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- Me Too movement was founded in 2006, only started dominating the social media world in 2017.

- Some women are still afraid to speak up because they have been threatened by their rapist.

- Me Too movement in Hollywood. Harvey Weinstein.

- I am not a victim of sexual assault, but I just feel the urge to try and bring more awareness to this topic.. especially in Africa.

- KEEPTHEENERGY a South African Instagram page made after Uyinene was raped and killed in 2019.  This Instagram page dedicates women that have lost their lives to GBV in South Africa.

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- Many women have gained the confidence to finally talk about their sexual assault stories.

- Most men take advantage of women's bodies.

- Society sexualizes a young girls from the age of 18 months old to 17 years old... and STILL, grown women are sexualized.

- "what were you wearing?" is the question that most rape victims get asked when they try to speak up...

- We need to raise awareness to this movement.

- South Africa has the highest rape crime statistics in the world, followed by Botswana.

- Women can't leave the house without second guessing if their outfits are okay, because we are scared that we will be apart of the statistic.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/08/opinion/sunday/madam-secretary-made-a-difference.html

INCLUDES

- How Hillary Clinton left a mark/legacy on the US government as a women.

- Let's not forget Kamala Harris, who was the first woman of color and the first female Vice President.

- How Hillary Clinton did not "steak a landmark peace agreement, nor is there a recognizable "Hillary Clinton doctrine".

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WHEN politicians have trouble spinning their own glories, that's a problem.

So it was bizarre that Hillary Rodham Clinton, asked at a forum in April about her legacy at the State Department, had trouble articulating it. That feeds into a narrative - awaiting her memoir on Tuesday - that she may have been glamorous as secretary of state but didn't actually accomplish much.

In fact, that's dead wrong, for Clinton achieved a great deal and left a hefty legacy - just not the traditional kind. She didn't craft a coalition of allies, like James Baker, one of the most admired secretaries of state. She didn't seal a landmark peace agreement, nor is there a recognizable "Hillary Clinton doctrine."

No, her legacy is different.

For starters, Clinton recognized that our future will be more about Asia than Europe, and she pushed hard to rebalance our relations. She didn't fully deliver on this "pivot" - generally she was more successful at shaping agendas than delivering on them - but the basic instinct to turn our ship of state to face our Pacific future was sound and overdue.

More fundamentally, Clinton vastly expanded the diplomatic agenda. Diplomats historically focused on "hard" issues, like trade or blowing up stuff, and so it may seem weird and "soft" to fret about women's rights or economic development.

Yet Clinton understood that impact and leverage in 21st-century diplomacy often come by addressing poverty, the environment, education and family planning.

It's not that Clinton was a softie. She was often more hawkish than the White House, favoring the surge in Afghanistan (a mistake, I believe) and the arming of moderate Syrian rebel groups (a good call, but one vetoed by President Obama).

Yet she grew truly animated when discussing the new diplomatic agenda. A couple of times I moderated panels during the United Nations General Assembly in which she talked passionately - and bewilderingly, for some of the audience - about civil society, women leaders and agricultural investments.

Pinstriped foreign and prime ministers looked on, happy to be considered important enough to be invited. They listened with increasingly furrowed brows, as if absorbing an alien language, as Clinton brightly spoke about topics such as "the business case for focusing on gender in agricultural development."

Clinton was relentless about using the spotlight that accompanied her to highlight those who needed it more. At one global forum, she went out of her way to praise Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning entrepreneur of microfinance, who was being persecuted by the Bangladesh prime minister. On trips, she found time to visit shelters for victims of human trafficking or aid groups doing groundbreaking work.

She may hide it, but Clinton is a policy nerd. Ask about microfinance, and she'll talk your ear off. Mention early childhood interventions, and she will gush about obscure details of a home visitation experiment in Elmira, N.Y., that dramatically improved child outcomes.

The kidnapping of the Nigerian schoolgirls in April was the kind of issue Clinton was out front of. She understood that educating girls isn't a frilly "soft" issue, but a way to transform a country to make it less hospitable to extremists. No one argued more presciently that women's rights are security issues.

"Those who argue that her championing of outreach to women and girls and her elevation of development was not serious miss a central reality of international politics in this century," notes Nicholas Burns, who was undersecretary of state in the George W. Bush presidency. "These issues are now mainstream globally."

"I disagree very strongly with those who charge that Hillary Clinton was not successful," adds Burns, who is now at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "A fair-minded view is that she was, in fact, highly effective."

Clinton was pioneering not only in the way she expanded the diplomatic agenda, but also in the tools she forged to promote it. She pushed government-to-people relations and people-to-people ties.

Some of this was pioneered in the George W. Bush administration, but Clinton greatly escalated public diplomacy with a rush into social media.

"She was very clear about it: This is the 21st century, and we're fools if we don't use it," recalls Michael McFaul, who became ambassador to Russia in this time. McFaul then had no idea what a tweet was, and there was strong resistance from senior diplomats. "I said the boss wants to do this," McFaul recalls, and he ultimately became a champion tweeter.

Today it's routine to use social media in multiple languages to communicate American diplomatic messages to the world.

So, sure, critics are right that Hillary Rodham Clinton never achieved the kind of landmark peace agreement that would make the first sentence of her obituary. But give her credit: She expanded the diplomatic agenda and adopted new tools to promote it - a truly important legacy.

And, anyway, she may have grander dreams about how her obituary should begin.

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Opinion | Madam Secretary Made a Difference (Published 2014)

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WHEN politicians have trouble spinning their own glories, that's a problem. So it was bizarre that Hillary Rodham Clinton, asked at a forum in April about her legacy at the State Department, had trouble articulating it. That feeds into a narrative - awaiting her memoir on Tuesday - that she may have been glamorous as secretary of state but didn't actually accomplish much.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/02/opinion/metoo-asifa-bano.html

INCLUDES

-  Women in India having the courage to finally speak up after being sexually assaulted...

- How men take advantage of young girls, because they know they are somewhat easier to manipulate.

- Asifa Bano was 8 years old...

- 1 in 3 women have experienced sexual violence in their life.

- Many women still have not gotten the justice they deserve...

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People in Bhopal in April protested the Indian government's handling of rape cases. Credit... Sanjeev Gupta/EPA, via Shutterstock

She was an 8-year-old girl with thick brown hair, large brown eyes, a purple dress and a fondness for running through the fields in northern India where she tended horses.

Then a man called her into the nearby forest, grabbed her by the neck and forced her to take sleeping pills, according to police accounts. The man dragged the girl, Asifa Bano, to a Hindu temple, where he and other men raped her repeatedly over three days, before murdering her - after one man insisted on raping her one last time. Asifa's body was left in the forest.

Murder and rape happen in all societies, but this girl's body was a battleground: Hindu extremists were trying to terrorize and drive out the Muslim community that Asifa belonged to. The killing triggered a huge controversy in India, with some Hindu lawyers and housewives protesting against prosecution of the murder suspects and Prime Minister Narendra Modi keeping shamefully silent for too long. To their credit, many middle-class Indians, including Hindus, mobilized to demand justice for Asifa.

There's a lesson from that horror story and millions more like it. The #MeToo movement has had a stunning impact across America, eroding the impunity that allowed powerful men to get away with sexual assault and harassment. But we now need a global effort - by rich and poor nations alike - to make the #MeToo principles truly universal.

A few glimpses of the scale of sexual violence as one of the top human rights challenges of our time:

■ A United Nations study of 10,000 men in six countries in Asia and the Pacific found that almost one-quarter acknowledged having raped a woman, including 62 percent of men in part of Papua New Guinea. A separate 2011 study found that 37 percent of men in part of South Africa said they had raped a woman.

■ More than 125 million women and girls in Africa and Asia have suffered female genital mutilation. In Somalia and some other countries, almost all the genital flesh is cut away and the vaginal opening is sewn closed with wild thorns, to remain nearly sealed until the girl is married.

■ A girl under the age of 18 is married every three seconds somewhere in the world, according to Unicef. (Even in the United States, thousands of underage girls are married each year, a few of them just 12, 13 or 14.) Whether in Bangladesh or in Texas, these child marriages are sometimes coerced and leave girls particularly vulnerable to rape and beating.

So let's see #MeToo as a global human rights movement.

We tend to think of "human rights" in terms of political dissidents being tortured, but gender violence is not only far more common but also sometimes institutionalized and shaped by legal codes and government policy. Indeed, in Myanmar last year, the government appears to have sponsored a policy of mass rape as part of a strategy to terrorize the Rohingya and drive them away. Those Rohingya women who speak up about this are truly heroic.

But we should all be speaking up, regardless of gender or geography. These assaults and indignities don't affect women alone, because these patterns of violence and repression suppress talent and hold back entire societies. When millions of girls and women are brutalized, we're all diminished.

The civil rights movement wasn't an issue just for black people, gay rights don't affect gays alone and widespread violence against women is a human rights violation that constitutes a moral and pragmatic challenge to all of us, men as well as women. At its extreme, this is just another form of terrorism.

The U.S. could show leadership in addressing these issues. A starting point would be for Congress to pass the long-stalled International Violence Against Women Act, which would require the U.S. to adopt a strategy to confront gender violence around the world and work with other countries to reduce it.

Another useful step would be for Western countries to use aid programs more frequently to end impunity. We can train the police and the courts abroad to treat sexual violence cases more seriously, and hospitals and clinics to treat victims with more professionalism and compassion. Crucially, we can also support women's groups in other countries as they try to raise these issues on their national agendas, for this kind of violence persists as long as it is invisible.

Finally, there's no better way to empower women and change the social dynamic than to educate girls. Extremist groups blow up girls' schools for the same reason we should support girls' education: Over time, educated women can transform societies.

Some will say these abuses beyond our borders are none of our business. No one would say that who had been with me in Nairobi's Kibera slum, where one study found that 43 percent of girls had their first sexual experience through coercion or rape (at an average age of 14). There I met a 4-year-old girl named Ida who had been raped so brutally that she needed surgery to repair internal injuries. Ida's parents took her to the police station to report the rape.

The reaction of the police? They demanded a bribe to arrest the perpetrator, but it seemed his family had already paid a bigger bribe. So the police, in my presence, shouted at Ida's parents, told them to go away and threatened to arrest them.

That's not one girl's problem, or one family's problem. That's the tip of a global human rights crisis.

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Opinion | #MeToo Goes Global (Published 2018)

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She was an 8-year-old girl with thick brown hair, large brown eyes, a purple dress and a fondness for running through the fields in northern India where she tended horses. Then a man called her into the nearby forest, grabbed her by the neck and forced her to take sleeping pills, according to police accounts.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/26/opinion/sunday/loujain-al-hathloul-saudi.html

INCLUDES

- A 29 year old woman from Saudi Arabia advocates for women's rights and gender equality.

- She was put in prison because of wanting justice for women, and gender equality rights. Saudi allies tortured her.

- Women in Saudi were not allowed to drive only until 2018. Women now have the freedom to drive, but they cannot drive alone... they have to have a male guardian by their side.

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The U.S. should pressure Saudis to respect the human rights of outspoken women.

Loujain al-Hathloul in London in 2017. Credit... Nina Manandhar

Remember this name: Loujain (pronounced Loo-JAYNE) al-Hathloul. She is 29 years old and a courageous advocate for gender equality - so she is in a Saudi Arabian prison, and reportedly our Saudi allies have tortured her, even waterboarded her.

There has properly been global outrage at Saudi Arabia's murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist for The Washington Post and resident of Virginia. Jamal was a friend of mine, and I find it infuriating that President Trump and other officials won't hold Saudi Arabia accountable for killing and dismembering him.

Still, we can't bring him back. So let's direct equal attention to those still alive - like Hathloul, along with nine other women's rights activists who are also in custody, including some who say they have endured torture.

Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Jared Kushner bet big on the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, but they were bamboozled. M.B.S. isn't a great reformer, and he isn't coming clean about Khashoggi's murder.

Nor is he releasing Hathloul, who, along with others, had peacefully and persistently campaigned for years to allow women the right to drive.

In 2014, she was arrested when she tried to drive into Saudi Arabia with a driver's license from the United Arab Emirates, nominally valid also in Saudi Arabia. Then in 2015, Hathloul was one of the first women to run for a seat on a municipal council. (She lost).

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'Ladies First': Saudi Arabia's Female Candidates

In this documentary, The Times takes us into the largely inaccessible world of Saudi women by profiling three women running for public office, including Loujain al-Hathloul, in the first Saudi election open to female candidates.

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In this documentary, The Times takes us into the largely inaccessible world of Saudi women by profiling three women running for public office, including Loujain al-Hathloul, in the first Saudi election open to female candidates. Credit Credit... Yousur Al-Hlou for The New York Times

She moved to the emirates. But in 2017, Saudi security forces effectively kidnapped her and her husband and returned them to the kingdom. The couple have divorced, and while accounts differ, some believe this is because of pressure the government placed on the husband.

Shortly before women were allowed to drive last June, the government rearrested Hathloul, along with other women's rights activists who had fought for the right the government was about to grant.

"She said she had been held in solitary confinement, beaten, waterboarded, given electric shocks, sexually harassed and threatened with rape and murder," her sister, Alia al-Hathloul, who lives in Belgium, wrote in a searing Op-Ed in The Times this month, recounting what Loujain had told their parents when they saw her. "My parents then saw that her thighs were blackened by bruises."

Despite being threatened with rape and murder and having her body thrown into the sewage system, Hathloul would not stay silent and reported the torture to her parents.

Her sister said Loujain was "shaking uncontrollably, unable to hold her grip, to walk or sit normally."

The other imprisoned women suffered similar treatment, according to Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and their families. They were said to have been subjected to electric shocks, whippings, forced kissing and hugging, threats of rape and more. Some were tied to a metal bed and flogged.

"Loujain's abuse exemplifies the methods of Saudi thuggish and lawless leadership, hellbent on exacting sadistic vengeance against any citizen who dares to think freely," Sarah Leah Whitson of Human Rights Watch told me. "The Saudi people owe a huge debt to Loujain."

A government spokesman did not respond to my inquiries about why Hathloul was imprisoned and tortured. A pro-government newspaper did suggest that Hathloul is a traitor who could even deserve to be executed.

In recent years, Saudi Arabia has stepped up the pace of executions, with about 150 reported last year. Apparently for the first time, prosecutors have sought the death penalty for a woman who is a nonviolent human rights defender, Israa al-Ghomgham.

Loujain al-Hathloul recorded a video in 2014 showing her driving in the United Arab Emirates toward the border with Saudi Arabia. Credit... Loujain al-Hathloul, via Associated Press

Trump is right that Saudi Arabia is an important ally. That's why it's important that it have a decent, modernizing leader, rather than one who feuds with neighbors, kidnaps Lebanon's prime minister, invades Yemen, murders a journalist and tortures outspoken women.

Saudi politics are murky, but there are whispers that the crown prince will not necessarily be elevated to king on the death of his father. Yet Trump, Pompeo and Kushner are acting as M.B.S.'s protectors and backers - so the world could be stuck with M.B.S. as a destabilizing and oppressive ruler for the next half century.

America doesn't have much leverage to improve human rights in countries like China, Venezuela or Iran. But we have enormous leverage over Saudi Arabia, because it depends on us for its security. Yet Trump, Pompeo and Kushner refuse to use that leverage.

I can't find any indication that any official in the Trump administration has even publicly mentioned Hathloul's name or called for her release. So I hope Congress will step up, oversee the relationship and ask tough questions about why we are silent when our close ally waterboards a woman seeking equal rights.

Saudi Arabia will never live up to its potential as long as it treats women as second-class citizens. What's at stake is not only justice but also stability, economic development and peace in the region.

Thus I urge the Nobel Peace Prize committee to consider selecting Hathloul this year.

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Opinion | She Wanted to Drive, So Saudi Arabia's Ruler Imprisoned and Tortured Her (Published 2019)

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The U.S. should pressure Saudis to respect the human rights of outspoken women. Remember this name: Loujain (pronounced Loo-JAYNE) al-Hathloul. She is 29 years old and a courageous advocate for gender equality - so she is in a Saudi Arabian prison, and reportedly our Saudi allies have tortured her, even waterboarded her.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/01/opinion/kristof-women-as-a-force-for-change.html

Talks about why

- "Women's Rights" is not just a feel good slogan.

- The United States military has an overwhelming record of sexual assault against women.

- 26,000 female service members experienced undesired sexual contact.

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As "women's empowerment" has become a buzz phrase in the last few years, some people are pushing back. They resent this as the latest fad in political correctness, a liberal mission to troll for support from woolly-minded female voters.

But a few recent incidents have underscored why a push on gender equity isn't just a mindless fad and why it's not primarily about political correctness.

Consider Marte Dalelv, the 24-year-old Norwegian woman who reported a rape in Dubai - and then was sentenced to 16 months in prison on charges that included extramarital sex. That was, she said, three months longer than the alleged rapist's prison sentence. After an outcry, the authorities "pardoned" Dalelv (and also, according to news-media reports, her alleged rapist). That's the first reason "empowerment" isn't just a feel-good slogan: profound gender injustices persist -not just in Dubai but also, albeit to a lesser extent, in the United States.

The United States military has a deplorable record of sexual violence within its ranks, with an estimated 26,000 service members experiencing unwanted sexual contact annually. Yet President Obama has so far declined to back the sensible, bipartisan and broadly supported proposal of Senator Kirsten Gillibrand to improve investigations of rape in the military and reduce conflicts of interest.

Add to the toxic brew of sexual violence the Steubenville rape case, widespread sex trafficking and laws in many states that give rapists custody rights to children they father. Ariel Castro, the Cleveland man who held three women in his house for about a decade, has already requested visitation with a child he fathered by rape - although a judge declined the request.

The political backdrop is frustration that women aren't fully represented in decisions that affect them, and that's a second reason this issue reverberates. That's why State Senator Wendy Davis of Texas electrified the social media when she filibustered restrictive abortion legislation. It's not that men favor tougher abortion laws than women (that's an issue with a negligible gender gap) but that plenty of women feel bullied by out-of-touch male lawmakers.

Anyone thinking that women's empowerment is a side issue also wasn't paying attention when Malala Yousafzai, shot in the head by the Pakistani Taliban for advocating girls' education, spoke to the United Nations in July on her 16th birthday. Malala highlighted the third reason to focus on empowering women and girls. It's perhaps the best leverage we have to fight social ills.

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Nicholas Kristof Credit... Damon Winter/The New York Times

As Malala noted, a powerful force for change in the world is education, especially girls' education. The United States has invested thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 9/11 and accomplished little; maybe we should have invested more in the education toolbox. Drones and military patrols sometimes reinforce extremism, while girls' education tends to undermine it.

Change can come not only from a bomb but also from a girl with a schoolbook studying under a tree or in a mosque. She will, on average, have fewer children, be more likely to hold a job and exercise more influence; her brothers and her children will be less likely to join the Taliban.

Likewise, women's health programs aren't a chivalrous handout but a cost-effective step toward a healthier society. The Guttmacher Institute reported this week that without publicly financed contraception programs in 2010 the unintended pregnancy rate among teenagers would have been 73 percent higher. And lawmakers want to cut such programs?

A final insight into women as leverage for change came during my annual win-a-trip journey, in which I take a student with me on a reporting trip. The winner, Erin Luhmann of the University of Wisconsin, and I delved into the malnutrition that contributes to 45 percent of all child deaths around the world.

So how do we save those millions of lives? It's not just about transporting more food to the hungry or about improving agricultural yields in Africa. It's also about - yes! - empowering women.

In rural Chad, we accompanied World Vision and chatted with local women about why children were malnourished. One factor there, as in much of the world: Men eat first, and women and children take what's left.

"We know about malnutrition," one said, but if the meat doesn't go mostly to the man, she added, "there is trouble in the house."

Researchers have found that giving women land titles, inheritance rights and bank accounts aren't just symbolic gestures. Rather, they are strategies to increase women's influence in household decisions and save children's lives.

So to those of you who chafe at "women's rights" as political correctness run amok, think again. This isn't a women's issue or a man's issue, for Malala is exactly right: "We cannot all succeed if half of us are held back."

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Opinion | Women as a Force for Change (Published 2013)

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As "women's empowerment" has become a buzz phrase in the last few years, some people are pushing back. They resent this as the latest fad in political correctness, a liberal mission to troll for support from woolly-minded female voters.

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Woman/Gender Equality and Inequality Key Points

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Woman/Gender Equality and Inequality Key Points

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Gender Equality : "All genders have equal rights, responsibilities and opportunities. "

Just like men, women, can do anything that men can.

Mental strength - women.
Physical strength - men.