What’s Current: Backpage.com CEO pleads guilty to facilitating prostitution in three states

  • Backpage.com CEO Carl Ferrer has pleaded guilty to facilitating prostitution and money laundering in three states. He has agreed to testify against Michael Lacey and James Larkin, the men who co-founded the site with him and who remain in jail.
  • The Care Quality Commission, a watchdog of the UK’s National Health Service, has launched a national review of sexual abuse in mixed sex wards in hospitals
  • Two Vancouver-area police officers are being detained and criminally investigated in Cuba for an assault on a 17-year-old girl.
  • Montreal’s women’s shelters receive far less government funding than their male counterparts.
  • Sara Danius, the first woman to head the body that is responsible for the Nobel Prize for Literature has been forced out, effectively paying the price for the sexual misconduct of a man, Jean-Claude Arnault. Katarina Frostenson, Arnault’s wife, has also left her position in the wake of allegations against her husband.
Lisa Steacy

Lisa Steacy is an Assistant Editor at Feminist Current. She has a B.A. in Women & Gender Studies from the University of Toronto. However, the women she met in her five years as a frontline worker and collective member with Vancouver Rape Relief & Women’s Shelter deserve almost all of the credit for her feminist education. She lives in Vancouver with her partner and their cats.