Yes, women's rights are under threat around the world. But we've found hope in unlikely places | Rahila Gupta

"In 2025, the world that had been opened up by women has often seemed to be closing in. The forces behind the rollback of abortion rights in Donald Trump's US are attempting to do the same in the UK. In Afghanistan, the Taliban has doubled down on its attacks on women and girls. Sexual violence is commonplace in Haiti and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In Mexico, even the president is not safe from sexual assault."

"But in researching our book, Planet Patriarchy, Beatrix Campbell and I found women's resistance erupting like green shoots through the cracks. In El Salvador, women can receive sentences of 30-50 years for miscarriages construed to be abortions. Yet feminists have managed to free all 72 women who had been imprisoned for this, using innovative penal and legal strategies. In Russia, feminists have taken to wearing blue and yellow ribbons, the colours of the Ukrainian flag, to signal their anti-war solidarity."

Abortion-rights rollbacks in the US and attempts to replicate them in the UK occur alongside intensified attacks on women by the Taliban in Afghanistan and widespread sexual violence in Haiti and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. High-profile sexual assault allegations have reached Mexico's presidency. Simultaneously, feminist resistance has produced concrete results: activists freed 72 Salvadoran women jailed over miscarriages, Russian feminists signal anti-war solidarity with blue and yellow ribbons, and Iceland achieved major gender-equality gains through strong unionization, mass strikes and subsequent legal guarantees of sex equality.

Read at www.theguardian.com