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Women and LGBTIQ people have won tremendous victories for rights and equality around the world. But organised networks, backed by dark money and coordinating with one another across borders, are working to roll back or prevent more progress. During the COVID-19 pandemic, ultra-conservative, far-Right and religious Right movements that target our rights aren’t slowing down. Instead, they’re celebrating new opportunities and fighting for new restrictions – on access to abortion, for example – while claiming that the pandemic is divine punishment for sexual and reproductive rights.
openDemocracy’s Tracking the Backlash team is on their trail. Among our projects, we’ve published multi-part investigations into Christian conservative support for the far Right in Europe (including through unregulated ‘Super PACs’), and a major series on how vulnerable pregnant women around the world are being targeted with misinformation about their health and rights.
Since our launch in 2017, we’ve collaborated with dozens of other freelance and staff journalists around the world, and our investigations have been picked up by publications including The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, Grazia UK, Deutsche Welle, Telemundo, Infobae in Argentina, the Mail & Guardian in South Africa and NV in Ukraine.
Our team now has editors and reporters across Europe, Africa and the Americas. We also have a series called Documenting the Resistance, which tells the stories of frontline activists resisting the backlash against women’s and LGBT rights.
Read more about us, and how to contact us, below.