#early-marriage

#early-marriage

We are now realising we deserve more and for me it's teaching women what to say so they get taken seriously. Women on the whole - I wasn't - aren't very good at standing up for ourselves.

Abida's world is a strip of cracked pavement along a busy four-lane road, surrounded by plastic-sheet shelters and dozens of other families who live there without walls or doors.

Helena describes violence against women as an 'epidemic'. Ministers have described a 'national emergency' and the UK government has pledged to halve violence against women and girls within a decade. To get a deeper, more human understanding of the situation, we tracked news reports throughout 2025 from across the UK of women or girls who had been potentially killed by men or boys.

I was taken to hospital chained to an officer with handcuffs but assumed they would be removed at the entrance to the hospital. I was so shocked when the cuffs weren't removed. When I told the prison guards who had brought me to hospital about what the Birth Companions booklet said, they replied: We don't know what that book is, we're not going to abide by it.

The hardship doesn't end with the protection order and the court decisions. You have to rebuild your life from scratch. Thanks to the support and protection system in place in Albania, Laureta received temporary financial assistance and found work as a hairdresser, demonstrating both the challenges survivors face and the resources available to help them move forward.

For more than 60 years, contraception has been almost exclusively a women's responsibility. Today, women have more than 14 modern contraceptive options, while men have just two: condoms and vasectomies. That imbalance has pushed women to shoulder physical side effects, financial burden, medical risks, and the career impact of family planning-costs that have been accepted as the "status quo" for far too long.

Then we circled back to the question that won't leave us alone. Do we bring a second child into this world, or do we stop at one? It's the most intimate climate question I've ever faced. Not a reusable bag choice. Not a diet tweak. A lifelong decision that will shape our home, our time, and yes, our footprint. I'm not alone in wrestling with this.

On the veranda of her family's home, with her laptop balanced on a mud slab built into the wall, Monsumi Murmu works from one of the few places where the mobile signal holds. The familiar sounds of domestic life come from inside the house: clinking utensils, footsteps, voices. On her screen a very different scene plays: a woman is pinned down by a group of men, the camera shakes, there is shouting and the sound of breathing.

We'd been working together for years to make my medication regimen-treatment for schizoaffective disorder-safe for potential pregnancy. Under her care, I was tapering off an antidepressant known to cause respiratory distress and hypertension in a newborn. I'd been experiencing wild mood swings, even suicidal thoughts. My beloved doctor's eyes were sad. "I'm saying no to a pregnancy, Meg." Even in the moment, I understood her priority as a physician was to keep me safe. Still, part of me hated her.

In the displacement camps of Ad-Damazin in southeastern Sudan's Blue Nile State, the war is reshaping social norms and introducing new realities that are forcing Sudanese women into manual labour to survive. Rasha is a displaced mother. She has ignored old boundaries and perceptions of what a man's work is and started working as a woodcutter to feed her children. Carpentry is hard, but the axe has become an extension of my hand, Rasha told Al Jazeera Arabic.

I really feel like the cultural norm around proposals is fundamentally silly and outdated. I wish more people would consider that women can propose too! It doesn't have to come from the male partner in heterosexual relationships. I asked my now-husband to marry me, and it was the best choice I've ever made. I think it's really interesting that this wasn't even mentioned in your advice-which goes to show how embedded this heteronormative idea about who gets to propose really is.

An Indian woman in the southern state of Kerala was arrested on Wednesday amid an investigation into the suicide of a man she accused of sexual misconduct in a viral video online. The case has evoked strong responses on both sides and a debate on the dangers of so-called "trial by social media" or by media more generally. Local police launched a case on Monday investigation possible abetment of suicide. The Kerala state Human Rights Commission also ordered a police probe into the incident.

Kiran's* husband was more than 10,000km away from the home she shared with her in-laws in a village in northern India. But despite the vast distance, he watched her constantly through cameras which beamed into a screen in his Brisbane home. He would say: I can always see what you do', she recalls through an interpreter. While her husband was visiting his family home in India in 2017, the cameras were installed in the house