Violence against women in all its forms is the most shameful violation of human rights. It is a violation that continues to increase over the years despite the existence of international and national laws. Morocco is one of the countries in the world that suffers from this discrimination against women. To deal with this phenomenon, national texts intervene to establish a legal framework that respects the principle of equality between women and men such as the Constitution of 2011, The Family Code (“Moudawana”) of 2004, and the adoption in 2016 of Law No. 27-14 on the fight against human trafficking, etc. In 2018, Law No. 103-13 related to the fight against violence towards women was promulgated. It is a law which constitutes a real legislative innovation in Morocco since it will reduce or even stop a certain number of abuses experienced by women. This is what leads us to ask ourselves, is Law No. 103-13 really going to allow us to abolish the segregation between men and women? And would this law allow us to fight against all kinds of violations against women?

Healthy bodies were central to the welfare projects of Red Vienna, 1919–34. This article traces the discourse of care surrounding single mothers and their children within the interwar Viennese welfare system, paying particular attention to the ways their bodies were described, monitored, and maximized for social utility. It establishes a shift in the perception of “worth” for these citizens, and then contrasts this stated value with the remembered experiences of children growing up without legal fathers in Red Vienna.

The development of Specialist Perinatal Mental Health Services in Ireland in recent years (2018–2021) is described. The paper highlights the role of unexpected opportunity in advancing this much needed service for women, infants and their families. It also emphasises the need for funding combined with an implementation mechanism to ensure that the service emerging is true to the Model of Care designed and is available in a uniform manner to women nationally.

In the wake of the Aladura (prayer people) religious movement of the late 1920s, a site of childbirth that relied primarily on faith healing emerged in Nigeria under the Christ Apostolic Church (CAC). This practice of faith-based delivery remained informal until 1959 when it evolved into a permanent structure with a professional guild of midwives, codified practices, and trained personnel. This article explores the advent of CAC's faith-based maternity practice, notably its faith home midwifery school, and how the faith home transformed its identity from the informal realms of religious healing to a recognized religious entity that offered primary maternity care based on the principles of faith healing. By examining the professionalization of Aladura faith homes, I highlight questions of legitimacy allocation in postcolonial Africa and how CAC navigated this process by courting legitimacy from state-backed institutions and sociocultural frameworks.

This article is the first to show that gender shapes the degree to which legislators use formal mechanisms to oversee government activities. Extensive scholarly work has analysed the use of oversight instruments, especially regarding who monitors whom. Whether, how, and why the conformity of men and women with institutional roles differs, has not yet received scholarly attention. We hypothesise that women become more active than men in overseeing the executive when in opposition while reducing their monitoring activities even more strongly than men when in government because of different social roles ascribed to men and women as well as differences in risk aversity between sexes. We analyse panel data for three oversight tools from the German Bundestag between 1949 and 2013 to test this proposition. Our findings imply that characteristics of political actors influence even a strongly institutionalised process as oversight and further clarify the gender bias in political representation.

In the nineteenth century, when Italy was undergoing significant institutional and socio-economic changes, the bourgeoisie affirmed its principles of ‘respectability’. In this context, the spread of prostitution among the poorest and most disadvantaged classes of the South became a real obsession for bourgeois society. Through the study of primary sources relating to various health institutions, this paper aims to assess the role of the Opere Pie in the control and management of prostitution. It furthermore highlights the hybrid function of the re-education, assistance and segregation of those women who represented a danger to bourgeois morality and order. Finally, it sheds light on the living conditions and social environment of young prostitutes.

This research sought to study how women cope with incarceration by exploring the pseudo-family phenomenon in female correctional centres, specifically in Kgoši Mampuru II and Johannesburg in the Gauteng Province of South Africa. The study employed a qualitative research approach to investigate the phenomenon. The research participants were selected through non-probability sampling, namely purposive, convenience and snowball methods. At the Kgoši Mampuru II centre, 21 offenders and seven officials were interviewed, while 15 offenders and six officials were interviewed at Johannesburg. In total, 36 offenders and 13 officials, including the two heads, were interviewed from both centres. The researchers chose theories on the sociology of corrections, specifically the deprivation and importation models, due to their suitability to explain the phenomenon under investigation. This study found that: (1) pseudo-families are structures or relationships that resemble families in general society; and (2) female offenders are motivated to join pseudo-families due to the need for protection, the need for belonging and comfort, and for smuggling contraband.

Rabiʿa Balkhi was a princess and poet who, according to medieval accounts, flourished in 10th-century Balkh. She gained wide popularity in 20th-century Afghanistan, where she has been the subject of books, poems, and movies. This article recounts the story of her grave's discovery in the center of Balkh's town park in the 1960s, the emergence of a shrine around it, and its integration with Balkh's landscape of antiquity. Drawing on parallels from across the Muslim world, I argue that Rabiʿa's shrine emerged through a dialogue between state officials and local forms of placemaking. But although initially motivated by nationalist sentiment, the Afghan state lost its ability to define Rabiʿa's life on nationalist terms. As Afghanistan fragmented through war, her shrine survived as a space where her life was constantly reinterpreted and where disputed visions over the nation's past and future played out.

Recent work on white women in Jamaica has shown that they were active participants in Jamaica’s slave economy. This article adds to this recent literature through an innovative use of social network analysis (SNA) to examine the credit networks in which women operated in the thriving eighteenth-century British Atlantic town of Kingston, Jamaica. In particular, it uses closeness and centrality measures to quantify the distinctive role that white women had in local credit networks. These were different from those of men involved in transatlantic trade, but were vital in facilitating female access to credit enabling domestic retail trade. White female traders in particular facilitated female access to credit networks, acting as significant conduits of money and information in ways that were crucial to the local economy. Their connectedness within trade networks increased over time, despite their greater exposure than larger traders to economic shocks. We therefore demonstrate that white women were active protagonists in the developing economy of eighteenth-century Jamaica.

This article examines the gacaca trials of women accused of perpetrating the Rwandan genocide, asking whether and how ideas about their gender impacted their defences, testimonies and experiences as defendants. It uses court reports of the trials of 91 accused women; a set of sources that provides novel insights into the role of gender in an African transitional justice system. These sources reveal that ideas about gender – particularly female peacefulness and passivity – were commonly invoked by both accused women and wider trial participants. These gendered ideas not only helped women to achieve acquittals, but they also contributed to the Rwandan state's construction of a ‘truth’ narrative that ordinary Rwandan women are not capable of genocide violence. Additionally, women's trials reveal a further function of the gacaca process: as a political tool that made moral judgements about contemporary Rwandan women's domestic roles and place within the household.

Sexual violence against women is commonly justified in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) despite international commitments to halt it. This study investigated the association between healthcare decision-making capacity and the justification of sexual violence among women in SSA. We used current datasets of 30 sub-Saharan African countries published between January 2010 and December 2018. The sample included 259,885 women who were in sexual unions. We extracted and analysed the data with Stata version 14. Chi-square test and multilevel logistic regression models were used to analyse the data. Results for the regression analysis were presented as adjusted odds ratios (AOR) with their corresponding 95% confidence intervals (CIs). The results showed that women who decided on their healthcare alone had lower odds [AOR=0.93; CI=0.91–0.96] of justifying sexual violence compared to those who were not deciding alone. We also found that women aged 45-49 [AOR=0.85; CI=0.82-0.89], those with higher education [AOR=0.26; CI=0.24-0.29], cohabiting women (AOR=0.82, CI=0.80-0.85], richest women [AOR= 0.58; CI=0.56-0.60], women living in urban areas [AOR=0.74; CI=0.73-0.76], and Christians [AOR=0.52; CI=0.51-0.54] had lower odds of justifying wife beating if a woman refuses to have sex with her partner. On the contrary, women who engaged in agriculture had higher odds of justifying sexual violence than those who were not working [AOR=1.07; CI=1.04-1.09]. Groups that should be prioritised with anti-sexual violence initiatives are the poor, rural residents, and young women. It is also vital to institute policies and interventions focused on educating men about women’s right to make decisions, and why partner violence is unjust and intolerable.