NAIROBI—For the past week, every morning, Akonya Shimeseru wakes up in her single-room home that she shares with her two children in Ongata Rongai, a town on the outskirts of Nairobi. She makes tea, with sugar but no milk, and takes it with white bread. Then she sets out and roams for hours.

Shimeseru looks for work—washing clothes, manual labor, anything that might bring in a couple hundred Kenyan shillings ($1 to $2). After a long day of circling, she returns home and fixes dinner, which is always sukuma wiki and ugali, greens and maize. “People are afraid that if you’ve come from outside, you could be bringing in new problems,” she said one evening last week after one of her daily, futile walks. She and her children listen to the radio; no matter the hour, the news is always about the coronavirus.

Seven days ago, she worked as a cleaner—a domestic worker—before abruptly losing her job amid the global pandemic. Now, she doesn’t know how she’ll continue feeding her family.

But Shimeseru is hardly alone. Currently, the official number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Kenya is 184. Limited testing and test kits may mean the number is far higher. The public health measures being taken to curb the spread of the coronavirus—and the economic depression that accompanied them—have decimated the livelihoods of informal workers like Shimeseru who make up 83.6 percent of Kenya’s total workforce, according to the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics.

“People are doing what they need to do to survive, but this [often] means they’re not safe,” explained Jacqueline Wamai, a legal advisor at Kudheiha, a trade union that advocates for the Kenyan domestic workers’ rights. “It’s everybody for themselves right now.”

15 million informal workers

The issue isn’t unique to Kenya. Across the African continent, informal work is the main source of employment, accounting for 85.8 percent. (The figure stands at 40 percent across the Americas.) And across East Africa, women make up the majority of the share of informal employment in total (92.8 percent), while men aren’t too far behind (74.8 percent), according to the International Labour Organization (ILO). The reasons why informal employment so dominates in Africa, writes Ahmadou Aly Mbaye, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, lie on both the supply and demand sides: A growing, young population faces a dearth of training and employment opportunities, while at the same time commodities-based industries—such as agriculture, mining, and oil—do little to cultivate high-quality formal employment.

Kenya’s informal sector employs nearly 15 million Kenyans, according to 2018 estimates, compared to the 2.9 million who work in the formal sector. These 15 million Kenyans are the domestic workers, cleaners, beauticians, mechanics, and street vendors, among many more, who prop up the country, and yet they have few legal protections—no unemployment benefits, safety regulations, or social security.

Those vulnerabilities have been brutally exposed by the pandemic. Kenya confirmed its first positive case of the new coronavirus on March 13. Days later, the government shut down schools, banned religious gatherings, and suspended most international flights. Kenyan citizens and residents entering the country are required to quarantine in government-designated facilities at their own cost. The government also asked businesses to allow staff to work from home, “with the exception of employees working in critical or essential services.”

Around the country, open-air markets, where most people buy their food, are increasingly being closed by the government to stop the spread of the coronavirus, leaving hundreds of thousands of Kenyans jobless. Others are going to work in defiance of government orders, despite the risk to public health and their own, because they feel they have no choice.

Women trapped in the most vulnerable segments

While the number of Kenyans working in the informal sector is high, it is women who are usually trapped in the most vulnerable segments, such as cleaning and street selling, said Frédéric Lapeyre, a senior coordinator at the ILO. “They will suffer the most,” he said.

If the loss of income wasn’t enough, social distancing measures also compound costs for the poor who work in the informal sector. For example, once matatus—privately operated minibuses that are the closest thing in Kenya to public transportation—were ordered to only fill half of their seats to maintain distance between passengers, operators doubled the fares.

Two-thirds of the capital’s residents live in informal settlements, where poverty, cramped conditions, and billowing fumes from charcoal fires make life hard. Social distancing measures have only compounded this. Without public piped water, residents pay a premium for water in a market controlled by cartels. Many live hand to mouth, without adequate safety nets or significant savings. They lack disposable cash, cannot stockpile food, and need a sustained income to meet basic needs.

Even though domestic workers are viewed as informal workers, says the legal advisor Wamai, they’re entitled to the same labor rights as other workers, such as getting paid a minimum wage, approximately $130 a month in a major city—but many aren’t. And while, in theory, employers and employees should mutually agree to “unpaid leave,” imbalanced power dynamics often means this isn’t the case.

When 14-year-old Wounaba first found out that she was pregnant, she was excited—until the fear kicked in. For as long as she could remember, her family of 12 had struggled to find enough food.

She asked for help. UNICEF had been visiting her village—a dusty community 16 hours’ drive east of Guinea’s capital, Conakry—for more than five years. In cyan blue T-shirts, its local volunteers led her to a medical clinic and assessed her height and weight. When her son was born later that year, doctors placed him on the scales as well, and as he grew they continued to check in: wrapping both mother and child in a measuring tape and handing over sachets of macronutrient-enriched peanut paste as the child’s weight began to drop.

In the meantime, Wounaba learned she was pregnant again. As with millions of teenage girls around the world, her role in ending malnutrition within her community hadn’t just been underestimated: It had gone entirely overlooked.

The global conversation around malnutrition is unifying and emotive: Pictures of children with protruding stomachs and razor-sharp ribs tug on the most hardened policymaker’s heartstrings and bring funders together. But experts also say the strategies in play are well worn and resistant to change, despite a clear need for innovation. One of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals set out by the United Nations is to attain “Zero Hunger” by 2030, but only 40 countries worldwide are on track to eliminate chronic child malnutrition in the next 10 years. Instead, rates of undernourishment are on the rise in South America and Africa, while progress made in Asia has led researchers to fear a swing in the opposite direction: One 2019 study predicts nearly two-thirds of the South and Southeast Asian population will be overweight or obese within 10 years.

Teenage mothers and their children: the most at risk from malnutrition

Those most at risk from malnutrition are teenage mothers and their children. Multiple studies have shown that because pregnant teenagers are still growing, their nutritional needs are larger—and if they go unmet, it can affect not only their own development but also that of their unborn child.

According to the World Health Organization, babies born to teenage mothers are twice as likely to be stillborn or die within the first month as children with parents over the age of 20. Teenage mothers are 20 percent more likely to experience problems while breastfeeding. In 2019, the International Food Policy Research Institute published a study on 60,000 first-time mothers in India that found children born to teenage mothers were smaller than those with adult parents, and had a lower height-to-weight ratio on average, too. Meanwhile, the 2018 Global Nutrition Report revealed there isn’t a single country in the world that’s on track to reduce rates of anemia in girls of reproductive age.

If malnutrition is cyclic—a bleak inheritance of hunger passed down from mother to baby from one generation to the next—then teenage pregnancy is the axle upon which the wheel spins. Yet international aid organizations consistently fail to take the specific needs of adolescent girls like Wounaba into account when working to reduce rates of maternal malnutrition and child undernutrition, and the lack of targeted support for teenage girls is impacting the lives of millions of children around the world.

Last year, the U.S. Agency for International Development invested more than $67 million in supporting adults and children who showed tape-measurable signs of undernourishment and to provide a range of assistance and training for international communities in times of crisis.

In Southeast Asia, a focus was placed on education and nutritional awareness. Locally based nonprofit organizations such as Mith Samlanh, a Cambodian organization that aims to support street children and their families, developed board games for young mothers, using brightly colored cardboard vegetables to teach them about which foods make up a balanced diet, while UNICEF has worked to develop a fish-based food supplement to appeal to local tastes. In West and Central Africa, education targeted at women and girls often takes the form of large-scale gatherings and traditional songs, working with age-old folklore to encourage girls to breastfeed their babies and seek professional help if they can’t. In Peru, the World Food Program has supported the development of an app that enables users to find out how much fruit and vegetables cost at local wholesale markets, in the hope that it will dissuade them from buying fast food instead.

Failing to address malnutrition’s root cause

But while these temporary projects may succeed in chipping away at the symptoms, they fail to address its root cause. To end child malnutrition, intervention must go further than laminated pictures of vegetables and the mass distribution of packets of Plumpy’nut peanut paste. Teenage girls need help avoiding underage marriage, staying in school (or going back to school after giving birth), and planning and preventing future pregnancies—none of which are currently included as part of the U.N.’s ongoing Zero Hunger challenge.

“I didn’t want two children this young, but I didn’t have a choice.”

For Wounaba, it’s a level of inaction that continues to cost her dearly. Now 16 years old, she has two sons who are clinically underweight. Both are frequently sick and have to be hospitalized. “I am afraid my children are suffering like I have suffered,” she told me, sitting outside the circular mudbrick hut she shares with her sister and two sons. She’ll move back in with her husband when her youngest son turns six months old. “I have no milk in my breasts and no food to feed them. I didn’t want two children this young, but I didn’t have a choice.”

In part, the failure by some nongovernmental organizations to take female empowerment into account when tackling malnutrition is little short of a telling oversight—raising questions both around who designs the programs and how sustainable they really hope their projects will be.

But those working in the sector also acknowledge another, more pressing roadblock: government funding and the stranglehold that the current U.S. administration has placed on women and girls’ reproductive services around the world. U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2017 reinstatement of the Mexico City policy—commonly known among critics as the “global gag rule”—has not only stopped all federal funding for nongovernmental organizations that provide abortion services, counseling, or abortion advocacy; it has also created an atmosphere of fear among other organizations, as they opt to give all family planning-related activities a wide berth in case their already-stretched budgets face cuts.

“There are more malnourished children, but their mothers are children too.”

Those in Cambodia say the situation is reaching a crisis point. Rates of teenage pregnancy across the Southeast Asian nation have nearly doubled since 2010. Malnutrition is also on the rise. U.N. statistics show approximately 80 percent of Cambodian children aged between 6 months and 8 months old are failing to receive the “minimum acceptable daily diet,” while 45 percent of children under the age of 5 in rural communities are growing up to be moderately or severely stunted.

“There are more malnourished children, but their mothers are children too,” said Nam Savshethao, a senior nurse at Dak Dam General Hospital on Cambodia’s eastern border, adding that most of the first-time mothers who she met in the district were aged between 13 and 17 years old. “We teach them how to breastfeed, and what to do if they can’t, which is common because they’re very young,” she said. “I think we should be telling them more about how to avoid having babies in the first place.”

Nurses at Marie Stopes International reproductive health clinics in both Siem Reap and Phnom Penh agreed. They said they were witnessing an uptick in the number of girls who were seeking abortions specifically because they were worried they wouldn’t be able to afford to feed a child.

Education around contraceptives across the country is too low, Marie Stopes’s Cambodia country director Amy Williamson told me in an interview in 2018. Were the clinics to close, she estimated there would be thousands of girls in Cambodia who would be forced to raise their children without enough food. Organizations designed to combat malnutrition across the country still seem unprepared for the coming challenges.

It’s a complacency that’s playing out around the world, and teenage mothers and their children are the ones suffering. In Guinea, Wounaba said she worried daily about returning to her husband and becoming pregnant for a third time. She can recite the signs of malnutrition by rote, she said, but she hasn’t heard of contraception and she never went to school. Her life might have been different if she had. “I would have liked to be a doctor,” she said. “If I had children when I was older, I think I would at least be able to afford rice.”

When SP le Roux began to think about the sexual violence epidemic in his home country of South Africa, he put his background as an electrical engineer and inventor to work. The first invention le Roux ever made was a collar that learns the normal behaviors of endangered rhinoceroses and alerts anti-poaching officials when it detects signs of stress. It was designed to give endangered rhinoceroses a way to fight back against the poachers that threaten their survival.

Could the same technology be repurposed to protect women, too? With that mission in mind, le Roux designed high-tech underwear for women that, he hopes, can detect distress—attempts to rip the garment off, for instance—and automatically alert law enforcement.

The invention may seem odd, but the inventor represents an increasingly common trend: Le Roux is just one of many men across the continent who have turned their attention to violence against women. It’s in direct response to a problem that is growing so large as to be undeniable: South African police recorded an average of 114 rapes each day between April 2018 and this March—a frightening increase from previous years.

In Uganda, police officers and boda (motorcycle taxi) drivers have teamed up to form “safe ride,” a campaign to end violence against women in Kampala’s transport sector. And in October, more than a thousand police officers—mostly male—took to the streets of Pretoria, South Africa, to protest the spike in violence against women, holding signs with messages such as: “When you abuse a woman, you stop being a man.”

The conversation about engaging men and boys in the fight for gender equality got global attention in 2014, when the United Nations launched its He for She campaign in New York. But African activists say the strategy shift is particularly important close to home.

“In African contexts, there are cultural issues at play—men don’t want to be seen as ‘weak people,’” said Elias Muindi, a program officer for the Kenya MenEngage Alliance.

After Muindi’s older sister was murdered by her husband in 1997, Muindi co-founded the Margaret Wanzuu Foundation to fight gender-based violence. Today, Muindi says, his foundation is one of the 16 organizations that make up the Kenya branch of the MenEngage Alliance, a global network that works with men and boys for gender quality. “When men talk to other men, they can open up and share issues affecting them,” he said.

According to Muindi, economic hardship is one of the issues that most often affects men who are at risk for committing acts of gender-based violence. Sometimes giving basic financial support—a small business loan or a few household staples—to men and families in need, Muindi said, is all it takes to decrease the risk of violence. What Muindi outlined is supported by evidence: This year, researchers from the National Bureau of Economic Research released a paper analyzing the effects of unconditional cash transfers on households in western Kenya. One year after the cash transfer, researchers found, rates of physical and sexual violence in study households had fallen dramatically: When women received the money, rates of beatings fell by 73 percent. But when the men received the money, rates of beatings fell by a staggering 82 percent.

“It’s a new era, it’s a new strategy,” Muindi said. “We’re not bashing men—we engage men in a positive way. We affirm that men and boys can change and can create change.”

Increasingly, men around the world agree with this philosophy. Earlier this year, a study by British market research company Ipsos MORI, in collaboration with the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London, found that a majority of men worldwide (three in five, or 61 percent), agreed that gender equality won’t be possible unless “men take actions to support women’s rights.”

But elevating male voices in the fight for gender equality is tricky.

Even the best intentions can backfire, reinforcing gender norms in which men’s perspectives are disproportionately valued. In Zambia, a report in Pacific Standard found, “bringing together men to talk about sexual violence had the unintentional impact of granting participants a sense of authority — and the effects were damning. The men, who reinforced their patriarchal attitudes about women as a result of these male-only spaces, felt encouraged to tell women how they should act, dress, and behave to avoid rape.”

There are other risks, too. Izeduwa Derex-Briggs, UN Women’s regional director for eastern and southern Africa, said the shift toward including men in the fight for gender equality has both pros and cons. “The majority of perpetrators [of violence against women] are men, and therefore men should be part of the solution,” Derex-Briggs said. “And men working for women has attracted interest from donors. But—and there is no data to validate this—I’ve found that women-led and women-owned NGOs are not getting as many resources as they did before. Now, those resources are going to NGOs owned by men. In some cases, those men used to work for women-led NGOs. Now they’ve started their own organizations, and they’re getting the grant money instead.” (Derex-Briggs said she is not aware of any watchdog groups that track donations to nongovernmental organizations on the basis of sex.)

And there’s traditional resistance. In 2007, then-Kenyan Member of Parliament Njoki Ndungu described the challenge of convincing male-dominated parliaments to take women’s issues seriously: “The motion to amend the sexual violence act had been introduced several times since independence and failed,” said Ndungu, who now serves on the Kenyan Supreme Court. “Each time, it was seen by the male members of parliament as giving too much power to women.” Kenya’s anti-sexual violence law only passed after certain sections, such as the one that would have criminalized spousal rape, were removed.

But despite these problems, most African gender equality activists agree that any sustainable solution to gender-based violence will involve men.

“Before, we used to focus on the victims without really resolving the problem,” said Aloys Mahwa, the country director for the Living Peace Institute, an NGO that targets male ex-combatants in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “It’s strong capital to use men to speak to other men. When we target men, we target the root cause of violence.”

First Papiya was forced into marriage at 12 years old. Then she was trafficked into sexual slavery.

Her story isn’t unusual. It’s echoed by tens of thousands of girls in Bangladesh, highlighting a link between child marriage and sex trafficking that should be impossible to ignore. The country with the highest rate of marriage involving girls under the age of 15 in the world, and where 150,000 to 200,000 children and young women have been trafficked into prostitution, the two forms of abuse are tightly intertwined. Traffickers prey on the vulnerable, and child marriage is what makes girls like Papiya vulnerable in the first place.

But international donors, policymakers, and even the U.S. State Department have failed to recognize this chain of exploitation, and that’s slowing down efforts to address it.

Since March 2017, I have interviewed over 400 women trapped behind the walls of four brothels in Bangladesh, in an investigation that was funded by the nonprofit organization Girls Not Brides. Marriage is illegal for girls under the age of 18 (and boys under 21) in Bangladesh under the 1929 Child Marriage Restraint Act (which was updated in 2017), although the law allows girls under 18 to marry under “special circumstances”—without establishing a minimum age limit, or clarifying what those circumstances must be. Half of the girls I spoke with told me that they had been married before the age of 18 and believed they had been trafficked into sexual slavery as a direct result.

Yet for all the obvious overlap, trafficking and child marriage in Bangladesh are viewed independently of one another by the U.S. State Department —and initiatives to end both are kept separate as a result. While child marriage is largely approached by nonprofit organizations through a lens of legislative lobbying and education as prevention, counter-trafficking efforts center on rescue, rehabilitation, and prosecution. Projects that work to prevent trafficking focus on unmarried girls who are still in school.

Approximately 52 percent of girls in Bangladesh are lost in the chasm between child marriage prevention and trafficking rehabilitation: coerced into marriage as children and left without the support they need to protect themselves and safely break out.

Papiya was still trapped in a brothel in the village of Kandipara when I first met her in March 2017. She told me how she fled her in-laws’ house barefoot in the middle of the night, leaving her sandals by the door so that slap of their soles on the stairs didn’t wake her 22-year-old husband. As the sun rose, she spotted a rickshaw driver sleeping by the side of the road and begged him for help. He agreed with a smile, she remembered. Then he drove Papiya to a brothel and sold her for more money than he’d usually make in a month.

Now 17, Papiya has been trapped in one of Bangladesh’s 11 government-registered, legal brothel villages ever since. Each one enslaves up to 3,000 women and underage girls in sexual servitude that can see them raped up to 11 or 12 times a day. Abdulla al-Mamun, the director of child protection and child rights governance at Save the Children International, says he receives reports of four or five children being trafficked to the country’s largest brothel every month.

Reporting from inside these brothels never gets easier. As lines of men jostle through the entry gates and policemen patrol the brothel streets for signs of drugs or disorder, Papiya and her friends lie on their beds in windowless metal cells and self-harm in a last-ditch attempt at temporary escape.

None of the girls came here consensually. For some, it was their husbands who sold them to the brothels—each man opting to free himself from the constraining role of babysitter in a marriage in which his child wife might feasibly sleep with a teddy bear, and earning about 300,000 taka, $3,500, in the process. But the majority of the girls shared the same story: Like Papiya, they also refused to accept the life of sexual violence and abuse that they found themselves forced into in the name of marriage, and they were willing to risk their lives to escape it.

Despite such widespread evidence of child marriage as a precursor to sex trafficking, the connection is consistently overlooked.

A few were picked up by traffickers as they attempted to make their way home. Others, like Rupa, Sony, Jinuk, crossed sunken rice fields and railway lines, only to find themselves rejected by their families for the social shame that accompanies a daughter who flees a life of exploitation. Within days, alone at a bus stop or a train station, each girl was approached by a man or woman proffering help and a place to stay for the night. They were drugged and sold to the brothel before they could understand what was going on.

Despite such widespread evidence of child marriage as a precursor to sex trafficking, the connection is consistently overlooked. The Bangladesh National Women Lawyers Association has been working to provide legal assistance and shelter to abused women across Bangladesh since 1979, but staff say they have found themselves struggling to make international donors understand the crossover between underage marriage and modern-day slavery. Funding for their anti-trafficking work has increased since 2017, but little support comes for cases that involve domestic violence or girls who need to flee their marriage.

“It is hard to make our donors see that these problems are all linked,” said Towhida Khondker, the director of the lawyers association. “They are all forms of violence, and one can quickly lead to another.”

One agency with the influence to effect change is the U.S. State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. Were they to take child marriage into consideration when assessing human trafficking in Bangladesh, local nonprofit organizations believe countertrafficking initiatives would likely be expanded to target the country’s most defenseless demographic: underage brides.

Since 2001, the United states has purported to hold foreign—often low- and middle-income—countries accountable for failing to adequately implement countertrafficking measures set out by the U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act, as established in 2000. It does so through the means of the Trafficking In Persons (TIP) Report—a controversial but vastly influential lengthy annual assessment of the response to trafficking in 187 countries, ranking them across four tiers: Tier 1 being the most successful at countertrafficking efforts, followed by Tier 2, Tier 2 Watch List, and finally Tier 3.

Countries considered not to be making sufficient efforts to combat trafficking are classified within Tier 3 and are subject to sanctions on U.S. aid to their governments, which are theoretically restricted to activities that are unrelated to human trafficking and its root causes. The U.S. State Department is then required by law to work with them to develop a more effective countertrafficking strategy going forward.

This year’s report, released in June, saw 21 countries fall within Tier 3, including China, Belarus and South Sudan. For the third year in a row, Bangladesh was assigned Tier 2 Watch List status—a ranking explained in part by researchers as a repercussion of the sudden influx of over a million Rohingya refugees since 2016, and accompanied by 13 recommendations for improvement.

The State Department is clearly aware of the implications that early marriage can have on a girl’s safety.

In 18 years of research and assessment, there has never been any mention of child marriage in Bangladesh’s TIP profile. Yet the State Department is clearly aware of the implications that early marriage can have on a girl’s safety: In this year’s report, they referenced child marriage as a contributing factor to girls’ vulnerability to sexual exploitation and trafficking in both Syria and Iraq.

Human rights advocates say that if the State Department viewed child marriage in Bangladesh as a form of trafficking or an enabler of trafficking, then it’s possible that the country would have received different recommendations, or even a different grade. Were that the case, the incentives for the Bangladeshi government to end child marriage and develop comprehensive child protection legislation would be considerable.

“The Bangladeshi government takes the TIP report very seriously,” said Liesbeth Zonneveld, the chief of Winrock International’s Counter Trafficking-In-Persons Project, adding that both Bangladesh’s secretary of home Affairs and foreign secretary have already shown a demonstrable commitment to implementing the State Department’s 2019 recommendations. Zonneveld doesn’t know why the United States refuses to consider child marriage as a form of trafficking and to include it in the TIP report accordingly. “The U.S. says there are 25 million global victims of human trafficking, whereas most of us would include forced marriage in that and say there are 40 million,” she said.

Funding for programs that address child marriage as a root cause of trafficking would also be easier to access, said Talinay Strehl, the program manager for the Dutch anti-trafficking nonprofit Free a Girl. “Our donors respect the information included in the TIP Report,” she said. “If we were able to show them that child marriage was referenced, it would probably be easier to get financial support for prevention projects that work with victims of child marriage.” Free a Girl does not currently run any anti-trafficking projects that target girls forced into early marriage, but Strehl acknowledges that they’re a high-risk demographic. “Right now, we just don’t have the resources,” she said.

Until the U.S. State Department acknowledges the role of child marriage in rates of trafficking in Bangladesh, and organizations on the ground are able to incorporate the victims of child marriage into their countertrafficking efforts, those working with trafficking survivors say girls growing up across Bangladesh will remain trapped at an alarming impasse: stay with your husband and endure sexual violence in the name of marriage, or run away and risk being sold into sexual slavery without hope of escape.

Since taking office in 2017, the Trump administration has claimed that its human rights agenda centers on human trafficking. “My Administration continues to work to drive out the darkness human traffickers cast upon our world,” President Donald Trump wrote in a 2017 executive order declaring January 2018 National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month. In a Washington Post op-ed, Ivanka Trump echoed her father’s claims that human trafficking was one of the government’s top priorities. “President Abraham Lincoln and the abolitionist movement gave America a unique inheritance: a principled commitment to fight slavery in all its pernicious forms,” she wrote. “This administration is continuing the fight to end modern slavery and using every tool at its disposal to achieve that critical goal.”

But when it comes to identifying the reality of trafficking inside the United States and fighting it, these claims are contradicted by many of the administration’s policies and much of its rhetoric. In many key ways, the Trump administration’s approach to trafficking in the United States has made matters worse for the most vulnerable communities. Anti-trafficking experts now worry that the government, by failing to recognize its failings, could do lasting damage to what has traditionally been considered the country’s top human rights report, the latest edition of which was released Thursday.

The State Department’s annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report is a collaboration between a designated office in Washington and local U.S. embassies that evaluates government responses to trafficking around the world. It provides a detailed narrative and assigns a tier ranking to governments. (Tier 1 is the highest and Tier 3 the lowest, possibly incurring sanctions.) Over the years, the TIP Report has been seen to surpass the International Religious Freedom Report and the general human rights report in impact and authority. “It’s the power of comparison that the report provides that is so effective,” said Judith Kelley, a professor at Duke University and the author of Scorecard Diplomacy: Grading States to Influence Their Reputation and Behavior. “Local embassies are very engaged leading up to its publication.”

The report has been published since 2001, after the Trafficking Victims Prevention Act (TVPA) was passed by Congress in 2000 and became the gold standard of anti-trafficking legislation. The United States started ranking itself during President Barack Obama’s administration to lend more credibility to the report. “Secretary [of State Hillary] Clinton said rightfully if we’re going to point the finger around the world, we need to point at ourselves, too,” said Alison Friedman, then the TIP office deputy director. The office consulted with nongovernmental organizations and legislators; assessed funding, victim services, and law enforcement response; and analyzed methods of data collection and prevention. In the end, the United States received a Tier 1 ranking, and it has never since been downgraded.

 This year’s report has just been published. Like years prior, it contains some rankings that are sure to make headlines. Denmark, Germany, and Italy have been downgraded to Tier 2 countries, while Saudi Arabia, in spite of protests from experts and news reports (and in spite of a Tier 3 ranking), was left off the report’s list of countries that exploit child soldiers. The Philippines maintained its controversial Tier 1 ranking.

 Perhaps unsurprisingly, the United States received a Tier 1 ranking in this year’s report. But there is ample evidence that, like Italy and Germany, the country should have been downgraded. Over the past six months, I have closely reported on the impact that the Trump administration has had on trafficking in the United States. Some of the policy changes appear small—minor tweaks to grant funding or longer wait times for visa applications—and are often weighed against more positive steps, like an increase in general funding for victims services. But, taken together, these seemingly small changes amount to a systematic dismantling of services for America’s most vulnerable communities, particularly noncitizen victims.

Five different times, Shana Grice reported her ex-boyfriend to the police in Sussex, England. The 19-year-old asked for help when he followed her home and when he used a stolen key to break into her house while she was sleeping. He put a tracker in her car and repeatedly called her breathing heavily.

But the police didn’t help—just as they ignored the 13 other women who had previously tried to report him for stalking. In Grice’s case, they fined her 90 pounds ($115) for “wasting police time.” So when her ex-boyfriend, Michael Lane, 27, drove a knife through Grice’s neck and set her bedroom on fire in August 2016, there was no one around to help.

Crimes against women are notoriously underreported in the United Kingdom and around the world—particularly when they’re of a sexual nature. Now, one police unit in England is trying to address this problem, and it’s a surprisingly bureaucratic response to a very violent problem: The unit is changing how the complaints are classified as they come in, and early research indicates it may be having effective results.

Underreporting by women happens around the world. In the United States, a staggering 77 percent of rapes and sexual assaults are never reported to the police, according to the 2017 National Crime Victimization Survey. It’s even worse in the United Kingdom, where the Office for National Statistics reports that more than 80 percent of sexual assaults go unreported. Even when they are reported, it hardly matters: Of the 57,600 rapes that were reported in 2018 in the U.K., only 2,822 of those resulted in a criminal charge, according to Nick Martin in the Crown Prosecution Service press office.

Conventional thinking has long been that women don’t report out of shame or stigma. But Grice’s murder highlights another reason: Nothing happens. Too often, when a woman does approach police to report threats or crimes, she gets ignored, belittled, fined, or worse—she aggravates her stalker. “It boils down to the fact that many women do not trust in the police and courts to provide justice after sexual violence,” said Rebecca Hitchen, the campaign manager for the U.K.-based End Violence Against Women Coalition.

That lack of trust was already being recognized as the main problem by police officers in Nottinghamshire, a former coal mining county of about 1 million people in the East Midlands region of England. In 2016, they launched a novel experiment: The police officers decided to record incidents of misogynistic behavior not just as crimes but as hate crimes.

The U.K. already had hate crime legislation, but it doesn’t include women as a protected category—despite the fact that attacks targeting women on the basis of their sex are at least as common as other forms of targeted attacks, according to the latest Crime Survey for England and Wales. Women who are black, Muslim, or Jewish are particularly targeted. Yet Britain’s hate crime legislation only defends people attacked due to race, sexual orientation, transgender identity, disability status, or religion.

The Nottinghamshire Police didn’t have the authority to change national hate crime law or to criminalize anything that wasn’t already a crime, such as catcalling. But they did have the power to classify those routine acts of misogyny—which affect a reported 93.7 percent of Nottinghamshire women—as “hate crimes” for internal recording purposes. And that reclassification has allowed them to keep data.

It turns out data can be pretty powerful. As word of the new policy spread, more women began to report acts of low-level misogyny—the day-to-day sexual harassment, catcalling, unwanted attention, and stalking that had terrorized Grice but barely register as crimes for most people, let alone for most police departments. “It’s those hostile actions and behaviors that, for whatever reason, have not risen to the level of being considered worth punishing that set the tone for society,” said Kristen Houser, the chief public affairs officer for the U.S.-based National Sexual Violence Resource Center. “[They’re] like scaffolding for the more egregious crimes.”

Since then, three other English counties have followed Nottinghamshire’s lead and classified misogyny as a hate crime (defined as “incidents against women that are motivated by the attitude of men towards women and includes behaviour targeted at women by men simply because they are women”) in their records, too.

Early research indicates that the experiment is working: A study for the Nottingham Women’s Centre found that 174 Nottinghamshire women had reported a misogyny hate crime between 2016 and 2018, up from zero before the policy was introduced. An online survey of Nottinghamshire residents found that 87 percent said the experiment was “a good idea.”

“It has increased women’s confidence in the police generally,” said Helen Voce, the CEO of the Nottingham Women’s Centre. “And even when they didn’t feel the need to actually go to the police to make a report, women have felt empowered to challenge instances of sexual harassment and verbal abuse themselves. The police saying, ‘This is not acceptable behavior,’ has empowered women to fight back.”

Now activists in the U.K. are calling for the misogyny hate crime policy to be rolled out nationally—not just for internal police records but for prosecution and sentencing purposes, too. (According to the U.K. Criminal Justice Act of 2003, a judge can impose a harsher sentence when an offense is classified as a hate crime.) Mark Khan, the lead on hate crime for the North Yorkshire Police, which started recording acts of misogyny as hate crimes in 2017, would like to see the policy adopted nationally. “There’s a lot to be done to build the confidence of women, and minority groups, in the police,” he said. “That was one of [the policy’s] purposes: to show that we take crimes against women seriously, as we do all hate crimes.”

The campaign has provoked the predictable list of free speech-related fears. “[L]ads could be dragged before courts and face serious sentences if they whistle at a woman,” worried one article in the Daily Star. But advocates say those fears are misplaced: A national misogyny hate crime policy would not criminalize anything that isn’t already illegal, such as catcalling. Noncriminal acts of misogyny would be recorded as “hate incidents,” while acts of criminal misogyny would be recorded and prosecuted as “hate crimes.” Khan said recording these low-level incidents of misogyny provides valuable data to the police, since verbal abuse often escalates to physical attacks.

The British campaign is part of a global trend. Worldwide, law enforcement is cracking down on misogynist harassment in an effort to address underreporting. In the nine months since France passed its new anti-catcalling law, almost 450 on-the-spot fines have already been handed out for degrading comments and offensive “sexual or sexist” behavior. Peru’s law, which was introduced in 2015, is even more strict: Men who harass women can face up to 12 years behind bars. Argentina and Nicaragua have also adopted their own versions of anti-misogyny laws, and Tanzania has introduced more than 400 police stations across the country with officers who are specifically trained to respond to women’s complaints.

But for some, the campaign to change the way police handle women’s reports is still too slow. Only last year, Michelle Savage, 32, contacted the Sussex Police—the same department that Grice had begged for help two years earlier—three times in 10 days to report fears that her ex-husband was “becoming more and more aggressive.” But history repeated itself, and six days later, Michelle was dead—shot, execution-style, along with her mother and dog.

Collecting accurate data may not immediately protect women, but it could be the weapon needed to convince people indisputably that stronger action must be taken. “Our daughter took her concerns to the police and instead of being protected was treated like a criminal,” Grice’s parents, Sharon Grice and Richard Green, told the Guardian. “It’s only right that the police make changes.”

Nearly three decades after the end of the Cold War, nuclear conflict remains the single greatest immediate threat to global security. The United States, Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, India, Israel, Pakistan, and North Korea are currently nuclear-armed states, and Iran, Libya, and Syria have pursued nuclear activities at various times. The nine nuclear-weapons states possess roughly 15,000 nuclear warheads; even a single nuclear warhead deployed on a major city could take hundreds of thousands of lives in seconds. This week, the AP reports on a deep chill in U.S.-Russian relations that is raising concerns of a potential armed conflict.

Yet despite the paramount importance of solid and stable nuclear policy to U.S. and global safety, one clear avenue for improvement has been roundly neglected: Getting more women in the field. Research shows that, absent women’s full participation in nuclear issues, the potential for risk-taking behavior is higher, negotiated agreements are less likely to hold, and innovative ideas are left unheard.

A study by the Royal Society showed that men in simulated wargames scenarios are more likely to demonstrate overconfidence than women, pointing to the benefits of ensuring women are fully represented in high-level policy roles. The same study showed that overconfidence in high-stakes conflict scenarios is more likely to lead to a decision to attack a perceived enemy. Research from the peacekeeping field also tells us that bilateral nuclear deals as well as global commitments like the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons would be stronger with women’s participation: When civil society groups, including women’s organizations, participate in peace negotiations, agreements are 64 percent less likely to fail.

Yet women represent only about a quarter of delegates in international nonproliferation talks; research shows a 30 percent threshold that changes group dynamics enough to lead to better outcomes. And at the 2015 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, 33 countries sent delegations with no female delegates or advisors, including Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, and Syria—states that are nuclear-armed or have pursued nuclear activities.

When the New America think tank interviewed 23 high-level U.S. female policymakers about their experiences in the nuclear field, they rejected the idea that women are more dovish and men more hawkish but reported that when women are present in policy discussions, collaboration was valued over competitiveness and innovation was more welcome. Research from the private sector supports New America’s findings: Gender diversity, when supported by gender-supportive norms and regulations within an industry, leads to better productivity and better exchange of diverse viewpoints.

Women have, in fact, played a role in nuclear security and policymaking dating back to the 1950s, when they were 20 percent of the CIA’s professional staff, according to New America. And some women are well known for their contributions, such as former Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman, who was awarded the National Security Medal by former President Barack Obama for her leading work to reach an agreement that would limit Iran’s nuclear activities.

Nevertheless, women continue to hold relatively few leadership positions in U.S. policymaking in the nuclear field, as shown in a graphic that was researched and developed by New America. Between 1970 and 2019, only 11 of the 68 people who held leadership positions in the Department of State were women, with just five of 36 at the Department of Energy and five of 63 at the Department of Defense. Two of the 21 national security advisors in that period were women.

These disparities may stem in part from the fact that men have always dominated media narratives about the nuclear field, thus discouraging female participation and leadership. In a Fuller Project survey of 20 recent articles that include the word “nuclear” in the New York Times, only 8 percent of all the people mentioned as sources or subjects were women. In an article for Inkstick that went viral among the nuclear security community, Matt Korda wrote that the lack of diversity in the field also pushes out younger professionals: “Nuclear policy organizations are typically too white, too male-dominated, too elitist, and too reliant on stale thinking; class and socioeconomic distinctions are rarely acknowledged.”

Research from Valerie Hudson of Texas A&M University and others also shows that women’s status, including their representation in decision-making, is the best predictor of state peacefulness.

Indisputably, women in nuclear policy face tremendous barriers, including lack of recognition. “There’s no shortage of women [in nuclear policy] … it’s fighting for the airspace to get included when there’s an interview to be done,” said Nancy Parrish, the executive director of Women’s Action for New Directions, an anti-nuclear activist organization that leverages women’s political power to advocate for peace.

Parrish leads the organization’s efforts on the U.S. No First Use campaign—with motions in 14 states to commit that the United States will not be the first to use nuclear weapons in the case of any international conflict—and its advocacy for other ways to curtail the Authorization for Use of Military Force passed after 9/11. The authorization gives the U.S. president power to use military force and even deploy nuclear weapons in the context of 9/11-related conflicts, without congressional approval.

Women have played a noted leading role in global peace movements, including protests against the use of nuclear weapons—for example, Dagmar Wilson, who mobilized half a million American women against nuclear testing in 1961 after radioactive isotopes were found in milk. Women have good reasons to mobilize: Bodies with uteruses and breasts are more susceptible to harmful radiation that affects survivors of nuclear attacks, according to the United Nations. And international security threats are often used as a political means to suppress human rights, including women’s rights.

Thanks to the Gender Champions in Nuclear Policy initiative, signed on to by over a dozen leading institutions working on nuclear security, conveners in the nuclear space have taken pledges against “manels,” the too-frequent panels of all men talking about policy in Washington. At the Carnegie International Nuclear Policy Conference last month, just over 50 percent of expert speakers were women. This matters, according to women in the field, because opportunity stems from visibility. A growing number of male experts make their participation in panels contingent on gender diversity.

Think tanks also need to examine their practices with an eye toward more recruitment and promotion of female leadership. A scorecard published by Women in International Security in 2018 found that 73 percent of experts in Washington think tanks are male, 78 percent of think tank governing board members are male, and only one of the 22 surveyed institutions has significant gender-related programming. Some women report that gender bias is particularly strong in think tanks, as compared to government institutions such as the Pentagon, because workplace effectiveness is more subjective. Systemic gender bias in university science departments is well documented, and it demands gender bias training and a review of hiring processes and criteria to ensure objectivity.

Journalists need to examine their practices when reporting on nuclear security, too. Gender bias is rife in journalism. When male political journalists in D.C. reply to fellow journalists on Twitter, 91.5 percent of the time they interact with fellow male journalists, according to a study by the University of Illinois. Journalists under the pressure of a tight deadline are more likely to turn to a known expert source, and that source is more often a man. Some news outlets now track how many of their sources are women—that simple action creates an incentive for journalists to get to more diverse sources.

All of these changes are justified as a matter of social justice—but also much more. Nuclear security is the field with the highest stakes of all. The world can’t afford to push innovation and talent out.

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador—When police finally found Joselyn Milena Abarca, her body had been cut up into seven pieces and dumped across San Salvador. The 26-year-old had been a psychology major in college and a rising star in her job. She recently bought a house and a car.

But her boyfriend, Rónald Urbina, treated her like a possession. She had to ask for permission to cut her hair; he had previously tried to suffocate her to death. Rónald was subsequently arrested and charged with murdering Joselyn. (He denies all charges.)

His increasingly violent and controlling behavior, however, was allowed to fester for the 10 years they were together without any legal repercussions. That’s sadly common in a country that often dismisses crimes against women. Homicides of women in El Salvador have more than doubled since 2013 to 468 in 2017, according to the Institute of Forensic Medicine. The violence is destabilizing the country and is considered a major push factor in driving up migration to the United States. Women currently make up 27 percent of all migrants apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics.

But while Salvadoran women’s rights advocates are trying to curb the violence and tackle the misogyny, the United States is undercutting those very efforts. The Trump administration is pulling funding from programs that support women in El Salvador and focusing funding and energy on a border wall to keep them and others out. Women seeking asylum based on domestic violence claims are now being rejected. In 2018, the United States committed only $600,000 to anti-violence programs, which was 1 percent of its aid budget to El Salvador.

To get a sense of how small that is, consider that at the height of the Salvadoran civil war in the 1980s, the United States was spending $1 million to $2 million a day on military and aid. The legacy of that war, and Washington’s direct role in fueling it, normalized the culture of violence that women suffer from today, many say. “[We] haven’t been taught [how] to live in harmony or in peace,” the criminologist Ricardo Sosa explained in a BBC interview. “We prioritize violence as a way to resolve conflicts.”

The Trump administration’s weak efforts to protect women are not only wrong—they’re also shortsighted. The United States should consider violence against women a national security threat and factor it into programs and policies aimed toward stabilizing international affairs. It’s the right move for El Salvador and a smart one for U.S. policy if it really wants to ease the migrant issue.

“Violence is a profound, complex issue—you’re not going fix it overnight,” explained Celina de Sola, the co-founder of Glasswing, a nongovernmental organization that works in vulnerable communities in El Salvador. “But when you consistently invest in prevention work at a community level, you start to build structures around young people.”

There’s a lot to support. Salvadoran women and men have made huge strides in recent years to meet rising rates of violence against women head-on. In 2011, the government passed a new law called “For a Life Free of Violence Against Women,” which punished all forms of violence against women, ranging from murders to mockery. More recently, in 2017, six courts were developed with aid from the United States to deal with violent crimes against women, including assault and sex crimes; judges for these courts have been trained against biased behavior, like asking about the way a victim was dressed. And in 2018, the Attorney General’s Office launched a new women’s unit to help tackle violence against women. It’s headed up by a woman, Ana Graciela Sagastume, who is now chief prosecutor on all female homicide cases across El Salvador.

Although these represent positive steps, the underlying problems are endemic. The judicial system is overworked and poorly funded. Only 3 percent of court cases involving violence against women ended in guilty verdicts between 2016 and 2017. Impunity is rife.

The United States shares blame for the violence against women in El Salvador. It was the U.S.-supported civil war in the late 1970s and ’80s, in which rape was weaponized as a war tactic by militaries, that has left a legacy of violence against women. What began as the Salvadoran civil war expanded into a proxy war between the United States and Russia, in which Washington was fueling government-led militias and death squads with up to $2 million a day in aid and weapons.

There has never been a reconciliation process that addressed the sexual violence women endured. But the United States has funded anti-violence efforts. Since 2013, U.S Agency for International Development funding has supported a Victims’ Assistance Center, which serves more than 300 women each year. Thirty-six victim assistance centers now exist throughout the country, as well as a Crisis Center for Sexual Abuse in San Vicente. The aid has also supported temporary shelters, equipment to collect evidence in sexual crimes, and efforts to reduce re-victimization.

Washington is now threatening to cut such funding. This past fall, President Donald Trump promised to end U.S. government aid to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador in response to the migrant caravan. “We will now begin cutting off, or substantially reducing, the massive foreign aid routinely given,” he tweeted. At that point, however, U.S. funding had already fallen significantly. For fiscal year 2017, the amount dedicated to El Salvador was $88 million—a figure that dropped nearly 50 percent just one year later. Of that, $2.3 million was for gender-based violence, which is only about 3 percent. For fiscal year 2018, El Salvador was promised $46 million in foreign assistance, of which about $600,000 (about 1 percent) was dedicated to gender-based violence. Less than $1 million, in a country with the highest rate of female homicide in Latin America, and the third-highest in the world.

Activists say one thing is clear: Slashing foreign assistance is detrimental to the work being done. “The U.S. should increase aid to the region for community-based programs that have a track record of successfully reducing crime and violence,” said Cindy Huang, the co-director of the Center for Global Development’s program on migration, displacement, and humanitarian policy. “Unlike billions for a wall, aid is a smart and cost-effective investment that will improve the security of Central Americans and the broader region.”

Some nonprofits use U.S. funding to do work specifically intended to keep people from migrating. Glasswing International’s Club for Returnees, funded through private donations and USAID, works with young women who have returned from Mexico or the United States. The organization provides trauma support, financial assistance, and referral care support. “We’ve seen real transformations take place,” de Sola said. “These women and girls are already resilient. They’re surviving every day—we just develop their skills. The more you provide them with opportunity to thrive in this context, the better they do.” Glasswing also runs clubs to equip young girls with the skills they need to navigate the daily risks they face. After one year of involvement in these clubs, nine in 10 girls could recognize signs of gender-based violence, including behaviors previously normalized, like pushing and yelling, and knew how to report it.

While there is no quick answer to El Salvador’s problem with violence against women, the United States can make a big difference by supporting anti-violence programs, Huang said, both through development assistance and diplomatic outreach. “So many threats today are transnational, from gangs to human trafficking,” she said. “They require collaboration and joint investment with other government, civil society, and private sector partners. Unfortunately, the Trump administration and other governments are dismissing lessons from the past.”

Efforts to improve violence in El Salvador won’t just help victims, but survivors, too. Joselyn’s mother, Yesenia Juárez, is still grieving her daughter’s death, but she is also spending her time creating a foundation. Set up in memory of Joselyn, the aim is to help prevent further female homicides. From schools to public institutions, she wants to ensure help is available and accessible to any Salvadoran women who need it. “I need to talk about this pain,” she said. “I have to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

KABUL—Parwin is dying from cancer, her time running out. There is no radiation available, and chemotherapy might not save her. But it isn’t just her life she’s worried about—it’s the future of her daughter Fatema, who had planned to go to college to become a midwife.

If Parwin dies of breast cancer, her husband will likely pull Fatema out of school and marry her off. One less mouth to feed for their struggling family. One less mother to keep the family together. One less midwife trained.

Parwin’s story is one of thousands just like it in Afghanistan, where the cost of women dying isn’t just a medical problem that hurts families—it’s a destabilizing force that weakens the country as a whole. And with the Taliban negotiating for an ascent to power, it’s time to recognize the critical connection between women’s health and national security.

U.S. officials announced Monday that they had tentatively agreed to the early stages of a plan to withdraw all U.S. troops if the Taliban agreed to keep Afghanistan from “becoming a platform for international terrorist groups,” among other concessions, U.S. diplomat and lead negotiator Zalmay Khalilzad told the New York Times. But while there is a desperate desire for peace after decades of bloodshed, Afghans—particularly Afghan women, who are not yet part of the negotiations—worry that hard-won rights and delicate advancements will be rolled back as a consequence of a hasty U.S. exit ordered by President Donald Trump. And then there are the advancements that have yet to occur.

Despite the United States having spent more than $132 billion on reconstruction in Afghanistan, and an estimated $800 billion on warfighting, the Taliban control more territory now than in 2001. There have been notable improvements in medicine, education, and justice since the days of Taliban rule—a grim baseline from which to measure success—but thousands of Afghans across the country still lack access to the basics. Death during pregnancy and childbirth and breast cancer are still the two leading killers of Afghan women. For women like Parwin, the reality is that Afghanistan still has only one oncologist for the entire nation. This all raises the question: Had the United States invested more in women’s health—and women, generally—would it be leaving behind a nation on a much stronger footing?

What if, 17 years ago, the United States had decided that women were the key to stabilizing and rebuilding Afghanistan, as a growing body of evidence suggests? The United States only spent a drop of the war’s budget on efforts to improve women’s health, economic stability, and good governance programs. “I have no idea why Afghan women’s health concerns aren’t taken seriously by the international community,” said Belquis Ahmadi, a senior program officer with the U.S. Institute of Peace’s Afghanistan program. “If I were a donor agency, that would’ve been top of my list of priorities.”

Maihan Abdullah, the head of Afghanistan’s National Cancer Control Program, has seen firsthand the destabilizing impact of women dying in the thousands of breast cancer. He’s seen children orphaned or neglected due to mothers dying of breast cancer. Those children often end up on the street, he says, resorting to begging to survive and at risk of recruitment by gangs and militant groups. “Whole families depend on a woman,” Abdullah said, especially when war has killed so many Afghan men, leaving women to navigate a male-dominated society.

When the United States has invested in Afghan women’s health—a drop in the pond compared with its warfighting budget—the results have been remarkable, especially efforts to curb the alarming rate of maternal mortality. Even though maternal mortality is still the biggest reason for death among women, the rate of women dying during pregnancy and childbirth has significantly dropped as a result of U.S. and international efforts to support and fund Afghan midwifery trainings and efforts. The World Bank estimates that 1,340 women died for every 100,000 live births in 1990, compared with 396 in 2015, though the accuracy of World Bank and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) statistics has come into question. Infant mortality is also down, though still high. Millions more girls are in school, though roughly 40 percent of school-aged kids are still not in school, and at least 85 percent of girls in southern provinces such as Helmand and Kandahar don’t receive an education.

The Afghan government, for its part, has successfully passed laws to protect women, such as the Law on the Elimination of Violence Against Women signed into law in 2009, although it is often not enforced and many women still find themselves without protection. And women, remarkably, make up nearly one-third of seats in Afghanistan’s parliament, though female lawmakers are routinely left out of negotiations and conversations that could determine the future of the country.

Nevertheless, more than 17 years after U.S.-led Afghan militias drove the Taliban out of Kabul, women’s empowerment—touted by the U.S. government as a reason to invade, occupy, and remain in Afghanistan—is still largely seen by Afghan society as a “zero-sum game, and therefore a loss for men,” according to a recent Asia Foundation report.

One of the major lessons of the last two decades, however, is that security is difficult to foster and maintain when large parts of communities and countries are disempowered and desperate. The most effective strategy for combating terrorism is to bolster economic growth, access to education, and opportunity—and in Afghanistan, women are among the most important vehicles for such economic and social stability. Mothers like Parwin, the rock of her family, are on the front lines of Afghanistan’s war against poverty, illiteracy, and poor health, responsible for fostering the kind of emotional and household stability that experts recognize helps keeps terrorism at bay. It’s mostly mothers who devote their lives to “invisible labor,” such as making sure their children are fed, clothed, cared for, and, when possible, educated—just as it was mothers who educated their daughters in secret when the Taliban banned education for girls and women.

The U.S. strategy, however, for advancing Afghan women’s economic prospects has largely consisted of paying millions of dollars to a litany of contractors and international organizations, many dispatched temporarily to Afghanistan and with limited success, with only minimal focus on bolstering community-led efforts by and for Afghans. A $216 million USAID program called Promote, originally billed as one of the world’s largest women’s empowerment efforts, was slammed by SIGAR, and first lady Rula Ghani herself, for failing to adequately support Afghan women. The program was “Exhibit A in what’s wrong with reconstruction in Afghanistan,” John Sopko, the head of SIGAR, told the Times. Much of the money went to Americans and foreigners flown in to train the women and to the enormous overhead costs to house, secure, and employ Americans in Afghanistan.

These efforts often fail to reach the women who are critical to Afghan stability and in desperate need of assistance. Consider Sherbano, a women in her late 20s who is dying of breast cancer. She discovered a lump while breastfeeding her eighth child, but she found no female doctor near her home in conflict-ravaged Helmand trained to look at the mass. Culturally, Afghan women usually cannot or do not show such sensitive body parts to men who are not family members. Instead, she waited months before finally seeing a female nurse, who described her symptoms to a male doctor. He recommended that she go to Pakistan, where there has been more investment in the medical sector and she could access better diagnostic and treatment facilities, but they didn’t have the money.

Her husband managed to scrape together a few hundred dollars by selling grapes from vines in front of their mud house to get her to Jamhuriat Hospital in the capital. Jamhuriat has the country’s sole oncology ward, where patients sometimes have to sleep two to a bed. There, she waited on the pavement outside for a bed before being diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer—a death sentence. “In our society, cancer means death,” said Zohra Ghior as she walked the blue-walled halls of the hospital.

Before this most recent round of negotiations between the United States and the Taliban, the Afghan government and a U.S. health organization called Global Medical Partners moved forward with plans to invest some $25 million in private funding into breast cancer detection and treatment.

Unless something changes for the better, Abdullah says thousands of women will continue to die every year of breast cancer, despite the best efforts of the doctors and nurses who often pay for chemotherapy drugs out of their own pockets to save women.

A rushed peace deal with the Taliban that doesn’t ensure rights are upheld, many Afghans fear, could bring back crushing restrictions on women and society in general. It’s the women like Parwin, Sherbano, and 25-year-old Abida, a mother of five children—four of them daughters—whose deaths will have far-reaching and long-lasting consequences on her family, community, and arguably the entire country. “I’ve left my health to God,” Abida said, an IV taped to her arm as she palmed prayer beads.

Abida might have survived the rocket attack that ripped through her family’s home in Jalalabad years ago, severing four of her toes and covering her body in raised scars. But it’s the breast cancer that will kill her.

Plenty happened this year that affected global women’s issues, for better and worse. Conversation about sexual assault deepened in the United States due to the Kavanaugh hearings and the spread of the #MeToo movement; there was also an unprecedented number of women elected to political office. Elsewhere in the world, there was record-setting violence against women campaigning for political office, and there were assassinations of female journalists and human rights defenders. “The women we talked to are really in much more danger than before from right-wing misogynistic movements in their country and their own government,” said Yifat Susskind, executive director of Madre, an international women’s rights organization.

What’s gone overlooked, however, is that women’s issues also had a reasonably good year in terms of U.S. government legislation.

Those trends have all been clear to anyone paying attention. What’s gone overlooked, however, is that women’s issues also had a reasonably good year in terms of U.S. government legislation.  Nothing has yet been signed into law, but several measures seeking to promote the global rights of women and girls quietly moved forward with more energy and bipartisan support than in past years.

Read the full article here.

In 2011, giant posters of women appeared on billboards, taxis, and buses across Yemen. Some wore colorful hijabs, leaving their faces uncovered, while others wore black niqabs, revealing only their eyes. All flashed giant smiles as they held thumbs up signs with dark purple ink staining the tips of their fingers.

The billboards were part of a United Nations education campaign to support voting referendums in Yemen’s upcoming presidential elections, and to encourage all Yemenis, especially women, to engage with the political process. “Everyone was expecting a new Yemen,” Nisma Mansoor, a Yemeni women’s rights activist, told me as we sat in her father’s home near the once-thriving waterfront of the southern port city of Aden.

But within months, the women’s hopeful smiles had been destroyed—slashed through with angry black markings. It was an early sign of unrest in Yemen that foretold an imminent reversal of the progress that women’s rights activists had made leading up to Yemen’s 2012 presidential election. “Then war came,” Mansoor said, “and everything collapsed.”

BAGHDAD—The courtroom was silent—all eyes were on a woman, a Turkish schoolteacher in her early twenties, who stood in a wooden cage in the center of the room. Her husband, killed in an airstrike, was an accused member of the Islamic State. She was one of the hundreds of foreign women who crossed illegally into Iraq and Syria and would become known as the “ISIS brides.” And today was her moment of reckoning.

It wasn’t clear, however, whether she understood that. She had only a court-appointed translator and public defender, neither of whom offered a proper translation or defense. When the judge asked if she pleaded guilty or innocent to illegally crossing into Iraq—at no point did they ask if she joined or supported the Islamic State—she seemed unsure what to say.

“Guilty,” she answered, looking around in confusion, her little boy dressed in blue wailing in the cage with her. With that admission, she was sentenced to death by hanging. Her trial would last only a few minutes.

Over the past three years, U.S.-backed Iraqi forces have captured, killed, and detained thousands of Iraqis and foreigners with alleged Islamic State ties, ultimately driving the militant group and its predominantly male ranks from power in Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, in July 2017. But left behind are the thousands of women married to or associated with the fighters, their children, and a burning ethical question: What should be done with them? We know historically that women often lose agency during wartime, particularly in patriarchal societies where they already lack freedom of choice and movement. Are these women victims themselves, forced into life under militant rule, or perpetrators of and partners in violence who should be held accountable for violence that tore apart Iraq?

Read the full article here.

This weekend’s meeting of female foreign ministers will be a historic achievement—and not nearly enough for the world’s women.

On Sept. 21 and 22, Canada will host the first-ever meeting of female foreign ministers, as part of a package of commitments it made to prioritize women’s issues under its G-7 presidency this year. Currently, about 30 women lead their countries’ diplomacy, including eight in Europe, 10 in Latin America and the Caribbean, five in Africa, and others in Asia, Australia, and the region.

The Montreal meeting will be historically unprecedented in its display of female power on the world stage. But symbolic achievements shouldn’t suffice. It would be a tragedy not to use the opportunity to focus attention on concrete ways to improve women’s status globally and advance what has been called a “feminist foreign policy.”

The Canadian government seems to agree. “This meeting is an historic opportunity to have a range of discussions amongst women foreign ministers,” said Marie-Pier Baril, a spokeswoman for Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland, “including such topics as international security, reinforcing democracy, diversity, and combating sexual and gender-based violence. It is important to bring these voices together.”

The concept of a feminist foreign policy was first popularized in 2014 by Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom, who will be in attendance this weekend. Wallstrom has described a feminist foreign policy as “standing against the systematic and global subordination of women” and a “precondition” for achieving Sweden’s wider foreign development and security policy objectives. Gender equality is a right on its own, she argues, and is also the most effective means for achieving other goals, such as the eradication of terrorism, economic growth, and improvement in health.

Reactions to Wallstrom’s ideas have ranged from giggling to outright hostility.Numerous Canadian officials—including outspoken, self-proclaimed feminist Prime Minister Justin Trudeau—have spoken about the backlash they have encountered in launching policies with the word “feminist” attached to them. Nonetheless, pieces of this idea have been adopted over the years by countries around the world, including in the United States. Australia’s first female foreign minister, Julie Bishop, spoke openly about making gender equality central to global peace and security. And the United Kingdom’s former foreign secretary, William Hague, made ending rape in war a priority of his policy platform during the country’s G-7 presidency.

In the United States, the Obama administration never pursued a feminist foreign policy under a single institutional umbrella. But the State Department, under Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, did craft a collection of issue-specific foreign policies on various gender issues, including a U.S. Strategy to Prevent and Respond to Gender-Based Violence Globally; a National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security (which dozens of other countries had also adopted well in advance of the United States); and a Global Strategy to Empower Adolescent Girls.

These were groundbreaking for the United States at the time but still fell short of Sweden’s full embrace of the concept. That’s consistent with the pattern elsewhere. Most countries that talk about a feminist foreign policy aren’t really implementing it; they’re simply adding aid programs for women. A truly feminist foreign policy would have to be more ambitious; either it must enshrine women’s rights across the government or it’s not deserving of the name. As Wallstrom has written, including in a recently released a handbook on the concept, such policies must aim to allocate sufficient resources to achieve gender equality, and they must disrupt male-dominated power structures, from the tables of diplomacy to the design of foreign assistance programs.

This weekend presents an opportunity to hone, define, and refine the idea of a feminist foreign policy and articulate feminist foreign-policy goals that governments everywhere can strive toward. “So much progress has been made [in Canada] with the Feminist International Assistance Policy, the National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security, as well as the gender focus in their progressive trade agenda and the new defense policy,” said Diana Sarosi of Oxfam Canada. “We now need to bring it all together in a feminist foreign policy to ensure coherence in all components of Canada’s foreign actions, including arms sales.” That should be the model not just in Canada but everywhere.

Accomplishing these goals will require a clear-eyed view of the policies that have been developed to date and the challenges they have faced. The first critique regards scope: Does a policy only address so-called “woman’s issues,” such as wartime rape, or does it seek to advance equity across all relevant social divisions—gender (including gender identity and orientation), age (including adolescent girls as well as aging women, young gay men as well as women of reproductive age), race and ethnicity, and other facets of identity? A further, and equally critical, scope question concerns whether all facets of a country’s foreign policy, ranging from aid to trade to development, have been involved.

Scope also relates to budget. This is perhaps the most fundamental issue in today’s context of shrinking foreign aid budgets, which severely threaten a government’s ability to achieve transformational change. Canada is a good example. The country made headlines last summer with its announcement that within five years, 95 percent of its aid initiatives would be dedicated to advancing gender equality. But the fine print reveals that the primary aim of these aid projects would not necessarily be to advance gender equality but rather merely to affect it in some way. Furthermore, this is a larger percentage of a shrinking pie: Critics point out that Canada’s budgets for official development assistance, while slightly larger since 2016, are still hovering around a 50-year low in real terms.

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