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After more than a year of protests at the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota, thousands of Native Americans and activists brought the fight to the nation's capital to demand indigenous rights and raise awareness about issues affecting the communities.

The event, the culmination of a four-day protest in the capital, was led by the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, which has been involved in a longstanding dispute with authorities over the construction of an oil pipeline in North Dakota, culminating in a two-mile march through Washington and rally in front of the White House.

With snow falling, the Native Nations Rise march took off from the headquarters of the army corps of engineers, the federal agency that authorized construction of the 1,172-mile Dakota Access oil pipeline. The march wound through the capital and along the way demonstrators paused in front of the Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue to erect a tipi.

At the White House, protesters demonstrated, danced and prayed in what organizers say is a show of solidarity against the federal government that has a long history of discounting tribal concerns on a range of environmental, economic and social issues.

The protesters, some dressed in traditional Native American clothing, snaked through the crowd carrying a black inflatable tube representing an oil pipeline. It was painted with the words: "No pipeline".

Nearby, a woman helping carry a large sign that read "This is Stolen Land!" led a chant: "Occupation is a crime, from Standing Rock to Palestine."

LeeAnn Eastman, of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate tribe on the Lake Traverse Indian reservation in South Dakota, doubted Trump was standing at the window watching their protest - but she said their message was breaking through.

"They woke up a giant when they told us they were just going to put this pipeline through our land, our sacred land," she said. "We do everything peacefully, prayerfully, but we're not going to let him just walk all over us like that and contaminate our water."

Eastman, who spent the last seven months camping on the Standing Rock reservation protesting against the pipeline with activists there, doesn't expect to change Trump's mind about the project.

"We know he has closed his heart and his mind to us as he did the rest of the nation," she said. "We're still praying for him - but it seems like we'll have to go about this another way."

The Standing Rock protest against the Dakota Access pipeline became an international rallying cry for indigenous rights and climate change activism, drawing thousands of Native Americans to the rural area of Cannon Ball, North Dakota.

"We stood in peace and prayer and yet we were shot with rubber bullets and teargas, concussion grenades and water cannons," said Bill Left Hand, a member of the Standing Rock tribe, who is involved in a lawsuit over the pipeline. "There is an obvious violation of our civil rights and our rights as indigenous people."

Opponents of the $3.8bn pipeline say the project threatens their water supply from the Missouri river, crosses sacred land and was approved without proper consultation with tribal leaders and without a thorough study of impacts.

During the days leading up to the rally, Native American leaders and activists met with members of Congress to press them to protect tribal rights. Leaders also set up an encampment of tipis near the Washington monument and held cultural workshops.

Former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley was among the supporters at the Native Nations Rise rally on Friday.

"It's not only about this pipeline," he said. "It's about the pipeline of tax subsidies, the pipeline of political brute force that Donald Trump is seeking to put behind the fossil fuel industry. When Exxon runs our foreign policy, that should tell us a lot about the intent of this administration."

Work on the pipeline, which is owned by Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners, was halted in December by the Obama administration. The army corps of engineers announced that it would look at alternate routes for the pipeline and that it would undertake an environmental impact statement.

But in January, Trump signed an executive order giving the pipeline project the go-ahead. The army corps granted an easement for the oil company to drill under a reservoir on the Missouri river that is adjacent to the Standing Rock Sioux reservation and construction resumed in early February.

The company has said it would be just a matter of weeks before up to 550,000 barrels of oil a day can begin flowing through the pipeline. The Standing Rock Sioux and the Cheyenne River Sioux tribes have filed a joint lawsuit against the pipeline project in federal court.

A judge's ruling is expected later this month or in April.
Topics

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Native Americans take Dakota Access pipeline protest to Washington

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After more than a year of protests at the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota, thousands of Native Americans and activists brought the fight to the nation's capital to demand indigenous rights and raise awareness about issues affecting the communities.

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In April 2014, more than 200 girls were kidnapped from a school in Nigeria. The world responded: #BringBackOurGirls.

Boko Haram dressed them in dark gowns and head coverings, broadcasting the images to the world the following month.

Four years later, more than a hundred of them have been freed.

Yola, Nigeria - The list had more than 200 names.

Martha James. Grace Paul. Rebecca Joseph. Mary Ali. Ruth Kolo. And so many others.

It took Nigerian officials agonizing weeks to publish the names of all the students Boko Haram kidnapped from a boarding school in the village of Chibok four years ago, on the night of April 14. Once they did, the numbers were staggering.

The list quickly circulated among the grieving parents searching for their daughters, some setting out on motorbikes to confront the Islamist militants who had stormed the school, loaded the girls into trucks and hauled them away at gunpoint.

Soldiers used the list, too, as they combed the countryside for the missing students, marching through the forest, dispatching jets and enlisting the help of foreign militaries.

Negotiators checked the names as they bartered with militants for the girls' release. And the list became an inspiration for protesters hundreds of miles away in the capital, who kept marching for the girls' return, day after day.

"As I began to read each name, my resolve strengthened," said Oby Ezekwesili, a former education minister who led protests. "They were not just statistics. These were real human beings."

Far away in America, France, South Korea and elsewhere, public figures and celebrities joined the cause.

Bring back our girls, they all demanded.

For years, the teenagers remained missing, changing from girls into women, lost to a band of extremists known for beating, raping and enslaving its captives.

And then, many of their names were joyfully crossed off the list.

"I'm 'back,' as they say," said Hauwa Ntakai, one of the Chibok students.

Nearly four years after they were abducted and dragged off to a forest hide-out, more than 100 of the students from Chibok now live on a pristine university campus four hours from their homes here in northeastern Nigeria, their days filled with math and English classes, karaoke and selfies, and movie nights with popcorn.

The government negotiated for the release of many of the Chibok students, who were set free in groups over the last year and a half. A few others were found roaming the countryside, having escaped their captors.

But more than 100 of their former classmates are still missing, held by Boko Haram. About a dozen are thought to be dead.

"I'm happy," said Ms. Ntakai, who was No. 169 on the list. Now, she is a 20-year-old student who rises at dawn for Saturday yoga class and argues about the benefits and dangers of social media during debate night at the university.

"But I'm thinking about my sisters who are still in the back," in Boko Haram's clutches, she said.

Nigeria is in its ninth year of war with Boko Haram, a group that has killed and kidnapped thousands of civilians across northern Nigeria. In many respects, the Chibok students, as extraordinary as their plight has been, were just another set of its victims. Many of the young women now consider themselves the lucky ones.

Weeks before the Chibok kidnapping, a group of young boys were burned alive in their own school, a tragedy that failed to resonate around the world in the same way as the mass abduction of the schoolgirls.

The vast majority of Boko Haram's victims will remain anonymous and unaccounted for, their names never broadcast across the globe. Many of their families will never even know what happened to them. The crimes committed against them occur in remote areas, far from the reach of cellphone networks, and often while the world's attention is elsewhere.

But the Chibok girls had names. Saratu Ayuba. Ruth Amos. Comfort Habila. Esther Usman.

And from a few weeks after they were taken - when Boko Haram broadcast images of its somber-looking captives, covered from head to toe in long, dark gowns - they had faces.

Teenage students from a village school suddenly became the unwitting representatives of all the dead and missing victims of a crisis that has upended a poor, remote corner of the globe.

They became the daughters of Nigeria, and more broadly daughters of the whole world, embraced and fretted over as though they belonged to everyone.

"When the Chibok abduction happened, it was the articulation of this whole saga," said Saudatu Mahdi, a co-founder of the Bring Back Our Girls movement. "They became a rallying point."

But the freed students from Chibok also bear the heavy burden of the celebrity that led to their release.

They are fortunate enough to attend a private university that educates the children of Nigerian politicians, businesspeople and other members of the elite.

But security restrictions on the Chibok students are especially tight. They are not allowed to leave campus without an escort. They can't have visitors without special permission. And though some of the women gave birth during their captivity, their children are not allowed to stay with them at the university. Administrators say that would distract from their studies.

In fact, the young women have rarely seen their families since they were freed from Boko Haram. The longest period they have spent with their parents, siblings and other relatives since their abduction in 2014 was over Christmas break last year, when they went home for a couple of weeks. Other than that, they have been under close supervision by officials and educators.

As soon as they were released from Boko Haram, the women were whisked to Abuja, the capital, where they spent weeks in the government's custody, questioned for information that could help find their still-missing classmates - and to satisfy officials that they had not grown loyal to Boko Haram.

Security agents warned the young women not to talk about their time with militants, arguing that it might jeopardize the safety of the students still held captive. Forget about the past and move forward, they were told.

For months, their access to their parents was severely restricted. They weren't allowed to leave the bland government building that was their dormitory. Even today, their only regular connection to their families is by phone.

Last summer, officials at the American University of Nigeria traveled to Abuja to meet with the government. Back in 2014, the university, in the city of Yola, had taken in about 20 students from Chibok who had been kidnapped by Boko Haram but had managed to escape within hours.

Administrators pitched the government on a plan to take the newly freed women, too. The idea was to incorporate them into a program designed to help them catch up on their studies, reunite them with their former classmates who were already at the university and prepare them for college life.

Now the Chibok students' lives are highly structured. With militants still at large in the country, they are considered high-profile targets. And as public figures, officials fear, they are vulnerable to exploitation.

"They will not be the normal people they were before they were abducted," said Ms. Mahdi, secretary general of the Women's Rights Advancement and Protection Alternative, an advocacy group for women and girls in Nigeria. "A lot of restrictions will come with their lifestyle."

Officials at the university had no experience educating a large group of former hostages from a village school. But neither did anyone else.

"We'll take them all and figure it out," the university's president, Dawn Dekle, an American, recalled thinking at the time. "They were traumatized as a group. Their healing has to be in a group."

All but one of the newly freed students agreed to attend. She had already been married at the time she was kidnapped, so she went back to live on her farm near Chibok with her husband.

At the university, officials scrambled to prepare for the students, renovating a dormitory so they all could be housed together and finding classrooms to accommodate the extra pupils.

The assistant dean of student affairs became the women's de facto principal. A therapist in the United States, who had counseled some of the early escapees from the kidnapping, was recruited to work as the students' psychologist. A conference room was designated as a prayer room for the few women who are Muslim. And for the Christian students, the person in charge of the university's recycling program, who also serves as a local pastor, leads Sunday services.

Last September, more than 100 of the students arrived at the tidy campus, with its trimmed hedges, three-story library and solar-powered buildings. Not everyone was happy to welcome such a large group of women who had spent the past few years living with militants.

Some of the other students were scared that Boko Haram would come for the Chibok women again, especially at a university representing the sort of Western education that Boko Haram has long condemned.

Others worried that the women had grown attached to their captors and could be terrorists themselves. One student told officials that she feared waking up at night to discover one of the women holding a knife to her neck.

After arriving on campus, the women were escorted to the university cafeteria for their first meal. The group drew stares from the other students.

"I could tell they were not feeling comfortable," said Reginald Braggs, a former United States Navy R.O.T.C. instructor who is in charge of the program for the Chibok students.

Rather than force integration, administrators decided to let the new arrivals eat most meals in their dorm.

All in their 20s now, the women are housed at the university, but in a program that sometimes seems designed for elementary students. Classrooms are decorated with pictures of Spider-Man and basic multiplication tables.

"Remember to flush the toilet and wash your hands," reads a poster on the bulletin board.

For months, their tablets, all donated, were ordered turned off at night. Messages of positive thinking are plastered on every wall: Never give up. Believe in yourself. Shine like stars.

When some of the women were upset at messing up during spelling bees, administrators gave them the words to study ahead of time. Even their church service, during which the women seemed relaxed and joyful as they sang and danced on a recent Sunday morning, is watered down. Raymond Obindu, a charismatic speaker who bounces beside the pulpit and uses an equally ebullient interpreter, keeps his sermons for the women more uplifting than the ones he delivers to his local congregation.

"The Bible says you are fearfully and wonderfully made," Mr. Obindu said during the service. "Everyone say, 'I'm beautiful.' "

"I'm beautiful," the room of women chanted.

He asked if anyone wanted to give thanks.

"I thank God for leaving me alive," said Magret Yama, who was released by Boko Haram last May.

University officials have the women adhere to a busy schedule - including classes on Saturdays - to keep their minds off the past.

"They've seen hell together," said Somiari Demm, the psychologist, who counsels the women, teaches them yoga and attends church services alongside them. "They share the extensive narrative that no one else does."

The women told their parents that they had endured periods of hunger while with Boko Haram. They were made to cook and clean for fighters. Some were raped. Some have shrapnel lodged under their skin. One is missing part of a leg from injuries suffered with Boko Haram.

Ntakai Keki, 60, said his daughter Hauwa had told him that the militants beat girls who disagreed with them or refused to follow orders. She was once lashed 30 times with a cane, he said.

Hauwa had told him that she saw the dead bodies of children who were being held hostage and witnessed fighters die of wounds from aerial bombings by the military.

"That has all ended now," Mr. Keki said.

Psychologically, Mr. Braggs said more than half of the women were in what he called the red zone. "They're just sad or down," he said.

University officials do not let journalists ask the women about their experiences with the militants, arguing that it could traumatize them further.

"They're grown women by American standards," Mr. Braggs said. "Even physically they are grown women. But look at their social development. They're still very vulnerable."

"I'm very, very cautious about people thinking I'm overprotective," he added. "I don't think they're children. But there's a certain responsibility I've been given."

At the university, the women are instructed to speak only English, a language most of them struggle with (they grew up speaking Hausa and local languages). Other than a few staff members posted to their dorm, most of the people in charge of the women can't communicate with them in their own languages - including the women's psychologist, their teachers and the director, Mr. Braggs.

A handful of the women speak English well. Some are using kindergarten-level phonics books. Yet most of the women's counseling sessions are carried out in English, raising questions about the depth of their therapy.

Ms. Demm contended that some of the Chibok students who had initially escaped the kidnapping had traveled to the United States, only to be exploited by people there. She said they were made to repeatedly recount the night Boko Haram came to their school, with their testimonies used to solicit donations for churches or other organizations.

Ms. Demm argued that she wanted to empower the students in her care to tell their own stories, in their own time.

For now, she said, the hardest adjustment for the women is "being free, but not really free."

Recently, one of the women, Glory Dama, learned that her father was being treated for an illness at a hospital not far from campus. She wanted to see him, so the university prepared to organize an escort for her. Before it happened, though, he was discharged and relatives drove him back to Chibok, without waiting for Ms. Dama to arrive. He died on the way.

Ms. Dama was devastated, and as the news traveled through the group so were the other women. Activities were canceled for the rest of the day.

The women, who spend their days in air-conditioned classrooms equipped with Wi-Fi, know that their current circumstances are vastly better than those of most people who have escaped or been freed from Boko Haram.

Militants have beheaded some of their captives, conscripted others to carry out murders and strapped suicide bombs to women who were the same age as the students from Chibok. Some captives freed from Boko Haram have been placed in crowded military barracks for months. Others live in squalid government camps where they have been raped by security forces and struggle to find enough to eat.

Ms. Dama wants to take university classes, return to Chibok and be a nurse to help her community. Another student, Rhoda Peter, wants to be a lawyer.

"I know I'm in a place where nobody will chase me and do something wrong to us," said Ms. Peter, 22. "They are here to help us."

In February, about 170 miles from Chibok, the unfathomable happened again.

Boko Haram stormed a secondary school in a village called Dapchi and left with more than 100 female teenage captives.

The nation began to mourn the kidnapping of yet another set of schoolgirls. Then, late last month, the militants suddenly brought most of the girls home safely, for reasons that are not entirely clear.

The Nigerian government says it is negotiating for the release of the rest of the missing girls from Dapchi, as well as the dozens of students from Chibok who are still being held captive.

Grace Hamman, a Chibok student who was released from Boko Haram last year, said she took comfort during her time in captivity in the knowledge that she hadn't been forgotten.

"I heard on the radio people were crying for us and were concerned," she recalled. "I thank everyone for what they did for us."

The photographs were taken at the American University of Nigeria, in the city of Yola, with the help of the university.

Produced by Craig Allen, Danny DeBelius, David Furst, Meghan Louttit, Meghan Petersen, and Rumsey Taylor.

Sunday Aghaeze/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

Produced by Craig Allen, Danny DeBelius, David Furst, Meghan Louttit, Meghan Petersen, Rumsey Taylor and Greg Winter.

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Kidnapped as Schoolgirls by Boko Haram: Here They Are Now

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In April 2014, more than 200 girls were kidnapped from a school in Nigeria. The world responded: #BringBackOurGirls. Boko Haram dressed them in dark gowns and head coverings, broadcasting the images to the world the following month. Four years later, more than a hundred of them have been freed.

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The global #BringBackOurGirls campaign is a great example of how a noble cause can backfire.

The abduction of over 200 girls from their school dorm in Chibok, Nigeria, by Boko Haram militants in April 2014 could have been an opportunity for the world to clamor for the release of the thousands of women and girls the insurgents have kidnapped in northeast Nigeria. Instead, it focused only on the Chibok schoolgirls and made celebrities out of them. That was a mistake.

The Chibok girls' names and faces were displayed in strategic locations around Nigeria's capital city, Abuja, and during protest marches from Paris to New York. Some schools in Nigeria asked each student to select the name of one missing Chibok girl and pray every day for her return. A list of the girls' names were displayed in newspapers and on large screens during humanitarian events.

That fame is now the greatest obstacle between the Chibok girls and a normal life after captivity.

In May 2016, Amina Ali Nkeki, the first of the missing Chibok girls to be seen after over two years, was rescued by the Nigerian military. She was flown VIP-style, by helicopter, to meet with President Muhammadu Buhari in Abuja. The international media was invited to the ceremony. In October, 21 Chibok girls were freed by Boko Haram in a deal brokered by the Swiss government and the International Committee of the Red Cross. They were also feted in Abuja. Subsequently, two more Chibok girls were found by the military.

But, months after the cameras were turned off and the curtains drawn, the girls remain in government custody. None of them have been allowed to return home to their families in Chibok.

Thanks to the #BringBackOurGirls campaign, so famous are the girls that the Nigerian military says it cannot guarantee their safety if they go home. Any other girl rescued by the Nigerian military can walk the streets freely, but the government is unwilling to risk the international uproar that would definitely accompany the re-abduction of a Chibok girl.

The Chibok girls' celebrity status also seems to have played a part in their continued captivity. Released Chibok girls describe a peripatetic life, constantly on the move with the militants. Some unsung rescued girls I've interviewed described, in contrast, being abandoned as the militants fled the approach of the Nigerian army. In some cases, the militants aimed stones at the women and girls, considering them a burden to take along as they fled, preferring to have them killed rather than freed.

Clearly, the militants knew better than to abandon their valuable merchandise and their claim to fame. The Chibok girls also say that they were fed plentifully until food ran out some weeks before they were released; given fabric to sew new clothes for themselves; and provided medical care from doctors whenever they were ill - treatment that is the complete opposite of that described by the average girl in Boko Haram captivity.

Without a doubt, the world meant well when it rallied round the #BringBackOurGirls campaign and called for the release of the Chibok girls. No one could have meant to create this problem for the girls and their families. But, the next time an opportunity arises to support a cause in Africa, let us all pause and think, and plan and consider, before jumping on the bandwagon and rushing to tweet.
Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani is a journalist and author based in Abuja, Nigeria.

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The global #BringBackOurGirls campaign is a great example of how a noble cause can backfire. The abduction of over 200 girls from their school dorm in Chibok, Nigeria, by Boko Haram militants in April 2014 could have been an opportunity for the world to clamor for the release of the thousands of women and girls the insurgents have kidnapped in northeast Nigeria.

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A customer at the New York City restaurant Fresh Kitchen was caught on video in a racist tirade threatening to call Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on some employees and patrons after they spoke Spanish. The minute-long footage, which has gone viral, shows the man berating an employee at the eatery and pointing at others around noontime Tuesday.

"Your staff is speaking Spanish to customers when they should be speaking English," he said. "Every person I listen to. He spoke it, he spoke it, she's speaking it. It's America."

Emily Serrano and her best friend, Deena are regular customers at the Madison Avenue restaurant. She told CBS News they befriended one of the workers there and often interact with him in English and Spanish.

Serrano says a patron who was in the line before her ordered his food in Spanish and that appeared to agitate the man in the video. Once she and her friend placed their order in the language, she said he flipped out on the workers. She then decided to pull out her phone and record him once she started to feel threatened by him.

"If you intend to be running a place in midtown Manhattan, your staff better be speaking to customers in English," he said.

While other patrons were quietly observing in the background, Serrano and her friend defended the workers and called the man "ignorant."

The video shows he then turned his attention on them, threatening to call ICE -- and made a remark about Serrano's weight -- before walking out of the restaurant.

"My guess is they're undocumented, so my next call is to ICE to have each one of them taken out of my country," he said.

Her best friend's husband later uploaded the video that's circulating online. That video has been viewed more than 3 million times on Facebook. (WARNING, before you watch it, the video below contains profanity.)

So my wife and her best friend Just experience what America is becoming ! They where on there lunch time and ordering there food and just because they where speaking in Spanish to the waiter this asshole jumps in and started to call the waiter and my wife and her best friend all types of names and threatened to call I.C.E on them and the employees !!!! What a big man talking down to couple of women and a helpless employee. I wish someone tells me I can't speak in my native language ! First of all they wasn't talking to you !! Asshole ! My country !! Haha 😆 I love the way people are just throwing that world around lately !! If you love this country this much ! Why don't you put on uniform and protect it !! If he was so offended because the waiter was speak in Spanish only because of a native person spoke to him in Spanish, why don't he start waitering and he won't have that issue and family stop getting Spanish nannies and stop getting Spanish people to farm and ......... You know where I'm getting !! So please stop !! Because in the end you need them ! But what you need to do is stop trying to control us ! Slavery stopped a long time ago !! Deena Gonzalez Emily Serrano
Posted by Edward Suazo on Tuesday, May 15, 2018

Twitter users identified the man in the recording as a Manhattan-based attorney, but his identity has not been confirmed. His name was trending on Wednesday and CBS News reached out for comment.

Serrano said the man should be "ashamed of himself."

"He was so upset," she said. "This is not OK. He had to understand what did is not OK."

"Honestly, it was overwhelming and unexpected," Serrano says of the experience. "New York is diversity. It was unbelievable."

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"It's America": Video of man's racist tirade at NYC restaurant goes viral

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A customer at the New York City restaurant Fresh Kitchen was caught on video in a racist tirade threatening to call Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on some employees and patrons after they spoke Spanish. The minute-long footage, which has gone viral, shows the man berating an employee at the eatery and pointing at others around noontime Tuesday.

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Immigrant students in the United States consistently perform worse academically than nonimmigrant students. This achievement gap is evident as early as preschool and only grows as immigrant students advance through high school.

But, what causes the achievement gap?

One notion that fuels anti-immigrant attitudes is the belief that immigrant students perform poorly because of their immigrant backgrounds.

This is misguided.

As a former teacher and now researcher of immigrant families, I am familiar with concerns about low academic achievement among immigrant students. However, as my work shows, immigrant students face barriers beyond their immigrant backgrounds, including restrictive learning environments in their classrooms.

A multitude of barriers

Research has also shown that immigrant students tend to be concentrated in poor neighborhoods, speak a language other than English at home and enter school later than nonimmigrant students.

michael_swan, CC BY-ND

We know that poverty, language barriers and low levels of preschool enrollment contribute to poor academic performance.

There is also another, lesser known, factor at work here: school and teacher attitudes toward immigrant students. Immigrant students have been shown to perform worse when their schools or teachers harbor negative attitudes about their presence and abilities.

Poverty

A recent report on immigration and education from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) shows the extent of the immigrant achievement gap.

According to the report, in 2012, students in the U.S. with an immigrant background performed worse than nonimmigrant students on the Programme for International Student Assessments (PISA), a test administered to 15-year-olds in 65 countries, including the U.S. Immigrant students in the U.S. scored about 20 points lower in reading and 15 points lower in math.

Many people are also concerned that immigrant students negatively impact the education systems that they enter.

Current research, however, shows the opposite.

The presence of immigrant students does not negatively affect overall school performance. Rather, schools that serve poor families tend to underperform and immigrant families are often poor.

Poverty affects over half of immigrant families. In 2013, 54 percent of immigrant families in the US qualified as low-income.

In fact, when family income is taken into account, the difference between scores from immigrant students and nonimmigrant students on the PISA disappears.

Language and preschool

Immigrant students also struggle when they do not have mastery of the dominant language in their new country.

In 2015, nearly 10 percent of students in K-12 in the U.S. were classified as English Language Learners. These language barriers explain a larger portion of the achievement gap than immigrant backgrounds.

Also, low levels of enrollment in early childhood programs have a huge impact. Early entrance into the school system increases students chances for success in later grades. However, many immigrant families do not enroll their children in preschool programs because of families' legal status, language barriers and cultural sensitivities.

Discrimination and racism

There is actually more evidence to show that schools in the U.S. are negatively impacting immigrant students and their families, not the other way around.

Many immigrant students face discrimination and racism in the form of segregation and hostile attitudes at their schools. Also, many schools don't offer essential resources, like family liaisons or other social services, that would support immigrant families as well as the larger school community.

Immigrant students are also affected by a rarely acknowledged but equally important factor: the receptiveness of their host country's education system, also known as the " context of reception."

https://www.flickr.com/photos/presidioofmonterey/6947110047/in/photolist-bzTKMr-cTmUAU-dvakxJ-8PCwt2-cTmE1d-8CutqV-bVACx8-eg5hzD-8SMZsm-cTmKxb-qrtqd2-9qr8c3-HJCf-am1wbA-2FMQZN-cTmM5q-9bTe76-d2kArd-5NpaP-pLViJs-dXkbDh-cTmU2f-6oG67K-dXeDxK-dXeeZ4-dXefeB-dXe, CC BY-NC

When teachers and staff have negative views of immigrant children and their families, it has a negative impact on the academic performance of immigrant students.

Negative views are particularly harmful when they involve deficit thinking, or the belief that immigrant students perform poorly because their families have less or know less.

Alternatively, immigrant students who enter a welcoming environment benefit from positive school outcomes. Research in education shows that students who enter positive contexts of reception are more motivated, better adjusted and more engaged in curriculum.

The OECD report also found that immigrant students who said they felt supported and cared for by their teachers scored higher on the PISA.

Value in diversity

Research shows that despite barriers, immigrant students often hold high aspirations for themselves. These high aspirations make them more likely to put in greater effort to take advantage of educational opportunities and succeed academically. This is part of a phenomenon known as the immigrant paradox.

Just consider this fact. Among low-income students who took the PISA, immigrants make up a larger share of high-performing students than nonimmigrants.

At a time when presidential candidates are threatening to build a wall along the US-Mexican border and governors are attempting to close their states to Syrian refugees, it is important to understand that immigrant students do not harm our education system or our communities. Instead, they bring valuable diversity.

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Here's why immigrant students perform poorly

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Immigrant students in the United States consistently perform worse academically than nonimmigrant students. This achievement gap is evident as early as preschool and only grows as immigrant students advance through high school. But, what causes the achievement gap? One notion that fuels anti-immigrant attitudes is the belief that immigrant students perform poorly because of their immigrant backgrounds.

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As resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline in Standing Rock, N.D., concludes its seventh month, two narratives have emerged:

1. We have never seen anything like this before.

2. This has been happening for hundreds of years.

Both are true. The scope of the resistance at Standing Rock exceeds just about every protest in Native American history. But that history itself, of indigenous people fighting to protect not just their land, but the land, is centuries old.

Over the weekend, the situation at Standing Rock grew more contentious. On Sunday night, Morton County police sprayed the crowd of about 400 people with tear gas and water as temperatures dipped below freezing.

But the resistance, an offspring of history, continues.

Through the years, details of such protests change - sometimes the foe is the U.S. government; sometimes a large corporation; sometimes, as in the case of the pipeline, a combination of the two. Still, the broad strokes of each land infringement and each resistance stay essentially the same.

In that tradition, the tribes gathered at Standing Rock today are trying to stop a natural gas pipeline operator from bulldozing what they say are sacred sites to construct an 1,172-mile oil pipeline. The tribes also want to protect the Missouri River, the primary water source for the Standing Rock Reservation, from a potential pipeline leak. (Energy Transfer Partners, which is building the pipeline, says on its website that it emphasizes safety and that, "in many instances we exceed government safety standards to ensure a long-term, safe and reliable pipeline.")

Since April, when citizens of the Standing Rock Sioux Nation set up the Sacred Stone Camp, thousands of people have passed through and pledged support. Environmentalists and activist groups like Black Lives Matter and Code Pink have also stepped in as allies. Many people who have visited say that the camp is beyond anything they've ever experienced.

"It's historic, really. I don't think anything like this has ever happened in documented history," said Ruth Hopkins, a reporter from Indian Country Today.

But there are historical preludes, and you don't have to look too far back to find them. In 2015, when the Keystone XL pipeline was being debated, numerous Native American tribes and the Indigenous Environmental Network organized against it. The pipeline would have stretched 1,179 miles from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. The Rosebud Sioux, a tribe in South Dakota, called the proposed pipeline an " act of war" and set up an encampment where the pipeline was to be constructed. Also joining in were the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Resources Defense Council, and the Omaha, Dene, Ho-chunk, and Creek Nations, whose lands the pipeline would have traversed.

President Obama vetoed Keystone XL. But even at the time, A. Gay Kingman, the executive director of the Great Plains Tribal Chairman's Association, warned that the reprieve would be temporary. "Wopila [thank you] to all our relatives who stood strong to oppose the KXL," Kingman said in a statement after the veto. "But keep the coalitions together, because there are more pipelines proposed, and we must protect our Mother Earth for our future generations."

In the case of the Dakota Access Pipeline, the Standing Rock Sioux have been able to attract support from hundreds of tribes all over the country, not just in places that would be directly affected. The tribes aren't just leaning on long-held beliefs about the importance of the natural world. They're also using long-held resistance strategies. Like the encampment itself.

"If you don't know very much about Native American people, you wouldn't understand that this is something that's kind of natural to us," said Hopkins, who is enrolled in the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate Nation and was born on the Standing Rock Reservation. "When we have ceremonies, we do camps like this. It's something that we've always known how to do, going back to pre-colonial times."

In the late 1800s more than 10,000 members of the Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes set up camp to resist the U.S. Army's attempt to displace them in search of gold. That camp took form at the Little Bighorn River in Montana. After the soldiers attacked the camp in June of 1876, the Battle of the Little Bighorn, widely known as (Gen. George) Custer's Last Stand, erupted. In defeating the Army, the tribes won a huge land rights victory for Native Americans.

There was also Wounded Knee, a protest that was part of the American Indian Movement. During the 1973 demonstration, about 200 people occupied the town of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota - the site of an 1890 massacre in which U.S. soldiers killed hundreds of Native Americans. Protesters turned Wounded Knee into what one former AIM leader called " an armed camp" in order to protest corruption in tribal leadership and draw attention to the U.S. government's failure to honor treaties.

Over the course of the 1973 occupation, two Sioux men were killed and hundreds more arrested. But the resistance, which lasted 71 days, underscored Native American civil rights issues in a way that many see reflected today in Standing Rock.

If Native American resistance is an old story, that's because the systemic violation of indigenous land rights is an old story. And if history is any precedent, the resistance won't end at Standing Rock.

"There are no rights being violated here that haven't been violated before." said Kim Tallbear, a professor of Native Studies at the University of Alberta, who for years worked on tribal issues as an environmental planner for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy. Those violations, she said, have taken two forms: long-term disregard for indigenous land rights and a "bureaucratic disregard for consultation with indigenous people."

When she sees images of police using pepper spray and water cannons or security guards unleashing dogs on Standing Rock protesters, Tallbear said, she isn't shocked. "I'm, like, oh yeah, they did that in the 19th century, they did that in the 16th century," she said. "This is not new. ... The contemporary tactics used against indigenous people might look a little bit more complex or savvy, but to me, I can read it all as part of a longstanding colonial project."

"Maybe for non-Natives who thought that the West was won, and the Indian Wars were over, and Native people were mostly dead and gone and isn't that too bad - now, they're like, 'Oh wait a minute, they're still there? And they're still fighting the same things they were 150 years ago?'

"Yeah, we are."

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The Standing Rock Resistance Is Unprecedented (It's Also Centuries Old)

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subscribe to Code Switch podcast subscribe to Code Switch podcast As resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline in Standing Rock, N.D., concludes its seventh month, two narratives have emerged: We have never seen anything like this before. This has been happening for hundreds of years. Both are true.

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Between 1940 and 1970, something remarkable happened to Asian Americans. Not only did they surpass African Americans in average household earnings, but they also closed the wage gap with whites.

Many people credit this upward mobility to investments in education. But according to a recent study by Brown University economist Nathaniel Hilger, schooling rates among Asian Americans didn't change all that significantly during those three decades. Instead, Hilger's research suggests that Asian Americans started to earn more because their fellow Americans became less racist toward them.
[The real secret to Asian American success was not education]
How did that happen? About the same time that Asian Americans were climbing the socioeconomic ladder, they also experienced a major shift in their public image. At the outset of the 20th century, Asian Americans had often been portrayed as threatening, exotic and degenerate. But by the 1950s and 1960s, the idea of the model minority had begun to take root. Newspapers often glorified Asian Americans as industrious, law-abiding citizens who kept their heads down and never complained.

Some people think that racism toward Asians diminished because Asians "proved themselves" through their actions. But that is only a sliver of the truth. Then, as now, the stories of successful Asians were elevated, while the stories of less successful Asians were diminished. As historian Ellen Wu explains in her book, " The Color of Success," the model minority stereotype has a fascinating origin story, one that's tangled up in geopolitics, the Cold War and the civil rights movement.

To combat racism, minorities in the United States have often attempted to portray themselves as upstanding citizens capable of assimilating into mainstream culture. Asian Americans were no different, Wu writes. Some, like the Chinese, sought respectability by promoting stories about their obedient children and their traditional family values. The Japanese pointed to their wartime service as proof of their shared Americanness.

African Americans in the 1940s made very similar appeals. But in the postwar moment, Wu argues, it was only convenient for political leaders to hear the Asian voices.

The model minority narrative may have started with Asian Americans, but it was quickly co-opted by white politicians who saw it as a tool to win allies in the Cold War. Discrimination was not a good look on the international stage. Embracing Asian Americans "provided a powerful means for the United States to proclaim itself a racial democracy and thereby credentialed to assume the leadership of the free world," Wu writes. Stories about Asian American success were turned into propaganda.

By the 1960s, anxieties about the civil right movement caused white Americans to further invest in positive portrayals of Asian Americans. The image of the hard-working Asian became an extremely convenient way to deny the demands of African Americans. As Wu describes in her book, both liberal and conservative politicians pumped up the image of Asian Americans as a way to shift the blame for black poverty. If Asians could find success within the system, politicians asked, why couldn't African Americans?

"The insinuation was that hard work along with unwavering faith in the government and liberal democracy as opposed to political protest were the keys to overcoming racial barriers as well as achieving full citizenship," she writes.

Recently, Wu and I chatted on the phone about her book and the model minority stereotype - how it was equal parts truth, propaganda and self-enforcing prophecy.
Can you tell us a little bit about the question that got you started on this book?
WU: America in general has had very limited ways of thinking about Asian Americans. There are very few ways in which we exist in the popular imagination. In the mid- to late-19th century, all the way through the late 1940s and 1950s, Asians were thought of as "brown hordes" or as the "yellow peril." There was the sinister, weird, "Fu Manchu" stereotype.

Yet, by the middle of the 1960s, Asian Americans had undergone this really arresting racial makeover. Political leaders, journalists, social scientists - all these people in the public eye - seemed to suddenly be praising Asian Americans as so-called model minorities.

I thought that might be a very interesting question to try to unravel.
How did these earliest stereotypes - these very negative, nasty images - take root?
Asian Americans first started coming in significant numbers during the California Gold Rush. Chinese immigrants came to do mining, then they ended up working on the Transcontinental Railroad, and agriculture. When those jobs died down, a lot of them moved to the cities where they started working in manufacturing.

At that time, in the 1870s, the economy wasn't doing that well in California. White American workers were very anxious about keeping their jobs. They looked around and they saw these newcomers who seemed very different from them.

There already had been a long tradition in the Western world of portraying the "Orient" as unknowable and mysterious. American workers started attaching these ideas to the Chinese newcomers, who were an easy target for white American anxieties about the growth of industrial capitalism and the undermining of workers' autonomy and freedom. They believed that the Chinese threatened American independence and threatened American freedom.

These ideas were particularly popular among the white working class at the time. The momentum started to build in the American West. There was the Workingmen's Party in California - one of their platforms was "The Chinese must go." That's how they rallied people. And they were very successful at it.

By 1882, Congress passed the first of a series of Chinese Exclusion Acts, which was the first time a race- and class-based group - Chinese workers - were singled out by American immigration law. The Chinese Exclusion Acts restricted their entry into the United States and said they couldn't become naturalized citizens.

What's really striking is that in the 1890s, the federal government even mandated a Chinese registry. That sounds a lot like this issue of the Muslim registry today, right?
A lot of what you're describing sounds familiar today - the economic anxiety bleeding into racial anxiety, the targeting of outsiders ...
Absolutely. There are a lot of resonances. What's happening today didn't spring out of nowhere - it has a very long history in the United States.
Can you describe some of these old stereotypes? I think that most people have some idea from old Hollywood movies, but it's just such a contrast to how Asians Americans are portrayed today.
The ways in which Americans thought about these "Orientals" hinged a lot on moral differences and on issues of gender, sexuality and family.

Many great historians and scholars have done work on this. The major groups that came before World War II were the Chinese, Japanese, South Asians, Koreans and Filipinos. There were both similarities and differences in how the groups were viewed, but generally they were thought to be threatening - significantly different in a negative sense.

For the most part, a lot of Asian immigrants weren't Christian, so that was suspect. American Chinatowns had a thriving vice economy, so gambling, prostitution and drugs became popularly associated with Asians. (Of course, some of the same white Americans who were criticizing Asians were also the ones participating in these activities.)

There was this idea of moral depravity. At the time, the Chinese and Filipinos and South Asians in America were mostly single, able-bodied young men, so that also raised a lot of eyebrows. It looked like they were sexually wayward.

If you look at old stereotypical imagery of Asians in political cartoons, the way they tend to be depicted is that they are not aligned with white, middle-class notions of respectable masculinity. There's the long hair, the flowing clothing that didn't quite look masculine yet didn't quite look feminine - or maybe it was something in-between, as some scholars have argued.

The women were also thought of as morally suspect - as prostitutes, sexually promiscuous, that kind of thing.
An important argument in your book is that Asians were complicit in the creation of the model minority myth. The way we talk about this issue today, it's as if the white majority imposed this stereotype on Asian communities - but your research shows that's not the case. How did it really get started?
Absolutely. That is a critical point to understand. The model minority myth as we see it today was mainly an unintended outcome of earlier attempts by Asians Americans to be accepted and recognized as human beings. They wanted to be seen as American people who were worthy of respect and dignity.

At lot was at stake. At the time, Asians were living life under an exclusion regime that had many similarities to Jim Crow - not the same as Jim Crow, but certainly a cousin of Jim Crow. There was a whole matrix of laws and discriminatory practices.

By 1924, all immigration from Asia had been completely banned. Asians were considered under the law "aliens ineligible for citizenship." There were all these racial restrictions to citizenship under the law - and the last of these didn't fall until 1952.

Asian Americans tended to be restricted to segregated neighborhoods, segregated schools. They often did not have the kind of job prospects that white people had. They would be barred from certain kinds of employment either by law or by custom.

In 1937, a young U.S.-born Japanese-American man lamented that even if you went to college, you could only end up being a "professional carrot-washer." That was really true for a lot of people. They had very limited options for social mobility. And of course there was also violence - lynchings.

So for Asian Americans, one survival strategy was to portray themselves as "good Americans."
As you argue in your book, it became increasingly expedient for mainstream Americans to acknowledge, and even amplify, Asian attempts to gain respectability. What changed?
Those claims really start to stick in the 1940s, when the nation was gearing up for global war. American leaders started to worry about the consequences of their domestic racial discrimination policies. They were concerned it would get in the way of forging alliances with other people abroad. That really motivated American leaders and the American people to work on race relations.

During World War II, lawmakers thought that Chinese exclusion made for bad diplomacy. So Congress decided to overturn Chinese exclusion as a goodwill gesture to China, who was America's Pacific ally.

With the beginning of the Cold War, American policymakers became really attentive to putting their best image out into the world. They were very interested in winning hearts and minds in Asia.

Japan is a very good example. Japan lost the war and the United States took charge of reconstructing Japan in its own image as a rising democratic, capitalist country. And because Japan became such an important ally, that was the moment when Japanese exclusion laws could finally be overturned, which happened in 1952.

Again, people in Congress worried that if we left these laws on the books, it would endanger a billion hearts and minds in the Far East.
It wasn't just a geopolitical thing right? It seems that by the 1960s, there were other reasons for investing in this image of Asians as upstanding citizens, reasons that were closer to home.
Oh, absolutely. There were definitely domestic reasons for why the idea was appealing that Asians could be considered good American citizens capable of assimilating into American life.

In the 1950s, there were general concerns about maintaining the right kind of home life. There's this image of the perfect American family - a suburban household with a mom, a dad, two to three kids, a white picket fence. That was the ideal, but it wasn't always realized. There was a juvenile delinquency panic in the 1950s, a big scare over how the nation's youth were getting themselves into trouble.

The Chinatown leaders were really smart. They started to peddle stories about Chinese traditional family values and Confucian ethics. They claimed that Chinese children always listened to their elders, were unquestioningly obedient and never got into trouble because after school they would just go to Chinese school.

When I started digging, I found that this idea of this model Chinese family, with the perfect children who always just loved to study and who don't have time to get into trouble or date - started to circulate quite prominently in the 1950s. That speaks to America's anxieties about juvenile delinquency.

Also, since these stories were taking place in Chinatowns, it allowed Americans to claim that America had these remaining repositories of traditional Chinese values at a time when the Communist Chinese had completely dismantled them. So there's this other level where these stories are also anti-Communist - they are doing this other ideological work.
How true were these stories though? How much of this was racial propaganda, and how much of it was rooted in reality?
These are obviously very strategic stories. In 1956, the federal government started to crack down on illegal Chinese immigration, which was in part motivated by the Cold War. So partly, the conservative Chinatown leaders thought this model Chinese family story would do a lot to protect them. They thought this PR campaign would reorient the conversation away from "Communists are sneaking into our country" to "Hey, look at these squeaky-clean, well-behaved children."

From reading community newspapers in these Chinatowns, we know they also had a lot of concerns about juvenile delinquency. In fact, behind closed doors there were heated disagreements about what to do. One woman in particular - Rose Hum Lee, a sociologist with a PhD from the University of Chicago - wrote lots of books and papers about the problems in Chinatown, and accused leaders of sweeping these problems under the rug.

There were Asian Americans then, as today, at the end of the socioeconomic spectrum. And that segment of the population tends to go unnoticed in these kinds of narratives.
It's interesting to compare the efforts of the Chinatown leaders to the parallel efforts of leaders in the African American civil rights movement, who also emphasized respectability - who wore their Sunday best on these marches where they were hosed down and attacked by dogs. What's stunning to me is the contrast. One group's story is amplified, and the other's is, well, almost denied.
I think the Japanese American experience also highlights some of this contrast. At the same time in the 1950s, you hear these stories about how the Japanese Americans dramatically recovered from the internment camps, how they accepted their fate. "After internment, many families were scattered across the country, but they took it as an opportunity to assimilate," that sort of thing.

Japanese Americans aren't perceived to be doing any kind of direct action, they weren't perceived to be protesting. A bad thing happened to them, and they moved on, and they were doing okay.

These stories were ideologically useful. They became a model for political cooperation. The ideas solidify in the 1950s. Americans had recast Asians into these citizens capable of assimilating - even if they still saw Asians as somewhat different from whites. And by the 1960s, what becomes important is that these socially mobile, assimilating, politically nonthreatening people were also decidedly not black.

That's really the key to all this. The work of the African American freedom movements had made white liberals and white conservatives very uncomfortable. Liberals were questioning whether integration could solve some the deeper problems of economic inequality. And by the late 1960s, conservatives were calling for increased law and order.

Across the political spectrum, people looked to Asian Americans - in this case, Japanese and Chinese Americans - as an example of a solution, as a template for other minority groups to follow: "Look how they ended up! They're doing just fine. And they did it all without political protests."

That isn't really true, by the way. Asian Americans did get political, but sometimes their efforts didn't get seen or recognized.

These stereotypes about Asian Americans being patriotic, having an orderly family, not having delinquency or crime - they became seen as the opposite of what "blackness" represented to many Americans at the time.
I would say it also costs the majority less to allow Asian Americans, who were still a very small part of the population, to let them play out this saga of upward mobility, rather than recognizing the rights and claims of African Americans during that same time.
I'm not saying somebody sat down and did a cost-benefit analysis. But in some ways, there seemed to be a big payoff for little risk. Even with the overturning of the exclusion laws, it's not like large numbers of Asians were coming into the United States at the time. Asian Americans at that time were still a pretty marginal part of the population.

As harmful as Asian exclusion was, I would agree that those structures were not as deep or pervasive as anti-black racism. It wouldn't do as much to change the overall social picture by allowing these small numbers of Asian Americans to move forward. It was easier to do, in some ways, because those exclusion structures were not as pervasive, and the consequences had not been as long-lasting as they had been for African Americans.
A really fascinating part of your book describes how these new Asian stereotypes shaped the Moynihan Report, which infamously blamed the plight of African Americans on "ghetto culture." I think that is a great example of how this model minority stereotype started to get used against others in the 1960s.
Daniel Moynihan, the author of that report, was a liberal trying to figure out how to solve this huge problem - the status of African Americans in American life.

If you look in the report, there's not really any mention of Asian Americans. But just a few months before the Moynihan Report came out in the summer of 1965, Moynihan was at a gathering with all these intellectuals and policymakers. They're talking about how Japanese and Chinese Americans were "rather astonishing" because they had thrown off this racial stigma. Moynihan points out that 25 years ago, Asians had been "colored." Then Moynihan says, "Am I wrong that they have ceased to be colored?"

That was a very striking and powerful moment to me.
I think a lot of people believe that the model minority stereotype came out of the huge surge of highly educated Asians who started coming to the United States after 1965. But as your book shows, I think, the causality actually runs the other way.
It's mutually reinforcing. At the time that the United States did this major immigration law overhaul in 1965, policymakers decided that the nation should select its immigrants based on how they could contribute to the economy (and also to reunify families). So what we start to see is people coming to the United States with these credentials and backgrounds and training, and they seem to confirm some of the ideas that are already there - that Asian Americans are model minorities.

My book stops in the late 1960s, but what I think has happened since then is that the model minority stereotype story has really shifted away from the original ideas of patriotism and anti-communism. We now fixate more on education. There's the image of the tiger mom focused on getting her kid into Harvard. That emphasis also speaks to a shift in the American economy, how upward mobility really depends on having a certain kind of educational training.

And the anxieties about Asians have never really gone away. Now they're portrayed as our global competitors. So underlying the praise there's also this fear.
Sometimes in America, it feels like there are only so many racial buckets that people can fall into. With increased immigration from South Asia and Southeast Asia, for instance, it seemed like lot of the newcomers were swept up into this model minority narrative.
What happened in 1965 is that we opened up the gates to large-scale immigration from places like Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia. From Asia, you get large numbers of people coming from South Asia, the Philippines, Korea. Then by the 1970s, the United States is fighting a war in Southeast Asia, so you get this refugee migrant stream. And you're right, they're stepping into this predetermined racial landscape, these preconceived notions about how Asians are.

But as a historian, as someone who thinks about race in American life for a living, I also think that the "model minority" category has only a limited usefulness now in terms of our analysis. We talk about it as a common stereotype, but it doesn't explain the whole scope of Asian American life today - especially since 9/11, when you have communities of South Asians who are Muslims or Sikhs now being racially targeted or labeled as terrorists. So that has become another stereotype of Asians these days.
I think that underscores maybe the meta-narrative of your book - how we in America have always viewed ethnic and racial minorities through the lens of politics and geopolitics, right? In terms of international relations, in terms of what kind of image we want to project to the world, and in terms of what our national anxieties about other countries are.
Absolutely, that's the link. The model minority stereotype and the terrorist stereotype are related, I agree, in how they speak to the geopolitical anxieties of their times.

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The real reasons the U.S. became less racist toward Asian Americans

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Between 1940 and 1970, something remarkable happened to Asian Americans. Not only did they surpass African Americans in average household earnings, but they also closed the wage gap with whites. Many people credit this upward mobility to investments in education.

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Then his words turned sledgehammer blunt.

"This isn't our first rodeo with the forces of genocide," said Goldtooth, a great-grandfather with long black braids sticking out from under the hooded sweatshirt he wore beneath a canvas Carhartt jacket.

Goldtooth sees the pipeline as a threat to the drinking water of thousands downstream. And he sees it as another effort by corporations - backed by the power of the government and expected support of Trump - to trample indigenous people as they have for "hundreds of years of colonial oppression."

"This pipeline represents something deeper," Goldtooth said. "We have to start worrying about the rights of our future generations. We have to start looking at making a just transition as a society away from a fossil fuel economy."

Goldtooth was raised on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico, the grandson of a tribal medicine man and the son of a pioneering Navajo woman who earned a college degree in microbiology.

"They gave me a strong spiritual foundation and a love for the land," said Goldtooth, who spent a couple of years in the Army in the 1970s, working on programs to combat discrimination against Native Americans, and later as a social worker helping indigenous families.

Goldtooth said that he has long seen "environmental racism" in energy projects forced on Native Americans and began turning his anger into activism starting in the early 1990s. Now he travels the world speaking about climate change, energy, pollution and sustainable resources.

"Capitalism feeds on unlimited growth," he said. "It's like this monster that's always hungry and thirsty and devouring the earth. That's what our message is here: We have to live in balance; otherwise we're going to perish."

As protests over the pipeline have grown increasingly violent, Goldtooth blamed police who have been eager to attack "peaceful and prayerful" protesters with tear gas and other weapons.

He acknowledged that some violence has come from anarchists and other outsiders who "don't want to follow the directions of nonviolence from our native elders," who have counseled protesters on how to resist escalation.

"I commend our young people for being patient and holding back their emotions, especially when they are being harassed and intimidated by the police," he said.

Goldtooth lives in Minnesota but has been coming to Standing Rock to visit relatives since he was a young man. He has become a key face of the movement here, and one recent morning he nodded as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental activist and lawyer, visited and likened the pipeline encampment to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

The same day, Goldtooth stood in an empty field amid a circle of volunteer architects, engineers and builders who had come from as far as Spokane, Wash., and Santa Fe, N.M., to help build a more permanent camp to ride out the bone-cracking winter.

"You have been brought here as part of a prayer," Goldtooth told them, whipped by a cold prairie wind. "This is going to be a place that provides safety and sustains us in our fight. . . . We're going to stay here however long it takes."

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Buried in the American heartland, this oil pipeline represents something deeper

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Then his words turned sledgehammer blunt. "This isn't our first rodeo with the forces of genocide," said Goldtooth, a great-grandfather with long black braids sticking out from under the hooded sweatshirt he wore beneath a canvas Carhartt jacket. Goldtooth sees the pipeline as a threat to the drinking water of thousands downstream.

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Top 5 ways anti-immigrant hate makes its way into media and policy - BRAVE NEW FILMS

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Save Darfur - Just another 2014 United to End Genocide Sites site

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Just another 2014 United to End Genocide Sites site

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks feminism, #MeToo movement

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The "Darfur Genocide" refers to the current mass slaughter and rape of Darfuri men, women, and children in Western Sudan. The killings began in 2003 and became the first genocide in the 21st century.[1] Unrest and violence persist today.

The genocide is being carried out by a group of government-armed and government-funded Arab militias known as the Janjaweed (which loosely translates to 'devils on horseback') or Rapid Support Forces (RSF). [2] The Janjaweed systematically destroy Darfuris by burning villages, looting economic resources, polluting water sources, and murdering, raping, and torturing civilians. These militias are historic rivals of the main rebel groups, the Sudanese Liberation Movement (SLM), and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM). As of spring 2020, over 480,000 people have been killed and more than 2.8 million people are displaced. [3]

Sudan is one of the largest countries in Africa. Located in northeastern Africa, it borders the Red Sea and falls between Egypt, Chad, Uganda, and six other countries. The capitol, Khartoum, is in the northeastern part of the country. Darfur is a region in western Sudan that encompasses an area roughly the size of Spain. The population of Darfur is estimated at 7 million people.

The conflict in Darfur has increased tensions in neighboring Chad and the Central African Republic as hundreds of thousands of refugees have streamed over the two countries' borders to escape violence.

Following independence from Britain in 1956, Sudan became embroiled in two prolonged civil wars for most of the remainder of the 20th century. These conflicts were rooted in the north's domination of the economic, political, and social institutions of largely non-Muslim, non-Arab, southern Sudanese. Competition for scarce resources played a large role. [4] As nomads began to compete for grazing land for their herds, disputes arose and traditional peaceful reconciliation measures were no longer able to settle these disputes, causing the region to become increasingly militarized. The complexities of desertification, famines, and the civil war raging between North and South Sudan contributed to a rise in regional tensions during the 1980s. Similarly, as oil was discovered in western Sudan, the Sudanese government and international contributors became increasingly interested in the land in Darfur.

The first civil war ended in 1972 but broke out again in 1983. [5] The second war and famine-related effects resulted in more than 4 million people being displaced and, according to rebel estimates, more than 2 million deaths occurred over a period of two decades. [6] As the civil war between the North and the South reached its peak in the 1990's, the government ignored reports of rising violence in Darfur.

The Comprehensive Peace Agreement ended the North-South War in 2005, [7] granting additional political power to South Sudan. However, it failed to take into account the effects of the war on Darfur. Darfur remained underdeveloped and marginalized at the federal level, lacking infrastructure and development assistance. This neglect, combined with allegations that the government was arming Arab tribesmen (Janjaweed) to raid non-Arab villages, was used as the justification for a rebel attack on a Sudanese Air Force Base at El Fasher, North Darfur in 2003. [8] This attack sparked government reprisals on residents of Darfur, contributing to the large-scale human rights atrocities facing Darfuri civilians today.

Failed peace talks have allowed for the continuation of the conflict. The most successful talks thus far took place in Abuja in 2005-2006, leading to the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA). Present at these negotiations were the Sudanese government and three main rebel groups: the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), Abdel Wahid Mohamed al-Nur's faction of the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM), and Minni Minawi's faction of the SLM. However, multiple negotiations have thus far been largely unsuccessful.

In July of 2007, the UN issued a hybrid United Nations-African Union mission (UNAMID) to maintain peace in Darfur. [9] UNAMID, with a projected strength of 26,000 troops, was authorized to use force to protect civilians. Despite this mandate, however, only 9,000 troops were sent, and they lacked the necessary equipment to carry out their mission. At its peak, close to 16,000 forces were deployed in the region, well short of the 26,000 that had been authorized. [10] However, throughout 2007-2020, the Sudanese government blocked and prevented UNAMID from accessing towns where many of the Janjaweed attacks occurred. Thus, UNAMID has been, for a large part, greatly ineffective in both providing aid to and protecting civilians. [11] UNAMID originally was authorized for ten years, but in 2017 a resolution was passed for a gradual troop phase-out, ending in mid-2020. [12]

On March 4, 2009, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir for crimes against humanity and, in July 2010, a warrant for arrest on charges of genocide. [13] For ten years the government of Sudan had yet to turn him over. Since the issuance of the warrants, Sudan has seen major protests and increased violence. The government has also forcefully expelled aid agencies from the country that has further jeopardized the conditions for thousands of displaced and marginalized civilians.

It was expected that al-Bashir would not face trial at the International Criminal Court in The Hague until he was apprehended in a nation which accepts the ICC's jurisdiction. Sudan is not a state party to the Rome Statute, the international treaty creating the ICC, which it signed but didn't ratify. By all accounts, al-Bashir should be a prisoner in his own country. However, in 2011 the Arab League has announced its solidarity with al-Bashir. Since the warrant, al-Bashir had visited Qatar and Egypt.[14] Both countries refused to arrest him, and the African Union also condemned the arrest warrant and asked the United Nations Security Council to delay its enforcement.

The Sudanese government and JEM signed a ceasefire agreement in February 2010, with a tentative agreement to pursue further peace.[15] However, talks have been disrupted by accusations that the Sudanese army continues to launch raids and air strikes against Darfur villages.

The Janjaweed have also been accused of incursions and attacks in neighboring Chad. Hundreds of aid workers in Chad were evacuated due to increased tension between rebel groups and military forces. Meanwhile, the Janjaweed have ventured deep into Chad to conduct assaults, resulting in the flight of nearly 100,000 Chadians. [16]

In July 2011, South Sudan gained independence from Sudan and became its own nation.[17] During the same month, the Liberation and Justice Movement, an umbrella organization representing rebel groups, and the Sudanese government signed the Doha Document for Peace in Darfur (DDPD). [18] This document represents the process of peace in Darfur; however, little progress has been made after the document was signed because of lack of implementation and enforcement.

In 2014 and 2015, government forces backed by the Janjaweed led counterinsurgency campaigns in Darfur where they repeatedly attacked villages, burned and looted homes, and beat, raped, and executed villagers. [19] In October of 2014, a mass rape of over 200 women and girls was organized and executed by Sudanese forces in a north Darfur town over the course of 36 hours. According to defected Janjaweed members, they had been explicitly ordered to "rape women". [20]

Violence continued into 2016. Amnesty International alleged that the government used chemical weapons against civilians, and 190,000 people were displaced due to violence, according to the UN. [21] In 2016, President Omar al-Bashir announced a unilateral ceasefire in conflict zones. This ceasefire was extended until the end of 2018. However, throughout 2017 and 2018, government forces continued to attack villages throughout Darfur, causing deaths and massive displacement of citizens. As of late 2018, over 2 million people remain displaced from the conflict and almost 5 million people in total have been affected. [22]

In April 2019, President Omar al-Bashir was finally ousted. He had been in power for over 30 years and his removal was in response to months of unarmed protests, to which the government responded with armed retaliation. In Sudan, al-Bashir's rule was first followed by a military council and, in August 2019, it was replaced by a transitional government of both military and civilian members. [23] In February 2020, the Sudanese government officially agreed to hand al-Bashir over to the ICC to face war crime and genocide charges. [24]

Attacks on Darfuri villages commonly begin with Sudanese Air Force attacks using Russian-supplied Antonov bombers. Air campaigns are often followed by Janjaweed militia raids. All remaining village men, women, and children are either murdered or forced to flee. Looting, burning food stocks, enslaving and raping women and children, and stealing livestock are common. Dead bodies are tossed in wells to contaminate water supplies and entire villages are burned to the ground.

The on-going conflict in Darfur, Sudan was declared "genocide" by United States Secretary of State Colin Powell on September 9, 2004, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.[25] On February 18, 2006, President George W. Bush called for the number of international troops in Darfur to be doubled. In addition, the US has imposed economic sanctions on Sudan since 1997. However, after working and talking with the Sudanese government for years, the US formally revoked its sanctions on Sudan in 2017. [26] This was largely in response to the Sudanese government's "sustained positive actions in reducing hostilities in conflict areas, improving humanitarian access throughout Sudan, and addressing the threat of terrorism in cooperation with the US." [27]

On September 17, 2006, British Prime Minister Tony Blair wrote an open letter to the members of the European Union calling for a unified response to the crisis.[28] In supporting the United Nations Security Council Resolution in 2007 to authorize the deployment of up to 26,000 peacekeepers to prevent further violence in Darfur, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said in a speech before the United Nations General Assembly that the Darfur crisis was "the greatest humanitarian disaster the world faces today."[29] The British government also endorsed the International Criminal Court's indictment of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and urged the Sudanese government to co-operate.

Both China and Russia have blocked many United Nations resolutions on Darfur because of their support for the Sudanese government, a big trading partner. From its seat on the United Nations Security Council, China has been Sudan's chief diplomatic ally. China invests heavily in Sudanese oil. [30] The country is China's largest oversees oil provider. Sudan's military is supplied by Chinese- and Russian-made helicopters, tanks, fighter planes, bombers, rocket launch propelled grenades, and machine guns.

Russia and China opposed UN peace keeping troops in Sudan. Russia strongly supports Sudan's territorial integrity and opposes the creation of an independent Darfuri state. Also, Russia is Sudan's strongest investment partner and political ally in Europe. [31] Russia considers Sudan as an important global ally in the African continent.

Since the ousting of Omar al-Bashir in early 2019, the Sudanese government has established and retained a transitional government. Although this government recently did agree to turn to turn over al-Bashir to the ICC, its next steps and transition to a permanent government remain to be seen. Arbitrary detention, torture, limitations of the freedom of press, and gender-based violence continue to be seen in both Darfur and Sudan as a whole under this new government. [32]
Updated: World Without Genocide, January 2021.
Citations:

[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/africa-july-dec08-origins_07-03

[2] https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/janjaweed

[3] https://tolerance.tavaana.org/en/content/darfur-genocide-0

[4] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/print_su.html

[5] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/country-fast-facts-sudan/

[6] https://secondsudanesecivilwars.weebly.com/facts.html

[7] https://peacemaker.un.org/node/1369

[8] https://reliefweb.int/report/sudan/sudan-rebels-retreat-under-government-air-attack

[9] https://www.un.org/press/en/2007/sc9089.doc.htm

[10] https://thedefensepost.com/2019/11/01/un-unamid-darfur-extended-march-2020/

[11] https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2019/country-chapters/sudan

[12] https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/mission/unamid

[13] https://www.icc-cpi.int/darfur/albashir

[14] https://worldpolicy.org/2011/07/07/the-icc-gains-ground-in-the-arab-world/

[15] http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/africa/02/23/sudan.peace.agreement/index.html

[16] https://www.hrw.org/news/2006/02/21/chad-darfur-conflict-spills-across-border

[17] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-14069082

[18] https://unamid.unmissions.org/doha-document-peace-darfur

[19] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mvpy8y/darfurs-tribes-are-killing-each-other-over-gold-and-water

[20] https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/02/11/sudan-mass-rape-army-darfur#

[21] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/sudan-crisis-amnesty-report-cites-evidence-government-used-chemical-weapons-n656121

[22] World Report 2019, op. cit.

[23] https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2020/country-chapters/sudan

[24] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-51462613

[25] https://www.ushmm.org/learn/timeline-of-events/after-1945/genocide-in-darfur

[26] https://www.state.gov/u-s-relations-with-sudan/

[27] https://sd.usembassy.gov/sanctions-revoked-following-sustained-positive-action-government-sudan/

[28] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2005/jun/23/speeches.eu

[29] https://www.ft.com/content/28b08110-3f73-11dc-b034-0000779fd2ac

[30] https://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/sudan1103/26.htm

[31] https://intpolicydigest.org/2018/03/26/russia-and-sudan-are-cozying-up/

[32] World Report 2019, op. cit.

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Sudan - Darfur " World Without Genocide - Making It Our Legacy

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The "Darfur Genocide" refers to the current mass slaughter and rape of Darfuri men, women, and children in Western Sudan. The killings began in 2003 and became the first genocide in the 21st century.[1] Unrest and violence persist today.

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Children in Agriculture - stopchildlabor

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After more than a decade of stakeholder input and analysis, the EPA revised the WPS and CPA rule to prevent injury and illness to the children, women and men who work around pesticides in agriculture, or who come into contact with pesticides in other settings.

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By Timothy Ryan
[Tim Ryan of the Solidarity Center is a CLC member, who wrote this piece on May 3, 1995 for The Christian Science Monitor. Iqbal Masih was murdered on April 16, 1995]
Anyone who knew Iqbal Masih, the 12-year-old boy recently assassinated in Lahore, Pakistan, by someone believed to be a feudal landlord and carpet manufacturer, was struck by his brilliance.

I don't simply mean his intellectual abilities, though once rescued from slavery at a carpet loom this young activist demonstrated a tremendous aptitude for learning. He went through five years of school curriculum in three. Although malnutrition and abuse left him, at the age of 12, physically smaller and more frail than my nine-year-old daughter, it was clear that his mind, his ambition, and his spirit burned brightly.

When I saw him last December in Karachi on his return from the United States, where he received a Reebok Human Rights Award, he was filled with the excitement of his first airplane ride, a new Instamatic camera, his visit with other schoolchildren in Boston, and the unimaginable promise that one day he might attend a university. Brandeis University had pledged to give a four-year scholarship to Iqbal when he finished his studies in Pakistan.

Then someone motivated by greed, by fear, by hatred, pulled the trigger of a shotgun and obliterated this promise.

I first met Iqbal last year through my work with the Bonded Labor Liberation Front as a representative of the AFL-CIO in South Asia.

The BLLF has worked dauntlessly for years to free thousands of bonded and child laborers, Iqbal among them. After working six years at a carpet loom, starting at the age of four, Iqbal was rescued by the BLLF when he was 10.

Iqbal's rescue was due in no small part to his own guts. Last December he told me that one day two years ago in the village where he was enslaved as a carpet weaver, he saw BLLF posters declaring that bonded and child labor was illegal under Pakistan law and secretly contacted BLLF activists. At the risk of his own life, Iqbal led the BLLF to the carpet looms where they rescued hundreds of children, who might still be in slavery if not for his courage.

It seems medieval, and perhaps it is, but for years carpet manufacturers, brick kiln owners, landowners, and manufacturers of sporting goods and other products in Pakistan have maintained an unrelenting grip on bonded laborers and children. Some estimates run as high as 20 million bonded and child laborers. At least half a million children are employed in the carpet trade alone.

Because of the current tension between Islamic and Christian communities in Pakistan, some apologists want to paint the killing of Iqbal as a purely religious matter. On one level this is a mere smoke screen. But on a more complex and sinister level, there is some connection between the fact that Iqbal was Christian and the fact that he was pressed into slavery in the first place.

Iqbal's story has an economic and political subtext: Politicians and businessmen in Pakistan form a tight web of relationships based on kin, clan, and caste. They count on family members who occupy positions of authority in local, provincial, national, and police bodies to look the other way when laws are violated, or, in many cases, to actively participate in crimes against workers and minorities.

Poverty is often the surface excuse for a problem that has deeper roots. It's a fallacy to see Iqbal's death solely as the result of brutal economics, rather than the outcome of broader, more pervasive violations of fundamental human rights.

On one level Iqbal's story is surely economic - poor people have less education, less income, less power than the rich. Even though it was outlawed in 1992 under Pakistan's Bonded Labor Abolition Act, the "advance" system that bonds people to their employers continues unabated. This system ensnared Iqbal at the age of four. The BLLF has taken some cases to court, but police and employer intimidation, along with judges' unwillingness to enforce the law, has prevented any prosecutions under the 1992 law.

It's at a deeper, generally hidden level that Iqbal's tragedy intersects with millions of Pakistani citizens and helps to explain the oppressive social and cultural patterns that are partly responsible for his death.

The fact is, most people who are bonded and enslaved are converted Muslims, indigenous tribal people, Hindus, and Christians - in short, anyone outside the mainstream of Sunni Islamic society. This insight reveals the intrinsic link between "economic" or "labor" issues and pervasive problems of intolerance and discrimination based on race, language, and ethnicity.

So we're not just talking here about poverty and economic hardship, or one brave little boy's death. We're talking about enslavement based on race and language and religion, about the treatment of human beings as commodities, as slave labor, and the slow grinding to death of people who not only are denied economic advancement, but also a chance at education, decent housing, clean water - the things that make life livable.

Iqbal's death must have a greater meaning beyond the tragedy of a bright meteor snuffed out by greed and corruption. His experience implores us to look beyond "poverty" or "economic hardship" as an explanation of why so many men, women, and children in traditional societies are exploited - to see the rights of child workers and bonded workers as part of a continuum of overall human rights that must be defended at all costs.
Published here with permission of the author who is member of the Child Labor Coalition. Please note that statistics in this article are from 1995, the year it was written. For more information about Iqbal's life, click here.
Please follow the CLC on Twitter by clicking here.
Please follow the CLC on Facebook by clicking here.

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By Timothy Ryan [Tim Ryan of the Solidarity Center is a CLC member, who wrote this piece on May 3, 1995 for The Christian Science Monitor. Iqbal Masih was murdered on April 16, 1995] Anyone who knew Iqbal Masih, the 12-year-old boy recently assassinated in Lahore, Pakistan, by someone believed to be a feudal landlord and carpet manufacturer, was struck by his brilliance.

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xoJane: Women's Lifestyle & Community Site - xoJane

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I am not a "person with a disability." I do not "have a disability." Given that I look like this:

You probably think I'm either delusional or in denial. I'm not, I just have a real problem with the phrase "person with a disability" and the notion of "having a disability."

I am disabled. More specifically, I am disabled by a society that places social, attitudinal and architectural barriers in my way. This world we live in disables me by treating me like a second-class citizen because I have a few impairments -- most obviously a mobility impairment.
Two ways of looking at disability
What's the difference between "having a disability" and "being disabled"? It all comes down to two sociological theories: the medical/individual model of disability and the social model of disability.

The medical model -- the idea that a person has a disability -- is the dominant notion in our society. It's the idea that a person is prevented from functioning in our society by their body or brain and it's just that person's tough luck. If they can't blend into this world, it's not the world's problem.

The social model is the way I prefer to view the world. It's the idea that a person with an impairment or illness is disabled by the society we live in because of all the barriers that are put in our way.
Society disables me.
I live in London, which has a world famous underground train network. Only around 20% of the stations have wheelchair access. Someone with a medical/individual perspective would state that I am prevented from getting around my city because I'm a person with a disability and it's tough luck that the Tube is so inaccessible. If I want to use the Tube then I'm just gonna have to find a new skeleton from somewhere.

The way I see it is that I've been disabled when it comes to travelling around my city by the architects that installed stairs and escalators instead of ramps and lifts at the majority of Underground stations. Stairs and escalators are man-made barriers put in the way by a discriminatory society that excludes me because I have impaired mobility. I continue to be disabled by a Mayor who has set the budget for improving access on the Tube to £0 for the next 3 years.

Most people look at the word "disabled" and assume it means "less able." It doesn't. It means "prevented from functioning." When I turn the wireless connection off on my computer, I get told that the connection has been "disabled":

Does this mean that my wifi has suddenly become less able or broken? Has my wifi acquired a disability? Of course not. It has been prevented from functioning by an external force. In a very similar way to how I'm disabled by bus drivers that just won't stop if they see me -- a wheelchair user -- waiting at the bus stop.

Hannah Cockroft is not someone you'd describe as "less able." The woman is an unstoppable force on an athletics track. But she is disabled when it comes to travelling around London because of the man-made stairs and escalators at Tube stations.

As a person with a mobility impairment I am disabled by steps, stairs, escalators, being denied computer access as I can't write by hand, inaccessible housing, and so on. To me a flight of stairs without a lift as an alternative is the equivalent of right-clicking me and selecting "disable Lisa."
Once I learned about the social model, I realized that my body wasn't the problem at all.
There are many who would argue that they do have a disability. They point out that even if all barriers put in place by society were removed, they'd still have things they can't do.

Firstly in response to that: It's a person's right to identify however the hell they want. If they're more comfortable as a "person with a disability" than as a "disabled person" then that's nothing to do with me.

Secondly, most of these people haven't noticed the social model's distinction between "impairment" (the things you can't do because of your body/brain) and "disability" (the social barriers disabling you on the grounds that you have an illness or impairment). I have a mobility impairment and because of that society gets all right-clicky and prevents me from functioning to my full potential.

Some people state that the social model is just a sociological theory; it doesn't make a bit of difference in one's everyday life. For me that's just not true. I was about 17 when I learned about the social model and it radically changed how I thought about my own body.

When I was a child I would wonder "why me?" on a daily basis. I would wonder why my spirit had been put into this body that hurt so much of the time. I hated my body when I was not allowed on school trips or when I was left in the classroom on my own while my classmates were doing something more fun. I'd get left in the classroom on my own with a math textbook -- anything is more fun than that.

Once I learned about the social model, I realized that my body wasn't the problem at all. The reason I spent so much time in pain was because I'd get half a paracetamol 1 every 4 hours for multiple broken bones. There was no need for me to be in pain; effective painkillers existed by the 1980s. I just wasn't given any. Denying someone needed pain meds is an attitudinal barrier making their life needlessly difficult.

It also made me realize that the reason I was treated like crap at school wasn't my body's fault at all. It was disablist discrimination. With hindsight, it seems so odd that I just accepted that my impaired body was to blame for all the misery I put up with during primary school 2, but it was the only difference I could see between me and all the other kids. No one stopped and told me that I was being discriminated against, that it didn't have to be happening, and that it wasn't my body's fault.
No one has ever told me that I should describe myself as a "person with gayness" or a "person with womanliness."
The main argument in favor of the phrase "person with a disability" is that it's "person first." Whaaaat? No one has ever told me that I should describe myself as a "person with gayness" or a "person with womanliness." I'm gay and I'm a woman -- no need to qualify that I'm a person too. But I have been told that I'm wrong for calling myself "disabled" rather than a "person with a disability." Unsurprisingly my response either tends to be about as long as this article or a short string of expletives.

We had the Paralympics here in London 2 months ago. During the games, it became the cool thing for unimpaired celebrities to tweet that the word disabled is "ridiculous" and needs to be replaced. I'd love to see if they still feel the same once they've been denied access to transport, housing, medical care and educational opportunities. "Disabled" is the best word in the world for describing the barriers I confront and no nondisabled person has the right to try and take that from me.

1. Or acetaminophen as it's called on your side of the Atlantic. Return

2. I understand that British primary school years are the equivalent of grades K - 5 in the US. Return

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I'm Not A "Person With a Disability": I'm a Disabled Person

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I am not a "person with a disability." I do not "have a disability." Given that I look like this: You probably think I'm either delusional or in denial. I'm not, I just have a real problem with the phrase "person with a disability" and the notion of "having a disability."

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Every 98 seconds someone in the U.S. is sexually assaulted. That means every single day more than 570 people experience sexual violence in this country.

Sexual violence permeates our culture, from violent rape scenes on hit TV shows to sexist dress codes that reinforce rape culture; from famous athletes telling young girls they're " supposed to be silent," to near-daily stories of sexual assaults on college campuses; from a former Olympic doctor accused of sexually abusing more than 100 women, to a President of The United States who has been publicly accused of sexually assaulting more than 15 women and was recorded boasting that he grabs women "by the pussy."

All of these examples create a culture that reinforces the normalization of sexual violence.

Since the first step toward preventing sexual violence is understanding the reality of it, we've rounded up 30 statistics that show just how insidious it is for National Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month.

Sexual violence is a problem that is deeply rooted in our culture, and these numbers prove that.

The estimated number of women who have been the victims of rape since 1998.

The percentage of perpetrators of sexual violence that will walk free.

The percentage of female rape survivors who will attempt suicide.

The percentage of trans people who will experience sexual assault in their lifetimes.

The total amount of money rape costs victims every year in the U.S., excluding child sexual abuse.

The age range that women are four times more likely than the general population to be victims of rape, attempted rape or sexual assault. Female college students ages 18-24 are three times more likely than women in the general population to experience sexual violence.

The fraction of American women who have survived an attempted or completed rape in their lifetimes.

The amount of times trans people of color are more likely to experience sexual violence than the general population.

The percentage of men who will be raped in their lifetime.

The percentage of adult rape victims that are female.

The average number of victims of rape and sexual assault per year in the U.S.

The estimated number of inmates who experience sexual violence in prison or jail every year.

The percentage of instances of sexual violence experienced by inmates that are perpetrated by jail or prison staff.

The number of times a person with a disability is more likely to be a victim of sexual assault or rape than a person without a disability.

The percentage of sexual contact between inmates and prison guards that is illegal and, therefore, non-consensual.

The estimated lifetime income that a survivor of sexual violence who was abused as an adolescent loses.

The amount of money it costs to get a rape kit tested. According to the Violence Against Women Act, a survivor should never have to pay for their own rape kit, but many states have loopholes that force survivors to do just that.

The age range in which people are most likely to be sexually assaulted.

The percentage of trans or gender nonconforming students who report being sexually assaulted while attending college.

The percentage of bisexual women who report being raped in their lifetime.

The number of military service people who experienced unwanted sexual contact in 2014.

The fraction of military service members who experienced an assault at the hands of someone in their chain of command.

The estimated number of men who have experienced an attempted or completed rape since 1998.

The average number of Native Americans 12 years and older who report being sexually assaulted each year.

The percentage of women who experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) during the two weeks directly after being raped.

The fraction of rapes committed by someone the victim knows.

The percentage of sexual violence perpetrators that are white.

The percentage of child sexual abuse perpetrators who know their victim.

The percentage of false rape reports.

The amount of money sexual violence and abuse cost the U.S. in 2008 alone.

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30 Alarming Statistics That Show The Reality Of Sexual Violence In America

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Every 98 seconds someone in the U.S. is sexually assaulted. That means every single day more than 570 people experience sexual violence in this country.

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The roots of racism run deep. They permeate our culture beyond the existence of racial slurs and persist regardless of our first black president. To see examples of systemic racism, you don't even need to look far. If you have gone to school, lived in a house, had a job, or been to the doctor, you've likely been hurt or helped by institutional racism at some point in your life.

Institutional racism, or systemic racism, is defined as the pattern of social and political systems discriminating against a group of people based on race. If you're wondering how a school or a bank or any "thing" or "system" can be racist, ask yourself who runs those "things" and "systems." A government or any other institution is created and run by human beings. While a building or a document cannot itself hold prejudice or beliefs (on account of...they're made of bricks and/or paper), human beings are more than capable of holding prejudicial beliefs, and in turn, creating systems that reflect those beliefs.

My "But slavery was abolished and hate crimes are illegal" senses are tingling; this is usually the part in the conversation where laws established or struck down are used as examples of why institutional racism can't exist. If Equal Employment Opportunity Laws make it federally illegal, how can job discrimination based on race persist? Oh, sweet, naive, hypothetical question. Making something illegal doesn't make it go away. If that were the case, murders would never happen and even if they did, they would all be solved and the victim brought justice. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but unsolved murders still very much exist. Like, there are whole basic cable channels dedicated to them.

Scott Olson/Getty Images News/Getty Images

The validity of institutional racism and whether it exists is a debate that is far from over. In September, Mike Pence criticized conversations on institutional racism, claiming those comments calling out systemic bias are what is actually creating division throughout the country. In his statement about the fatal police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott, Pence said, "We ought to set aside this talk, this talk about institutional racism and institutional bias." Before a problem can be solved, we need to acknowledge and agree on the fact that problem exists. There is disagreement at the highest level of our government about the existence of institutional racism.

Institution racism is real. Systemic bias exists. Here are just eight examples of how our systems treat people of color differently - and how it shows that institutional racism is still a very real problem.

2

58 percent of prisoners are black or Hispanic, despite making up one quarter of the U.S. population.

Scott Olson/Getty Images News/Getty Images

The way the justice system disproportionately affects people of color goes beyond wrongful convictions. The above statistic comes from the NAACP's criminal justice fact sheet, which also mentions that in 2001 one in six black men had been incarcerated at some point in their lifetime. Overall, black people are incarcerated at six times the rate of white people.

Ava DuVernay's film 13th examines the way the criminal justice system disproportionately affects black people, specifically as it relates to the 13th amendment which abolished slavery. As the trailer points out, the language in the amendment makes an exception for criminals. If you haven't already, watch the Oscar-nominated 13th on Netflix and learn about how race and mass incarceration are deeply intertwined in the United States.

4

74 percent of black students and 80 percent of Latino students attend schools that are more than half-minority populations.

Finnbarr Webster/Getty Images News/Getty Images

Brown versus Board did not solve the racial injustices in our education system. In fact, many school are more segregated now than they were in the the '50s and '60s. The above statistic matters because it shows in numbers the lack of integration among white students and students of color. The "resegregation" of schools has been widely discussed as of late. PBS publishes these infographics on school segregation. ProPublica examined resegregation in the south. NPR ran a series on systemic segregation that highlights how integration helps students of every race.

Racial bias is especially prevalent in the way schools discipline student of color versus white students. Black students are suspended and expelled at three times the rate of white students. This especially affects female students of color, as they are "suspended at higher rates than girls of any other race or ethnicity and most boys."

This video on institution racism in schools from the National Education Association touches on a broader issue at hand: the segregation of our schools is widely a result of the segregation of our cities.

8

White families hold 90 percent of the national wealth. Black and Latino families combined hold less than five percent.

David McNew/Getty Images News/Getty Images

Inequality in schools and the job market as well as other racial biases compound to create a great disparity in the distribution of wealth. A 2013 survey from the Federal Reserve showed that the top 10 percent of white families own pretty much everything. This works out to mean the median net worth of white families is $134,000. That's almost ten times higher than $14,000 for Hispanic families and $11,000 for black families.

These disparities are overwhelming when you see them compiled in a list. Even more so when you experience them every day. But like with any other problem, the first step is acknowledging there is something wrong. Once we do that, we can start fixing these systems so they truly help all people.
This article was first published on March 15, 2017. It was updated on June 6, 2019.

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This Is Proof That Institutional Racism Is Still Very Much A Problem

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The roots of racism run deep. They permeate our culture beyond the existence of racial slurs and persist regardless of our first black president. To see examples of systemic racism, you don't even need to look far. If you have gone to school, lived...

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It wasn't too long ago that a lot of people were talking about a post-racial America. We had elected a Black president for the first time, and then went ahead and re-elected him four years later, and the country was feeling pretty good about itself.

While Barack Obama's presidency was indeed a profound and meaningful mark of true progress, racism, of course, never really went away. The presence of a Black president, hockey star, or movie-franchise superhero, however welcome and exciting, cannot reverse centuries of racial injustice.

In fact, racism is built right into every level of our society in ways that might surprise you.

Racism at Every Level of Society

Racism of this kind, racism that infects the very structure of our society, is called systemic racism. And at first glance, it may be difficult to detect.

Since the election of Donald Trump, hate crimes have been on the rise. White supremacists have been emboldened. Anti-immigrant rhetoric has intensified. We condemn these awful examples of prejudice and bias and hate, but systemic racism is something different. It's less about violence or burning crosses than it is about everyday decisions made by people who may not even think of themselves as racist. As sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has said, "The main problem nowadays is not the folks with the hoods, but the folks dressed in suits."

Systemic racism persists in our schools, offices, court system, police departments, and elsewhere. Why? Think about it: when white people occupy most positions of decision-making power, people of color have a difficult time getting a fair shake, let alone getting ahead.
We all have to do a better job of calling out systemic racism. Here are seven ways we know that it's real.
WEALTH

According to one study, white families hold 90% of the national wealth, Latino families hold 2.3%, and Black families hold 2.6%. Not only that, the Great Recession hit minority families particularly hard, and the wealth gap has increased. Think about this: for every $100 white families earn in income, Black families earn just $57.30. That's almost unbelievable-and it's a huge racial-justice issue.

EMPLOYMENT

It's next to impossible to build wealth without steady and rewarding employment. But the Black unemployment rate has been consistently twice that of whites over the past 60 years, no matter what has been going on with the economy (whether it's been up or down). Hmm, maybe higher education would help with that? Well, according to the data, Black people with college degrees are twice as likely to be unemployed as all other graduates. That may be because, as one study found, job applicants with white-sounding names get called back about 50% more of the time than applicants with Black-sounding names, even when they have identical resumes. (This seems to be a widespread problem: even guests with distinctively Black names get less positive reviews from property owners on Airbnb.)

EDUCATION

Let's discuss education a little more in depth. If you thought that preschool, at least, was a racism-free zone, well... consider that while Black children constitute 18% of preschoolers nationwide, they make up nearly 50% of suspensions. When all age groups are examined, Black students are three times more likely to be suspended than white students, even when their infractions are similar. Overall, Black students represent 16% of student enrollment and 27% of students referred to law enforcement. And once Black children are in the criminal justice system, they are 18 times more likely than white children to be sentenced as adults.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE

Given this, perhaps it should not come as a surprise that even though, as we said, Black people make up 13% of the population, they represent about 40% of the prison population. Why is that? Perhaps because if a Black person and a white person each commit a crime, the Black person has a better chance of being arrested. It's also true that, once arrested, Black people are convicted more often than white people. And for many years, laws assigned much harsher sentences for using or possessing crack, for example, compared to cocaine. Finally, when Black people are convicted, they are about 20% more likely to be sentenced to jail time, and typically see sentences 20% longer than those for whites who were convicted of similar crimes. And as we know, a felony conviction means, in many states, that you lose your right to vote. Right now in America, more than 7.4% of the adult African American population is disenfranchised (compared to 1.8% of the non-African American population).

HOUSING

When the government sought to make mortgages more affordable back in the 1930s, thereby jumpstarting the epoch of suburban living, the Home Owner's Loan Corporation (and thereafter private banks) ranked neighborhoods all around the country, giving high marks to all-white neighborhoods and marking those with minorities in red as risky investments. Redlining, which essentially barred Black people and other minorities from sharing in the American Dream and building wealth like their white counterparts, was officially outlawed in the '60s, but the practice really never went away. In fact, during the Great Recession, banks routinely and purposely guided Black home buyers toward subprime loans. A recent study demonstrated that people of color are told about and shown fewer homes and apartments than whites. Black ownership is now at an all-time low (42%, compared to 72% for whites).

SURVEILLANCE

If you're white, you don't usually need to worry about being monitored by the police. But the day-to-day reality for African Americans is quite different. More than half of all young Black Americans know someone, including themselves, who has been harassed by the police. Statistics also show that Black drivers are about 30% more likely than whites to be pulled over by the police. (So African Americans can expect to be monitored wherever they go-but did you know that they can't even expect to safely cross the street? Black people are twice as likely to die in pedestrian accidents than whites, perhaps because, according to one study, motorists are less likely to stop for Black people in the crosswalk.) And of course it's well-known that Muslims are under increasing and often illegal surveillance.

HEALTHCARE

African Americans in particular face discrimination in the world of healthcare too. A 2012 study found that a majority of doctors have "unconscious racial biases" when it comes to their Black patients. Black Americans are far more likely than whites to lack access to emergency medical care. The hospitals they go to tend to be less well funded, and staffed by practitioners with less experience. But even Black doctors face discrimination: they are less likely than their similarly credentialed white peers to receive government grants for research projects. And it seems that facing a lifetime of racism leaves African Americans vulnerable to developing stress-related health issues that can lead to chronic issues later in life.

Let's be clear: systemic racism is a corrosive and widespread problem in our society, and we all need to do a better job of confronting it-in our towns, in our neighborhoods, and in ourselves.

Want to be part of the solution? Here's how you can take action:

Watch the totally amazing video below from our friends at Demos about the roots of systemic racism

Start a conversation. Once you know the truth, it's hard to keep it to yourself. So tell a friend, a sibling, a roommate, your kooky uncle...that systemic racism is real, and we all need to be fighting to end it.

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Yes, systemic racism is real. And people of color - African Americans, Latinos, Asians, and other minorities - face it every day. We still have a lot of work to do, America. The good news: by speaking up about it, you can be part of the solution.

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A version of this post originally appeared on the Mobility Resource blog
Discrimination is a fact of life for many groups of people, but to be honest, I never really gave much thought to discrimination growing up. It wasn't until I became disabled when I was 14 years old when I finally understood what discrimination meant. It meant not only being misunderstood, but being rudely mistreated. No one truly understands what discrimination is until they're on the receiving end of things.

To say it has been a real wake-up call these past 20 years of disabled life would be a huge understatement. My goal however has always been to be grateful, not bitter, about these discriminatory occasions. Wisdom can be found everywhere too and there are a handful of things you tend to run into daily. I'm sure you've experienced many of these hundreds of times if you have a disability.

For some keen insight into real life with a disability, here are seven examples of the most common examples of discrimination people with disabilities experience every day.
Store employees assuming we're stupid.

Go to the grocery store, the movie theater, a store in the mall, a restaurant or any public-type place that has employees, and five times out of ten you'll run into an employee who will automatically assume you're ill-equipped mentally because of an obvious physical disability.

This happens to me constantly, especially if I'm at a grocery store with an able-bodied friend. Every time at check out, the cashier will always ask my friend if she wants paper or plastic, directing all her questions towards her, never assuming I'm the one who's paying. Very, very frustrating.
Taxis passing us by.
If you live in a big metropolitan area like NYC, chances are you've experienced taxis passing you by quite often. People with disabilities constantly complain that taxis pass them by when they're out on the road trying to hail a cab. Taxis frequently avoid passengers with physical disabilities, not wanting to deal with our extra needs, seeing them as a headache and not looking at us as an equal customer.

Little do they know that we do not demand their assistance. Anyone with a disability hailing a cab solo can likely handle the entire transfer on their own.
Read also: Will Driverless Cars Carry People With Disabilities Into The Future? Stairs in public spaces.
You go to grab a coffee or meet a friend for lunch, but wait -- you can't get in. This is architecture discrimination at its finest and we encounter it every day. Despite the misguided notion that certain buildings are grandfathered-in to the ADA and do not need to be accessible, umm no, they do. Any public space must.

That means any store, restaurant, hotel or bar needs to meet all the ADA requirements. The sad part is how so many owners simply don't care and choose to blatantly discriminate. Clint Eastwood's refusal to make his hotel ADA accessible goes down as the worst.
Wheelchair "quotas."
"Sorry, no more wheelchairs allowed." Concert venues, airplanes, city buses, amusement park rides -- quotas on how many wheelchairs are allowed in certain places are a reality of disabled life. They're instated for safety, but they're also highly limiting, generally only allowing a half dozen people with disabilities or so into an event or two people who use wheelchairs on a city bus.

These rules can be highly limiting, forcing us to change our plans. Very often when I try to buy tickets for a show, the wheelchair tickets have long been sold out, leaving me no option but to not go. While this isn't considered illegal discrimination, in my eyes it is just as bad.
Strangers pretending they don't see us.
Once in a while you'll run into someone who's not very pleasant. Maybe they're budding in line in front of you, or avoiding your gaze when you're looking for someone to help you grab something from the shelf. These folks like to pretend they don't see us, thinking it's easier to do that than just interact with us.

This also will happen in a crowd when people are trying to get past you. Moms with strollers are the worst. They will ignore you just so they don't feel bad about ramming into you to get where they're going.
People taking our parking spots.
It happens all the time -- able-bodied individuals parking in handicapped parking spaces. The convenience is just too hard to deny. And while this is all fine and dandy when it's in the middle of the night and there's no one else at the store, they generally take our spots in the daytime, especially the good ones that have extra room for our ramps.

Whatever you do, don't let these daily discriminatory occasions bring you down. Patience is huge in the life of a wheelchair-user, especially if you want to survive and do so with grace. Discrimination may even be your reality for upcoming several years. However, if you can use each time you discriminated against as a learning opportunity, then you're on your way to true success.
A version of this post originally appeared on the Mobility Resource blog.

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6 Instances Of Discrimination People With Disabilities Face Every Day

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A version of this post originally appeared on the Mobility Resource blog Discrimination is a fact of life for many groups of people, but to be honest, I never really gave much thought to discrimination growing up. It wasn't until I became disabled when I was 14 years old when I finally understood what discrimination meant.

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Movie stars are supposedly nothing like you and me. They're svelte, glamorous, self-possessed. They wear dresses we can't afford and live in houses we can only dream of. Yet it turns out that-in the most painful and personal ways-movie stars are more like you and me than we ever knew.

In 1997, just before Ashley Judd's career took off, she was invited to a meeting with Harvey Weinstein, head of the starmaking studio Miramax, at a Beverly Hills hotel. Astounded and offended by Weinstein's attempt to coerce her into bed, Judd managed to escape. But instead of keeping quiet about the kind of encounter that could easily shame a woman into silence, she began spreading the word.

"I started talking about Harvey the minute that it happened," Judd says in an interview with TIME. "Literally, I exited that hotel room at the Peninsula Hotel in 1997 and came straight downstairs to the lobby, where my dad was waiting for me, because he happened to be in Los Angeles from Kentucky, visiting me on the set. And he could tell by my face-to use his words-that something devastating had happened to me. I told him. I told everyone."

She recalls one screenwriter friend telling her that Weinstein's behavior was an open secret passed around on the whisper network that had been furrowing through Hollywood for years. It allowed for people to warn others to some degree, but there was no route to stop the abuse. "Were we supposed to call some fantasy attorney general of moviedom?" Judd asks. "There wasn't a place for us to report these experiences."

Finally, in October-when Judd went on the record about Weinstein's behavior in the New York Times, the first star to do so-the world listened. (Weinstein said he "never laid a glove" on Judd and denies having had nonconsensual sex with other accusers.)

When movie stars don't know where to go, what hope is there for the rest of us? What hope is there for the janitor who's being harassed by a co-worker but remains silent out of fear she'll lose the job she needs to support her children? For the administrative assistant who repeatedly fends off a superior who won't take no for an answer? For the hotel housekeeper who never knows, as she goes about replacing towels and cleaning toilets, if a guest is going to corner her in a room she can't escape?

Like the "problem that has no name," the disquieting malaise of frustration and repression among postwar wives and homemakers identified by Betty Friedan more than 50 years ago, this moment is born of a very real and potent sense of unrest. Yet it doesn't have a leader, or a single, unifying tenet. The hashtag #MeToo (swiftly adapted into #BalanceTonPorc, #YoTambien, #Ana_kaman and many others), which to date has provided an umbrella of solidarity for millions of people to come forward with their stories, is part of the picture, but not all of it.

This reckoning appears to have sprung up overnight. But it has actually been simmering for years, decades, centuries. Women have had it with bosses and co-workers who not only cross boundaries but don't even seem to know that boundaries exist. They've had it with the fear of retaliation, of being blackballed, of being fired from a job they can't afford to lose. They've had it with the code of going along to get along. They've had it with men who use their power to take what they want from women. These silence breakers have started a revolution of refusal, gathering strength by the day, and in the past two months alone, their collective anger has spurred immediate and shocking results: nearly every day, CEOs have been fired, moguls toppled, icons disgraced. In some cases, criminal charges have been brought.

Emboldened by Judd, Rose McGowan and a host of other prominent accusers, women everywhere have begun to speak out about the inappropriate, abusive and in some cases illegal behavior they've faced. When multiple harassment claims bring down a charmer like former Today show host Matt Lauer, women who thought they had no recourse see a new, wide-open door. When a movie star says #MeToo, it becomes easier to believe the cook who's been quietly enduring for years.

The women and men who have broken their silence span all races, all income classes, all occupations and virtually all corners of the globe. They might labor in California fields, or behind the front desk at New York City's regal Plaza Hotel, or in the European Parliament. They're part of a movement that has no formal name. But now they have a voice.

II

In a windowless room at a two-story soundstage in San Francisco's Mission District, a group of women from different worlds met for the first time. Judd, every bit the movie star in towering heels, leaned in to shake hands with Isabel Pascual, a woman from Mexico who works picking strawberries and asked to use a pseudonym to protect her family. Beside her, Susan Fowler, a former Uber engineer, eight months pregnant, spoke softly with Adama Iwu, a corporate lobbyist in Sacramento. A young hospital worker who had flown in from Texas completed the circle. She too is a victim of sexual harassment but was there anonymously, she said, as an act of solidarity to represent all those who could not speak out.

From a distance, these women could not have looked more different. Their ages, their families, their religions and their ethnicities were all a world apart. Their incomes differed not by degree but by universe: Iwu pays more in rent each month than Pascual makes in two months.

But on that November morning, what separated them was less important than what brought them together: a shared experience. Over the course of six weeks, TIME interviewed dozens of people representing at least as many industries, all of whom had summoned extraordinary personal courage to speak out about sexual harassment at their jobs. They often had eerily similar stories to share.

In almost every case, they described not only the vulgarity of the harassment itself-years of lewd comments, forced kisses, opportunistic gropes-but also the emotional and psychological fallout from those advances. Almost everybody described wrestling with a palpable sense of shame. Had she somehow asked for it? Could she have deflected it? Was she making a big deal out of nothing?

"I thought, What just happened? Why didn't I react?" says the anonymous hospital worker who fears for her family's livelihood should her story come out in her small community. "I kept thinking, Did I do something, did I say something, did I look a certain way to make him think that was O.K.?" It's a poisonous, useless thought, she adds, but how do you avoid it? She remembers the shirt she was wearing that day. She can still feel the heat of her harasser's hands on her body.

Nearly all of the people TIME interviewed about their experiences expressed a crushing fear of what would happen to them personally, to their families or to their jobs if they spoke up.

For some, the fear was born of a threat of physical violence. Pascual felt trapped and terrified when her harasser began to stalk her at home, but felt she was powerless to stop him. If she told anyone, the abuser warned her, he would come after her or her children.

Those who are often most vulnerable in society-immigrants, people of color, people with disabilities, low-income workers and LGBTQ people-described many types of dread. If they raised their voices, would they be fired? Would their communities turn against them? Would they be killed? According to a 2015 survey by the National Center for Transgender Equality, 47% of transgender people report being sexually assaulted at some point in their lives, both in and out of the workplace.

Juana Melara, who has worked as a hotel housekeeper for decades, says she and her fellow housekeepers didn't complain about guests who exposed themselves or masturbated in front of them for fear of losing the paycheck they needed to support their families. Melara recalls "feeling the pressure of someone's eyes" on her as she cleaned a guest's room. When she turned around, she remembers, a man was standing in the doorway, blocked by the cleaning cart, with his erect penis exposed. She yelled at the top of her lungs and scared him into leaving, then locked the door behind him. "Nothing happened to me that time, thank God," she recalls.

While guests come and go, some employees must continue to work side by side with their harassers. Crystal Washington was thrilled when she was hired as a hospitality coordinator at the Plaza, a storied hotel whose allure is as strong for people who want to work there as it is for those who can afford a suite. "Walking in, it's breathtaking," she says.

But then, she says, a co-worker began making crude remarks to her like "I can tell you had sex last night" and groping her. One of those encounters was even caught on camera, but the management did not properly respond, her lawyers say.

Washington has joined with six other female employees to file a sexual-harassment suit against the hotel. But she cannot afford to leave the job and says she must force herself out of bed every day to face the man she's accused. "It's a dream to be an employee there," Washington says. "And then you find out what it really is, and it's a nightmare." (Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, which owns the Plaza, said in a statement to TIME that it takes remedial action against harassment when warranted.)

Other women, like the actor Selma Blair, weathered excruciating threats. Blair says she arrived at a hotel restaurant for a meeting with the independent film director James Toback in 1999 only to be told that he would like to see her in his room. There, she says, Toback told her that she had to learn to be more vulnerable in her craft and asked her to strip down. She took her top off. She says he then propositioned her for sex, and when she refused, he blocked the door and forced her to watch him masturbate against her leg. Afterward, she recalls him telling her that if she said anything, he would stab her eyes out with a Bic pen and throw her in the Hudson River.

Blair says Toback lorded the encounter over her for decades. "I had heard from others that he was slandering me, saying these sexual things about me, and it just made me even more afraid of him," Blair says in an interview with TIME. "I genuinely thought for almost 20 years, He's going to kill me." ( Toback has denied the allegations, saying he never met his accusers or doesn't remember them.)

Many of the people who have come forward also mentioned a different fear, one less visceral but no less real, as a reason for not speaking out: if you do, your complaint becomes your identity. "'Susan Fowler, the famous victim of sexual harassment,'" says the woman whose blog post ultimately led Uber CEO Travis Kalanick to resign and the multibillion-dollar startup to oust at least 20 other employees. "Nobody wants to be the buzzkill," adds Lindsey Reynolds, one of the women who blew the whistle on a culture of harassment at the restaurant group run by the celebrity chef John Besh. (The Besh Group says it is implementing new policies to create a culture of respect. Besh apologized for "unacceptable behavior" and "moral failings," and resigned from the company. )

Iwu, the lobbyist, says she considered the same risks after she was groped in front of several colleagues at an event. She was shocked when none of her male co-workers stepped in to stop the assault. The next week, she organized 147 women to sign an open letter exposing harassment in California government. When she told people about the campaign, she says they were wary. "Are you sure you want to do this?" they warned her. "Remember Anita Hill."

Taylor Swift says she was made to feel bad about the consequences that her harasser faced. After she complained about a Denver radio DJ named David Mueller, who reached under her skirt and grabbed her rear end, Mueller was fired. He sued Swift for millions in damages. She countersued for a symbolic $1 and then testified about the incident in August. Mueller's lawyer asked her, on the witness stand, whether she felt bad that she'd gotten him fired.

"I'm not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault," she told the lawyer. "I'm being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are a product of his decisions. Not mine." (Mueller said he would appeal.)

In an interview with TIME, Swift says that moment on the stand fueled her indignation. "I figured that if he would be brazen enough to assault me under these risky circumstances," she says, "imagine what he might do to a vulnerable, young artist if given the chance." Like the five women gathered at that echoing soundstage in San Francisco, and like all of the dozens, then hundreds, then millions of women who came forward with their own stories of harassment, she was done feeling intimidated. Actors and writers and journalists and dishwashers and fruit pickers alike: they'd had enough. What had manifested as shame exploded into outrage. Fear became fury.

This was the great unleashing that turned the #MeToo hashtag into a rallying cry. The phrase was first used more than a decade ago by social activist Tarana Burke as part of her work building solidarity among young survivors of harassment and assault. A friend of the actor Alyssa Milano sent her a screenshot of the phrase, and Milano, almost on a whim, tweeted it out on Oct. 15. "If you've been sexually harassed or assaulted write 'me too' as a reply to this tweet," she wrote, and then went to sleep. She woke up the next day to find that more than 30,000 people had used #MeToo. Milano burst into tears.

At first, those speaking out were mostly from the worlds of media and entertainment, but the hashtag quickly spread. "We have to keep our focus on people of different class and race and gender," says Burke, who has developed a friendship with Milano via text messages. By November, California farmworkers, Pascual among them, were marching on the streets of Hollywood to express their solidarity with the stars.

Women were no longer alone. "There's something really empowering about standing up for what's right," says Fowler, who has grown comfortable with her new reputation as a whistle-blower. "It's a badge of honor."

III

Discussions of sexual harassment in polite company tend to rely on euphemisms: harassment becomes "inappropriate behavior," assault becomes "misconduct," rape becomes "abuse." We're accustomed to hearing those softened words, which downplay the pain of the experience. That's one of the reasons why the Access Hollywood tape that surfaced in October 2016 was such a jolt. The language used by the man who would become America's 45th President, captured on a 2005 recording, was, by any standard, vulgar. He didn't just say that he'd made a pass; he "moved on her like a bitch." He didn't just talk about fondling women; he bragged that he could "grab 'em by the pussy."

That Donald Trump could express himself that way and still be elected President is part of what stoked the rage that fueled the Women's March the day after his Inauguration. It's why women seized on that crude word as the emblem of the protest that dwarfed Trump's Inauguration crowd size. "All social movements have highly visible precipitating factors," says Aldon Morris, a professor of sociology at Northwestern University. "In this case, you had Harvey Weinstein, and before that you had Trump."

Megyn Kelly, the NBC anchor who revealed in October that she had complained to Fox News executives about Bill O'Reilly's treatment of women, and who was a target of Trump's ire during the campaign, says the tape as well as the tenor of the election turned the political into the personal. "I have real doubts about whether we'd be going through this if Hillary Clinton had won, because I think that President Trump's election in many ways was a setback for women," says Kelly, who noted that not all women at the march were Clinton supporters. "But the overall message to us was that we don't really matter."

So it was not entirely surprising that 2017 began with women donning "pussy hats" and marching on the nation's capital in a show of unity and fury. What was startling was the size of the protest. It was one of the largest in U.S. history and spawned satellite marches in all 50 states and more than 50 other countries.

Summer Zervos, a former contestant on The Apprentice, was one of roughly 20 women to accuse the President of sexual harassment. She filed a defamation suit against Trump days before his Inauguration after he disputed her claims by calling her a liar. A New York judge is expected to decide soon if the President is immune to civil suits while in office. No matter the outcome, the allegations added fuel to a growing fire.

By February, the movement had made its way to the billionaire dream factories of Silicon Valley, when Fowler spoke out about her "weird year" as an engineer at Uber. "I remember feeling powerless and like there was no one looking out for us because we had an admitted harasser in the White House," Fowler says. "I felt like I had to take action."

Barely two months later, Fox News cut ties with O'Reilly after the New York Times reported that he and the company had spent $13 million to settle claims against him from five women. In October, the Times revealed a sixth settlement, bringing that total to more than $45 million. Wendy Walsh, a psychologist and former guest on the network, was one of the first women to share her story about the star anchor-but she was initially reluctant to go on the record. "I was afraid for my kids, I was afraid of the retaliation," she says. "I know what men can do when they're angry."

Eventually she allowed her name to be used. "I felt it was my duty," Walsh says, "as a mother of daughters, as an act of love for women everywhere and the women who are silenced, to be brave."

The downfall of O'Reilly, who has denied all allegations of harassment, would prove to be just the beginning of the reckoning in media and entertainment. In June, Bill Cosby was brought to trial on charges that he had drugged and sexually assaulted a woman named Andrea Constand, one of nearly 50 women who have accused Cosby of sexual assault over several decades. Although the case ended in a mistrial-it is scheduled to be retried in April-the fact that it happened at all signaled a shift in the culture, a willingness to hold even beloved and powerful men accountable for past misdeeds.

Complaints at the University of Rochester helped expose harassment in academia. The chief executive of SoFi, the $4 billion lending firm, resigned following a lawsuit over claims of sexual harassment. Then, in early October, the dam finally broke.

On Oct. 5, the New York Times published the first story to expose Weinstein, one of the most powerful men in Hollywood and a leading Democratic political fundraiser, as a serial sexual predator. The revelation was quickly followed by New Yorker investigations that widened Weinstein's list of accusers and showed the incredible lengths he went to cover his tracks. Weinstein denied the allegations, but the levers that he had long pulled to exert his influence suddenly were jammed. Fellow chieftains refused to defend him. Politicians who once courted him gave away his donations. His company's board fired him.

Within days, the head of Amazon Studios, an influential art publisher and employees at the financial-services firm Fidelity had all left their jobs over harassment claims. By the end of the month, the list of the accused had grown to include political analyst Mark Halperin, a former TIME employee; opinion-shaping literary critic Leon Wieseltier; and numerous politicians and journalists. The Oscar-winning actor Kevin Spacey was scrubbed from a completed movie.

The response to the Weinstein allegations has shaped the way people view women who come forward. In a TIME/SurveyMonkey online poll of American adults conducted Nov. 28-30, 82% of respondents said women are more likely to speak out about harassment since the Weinstein allegations. Meanwhile, 85% say they believe the women making allegations of sexual harassment.

The movement-and fallout-quickly spread around the world. Michael Fallon, Britain's Defense Secretary, quit the Cabinet after journalist Jane Merrick revealed that he had "lunged" at her in 2003, when she was a 29-year-old reporter. In France, women took to the streets chanting not only "Me too" but also " Balance ton porc," which translates roughly to "Expose your pig," a hashtag conceived by French journalist Sandra Muller. In the week after #MeToo first surfaced, versions of it swept through 85 countries, from India, where the struggle against harassment and assault had already become a national debate in recent years, to the Middle East, Asia and parts in between.

"Suddenly," says Terry Reintke, a German member of the European Parliament, who discussed her own harassment in a speech on Oct. 25, "friends from primary school or women that I know from completely different surroundings that would never call themselves feminists were starting to share their stories."

By November, the spotlight was back on American politicians. A woman named Leigh Corfman told the Washington Post that Roy Moore, the Alabama Republican nominee for the Senate, abused her when she was 14 and he was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney. Nine women have come forward to describe inappropriate encounters with Roy Moore, including several who say he pursued them when they were teenagers. Moore has called the allegations "false" and "malicious." "Specifically, I do not know any of these women nor have I ever engaged in sexual misconduct with any woman," he said in late November.

The following week, radio host Leeann Tweeden wrote that Minnesota Democratic Senator Al Franken groped her on a USO tour in 2006, before he was in office. Several other women have since come forward with similar harassment allegations against Franken, who has called on the Senate Ethics Committee to investigate his own behavior. On Dec. 5, Michigan Democratic Representative John Conyers resigned amid allegations that he had made sexual advances toward the women on his staff. He has said that the allegations "are not accurate; they are not true."

Texas Republican Representative Blake Farenthold has also found himself in the crosshairs after media reports that he used $84,000 in taxpayer dollars to settle a sexual-harassment lawsuit with a former aide in 2014. Farenthold denies that he engaged in any wrongdoing and has vowed to repay the settlement.

The accused were both Democrats and Republicans, but the consequences thus far have been limited-and often filtered through a partisan lens. In politics, at least, what constitutes disqualifying behavior seemed to depend not on your actions but on the allegiance of your tribe. In the 1990s, feminists stood up for accused abuser Bill Clinton instead of his accusers-a move many are belatedly regretting as the national conversation prompts a re-evaluation of the claims against the former President. And despite the allegations against Moore, both President Trump and the Republican National Committee support him.

That political divide was revealed in the TIME/SurveyMonkey poll, which found that Republicans were significantly more likely to excuse sexual misdeeds in their own party. The survey found that while a majority of Republicans and Democrats agree that a Democratic Congressman accused of sexual harassment should resign (71% and 74% respectively), when the accused offender was in the GOP, only 54% of Republicans would demand a resignation (compared to 82% of Democrats).

As another election cycle approaches, Americans find themselves trying to weigh one ugly act against another in a painful calculus of transgression. Is a grope caught on camera more disqualifying than a years-ago assault that was credibly reported? What are we willing to forgive or ignore or deny if the violator shares our politics?

IV

It wasn't so long ago that the boss chasing his secretary around the desk was a comic trope, a staple from vaudeville to prime-time sitcoms. There wasn't even a name for sexual harassment until just over 40 years ago; the term was coined in 1975 by a group of women at Cornell University after an employee there, Carmita Wood, filed for unemployment benefits after she had resigned because a supervisor touched her. The university denied her claim, arguing that she left the job for "personal reasons."

Wood, joined by activists from the university's human-affairs program, formed a group called Working Women United that hosted an event for workers from various fields, from mail-room clerks and servers to factory workers and administrative assistants, to talk about their own harassment experiences.

It was a proto-version of the social-media explosion we're seeing today, encouraging unity and reminding women that they were not alone. But even as public awareness about the problem of sexual harassment began to grow, legal and policy protections were almost nonexistent. In the 1970s, most businesses and institutions had no policies on sexual harassment whatsoever, and even egregious complaints were regularly dismissed.

In 1980 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the federal agency tasked with enforcing civil rights laws in the workplace, issued guidelines declaring sexual harassment a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. It was a victory, but with caveats: even after sexual harassment became explicitly illegal, it remained difficult to lodge a complaint that stuck-in part because acts of harassment are often difficult to define. What separates an illegal act of sexual harassment from a merely annoying interaction between a boss and his subordinate? When does a boss stop just being a jerk and become a criminal? Because the Civil Rights Act offered no solid legal definition, interpretation has evolved slowly, shaped by judges and the EEOC over the past 37 years.

In 1991, Anita Hill testified before the Senate committee confirming Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, accusing him of sexual harassment and bringing national attention to the issue. But, she says, "The conversation was not about the problems in the workplace. It was about the fallout in politics."

Even now, the contours of what constitutes sexual harassment remain murky. Some of the recent stories clearly cross the line, like a boss exposing himself to a subordinate or requiring that his researcher sit on his lap. But others feel more ambiguous. Under what circumstances can you ask a colleague about their marriage? When is an invite to drinks alone a bridge too far?

Jonathan Segal, a partner at the Philadelphia law firm Duane Morris, who specializes in workplace training, says he hears that confusion in the conversations men are now having among themselves. "It's more like, 'I wonder if I should tell someone they look nice, I wonder when it's O.K. to give a hug, I wonder when I should be alone with someone in a room,'" he says.

This uncertainty can be corrosive. While everyone wants to smoke out the serial predators and rapists, there is a risk that the net may be cast too far. What happens when someone who makes a sexist joke winds up lumped into the same bucket as a boss who gropes an employee? Neither should be encouraged, but nor should they be equated.

Companies, meanwhile, are scrambling to keep up. Most large U.S.-based corporations now have fairly complete policies on sexual harassment, and many have anti-sexual harassment training programs and claim to be "zero-tolerance workplaces." A 2016 EEOC report found that a company's willingness to protect so-called rainmakers-high-performing men like Kalanick, Weinstein and O'Reilly-to be one of the most pernicious reasons C-suites and corporate boards overlooked harassment. It doesn't matter how good a company's policy is if its systems are ignored or don't work. "So much harassment training is like an episode of The Office," says Victoria Lipnic, the acting chair of the EEOC.

In some instances, sexual-harassment training has even been shown to backfire. In a 2001 study, Lisa Scherer, an associate professor of industrial-organizational psychology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, found that while training increased knowledge about what constituted sexual harassment, it also sometimes had a corrosive effect on workplace culture. "What was disturbing was that the males who had gone through training showed a backlash effect," she says. "They said they were less willing to report sexual harassment than the males who had not gone through the training."

Employers are also girding for future allegations and lawsuits. The insurance company Nationwide reported a 15% increase in sales of employment practices liability insurances between 2016 and 2017. And Advisen, which tracks insurance trends, says that EPLI insurance price has increased 30% since 2011, which indicates that more companies are reporting losses.

Corporate boards, wary of alienating female employees and customers and of drawing bad press, have been among the quickest to make changes. Uber, for example, which built its reputation on a willingness to flout norms, used to be a guiding light for small startups. Now nobody is pitching their company as the next Uber, says Fowler. "There's a shift to, 'We're not disrupting anymore. We're trying to build something that's good for consumers and treats employees fairly.'" It's a start.

State and local governments have also taken some concrete steps. In October, the Chicago city council passed an ordinance requiring hotels to provide panic buttons to employees who work alone in hotel rooms. In Springfield, Ill., lawmakers passed a measure that will allow an investigation into a backlog of sexual-harassment complaints in the statehouse. In Arizona, pending legislation would void nondisclosure agreements signed by victims of harassment to keep them silent.

At the federal level, the House and Senate have passed new rules requiring members of Congress and their staff to complete mandatory sexual-harassment training. A handful of Senators have also introduced legislation to rein in what are known as mandatory arbitration agreements-legal clauses that can appear in employee contracts that prevent workers from suing their employers in court for any reason, including sexual harassment. Some 60 million American workers are currently bound by them.

V

We're still at the bomb-throwing point of this revolution, a reactive stage at which nuance can go into hiding. But while anger can start a revolution, in its most raw and feral form it can't negotiate the more delicate dance steps needed for true social change. Private conversations, which can't be legislated or enforced, are essential.

Norms evolve, and it's long past time for any culture to view harassment as acceptable. But there's a great deal at stake in how we assess these new boundaries-for women and men together. We can and should police criminal acts and discourage inappropriate, destructive behavior.

At least we've started asking the right questions. Ones that seem alarmingly basic in hindsight: "What if we did complain?" proposes Megyn Kelly. "What if we didn't whine, but we spoke our truth in our strongest voices and insisted that those around us did better? What if that worked to change reality right now?" Kelly acknowledges that this still feels more like a promise than a certainty. But for the moment, the world is listening.
-With reporting by Charlotte Alter and Susanna Schrobsdorff/New York, Sam Lansky/Los Angeles, Kate Samuelson/London, Maya Rhodan/Washington and Katy Steinmetz/San Francisco
Correction: The original version of this story misstated when the claims settled by Bill O'Reilly and Fox News were first disclosed. The New York Times reported in April that Fox and O'Reilly had settled five claims against him. O'Reilly left the network later that month.

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TIME Person of the Year 2017: The Silence Breakers

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Movie stars are supposedly nothing like you and me. They're svelte, glamorous, self-­possessed. They wear dresses we can't afford and live in houses we can only dream of. Yet it turns out that-in the most painful and personal ways-movie stars are more like you and me than we ever knew.

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The power of #MeToo lies in the collective experience, solidarity and action its name implies. I don't just believe you, it says, I can relate to your own experience. We are not just here for you. So many of us are you.

Young Spanish women (and some men) sent such a message through protests and sits-ins last week that rocked Spanish cities after five men accused of gang raping a teenage girl during the 2016 Running of the Bulls in Pamplona were convicted of the lesser offense of sexual abuse (which under Spanish law assumes no violence or intimidation occurred). The accused men, who had denied wrongdoing, had recorded video of their encounter with the victim. The prosecution and defense now plan to appeal the verdict.

Crowds took to the streets in Madrid, Barcelona, Pamplona and elsewhere to denounce the outcome of the trial for a crime that resonated worldwide because of the global fame of the San Fermín festival where it occurred. "Yo te creo/I believe you" read the protest signs in front of Madrid's Ministry of Justice and elsewhere.

That message, repeated over and over again on so many signs, makes a difference at a time when the verdict in Spain might leave some discouraged for the fate of #MeToo on the global stage.

One lone woman or man protesting would have been an oddity, but the sea of bodies made the news, leading many Spanish female politicians to tweet their disagreement with the verdict and call for a revision of pertinent laws.

Contrast this scene with the women standing on the courthouse steps after Bill Cosby's conviction on three counts of aggravated sexual assault against Andrea Constand in 2004. More than 50 women have accused the actor of sexual misconduct over a period of more than 40 years.Yet only one woman's testimony apart from Constand's was heard in court at his first trial in 2017, which produced a deadlocked jury. The message? Some of us believe you. And some of us are not sure. We need more evidence.

Since that first trial in June, the #MeToo movement has sensitized the public to the financial, psychological and career costs for women who gather the courage to recount their experiences at the hands of powerful men such as Cosby and Harvey Weinstein, and the importance of having multiple testimonies. The Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, district attorney who led the Cosby retrial, Kevin Steele, requested that 19 women be allowed to speak in court -- and was granted court time for five testimonies in addition to Constand's. This time, the trial had a different outcome.

And indeed, it has taken a small army of women -- famous and unknown, of all ages and races -- to bring down men with resources of celebrity and wealth such as Cosby, who had developed veritable systems and protocols of abuse, enabled by male and female collaborators who protected them out of concern for company profits or to keep their own jobs.

In America, #MeToo has spawned a host of institutional responses, from mandatory workplace trainings and seminars to company retreats, all designed to encourage the identification, reporting and handling of cases of harassment and discrimination.

Yet roadblocks to being "the first one" to denounce improper or criminal behavior publicly remain. Well-meaning friends, family and colleagues often counsel women and men to "move on" to protect their careers, families and mental and financial health. And it's undeniable that the careers, and thus economic conditions, of whistleblowers do suffer. Many accusers, even if vindicated by courts of law or their employers, don't find jobs easily again.

In addition, American culture very often affords men the narrative of the " comeback," something possibly in the works already, according to Tina Brown, who told the New York Post's Page Six of a television series starring journalist Charlie Rose in which he'd interview men who have been affected by #MeToo investigations. We have no equivalent "redemption narrative" for women. The man who falls from grace through his own toxic behavior can become a "comeback kid," whereas the woman brought down in that fall from grace is just gone forever, even in our time of #MeToo.

It's still too easy for one voice to be disregarded or discredited. In the Cosby case, defense attorney Thomas Mesereau tried the old lines, arguing that the accusers were just making things up to get attention and money and conspiring to destroy an innocent man's reputation. It's much harder to make these lines stick when the stories are many and the voices keep coming.

Come out of the shadows, the Cosby verdict tells men and women who have suffered; leave the prison of your isolation and speak your truth. Others will join you if you take that first step. As the protests in Spain show us, on the streets if necessary.

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this message keeps the global #metoo movement alive (opinion)  - cnn

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This message keeps the global #MeToo movement alive

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The power of #MeToo lies in the collective experience, solidarity and action its name implies. I don't just believe you, it says, I can relate to your own experience. We are not just here for you. So many of us are you.

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How will the #MeToo movement go down in history? As a flash in the pan, or a significant milestone on the path towards gender equality? The answer lies in what happens next. We need to keep up the pressure to ensure that suffering abuse isn't part of anyone's job description - anywhere in the world.

We all know how it unfolded: the revelations of sexual harassment in Hollywood that sent shockwaves around the world. And these "shocks" were unusual in that, for millions of women, they were wearily not shocking.

But in sectors or parts of the world where the #MeToo revelations were not being amplified, it was clear this was because of a fear of the consequences of speaking out about harassment, rather than the absence of it. For just like most atrocities, this one hits the poorest women and girls the hardest. The women who can't speak out or make a formal complaint, or quit their jobs - because losing their poorly paid, insecure job will mean they don't get to eat, or feed their families, or protect their children. Around the world, sexual harassment at work continues, including, far away from the glamour of the film industry, in some of the most poorly paid sectors of employment. For example, a Care International study found that one in three female garment workers in Cambodia had experienced sexual harassment or violence in the space of a year.

Powerful social media-driven feminism comes from only one segment of society, yet it echoes a wider collective experience and solidarity. This solidarity is also expressed in more traditional forms of campaigning, including marching in the street, shoulder-to-shoulder, as of old. The Women's March in January picked up the rallying cry of #TimesUp, and then #March4Women ahead of International Women's Day brought together thousands of feminists in London. This year, on the centenary of the first time some women could vote in parliamentary elections in the UK, Trafalgar Square was once again centre stage. We felt frustrations at the pace of change, but also a sense of global solidarity and of hope - a hope that finally social norms are changing everywhere.

As Nazma Akter, a Bangladeshi labour rights activist, shouted out to the crowd at #March4Women: "When clothes are cheap, women are cheap. Nothing comes for free in this world. Nothing is a discount." Women in the crowd heard her, and felt it. They also recognised that we in the UK are implicated directly, since we are consumers of these cheap clothes.

What we need, in response to #MeToo, is a global culture change in the workplace, from the Hollywood Hills to the corridors of power in Westminster, to the factory floors of Dhaka and back again, leaving no one out. And there is a solution, a way of combining feminist energy with legislative change to ensure fundamental transformation in all workplaces, around the world.

On 28 May the International Labour Organization is holding a conference to debate whether or not to legislate for a global convention on sexual harassment and abuse in the workplace. We need the UK government to support a strong global legislative framework that is legally binding, and that explicitly includes the most vulnerable workers here and abroad, including those such as domestic workers who are employed outside businesses with formal HR policies. It should also refer to the UN guiding principles on business and human rights - to ensure that companies adhere to globally agreed standards throughout their supply chains. This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform the lives of women and girls everywhere.

A letter from the global development and women's rights charity Care International UK to Alok Sharma MP, the minister for employment, is being signed by thousands, urging him to support this global initiative, and to make it as strong and effective as possible. If you or anyone you know were one of the millions to say #MeToo - or if, like many, you have found it too difficult to speak up - please sign this letter. If you believe a job should never, as a matter of course, include sexual harassment, exploitation, coercion or abuse - please sign it.

Let's do justice to the bravery of all the women who have spoken up to push for global legislative change. As we give thanks to the courage of the suffragettes for the political voice they helped give us a hundred years ago, let us, in turn, make sure that future generations remember this moment as the one that put a stop to workplace violence globally.

* Helen Pankhurst is senior gender adviser at Care International UK
Topics

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The #MeToo movement needs to become a truly global phenomenon | Helen Pankhurst

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How will the #MeToo movement go down in history? As a flash in the pan, or a significant milestone on the path towards gender equality? The answer lies in what happens next. We need to keep up the pressure to ensure that suffering abuse isn't part of anyone's job description - anywhere in the world.

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No7 Match Made Ad with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 60’

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CLOSE

Your life is the decisions you make, large and small. But do they reveal who you are, or who you are taught to be?

You decide whether marriage is something to covet, or something to eschew. You decide how to spend your time and money. How to parent. Whether to interrupt or wait politely to speak. Whether to put on lipstick or step on a scale each day. Which selfies to share, and the parts of yourself you never will.

In American society, the most insidious form of sexism isn't the one we see when we look out at the world, but the one we fail to see when we look inside ourselves. It's internalized sexism, and it's no one's fault but everyone's problem.

In the last century, women have made gains toward gender equality. But despite a slow revolution that has given many women increasing power over their lives, sexism is pervasive. Every woman has felt it, even if she refuses to label it, but many women - conservatives and progressives, elite women and marginalized women, avowed feminists and those who would never refer to themselves as such - may not realize that since the moment they were born they have been groomed to be sexist, too.

"You could not subordinate half the human race unless some of that was internalized," Gloria Steinem said.

"You could not subordinate half the human race unless some of that was internalized."
Gloria Steinem
Culture sells the idea of a "perfect woman." Girls are taught to aspire to it, boys learn to expect it. A woman should be sexy, not slutty. She must be strong, but also sweet. She should speak up, but not too loudly. She should be competent, but not aggressive. Remember to smile. Not so big.

The media ritually objectifies women's bodies, yet women obsessively use those images to measure themselves and the women around them against an impossible standard. In the U.S., 20 million women will suffer from an eating disorder at some point in her life.

Rape is an epidemic that affects one in six women, yet instead of blaming male perpetrators, many women blame victims, and hold fast to the false idea that if they dress modestly and behave prudently they will avoid becoming victims, too.

"Cool girls" who find other women "petty" say they feel safe enough and empowered enough to act like one of the guys - but if they're really empowered, shouldn't they just act like themselves?

"In the past sexism operated differently. It was structural, it was legal, it was overt. It was taught in churches. It was taught in schools," said Juliet Williams, a professor of gender studies at UCLA. "Today ... we see in our everyday lives women doing things that men do and doing it as well, so the internalized sexism in women is really part of the explanation of the resilience of sexism in the face of everything that's been accomplished."

Women who internalize sexism may not call themselves sexist or condone overtly sexist behavior. Instead, they undervalue their talents, undermine other women and unwittingly bolster a boys' club that has a long history of policing women's bodies, curtailing women's choices and protecting its own power.

"It's almost impossible with all the double binds, but there's this myth that if you can somehow embody all of the ideals of femininity that you'll be protected from bad things happening to you," said Kjerstin Gruys, a sociology professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and author of Mirror, Mirror Off the Wall, which chronicled the year she completely avoided mirrors (while planning her wedding).

Society, Gruys said, holds up women like Ivanka Trump, who through her privilege is better able to navigate these impossible tensions, but who reinforces "the idea that everyone can manage sexism as long as they just do the right thing."

Ivanka Trump listens at the beginning of a policy and strategy forum with executives in the State Dining Room of the White House on Feb. 3, 2017. (Photo: Brendan Smialowski, AFP/Getty Images)

'The Beauty Myth'

A rigid standard of female beauty is one of the most powerful forms of cultural currency, despite us having no control over our genetic makeup. The fashion and beauty industries are becoming more diverse, but a young, white, thin ideal persists. During the Spring 2017 season, plus-size models accounted for 16 of the 2,973 model spots, only 13 models were over age 50, and seven out of the 10 models with the most bookings for the season were white.

So women strive for the ideal. They buy makeup and anti-aging serums. They suffer Spanx, slip into shoes that pinch and skirts that constrict. They see natural body hair as an enemy of the state.

But what is it that really keeps us from viewing wrinkles as badges of honor and stretch marks as the map of a body's extraordinary transformation? Why do we work so hard to fight the body we're born with, bear children with, grow old in?

For some women, the answer is that attending to their bodies is akin to personal care. It makes them feel good. Nigerian-born author and celebrated feminist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has said she was afraid of not being taken seriously because of her love of fashion and make-up, but now she embraces it. She also embraces Alicia Keys' #nomakeup campaign.

"That's my hope and my prayer for women - that women are allowed to be whatever version makes them feel truly like themselves," she told Racked magazine in November.

The problem is when women perform these rituals as a matter of course, even when it doesn't make them feel true to themselves.

Naomi Wolf's seminal book The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, first published nearly thirty years ago, argues that as legal and structural barriers for women crumbled, the more beauty became a tool of social control. "The beauty-myth," she writes, "like many ideologies of femininity, mutates to meet new circumstances and checkmates women's attempts to increase their power."

Many women who participate in beauty rituals do it because they believe they'll be rewarded, Gruys said, whether it's through attracting male attention or gaining social acclaim. But they pay a price, too, and so do the women around them.

"Women who internalize sexism are more likely to diet, to be critical of their appearance if they don't meet the impossible appearance standards that we see in the media, but likewise it can make women judge other women along those same lines," she said.

If you're a thin and hungry woman not eating fries, but the larger woman next to you is, you resent her.

The beauty myth is why so often women view one another as competition, rather than allies. If we truly loved our bodies, it stands to reason that we might not care so much what other women did with theirs.

Lena Dunham, who has spoken openly about body positivity and challenged the thin stereotype on her HBO show Girls, said she received a barrage of criticism online after recently losing weight. Women accused her of conforming to the standard she condemns. Dunham, who said she began exercising to deal with chronic pain and manage anxiety, lamented to Ellen Degeneres, "you just can't win."

'Female Chauvinist Pigs'

Some women, though, believe they have won. In her book Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, Ariel Levy writes about a new generation of young women who don't worry much about sexism and misogyny. They're the ones that say, "I get along with guys so much better than girls," though many of these women conflate empowerment with objectification.

Women who make sex objects of themselves and other women to capture male attention, Levy writes, don't actually get what they think they do. Whether it's wearing a Playboy Bunny costume or fondling a roommate in front of an audience of frat boys, "these are not stories about girls getting what they want sexually, they are stories about girls gaining acclaim socially, for which their sexuality is a tool."

'What were you wearing?'

The sexual objectification of the female body has dangerous consequences, because it contributes to a culture of sexual violence. Young or old, privileged or poor, gay or straight - no group of women is invulnerable.

Yet one of the greatest myths of internalized sexism is that if you are the perfect woman, if you dress demurely, drink moderately, socialize in the right settings, reject promiscuity, that you will be safe. It's why you hear women asking, "did you drink too much?" or "did you do anything that could've been misinterpreted?" This contributes to a culture of victim-blaming, which discourages women from reporting abuse, and allows male predators to go unpunished. About 2 out of 3 sexual assaults are never reported to police, according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network.

Women internalize sexism because it's comforting to think if you follow society's rules, you won't get hurt.

"Some of the most destructive internalized sexism I see is when women blame other women for their sexual assault," Gruys said. "But you have to remember that if you admit that this other woman did nothing to provoke it, then you yourself have no control over you yourself being someday assaulted. It's really important to our brains to believe that we can protect ourselves from danger."

'Choosing' the right career

As Sheryl Sandberg affirmed in her feminist manifesto Lean In, even the most successful women internalize sexism.

Ambitious women can rethink a challenging career because they hope to have a child: "A teacher might pass on leading curriculum development for her school. A sales representative might take a smaller territory or not apply for a management role. Often without even realizing it, the woman stops reaching for new opportunities," Sandberg wrote. The problem, she added, is twofold: Not only does this woman fall behind in the workplace, but if and when she does one day have a child, she may return to work that isn't as fulfilling as she'd like.

Gruys sees this in her classroom. Young women who are not pregnant or trying to get pregnant plan careers around the idea that they will one day become pregnant. A woman who is interested in medicine may lean toward becoming a nurse over a doctor, because she believes nursing is more suitable for motherhood.

"Before they've even left college they're framing their future careers around this internalized expectation that not only will they be mothers, but that their partners will not be taking care of the parenting," Gruys said.

Not buying what they're selling

Any woman who calls out internalized sexism faces some risk, but for women who are perceived as different - whether it's by race, class, sexuality, or gender expression - the consequences of challenging sexism are more severe.

"If a woman of color starts talking about mansplaining in the black community, that just feeds into stereotypes of black men as like retrograde sexists, and that's really not what that woman was trying to communicate," Williams said.

In one regard, at least, women of color may have a slight advantage over their white female counterparts: They can better spot the myth. While different groups of women have different standards of beauty, women of color know they can never attain the ones our culture delivers most aggressively. As black women, they will never look like Ivanka Trump, so they don't buy what she's selling.

"They don't think Ivanka Trump approving of her father is evidence of that group being non-sexist and non-racist," she said. In the 2016 presidential election, only 6% of black women voted for Donald Trump.

Confronting internalized sexism

Confronting internalized sexism is an uncomfortable unraveling. It requires disentangling what we actually want from what we learn explicitly and implicitly.

"When I lecture, I'm struck by how much of the time, energy, and power of young women continues to be diverted into the management of their appearance," Williams said. "And even though I completely understand that appearance is a site of self-expression and should not be dismissed as meaningless or trivial, I still think that the understanding we have in our society is that a woman's social worth is indexed to her attractiveness to men, and that equation dominates too much of the choices and experiences that women have."

Becoming the "perfect woman" isn't possible. She doesn't exist. The more we try to mold ourselves to her, the less time we have to figure out who we truly are.

"Every individual woman has her own desires, her own experiences, her own life, and so there's no way to prescribe a certain way of behaving for every single woman," Gruys said. "I do ask people to think, is there a point of diminishing returns, whether amount of time or money or effort or anxiety. ... If you stop at that point, you have more resources available to do more that you value for yourself and the world."
Alia Dastagir writes about media and culture for USA TODAY. You can follow her on Twitter @alia_e.
Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2mVGKTO

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CLOSE Your life is the decisions you make, large and small. But do they reveal who you are, or who you are taught to be? You decide whether marriage is something to covet, or something to eschew. You decide how to spend your time and money. How to parent.

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I think it's fair to say that anyone who watches New Girl knows about True American. This crazy, non-sense drinking game which pops up every so often throughout the seasons and first introduced in Season 1 Episode 20.

The game, as described by New Girl character and fan-favorite Schmidt, is 75% drinking game and 20% Candy Land with a floor of molten lava.

The point of the game is for players to navigate through the Candy Land-like spaces to the "castle," which is a table in the center of the room that holds beer "pawns" and the "king" bottle. The first person to reach and sip from the bottle wins.

SEE ALSO: 15 Things "New Girl" Fans Know to Be True

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Here's how to play:

Step #1: Prepare the "castle"

First, set up your "castle." The castle is made up of beer "pawns" and the "king," a bottle filled with the alcohol of your choice.

The bottle should be in the middle of the table, surrounded by four lines of beer pawns. There is no exact number of beers necessary for each line of beer pawns. Choose any amount of beers that seems appropriate for the amount of players.

Step #2: Set up spaces

Set up spaces using pillows, chairs or any other objects players will be able to stand on. Place an equal amount of spaces around the table. You'll want about 5-8 spaces on each side, depending on the size of the room you're playing in.

Only four of these spaces should reach the castle, lining up with the parade of beer "pawns" and allowing players to take a beer pawn from the castle. For example, in the photo above, each of the chairs touch a corner of the table at the end of the line of beer pawns. Therefore, these are two of the four special spaces that allow players to take a beer. Unlike the pillows pictured, which are just regular spaces that the players can use to move around.

Step #3: Pick teams

Teams are optional. To pick teams, all of the players will place a certain number (1-5) of fingers against their forehead on the count of three.

Any players who hold up the same number are a team. Unmatched players can team up as needed or simply pair up with the person standing closest to them.

Step #4: Begin

Begin with a shotgun "tip-off" to determine which player goes first.

The winner of this shotgunning contest will yell, "One, two, three...JFK!" to announce the official beginning of the game. All players will enthusiastically respond, "FDR!" then quickly grab a beer pawn from the castle and run to any space they wish to start at, excluding for the four special spaces that reach the castle.

Step #5: Make moves

The winner of the shotgunning contest has earned the first turn. From then on, the order of turns will move in a clockwise rotation. During each turn, the player will move one space toward the castle and choose to play one of the following mini-games.

Mini-game number one: the player whose turn it is will count to three then all players will place a certain number (1-5) of fingers on their forehead. Any player who selects a number no one else selected can move ONE space.

Mini-game number two: the player whose turn it is will recite the beginning of a famous American quote. The first player to complete the quote can move TWO spaces.

Mini-game number three: the player whose turn it is will name two famous American people, places or things. The first player to identify what the two have in common can move THREE spaces.

For example, say it's your turn. You will move one space then choose one of the three mini-games. You and all of the players will participate in that game, and the winner will move accordingly. After this, your turn is over and it's the next player's turn (in the original clockwise rotation).

Step #6: "Play on, playa."

Continue playing by these rules until one lucky winner reaches the bottle and sips from its royal glass.

The bottle cannot be opened until every last pawn is removed from the castle. Any players who fail to keep at least one beer in hand, who accidentally end up with more than three beers in hand, or who touch the lava are immediately disqualified. Disqualified players can rejoin the game by shotgunning a beer.

Congratulations!

You are now able to impress all of your New Girl-loving friends with knowledge of the workings of the epic True American drinking game. Know your limits, drink responsibly and enjoy!

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I think it's fair to say that anyone who watches New Girl knows about True American. This crazy, non-sense drinking game which pops up every so often throughout the seasons and first introduced in Season 1 Episode 20.

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This issue is not going away any time soon

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More Examples of Systemic Racism | Calgary Anti-Racism Education | University of Calgary

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Below are a few more examples of systemic racism. Education School curricula claims to be 'inclusive' and 'representative', and there have been some significant improvements in curricula development and delivery in recent decades.

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The Irish photographer Richard Mosse has been awarded the 2017 Prix Pictet for his series Heat Maps, made using a military camera that is classified as a weapon under international law. The hi-tech surveillance device, designed to detect body heat from a distance of over 30km, was used by Mosse to track the journeys of refugees from the Middle East and north Africa.

The result is a series of large-scale prints - and an acclaimed film, Incoming - that reconfigures the refugee crisis as a spectral, almost sci-fi drama of human endurance and survival.

Given that the Pictet judges have tended to canonise work that is grandstanding in ambition and large-scale in presentation - Nadav Kander, Mitch Epstein and Luc Delahaye have all won in recent years - Mosse is an unsurprising winner. His application of state-of-the-art technology to the most urgent and contested issue of our turbulent times makes him very much the photographic artist of the moment.

He is both politically engaged and art-world savvy: the two large prints on display at the Pictet shortlist exhibition at the V&A in London are in the tradition of concerned photojournalism yet as far from its cliches as it is possible to go without crossing into pure conceptualism.

His panoramic view of the Idomeni refugee camp in Greece is a vast tableau of small human dramas: almost cartoonlike figures gathered outside of a tent; a man walking purposefully through the dismal, debris-strewn landscape; the knots of people, shadowy buildings and figures all reflected in the still water in the foreground. Without foreknowledge, one might think images like this are stills from a Ballardian sci-fi movie, which has prompted some critics to accuse Mosse of turning suffering into spectacle and, in the process, dehumanising the "other".

Yet there is a haunting undertow to these vast prints which, though less overwhelming than the moving images of Incoming, force us to see the refugee crisisanew - something that even the most powerful reportage struggles to achieve. Under the heat-mapping gaze of his extraordinary camera, Mosse's subjects are, he insists, made both more anonymous and more human - "all that's left to them is the biological fact of their birth - a thing foregrounded by the camera, which depicts the human body as a radiant glow of biochemical processes such as respiration, energy production, hypothermia and warmth".

The theme of this year's Prix Pictet is Space which, as the rest of the exhibition shows, has so many meanings as to be almost meaningless. The work of the 12 shortlisted artists ranges from the almost humble (Saski Groneberg's Büropflanz, a series of black and white still lifes of plants that decorate otherwise glumly functional offices) to the cosmic (Thomas Ruff's series, ma.r.s, which comprises digitally compressed and colourised riffs on images transmitted from Mars by Nasa's Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft).

Quite how the latter fulfils the Pictet's overall theme of sustainability is anyone's guess, but Ruff remains a mysteriously engaging artist. Likewise, Rinko Kawauchi, who has forgone the fragile poetic intimacy of her earlier work for big prints that portray the Japanese tradition of yakihata (controlled agricultural field burning), which takes place annually in Aso in southern Japan.

Her image of a hill, divided in two by a wall of flame, one side scorched black, the other untouched, seems oddly dreamlike in its painterly beauty. Kawauchi's work is imbued with a mysteriousness that is all her own, a sense that you are catching a glimpse of her imagination at work on her surroundings. As such, she seems almost out of place here.

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Oddly dreamlike in its painterly beauty ... Rinko Kawauchi's Ametsuchi, 2012. Photograph: © Rinko Kawauchi, Prix Pictet 2017

Elsewhere, Michael Wolf captures the singular hell of the Tokyo rush hour in his closeup portraits of faces pressed against the glass of morning subway trains on the Odakyu commuter line, while Benny Lam evokes the claustrophobia of impossibly small - and cluttered - single-room living spaces in Hong Kong, shooting from above to accentuate the sense of enclosure.

Like Mosse, Sohei Nishino works large-scale, but his city dioramas, comprising thousands of prints taken over three months on daily walks, are an obsessive exercise in old-fashioned handmade craft rather than technology. He meticulously collages the prints into cityscapes that are both recognisably real and wonderfully befuddling.

I was also struck by Pavel Wolberg's series Barricades which - like Sergey Ponomarev's work - is the closest this year's Prix Pictet comes to on-the-ground photojournalism. His image of two Ukrainian female protesters wearing angel wings as they approach a line of riot police is an altogether different take on the theme.

In this image, space is a contested zone as well as a theatre of conflict between the state and its citizens. It's a long way from the surface of Mars, office plants, the Tokyo rush hour or burning mountains. As is often the case with photography awards, it is difficult to see how one could possibly judge the merits of this kind of traditionalism against, say, the conceptual strategies of Ruff. It seems almost absurd that they are sharing the same exhibition space on the same theme, given that the space between them is so vast.

The Prix Pictet: Space exhibition is at the V&A, London, 6-28 May.

Topics

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Prix Pictet 2017: Richard Mosse wins prize with heat-map shots of refugees

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The Irish photographer Richard Mosse has been awarded the 2017 Prix Pictet for his series Heat Maps, made using a military camera that is classified as a weapon under international law. The hi-tech surveillance device, designed to detect body heat from a distance of over 30km, was used by Mosse to track the journeys of refugees from the Middle East and north Africa.

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Reading heat as both metaphor and index, this project is an attempt to reveal the harsh struggle for survival lived daily by millions of refugees and migrants, seen but overlooked, and ignored by many. By attaching a thermographic camera to a robotic motion-controlled tripod, Mosse has scanned significant sites in the European refugee crisis from a high eye-level, creating densely detailed panoramic thermal images.

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CARE offers information on the global refugee crises. Learn how you can help CARE reach refugees in need and support our poverty fighting programs.

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A peaceful uprising against the president of Syria 12 years ago turned into a full-scale civil war. The conflict has left half a million people dead, devastated cities and drawn in other countries.

Even before the conflict began, many Syrians were complaining about high unemployment, corruption and a lack of political freedom under President Bashar al-Assad, who succeeded his father, Hafez, after he died in 2000.

In March 2011, pro-democracy demonstrations erupted in the southern city of Deraa, inspired by uprisings in neighbouring countries against repressive rulers.

When the Syrian government used deadly force to crush the dissent, protests demanding the president's resignation erupted nationwide.

The unrest spread and the crackdown intensified. Opposition supporters took up arms, first to defend themselves and later to rid their areas of security forces. Mr Assad vowed to crush what he called "foreign-backed terrorism".

The violence rapidly escalated and the country descended into civil war. Hundreds of rebel groups sprung up and it did not take long for the conflict to become more than a battle between Syrians for or against Mr Assad. Foreign powers began to take sides, sending money, weaponry and fighters, and as the chaos worsened extremist jihadist organisations with their own aims, such as the Islamic State (IS) group and al-Qaeda, became involved. That deepened concern among the international community who saw them as a major threat.

Syria's Kurds, who want the right of self-government but have not fought Mr Assad's forces, have added another dimension to the conflict.

The United Nations Human Rights Office estimated last year that 306,887 civilians - 1.5% of the total pre-war population - were killed between March 2011 and March 2021 due to the conflict.

It said 143,350 civilian deaths were individually documented by various sources with detailed information, and that a further 163,537 deaths were estimated to have occurred using statistical techniques. At least 27,126 of those estimated to have been killed were children.

The then-UN Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, stressed that the fatalities were the "direct result of war operations", adding: "This does not include the many, many more civilians who died due to the loss of access to healthcare, to food, to clean water and other essential human rights."

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a UK-based monitoring group with a network of sources on the ground, had documented the deaths of 503,064 people by March 2023. It said at least 162,390 civilians had been killed, with the Syrian government and its allies responsible for 139,609 of those deaths.

The group estimated that the actual toll from the war was more than 613,400, with an additional 55,000 civilians believed to have died of torture in government-run prisons.

Another monitoring group, the Violations Documentation Center, which relies on information from activists across the country, had documented 240,215 battle-related deaths, including 145,765 civilians, as of March 2023.

The government's key supporters have been Russia and Iran, while Turkey, Western powers and several Gulf Arab states have backed the opposition to varying degrees during the conflict.

Russia - which had military bases in Syria before the war - launched an air campaign in support of Mr Assad in 2015 that has been crucial in turning the tide of the war in the government's favour.

The Russian military says its strikes only target "terrorists" but activists say they regularly kill mainstream rebels and civilians.

Iran is believed to have deployed hundreds of troops and spent billions of dollars to help Mr Assad.

Thousands of Shia Muslim militiamen armed, trained and financed by Iran - mostly from Lebanon's Hezbollah movement, but also Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen - have also fought alongside the Syrian army.

The US, UK and France initially armed what they considered "moderate" rebel groups. But they have prioritised non-lethal assistance since jihadists became the dominant force in the armed opposition.

A US-led global coalition has also carried out air strikes and deployed special forces in Syria since 2014 to help an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias called the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) capture territory once held by IS militants in the north-east and stop the jihadist group rebuilding.

Turkey is a major supporter of the opposition, but its focus has been on using rebel factions to contain the Kurdish YPG militia that dominates the SDF, accusing it of being an extension of a banned Kurdish rebel group in Turkey.

Turkish troops and allied rebels have seized stretches of territory along Syria's northern border and intervened to stop an all-out assault by government forces on the last opposition stronghold of Idlib.

Saudi Arabia, which is keen to counter Iranian influence, armed and financed the rebels at the start of the war. Having refused to engage with President Assad for more than a decade, it is now discussing how to facilitate Syria's "return to the Arab fold".

Israel, meanwhile, has been so concerned by what it calls Iran's "military entrenchment" in Syria and shipments of Iranian weapons to Hezbollah and other Shia militias that it has conducted air strikes with increasing frequency in an attempt to thwart them.

Twelve years of war have inflicted immense suffering on the Syrian people.

In addition to the bloodshed, more than half of Syria's pre-war population of 22 million have had to flee their homes. Some 6.8 million are internally displaced, with more than two million living in tented camps with limited access to basic services.

Another 6 million are refugees or asylum-seekers abroad. Neighbouring Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey, which are hosting 5.3 million of them, have struggled to cope with one of the largest refugee exoduses in recent history.

At the start of 2023, the UN said 15.3 million people inside Syria were in need of some form of humanitarian assistance - an all-time high since the war began - and 12 million did not know where their next meal was coming from.

The already dire humanitarian situation in north-western Syria - the location of the last opposition stronghold - was made significantly worse by the huge earthquake that struck near the Turkish city of Gaziantep, about 80km (50 miles) from the Syrian border, on 6 February 2023.

More than 5,900 people were killed across Syria and another 8.8 million were affected, according to the UN. Thousands of homes and critical infrastructure were destroyed, leaving many families without food, water and shelter. Deliveries of life-saving aid to opposition-held areas were also delayed for days because of what a UN panel described as "shocking" failures by the warring parties as well as the international community.

The disaster happened at a time when the prices of food and fuel in Syria were already skyrocketing because of runaway inflation and the collapse of its currency, as well as the global crisis exacerbated by the war in Ukraine.

Syria has also been one of the countries in the Middle East worst affected by the Covid-19 pandemic - although the true extent is not known because of limited testing - and is now also having to deal with a deadly cholera outbreak that was made worse by the earthquake.

Access to medical care is severely restricted for the sick and injured because only half of the country's hospitals are fully functional.

Despite their protected status, 601 attacks on at least 400 separate medical facilities had been documented by Physicians for Human Rights as of February 2022, resulting in the deaths of 942 medical personnel. The vast majority of the attacks were blamed on government and Russian forces.

Entire neighbourhoods and vital infrastructure across the country also remain in ruins. UN satellite analysis suggested that more than 35,000 structures were damaged or destroyed in Aleppo city alone before it was recaptured by the government in late 2016.

Much of Syria's rich cultural heritage has likewise been destroyed. All six of the country's Unesco World Heritage sites have been damaged significantly, with IS militants deliberately blowing up parts of the ancient city of Palmyra.

A UN commission of inquiry has concluded that the warring parties "have cumulatively committed almost every crime against humanity... and nearly every war crime applicable in a non-international armed conflict".

"Syrians," a February 2021 report says, "have suffered vast aerial bombardments of densely populated areas; they have endured chemical weapons attacks and modern day sieges in which perpetrators deliberately starved the population along medieval scripts and indefensible and shameful restrictions on humanitarian aid".

The government has regained control of Syria's biggest cities, but large parts of the country are still held by rebels, jihadists and the Kurdish-led SDF. There have been no shifts in the front lines for three years.

The last remaining opposition stronghold is in the north-western province of Idlib and adjoining parts of northern Hama and western Aleppo provinces.

The region is dominated by a jihadist alliance called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), but is also home to mainstream rebel factions backed by Turkey. An estimated 2.9 million displaced people, including a million children, are living there, many of them in dire conditions in camps.

In March 2020, Russia and Turkey brokered a ceasefire to halt a push by the government to retake Idlib. That led to an extended lull in violence, but there continues to be sporadic clashes, air strikes and shelling.

In the country's north-east, Turkish forces and allied Syrian rebels launched an offensive against the SDF in October 2019 to create a "safe zone" clear of Kurdish YPG militia along the Syrian side of the border, and have occupied a 120km (75 miles) long stretch since.

To halt the assault the SDF struck a deal with the Syrian government that saw the Syrian army return to the Kurdish-administered region for the first time in seven years. Despite the presence of Syrian troops, there are still regular clashes between the SDF and Turkish-led forces along the front line.

IS sleeper cells also continue to carry out frequent and deadly attacks.

It does not look like it will anytime soon, but everyone agrees a political solution is required.

The UN Security Council has called for the implementation of the 2012 Geneva Communiqué, which envisages a transitional governing body "formed on the basis of mutual consent".

Nine rounds of UN-mediated peace talks - known as the Geneva II process - failed to make progress, with President Assad apparently unwilling to negotiate with political opposition groups that insist he must step down as part of any settlement.

Russia, Iran and Turkey set up parallel political talks known as the Astana process in 2017.

An agreement was reached the following year to form a 150-member committee to write a new constitution, leading to free and fair elections supervised by the UN. But little progress has been achieved after eight rounds of talks.

As the conflict entered its 13th year, UN special envoy Geir Pedersen said the situation in Syria was "untenable" and that "to carry on in the same manner, defies humanity and logic".

But he also expressed hope that the devastating earthquake could be a "turning point", noting the "humanitarian steps from all sides that have moved beyond previous positions, even if temporarily".
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While the world's attention is focused on Ukraine, Syria is still suffering in its long war.

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(Beirut) - Guards at Turkey's closed border with Syria are indiscriminately shooting at and summarily returning Syrian asylum seekers attempting to cross into Turkey, Human Rights Watch said today.

Syrians are fleeing heightened violence in Idlib to seek refuge near the Turkish border, which remains closed to all but critical medical cases. According to the UN, 247,000 Syrians were displaced to the border area between December 15, 2017 and January 15, 2018. Refugees who succeeded in crossing to Turkey, using smuggling routes, told Human Rights Watch that Turkish border guards shot at them and others while attempting to cross into Turkey. In some cases, Turkish border guards beat asylum seekers they detained and denied them medical assistance.

"Syrians fleeing to the Turkish border seeking safety and asylum are being forced back with bullets and abuse," said Lama Fakih, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. "As fighting in Idlib and Afrin displaces thousands more, the number of Syrians trapped along the border willing to risk their lives to reach Turkey is only likely to increase."

Human Rights Watch described its findings in a letter on January 30, 2018 to Turkey's interior minister.

Human Rights Watch spoke to 16 Syrian refugees who entered Turkey with smugglers between May and December 2017, 15 in person in Urfa and Gaziantep, in southern Turkey, and the other remotely. Thirteen said Turkish border guards shot toward them or other fleeing asylum seekers as they tried to cross while still in Syria, killing 10 people, including one child, and injuring several more. At other border crossings, witnesses told Human Rights Watch that Turkish border guards fired warning shots into the air but did not target asylum seekers directly.

Turkish border guards also abused detained asylum seekers, witnesses said. Those interviewed described different treatment at various crossing points, though treatment at each point was consistent. In seven cases, interviewees told Human Rights Watch that Turkish border guards also failed to provide apprehended asylum seekers with medical treatment when it was requested or clearly needed, and instead summarily returned them to Syria.

Twelve of the families Human Rights Watch spoke to who crossed near the Syrian internally displaced persons camp in al-Dureyya, near the city of Darkush said that upon capture, Turkish border guards placed them in a large square where they would remain until the guards had collected enough people to send back to Syria. Three families estimated that the square could fit up to a thousand people and usually had hundreds in it.

Those interviewed described their journeys across the border into Turkey as arduous and dangerous. Aside from the danger of being shot at by border guards, they described terrain littered with landmines, steep climbs, narrow paths along ravines, and valleys. They said they paid smugglers between US$300 and US$8,000 per person to reach Turkey, in many cases exhausting their resources.

Turkey has taken in about 3.5 million Syrians, hosting more refugees than any other country. Turkey has granted many of them temporary protection status, and sought to provide them with basic services, including medical care and education. However, Turkey's generous hosting of large numbers of Syrians does not absolve it of its responsibility to help those seeking protection at its borders.

While Turkey is entitled to secure its border with Syria, it is required to respect the principle of nonrefoulement, which prohibits rejecting asylum seekers at borders when that would expose them to the threat of persecution, torture, and threats to life and freedom. Turkey must also respect the right to life and bodily integrity, including the absolute prohibition on subjecting anyone to inhuman and degrading treatment.

The Turkish government should issue standard instructions to the border guards at all crossing points that lethal force must not be used against asylum seekers and no asylum seeker is to be mistreated, but should be given access to medical aid when required. It should ensure that all crossing points comply with these core legal obligations, as well as the ban on refoulement.

The escalation of hostilities in the provinces of Idlib and Afrin inside Syria, and Turkey's refusal to allow Syrian asylum seekers to cross the border, comes as some refugee host countries assert that Syria is safe for returns. Both Lebanon and Jordan have effectively closed their borders to Syrian asylum seekers as well.

In October 2017, the UN refugee agency stressed that "all parts of Syria are reported to have been affected, directly or indirectly, by one or multiple conflicts" and therefore maintained its long-standing call on all countries "not to forcibly return Syrians."

Turkey's international partners - including the European Union, which has a migration agreement with Ankara aimed at stemming onward migration to the EU - should press Turkey to keep its borders open to refugees, provide financial support to support Turkey's refugee efforts, share responsibility by stepping up resettlement of refugees from Turkey, and refrain from returning people to Syria, Human Rights Watch said.

"Conditions in Syria are not safe for refugee returns," Fakih said. "With hostilities in Afrin contributing to the growing displacement crisis in the country, Turkey should allow the thousands of desperate Syrians seeking refuge to cross the border."

Since at least mid-August 2015, Turkish border guards have pushed back Syrians trying to reach Turkey. In April and May 2016, Human Rights Watch documented Turkish border guards shooting and beating Syrian asylum seekers trying to cross to Turkey, resulting in deaths and serious injuries, and sending those who managed to cross back to Syria. By November 2017, at least 330 people had died while trying to cross the border, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Turkey has also erected a wall along most of its 911-kilometer borders with Syria.

Turkey's land borders are legally protected by army border units of the Turkish Armed Forces. Gendarmerie also on duty at the borders operate under the authority of the land forces command. There are also gendarmerie stations near the borders charged with regular rural policing activities. In documenting the abuses, Human Rights Watch refers generically to border guards without specifying if they are soldiers or gendarmes since such specific information was not provided or known by many witnesses.

In December 2017, clashes between the Syrian government and non-state armed groups in Idlib escalated, with the Russian-Syrian military alliance conducting strikes to support the advancement of Syrian ground troops. According to the UN, heightened violence led 247,000 Syrians to seek refuge near the Turkish border between December 15th and January 15th. On January 20, 2018, Turkey launched an offensive in Kurdish-held Afrin in Syria.

Accounts of Shootings by Border Guards
The refugees said the shootings took place near al-Dureyya camp for internally displaced Syrians, at Turkey's border wall near the Bab al-Hawa/Cilvegözü border crossing, and near the Orontes river smuggling point.

Witnesses told Human Rights Watch of new cases of Turkish border guards opening fire at civilians trying to enter Turkey through smuggling routes. Twelve witnesses said that the guards shot directly at the groups as well as firing indiscriminately. Three witnesses said that at least three people had died with them while attempting to cross, and one family spoke of six others that died with them in one crossing. In one of these cases, they shared the names of the dead with Human Rights Watch.

One woman that attempted the crossing with her family seven times at several crossing points between September and October said that the Turkish border guards shot at them during almost every attempt:

When they [Turkish border guards] open fire, we would be hiding in the valley. They would shoot randomly. I could see the bullets spark between my feet. In one incident, a woman was hit twice in her belly, and two men carried her back to Syria. We could see the trail of blood between the bushes.

She told Human Rights Watch that the shots came from "the front." The family had three children with them, and the woman was pregnant at the time.

A second woman described the shooting of a 13-year-old child who was attempting to cross with his mother:

We had reached the wide street that divides Syria and Turkey, and the smuggler told the child and another man to cross it. They started to walk across, and then bang, bang. They were both shot. The kid, it went straight through his stomach, and he was bleeding heavily. We dragged him back with us all the way, and he died in Syria."

Abuse of Detainees; Lack of Medical Care
At al-Dureyya crossing, border guards hit and otherwise mistreated captured asylum seekers, Syrians interviewed said. Five asylum seekers said that they saw the border guards hit men and women, including stepping on them with military-issued boots. One witness who was captured while attempting to cross, described the treatment:

When they [the Turkish border guards] captured us, we would stay out in the cold for hours [gathered in a square] until they had collected enough groups to return us to Syria. Even when it was cold and raining, they would force us to sit silently. One time a woman asked for a drink of water, and they hit her.

Three witnesses said that as many as 1,500 people were being held in the square when they were there.

Witnesses also described mistreatment at the crossing near Bab Al-Hawa/ Cilvegözü. A young man who was captured after attempting to cross with his family said that members of the Turkish border patrol hit him on the back and shoulder with a rifle and military-issue helmet, and subjected others in the group to similar treatment.

One witness said that a man had fallen into the valley while trying to cross, and had clearly broken his hands. When the group was captured, the man asked for help, but the Turkish border guard refused to take him to a hospital. They didn't even give him painkillers, the witness said.

In a second case, a woman had given birth while attempting to cross the border. The Turkish border guards sent her and the child back to Syria without providing medical assistance.

In two cases described, it appeared that guards were trying to provide medical care, but that the efforts were too late and two refugees died. In one of the cases, a family told Human Rights Watch that a man had fallen ill at the border. The Turkish border guards had requested an ambulance, but the man died. His body was returned to Syria, with his family and the captured group.

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Turkey/Syria: Border Guards Shoot, Block Fleeing Syrians

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(Beirut) - Guards at Turkey's closed border with Syria are indiscriminately shooting at and summarily returning Syrian asylum seekers attempting to cross into Turkey, Human Rights Watch said today. Syrians are fleeing heightened violence in Idlib to seek refuge near the Turkish border, which remains closed to all but critical medical cases.

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Murdered by a paramilitary death squad in Gambia; "staggering" bloodshed on Gaza border; HRW sues Israeli government over revoked work permit; Virunga National Park killings in DR Congo; opposition politician Anwar Ibrahim freed from jail in Malaysia; prominent German reporter will be allowed to attend football World Cup at Russia backtracks; Gay Pride cancelled in Lebanon; Uzbezistan reform; "repugnant" violence as parents use own children to bomb Christian churches in Indonesia; Copenhagen Fashion Summit; and Sudanese woman sentenced to death for killing her husband as he tried to rape her.

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Worldwide one billion individuals have a disability. Many people with disabilities live in conflict settings or in developing countries, where they experience a range of barriers to education, health care and other basic services. In many countries, they are subjected to violence and discrimination.

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People around the world face violence and inequality-and sometimes torture, even execution-because of who they love, how they look, or who they are. Sexual orientation and gender identity are integral aspects of our selves and should never lead to discrimination or abuse.

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Learn how Facing History helped Capital City Public Charter strengthen school culture and decreased bullying behavior.

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HRW: Saving Lives at No Longer Alone: LGBT Voices from the Middle East & North Africa

LGBT Voices from the Middle East & North Africa

This page uses JavaScript to play video files.

Religious figures, the government, your parents-they all want to have a say in what you do between your legs. I want to tell you it's none of their business and that your body, your desires and your ideas are yours alone. If they don't like what you are, they are wrong."

-"Rima," bisexual woman, Lebanon

I am a human like everyone else, and I have rights. I will defend those rights."

-"Ahmed," gay man, Libya

Despite state-sponsored repression and social stigma, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in the Middle East and North Africa are finding ways to speak out. They are telling their stories, building alliances, networking across borders, developing national and regional movements, and finding creative ways to combat discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Human Rights Watch and the Arab Foundation for Freedoms and Equality (AFE) teamed up to produce videos featuring Arabic-speaking LGBT activists describing their journeys of self-acceptance. Through the campaign "No Longer Alone," they offer messages of support and encouragement to LGBT people living in Arabic-speaking countries in the Middle East and North Africa.

For many, their personal experiences of isolation and abuse led them to activism. Rayan, a gay man from Algeria, describes being taken by his parents to a religious healer known as a raqi, who beat him, saying that there was a woman inside him that needed to get out. "He could beat me all night, but nothing would change," says Rayan. Rayan is now working to sensitize mental health professionals in Algeria so that they are equipped to help LGBT people rather than trying to change them.

Once painfully reserved, Rashed overcame his shyness to create a play about his experience coming to terms with his gender identity and performed it in front of 50 students in Irdib, in northern Jordan.

Hajar, a lesbian from Morocco, came out publicly through a YouTube video that went viral. She eventually had to leave Morocco for the Netherlands, where she continues her activism, working with LGBT refugees.

After finding support and community, many of these activists have gone on to offer that support to others. Noor, from Sudan, remembers searching on Facebook for people like her: "I found this group that had many Sudanese [lesbian] girls. I wrote, 'Where are you people?' I realized I was not alone in the world, there are many people like me, and I was very happy. I think that night I was so happy I didn't sleep." Now a seasoned activist, Noor works throughout North Africa to provide resources to LGBT people who are in the same position of isolation where she once was, and to document and share their stories.

Some of the activists featured in "No Longer Alone" insisted on having their faces hidden or their voices altered. They send an important message to LGBT people in the Arab world: one must not be "out" in order to be making change. As one activist said in an interview with Egypt's MadaMasr, "It's not about a group of individuals coming out to society... but rather about the issue itself 'coming out' for social discussion." While some of these activists hope that a time will come when they can safely show their faces to the world, they are adept at working creatively within the constraints imposed by states and society, and sometimes that means working undercover while ensuring that the issues-LGBT identities, LGBT health, equality, discrimination, violence-obtain coverage.

To accompany the videos, a new Human Rights Watch report, " Audacity in Adversity," highlights the resilience of LGBT movements throughout the region and how they are making change in the face of significant obstacles, including criminalization of same-sex conduct and gender non-conformity, arbitrary arrests and ill-treatment, lack of recognition of transgender people, violence, restrictions on freedom of expression and association, family rejection and social stigma.

In Oman, several men started small: organizing "parties for gay guys to meet and network in a safe space, so that they can help each other in the future." In Kuwait, an activist trained LGBT people on digital security, working out of peoples' houses. In Jordan, a number of activists are using theater and other arts to raise awareness about sexual orientation and gender identity among LGBT communities themselves and in some cases, the general public.

In other countries, activists are taking on their governments, successfully pushing for incremental change. In Lebanon, lawyers linked to LGBT activist communities have persuaded several courts to acquit people accused of "unnatural offenses" arguing that this phrase does not apply to same-sex sexual acts. In Morocco, activists have pushed for courts to convict perpetrators of violence based on sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI). In response to reports submitted by activists at the UN Human Rights Council, Iraq has publicly acknowledged the need to address SOGI-based violence. In Lebanon and Tunisia, activists have successfully lobbied state institutions to commit to ending forced anal examinations as a means of obtaining evidence in sodomy prosecutions.

Repressive laws make activism difficult. In most countries in the region, same-sex acts between consenting adults in private are treated as a criminal offense. Some laws prohibit all sex outside marriage, or zina, including all sex between same-sex partners. Some states explicitly outlaw same-sex acts, while others refer to undefined "unnatural" sex. And several countries use vague "morality" laws to persecute people for consensual same-sex conduct. Some states in the region also criminalize non-normative gender identities: Oman, in its revised 2018 penal code, became the latest country to take this regressive step.

Restrictions on freedom of association also pose obstacles to the work of LGBT groups. According to an analysis by the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex Association (ILGA), laws regulating non-governmental organizations in Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates make it virtually impossible for organizations working on issues of sexual orientation and gender identity to legally register.

Backlash is a constant, looming threat for activists who seek to push boundaries. In September 2017, Egyptian security forces arrested dozens on charges of "debauchery," "inciting debauchery," and participating in an "illegal group" following the display of a rainbow flag-a sign of solidarity with LGBT people-at a concert. Even by recent standards in Egypt, where hundreds of people have been arrested on homosexuality-related charges since President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi took power in 2013, the September crackdown-involving scores of arrests, forced anal examinations, and a formal media blackout on pro-LGBT speech - was severe. Some had to leave the country. But activists demonstrated creativity and dynamism even in such challenging contexts. Some provided emergency shelter for LGBT people being hounded by the police, while others focused on training LGBT people on how to digitally protect themselves from police surveillance and entrapment. Several groups have been working to galvanize international pressure on the Egyptian government, a tool that they employ cautiously, often reserving it for human rights emergencies.

Even in countries that do not criminalize same-sex conduct or gender non-conformity, severe social stigma forces many people to hide their identities, making activism more difficult. Yousif, a gay man from Bahrain, which does not criminalize same-sex conduct, said that the same "social contract" that stifles dissent of all kinds also limits the options of LGBT people who might wish to speak out: "It's a social contract-'We have oil, you're going to get wealth, so shut up. And if you don't like it, get out.'"

In spite of the repressive legal and social environment, several LGBT activists from Arabic-speaking countries in the Middle East and North Africa told us they were frustrated by one-dimensional international media coverage portraying the region as hell on earth for LGBT people. Such coverage fails to recognize the agency of LGBT activists from the region, or renders them completely invisible. "We don't want the image anymore of just being victims," says Zoheir, an activist from Algeria. "We want to speak about reality, speak about violence, but also to [show what is] positive."

By amplifying the voices of LGBT activists from the Middle East and North Africa and inviting them to share their personal stories and their experiences as activists, this project seeks to examine all that is possible beyond victimhood.

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LGBT Voices from the Middle East & North Africa

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China: Gender Discrimination in Job Advertising

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As the sexual misconduct scandals continue to unfold, our gender team is providing updates and analysis in a newsletter. Today, we present artwork inspired by the cultural reckoning - made by you, our readers. Sign up here to receive future installments, and tell us what you think at nytgender@nytimes.com.
Judy Chicago established the first known feminist-art program in the United States, in the fall of 1970, at the California Institute of the Arts. Later, she formed the art collective known as "Womanhouse " because, as she put it, " women artists were simply not taken seriously."

Two decades later, the Guerrilla Girls forced attention to the fine art world's gender and racial disparity with their gorilla masks and guerrilla-style stunts. ("Guerrilla Girls' definition of a hypocrite?" read one poster. "An art collector who buys white male art at benefits for liberal causes, but never buys art by women or artists of color.")

From Picasso's Guernica - observed as a cry against the atrocities of the Spanish War - to the graffiti of the Arab Spring, social movements and injustice have long inspired art of all forms. The #MeToo Moment is no exception.

We asked readers to submit work on this theme. In her piece above, the Michigan-based illustrator, Libby VanderPloeg, showcases the concept of momentum: "When people join forces," she explained, "they can exert greater leverage over a situation."

Below, eight more of the pieces you sent our way, with comments from the artists.

'Peeling Back the Silence'

"This is a watercolor piece, portraying three individuals of different ethnic groups and genders, that demonstrates how the victims of sexual assault and harassment vary. "The individuals are removing tape from their mouths to signify victims finding the courage to come forward. "Having more than one person in the piece shows the unity within the movement and how rape culture affects more than just a few people."

- Graciella Delgado is a 17-year-old artist in Houston, Tex.

'A Collection of Body Parts'

"I was around 15 and a man approached me on the street, said he liked my shoes. I thanked him. "He then began to list every other part of me he liked (legs, mouth, hair, everything), following me down the street as I tried to leave the conversation. First by politely excusing myself, then by breaking into a run. "That was the first time I felt myself seen as nothing but a collection of body parts. It wasn't the last."
- Alicia Tatone is a graphic designer in Brooklyn, N.Y.

'Oh Yeah, Me Too'

"The cartoon is pretty self-explanatory, but for me it's just about how women who share stories often find out that we all often experience the same pain, no matter how different our backgrounds."
- Hilary Campbell is a cartoonist in Brooklyn, N.Y.

'Standing on the Patriarchy'

"I have my own lifetime of #MeToo experiences, and one response I have to the courage of those contributing to this uprising is the sense of pure joy and freedom when I imagine that culture is finally in ruins. "There are serious aspects to this movement, but I want to show the inevitability and inherent positivity of its impact as something to be celebrated."
- Kathleen Morris is a textile and collage artist in Australia.

'If Walls Could Hear'

"I drew these sketches in a shelter for women and children escaping domestic violence. In order to preserve the privacy of women, I portrayed only their ears. "The shape of our ears is unique, like our fingerprints. However near the partners are, they still can't actually identify that shape."

"I like that this piece shows that we as women are all a collective force, just as the ocean is a large force made up of individual water drops."
- Caralena Peterson is a writer and artist in Washington, D.C.

'Not Yours'

"My image was inspired by the #MeToo Revolution, my personal experiences with the male gaze and a healthy amount of frustration and repulsion. What I hope to convey in this image is the sense of verbal, physical and energetic male ownership that is placed on women in society."
- Beata Kruszynski is a freelance illustrator and art teacher in Ontario, Canada.

'Body As Object'

"By hiding the dolls' faces, I hoped to highlight how the objectification of girls' bodies takes away their identities."
- Dora Guo is a high school student in Lincolnshire, Ill.

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The #MeToo Moment: Art Inspired by the Reckoning

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As the sexual misconduct scandals continue to unfold, our gender team is providing updates and analysis in a newsletter. Today, we present artwork inspired by the cultural reckoning - made by you, our readers. Sign up here to receive future installments, and tell us what you think at nytgender@nytimes.com .

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While it is estimated that about 40% of all child soldiers globally are active on the African continent, scholars appear to evaluate this number in different ways. Vera Achvarina and Simon Reich draw the conclusion that "[s]ince 1975, Africa has become the epicentre of the problem, providing the largest concentration of both conflicts and child soldiers". ¹ On the other hand, Mark A. Drumbl states that "only a plurality - reportedly, about 40% - of the global number of child soldiers is located on the African continent". ² Many African societies are experiencing or have experienced civil conflict at some stage, but it is important to emphasise that this article does not intend to "Africanize a global phenomenon and pathologize African conflicts". ³

Although the causes of civil conflicts remain almost too complex to be thoroughly analysed, some attention has to be paid to the so-called feasibility thesis, which suggests that rebellious movements occur where they are feasible. ⁴ Underlying causes of civil conflicts can be said to be low per-capita income and slow economic growth, among others. ⁵ For rebel groups and other individuals, civil war might be seen as an economic opportunity. Other explanations for civil war, and its reasons, such as the greed and grievance debate, have been challenged and will not be tackled in this article. ⁶

To understand the living situation of many African children, it is essential to recognise the risk involved with a post-conflict society relapsing into conflict. Within a time span of a decade, according to Paul Collier et al., this risk is as high as 40% ⁷ - meaning that many children live in an environment that is constantly under threat of reverting to conflict. "Many of these wars do not formally end through victory or negotiated settlement; they are low-intensity conflicts [...]. It is in these types of environments that we are most likely to encounter the use of child soldiers." ⁸

Moreover, the end of the cold war left some armed forces or groups without further financial support - before, they had been supported by either the United States or the Soviet Union fighting proxy wars. ⁹ The result was that "[g]roups no longer able to finance their conflicts pursued peace negotiations, were defeated militarily, or started recruiting or abducting relatively cheap child soldiers". ¹⁰

By understanding the recruitment process of child soldiers, the design of post-conflict reintegration programmes can be improved. Future recruitment can be prevented if international agencies know the underlying causes for employing child soldiers. Therefore, two major questions require further exploration. First, why are child soldiers recruited at all? Second, why and how do children join armed forces and groups? Not all recruitment can be said to happen involuntarily. In other words, the push and pull factors involved have to be critically assessed.

The Reasons for Recruitment

The benefits of recruiting child soldiers seem to be concealed when first approaching the topic. Why would any army or military movement rely on the inferior physical power and inexperience of children? Why are children the "weapon of choice" in so many countries? ¹¹

Roméo Dallaire, who encountered child soldiers in the Rwandan genocide, states that more than 50% of the population in many African conflict or post-conflict zones consists of children younger than 18 years old. ¹² Consequently, one of the reasons for employing child soldiers is that "they are viewed as expendable, replaceable" - and they are cheap to maintain. They are also psychologically more vulnerable than many adults, who already have a more shaped personality. Since younger children, in particular, can lack a sense of fear, they might be preferred over adults because they accept more dangerous tasks without scrutinising them. ¹³ Children's and adolescents' identities are still being formed, meaning that they can be more easily influenced and controlled, since they are dependent on protection and guidance. If parents, family and friends are lost, children might:

...transfer loyalty to another adult, especially one who holds the power of reward and punishment. They can be psychologically manipulated through a deliberate programme of starvation, thirst, fatigue, voodoo, indoctrination, beatings, the use of drugs and alcohol, and even sexual abuse to render them compliant to the new norms of child soldiering. ¹⁴

Still puzzling, though, is the question of how children can actually be effective in direct combat, given the fact that they are smaller and physically weaker than adults? Child soldiers are able to take part in combat, due to the widespread and global proliferation of small arms - mainly AK-47 assault rifles, the so-called Kalashnikovs. "[T]echnological improvements in small arms now permit these child recruits to be effective participants in warfare," ¹⁵ which makes them almost as dangerous and effective as any adult soldier. Approximately more than 70 million AK-47 rifles have been produced globally since 1947, ¹⁶ and this weapon "can be easily carried and used to deadly effect by children as young as 10". ¹⁷

Due to the wide proliferation of small arms, two major problems are faced in post-conflict societies and throughout the disarmament and demobilisation process. First, a country's leadership finds itself confronted with large stocks of so-called "surplus weapons", which could pose a serious security threat if they fall into the wrong hands. ¹⁸ Second, "enormous numbers of weapons remain or fall in the hands of ex-combatants" ¹⁹ because disarmament programmes might have limited success - many combatants own more than one weapon and are suspicious about turning them in, in case ceasefires do not hold.

Although the spread of light weaponry certainly does play a significant role in the use of child soldiers, it has to be borne in mind that children also participate in conflict without technologically advanced weapons. In Rwanda, killings took place by either using a panga, which is a machete, or a masu, a club studded with nails. ²⁰ As Drumbl states: "Child soldiering connects to these conventionally cited and situational forces [but...] is, however, much more than merely epiphenomenal to these forces." ²¹ To understand more about the recruitment of child soldiers, both forced and voluntary recruitment have to be thoroughly analysed.

Forced Recruitment

Abduction is the most common method by which child soldier recruitment takes place. In short, there are two primary ways children can become child soldiers:

1. they are abducted, or conscripted through coercion or severe threats; or

2. they are born into forces or groups.²²

The Ugandan Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), for example, is commonly known for abducting children from their homes. According to the 2008 Global Report on Child Soldiers by the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, the LRA has abducted about 25 000 children since the 1980s. "During active hostilities children in the LRA were forced to participate in combat and to carry out raids, kill and mutilate other child soldiers and civilians, and loot and burn houses." ²³ Although most parents and family try to hide and protect their children, many of them get taken anyway - as in the case of an adolescent who had been abducted at the age of 16 in Sierra Leone:

My Dad and I were planting rice and the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) came and captured us. Dad begged the soldiers to release me, but they insisted... Dad trailed them since he couldn't let me go... So they killed my Dad. ²⁴

Similar to the LRA, the RUF in Sierra Leone used abduction as one of its main recruitment methods, but it should not be forgotten that "all sides had recruited children, who were the main victims of forced recruitment" ²⁵ - meaning that the pro-government Civil Defence Forces (CDF), the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) and the Sierra Leone Army also forced children into their ranks. "By 1998 about 25% percent of the fighting forces were under 18." ²⁶

Voluntary Recruitment

However, if children are not forcibly recruited, why do they decide to join armed groups and forces, apart from peer pressure? Whereas push factors first drive children away from their known environment, pull factors encourage them to join the fighting forces. Push factors include "grievances, repression and discrimination" ²⁷ as well as poverty, lack of education and employment, abuse at home or - due to previous conflict - having no home or community at all any more. Pull factors include - paradoxically - seeking security in fighting forces, provision of food, a sense of belonging and ideology or group identity, as well as economic reasons such as gaining profit. ²⁸ A study on recruitment in Colombia, for example, revealed that many children who voluntarily joined the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) were driven by "poverty, unemployment, vengeance, avoiding violence from the rival group, and the allure of the military life" ²⁹ as main push factors

Furthermore, children are often promised some payoff when joining armed forces and groups. These can be divided into pecuniary and non-pecuniary rewards, with pecuniary rewards mostly consisting of "wages, one-shot monetary rewards (often associated with loot), and other tangible rewards such as drugs and alcohol". ³⁰ Non-pecuniary rewards could include the achievement of rank, bonding with comrades and commanders, and forming a group identity. All these factors are used to motivate group members, which is why allegiance is seldom achieved by pecuniary rewards but rather by certain socialisation processes. ³¹ Hence, not all children are simply forced at gunpoint to become combatants - in many cases, their decision is made based on their social, cultural and economic environment and limited opportunities.

One remaining significant question is why the use of child soldiers differs from area to area or country to country? It is important to realise that numerous reasons are valid, and that it is tempting but misleading to make sweeping generalisations. However, it is crucial not to omit so-called accessibility factors, which describe to which extent children are easily accessible for recruiters. ³² Recent studies have suggested that the previously mentioned push and pull factors indeed contribute to children becoming soldiers, but those factors alone do not capture the full picture.

For recruiters, easy access to large groups of children is provided in refugee and internally displaced persons (IDP) camps. While "[i]nternational law mandates respect the civilian and humanitarian character of refugee camps and prohibits refugee participation in military activity", ³³ the same does not hold true for IDP camps. Here, international law assumes that since people are internally displaced, their national governments will take care of them. "In reality, though, IDPs flee because their government cannot or will not protect them" ³⁴ - meaning that, in many cases, IDP camps remain almost unprotected, thus turning into major recruitment grounds, infiltrated by fighting forces.

Political scientist Sarah K. Lischer recognises two main patterns by which children are recruited in refugee and IDP camps: the militarisation path and the insecurity path. ³⁵

As visualised above, both the militarisation path and the insecurity path are actively used in refugee camps to recruit new child soldiers. The presence of non-civilian militants among refugees can lead to refugee militarisation, and subsequently to the recruitment of child soldiers. Insecure camps, on the other hand, pave the path for the abduction of refugee children by militant groups, while the insecurity path over time leaves room for potential child soldier recruiters to infiltrate the camps and indoctrinate children and adolescents.

Another study went even further by stating that "substantial poverty rates say little about whether a country is likely to have child soldier participants in armed conflicts". ³⁶ Moreover, it is argued that even orphan and child soldier rates do not exhibit any significant correlation in the countries under investigation, such as Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Burundi, Senegal, Mali, Rwanda, Uganda, Angola, Mozambique, Sierra Leone and Lesotho. ³⁷ As can be seen, although circumstances such as severe poverty can definitely have a threshold effect, accessibility factors should not be underestimated. Due to this realisation, non-governmental organisation workers and volunteers often try to protect refugee and IDP camps by their mere physical presence, trying to deter recruiters:

This "protection by presence" usually breaks down in the face of life-threatening security situations. In 2006, riots in a camp for internally displaced persons in Darfur, Sudan, forced the evacuation of aid workers and journalists from the camp. The only security force consisted of a handful of unarmed African Union soldiers. ³⁸

Such situations leave children particularly vulnerable to abduction and recruitment, since many children in these camps lack family protection or support by relatives.

Conclusion

Now the question is whether we will commit ourselves to the protection of our most precious heritage, our children. ³⁹

In sum, the recruitment of child soldiers is more complex than it initially appears. Each individual child has a different life story and upbringing, as well as individual reasons to either try to stay away from armed forces and groups or to join them - if they have not already been forced to join the ranks.

Again, what has to be borne in mind is the need to look beyond conventional wisdom and stereotypes: most voluntary recruitment is not due to children's free choice. For some children, joining a guerrilla movement might be the most attractive alternative to stay alive, given the social, structural and political conditions. In other words, the universal condemnation of the recruitment of child soldiers needs to take the issue of alternatives into consideration. What if the alternative is worse than becoming a child soldier? If the recruitment and re-recruitment of children as soldiers is to be prevented, then the economic, social and individual environment of potential recruits must be taken into account.

Finally, the reintegration of former child soldiers should aim at preventing further recruitment. It makes no sense to simply let it happen and then provide aid after the damage has occurred. In addition to the idea that successful reintegration can serve as a recruitment prevention strategy itself, other strategies should also be employed.

There are other strategies that must be combined to have an effect on the recruiters of child soldiers. Currently, the UN employs three different strategies: "deterrence, naming and shaming, and criminalisation of the recruitment of child soldiers." ⁴⁰ While every strategy has proven to have severe limitations, and even the effect of the prosecution of military leaders for war crimes and the employment of child soldiers is questionable, ⁴¹ it can be agreed that even slow progress is, nonetheless, progress. Whether this progress continues or not will also depend on the assistance provided to disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration. The recruiters of child soldiers should be held accountable by international as well as national agencies. ⁴²

Dealing with the highly complex issue of recruitment and the reintegration of child soldiers - and, possibly, even the future prevention of their employment - is a very challenging problem with significant consequences and impacts. But, Dallaire reminds us to remain indefatigably positive and steadfast in our quest to end the recruitment of child soldiers:

...but so what if we have to battle? So what if it takes forty or fifty years to end the use of the child soldier [...]? It will have been worth it for the betterment of humanity and the protection of our youth. ⁴³

Endnotes

1. Achvarina, Vera and Reich, Simon (2010) No Place to Hide: Refugees, Displaced Persons, and Child Soldier Recruits. In Gates, Scott and Reich, Simon (eds) Child Soldiers in the Age of Fractured States. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, p. 56.

2. Drumbl, Mark A. (2012) Reimagining Child Soldiers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 6.

3. Ibid., p. 6.

4. cf.Collier, Paul et al. (2008) Post-conflict Risks. Journal of Peace Research, 45(4), p. 464.

5. cf. Ibid., p. 464.

6. cf. Sanin, Francisco G. (2010) Organizing Minors: The Case of Colombia. In Gates, Scott and Reich, Simon (eds) op. cit., p. 135.

7. cf. Collier, Paul et al. (2008) op. cit., p. 474.

8. Gates, Scott and Reich, Simon (2010) Conclusion: Children and Human Security. In Gates, Scott and Reich, Simon (eds) op. cit., p. 250.

9. cf. Ibid., p. 249.

10. Ibid., p. 249.

11. Dallaire, Roméo (2011) They Fight like Soldiers, They Die like Children. London: Arrow Books, p. 3.

12. cf. Ibid., p. 117.

13. cf. Wessels, Michael (2006) Child Soldiers: From Violence to Protection. London: Harvard University Press, p. 36.

14. Ibid., p. 118.

15. Singer, P.W. (2010) The Enablers of War: Causal Factors Behind the Child Soldier Phenomenon. In Gates, Scott and Reich, Simon (eds) op. cit., p. 95.

16. cf. Machel, Graça (2011) The Impact of War on Children. London: C. Hurst & Co., p. 122.

17. Ibid., p. 7.

18. cf. Kingma, Kees (1997) Demobilization of Combatants After Civil Wars in Africa and Their Reintegration into Civilian Life. Policy Sciences, 30, p. 155.

19. Ibid., p. 156.

20. cf. Drumbl, Mark A. (2012) op. cit., p. 63.

21. Ibid., p. 63.

22. Ibid., p. 62.

23. Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers (2008) Child Soldiers: Global Report 2008. London: Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, p. 347.

24. Wessels, Michael (2006) op. cit., p. 38.

25. Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers (2008) op. cit., p. 299.

26. Ibid., p. 299.

27. Hauge, Wenche (2011) Girl Soldiers in Guatemala. In í-zerdem, Alpaslan and Podder, Sukanya (eds) Child Soldiers: From Recruitment to Reintegration. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, p. 92.

28. cf. Ibid., p. 92.

29. Sanin, Francisco G. (2010) op. cit., p. 137.

30. Andvig, Jens C. and Gates, Scott (2010) Recruiting Children for Armed Conflict. In Gates, Scott and Reich, Simon (eds) op. cit., p. 81.

31. cf. Vermeij, Lotte (2011) Socialization and Reintegration Challenges: A Case Study of the Lord's Resistance Army. In í-zerdem, Alpaslan and Podder, Sukanya (eds) op. cit., p. 184.

32. cf. Ames, Barry (2010) Methodological Problems in the Study of Child Soldiers. In Gates, Scott and Reich, Simon (eds) op. cit., p. 15.

33. Lischer, Sarah K. (2010) War, Displacement, and the Recruitment of Child Soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In Gates, Scott and Reich, Simon (eds) op. cit., p. 145.

34. Ibid., p. 146.

35. cf. Ibid., p. 145.

36. Achvarina, Vera and Reich, Simon (2010) op. cit., p. 60.

37. Ibid., pp. 61-62.

38. Lischer, Sarah K. (2010) op. cit., p. 149.

39. Wessels, Michael (2006) op. cit., p. 257.

40. Gates, Scott and Reich, Simon (2010) op. cit., p. 252.

41. cf. Wessels, Michael (2006) op. cit., p. 238.

42. Becker, Jo (2005) Child Soldiers: Changing a Culture of Violence. Human Rights, 32(1), p. 18.

43. Dallaire, Roméo (2011) op. cit., p. 237.

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Understanding the Recruitment of Child Soldiers in Africa - ACCORD

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While it is estimated that about 40% of all child soldiers globally are active on the African continent, scholars appear to evaluate this number in different ways. Vera Achvarina and Simon Reich draw the conclusion that "[s]ince 1975, Africa has become the epicentre of the problem, providing the largest concentration of both conflicts and child soldiers".

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The issue of child soldiers in Africa is on the increase. The official military age (age at which an individual is allowed to become enlisted in the military) for most countries in Africa is 18 years and even 21 in some others but this is not the case especially in countries where there is disrupted peace, unity and marked abuse of human rights.

Today there are many African child soldiers participating in wars and conflicts in various countries. These children are forced to join the military by various groups in different nations across the continent with the aim of providing a dispensable force to the group. There are various ways that the vulnerability of children can be exploited by the recruiters of these child soldiers in Africa, part of which involve:

Taking direct part in hostilities (child soldiers)

Used in various support roles like spies, messengers and lookouts

Children can be used as human shields or in propaganda to achieve political advantage.

Apart from the vulnerabilities of these children towards abuse, a fact that is worth considering is the false power and authority given to these minors when they are standing behind a high-powered AK 47 riffle. Here are 10 shocking facts about child soldiers in Africa.

1. Child Soldiers are Underaged

Thousands of children under the age of eighteen years are made to serve in various armed rebel groups and government forces in the continent. Some children are even below the age of eight when they get recruited into the military. Even though the exact number of child soldiers in Africa is unknown, the estimated number of child soldiers globally is in the range of 200,000 to 300,000 and a larger proportion of these, are in Africa.

2. Forced Labour

Not all the child soldiers take part in active combat, some are recruited to cook, work as suicide bombers, spies, human shield, messengers, couriers, cleaners and girls are forced into sexual slavery but whatever the case may be, they are compelled to go against their wish for wars that they didn't start.

3. Recruited Girls are Raped

Most child soldiers in Africa are boys, but girls make up a substantial minority and constitute about 40% of the population of child soldiers. However, girls are much more vulnerable to abuse and are used mostly used for sexual purposes by male soldiers. In some countries, girls are raped or are taken to military commanders to become their wives. In the last decade, more facts revealed that the vice has spread to almost every conflict region across Africa.

4. Recruited Child Soldiers Lack Basic Needs

Children are mainly recruited to the military because they are easily manipulated. This is because they are very young to understand or resist any command. Child soldiers are preferred mostly because they eat less food compared to adults and they are not paid. The sense of danger in children is not highly developed making it easy to send them to the line of fire. The recruited children are mainly from poor families, they have no access to education and some have separated from their families or are displaced from their homes.

5. Social and Economic Pressure Contribute a lot

Due to social or economic pressure, there are children who are not forced to join the military. Some volunteer to join the military with a feeling that volunteering will satisfy some of their needs such as income, security and food. However, there are those who are abducted or forcibly recruited by rebels. Before the recruitment process, their basic economic and social rights are taken away and are either destroyed by accident in times or war or is part of a deliberate attempt to strip the community of its supplies making them highly vulnerable (a strategy that is commonly used by the recruiters).
Image credit: filipspagnoli.wordpress.com stats on child soldiers
6. Many Countries in Africa Recruit Children in the Military

Children have been recruited as soldiers in countries such as Sudan, Somalia, South Sudan, Libya, Mali, Chad, Uganda and Central Africa among many other countries.

Sierra Leone: African child soldiers terrorized civilians by cutting off hands and arms

Somalia: War profiteers use child soldiers to continue and prolong fight against the government in order to prevent taxes and curtailing illegal businesses.

Congo: Child soldiers who are mostly males, keep the violence alive at borders beyond government control.

Liberia: Former president, Charles Taylor abducted many child soldiers whom he used in his fight for the presidency in a war that lasted 14 years.

Mozambique and Uganda also used many African child soldiers in their long civil wars.

7. Technology Growth has Contributed a lot

Growth in technology, especially in the development of arms and weapons has also contributed to the recruitment of child soldiers. Today we have small automatic arms that are simple to use, easily accessible and can be used by both adults and children without the need for vigorous training on handling.

8. Forced to Commit Atrocities Against their Relatives.

To ensure that the children are not able to return to their homes or to their communities, the rebels force the children to kill their family members, relatives or even their neighbours. By doing this, a child is stigmatized and unable to go back to his or her community. This is usually done as part of their recruitment.

9. Usually Part of Rebel Groups

In many cases, the groups that use child soldiers are anti-government groups or rebels and are not ready to negotiate since many affected countries in Africa do not have a functioning government. However, since early 1998 over one hundred thousand child soldiers have been reintegrated back to their families after being released from the armed rebels. Non-profit organizations and anti-child soldiers groups like War Child and Child Soldiers International have played a big role in reintegrating the child soldiers into the society across Africa.

10. Lack of Rehabilitation Programs

There are some countries with good progress since many former child soldiers are helped through rehabilitation programs to adopt and live with their families and some even go back to school. However, there are those who have no access to such facilities and therefore have no way to support themselves.

Lack of support poses a risk for the children and may lead to them being recruited back to the military. The problem of girls and boys being recruited to the military is not going away very soon but people are urged to offer their support and take a stand against the use of child soldiers in Africa. This can only be done through making laws that are against recruitment of child soldiers.

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Child Soldiers in Africa: 10 Shocking Facts You Didn't Know Before Now

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The issue of child soldiers in Africa is on the increase. The official military age (age at which an individual is allowed to become enlisted in the military) for most countries in Africa is 18 years and even 21 in some others but this is not the case especially in countries where there is disrupted peace, unity and marked abuse of human rights.

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avid Zelu, not yet 16 years old, looks up, smiles, and stretches his arms to the sky where the sun is finally breaking through the clouds. The rain that has hammered on the wooden roof of the small hut he shares with four other teenagers has passed. Crows wheel overhead, and small thin children jump in puddles.

David is one of seven "bodyguards" of a senior officer of a rebel militia in the east of South Sudan, and so a "child soldier", like thousands of others in his country, and tens of thousands more across Africa.

"It is tough in a warzone that's true," he says. "It is sad to lose your friends. But what can you do? If you don't carry a gun round here you are nothing."

There are children bearing arms in Central African Republic, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in Somalia, where they have been recruited by the al-Shabab Islamist movement and among the ranks of Boko Haram, the Islamic State affiliate, in Nigeria.

Then there is the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), which during a 20-year campaign of terror across Uganda and nearby states forced tens of thousands of children to fight, perform menial tasks and commit atrocities too. Though now a shadow of its former self, the LRA still has several hundred children fighting in its ranks.

But the chaos that followed South Sudan's declaration of independence from Sudan six years ago has led to a surge in the number of children under arms. The world's youngest country, racked by famine, disease, ethnic strife, corruption on an immense scale and war, now hosts the largest concentration of "child soldiers" on the continent, possibly in the world.

According to the UN, 18,000 child combatants have been recruited in the past four years in South Sudan. Most are still fighting.

The conventional image of the child soldier is a teen or pre-teen abducted by adult fighters, brainwashed, brutalised, and turned into a killer. This happened to tens of thousands of children during the savage civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the 1990s.

It is the story told by Dominic Ongwen, a former abductee and child soldier with the LRA who is on trial for war crimes at the international criminal court in The Hague. It has happened on a horrific scale in Nigeria in recent years.

But many child soldiers volunteer. "One of the biggest myths [about child soldiers] is that they are all forced to join an armed force, or even, that they are all abducted," says José Luis Hernández, a South Sudan-based child protection officer with Unicef, the UN children's fund.

James, 17, became a soldier when still in primary school, fighting with the Cobra Faction, an opposition militia in the east of South Sudan. He joined after government troops launched a crackdown on local communities in Jonglei state, which had demanded greater autonomy and a larger share of the oil-rich nation's resources shortly after South Sudan gained its independence.

"I didn't much like lessons. I got into trouble. Then the army came, and the schools were closed and bad things started happening ... so I decided to go and fight," says James.

With two other boys - Baba, 10, and his brother, Simon, 12 - James slipped away from his home in Pibor, a poor town in Jonglei, one night. Guided by a relative who was a Cobra Faction sympathiser, the trio made their way to the militia in the bush.

On arrival, the boys were given weapons, ammunition and a few hours training. At first they were excited. "I was happy when they gave me a gun," says James. "I felt safe. I felt I could protect myself."

But the boys soon found themselves thrown into frontline combat. A dozen former child soldiers interviewed in Pibor by the Guardian described the fear, confusion and shock of their first experience of war.

Many spoke of dreaming of their own deaths, or those of close friends and relatives. "I was feeling very bad, I was expecting to die," says James.

The battles between the rebels and the government were chaotic, with ambushes, clashes in deep undergrowth, terrific noise and often heavy casualties. The former child soldiers described "piles" of corpses of enemy soldiers after clashes and comrades killed or wounded.

"Our officer was killed and because my friend was the senior bodyguard he ran to pick up his weapon and got shot too ... I was hit in the foot," says James.

Only the most rudimentary medical facilities existed. James's foot was daubed with a poultice of leaves and bound with dirty rags. Others - even those who could have been saved by anyone with a basic knowledge of battlefield medicine and some proper dressings - died.

Baba, now 15, describes a clash with government forces. "They came at us in trucks and then jumped out. Everyone was firing ... I was very afraid. The first time I fired my gun I shot off all my ammunition in one go. The soldiers were attacking our rear areas and people were being killed all around."

The fighting slackened at nightfall, but in the early morning the Cobra Faction's camp was bombarded by government artillery.

"All these bombs were falling from the sky," says Baba. "There was just noise and flames. People were running everywhere, falling down. I fell down too. So did my brother. But he did not get up ... We covered his body with leaves and left him there. I think of his face every day. He was my best friend. We did everything together."

But if the boys had joined the militia voluntarily, leaving was impossible. "They told us that if we tried to go anywhere without permission they would find us and kill us, or take our family's cattle. If we disobeyed anything, even just an order to bring water or any little thing, we were beaten or made to stand in the sun for hours, or put in prison. We knew what would happen if we tried to leave," says George, 15, who spent 18 months with the Cobra Faction.

Other boys describe potential "deserters" being shot, or subjected to brutal punishment.

"Even if I had the courage, it was not possible [to escape]. How would I find my way?, asks James. "How would I survive in the bush? I could not contact my family, so who could help? It was impossible. I put it out of my mind. And with all the fighting, I barely thought about it." He spent three years with the militia.

Between 2015 and last year, Unicef negotiated the release of 1,900 child soldiers in South Sudan, one of the largest such demobilisations ever. James, Baba and hundreds of others walked out of the bush, handed back their weapons and uniforms, and returned to their families.

The release was a milestone for those trying to fight the intractable problem of child soldiers. "It showed something could be done," says one UN official involved.

For Anna Koren, 35, a farmer in Pibor, it was simply a miracle that her sons came home after four years with the rebels. "There was no news. We knew there was fighting everywhere. We just prayed. God is the only one to bring them back," says Koren.

Unicef now runs a programme to reunite the soldiers with their families, offering counselling as well as assistance with schooling and skills, and providing material help to desperately poor families.

Many of the boys who have been "in the bush" are irrevocably changed. Most talk of having nightmares, and their teachers and parents describe their anger and spasms of violence.

Some have taken part in atrocities against civilians, says Lukas Mangole, a team leader with Grassroots Empowerment and Development Organisation (Gredo), an NGO supported by Unicef that mentors former child soldiers.

"After an ambush or heavy losses the commanders blame local villagers for betraying them. The smaller children are selected to beat and torture people while they are interrogated. Raids for food can be very brutal too," says Mangole.

Some have killed too - though in the chaos of combat it is often impossible to be sure who has fired a deadly shot. James carried a "Pika" - a more lethal weapon than the standard assault rifle used by the other children.

"I fired my gun with the others at the enemy, and when they retreated we found lots of them dead on the ground. But was it me? I don't know," he says.

The reintegration programme for the children faces profound challenges. It is underfunded and dangerous. Seven Gredo staff died in an ambush this year.

The former fighters learn carpentry and mechanics, but there are few opportunities to practice either craft. The secondary school that the older boys should attend is shut for lack of teachers. Many know friends or even relatives who are still fighting.

Former child soldiers take part in a leatherwork skills session and play football at the Pibor youth centre

Tit-for-tat cattle raiding - with thousands of armed adolescents and young men fighting with automatic weapons - is endemic. This means the traditional "warrior culture" remains deeply embedded locally, with few alternative role models for young people. Several of the former child soldiers freed last year died defending their villages during a cattle raid by another tribe in February.

"They've seen their fathers fight and so view it as the only way to gain prestige or honour within the community," says Hernández.

Most of the released child soldiers swear they will never pick up a gun again, but there is a constant risk of being recruited again. For many going back to the bush is a last resort - only an option if things don't get better in Pibor.

David Zelu was among those released by rebel groups last year. Three months later, he rejoined the militia, which is observing a fragile truce. He now spends his days with other young fighters in the group's compound of rudimentary huts in Pibor, training and foraging for food.

Fighting and rains have severed the poor roads linking Pibor to Juba, the capital, 200 miles away. The helicopters that arrive every other day are the only link to the outside world. A short distance away from the faction's small encampment, aid workers try to keep malnourished infants alive.

"I had nothing once I left [the militia]: no food, no job, no school. I had no choice," says David.

Rebel commanders say they are forced to recruit children. "In your country, the children have schools, a home, food. Here it is not like that. So all have risen in arms, young and old, to achieve something better," says Nyeland, David's commanding officer.

James Jowang, a political officer with the faction, offers another explanation. "Here, in our country, there is no age for fighting," he says. "If you are old enough to carry a weapon, you are old enough to be a soldier."

Some names have been changed to protect the identities of former child combatants

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'If you are old enough to carry a gun, you are old enough to be a soldier'

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avid Zelu, not yet 16 years old, looks up, smiles, and stretches his arms to the sky where the sun is finally breaking through the clouds. The rain that has hammered on the wooden roof of the small hut he shares with four other teenagers has passed.

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Rolling Stone Article

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Protesters have filled streets across the country in the last two weeks to speak out against two outrageous failures of justice. First, in Ferguson, Missouri, a grand jury declined to indict the police officer who shot unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown to death this summer and left his body in the street for four hours. Then, adding insult to injury, another grand jury in Staten Island, New York, chose to look the other way and return no indictment of the police officer who choked unarmed father of six Eric Garner to death, on camera, using an illegal chokehold as Garner pleaded, "I can't breathe!"

Brown and Garner were two people living a thousand miles apart, at very different points in their lives. But they share one tragic fact in common: They were both black men executed in broad daylight by cops. And unless the U.S. Justice Department nails their killers on federal civil rights charges, neither of their families will get even the cold comfort of a day in court.

Sadly, there's nothing new about this pattern of lethal racial profiling. For far too long, African-Americans in this country have had to worry about whether police will kill their loved ones on the slightest pretext without facing any meaningful punishment. Racist violence is a deep-rooted part of this country's history, and it's going to take substantial nationwide reform of the policing and court systems to change this awful reality. Here are 11 of the most heartbreaking examples of black men, women and children killed by police in the last 15 years. Their stories are different in many ways, but none of them deserved to die the way they did - and we could fill many more pages with others like them.

1. Amadou Diallo (1999)
Four NYPD officers notoriously rained 41 bullets down onto Diallo in the Bronx, killing the unarmed Guinean immigrant as he tried to enter his apartment building. They later claimed to have seen Diallo reaching for something that looked like a weapon; in fact, all he had in his hand was a wallet. The incident sparked national headlines and civil rights marches, as well as Bruce Springsteen's protest song "American Skin (41 Shots)" - but all four police officers were acquitted of all charges in the case. One of the killer cops, Kenneth Boss, remained on the force and was allowed to carry an NYPD gun again in 2012.

2. Patrick Dorismond (2000)
Dorismond was hanging out in Manhattan with a friend when an undercover cop approached and asked where he could score some weed - blatant profiling based on Dorismond's appearance. A confrontation ensued, and another officer shot him fatally in the chest. Then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani released the 26-year-old security guard's sealed juvenile legal records in an effort to smear his police force's latest victim, infamously saying that the dead man was no "altar boy"; it was later revealed that Dorismond had attended the same Catholic school as the mayor, and served as an altar boy in his youth. A grand jury chose not to indict the officer who shot Dorismond to death.

3. Ousmane Zongo (2003)
The NYPD crossed paths with Zongo at a storage facility in Manhattan during a raid on a counterfeit CD ring. Zongo, an unarmed 43-year-old immigrant from Burkina Faso who repaired art, had nothing to do with the raid, but police shot him four times when they saw him in a corridor. The officer who killed Zongo was convicted of criminally negligent homicide - but a judge sentenced him to no more than five years of probation and 500 hours of community service for taking an innocent man's life.

4. Timothy Stansbury (2004)
NYPD Officer Richard Neri fatally shot Stansbury, an unarmed 19-year-old, during a late-night patrol of a Bedford-Stuyvesant housing project. Neri said it was an accident, and a grand jury believed him, declining to return an indictment. The only punishment he faced was a 30-day suspension from the force. Neri was later elected to a prestigious position in a New York police union.

5. Sean Bell (2006)
The night before his wedding, Bell and some friends went to a strip club in Queens for his bachelor party. When they left the club around 4:15 a.m. the next morning - Bell's wedding day - they ran afoul of a group of undercover and plainclothes NYPD cops, who fired an astonishing 50 bullets into the 23-year-old's car, killing him instantly. The case led to major protests, but all three police officers charged in the case were acquitted.

6. Oscar Grant (2009)
On New Year's Day, 2009, Bay Area transit officer Johannes Mehserle detained Grant on a subway platform after reports of a fight. The unarmed 22-year-old was lying face-down on the ground when Mehserle shot and killed him, as captured on video by many bystanders. Mehserle was charged with murder, but the jury convicted him of a lesser crime, and he ended up serving less than a year for killing Grant.

7. Aiyana Stanley-Jones (2010)
Aiyana Stanley-Jones was just seven years old when a Detroit SWAT team took her life. Late at night, searching for a suspect in her neighborhood, the police threw a flash grenade through her family's window, stormed the house and shot the little girl in her sleep. The raid occurred while the SWAT team was accompanied by a camera crew from the reality show The First 48. There have been two trials so far, both ending in mistrials.

8. Ramarley Graham (2012)
Plainclothes narcotics cops chased 18-year-old Graham into his family's home in the Bronx for unclear reasons. They shot and killed him at the door of his family's bathroom. A tiny quantity of marijuana was later found in the toilet - hardly enough to justify an instant death sentence for a teenager. The cop who killed Graham was not indicted, but a federal investigation is ongoing.

9. Tamon Robinson (2012)
An NYPD patrol car collided with Robinson at a Brooklyn housing project, killing him, after responding to a report that Robinson was digging up paving stones to sell them for some extra cash. He was unarmed. A police report claimed that Robinson caused his own fatal injuries by running into a stationary patrol car, but eyewitnesses said the cops rammed their vehicle into the 27-year-old; a few months later, the department had the gall to try and bill Robinson's grieving family for $710 for damage to the car. Two years later, the case has yet to go before a grand jury.

10. Rekia Boyd (2012)
Off-duty Chicago cop Dante Servin opened fire from his car into a group of people on the street, claiming he perceived a threat to his life. 22-year-old Rekia Boyd was among the people on the scene; she died after taking a bullet to the head. Servin has been indicted (making him the first Chicago police officer in many years to face trial for a fatal shooting), but his case was recently delayed to 2015.

11. Kimani Gray (2013)
Plainclothes NYPD officers confronted the 16-year-old Gray in Brooklyn. Police claimed that he pulled a gun before they shot him to death on the street, but Gray's family disputed this allegation. Prosecutors announced this summer that they are not pursuing charges against the officers who killed the teenager.

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Black Lives Matter: 11 Police Killings With No Justice

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Protesters have filled streets across the country in the last two weeks to speak out against two outrageous failures of justice. First, in Ferguson, Missouri, a grand jury declined to indict the police officer who shot unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown to death this summer and left his body in the street for four hours.

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Black victims of police violence are victims of gun violence

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A new video from Media Matters for America breaks down the ways many media outlets demonize Black victims of police killings.

Despite the efforts of young leaders in the movement to end gun violence, mainstream media outlets fail to cover Black people killed by the police with the same humanity granted to White victims and survivors. Media advocacy organization Media Matters for America took on this dissonance in a new video released yesterday (April 24). It highlights the work of activists working for gun control that saves Black lives, and shows clips of commentators on CNN, Fox News, CBS and other outlets as they defend police killings by blaming their Black victims and calling them criminals. Watch the video in full above.

Related Articles

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WATCH: How Mainstream Media Erases Black Police Shooting Victims From Gun Control Coverage | Colorlines

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A new video from Media Matters for America breaks down the ways many media outlets demonize Black victims of police killings. Despite the efforts of young leaders in the movement to end gun violence, mainstream media outlets fail to cover Black people killed by the police with the same humanity granted to White victims and survivors.

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"He said that Tray was gone."

That's how Sybrina Fulton, her voice full of ache, told me she found out that her 17-year-old son, Trayvon Martin, had died. In a wrenching telephone call, the boy's father, who had taken him to visit a friend, told her that Trayvon had been gunned down in a gated townhouse community in Sanford, Fla., outside Orlando.

"He said, 'Somebody shot Trayvon and killed him.' And I was like, 'Are you sure?' " Fulton continued in disbelief. "I said 'How do you know that's Trayvon?' And he said because they showed him a picture."

That was Feb. 27, one day after Trayvon was shot. The father thought that he was missing, according to the family's lawyer, Benjamin Crump, but the boy's body had actually been taken to the medical examiner's office and listed as a John Doe.

The father called the Missing Persons Unit. No luck. Then he called 911. The police asked the father to describe the boy, after which they sent officers to the house where the father was staying. There they showed him a picture of the boy with blood coming out of his mouth.

This is a nightmare scenario for any parent, and the events leading to Trayvon's death offer little comfort - and pose many questions.

Trayvon had left the house he and his father were visiting to walk to the local 7-Eleven. On his way back, he caught the attention of George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old neighborhood watch captain, who was in a sport-utility vehicle. Zimmerman called the police because the boy looked "real suspicious," according to a 911 call released late Friday. The operator told Zimmerman that officers were being dispatched and not to pursue the boy.

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Charles M. Blow Credit... Damon Winter/The New York Times

Zimmerman apparently pursued him anyway, at some point getting out of his car and confronting the boy. Trayvon had a bag of Skittles and a can of iced tea. Zimmerman had a 9 millimeter handgun.

The two allegedly engaged in a physical altercation. There was yelling, and then a gunshot.

When police arrived, Trayvon was face down in the grass with a fatal bullet wound to the chest. Zimmerman was standing with blood on his face and the back of his head and grass stains on his back, according to The Orlando Sentinel.

Trayvon's lifeless body was taken away, tagged and held. Zimmerman was taken into custody, questioned and released. Zimmerman said he was the one yelling for help. He said that he acted in self-defense. The police say that they have found no evidence to dispute Zimmerman's claim.

One other point: Trayvon is black. Zimmerman is not.

Trayvon was buried on March 3. Zimmerman is still free and has not been arrested or charged with a crime.

Yet the questions remain: Why did Zimmerman find Trayvon suspicious? Why did he pursue the boy when the 911 operator instructed him not to? Why did he get out of the car, and why did he take his gun when he did? How is it self-defense when you are the one in pursuit? Who initiated the altercation? Who cried for help? Did Trayvon's body show evidence of a struggle? What moved Zimmerman to use lethal force?

This case has reignited a furor about vigilante justice, racial-profiling and equitable treatment under the law, and it has stirred the pot of racial strife.

As the father of two black teenage boys, this case hits close to home. This is the fear that seizes me whenever my boys are out in the world: that a man with a gun and an itchy finger will find them "suspicious." That passions may run hot and blood run cold. That it might all end with a hole in their chest and hole in my heart. That the law might prove insufficient to salve my loss.

That is the burden of black boys in America and the people that love them: running the risk of being descended upon in the dark and caught in the cross-hairs of someone who crosses the line.

Trayvon Martin Credit... Courtesy of Sybrina Fulton

The racial sensitivity of this case is heavy. Trayvon's parents have said their son was murdered. Crump, the family's lawyer, told me, "You know, if Trayvon would have been the triggerman, it's nothing Trayvon Martin could have said to keep police from arresting him Day 1, Hour 1." Even the police chief recognizes this reality, even while disputing claims of racial bias in the investigation: "Our investigation is color blind and based on the facts and circumstances, not color. I know I can say that until I am blue in the face, but, as a white man in a uniform, I know it doesn't mean anything to anybody."

Zimmerman has not released a statement, but his father delivered a one-page letter to The Orlando Sentinel on Thursday. According to the newspaper, the statement said that Zimmerman is "Hispanic and grew up in a multiracial family." The paper quotes the letter as reading, "He would be the last to discriminate for any reason whatsoever" and continues, "The media portrayal of George as a racist could not be further from the truth." And disclosures made since the shooting complicate people's perception of fairness in the case.

According to Crump, the father was told that one of the reasons Zimmerman wasn't arrested was because he had a "squeaky clean" record. It wasn't. According to the local news station WFTV, Zimmerman was arrested in 2005 for "battery on a law enforcement officer."

Furthermore, ABC News reported on Tuesday that one of the responding officers "corrected a witness after she told him that she heard the teen cry for help." And The Miami Herald published an article on Thursday that said three witnesses had heard the "desperate wail of a child, a gunshot, and then silence."

WFTV also reported this week that the officer in charge of the scene when Trayvon was shot was also in charge of another controversial case. In 2010, a lieutenant's son was videotaped attacking a black homeless man. The officer's son also was not initially arrested in that case. He was later arrested when the television station broke the news.

Although we must wait to get the results from all the investigations into Trayvon's killing, it is clear that it is a tragedy. If no wrongdoing of any sort is ascribed to the incident, it will be an even greater tragedy.

One of the witnesses was a 13-year-old black boy who recorded a video for The Orlando Sentinel recounting what he saw. The boy is wearing a striped polo shirt, holding a microphone, speaking low and deliberately and has the heavy look of worry and sadness in his eyes. He describes hearing screaming, seeing someone on the ground and hearing gunshots. The video ends with the boy saying, "I just think that sometimes people get stereotyped, and I fit into the stereotype as the person who got shot."

And that is the burden of black boys, and this case can either ease or exacerbate it.

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Opinion | The Curious Case of Trayvon Martin

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"He said that Tray was gone." That's how Sybrina Fulton, her voice full of ache, told me she found out that her 17-year-old son, Trayvon Martin, had died. In a wrenching telephone call, the boy's father, who had taken him to visit a friend, told her that Trayvon had been gunned down in a gated townhouse community in Sanford, Fla., outside Orlando.

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History of Survivance: Upper Midwest 19th-Century Native American Narratives

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History of Survivance: Upper Midwest 19th-Century Native American Narratives

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For every object that ends up in a library or museum collection - whether it's a manucript, a photograph, or something more approaching the concept of "art" - there is a narrative, a story that gets told. The story a visitor to an exhibit ends up hearing, of course, is dependent upon who is telling the story and the slant of their own perspective. When the subject of the exhibit is Native Americans in the Upper Midwestern United States during the extraordinary upheaval of the 19th century, one must be particularly careful about the story being told since the narrative that largely exists is one of cultural denouement, of endings, as told by a colonizing population to its descendants.

The dominant narrative of the demise of traditional Native American culture in the face of colonization, conversion to Christianity, confinement to reservations and economic collapse is, however, not the only story that can be told. The accounts of the lives of Native Americans during the 19th century that are told by Native peoples themselves are strikingly different to those recounted in history books, movies, and all too frequently in museums. Rather than narratives solely recounting destruction and demise, Native stories about Native history tend to focus on what White Earth Ojibwe scholar Gerald Vizenor has called survivance - a narrative incorporating themes of survival and resistance that insist on the inclusion of the Native presence.

The following is an exhibit of resources that can be found within the Digital Public Library of America retold through the lens of Native American survivance in the Minnesota region. Within are a series of objects of both Native and non-Native origin that tell a story of extraordinary culture disruption, change and continuity during 19th c., and how that affects the Native population of Minnesota today.

Credit: Minnesota Digital Library. http://www.mndigital.org

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History of Survivance: Upper Midwest 19th-Century Native American Narratives

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For every object that ends up in a library or museum collection - whether it's a manucript, a photograph, or something more approaching the concept of "art" - there is a narrative, a story that gets told.

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But it has also spurred fierce opposition under banners like All Lives Matter, White Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter (proffered by the supporters of police officers). On Sunday in Houston, for example, a White Lives Matter rally drew 20 people clutching Confederate flags and white supremacist symbols outside the N.A.A.C.P.'s headquarters to denounce attacks on police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, La.

In the report on race and social media, Mr. Rainie and his colleagues, led by Monica Anderson and Paul Hitlin, retraced the rise of #BlackLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter over a period of nearly 1,000 days, from July 12, 2013, to March 31, 2016.

The #AllLivesMatter hashtag generally tracked the ups and downs of its counterpart, but at a small fraction of the intensity, as shown in the chart below, based on the Pew data obtained using the social analytics software Crimson Hexagon.

The data show that the deaths of Mr. Garner on July 17, 2014, and Mr. Brown on Aug. 9, 2014, marked an early and small turning point for #BlackLivesMatter, but the hashtag didn't enter orbit until later that year.

On Nov. 25, 2014 - three days after a Cleveland police officer fatally shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice and one day after a grand jury declined to indict the officer who shot Mr. Brown - daily mentions of #BlackLivesMatter spiked drastically to 172,772, according to Pew.

Mentions of the hashtag soared even higher days later. On Dec. 4, one day after a grand jury declined to indict the police officer whose chokehold led to Mr. Garner's death, #BlackLivesMatter appeared 189,210 times on Twitter. It was mentioned 160,810 times the following day, too.

John Donne said "any mans death diminishes me."#BlackLivesMatter
- Chris Hartwell (@PastorChrisH) Dec. 4, 2014

Those events coincided with a lasting spike in the mentions of #BlackLivesMatter. In the three months leading up to Nov. 25, 2014, the hashtag averaged fewer than 1,500 daily mentions. In the three months after, it averaged more than 30,000.

The hashtag enjoyed subsequent spikes, too. It was mentioned more than 120,000 times on the first anniversary of Mr. Brown's shooting and more than 127,000 times on Oct. 14, 2015, one day after Senator Bernie Sanders, then a Democratic presidential contender, defended the movement during a campaign debate.

The Pew study cut off at the end of March of this year, but the team behind the report later conducted a supplemental analysis covering two weeks in July when two black men were separately killed by police and eight police officers were killed in a pair of targeted attacks.

What they found was a tremendous surge in the mentions of #BlackLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter.

On the day that Alton B. Sterling was fatally shot by police in Baton Rouge, La. - July 5 - #BlackLivesMatter was mentioned just under 10,000 times on Twitter. The next day, Philando Castile was fatally shot during a traffic stop in Minnesota and the hashtag spiked to more than 250,000 times. On July 7 - the day that Micah Johnson opened an attack on Dallas law enforcement officers, killing five - #BlackLivesMatter appeared more than 850,000 times on Twitter.

By July 8, the hashtag soared to more than 1.1 million mentions. On that same day, #AllLivesMatter appeared 189,000 times on Twitter - matching the record for #BlackLivesMatter during the entire earlier thousand-day study period.

The number of mentions for both hashtags remained high in the days leading up to July 17, when three more officers were fatally shot in Baton Rouge.

The July flurry of activity is notable not only for the level of discussion around the hashtag, but also for how the tone of the conversation changed, according to Pew.

Over the course of the 1,000-day study period, 38 percent of #BlackLivesMatter mentions were positive, compared with 11 percent negative, according to a Pew sentiment analysis. The hashtag was used neutrally 12 percent of the time. (The remaining references fell into an "other" category.)

And in the days leading up to the Dallas shooting, the tone was even more supportive: 87 percent of posts mentioning #BlackLivesMatter did so in a positive light, with just 11 percent of mentions appearing negative from July 5 to July 7.

But that quickly and drastically shifted, with support falling to 28 percent and opposition rising to 39 percent in the 10 days after the Dallas shooting.

"We really saw that shift overnight," Ms. Anderson said. "It really shows you where current events can drive the conversation on social media and also change the tenor of conversation there, as well."

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police brutality  misconduct and shootings

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How #BlackLivesMatter Came to Define a Movement

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But it has also spurred fierce opposition under banners like All Lives Matter, White Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter (proffered by the supporters of police officers). On Sunday in Houston, for example, a White Lives Matter rally drew 20 people clutching Confederate flags and white supremacist symbols outside the N.A.A.C.P.'s headquarters to denounce attacks on police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, La.

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Exactly 365 days have passed since the girls were snatched from their boarding school dormitories in the dead of night in Chibok, northeastern Nigeria. They are still missing.

For this we should all feel shame: shame that we live in a world where the lives of young girls can be shattered with impunity by fanatical thugs. Shame that when such horrendous acts occur, our collective attention span is so fleeting.

A year ago, I could never have imagined that we would be here today, marking the grim 12-month milestone of these girls going missing.

In the early days of their abduction much of the world stood as one, rallying around the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls.

On the ground in Nigeria as part of CNN's team covering the story, I was buoyed by this global solidarity.

Caught in the blinding glare of global attention, and facing a tide of questions about their bungled response to the kidnappings, the Nigerian government felt the weight of accountability and was spurred to take greater action; offers of assistance from the likes of the US, UK, France, and China were accepted.

Promise after promise was made by Nigerian government officials that the girls would come home -- so where are they, and where is the global outrage over these broken promises and broken dreams?

My heart goes out to the grief-stricken loved ones of these missing girls on this painful anniversary.

Poor and socially marginalized, all many of them have is their hope that their girls will one day return.

The task of keeping that hope alive has largely been taken up by the handful of #BringBackOurGirls campaigners in Nigeria.

These men and women have worked tirelessly to keep the story alive for the past year; their struggle has been a painful and increasingly lonely one.

But as the world's gaze has shifted they have continued to meet the Nigerian government's silence with cries of: "Bring Back Our Girls, now and alive!"

At this point, finding the girls will not be easy. But it can be done. It must be done.

These girls are no different from your daughters, sisters, nieces: each has hopes and dreams of their own.

But I also believe there is another reason these girls must be reunited with their families - in the words of Martin Luther King: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects us all indirectly."

Our common humanity compels us to do our part, to right this shameful wrong.

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a year on: we should all feel shame - cnn

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#BringBackOurGirls, a year on: We should all feel shame - CNN

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Exactly 365 days have passed since the girls were snatched from their boarding school dormitories in the dead of night in Chibok, northeastern Nigeria. They are still missing. For this we should all feel shame: shame that we live in a world where the lives of young girls can be shattered with impunity by fanatical thugs.