External resources relating to Gender and sexuality

In the months before the world went into lockdown to battle the COVID-19 pandemic, the people of Chile were rising up in their thousands to demand an end to neoliberal polices that have created a society rife with inequality. On the streets, protesters were met with gunfire, tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets. Behind the closed doors of interrogation cells, they were met with torture, rape and sexual violence.

On the 20th floor of an office tower in the heart of Toronto’s financial district, Irma Yolanda Choc Cac’s bright pink embroidered blouse and handwoven skirt contrasted with the suits of the lawyers around her as she detailed the hardest day of her life.

It was the first time Choc Cac had ever left Guatemala. But the story that she and 10 other Maya Q’eqchi’ women had come to tell is at the heart of a precedent-setting legal challenge pitting indigenous people against a transnational corporation – and which has cast a chill over Canada’s vast mining industry.

The case centres on allegations dating back to 2007, when the women say hundreds of police, military and and private security personnel linked to a Canadian mining company descended on the secluded village of Lote Ocho in eastern Guatemala.

A shocking account of police violence towards women in Mexico. Content note: includes reference to sexual violence and torture from the start and throughout.

In this public lecture, world renowned feminist scholar Professor Cynthia Enloe explores how militarisation is a social process that affects our everyday lives and enables states to fight wars. Enloe asks ‘where are the women?’ in international affairs and explores how women as soldiers' wives, secretaries, factory workers, shoppers and soldiers can both support and oppose armed conflict.  She also explores how notions of masculinity and femininity can be militarised or de-militarised and what the implications of this are for state foreign policy.

Torture is widespread in Mexico’s “war on drugs”, but the impact on women has been largely ignored or downplayed. This Amnesty International report analyses the stories of 100 women who have reported torture and other forms of violence during arrest and interrogation by police and armed forces. Severe beatings; threats of rape against women and their families; near-asphyxiation, electric shocks to the genitals; groping of breasts and pinching of nipples; rape with objects, fingers, firearms and the penis – these are just some of the forms of violence inflicted on women, in many cases with the intention of getting them to “confess” to serious crimes.

Who Profits Research Center and the Coalition of Women for Peace have joined together to publish this up-to-date position paper on Palestinian women’s struggle against the Israeli control of population, manifested in the checkpoint industry. The following paper sheds light on both government and corporate practices and their repercussions on the ground. This will also be reflected through recent testimonies of Palestinian women confronting checkpoints on a day-to-day basis.

While many Civil Society Organizations have been addressing the political context that governs women’s lives under occupation, the economic factors that engineer the political system and perpetuate the power relations at hand are still in need of greater attention. The Israeli checkpoints, as military structures, have been a symbol of the Israeli control of the Palestinian population. Yet, underneath these structures lies an economic infrastructure generated by corporate profit. The vast checkpoints industry includes the construction of checkpoints, security personnel and equipment provided by Israeli and international companies.

The following pages address the checkpoint industry in the occupied West Bank as a case study of the integral part played by corporate stakeholders in oppressing Palestinian population and women specifically.

On 30 May 2013, police cleared Gezi Park in central Istanbul of a small group of protestors opposed to its destruction. The denial of their right to protest and the violence used by the police touched a nerve and a wave of anti-government demonstrations swept across Turkey. The authorities’ reaction was brutal and unequivocal. Over the next few months, police repeatedly used unnecessary and abusive force to prevent and disperse peaceful demonstrations. This report by Amnesty International documents the human rights violations that have accompanied the crushing crackdown on the Gezi Park protest movement.

Commencing with the quantitative attributes of the industry, the chapter will first show that private policing armament in Israel has significantly raised the number of firearms circulating through the streets and homes, distinctly accelerating small-arms proliferation.  It will also outline the scope and dimensions of the private policing industry active in Israel...  The following two sections of the chapter then go on to describe how the spread and growth of private policing have deepened Israeli militarization in unprecedented ways...  Finally, addressing the strongly gendered implications of these developments, I will trace ways in which the process of militarization, enhanced by the private policing industry in Israel and the accelerated proliferation of the arms it sanctions, has intensified exsiting gender disrimination and violence against women.

Turkish authorities committed human rights violations on a massive scale in the government’s attempts to crush the Gezi Park protests this summer said Amnesty International.

In a report published today the organization details the worst excesses of police violence, during the protests, the failure to bring these abuses to justice and the subsequent prosecution and harassment of those that took part...