₦airaland Forum

The bodies of women, which Indian societies consider the storehouse of their bloodline’s honor, don’t belong to them as much as they do to their families. But for Dalit women, their bodies are also where the upper-caste societies deliver abuse and caste violence.

When upper-caste men need to remind a Dalit family of their place, they attack and abuse Dalit women. But even when punishment is not the point, upper-caste men feel they are entitled to sexual and physical ownership over Dalit women. Among the 500 (mostly rural) women that the authors of Dalit Women Speak Out, a study of the systemic violence that Dalit women face, interviewed, many spoke about the shocking practice of an upper-caste man r**ing a young Dalit bride on her wedding night. This r**e and abuse continue throughout her life, where any upper-caste man can r**e her any time he wants. When the husband of the woman sees the footwear of an upper-caste man outside his house, it is a sign, and he must spend the night elsewhere.

Dalit women who must deal with the horror and trauma of r**e are also often imprisoned on false charges for trying to get justice.

Upper-caste men also use public humiliation, mutilation and brutal violence against Dalit women to keep their families and entire Dalit communities in check. They use this violence on Dalit women to kill any pushback or dissent. It is also used to remind Dalits of their place if they are seen improving their lives by wearing good clothes, getting educated or making money.

The case triggered a nationwide outcry over one of India’s rampant problems: a decades-long struggle to curb rising sexual violence against women.

Reports of horrific sexual assaults on women have become familiar in India, where police recorded 31,516 r**e cases in 2022, a 20% increase from 2021, according to the National Crime Records Bureau.

The real figure is believed to be far higher due to the stigma surrounding sexual violence and victims’ lack of faith in police. Women’s rights activists say the problem is particularly acute in rural areas, where victims of sexual assault are sometimes shamed by the community and families worry about their social standing.

“Often, the victims are victimized further with insults, and it makes it very difficult for them to report the crime to the police. In such cases, women think it is best to keep quiet,” said Mariam Dhawale, a women’s rights activist and general secretary of the All India Democratic Women’s Association.

The country has seen a surge in crimes against women, according to figures from the National Crime Records Bureau. A staggering 445,256 cases were registered in 2022 alone, equivalent to nearly 51 reports every hour

However, since Modi’s party has been in power, the country has witnessed a further spurt in violence against women. The 2021 data of the National Crime Records Bureau reveals that on average, eighty-six women were r**ed every day in India, while forty-nine cases of crimes against women were lodged every single hour. The overall number of crimes against women per one hundred thousand of the population increased from 56.3 in 2014 to 66.4 in 2022.

Growing violence against women reflects not only a deep patriarchal bias but also an utter institutional failure. At times, we have seen the BJP defending and protecting those accused of violence against women. For example, the union minister of women and child development, Smriti Irani, shamefully lashed out at victims who publicly expose their perpetrators, accusing them of “defaming” the government.

A flagship project of Angola’s former president José Eduardo dos Santos era, the ‘new city’, located on the outskirts of the capital Luanda, has not lived up to all its promises. However, projects of this type are multiplying, encouraged by the current president, João Lourenço.
All African cities are looking for solutions to manage their growth. Luanda, Angola’s capital, which is home to almost a third of the country’s 33 million inhabitants, is no exception to the rule. In recent years, the creation of ‘new centralities’ (novas centralidades in Portuguese) has multiplied on the outskirts of the metropolis and the other provinces of the lusophone world’s oil giant.

This movement started by former president José Eduardo dos Santos, who was in power from 1979 to 2017, has continued with his successor João Lourenço, and for good reason. In Angola, as elsewhere on the continent, the demographic boom and galloping urbanisation are generating a growing need for housing, which Angolan authorities intend to meet by building new cities.

The flagship of this policy is Kilamba Kiaxi, which was created by the Chinese group Citic, about 30 km from Luanda. The giant city of 20,000 flats is visible from afar due to its size and the bright colours delineating the different blocks of buildings. It was inaugurated in July 2011 with great pomp by President dos Santos, shortly before the 2012 general elections.

A trailblazing project
At the time, Kilamba Kiaxi, an African trailblazer in terms of its scale, was presented as a solution to the housing deficit for an emerging middle class. The reality turned out to be more complex. After a difficult start, notably because of high property prices, the city finally came to life and even expanded with the construction of 5,000 additional homes. However, its growth was thwarted by the economic crisis, caused by the fall in oil prices, which hit the country between 2014 and 2016. Since then, Kilamba has regained momentum and continues to inspire many Angolans, despite its limitations.

During its early days, the city was sometimes referred to as a ghost town or a white elephant, but has still managed to beat the odds. Almost fully occupied and connected to water and electricity, Kilamba Kiaxi has become one of the Angolan capital’s districts in its own right, with local administration and police, health centres and sports fields, a huge supermarket, a few local shops and street vendors.

“In Angola, there is no better offer in terms of nurseries and schools,” says one resident, pointing to the infrastructure nestled in the centre of each block of buildings. To make the area more attractive, authorities have relocated certain public services and even university classes to the area, as well as adding a church, a shopping centre and a hotel. “Kilamba is less and less a commuter town,” says one resident who has lived there since 2013. “Even if everything isn’t perfect, those of us who live here are happy to be the envy of many, proof of the city’s attractiveness.”

Lower sales prices
Before reaching this point, however, two major things occurred. The first was a 30% to 40% reduction in the sale price of flats. Put on the market from $120,000 to $200,000 for three to five-room flats, these apartments only found takers a year later, after the state offered a rent-to-own scheme with a preferential interest rate, reducing the price of the smallest flat from $120,000 to $84,000. This programme was costly for the state, but paved the way for the arrival of many civil servants.

The second aspect concerns the management of the housing stock. It was initially entrusted to the private company Delta Imobiliaria and then handed over to Sonip, a subsidiary dedicated to national oil company Sonangol’s real estate investments. The program was later entrusted to the private company Imogestin for marketing, alongside the Housing Support Fund – which is part of the ministry of public works – for the collection of rent. Although the system seems to have stabilised, there is still room for improvement, with the fund struggling to collect certain sums due…

Kilamba has a mixed record. “While the project is a success on the social front since it expanded access to property, that is not the case from an economic perspective,” says Allan Cain, an architect who heads Development Workshop, an NGO specialising in urban planning, and is the author of several studies on Angola’s new cities.

This was an expensive system that increased Angola’s debt, without the country managing to make a profit on its investment

Kilamba Kiaxi’s first phase, which cost $3.5bn, was financed by Chinese loans repaid through Angolan oil sales. This was “an expensive system that increased Angola’s debt, without the country managing to make a profit on its investment”, says Cain, an architect who has been living in Luanda for more than 40 years. Aside from this was the ongoing criticism during the construction phase over the massive use of Chinese labour instead of Angolan workers.

In addition to these difficulties, two other problems have long been criticised. First of all, although wide avenues provide access to the entrance of the district, no public transport network has been planned to serve it, forcing inhabitants to spend a large part of their income on petrol, group taxis or individual transport services. “Without a car, your life is hell,” says one resident, who limits his weekly outings to manage his budget.

On the other hand, while the project was supposed to meet the housing needs of the majority, it has in fact benefited only a certain category of people, the middle class, even though the stated goal of Kilamba Kiaxi was to provide social housing. “The problem of housing for the poorest, who are the majority of the population, remains,” says Cain. According to official statistics, 42% of Angolans live without access to drinking water and 60% without sanitation.

This context explains why other ‘new city’ projects are ongoing throughout the country. In late December 2022, the government awarded a $750m contract to the Israeli group Mitrelli, which has long been present in Angola, for the construction of 4,500 homes in two provinces (Malanje and Kwanza Norte). It already validated another $730m contract with the same group in May 2021 to build some 5,000 homes in three other provinces (Kunene, Bengo and Cabinda).

Have the lessons from the Kilamba Kiaxi experience been taken into account? At the June 2022 inauguration of another project – 3,000 homes that will be part of a 20,000-person residential area in the Huambo region – Mitrelli said the construction site had created 2,000 direct jobs locally. Explaining that it had carried out the project in collaboration with the future inhabitants, the group insisted on the services available (education, health, security, etc.) and on the social support planned to facilitate settlement.

Is this the beginning of a new era?

ShadowMarking:
They are already tired of outsiders.

immortalcrown:
But the problem in this generation is entitlement mentality, not provision.

sirblend:
What about power generation?

Why can't each state in Nigeria generate their own electricity?

Japan's street crime rates are among the lowest in the world, with homicide and robbery rates about ten times lower than the rates in other developed democracies (Zimring Reference Zimring2012). But violence against women is much more common than official statistics suggest (Osawa Reference Osawa2023), and it takes various forms, from domestic violence (Fulcher Reference Fulcher2002; Kumagai and Ishii-Kuntz Reference Kumagai and Ishii-Kuntz2016) and sexual harassment (Dalton Reference Dalton2021; McKirdy and Watatsuki Reference McKirdy and Watatsuki2018) to the sex crimes of r**e, forcible indecency, and m**estation (Ito Reference Ito2019; Makino Reference Makino2019; NHK 2023). This article focuses on the crime of r**e to call into question the conventional wisdom about public safety in Japan and to show that serious acts of sexual violence are seldom subject to legal control. Of course, persons of all genders are victimized by sex crime, but this article concentrates on cases in which men and boys victimize women and girls because this is the most common pattern of sex offending in Japan (as it is in many other nations), and because most of the available evidence concerns male-against-female sexual assaults. This article also focuses on the period before July 2023, when Japan revised its Penal Code for the second time in six years. That reform changed the legal definition of r**e and some other sex crimes, but it remains to be seen what effect those changes will have on how sex offenses are actually handled in Japanese criminal justice. At present, the evidence shows that Japan's most serious sex offenders routinely get away with it, and this article argues that patriarchal social and legal norms help explain why that occurs (Matsui Reference Matsui2023, ch. 3; Osawa Reference Osawa2023, p. 138).

The number of retractions issued for research articles in 2023 has passed 10,000 — smashing annual records — as publishers struggle to clean up a slew of sham papers and peer-review fraud. Among large research-producing nations, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Russia and China have the highest retraction rates over the past two decades, a Nature analysis has found.

Just 263 Vietnamese crossed into the United States via its border with Mexico between October 2021 and October 2022, but nearly 3,300 made that crossing a year later, according to figures from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, or CBP. That number is certain to be surpassed in 2024. From last October to this March, nearly 2,400 have already crossed.

The surge in migration to the U.S. has found parallels elsewhere. In April, the UK’s Home Office announced a partnership with Vietnam to tackle illegal migration routes amid skyrocketing numbers of risky small boat crossings over the English Channel. In 2022, 1% of those arriving on small boat arrivals came from Vietnam, rising to 5% in 2023. So far this year, more Vietnamese have crossed by boat than any other nationality.

But those figures still pale in comparison to the numbers arriving in the U.S.

Back home in Nghe An, Minh, Truc and Ngu struggled to make ends meet — and saw little possibility for improvement. They spoke of being stuck in menial, poorly paid jobs and of corrupt officials who demand bribes from anyone trying to strike out on their own.

“I was not happy with the way the government treated us in Vietnam. My work was suppressed and could not develop,” said Minh, who had been a small business owner in Nghe An. “I could be OK if I chose to do manual jobs like construction work. But if I had a restaurant they [authorities] would just come to ask for money, and suppress us.”

An estimated 18,000 people are smuggled from Vietnam to Europe each year.

Back in October, 39 Vietnamese migrants were found ---- in the refrigerated container of a tractor-trailer at an industrial park about 20 miles east of London. The container had been shipped from the Belgian port of Zeebrugge to Essex, England. The victims inside ranged in age from 15 to 44, and each appeared to have a bag with clothes, a mobile phone and other belongings, according to Essex police.

Vietnam is continually featured in the top three nationalities of potential trafficking victims referred to the U.K. National Referral Mechanism, a government framework "for identifying and referring potential victims of modern slavery", as the number of Vietnamese victims has consistently increased over the past few years.