White House Painted Purple and Gold for Women's Suffrage
New
Age Islam News Bureau
27 August 2020
• White House Painted Purple and Gold for Women's Suffrage
• Saudi Jeweller Woman Manipulates Wire to Create
Impressive Items
• Masks from Garment Scraps: Bangladesh Rural Women
Earning A Living Amidst the Pandemic
• Connected World Honours Lisa Matta Among the 2020
Women of Technology
• Escape: The Woman Who Brought Her Trafficker To
Justice
• HerHQ Media Launches Ad Revenue Generation Platform
For Women-Centric Start-Ups
• New Treatment Possibilities for Young Women
Diagnosed With Rare Form Of Ovarian Cancer
Compiled By New Age Islam News Bureau
URL: https://www.newageislam.com/islam-women-feminism/white-house-painted-purple-gold/d/122732
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White House Painted Purple and Gold for Women's Suffrage
27th August
By Associated Press
The White
House and other sights in Washing DC were painted in purple and gold for
Women's Equality Day
-----
The White House and other sights in Washing DC were
painted in purple and gold for Women's Equality Day, which marks the centennial
of the 19th Amendment which gave women the right to vote in the United States.
For about a week the colors honoring the women's
suffrage movement have illuminated the Belmont-Paul Women's Equality National Monument,
the headquarters of the National Woman's Party.
The lights resonate with the slogan from the
initiative: "Forward through the Darkness, Forward into Light."
Other major sites in the nations capitol including the
White House, the Kennedy Center for the Arts, and various Smithsonian Museums.
An array of lights, a stage and a large seating
section was also being set up on the South lawn of the White House in
anticipation of President Donald Trump's nomination speech to lead the
Republican Party's ticket.
https://www.republicworld.com/world-news/us-news/wh-painted-purple-and-gold-for-womens-suffrage.html
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Saudi Jeweller Woman Manipulates Wire to Create
Impressive Items
HUDA BASHATAH
August 26, 2020
Esraa
Eskobi’s jewellery workshops have gone from home project to family business
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JEDDAH: While passion is a key factor driving people
toward success, a Saudi jeweler has taken an unorthodox approach in pursuing
her dream.
Esraa Eskobi, wife and mother, is the founder and
owner of Wire Craft project, which provides hand-made gifts as part of its
signature Esraa Jewelry range.
The art involves wrapping the wire, which can be made
of copper, metal, gold or silver, using different techniques to produce a range
of shapes, accessories and jewelry.
The 29-year-old jewelry designer and retailer has more
than six years’ experience in the field. She has a bachelor’s degree in fashion
and jewelry design and a master’s degree in fashion design.
“I came up with the idea for my project after
receiving my bachelor’s degree. However, it was not until 2019 that the idea
became a serious and funded project,” said Eskobi. “The first step was
developing a blog where I published lessons on how to make hand-made jewelry.”
She opened an online store to sell jewelry-making
tools so others would not face the same obstacle. She also wrote a book titled
“Basics for Jewelry Making and Design” as a manual for trainees and an Arabic
educational tool.
“I presented a new idea in my project, which is making
wire-craft gifts in addition to making hand-made jewelry for special requests
with unique designs that meet the needs and aspirations of each client,” she
said.
She thought of organizing workshops after visiting
local fashion and jewelry events that impressed her with creative designs and
hand-made accessories made by Saudi women.
“But I was really saddened to see these beautiful
pieces undermined due to their execution and finishing, also poorly reflecting
the time and effort invested into making them,” Eskobi said.
The problem was to be expected, she added, given the
lack of workshops and Arabic books in the field. This led her to focus on the
educational aspect of the industry, despite the high demand for products.
At the beginning of her project, Eskobi said she
needed a large amount of capital, given that her project started from home. She
needed to import tools and cover the cost of designs and educational content.
“I decided to make it a family business and the
project was funded by my biggest supporters — my mother, father and husband. My
sister also helped me in following up on orders and social media pages.
Freelance designers helped me in the drawing, designing and printing processes,
and I was often offered the free help of close friends in services such as
proofreading,” said the jeweler.
Shortly after launching her project, an investor who
had previously refused to fund her workshops invited Eskobi to deliver a course
encouraging women to start their own projects.
She has an online platform for product sales and
another in development for remote training.
Her marketing relies on word of mouth and free
educational content, as her team is still too small to handle many orders.
Eskobi’s hand-made gifts appeal to all ages, while her
training focuses on female university and college students.
However, during the workshops held in cooperation with
handicrafts centers, Eskobi met many young women who made accessories for their
friends and older women who made them for granddaughters. This inspired her to
offer training to all women aged over 13.
Eskobi said the pandemic has increased demand for her
workshops and gifts for special occasions, including engagements, weddings,
graduations and newborn celebrations.
As for her future plans, Eskobi hopes to achieve the
goals of the Saudi Vision 2030 in supporting education in the Kingdom through
training. She wants to nurture her special artistic craft which reflects Saudi
heritage and adds to the distinguished arts movement.
https://www.arabnews.com/node/1725091/saudi-arabia
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Masks from Garment Scraps: Bangladesh Rural Women
Earning A Living Amidst the Pandemic
August 27, 2020
Nilima Jahan
When the countrywide school closure notice due to the
Covid-19 outbreak was announced on March 17 this year, Johora Pervin and
Abdullah Al Maruf -- both teachers -- lost their livelihoods and the income
they needed to maintain their family of five in Rajbari.
Last month, however, Johora learnt to produce face
masks, alongside around 500 women from seven districts -- Rajbari, Jamalpur,
Kushtia, Magura, Gazipur, Narayanganj, and Dhaka.
At a time when informal sector jobs have all but
disappeared leaving so many unemployed, a byproduct of the pandemic has led to
livelihood opportunities for some rural women who are making biodegradable,
reusable face masks from garments factory scraps.
What the women are making are called Ella masks, a
product of ELLA (Eco-friendly low-cost liquid absorbent) Pad, an award-winning
social enterprise known for reusing high-quality textile scraps from
export-oriented garments factories to produce reusable sanitary napkins for RMG
workers at an affordable price.
"We are provided with the garment scraps. Our
cutting masters cut the scraps according to the pattern provided by Ella. And then
we stitch the masks on our own," said Johora.
She has been making around 100 masks a day from the
scraps and getting Tk 4 per mask. "The amount is way better than the
salary I would get through teaching."
"My husband has been coordinating the process here
-- collecting the scraps, arranging additional materials, and sending the ready
masks to the capital," she added.
Like Johora, three other teachers of a local private
school and a madrassa and six homemakers in her area are earning around Tk 400
a day through this initiative.
According to the organisation, Ella masks are
standardised as per the World Health Organisation (WHO) and Centre for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines.
Mamunur Rahman, founder of ELLA Pad, said the
organisation has been trying to develop a new supply chain for the women
manufacturing the masks.
"We are connecting them with different
institutional buyers. For instance, officials of the US Embassy and UN agencies
such as UNFPA, UNDP, UNIDO, and UNCDF, are currently purchasing their masks,
while USAID is also planning to buy through bulk orders. ELLA is just working
as a matchmaker," said Mamunur.
Currently, 30 micro female entrepreneurs of Mouchak
Mohila Unnayan Sangstha, a national award-winning organisation in Melandaha
upazila, have been producing Ella masks since April and making a significant
contribution to their household incomes.
"I even make masks on Fridays, as my husband who
is a construction worker has been idle since the shutdown. If I didn't have
this gig, it would have been difficult for us to survive during that
time," she said.
"By dint of these masks, I was able to afford
private tuition for my two children, as they were at home without lessons since
schools closed."
Earlier, Nazma would earn some income from making
handicraft clothes where she would get around Tk 350 for a three-piece suit --
but one would take around 10 days to make.
Sahera Akter from Melandaha has also been earning some
extra bucks from making masks, alongside her regular job as a trainer at a
local social organisation.
"I usually work at my office from 9:00am to
2:00pm. In the afternoon, I start making masks at the Mouchak Mohila Unnayan
Sangstha's factory, and bring back some scraps for stitching at night using my
own sewing machine," said Sahera.
Shamsul Alam, Ella mask coordinator at Melandaha and
the founder of the Mouchak Mohila Unnayan Sangstha, said they try to involve
women who lack financial independence.
Earlier, these women would do handicraft work on
nakshikantha, three-piece suits, two-piece suits, and bedsheets, through which
they would receive a small amount for their weeklong labours, said Shamsul.
"However, in mask-making, they are earning Tk 400
each day, without any additional expenses or hassle. We usually collect the
scraps from factories in Gazipur and Narayanganj, and they just do the
manufacturing," said Shamsul.
Currently, Mamunur is aspiring to diversify the
products from the garment scraps, once the demand for masks slows down -- into
home textile items for one. This way, these women will continue to have regular
employment, even beyond this time of crisis.
https://www.thedailystar.net/backpage/news/making-masks-garment-scraps-1951485
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Connected World Honors Lisa Matta Among the 2020 Women
of Technology
Aug 26, 2020
Wi-Tronix
BOLINGBROOK, Ill., Aug. 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ --
Connected World® has honored Lisa Matta, Cofounder and VP of Product Management
for Wi-Tronix, as a 2020 Women of Technology award winner.
Connected World®, a publication focusing on IoT,
innovative technology, and influential media, is recognizing women who have
helped create a diverse leadership effort in order to move the needle
forward—especially in the IoT, AI security, and other emerging tech arenas
within key verticals.
The 2020 Women of Technology Award is compiled of
nominations submitted by the industry and researched by the editorial team of
Connected World with a total of 45 women chosen.
As a leader in technology for over 20 years, Lisa
Matta innovates solutions that solve critical issues faced by the rail
industry. She combines a talent for invention with a passion for education,
providing a pathway for future innovators and leaders in her field. As a
co-founder of Wi-Tronix, Lisa is named in five patents and has been instrumental
in spearheading the design, development, test, and launch of new software and
products. Lisa serves as Vice President of Product Management for Wi-Tronix,
paving the roadmap for future company products. She continues to cultivate
engineering skills in students at all levels through her volunteer work as an
active member of the Society of Women Engineers and team manager and mentor in
the STEAM youth organization, Destination Imagination where she recently
coached an all-girls team to the Global Finals.
"From a young age I wanted to be challenged and
take on new projects, and develop skills that make a difference, drive change
and solve problems," said Lisa Matta. "As a mother, I take pride in
empowering young children (especially girls) on STEM related activities. You
never know what impact you may have on an individual and ultimately their
future impact on the world as a whole."
Wi-Tronix is proud to have Lisa Matta on its Board of
Directors, in addition to her role as a VP, driving the Safety, Efficiency, and
Reliability of the Railroad industry forward.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/connected-world-honors-lisa-matta-among-the-2020-women-of-technology-301118603.html
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Escape: the woman who brought her trafficker to
justice
By Ottavia Spaggiari
27 Aug 2020
Susan had been on Italian soil for exactly three days
when, on 23 July 2015, she was taken with dozens of other new arrivals to a
noisy, overcrowded detention centre in Rome, and told she would shortly be
deported back to Nigeria. Some women shouted in anger, others started to cry.
Susan remained silent. She could not go back.
The previous spring, Susan had been persuaded to make
the journey to Italy by a Nigerian woman called Ivie, who she met in her home
village in the southern Nigerian state of Edo. The woman had offered to pay for
Susan’s journey to Europe and promised she would get decent, paid work when she
arrived. Susan underwent a traditional juju oath-taking ceremony, in front of a
priest, in which she swore to pay the woman back and to be loyal to her. Now,
here in Italy, Susan knew that if she did not repay the debt, there would be
terrible consequences.
A lawyer from a voluntary organisation helped Susan
make an asylum application that would allow her to remain in the country, and
after a few more weeks in detention she was transferred to a migrant reception
centre in central Italy to wait for her case to be processed. Soon after, Ivie
picked her up and brought her to an apartment in Prato, outside Florence. Four
other young Nigerian women were already living there. One of them handed Susan
a pair of high-heeled shoes and a short skirt. “Let’s go,” she said. “We have
to work.”
Susan thought it must be a joke. She had been promised
work as a babysitter or a supermarket cashier. “They didn’t tell me I would
come here to be a prostitute,” Susan told me. But the women around her were not
laughing. When she protested, Ivie reminded her that she had paid for her
journey, and of how much money she owed. If she didn’t pay, or if she spoke
about it to anyone, her mother and brothers back home would be in danger. “I
was crying,” Susan told me. “The other girls said: ‘You’ll get used to it’. I
said: ‘I’ll never get used to it.’”
There were no days off. Susan was never alone, but she
felt isolated. Ivie had created a hierarchy, making it hard for the girls to
bond. Hillary, another young woman from Edo state, had been given the role of
collecting the money at the end of the night and checking on the girls. Susan’s
survival strategy was to avoid the men who came looking for sex – to work as
little as possible. In January she made only €420. Frustrated by Susan’s poor
earnings, Ivie hit her so hard that Susan was afraid she was going to lose the
sight in one eye.
One day at the end of January, five weeks after Susan
had arrived in Prato, Susan was moved to another town in the north of Italy.
Ivie controlled her from afar, calling her often, and her new madam pressured
her for money. “I couldn’t continue like that. Every night in the rain, every
day,” Susan said. The hardest thing to bear was that her sacrifice was not even
helping her family in Nigeria. “They didn’t let me send any money home.”
Since 2015, about 21,000 Nigerian women and girls have
arrived on Italian shores. In 2017, the UN’s International Organization for
Migration reported that 80% were potential victims of sex trafficking, but
numbers are hard to confirm. Italy has been the stage for a cruel cycle of
exploitation in which survivors of trafficking, after years of forced prostitution,
have become traffickers themselves, the so-called “madams”. Some of them bring
new women to Italy in order to finish paying off their debt to their
traffickers and find a way out of the streets, and others have been exploited
for so long that they see exploitation of others as their only option for a
better life.
Victims are generally afraid to come forward, and few
traffickers have been identified. The UN Convention against Transnational
Organized Crime, a key tool in international law to prosecute traffickers and
protect survivors, states that survivors of trafficking should be offered
temporary or permanent residence. Italy was a major proponent of the
convention, which was signed in Palermo in December 2000. But since then, as
more migrants have arrived, the political landscape has changed.
After 2009, when Italian law made it a criminal
offence to enter and stay in the country without a visa, the fear of being
arrested forced undocumented migrants to go underground. Victims of trafficking
are rarely identified during immigration controls. Even if they are identified
as possible victims, under questioning, many women struggle to recall details
of their journey. “They don’t remember the name of the city they were
transferred to, so they are not considered believable,” Carla Quinto, a lawyer
working with the anti-trafficking organisation Be Free, told me.
If they are believed, gathering evidence for the three
elements constituting the crime of human trafficking – recruitment, transfer
and exploitation – presents further challenges: the difficulty of co-ordinating
international investigations with police from the countries of origin, the lack
of sympathy or support from many police officers and prosecutors in Italy, and
the fact that Nigerian criminal groups behind human trafficking sometimes
collaborate with the local mafia for protection. Investigations are complex and
often slow, while traffickers move quickly, relocate their victims frequently
and change their phone numbers multiple times. “Criminal organisations are
always ahead of us,” Quinto said.
But in February 2016, a magistrate specialising in
organised crime, Angela Pietroiusti, launched an investigation that would cut
through layers of prejudice and bring the expertise of anti-mafia units to bear
on sex trafficking. Over the course of a year, the investigation uncovered a
sophisticated network of traffickers operating between Nigeria, Libya, Italy,
France, Germany and the UK, which recruited young women and girls, and brought
them to Europe.
Key to this investigation were the detailed notes and
photographs that one woman, outraged at being forced into prostitution, had
amassed in secret. That woman was Susan.
Francesca De Masi has been visiting the Ponte Galeria
women’s detention centre in south-west Rome every week since 2008. Her task is
to identify human trafficking victims among the detainees, offer them
counselling and legal help, and get them moved to a shelter. On Wednesdays, De
Masi and her team Be Free usually set up in Ponte Galeria’s library, a dark
room with few books and many mosquitos. Sometimes she and her colleagues
approach the detainees in the corridors; sometimes it’s the women who enter the
library and strike up a conversation. The first few minutes of the exchange are
crucial. Female traffickers could be in detention together with their victims.
“We can’t say openly that we are an anti-trafficking organisation,” De Masi
explained.
Once every two weeks, Quinto, Be Free’s in-house
criminal lawyer, joins the team in Ponte Galeria to help women who want to
press charges against their traffickers. Quinto and De Masi share a passion for
cigarettes, and the affectionate, brutal intimacy of siblings. Quinto speaks as
if she is always in a hurry. “Sometimes I kick her under the desk,” De Masi
laughed – the kick is her sign to Quinto to slow down. “Some of the women need
time to open up.”
When she heard the news, in July 2015, that 66 young
women from Nigeria, who had just arrived by boat in southern Italy, had been
flown to Rome and taken to Ponte Galeria, De Masi had grabbed her car keys and
rushed out the door. That day was like nothing she had ever experienced. The
women were terrified. Susan was among them, exhausted but determined to avoid
deportation. The room where the women were held was overcrowded and hot. To
make themselves heard above the panicked and bewildered voices, De Masi and
other aid workers climbed on to a table and shouted. They explained that they
would need to speak to each of the women individually.
“Nobody,” Susan replied firmly. She had sworn her
loyalty to Ivie, the woman she met in Edo state. She did not yet know what Ivie
had in store for her. Susan’s main concern was to stay in Italy and protect her
patron at all costs.
After a few failed attempts to gather more of Susan’s
story, De Masi, together with the immigration lawyer, helped her file an asylum
application. This would protect her from deportation, but because she would not
admit that she was recruited in Nigeria, Susan had to remain in the detention
centre until the interview with the asylum commission, which was scheduled a
month later. Then she would be transferred to a migrant reception centre.
De Masi feared that if Susan was transferred to the
reception centre, she would be picked up by her trafficker. Reception centres
for adult migrants have become connection hubs between traffickers and their
victims. In some cases, suspected traffickers walk right into migration centres
to pick up their targets.
De Masi’s fears proved correct. Once she got to the
reception centre, Susan managed to get hold of a phone and re-established
contact with Ivie. After two months, Ivie came in a car to collect her. And
with that, Susan disappeared.
In Prato, Susan found herself living a nightmare.
Enraged by her meagre earnings, Ivie would yell at her: “You’re not a serious
girl.” She was forced to work the streets every night, from 5pm until 3am,
standing in the cold and rain. There were no days off. If she had a fever, or
had her period, she had to work.
Furious about the lies she had been told, Susan
decided to document her new life in Italy. She began taking pictures on her
phone of the apartment where she was kept, and even snapped surreptitious
photos of Ivie. She kept records of phone numbers and notes of what happened to
her. At the time, she wasn’t sure she would be able to do anything with them,
but she wanted evidence of what she was being forced to endure. Ivie had given
her a notebook in which Susan was supposed to write down the amount of money
she gave Ivie each week, and how much she still owed. The notebook was a record
of Susan’s debt bondage – a reminder that if she met more clients and made more
money, she could supposedly earn her freedom more rapidly. Susan, however, used
the notebook to record her experience. Every transaction she wrote down was
evidence of what she was forced to endure.
After Susan was transferred to the new city in
northern Italy in January 2016, she kept recording as many details as she
could. At first, her life was controlled by a new woman who kept close watch
over her. But about a week after her arrival, the new madam went on a trip to
Nigeria, leaving Susan with another woman whose control wasn’t as tight.
“That’s when I decided to leave,” Susan said.
One morning in early February, she packed her phone
and notebook in a small purse and left the house, saying she had to meet a
client in a nearby town. Instead, she walked to the train station, intending to
travel to Rome. She had managed to keep the contact details of the immigration
lawyer she had seen at the Ponte Galeria detention centre in July 2015. Susan
tried to keep a low profile at the train station, terrified that someone might
recognise her, but she had no cash, and had to stop strangers to beg for money
to buy a ticket.
When she finally made it on the train, her phone began
to ring. Both Ivie and the new madam were calling her. Susan knew that if she
kept ignoring their calls, they would realise something was wrong. She was
especially afraid that there would be retaliation against her mother. She had
to come up with a good excuse. She finally picked up and told Ivie she could
not talk because she had been caught by the police. She repeated the same line
when the madam called. She then threw away her sim card, praying that they
would believe her, and leave her and her family alone.
‘Susan is back.” The immigration lawyer was on the
phone to De Masi. Susan had made it to Rome, and found the lawyer’s office
before nightfall. “She has nowhere to go.” An hour later, De Masi was at the
lawyer’s office. Five months had passed, and Susan looked very different from
the distant and defensive girl De Masi had met in Ponte Galeria. “She was
outraged that someone she had trusted could put her in danger,” De Masi told
me. This time Susan wanted to talk. She wanted justice. “She was angry as
hell,” said De Masi.
After De Masi picked Susan up from the immigration lawyer’s
office, she helped to get her into a shelter. In the weeks that followed, she
began to gather Susan’s testimony. Susan’s information was detailed, reliable
and well documented. “She had provided a copy of her notebook, photos, names
and personal information about her traffickers,” De Masi said. Filing criminal
justice complaints is a way for women who have been trafficked to regain a
feeling of power, De Masi said. Be Free’s lawyer Carla Quinto pointed out that
it can also afford them better protection: if traffickers threaten a survivor
after she presses charges, police forces are usually quicker to intervene.
Even with the evidence Susan had amassed, De Masi and
Quinto knew how hard it would be to put together a case against her
traffickers. Of the 70 survivors’ cases that Be Free handles every year, no
more than three go to trial, and almost never for human trafficking or slavery.
Criminal charges are usually dropped, or reduced to exploitation of
prostitution, which is a misdemeanour. “In the end, many cases go to trial for
minor crimes with evidence that is easier to get,” Quinto explained.
One reason convicting traffickers is so hard is
because the crime usually involves large numbers of criminals working in
multiple jurisdictions. At each step along her journey to Europe, Susan had
been picked up by different sets of middle men, who were co-ordinating their
operations via phone with Ivie, her madam in Italy. In Libya, Susan had been
locked up for two weeks in a makeshift jail, crowded with people who were
waiting to cross the sea to Europe. The madam would regularly check in with the
Nigerian and Arab men who served as jailers. The lack of investigative
collaboration with Nigeria, Niger and Libya made it impossible to investigate
or prosecute any of the middle men involved in Susan’s trafficking.
The number of investigations into trafficking to Italy
dropped steeply from 2014 onwards, just as there was a spike in arrivals of
Nigerian women and girls without visas. According to a US state department
report, published in June this year, only 135 people in Italy were investigated
for trafficking in 2019, compared to 314 in 2018, and 482 in 2017. The report
said the Italian authorities “did not meet the minimum standards for the
elimination of trafficking”. The lack of interpreters from west Africa who can
translate intercepted phone calls was one obstacle. But people working with
survivors believe that there is a widespread lack of interest in prosecuting
traffickers, due in part to the fact that a large number of survivors are Black
women.
De Masi, who has worked for Be Free for more than 20
years, believes the hardening of attitudes towards migrants among Italian law
enforcement authorities is not a recent phenomenon. After the Balkan wars and
the rise of organised crime in post-communist eastern Europe, De Masi and her
colleagues noticed increasing numbers of women who were being trafficked for
sex. At first, it was often the police who would bring women off the streets to
the shelter. But after Silvio Berlusconi’s rightwing government issued new
legislation in 2009 to clamp down on undocumented migrants, the police attitude
towards sex-trafficking victims started to change. “The police priority was no
longer to bring survivors to an anti-trafficking organisation or to women’s
shelters and help them,” De Masi said. “What became crucial was whether women
had their documents in order. Criminalisation of migration became the
priority.”
In spite of the danger to witnesses and their
families, the Italian system puts the onus on survivors to press charges
against their traffickers. If survivors do file a complaint, their families
back home are at risk of retaliation. Under an agreement between Italy and
Nigeria, Italian police forces may alert Nigerian authorities so that they can
protect survivors’ relatives once a complaint has been filed, but this measure
has proven ineffective. De Masi says that whenever she has made a request to
protect a woman’s family, the Nigerian authority responsible for fighting human
trafficking has failed to respond. Several of Quinto’s clients’ families have
been attacked. In one case, a survivor’s mother was killed.
In March 2016, about a month after Susan fled to Rome,
Ivie sent men to her mother’s house in Nigeria. They beat her badly and left a
message for Susan: “Go back to your madam.” The threat had the opposite effect.
After her mother told Susan what had happened, she grew more determined than
ever. She saw the criminal complaint as the only means to fight back and protect
her family.
In May, a criminal complaint was filed against Ivie on
Susan’s behalf. De Masi and Quinto knew Susan’s chance of winning justice was
small. According to Quinto, the outcome often depends on the attitudes of
whoever happens to be the prosecutor on the case. Previous complaints had been
dismissed by police officers, investigating magistrates and prosecutors who did
not take the women’s stories seriously, or dragged their feet, given the
difficulty of gathering enough evidence for a successful prosecution. But this
time, they were in luck.
Susan’s case ended up in the offices of the anti-mafia
directorate in Florence, close to where she had been forced into prostitution
for the first time. Because of their complexity, in Italy human trafficking
investigations are managed by local anti-mafia directorates – special
prosecutors’ units created in the early 90s to coordinate investigations into
organised crime in Italy.
The woman who picked up her file was an experienced
special prosecutor named Angela Pietroiusti. Five months earlier, she had
launched an investigation into sex trafficking in Tuscany, and ordered
surveillance of the apartment in Prato where Ivie kept the girls. She was
building a case by following the women’s activities, but needed access to
communications between the traffickers.
“The information offered by Susan’s criminal complaint
coincided perfectly with what we were finding in our investigation,”
Pietroiusti told me. “She was incredibly reliable. She provided her madam’s
phone number and the names of the other girls.” As one of the few prosecutors
handling human trafficking cases in her office, Pietroiusti was able to make a
connection between Susan’s criminal complaint and the investigation she had
recently started. Thanks to the detailed information Susan had provided, in
June 2016 Pietroiusti obtained authorisation for a wiretap.
“Trafficking cases are as complex as mafia cases,”
Pietroiusti told me when I met her in her office overlooking the city of
Florence, with Brunelleschi’s dome and the Tuscan hills in the distance.
Pietroiusti is in her early 60s, and that day was wearing a sparkling blue
glittery top, which made for a vivid contrast with metal detectors at the
entrance of the building and the security guards outside her office – grim
reminders of the dangers of her work. She remembers the names of all the
survivors of the cases she worked on, and those of their traffickers.
Once they got the wiretaps in place, together with
police officers and translators, Pietroiusti spent hundreds of hours building
the case. One of the challenges was finding people who could translate from
Igbo into Italian. The Nigerian community in Italy is not large, and most
recent migrants are afraid of causing trouble for themselves and their families.
“But we managed to find some of them,” Pietroiusti said with a smile.
Wiretaps and surveillance revealed that Ivie was part
of an international network. Together with other madams, she moved young women,
some under 18, across several European countries. The investigation also
revealed that Ivie had herself worked in the streets as a sex worker for a few
years before becoming a madam. She had built a thriving business, and trained
her 24-year-old daughter to run it for her, exploiting women her own age and
younger. Half a dozen people were investigated, but in January 2017, just four
madams, including Ivie’s daughter, were indicted for trafficking 17 young women
and girls from Nigeria to Italy.
It had taken Pietroiusti a year to gather enough proof
to file a request for an arrest warrant, and it would take two more years for
the judge to sign it. By the time the four madams were arrested, it was three
years since Susan had filed her criminal complaint. Complex cases, such as ones
involving human trafficking, tend to be passed over by judges, Pietroiusti said
with a sigh, as they require more time and work to evaluate. Susan’s case
involved thousands of pages of phone records and transcribed conversations. “I
am not without sin,” Pietroiusti told me, “but among all the requests I get, I
try to prioritise those cases that threaten human dignity.”
In trafficking cases, witnesses need both physical
protection – they often live in shelters with secret addresses – and emotional
support. Some survivors are so scared of their traffickers that they deny they
were trafficked and forced into prostitution, even when they are presented with
the evidence. Interviewing them requires careful strategy and sensitivity. To
make the process less traumatic, sometimes Pietroiusti travels long distances
to meet them in their secret shelters, where they feel more secure. Pietroiusti
also has a rule: she only asks questions when it is strictly necessary. “The
less you interview them, the better it is,” she told me. “It’s hard for them.”
There is also a need for absolute confidentiality. “As much as you can
recommend them to keep it private, they are still girls – they might talk to a
friend about it, and word of the investigation may get around.”
In addition to witness testimony, the wiretaps also
offered a window into the violence that the victims experienced on a daily
basis. One underage girl, Marianne, was raped at a gunpoint by a client – a man
who had posed as a police officer – and then forced to get an abortion. She had
been trafficked to Italy in 2016 by the same woman who had brought Susan from
Nigeria. The madam was frustrated by Marianne’s meagre earnings: “You didn’t
come to Europe to play!” she shouted at her in a phone conversation that was
intercepted by agents.
In August 2016, once she had realised Marianne was
under 18, Pietroiusti instructed police officers to stop her in the streets and
take her to a shelter for minors while surveillance on the other women
continued. But Marianne, frightened and alone, ran away and went back to the
madam, the only adult she knew in Italy. The fact that victims are
undocumented, and tend not to trust the police, means they become even more
dependent on their traffickers.
When police officers stopped Marianne again and tried
to put her in a shelter for the second time, she escaped again. This time the
madam transferred her to France, together with another underage girl. The
trafficker called them “the little ones”, Pietroiusti said. By the time arrest
warrants were issued for the four Nigerian madams, police had lost all trace of
the girls.
When De Masi learned that Susan’s evidence had finally
led to arrests, she was taken aback. “So much time had passed, I thought the
case had been dismissed,” De Masi told me. A pre-trial hearing was set for July
2019, and Susan took the train to Florence. She was nervous but determined.
Seeing De Masi and Quinto waiting for her at the station was a relief.
Be Free rented an apartment so that Quinto could help
Susan prepare for the hearing. The lawyer established the most important thing:
that the woman who had trafficked Susan would not see her. The judge would hear
the witnesses in court, one by one, but the defendants would be in a separate
room in the courthouse, following their testimonies via videolink. The
survivors’ faces would not be on camera, only their backs.
“You deserve the princess room,” De Masi told her,
giving her the biggest room in the apartment, with a queen-size bed and a
television. Susan laughed, pleased with the privacy and comfort. She had spent
years in a shelter, sharing her room, bathroom and kitchen with other women.
Before going to sleep, Susan took some selfies with De Masi and Quinto. “It was
nice to stay with both of them, they are so funny,” Susan told me, laughing.
She reminded me what Quinto, who has salt-and-pepper short hair and always
wears jeans and tennis shoes, often says: “Clients like me because I don’t look
like a lawyer.”
The morning of the hearing, Susan wore a bright
T-shirt with the words: “I must be successful.” Nine survivors were due to
speak as witnesses in the trial. To protect them from crossing paths with their
traffickers, Pietroiusti invited them to wait in her office. As more survivors
arrived, Susan remembered her time with the girls as a stretch of lonely,
desperate days. Seeing Hillary particularly upset her. “She is bad,” Susan told
De Masi, remembering how Hillary would control her and the other girls. De Masi
told Susan she believed Hillary was a victim like her.
Hillary was the only one who had paid back her €30,000
debt entirely. Her madam had celebrated the final payment by asking for another
€2,000 as a “gift” and offering Hillary the opportunity to become a madam
herself. Hillary’s father, who lived in Nigeria, had been working closely with
Ivie, and had recruited his own daughter, as well as other girls. The
investigation revealed that he had pressured Hillary to work overtime, so that
she could pay her debt and become a madam – something that she never did.
As Susan waited her turn to give evidence, there were
moments of tension. One of the survivors got a bad headache. “It’s the juju!”
she screamed, convinced that she was being punished because she was about to
betray her madam, to whom she had sworn an oath of loyalty back in Nigeria. The
traditional ritual is very frightening, and exerts power over the young women
long after they have left their home. “Using these very old belief systems
passed down through generations is a psychological form of control that is much
stronger than any violence,” Princess Inyang Okokon, who runs Piam Onlus, an
anti-trafficking NGO, told the Guardian in 2017.
As other women got anxious, De Masi took out her
phone. In 2018, she had spent two months in Nigeria’s Edo state to research the
country’s anti-trafficking efforts. That year, in an attempt to curb
trafficking to Europe, Oba Ewuare II, the spiritual ruler of the kingdom of
Benin, held a sacred ceremony to revoke all curses that sealed the debt bondage
and set victims free. De Masi, who had been present, showed a video of the
ceremony to the girls. “Everybody calmed down,” she told me.
When Susan’s turn to see the judge came, she was
shaking, but she quickly got over her nerves. “I started telling the truth, and
I became so relaxed,” she told me. She said it felt like a weight had been
lifted from her.
The trial was set for five months later, on 13
December 2019. The defendants had chosen a fast-track trial – a tool in Italian
law that speeds up the criminal process and, in case of conviction, allows a
reduction of the sentence. The trial would last just one day. None of the
victims were required to attend in person, but De Masi and Quinto were there to
see the traffickers, who had caused so much pain and suffering, brought to
justice. “There was no way I was going to miss this day,” De Masi told me.
After the closing arguments, prosecutor Angela
Pietroiusti invited De Masi and Quinto into her office to wait for the judge’s
decision. They made small talk and chain smoked. At 7pm, Pietroiusti’s landline
rang.
The four defendants were sentenced to a total of 45
years for trafficking 10 girls to Italy and forcing them into slavery. When she
heard the sentence, De Masi cried. “It was as if justice had been served not
only for Susan, but for all the other women we had worked with,” she told me.
De Masi and Quinto bought a bottle of wine to celebrate on the train back to
Rome. As their train was leaving, they called Susan to tell her that Ivie had
been sentenced to 16 years and eight months. “Oh Jesus!” Susan screamed, overjoyed.
The judge had ordered the trafficker to pay Susan
€80,000 compensation, and €10,000 costs to Be Free. But neither of them will
likely ever see the money. Human traffickers tend to send their profits back to
their home countries (wiretaps had revealed that Susan’s madam had boasted
about owning several houses in Nigeria), and leave no assets in Italy.
Not everybody involved in Susan’s trafficking was
prosecuted. The madam she had been transferred to in northern Italy was never identified,
nor were the male traffickers involved in her journey from Nigeria to Italy.
The law usually pursues the madams, but, as Quinto pointed out, 90% of them
have been forced into prostitution themselves. The men who are the key players
in Libya, Europe and Nigeria remain beyond reach.
For Susan, Ivie’s conviction was more than had she
hoped for. But things did not get easier for her. In autumn 2018, the so-called
Salvini decree – named after the far-right politician who was then deputy prime
minister of Italy – introduced a series of measures that made it more difficult
for survivors of trafficking such as Susan to renew their immigration status
and rebuild their lives.
Four years after she escaped her traffickers and filed
the criminal complaint that would uncover an international trafficking network,
Susan’s life is still in limbo. She has no work permit. She would like to go
back to school, but more than anything she wants to be able to work and help
her family back home. “I’d like to do any job,” she told me. “If I could
choose, I would like to help old women.” She is now waiting for the Italian
asylum commission to re-evaluate her case and to have her documents renewed.
De Masi has been helping Susan fight for her right to
remain in Italy and rebuild a life here. As one of the key witnesses in a
trafficking trial, it is too dangerous for her to go back to Nigeria. “We
should roll out a red carpet for trafficking survivors,” De Masi told me. “From
immigration offices to prosecutors’ offices, every door should be wide open to
them. But everything remains so difficult.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/27/nigeria-italy-human-trafficking-sex-workers-exploitation-justice
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HerHQ Media launches ad revenue generation platform
for women-centric start-ups
26-August, 2020
by EE News Desk
IncNut Digital, a globally renowned media and commerce
company, appoints HerHQ Media as its exclusive sales partner for India region.
Over the years we are witnessing constant evolution in
consumption and purchase behaviours; one such is, women’s strong voice,
influence and participation in decision making, more than ever before. Women
drive 80% of consumer purchases through a combination of buying power and
influence. They are the gateway to the people in their households as well in
their social and business networks.
Smart and agile companies have realised this shift and
are endorsing women communities as an integral part of their messaging. While
women-centric innovation in products and services is on the rise, still,
potential of such platforms continues to be underserved. HerHQ Media is on a
mission to create an assemblage of engaged and heterogenous women
communities/cohorts for brands to leverage at scale. HerHQ’s aim is to
reach~100 million audiences by aggregating plat-forms catering to women across
life-stages.
Speaking on the association, Meera Chopra, Founder,
HerHQ Media said, “We are excited to partner with IncNut Digital to represent
their expansive reach of 24 million women communities across MomJunction,
Stylecraze and The Bridal Box. With common goals and shared values, together we
look forward to achieving new milestones”.
“Brands will find immense value in this partnership
for a variety of reasons - HerHQ Media is a first-of-its-kind women focussed
monetisation network that plays the role of a unifier by aggre-gating
platforms, and provides a single window for brands to advertise. Today, brands
are super engaged with their audiences and require targeted media plans and
that is why a one-size-fit-all strategy may not be relevant, all the time.
HerHQ Media’s heterogeneous platform enables brands to connect with women
audiences.”
Chaitanya Nallan, CEO, IncNut Digital said, “IncNut
Digital’s women centric communities, from Stylecraze (India’s largest beauty
& wellness community) to MomJunction (India’s biggest par-enting community)
have been an integral part of a woman’s journey and have assisted them in
making informed decisions across some of their significant life stages. With growing
participa-tion of women in the economy there has been an explosive increase in
consumption by women. We are excited to partner with HerHQ Media which brings
in the right expertise and experience in leveraging this trend and positioning
us optimally for this inflection point in our economy.”
Natasha Garyali, VP, IncNut Digital said, “We see
women of today as a powerful, dominant voice when it comes to consumption as
well as making purchase decisions. This trend will stim-ulate extraordinary
growth in the economy as well for the businesses that serve women. With our
partnership with Meera and her unique team at HerHQ Media we hope we can
broaden the gender lens to view the role of women in the wider ecosystem as
major growth drivers.”
http://everythingexperiential.businessworld.in/article/HerHQ-Media-launches-ad-revenue-generation-platform-for-women-centric-start-ups/26-08-2020-313250/
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New Treatment Possibilities For Young Women Diagnosed
With Rare Form Of Ovarian Cancer
27 August, 2020
by ANI
Washington D.C. [USA], August 27 (ANI): A recent
finding by researchers at the BC Cancer Research Institute and the University
of British Columbia (UBC) may offer a new treatment possibility for people
diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of ovarian cancer.
Small cell carcinoma of the ovary, hypercalcemic type
(SCCOHT), is a particularly devastating cancer that has no effective treatments
and is usually diagnosed in women in their 20s. The study, published in
Clinical Cancer Research, describes a metabolic vulnerability present in cells
that may represent a therapeutic target if proven in clinical trials.
"Finding this vulnerability and identifying a way
to exploit it could have a huge impact for anyone diagnosed with this rare
disease," said the study's first author Jennifer Ji, an MD/PhD candidate
at UBC's faculty of medicine and trainee at the BC Cancer Research Institute.
The discovery is welcome news to Justin Mattioli,
whose 34-year-old wife Eileen, passed away from SCCOHT in the spring of 2019.
Prior to her passing, Eileen made the decision to donate her tissue samples to
help advance cancer research in the hopes of finding new treatments for others
facing the disease.
"We would hate to see someone else go through
what Eileen did," said Justin. "And there is a good possibility that
this may help advance further research into other types of cancers as
well."
Eileen's samples are being used as a new cell model,
enabling researchers to test the effects of new treatments and to better
understand the biology of the disease.
The team found that SCCOHT cancer cells have very low
levels of an enzyme necessary for the production of arginine, an amino acid
needed to help our cells build protein.
Non-cancerous cells have this enzyme and can produce
their own arginine, but tumours without it cannot produce this amino acid
themselves, meaning that they need to be in an arginine-rich environment to
survive.
Using a small molecule agent, the team has found a way
to eliminate arginine in the tumour environment, essentially starving the
cancer to death while having minimal effect on normal cells.
"This agent basically absorbs all of the arginine
within the tumour environment so cells can't produce it themselves, thus
starving the tumour," said research team lead Dr. David Huntsman, a
pathologist and ovarian cancer researcher at BC Cancer and professor in the
departments of pathology and laboratory medicine and obstetrics and gynecology
at UBC. "As such vulnerability has been also discovered in several other
cancer types, we are now looking to partner with other research organizations
who are evaluating these treatment options in patients whose cancer lacks the
expression of this particular enzyme."
So far, researchers have validated this treatment in
pre-clinical studies. They are now exploring combination therapy, with the use
of Eileen's samples, in an effort to boost the response and avoid potential
resistance. In addition, they want to test their findings in clinical trials.
"This research is another step to better understanding
a very aggressive form of ovarian cancer and providing better treatment
outcomes for women diagnosed with this disease," said Huntsman.
http://www.businessworld.in/article/New-treatment-possibilities-for-young-women-diagnosed-with-rare-form-of-ovarian-cancer/27-08-2020-313550/
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URL: https://www.newageislam.com/islam-women-feminism/white-house-painted-purple-gold/d/122732