laws of their cultural community.

While a husband is allowed to divorce his wife at any time, without cause, often imams will not grant a woman divorce without her husband’s consent, or proof she has legitimate grounds for an annulment (which, depending on the legal school, can include infidelity, physical, financial or emotional harm, and sexual dysfunction).

In theory, domestic violence is one such reason: if a woman can prove her husband has been abusive — for example, by producing an intervention order, or photographs of her physical injuries — imams in Australia say they’ll dissolve the marriage and hand over the paperwork, no problem.

But in practice, advocates and survivors say many imams are denying women the right to divorce, in too many cases detaining them in abusive marriages for years.

Confronting domestic violence in Islam

Most Muslims believe Islam abhors violence. So why do some say the Koran sanctions “lightly” beating your wife?
This was Noor’s experience. Having presented the Board of Imams with what she believed was sufficient evidence, she was hopeful they’d acknowledge her husband’s violence and swiftly grant a divorce.

Instead they dismissed the tape, she said, and told her to give the relationship another chance. “I honestly thought they weren’t listening to me,” she said. “They wanted me to go back and try again for the sake of the kids.”

When she insisted she had tried, that she had made up her mind, they told her they needed to hear her husband’s “side of the story” and that they’d be in touch after that.

It took six months for the Board of Imams to get back to her, Noor said, at which point they claimed to have forgotten the details of her case and asked her to come back in to retell her story.

Eventually, after a year of waiting, calling, praying, Noor — who had moved in with her parents — withdrew her divorce application, defeated and depleted.

“It killed me,” she said. At that stage she wasn’t interested in starting a new relationship; she simply longed to be free of a man who for years had controlled every aspect of her life.

“For me to move on psychologically I had to get that Islamic divorce … I just wanted closure for me and my children, and at the same time I wanted [my ex] to stop saying I was his wife.”

‘It’s easier to divorce in some Muslim countries’
In many Muslim countries around the world, women-led campaigns to reform Islamic laws governing marriage and divorce are gaining momentum.

In India, for example, the government is set to introduce new laws banning Muslim men from instantly divorcing their wives simply by pronouncing “talaq” — the Arabic word for divorce — three times.

Some countries — including Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia and Morocco — also stipulate women’s right to initiate divorce in standard marriage contracts.

But in Australia, where Islamic law (sharia) operates in the shadow of the official legal system and the all-male imams who administer it with impunity, Muslim women’s right to leave a marriage is not always recognised.

Compounding the problem, social workers and survivors say, is the fact that many imams are ignorant or dismissive of the dynamics and seriousness of domestic violence.

(There is no evidence suggesting Muslim women experience domestic abuse at a higher rate; no reliable data on this question has ever been collected in Australia.)

An illustration shows a woman in a purple head scarf sitting before a panel of unidentifiable men.
An interviewed several Muslim women in Australia who have experienced great difficulty getting a divorce.

Many were threatened, raped or beaten by their husbands after instigating the process; one, a Lebanese Muslim woman living in Melbourne, said she had left her husband nine years ago but had been denied a divorce several times by the Board of Imams Victoria, who said they couldn’t track the man down to seek his approval.

Now, advocates are sounding the alarm and demanding agency and equality for women in the Islamic divorce process, which they say is not only stacked against women and re-traumatising for survivors of abuse, but putting women’s lives at risk.

Do you have a story to share? If you are a Muslim survivor of domestic abuse, or have experience with the Islamic divorce process in Australia, please get in touch (we respect your confidentiality):

Salma*, who has worked with Australian Muslim women escaping violence for more than two decades, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from imams, says she has never seen a woman get an Islamic divorce easily “unless her husband wants to divorce her, too”.

“It is easier to get a divorce in some Muslim countries” — where women’s rights are outlined in statutory laws — “than it is in Australia,” Salma said.

“That’s not without its complications, and women can still have a difficult time, but they’re not held captive by how a particular imam at a particular mosque interprets sharia.”

Trapping women in unwanted marriages is a form of abuse, Salma says, and a violation of human rights: “For women to not have the absolute right to leave a marriage is the very definition of structural violence and it needs to change.”

Imams say they have taken steps in recent years to improve the process for women — for example, by participating in family violence training programs and employing women to assist with divorce applications involving domestic abuse.

“We don’t force any woman to go back to her husband or ‘be patient’ — that’s not the way,” said Sheikh Muhammad Nawas Saleem, the secretary of the Board of Imams Victoria, one of several informal councils of imams in Australia that adjudicates Islamic divorce (these councils represent the Sunni denomination of Islam, of which the vast majority of Muslims in Australia are part).

But an ABC investigation — part of an ongoing series examining the complex links between religion and domestic violence — has found that just in the past few weeks, several women with family violence intervention orders have been told to return to unsafe marriages by the Board of Imams Victoria.

(In Victoria, a family violence intervention order is made by a magistrate to protect a person from family violence, including physical, emotional, financial and sexual abuse.)

‘But he doesn’t hit you’
One woman who had suffered severe physical and emotional abuse by her husband for more than a decade applied to the Board of Imams Victoria for a divorce earlier this year.

But according to a family violence worker assisting the woman, during one of her meetings the imams said they would not finalise the divorce unless she first came in to discuss the terms with her husband.

The fact that she had an intervention order against him didn’t matter, they said; she could sit in one corner of the room and her husband in another.

“I was shocked,” said the family violence worker, who asked not to be named. “There’s no respect for the law.”

In a subsequent meeting, the worker said, the imams told the woman to go back to her husband and “try again” for a month.

“They tried to convince her to go back. They said, ‘for the sake of the kids, go back’,” she said. “But it was for the sake of her children that she left him in the first place.”

Part of the problem is the stubborn belief among many imams that domestic abuse is only ever physical.

Late last year, Maryam*, a mother of three living in Melbourne, met twice with the Board of Imams Victoria.

The two imams handling her divorce application disregarded her husband’s abuse and insisted she go back to him, she said, despite the fact she had left him several times in recent years and had previously taken out an intervention order against him.

An illustration shows a woman wearing a hijab kneeling on a carpet, praying.
Her husband, who is still refusing to agree to the divorce, had been controlling from the beginning of their marriage, she told ABC News: she wasn’t allowed to spend a cent without his permission, he tried to stop her from working and he was critical of her housework, yelling at her and complaining to her family if she didn’t cook and clean to his liking.

He even tracked the kilometres she drove in the car, she said, and accused her of lying about where she’d been if the odometer showed a higher reading than he believed was appropriate.

“I told them [the imams] it’s an emotionally, psychologically and financially abusive relationship. But they were like, ‘But he doesn’t hit you’ … Because he wasn’t hitting me they didn’t consider it domestic violence,” Maryam said.

“I’m really upset, and I’m disappointed in them because they’re supposed to be leaders and role models, and instead they’re pushing me back to an abusive relationship and just telling me to live with it.”

Survivors say this attitude — that women are unqualified to make decisions about their own safety and wellbeing — is evident among Australia’s most senior Islamic clerics.

(A Sunni Islamic scholar, the Grand Mufti is elected by the Australian National Imams Council. A new Mufti was elected last month.)

Jewish wives held hostage in abusive marriages

An upsurge in cases of men refusing to grant their wives a religious divorce is causing mounting alarm in Australian Jewish communities.
Sitting in his Fairfield office, she claims she told him she had fled the marital home and was adamant there was no going back: “At times he was compassionate,” Yasmin said.

“But he said that, because I am a woman, I was very emotional and that I wasn’t thinking with a clear mind. He told me to go away and think about it before I made a decision.”

At no point during her meetings with him, she claims, did the Mufti refer her to any domestic violence services or suggest she go to police: “I felt really let down … that I didn’t really have a voice,” she said.

“I was terrified of something bad happening — people were telling me that leaving is the most dangerous time, and I didn’t know what he [my ex] was capable of. And yet I was being made to feel as if I was making the wrong decision, that I didn’t know how to keep a marriage going … that I was too free-minded.”

After several weeks — and, according to Yasmin, two heated arguments with the Mufti about her Islamic rights and entitlements — she says she was reluctantly granted a divorce, though her dealings with him and other Western Sydney imams have left her scarred.

“If I ever had an ounce of love for my religion, it’s been taken away from me because of the way these men have completely hijacked it to benefit them.”

In a response from his lawyers, Dr Ibrahim said he was “very surprised by these allegations”.

He stressed that he does not divorce couples, nor officiate Islamic marriages, and “does not ordinarily meet with members of the public to discuss these issues”.

He added that it is the Australian National Imams Council’s “procedure to refer the victims of any suspected emotional or psychological forms of domestic abuse to a psychologist … and any physical domestic abuse to the police” and that he has “certainly employed this practice in his personal capacity”.

Women do not have equal rights to divorce
So if refusing to let women leave violent marriages is, as imams insist, “not the way”, if they are taking domestic violence as seriously as they claim, why are women still struggling to access religious divorce? What can be done? And why are so few women prepared to speak out about their experience?

Interviewed dozens of survivors, social workers, women’s advocates, academics and imams over the past four months with three main findings.

First, the Islamic divorce process is often inconsistent and ad-hoc, confusing for women to navigate, lacking in procedural fairness and administered by imams who operate with no oversight or accountability.

Second, imams’ response to women seeking divorce from abusive husbands shows a persistent lack of awareness — or worse, a blatant ignorance or denial — of the dynamics of domestic violence and the legal conditions of intervention orders.

Family violence and murder in Australian Hindu and Sikh communities

There are growing concerns about a recent, significant increase in domestic violence in Hindu and Sikh communities, a crisis which has become public in a spate of horrific deaths.
As a result, women are being told by imams who claim to be acting in the name of Islamic law to be patient with violent marriages.

But the crux of the issue, experts say, is the fact that the laws governing Islamic divorce in Australia are based on deeply conservative, patriarchal interpretations of Islam, which means women’s rights are ultimately ignored.

As Salma said: “Unless women are given the right to divorce that is equivalent to men’s, every other sort of reform is window-dressing.”

In addition, many Muslims believe Islamophobia in Australia continually distorts any discussion of their religion with an intensity and focus on fringe groups or sentiments that do not represent the whole community.

This, they say, deters them from speaking out about issues like gender inequality and domestic violence and is stifling progress in Muslim communities, by giving cover to imams, and perpetuating the silence among women, leaving them more vulnerable to abuse.

Simply raising the issue is often construed as an attack on Islam, rather than an opportunity to examine cultural factors — or patriarchal structures — within Muslim communities that may be exacerbating or concealing abuse.

Imams were put on notice a decade ago
The little evidence that has been produced on family violence in Muslim communities has long been buried.

A decade ago, imams accused of condoning domestic violence were put on notice when a landmark report by the Islamic Women’s Welfare Council of Victoria revealed some imams were condoning rape in marriage, hindering police from pursuing domestic violence charges and denying abused women seeking Islamic divorce their rights and entitlements.

The 2008 research, which was commissioned and funded by the Howard Government, involved “extensive community consultation” with Muslim women, community and legal workers and police.

Imams, who it said were ill-equipped to respond to complex modern problems including marriage, divorce and domestic abuse, were also reported to have conducted polygamous and underage marriages.

In response, Sheikh Fehmi Naji El-Imam, then Mufti of Australia, said it was “absolutely wrong” that women’s rights were ignored in marriage or divorce, or that imams brushed aside domestic violence.

He also “absolutely” denied the issues raised in the report. “They must have heard stories here and there and are writing about them as though they are fact,” he said of the Islamic Women’s Welfare Council.

The report then vanished and has never been publicly released; the Home Affairs department said it was unable to supply News with a copy because “it is not a publicly available report”. It declined to provide further comment.

What are imams saying about abuse?
However, the problems identified in the 2008 report are still significant, and remain unaddressed, Muslim women say.

A close examination of public statements by some influential Muslim clerics reveals conflicting messages about whether Islam allows for — or even at times condones — the non-physical abuse and control of women.

Sheikh Shady Alsuleiman, the president of the Australian National Imams Council, was the lead signatory on a letter signed last year by more than 30 Muslim figures that condemned “all forms of intimidation and abuse targeting women.

(ABC NEWS)

A young woman who was left paralysed from the neck down after suffering a severe stroke has written a book using only her eyes.

Mia Austin, 29, was just 21 years old when a stroke left her trapped in her own body, unable to speak.
Diagnosed with ‘locked in syndrome’, a condition doctors describe as “the closest thing to being buried alive:, she can see, hear, and think as normal, but cannot move from the neck down and has to be fed through a tube.

Austin can only communicate through eye movement and a spelling chart – the method she used to pen her book, In the Blink of an Eye.

In her introduction, Austin writes: “I must have woken on the morning of November 16 2009, totally oblivious as to what was going to happen because I’d been to work, as usual, nothing different, followed by the gym where I did my normal workout.”

She further writes, “I went straight in to tell my mum how badly I’d done (at the gym) and she replied ‘There’s always tomorrow’…How ironic.”

“Welcome to my story all about me. Now you can get into the head of a stroke victim,” she then elaborates.

After Austin suffered the stroke at her home in Wirral, doctors told her family to expect the worst. They didn’t believe Austin, who was put on a life support machine at Arrowe Park Hospital, Merseyside, would survive the night.

However, as they were preparing to withdraw life support, Austin opened her eyes.

Despite being completely immobile, doctors realised she could still see, hear and think as normal and she was diagnosed with ‘locked in syndrome’ a week later.

Speaking of his daughter’s book, Austin’s father Rick said: “Personally, I feel incredibly proud of Mia. To write a book in quite literally a blink of an eye is outstanding. It took her around one year to write but it was a very laborious task, using her eyes to choose each letter.”

The family, including Austin’s bother Sam, 32, and sister Sophie, 25, all helped Austin using a spelling chart to write poems and short stories in the hospital. Carole said, “As you can imagine using the spelling graph took forever, it was very tiring for her, it is so much easier now she has the special computer.”

The book sees Austin write about her experiences and addresses all the questions everyone probably wants to know but are too polite to ask.

The book is by no means Austin’s only incredible feat of determination. She completed a criminology course at Wirral Metropolitan College in 2017 before signing up for a forensics course with the Open University. And this year she will begin another course in criminal justice.

Around 300 students from various colleges in the city donning black outfits, and sashes of ‘#AmINext’ worn around their heads and hands flocked under the banner of Humanising India, a students’ initia

Around 300 students from various colleges in the city donning black outfits, and sashes of ‘#AmINext’ worn around their heads and hands flocked under the banner of Humanising India, a students’ initiative to stir awareness and protest against atrocities towards women.Humanising India conducted a silent march from St. Joseph’s College (Autonomous), Shantinagar to the Town Hall, spearheaded by Arya Samaj supremo, Swami Agnivesh, on Thursday afternoon. The protest march took place in light of the recent horrific events of rape in Kathua and Unnao.“What we are used to is, they see, they empathise, they sympathise, but they do not speak up;
they are just like ‘it keeps happening’ but we need to start taking a stand, we need to speak up,” said Renita, a student of St. Joseph’s College who is said to be the brainchild of this movement.On being asked why Swami Agnivesh was invited to head the protest, one of the organisers said, “He is the only person who wears a saffron outfit but does not have a saffron ideology. He has also very boldly stood out and spoken about atrocities not only against women, but also other sections of society.”Swami Agnivesh highlighted the deplorable state of sexual abuse victims, speaking in the context of occurrences of communal violence and hate speeches perpetuated towards the minority communities and women at large. He cited examples of violence towards the Rohingyas, Bakarwal Muslims and the dreadful Unnao case in Uttar Pradesh.
The Arya Samaj scholar also alleged that most rape cases were reported in states ruled by the BJP, for which, justice keeps getting delayed.The gathering ended with the lighting of candles and singing prayers, followed by a brief moment of silence in remembrance of the victims. Humanising India roped in 22 educational institutions for the silent protest march to provoke actions by pious and effective means.

An untoward incident can happen to anyone at any moment. You may be walking home from somewhere when suddenly, you become the victim of a crime. A teenager in Salt Lake, Kolkata, displayed an exemplary presence of mind and taught her attackers a lesson they’ll never forget.

The teenage girl was returning home on April 18, from the Sports Authority of India complex, where she trains in judo for two hours each day. Bijoy Das and four minor boys allegedly passed lewd comments at her.
Initially, the girl ignored them, but the gang allegedly molested her and tried to drag her to a dark, deserted area. Unfortunately for the gang, the girl happened to hold a blue belt in judo. She fought back bravely, and hit her attackers, managing to escape and reach home safely.
Back home, she told her father, a priest at a local temple, about the incident. The father returned to the spot, and found the gang, and asked them why they had harassed his daughter. The unscrupulous gang members assaulted the poor priest, raining blows on him before running away.

The father lodged a complaint with the Bidhannagar South Police Station, where authorities swung into action and picked up all five molesters from their houses.

According to Amit Jalvagi, Deputy Commissioner, Headquarters, Bidhannagar Commissionerate, in The Telegraph, the gang members were regular offenders, who harassed women every evening. The girl’s neighbour, told The Telegraph, that the gang took advantage of the dark stretch devoid of street lights to indulge in anti-social activities.

Thanks to the efforts of the girl and her father, the accused were produced before a juvenile board on Tuesday and sent to an observation home. They will be presented before the board again. Bijoy Das, the only adult among the accused, was taken to court at Barasat and will remain in judicial custody till April 30.

Failed by flawed government policies and left out of development programs, women farmers around India are coming together to demand fair treatment and access the support to which they are entitled.
Sitting outside her house in Rakhukhor village, Suhbawati Devi describes the daily routine she shares with her friends. “Our day begins at the break of the dawn,” says Devi, 41. “After completing all household work and sending the children to school, we go to the field to cultivate our land. In the afternoon, we return home to attend to our livestock. Soon after, we go back to the field where we work until sunset.”

The farms where the women work in eastern Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, are small. But they are essential to the survival of their families, who rely on the income they earn by selling the vegetables they grow. “We have a number of mouths to feed,” Devi says. “We pay for our children’s education and [we have to] be prepared for unforeseen expenses like someone falling ill or crops failing.”

Small and marginal land holdings – anything smaller than 2 hectares (4.9 acres) – account for almost half of the net irrigated land in India, and in most rural and semi-urban areas in Uttar Pradesh the average size of cultivating land for small and marginal farmers is only 0.5 hectares. Farms of that size do not produce enough to support the farmers’ often large families, so many men from the villages migrate to urban areas to work, leaving the entire burden of agricultural output on women.

A 2012 report by U.N. Women, the United Nations’ gender-equality agency, found that 79 percent of the women in India’s rural workforce are engaged in agricultural activities, compared with 63 percent of men. But women have almost no opportunity to make decisions about the land they work.

According the latest economic survey of India, women constitute more than 55 percent of the farming sector’s main workers – defined as anyone who spends six months or more a year making money through agricultural activities – yet they hold only 12.8 percent of agricultural assets.

To address that disparity, the government has introduced a number of measures over the past year. They include boosting access to micro-credit for women’s self-help groups and ensuring that at least 30 percent of the budget for all government agriculture development schemes is targeted to women. Last year the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare declared Oct. 15 Women Farmers’ Day.

But activists say the policies and interventions have done little to improve the lives of female farmers.

“I can tell you not a single government program has ever reached a woman in my village,” says Saroj Patil, 41, a farmer and activist from Jalgoan district in the western Indian state of Maharashtra.

“The patriarchy is so dominant and caste system so deeply rooted that, in reality, women’s right to property is a distant dream. Men simply want women to be confined to the walls of their homes.”

‘They Always Ask for Our Husbands’
In Rakhukhor village, the women farmers say without property or land in their names, they are not eligible for loans offered under government schemes. With their husbands often away for months at a time, “when we need money to buy seeds or fertilisers or to deal with emergencies, we have to [pawn] our jewellery to a private money lender who exploits us by charging astronomical rates of interest,” Devi says.

“In reality, women have no say in the decision-making process. Women are not seen as farmers, but simply as the support hands for the men.”

When government workers come to the village to run programs to help farmers boost their crop yields, the women are often ignored and undervalued. “They always ask for our husbands,” says another farmer, Premshiela Devi (no relation). “There are no women officers in this sector and if we ask something twice the men get agitated, which makes us very uncomfortable. We are never invited to any meetings in the village where they discuss farmers’ issues because we don’t own any land. The society here believes that things outside home are the prerogative of men.”

Even in cases where land is registered in a woman’s name, it may only be because doing that can save a man some money – in some states, women property buyers pay lower stamp duty. “In reality, women have no say in the decision-making process,” says Shiraz Wajih, director of Gorakhpur Environment Action Group, an NGO that advocates for female farmers’ rights. “Women are not seen as farmers, but simply as the support hands for the men.”

Vicious Cycle of Poverty
On March 12, tens of thousands of farmers from across Maharashtra state marched on the state capital Mumbai, demanding fair prices for their produce and waivers on loans after unseasonable rain destroyed their crops.
Patil, the activist from Jalgoan, was among them. She says farmers across India believe the lopsided government policies are ruining their livelihoods. “Men are committing suicide because of the inability to pay their debts and it is women who bear the brunt,” she says. Between January and October last year, 2,414 farmers took their own lives in the state of Maharashtra alone.

Experts point to a number of government missteps that are putting a strain on India’s farmers, including confusing pricing mechanisms, poor storage facilities and short-sighted market regulation. Large farms can usually absorb the dramatic price swings that happen as a result, but for smallholder farmers, most of whom are women, “such erratic fluctuation of prices can be devastating as they have no other recourse to recover their loss when crops fail,” Nirja Bhatnagar, head of Action Aid in Maharashtra, says.

“The situation is so bad that in villages in Maharashtra most women farmers are malnourished, and this has a toll on their children’s health. The system is keeping farmers in the vicious cycle of poverty.”

Raised Voices and Collective Action
As they try to provide for their families in the face of failing policies and oppressive cultural attitudes, some women farmers in India are finding strength in numbers.

A self-help group of women farmers in Suras village in eastern Uttar Pradesh realized they were missing out on government benefits and so, in 2006, they decided to organize themselves into a union. Its head, Saraswati Devi, 55, now represents 29 villages, and leads protest rallies to the government’s doorstep in the state capital, Lucknow. “If the government does not come to us, we shall come to the government,” she says.

The women in the village say in the past they were sidelined when it came to government initiatives like the Kisan Credit Card scheme. The card gives farmers short-term credit during the planting and harvesting season and comes with benefits such as crop insurance and personal accident benefit. The scheme launched in 1998, but until recently women could not apply because most have no land registered in their names.

Then the women discovered they could apply for the cards if they formed a joint liability group, in which all of the members are responsible for repaying any money borrowed by the group. Banks in India are obliged to give joint liability groups access to loans and credit even if the members have no collateral. “The bank started trusting us because women repaid the loans more regularly than men,” Devi says.

Today, almost all the women farmers in the village have Kisan Credit Cards, as well as access to several other incentives that were once only offered to men.

“As women we have been exploited for centuries, but we never raised our voice,” Devi says. “But now we realize unless we are brave and strong from within and collectively raise our voice, women will never get their rights. Now we have decided to climb to the top of the mountain, and we will do that.”

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced a series of initiatives aimed at addressing a disturbingly high rate of maternal mortality among black women, who are four times more likely to die in childbirth than white women in New York State, according to a study released last year.

The plan includes a pilot program that will expand Medicaid coverage for doulas, birth coaches who provide women with physical and emotional support during pregnancy and childbirth.

Studies show the calming presence and supportive reinforcement of doulas can help increase birth outcomes and reduce birth complications for the mother and the baby. Still, only a small percentage of women use doulas nationwide.

Hiring a doula — the word means “servant” in Greek — can be expensive. Doulas can charge more birth, and studies show there is little diversity in the doula work force.

Black and low-income women are the most likely to want but not have access to doula services, according to one survey. Medicaid coverage for doula services, state officials hope, would help bridge racial disparities and reduce maternal deaths.

“Maternal mortality should not be a fear anyone in New York should have to face in the 21st century,” Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, said in a statement on Sunday. “We are taking aggressive action to break down barriers that prevent women from getting the prenatal care and information they need.”

The United States’ soaring rates in maternal mortality compared with other wealthy nations have become a cause of concern, but so have the racial disparities, an intractable phenomenon that has not eluded New York. In New York City, the numbers are worse: Black women are 12 times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women, according to a city study.

The design of the doula pilot program will be finalized by the state’s Health Department within 45 days, and the program will start immediately thereafter. The state will work with health care professionals to determine how many women will be enrolled in the pilot program, state officials said.

If the doula program is successful, New York would join Minnesota and Oregon as the only states that allow Medicaid reimbursements for doula services.

Providing this service, however, has not always been smooth. In Minnesota, not many Medicaid beneficiaries were aware of doula coverage, and reimbursement rates were low, one study found. Additionally, doulas are not licensed in New York, which might be a challenge because Medicaid programs must pay licensed providers to receive matching federal funds.

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A doula and committee member of the Rochester Area Birth Network, was encouraged by a possible Medicaid expansion, but cautioned that it could change the essence of the doula profession because a doula might be required to work for a provider whose interests are not aligned with the mother’s.

“When doulas get paid by someone other than the mother, it gets to the question of, Who does the doula work for?” Ms. Deutschbein said. “I’d have to see more of the details.”

In fact, New York’s Health Department once shied away from the idea of expanding Medicaid coverage for doulas in 2011, saying it was a “complex issue.”

“We see it as this really critical piece of improving outcomes most especially for most at-risk mothers,” said Élan McAllister, a former doula and a co-founder

“There’s something about having a support person who can bring humanity into a situation and who cares that you survive childbirth and get through it.”

The governor is also creating the Task Force on Maternal Mortality and Disparate Racial Outcomes, which will collaborate with the Maternal Mortality Review Board, a new entity composed of health professionals that will review each maternal death in the state.

The board will count all maternal deaths outside the five boroughs, as New York City began a similar program in December to investigate each maternal death in the city and understand its causes and circumstances.

The state is also expanding prenatal education programs for women and reviewing best practices in hospitals to address hemorrhaging, one of the leading causes of pregnancy-related deaths.

A prominent international level sportswoman from Maharashtra has accused a Karnataka doctor of raping her for two years, police said.

According to Investigating Officer Dilip Tibile of Karveer Police Station, the complaint was received earlier this week from the 33-year-old sportswoman against a doctor living in Gulbarga town in north Karnataka.

“The complainant has said the accused has repeatedly raped for over two years with hopes of marriage and then renegeding on his promise. The accused is absconding and we are on the lookout,” Tibile told IANS.

The victim said she came in touch with the doctor via social media in December 2016 and after sometime, he visited Kolhapur to meet her.

Later, he proposed marriage and since he appeared to be from a respectable background, she agreed to the proposal.

Subsequently, till March, he called her on two occasions to Goa and Bengaluru and sexually assaulted her, as per the complaint, said Tibile.

When she reminded him of the marriage proposal, he flatly refused to marry her, leading to a major argument.

Shocked by this, the sportswoman threatened to lodge a police complaint. However he retorted by warning her of dire consequences on social media and even threatened to kill her, according to her complaint.

Taking serious note of the grievances, the Kolhapur Police have formed teams to hunt down the doctor, said Tibile.

The Maharashtra Police has sought the help from its Karnataka counterpart to help trace the accused and bring him to justice.

Last year, the number of women making the journey from Nigeria to Italy, via Libya, was almost double that of the year before. But in their attempt to escape crippling poverty, the women end up caught in trafficking rings, abused and exploited.
As she sat in the rubber boat that was taking her to Italy, Blessing,16, thought of a tale her grandmother had told her once, about a goddess of the sea who had the power to swallow souls forever or save them.

One night last September, a man had woken her up with a kick while Blessing (not her real name) was sleeping on the floor of an abandoned warehouse in Zawiya, on the western coast of Libya. He told her the weather was good, the sea was finally calm and it was time to head to Europe.

Now she was floating in a boat across the water, which was darker and bigger than she could have ever imagined. But she was not afraid. “On the other side of the sea, beyond the divinity that kills or forgives, there is Italy,” Blessing told herself.

She thought there was a job waiting for her. But in Italy she only found abuse and exploitation.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM), says 11,009 women came from Nigeria to Italy by sea in 2016, almost double the 5,600 who made that same journey the year before. A report by the organization estimates that 80 percent of the Nigerian women who came to Italy in 2016 were – or still are – potential victims of trafficking.

“What our report shows is that human trafficking networks are becoming brutal and efficient to exploit the vulnerability of migrants,” said Simona Moscarelli, an anti-trafficking expert at IOM, in an official statement.

Blessing grew up in a village in Imo State, one of the poorest areas in Nigeria. Her father died when she was 7 years old, and she and her siblings stopped going to school. Her older brother had to take a job as a mechanic. Some of the other children in the family started selling water and bread in the streets or turned to begging.

One day, a woman approached Blessing in the village market. “I know your family needs help, they need money,” the woman told her. “My sister lives in Europe and she can help you.” The woman had also spoken to Blessing’s friend Gift, 15, saying that in Europe many families needed cooks. Both girls loved to cook.

“The woman told me and Gift to follow a friend of hers, who would accompany and protect us from Nigeria to Libya. So one night we took a backpack and ran away,” Blessing says.

The woman’s friend was one of the many “connection men” who have become key figures in human trafficking. They usually work for criminal organizations, taking girls from their home nations through Libya and, if they escape arrest or drowning, on to Italy.

“The traffickers know they can take advantage of Nigerian poverty and, on the other end, the power vacuum in Libya.”

When the girls finally got to Italy, their connection man gave them a mobile number and told them to call their madam.

“When I came to my madam, she told me I had to start working immediately to repay the debt of the trip. In that moment, I realized that my debt was 40,000 euros,” says Blessing.

“She gave me a bra, saying: This is your job. Go onto the street at night and come back in the morning with money.”

That was how Blessing found herself standing half-naked on a road near a disused bridge in the province of Asti, northern Italy. “The first night, I hid behind the bushes and cried. I just wanted to call my mom and go away, go home,” she says.

“I wasn’t angry. I was just full of shame.”

Blessing says she was beaten until she agreed to work. For three months, she was forced to have sex with up to six men a day. “I did not know Italian,” she says. “My madam had only taught me to say ‘20 euros’ or ‘30 euros’ based on what those men asked me to do.”

Then one day, another Nigerian woman named Princess approached Blessing on the street. “I know what you are doing, because I’ve lived it too,” the woman told her.

Princess is the cofounder of PIAM Onlus, an Italian NGO working to rescue trafficked girls. The organization’s other founder, Alberto Mossino, says the rise of Nigerian girls being trafficked to Italy is indicative of the growing power of traffickers.

“In the past two years, we have seen that many girls reach Europe in a very short period, sometimes less than one month, from a village in deepest Nigeria to Italy,” says Mossino. “This means the mafia who control the trafficking have the power to bribe the tribes and militias along the journey. And the traffickers know they can take advantage of Nigerian poverty and, on the other end, the power vacuum in Libya.”

“When I called my sister, to tell her what was going on, she shouted that I had to do prostitution, otherwise [the traffickers] would ask for their money back.”

Mossino says the work that groups like PIAM Onlus do to help the girls is made more difficult by the lack of government support. If a girl who escapes her traffickers is under the age of 18, she usually ends up in one of the country’s various centers for minors, where she can stay until she turns 21. After that, she is expected to find a job and a place to live, with little help.

Mossino would like to see centers and programs dedicated specifically to trafficking victims. PIAM Onlus runs six such homes in Asti, but it’s not nearly enough, he says. “Trafficked girls need specific projects and for [that] we surely need more funds. Many of the girls risk ending up in the hands of the traffickers again, and just being moved to other European countries.”

Happiness lives in a government-run center for minors near Bologna. When she turns 21, she has to leave the center and find a job and a home on her own. (Alessio Romenzi)

Happiness, 16, lives in a government center for minors near Bologna. Sometimes she thinks of her family back in Benin City, and she cries.

Last year, her sister had suggested she leave Nigeria for Germany, where a woman was looking to hire a hairdresser. After a week of traveling, Happiness was in Libya, sitting in a minivan being driven to Tripoli. She told the driver she wanted to go home.

“Impossible,” he told her. “Your sister has sold you, now you will learn to work here in Libya.”

Happiness was held in a house on the outskirts of the city and forced into prostitution, along with about 30 other girls. “An older woman told us that we would have to practice before we went to Italy,” she says.

When another group of girls from Nigeria arrived at the house four months later, Happiness was taken to Garaboli, on Libya’s western coast, to wait for the rubber boat that would take her to Italy. Once in Sicily, Happiness ripped up the sheet of paper with the number she was supposed to call to reach her madam. Instead, she found her way to a local humanitarian NGO and asked for help.

Now Happiness is waiting to see what will happen to her next. “When I called my sister, to tell her what was going on, she shouted that I had to do prostitution, otherwise [the traffickers] would ask for their money back.”