The real migration scandal in the UK are the people forced to live without any recourse to public funds. Migrant women who leave violent husbands, and women who have been trafficked into the UK to work in the sex industry, face the additional trauma of destitution, says Jenny Phillimore
Artist Sarah Maple’s new exhibition places feminism firmly at the centre of its work, using comedy to explore 21st century gender issues. Heather McRobie asks whether feminism is finally coming back to the fore in the art world
In the days ahead a struggle looms over women's human rights and gender justice in Egypt. Will the Muslim Sisters rise to the occasion?
Women in Burundi have won radical changes to the country's Penal Code, making rape punishable by life imprisonment. The taboo of speaking out against sexual violence has been broken and the lives of some women - and men - are beginning to change forever, says Lyduine Ruronona
The war over contraception in America during the last bizarre month was never about religious freedom or women’s health care. It was about controlling women’s right to control their own bodies and to make their own sexual and reproductive choices, says Ruth Rosen
The feminist critique of religion should not appease the strident voices which label secularism as fundamentalist or militant by promoting a secularism that has had its teeth drawn. Feminists must continue to argue for a robust secularism and the right to stand against religion, argues Rahila Gupt
What are the evolving narratives of the Arab Spring? Hoda Elsadda reports from a conference in Cairo examining the conflicting narratives of and about the Arab revolutions, and the geopolitics of these narratives
Governments are constructing social policy based on misrepresentations and stereotypes about poor people and welfare claimants, rather than by reference to the structural inequalities that affect everyone, argues Kate Donald
Child widows, some less than ten years old, face bleak futures as they bear the triple disadvantage of gender, marital status, and being underage. Research is now revealing the hidden lives of these children, and it's time to hold governments to account under international law, argues Margaret Owe
The Tate Britain exhibition, ‘Migrations: Journeys into British Art’ highlights migrants’ central role in the development of British art, as well as exploring tensions that arise from such mobility. Our cultural heritage owes much to the circulation of ideas and people, argues Jenny Allsopp
The push to police the way that women dress continues across Africa on the pretext that it causes sexual harassment and violence against women. What really underlies this censorship of women’s expression? asks Bibi Bakare-Yusuf