April 14, 2018 – Bridge Agents

#GirlsOnBikes: Women Ride Bicycles To Reclaim Public Spaces in Pakistan

April 14, 2018 Bridge Agents

Pakistan (GV) – On April 1, 2018, a bicycle rally was organized in major cities of Pakistan (Islamabad, Lahore, and Karachi) by prominent Pakistani feminist collective Girls at Dhabas. The ‘Girls On Bikes’ Rally was their third annual event to promote female participation in public events, fight restrictions faced by women in public places and increase awareness about issues faced by women. In May 2015, two Karachi-based girls, Sadia Khatri and Natasha Ansari, started using the hashtag #GirlsAtDhabas as a space to curate photos of women on Tumblr. The hashtag went…

It’s Time to Cut the Contractors Loose

April 14, 2018 Bridge Agents

(OW) – How much of your paycheck do you plan to hand over to corporate Pentagon contractors this year? The average American taxpayer will have paid $14,520 in federal income taxes in 2017. And that’s not even including the taxes that every working person pays to take care of our elders (and one day, ourselves) through Social Security and Medicare. If that seems like a ton of money, it is. A full-time, minimum-wage worker earning $7.25 an hour would have only earned $15,080. Of course, how much you pay depends…

How an uproar over aid and sexual exploitation ignored women’s actual experiences

April 14, 2018 Bridge Agents

(Conversation) – The recent “Oxfam sex scandal” – during which some aid workers were accused of paying for sex with young women in vulnerable conditions – has focused almost exclusively on the aid workers and aid organisations involved. But the perspectives and motivations of the young women who were paid for sex with money or material goods have hardly been discussed at all, and the contexts in which they live have been misrepresented and misunderstood. The problem of transactional sex in areas hit by disaster, war, or extreme poverty is…