France is to consider a change to its laws around sexual consent, according to the minister for gender equality. Marlene Schiappa said the government was considering setting a fixed age below which sex was automatically a serious offence. It comes after two cases where men were acquitted of raping two 11 year old girls. In France the age of consent is 15, but prosecutors still have to prove sex was non-consensual to prove rape.

A New Zealand man has died after allegedly being forcibly tied to a bed in a Japanese psychiatric hospital for 10 days. Kelly Savage, 27, who also had US citizenship, died in May after a massive heart attack at the Yamato municipal hospital, where he was admitted on 30 April following a manic episode with psychotic features. His family believes the heart attack was the result of deep vein thrombosis, which he developed after...

Women working in Cambodian factories supplying some of the world’s best-known sportswear brands are suffering from repeated mass faintings linked to conditions. Over the past year more than 500 workers in four factories supplying to Nike, Puma, Asics and VF Corporation were hospitalised. The most serious episode, recorded over three days in November, saw 360 workers collapse. The brands confirmed the incidents...

The Israeli Knesset has, after sixty years of cover-up, exposed one of the most lurid scandals in the history of Israeli medicine. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, inspired by Ben Gurion’s philosophy that Israel must populate itself via Jewish immigration to compete with the Arabs, Israel airlifted tens of thousands of Yemenite Jews and resettled them.

A Palestinian child from Beit Furik town in Nablus survived certain death on Wednesday after Jewish settlers kidnapped and tortured him inside their settlement. Local sources told reporters that eight-year-old Bashar Ghazal was found in the illegal Itamar settlement, handcuffed and injured as a result of his exposure to severe torture at the hands of extremist settlers.

This article reports updated findings I obtained in a further examination of videos published by the White Helmets, and which aimed to represent consequences of an alleged gas attack in Sarmine in March 2015 [See my first report of March 6, 2017]. [1] The videos depict a medical rescuing scenario focused on ‘lifesaving’ procedures on children.

A charity is advising UK nationals not to report rapes to the Dubai police after a sex attack victim was arrested when she went to the authorities for help. The 25-year-old woman was locked up by police after telling them she had been gang-raped by two British men in a Dubai hotel room. She has reportedly been released on bail but had her passport confiscated and could face charges of having extra-marital sex. Radha Stirling, the founder of Detained in Dubai, told the Independent that Dubai police assumed Western women were "looking for it".

The largest victims' group in the independent inquiry into historical child sex abuse has left the process, calling it an "unpalatable circus". The BBC has been told the Shirley Oaks Survivors Association, which represents 600 victims who lived in children's homes run by Lambeth Council, has lost confidence in the inquiry's leadership. It had threatened to withdraw before - questioning the inquiry's independence.

Every second woman in Pakistan suffers from some form of domestic violence that has an extremely damaging effect on her physical and mental well-being, said Dr Tazeen Saeed Ali during a session held on Saturday as part of the three-day national health sciences research symposium being organised at the Aga Khan University (AKU).

A Louisiana judge has struck down a state requirement that clergy members report suspected child abuse even if they learn about it during a private confessional.

An eight-year-old Chinese girl has been tied to a tree outside her grandparents' home for six years because she suffers from mental illness. Zhao Ziyi’s grandparents said they first strapped her to the tree outside their home in 2010 after she became mentally ill and started to hit people, Henan Television reported. The girl was filmed barefoot with ropes tied around her neck and chest when reporters visited her home, in Henan province, in September.

Abuse is progressive. This is how it gets from point A to point B.

A groundbreaking and sensitive documentary portraying the real stories and experiences of male victims of domestic abuse in the UK.

Turkey's constitutional court has prompted anger after voting to scrap a law that automatically categorises sexual acts with children between the ages of 12 and 15 as sexual abuse. Judges in the country's highest court voted to annul the provision by a narrow margin, in response to an application from a district court which complained the law did not differentiate between age groups in cases of child sexual abuse. The complaint also said the law failed to take into account the “consent” of victims in cases where the child victim was between the ages of 12...

Every faithful or once faithful member of their respective religion should be familiar with the idea of a “trial of faith”. When hardship and tragedy strike, we are told that God is testing us. We are expected to endure and remain faithful through our trials, and after… AFTER… we will be blessed. There are many explanations for why the troubling experiences we have supposedly bring us closer to God. Mostly though, God just wants to see how much he can fuck with you before you give up on him.

A British paedophile who wrote a manual on how to abuse children and sold videos of himself raping children and babies online is facing as many as 22 life sentences after admitting an unprecedented number of child sex offences. Richard Huckle, 30 from Ashford in Kent, pleaded guilty to 71 offences including rape, sexual assault and grooming following an nine-year campaign of abuse against children in Malaysia.

A depraved former priest was able to carry out a decade-long reign of abuse against three girls and nine boys because he was protected by the Catholic Church, a Sydney judge says. Loud applause broke out in court on Monday as John Joseph Farrell was led from the dock after being sentenced to 29 years behind bars for his crimes in Moree and Tamworth, in country NSW. Victims and their loved ones packed into the courtroom at Sydney's Downing Centre District Court...

Two BBC radio presenters have been charged with sex offences involving four children. Tony and Julie Wadsworth, who have worked for the broadcaster's local stations in Leicester and Birmingham, are due to appear in Warwickshire Magistrates' Court on 11 May. Tony Wadsworth, 68, of Broughton Astley, Leicestershire, has been charged with five counts of inciting a boy under the age of 16 to commit an act of gross indecency. His wife, 58-year-old Julie, has been charged...

Last year, ABC's Four Corners program and Fairfax revealed workers at the convenience stores were systematically paid about half the minimum wage. Many of those affected were foreign workers. The convenience store chain set up an independent panel to assess the claims of about 20,000 past and present workers from the convenience store's franchises. The head of the panel, Professor Allan Fels, has told a senate committee several employees faced threats from franchisees.