What’s Current: Italy’s first sex doll brothel raided; shut down

  • Italy’s first sex doll brothel has been raided and shut down after being open for just nine days.
  • McDonald’s restaurant workers have voted to stage a one-day strike in 10 US cities next week to protest the company’s inaction on sexual harassment of female employees.
  • Amelia Tiganus, a sex-trade survivor from Romania who was prostituted in Spain, tells her story and talks about her current efforts to end the sex trade and violence against women.
  • Richard Bailey, a man with a long history of convictions for crimes of violence against women, was sentenced to 29 years in jail in a UK court for the murder of Charlotte Teeling. The judge rejected Bailey’s defence that Teeling consented to “rough sex,” including the strangulation that caused her death.
  • Tanzanian President John Magulfi told rally attendees that women across the country should stop using birth control, saying the only reason women access contraception is because they are too lazy to do the work of raising large families.
  • A new survey of 622 sexual health services, youth workers, schools and families in New Zealand found that genital injuries, sexual aggression and sexual assault have increased among youth as a result of “pornography that depicts violence as normal.”
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.