South Africa faces one of the world's worst rates of violent crime. In 2024, 26,232 murders were recorded around 72 each day for a homicide rate of nearly 42 per 100,000 people. Data derived from early 2025 numbers show a 12.4% drop in murders (5,727 cases) and fewer serious assaults, but these gains haven't changed the big picture: Violence is still widespread, and many South Africans feel unsafe.
In the airport ad, the Replacers are seen roughly handling a passenger after he is stopped at a security checkpoint. Stormare's Replacer tells the man he has been "randomly selected to be manhandled." Glaser's Replacer puts on blue gloves, and the passenger is told he has to remove all his clothing. The gloved Replacer then says, "Time for the puppet show."
An advert for a Call of Duty game has been banned by the UK's advertising regulator for trivialising sexual violence. The commercial for Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 featured fake officers at an airport security check - as the real ones were too busy playing the game. Viewers complained the video, which included a man being told to strip down while an officer put on gloves and said "time for the puppet show", was "irresponsible and offensive".
On the afternoon of April 15, 1994, Donald Ewing and Doniel Quinn were in an idling car in Kansas City, Kansas, when a man dressed in black opened fire with a shotgun, killing them both. Ruby Mitchell saw the shooting from her house and told police that the killer looked like her niece's boyfriend, Lamont. Lamont was reportedly out of town, but Detective Roger Golubski's investigation quickly zeroed in on someone with a similar name: Lamonte McIntyre, who was seventeen.
"The off-duty Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent who killed Keith Porter, Jr. has a history of racism, child abuse, and explosive tempers. Despite murdering Porter in cold blood, Brian Palacios remains free without charge and employed by ICE," the groups' website states, invoking the name of Porter, a Black 43-year-old father of two who was fatally shot by an ICE officer on New Year's Eve outside his apartment complex
Tarana Burke tells Marc Lamont Hill on Epstein, Trump and how widespread sexual violence is in the United States. In 2017, a reckoning over sexual violence called #MeToo swept the globe. Eight years later, has the movement done enough for survivors? And what will it take for some of the world's most powerful men accused of sexual misconduct to face consequences?
As the end of 2025 draws closer, so too does the daunting possibility that the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has handed the Labour government justification to ban trans people from public bathrooms. Even more daunting is the possibility that the government, in all its wilful ignorance and desperation to court the votes of bigots, will follow-through with said ban.
For more than a month, the court has heard about rape used as a weapon of war, sexual slavery, forced labour, torture, mutilation, summary executions, systematic looting, extortion, and the plundering of resources, including diamonds. The alleged atrocities were committed in 2002-2003 during Operation "Erase the Slate", conducted in the northeast of the country by the Rally of Congolese Democrats and Nationalists (RCD-N) -- Lumbala's rebel group.
No child should have to suffer the ordeal that she suffered. It's clear from the footage we have seen that no one can seriously entertain the thought that you believed she was consenting. This is a case where it was absolutely clear to both of you that you were taking a child away from her friends in the face of her vigorous protests to somewhere that could not be observed in order to commit this offence.
Dos Santos was only a child, but along with others, she ran to hide in the nearby mountains. The invading Indonesian forces were determined to find them especially the women and girls. The army searched for us in the bush, captured us and took us back, she said, recounting how at just nine years old she was violently raped by Indonesian soldiers.
Up to a million women worldwide are facing sexual violence and forced labour in prisons, where they are overlooked and forgotten, in what is being called a growing global crisis. The number of incarcerated women is rising much faster than men and is expected to surpass one million on current trends. While on average women account for between 2% and 9% of national prison populations, since 2000 the number imprisoned has grown by 57%, compared with a 22% increase in the men's prison population.
More than two in five sexually active under-18s in the UK have either been strangled or strangled someone during sex, research has found, despite the serious dangers of the practice. Choking, as it is commonly known, has become normalised in young people's sexual habits, the study by the Institute for Addressing Strangulation (Ifas) showed, with 43% of sexually active 16- and 17-year-olds having experienced it.
A serial rapist suspected of being one of the UK's worst sex offenders has been jailed for life with a minimum of 14 years, after spiking and recording his victims as he abused them. Chao Xu, 33, had placed hidden cameras inside household objects such as an air freshener and a packet of sanitary pads to spy on women visiting his home address in Greenwich, and had also filmed women at his workplace and participated in upskirting at London Bridge underground station.
Mothers flee gunfire with infants in their arms. Girls are raped, boys are forced to fight and families go hungry, but the world looks away. Imagine walking for days and nights to escape gunfire. You carry your child in your arms, guiding them through the darkness to avoid drone attacks. You have no food, no water, and nowhere safe to go.
"We don't want to be separated - we want to be protected!!! Offer us solutions, not promises. "But if there are no effective solutions, we may have to seriously consider separate carriages - an extreme, desperate, and drastic measure (...) Women should not have to feel fear every time they travel. They have the right to travel in peace and safety."
"When people say it changes your life, it really is true," she said. "For me, it kind of felt like dying which is also why I feel the link to surviving is so important, to draw that out." She said while it gets easier over time, it is still hard to talk about and live with. "You might see a trigger that you weren't expecting and then it might give you nightmares."
Video of the alleged rape of Palestinian prisoner at Sde Temain went viral last year. Now the prosecutor who leaked it has quit. The Israeli military's top lawyer, Major-General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, has resigned after admitting to leaking footage showing the gang rape of a prisoner at the Sde Temain prison facility in August last year. The video of the rape had originally been leaked to the press in early August in the midst of a right-wing backlash following the arrest of a number of soldiers for the rape of a Palestinian prisoner.
Throughout Ali's childhood in Iraq, he was repeatedly bullied by students and teachers for what he described as his feminine behavior. During his pre-teen and teenage years, men sexually assaulted him, but he couldn't report it to the police for fear that he'd be thrown into jail for years since Iraq has criminalized homosexuality. Ali was afraid to come out or talk about these assaults to his family.
In 2006, as genocidal violence in Sudan's Darfur region spilled into neighbouring Chad, I spent several weeks with an Amnesty International research team travelling along the Chadian side of that troubled border, documenting the impact of a string of brutal attacks against isolated villages that had left a macabre trail of death, destruction, and fear. This part of eastern Chad is arid and barren, with rocky, hard-packed earth, shifting sands, gnarled trees, and scrappy bush.
Frenchwoman Gisèle Pelicot, whose ex-husband recruited dozens of strangers online to sexually assault and rape her while drugged, arrived in court on Monday for an appeal trial triggered by the bid of one man who said he "never intended" to rape her. Fifty-one men, including her former husband Dominique Pelicot, were convicted after an initial months-long trial that ended in December last year and turned Gisèle Pelicot into a global icon.
This time last year, Beatrice Zavarro, a then unknown lawyer from Marseille, drew herself up to her full 1.45-metre (4ft 8in) height, and addressed the figure in the dock: It's you and me against the world. That man was Dominique Pelicot. Over the next three months and 17 days, the court would learn that for almost a decade he had drugged his wife, Gisele, and invited more than 50 men into their bedroom to rape her while she was unconscious.
