Campaign aims to put onus on men to stop violence against women as figures suggest most already feel country safe place for women

A campaign aimed at making young men reflect about violence against women and domestic abuse is being launched in Wales as new figures suggest most already feel the country is a safe place for women and almost 40% believe enough has been done to fill the gender equality gap.

The “Sound” campaign, which the Labour-controlled government hopes will help tackle the crisis of toxic masculinity, is aimed at men between the ages of 18 and 34, and will try to reach them via social media, podcasts, digital television and streaming channels.

75% of men think Wales is a safe place to be a woman.

37% believe the country has gone far enough in closing the gender equality gap.

39% believe efforts to achieve women’s equality have led to discrimination against men.

43% believe traditional masculinity is under threat.

64% underestimate the prevalence of violence against women.

There was a very low understanding of terms such as love-bombing, gaslighting and coercive control.

Younger men were both more likely to agree that traditional masculinity is under threat – and to describe themselves as feminists. They also perceived scenarios involving physical abuse as less harmful and wrong compared with older age groups.

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Antonio Avola, 66, went on trial for sexually assaulting student, 17, but judge rules grope too fleeting to be a crime

An Italian judge has provoked outrage after clearing a school caretaker of groping a teenage girl because the sexual assault only lasted “a handful of seconds”.

The case relates to a 17-year-old student at a school in Rome who described being groped by the caretaker as she walked up a staircase with a friend.

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Experts are divided on whether the illness can be considered terminal, raising fundamental questions over bodily autonomy and treatment

“Mom, I want to go to Oregon.”

Jennifer Hesketh Aviles knew her daughter, Heather Thompson, wasn’t asking to finally visit Portland, or hike along the azure depths of Crater Lake. Heather wanted to go to Oregon for one reason: she wanted to die.

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Both men faced backlash for attempts to control their girlfriends. Unfortunately, this behavior is far from unique

Last week, Darius Jackson, the father of actress Keke Palmer’s child, came under fire for his very public criticism of an outfit she wore to Usher Raymond’s Las Vegas show, which he deemed inappropriate for a mother.

A few days later, Jonah Hill’s ex-girlfriend Sarah Brady posted several disturbing messages the actor allegedly sent to her during their relationship online, which she describes as emotionally abusive. In them, Hill tells Brady (who is a surfing instructor) to take down any surfing photos or videos that showed her “ass in a thong” from her Instagram page. He also shared a list of things she wasn’t allowed to do if they were going to be together, which included “surfing with men”, “modeling” and being friends with “women who are in unstable places”.

Tayo Bero is a Guardian US columnist

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There has been a huge rise of peer-to-peer lending online, where people borrow clothes directly from one another. For some, it can be a lucrative side hustle and a way to pursue bigger dreams

A Burberry dress for £60? A Prada bag for £100? It sounds too good to be true but – thanks to the booming fashion rental market – designer pieces are no longer reserved for those with a six-figure salary.

Experts have dubbed it the “rental revolution”, with GlobalData forecasting that the UK rental apparel market will reach a value of £2.3bn by 2029 . In the UK, the biggest players are the website Hurr and the app By Rotation . Both offer peer-to-peer lending, where people borrow clothes directly from one another, usually for a minimum period of three days.

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Caitlin Bernard deserves a statue for her service. Instead, she’s been harassed and persecuted

If the United States was a country that valued women and girls, or that understood the moral gravity of misogyny, then there would be statues to people like Caitlin Bernard. The Indiana doctor has long been a champion of reproductive rights; she joined a 2019 lawsuit challenging her state’s Roe-era ban on dilation and evacuation abortions, or D&E procedures; she’s long been outspoken, in her very red state, about her faith that women and girls are worthy of control over their own bodies. So maybe Indiana Republicans, like the attorney general Todd Rokita, already thought of her as an enemy in July 2022, when, just days after the supreme court’s Dobbs decision overturned Roe and threw an anti-abortion trigger ban into effect in neighboring Ohio, Bernard performed an abortion on a patient who had had to travel to Indiana to get her procedure: a 10-year-old girl, the victim of rape.

This act alone – Bernard’s gesture of compassion and respect to an abused child, one that spared the young girl the danger and torture of an underage, rape-produced pregnancy and helped to end the suffering and indignity that followed her assault, is itself a solemn kind of service. Bernard’s work brought her into the darkest realities of what men do to women – raping and impregnating them as children, making laws that will keep them pregnant against their will, as children, unless they can flee – and to face that darkness with integrity and courage. Few of us would have the capacity to do what Bernard did in treating that child; few of us would be able to face that truth about our world.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

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Justice secretary cites ‘significant progress’, but campaigners point out that vast majority of rape survivors still do not report to police

Violence against women campaigners have accused ministers of being too quick to celebrate increased rape convictions while overall reporting rates remain low.

The justice secretary, Alex Chalk, said on Monday that the government was on course to exceed a target to reverse low conviction rates for rape by the end of this parliament.

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Elkin’s capacious survey of female artists who focused on the body might have worked better as a collection of essays

When Lauren Elkin began work on this book, she believed its subject was monstrosity and female creativity, her spur a now much-quoted line from Jenny Offill’s 2014 novel Dept of Speculation : “My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead.” Naturally, Elkin hardly needed to be told that such a monster is almost inevitably male: a beast who relies on women for all the mundane things in life (the cooking, the washing, the regular praise due to an undoubted genius). Female art monsters are thin on the ground because to become one means choosing work over motherhood.

But it wasn’t only such unfairness that interested her. The more she thought about it, the more she saw that while it is still agonisingly difficult for a woman to allow herself to be monstrous – how we fear baring our teeth – it’s also terrifyingly easy inadvertently to become so, at least in the eyes of others. Behaviour that is perfectly acceptable in a man – determination, rage, ambition – is all too often seen as ugly and unwarranted in a woman.

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Never mind worrying about getting beach-body ready, this summer it’s all about rotting in bed and your inner bog man

One of my earliest childhood memories is of the bog man. In the mid-1980s, a body was recovered from a peat bog in Cheshire – after a violent death he had lain there since the iron age, and when he was exhibited in the British Museum I went to have a look. He lay under glass as if asleep, his mouth open in a sort of snore, his skin tanned orange after thousands of years buried in the spongy wetlands near Wilmslow, pickled by layers of moss. He was recognisably a body, but one that appeared to have melted, like chocolate or cheese – he looked like dropped ginger cake. I was quite taken with him. I drew pictures in my little book.

Reading the story of the discovery today (and the surrounding ethics of displaying human remains) was fascinating, not least the detail that the peat worker who found him in the 80s, chucking what he thought was a piece of wood at his mate (they quickly realised it was actually… a foot), had discovered another body (a woman’s, dating from around AD210) only a year earlier. Andy Mould, his name was. Lucky chap. I wondered why this lone slice of history had stuck with me, a person unproud but accepting of the strict limits of my interests, which are rarely piqued by events pre-disco. It wasn’t the poetry of it, though stumbling through a science piece about the bodies in the New York Times I was moved by a line from Seamus Heaney’s Bog Poems , which includes a lament for one bog man whose throat was cut: “The cured wound / opens inwards to a dark / elderberry place.” And it wasn’t the science itself, the way the magical chemistry of bogs prevented decay. It took an afternoon in bed to realise that the thing that gripped me was how appealing it seemed.

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