Indigo Jo Blogs Blog

Woman’s Place: Is the tail wagging the dog?

Last night I went to a public meeting organised by a group called A Woman's Place UK (@Womans_Place_UK on Twitter), ostensibly to discuss the potential impact on proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act...

Another FGM wild goose chase

Yesterday a Somali man living with his family in Bristol was cleared on the judge's direction of a child cruelty charge, brought as a result of his supposedly telling a passenger in his taxi...

Swype dies unnoticed

Swype, for a long time my favourite keypad to use on Android phones which I first encountered on my Samsung Galaxy S back in 2011, has been killed off after years of slow development...

Review: Dispatches, “Inside the Priory”

This documentary on Channel 4 last night (19th Feb) exposed abusive practices, short staff, over-reliance on temporary staff (including the undercover reporter for this programme) and poor safety at a hospital unit, The Dene...

Let’s investigate “death threats”

So, in the wake of Mary Beard's ill-considered (patrician, soft-racist) tweet last week about how she wouldn't go out to a disaster zone and do what those brave Oxfam staff (accused of sexually exploiting...

Mary Beard and the defence of low expectations

Earlier today Mary Beard, the Cambridge historian well-known for championing the role of women in academia as well as for her TV series, posted tweet defending aid workers accused of sexual abuse in disaster...

A lesson they’ll never forget

Every time there's a mass shooting in the United States, the anti-gun-control lobby insist that the right way to stop such incidents is for there to be more guns rather than less; that the...

If you don’t like trucks, don’t buy stuff

A member of Kent County Council has called for trucks to be banned from roads in Kent, claiming they cause "more damage than 10,000 cars" driving through his village. Seán Holden, council member for...

Zac Goldsmith, an authority on FGM?

Earlier today, BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour featured a 6-minute segment on FGM, tomorrow apparently being "International Zero Tolerance on FGM Day" and who better to invite on than the co-chairs of the All-Party...

Review: Silent Witness, “One Day”

Silent Witness is a series based on the work of police pathologists: the "witness" refers to the body of a murder victim. It's been running since 1996 and the stories are always in two...

It’s not just the Far Right

Yesterday (Friday), Darren Osborne, who drove a van into a crowd of Muslims after a night-time prayer (taraweeh) last Ramadan and killed a 51-year-old worshipper, Makram Ali (right), who had collapsed prior to the...

Polygamy and “violent societies”

I saw this video being tweeted out by the Economist, a London-based weekly news magazine, this morning. It posits the idea that polygamy is strongly linked to violence in a society. Polygamy is still...

One lesson from Richard Handley’s inquest

Shitstorm. | Who By Fire The inquest into the death of Richard Handley (right), who died of faecal impaction in Ipswich in November 2017, is ongoing and is being live-tweeted on the account @HandleyInquest,...