While political blackness seems to be making quite a comeback, this resurgence has also met with frustration and ambivalence. This paper aims to make sense of why this mobilising concept is accepted in some contemporary black feminist circles and outright rejected in others. It unpicks the diasporic dimensions of political blackness, reflecting on the issues that converged to foreground ‘black’ as the basis for mobilising women of African and Asian decent to engage in collective activism.

How do victim-survivors experience image-based sexual abuse? The study, which was co-authored by professor Erika Rackley, from the University of Kent, and Dr Kelly Johnson of Durham University, called for image-based abuses to be reclassified as sexual offences.

It warned that current laws were a “patchwork of piecemeal and out-of-date provisions with many significant gaps”, with some requiring proof of sexual gratification or distress as motives for a charge. 

Aspects of the social security system undermine the UK Government’s Domestic Abuse Bill.

Economic abuse is included in a statutory definition of abuse in the draft Domestic Abuse Bill; but the Bill’s potential is undermined by aspects of the benefits system that give additional scope for abusers to misuse benefits (e.g. the Universal Credit single payment) and by failing to meet survivors’ needs.

Read the full report here.

Women across England and Wales will get vital mental health support as part of a major new programme launched by mental health charity Mind and Agenda, the alliance for women and girls at risk.

The £1.8 million programme, called Women Side by Side, will increase the availability of high quality, community-based peer support for women through around 70 projects delivered by specialist organisations across the country.