Keeping salmon in her children’s diet is “an entire job,” says Georgiana Gensaw, a Yurok Tribe member and mother of four in Klamath Glen, a community whose only easily accessible food store is a fried chicken shop attached to a gas station a few miles away. The nearest grocery store, Safeway in Crescent City, lies 24 miles away along a stretch of road frequently plagued by landslides and toppled redwoods—last summer it was closed for 20 hours a day due to a washout—making queues to get through the roadworks up to five hours long.

As a lifelong reservation resident, Gensaw recalls when fresh food was abundant. “I grew up with fish patties, rice and fish, noodles and fish, salmon sandwiches, dried fish,” she remembers fondly. “We never understood how lucky we were, that it was going to go away.”

The Yurok reservation where Gensaw lives sits on a remote strip of land that snakes shoulder to shoulder with the final 44 miles of the Klamath River alongside the misty Northern California coast. In 2001, drought descended on the Klamath Basin, the watershed that feeds the river. Due to a history of water mismanagement in the basin, combined with an historic drought, the river is sick—and the Yurok are too.

The salmon they’ve long depended on as both dietary staple and cultural cornerstone have become scarce. Combined with the lack of food sovereignty, it has prompted the need to fight for their main sources of nutrition and for their very way of life, they say. Yurok women, traditionally their tribe’s caregivers and food providers, bear the brunt of the food and health crisis while leading the fight for cultural preservation.

“The situation has gotten so bad that I don’t even know what kind of loss to compare it to. Because there’s no replacing salmon,” Gensaw says, her voice breaking. “My babies were meant to eat Klamath River salmon.”

In a community whose median income is $11,000, with unemployment rates as high as 80 percent, with some 35 percent living below the poverty line and most of the population in a food desert, the result is a serious impact on their nutrition sources and health. A 2019 University of California-Berkeley study of Native communities in the Klamath Basin found “91.89 percent of households suffering from some level of food insecurity and over half experiencing very low food security.”

Food sovereignty—the right to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods—is linked to Yurok Tribe members’ rights and cultural identity as well as their nutrition and health. The tribe’s former general counsel, Amy Cordalis, finds being a Yurok woman provides her a unique vantage point from which to hold the U.S. government accountable on this issue to ensure her people’s health and way of life.

“I translate between Yurok cultural values and this colonized American law,” Cordalis, who has been part of her tribe’s legal team since 2014, tells The Fuller Project. “You can’t exercise the right to eat your traditional foods if there are no traditional foods,” says Cordalis, a mother of two and lifelong fisherwoman. “So the fight for a clean, healthy river is inextricably tied to the ability to exercise food sovereignty.”

Earlier this year, a fish kill of enormous magnitude left 70% of juvenile salmon dead, according to Yurok biologists. Tribal scientists later found the deadly pathogen Ceratonova shasta, which spreads due to low water quality and piscine stress, present in 97% of the fish they captured. The Yurok, who usually run a commercial fishery to bring in much needed income, have had their fishing rights severely curtailed to protect the remaining salmon population.

Gensaw has long campaigned for a healthier river: organizing rallies, attending state water board meetings and helping negotiate with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which governs the dams the Yurok say have ruined the ecosystem and endangered the salmon population. She sees the ill effects of salmon scarcity, especially on children. Without fish in their diet, there are “a lot more chubbier, overweight kids,” Gensaw says. “As moms, we talk about it a lot. Queenie is my first kid without a steady diet of salmon, and I can dramatically see the difference,” referring to her five-year-old and her older children, ages nine and 17.

The children’s changed diets are affecting their health. Dr. Terry Raymer, a diabetes expert at the United Health Services in Arcata, south of Klamath, treats Yurok pre-teens who, he says, have a “very significant elevated body mass index,” putting them at increased risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

One 2021 report from the American Academy of Pediatrics said that Native American youths have “excessive disease rates compared with the general pediatric population,” with children aged 2 to 5 having a higher combined prevalence of overweight and obesity—at 58.8 percent—than children of any other ethnicity or race. And it’s not just the children: The UC-Berkeley study noted high levels of disease related to poor diet in the Klamath Basin tribes, “with 83.58 percent of all households reporting at least one person in their household suffering from a diet/lifestyle related health issue including high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity and cavities.”

In 2017, the Tribe secured additional water flows for salmon under the Endangered Species Act and challenged faulty data that U.S. government agencies used to determine water levels needed to protect salmon in a case Cordalis contributed to. Now she is fighting both for dam removal, to improve water quality and help the salmon populations recover, and for access to land owned by logging companies that contain traditional foods like the oak trees that produce acorns, a staple of the Native American diet for generations and to which Yurok mothers are turning to increasingly to feed their families as the salmon dwindle. (Under the Dawes Act, Native Americans were purposely allocated land of poor agricultural quality. Ancestral land once spanned almost half a million acres, giving the tribes plenty of land to fish, farm and forage, but the U.S. government confined the tribe to just 10 percent of that area.) A 2019 study in the journal Food Security noted that for the Yurok and other Native peoples, restoring access to Native foods lost due to colonialism is key to “revitalizing culture and restoring community health and well-being.”

Yurok activist Annelia Hillman, 46, recruits young Yurok members to help wage her people’s long struggle against loggers, farmers and the U.S. government—not only for land and resources rights, but also for the very health and welfare of their tribe. “We need the next generation to carry on this work,” Hillman says, speaking of the activism she has been involved in for more than half her life, “so they can establish their identity as Indigenous people and challenge institutional systems.”

The Yurok women may have a powerful ally in Deb Haaland, the first Native American woman to serve as Secretary of the Interior. A member of the Laguna Pueblo Tribe, Haaland wrote to FERC supporting the removal of the PacifiCorp dam early this year, noting that doing so would have many benefits including “protect[ing] public health.” But when Haaland, who taught Cordalis in her pre-law program, visited the Yurok reservation in August, she addressed several issues—but not the salmon or health crisis. “We are thrilled she’s here,” says Cordalis. “But she [didn’t] visit the river, and we were very disappointed about that.”

The Department of the Interior has not responded to queries from The Fuller Project as to Haaland’s stances on Yurok food sovereignty and protecting the Klamath River and its salmon.

The director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Office of Tribal Relations said the health of indigenous children is of paramount importance to that agency. “Long term we are looking to support and foster local tribal food sovereignty initiatives to increase locally grown and indigenous foods to help restore indigenous food ways and protect better against food insecurity,” Heather Thompson tells The Fuller Project. Thompson, a Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe member who previously represented the Yurok while working at a private law firm, says she believes one of the most important issues for Indigenous women is the “health and nutrition of our children and families.”

For Gensaw, that means restoring the river and its salmon population to health, because when the fish thrive, so do the children and families. “No fish means no food,” she says. “Our communities depend on the river for sustenance.”

Correction (10:07 a.m. Oct. 14, 2021): An earlier version of this story misstated Annelia Hillman’s age. She is 46, not 34.

Correction (6:04 p.m. Oct. 19, 2021): An earlier version of this story misstated Amy Cordalis’s role. She is the former, not current, general counsel for the Yurok Tribe. Her role in a lawsuit was also clarified to make more clear that she contributed to the case and did not lead it.

This story was published in partnership with The Guardian and The Fuller Project.

Marissa vividly remembers the day last September when her son’s counselor asked to speak with her at the end of his Zoom session. The counselor told Marissa to try to control her reaction to what she was about to hear.

Marissa stepped into the backyard of their home outside of Seattle, Washington, to speak to the counselor privately. At the time, Marissa’s nine-year old son Zachary attended regular counseling sessions as a result of Marissa’s ongoing legal battles with her ex-boyfriend, Carter. That day, Marissa heard the news she would spend the next several months going over again and again: Zachary had revealed to his counselor that Carter had “touched his private parts” in bed when the family had lived together.

The disclosure was deeply troubling on its own — in the months that followed, Zachary would disclose additional and increasingly severe incidents of abuse, including rape, by Carter to a King county child interview specialist and his counselor over multiple interviews and sessions, according to a case report filed by the local police department. (The Guardian is using pseudonyms for the families in this article to protect their privacy and safety.)

But the allegations of abuse also complicated an already contentious custody battle between Marissa and her ex – and for Marissa, illuminated the unexpected pitfalls that mothers face when accusing their partners of abuse in family court.

At the time of Zachary’s counselor’s call, Marissa was a medical school student supporting herself and her children on student loans. She was also receiving federal food benefits, Medicaid and state heating assistance. She’d been dealing with the court system since she and her ex separated in 2018, the same year she filed a police report alleging Carter physically assaulted her (he was found not guilty of domestic violence in court six months later). After filing the report, she hired an attorney to put together a plan for how she and Carter would share custody of Zachary’s then-three-year-old brother Eli, their biological son (Zacharyhas a different biological father).

Carter has repeatedly denied Zachary’s allegations through his lawyer and has been fighting for parental rights not only of Eli but also of Zachary, whose biological father is out of the picture. Carter is seeking to legally change Zachary’s birth certificate to list him as the father — a change known as “de facto” parentage of Zachary in court, which would grant Carter legal rights to act as Zachary’s father. Throughout their three-year legal battle, Carter has retained steady legal representation — unlike Marissa — and countered that Marissa has been “coaching” Zachary to report allegations of abuse by Carter. Later this year, a judge is scheduled to decide the role Marissa’s son’s alleged rapist will play in her children’s lives.

Assertive and a quick learner, Marissa is a ready advocate for herself and her family — a skill she’s used elsewhere in her personal life. She spoke out against the nursing home where her father and many other residents contracted Covid-19. She has the dogged determination that would lend itself to the lengthy legal battle against Carter that she says has drained her savings and forced her to learn how to become her own attorney when she could no longer afford to pay for one. (She says she did not trust an overworked court-appointed lawyer to have the bandwidth to catch up on the hundreds of pages of detail that make up her cases with her ex.)

However, the way Marissa has had to aggressively advocate for herself and her children in court — made more urgent by Zachary’s allegations — and the mistakes she’s made while learning how to represent herself have compounded the difficulties she faces in the family justice system. Her ex’s legal team has been able to paint her as “belligerent”, “unreasonable” and “intransigent” and therefore a less fit parent than Carter.

Marissa’s time in court also made clear that when women accuse former partners of abusing their children, they risk uphill legal battles. Navigating a criminal justice system that tends to favor those who have the most resources to make their case can become a nightmare, as women seeking justice from their alleged abusers learn how far they must go to be taken seriously.

Courts ‘helping abusive fathers keep custody’

Mothers who accuse their partners of abuse can be seen as the “less cooperative” parent in custody and visitation cases, say lawyers and domestic violence experts, because they’re not facilitating a relationship between father and child — a relationship the court sees as important for the child’s development. Opposing counsel can portray them as combative and intransigent, making their clients appear to be better custodial parents.

As a result, mothers often find themselves on the defensive, says Joan Meier, a clinical law professor and the director of the National Family Violence Law Center at the George Washington University Law School.Advertisement

“That’s like the ticket to death,” she says. “If you’re a mom and you raise [allegations of] child sexual abuse [by the father], the odds are you lose custody.”

In 2019, Meier looked at 200 cases in which mothers alleged child sexual abuse by fathers and found that courts sided with the mothers in just 15% of cases. In the same study, she found that, of 1,137 cases where mothers alleged domestic violence, courts credited the claims in just 517 cases. (In general, mothers tend to be custodial parents, usually as a result of out of court settlements, says Meier. Eighty per cent of mothers have primary custody of their children, compared with approximately 20% of fathers, according to 2015 census data.)

Accusing your partner of child abuse can be a lengthy, unpredictable process for mothers seeking justice in US family courts; historically, the process has pushed women to take drastic measures to protect their children from allegedly abusive guardians.

In 1987, Elizabeth Morgan sent her five-year-old daughter to live with her maternal grandparents in New Zealand after a family court granted unsupervised visits between the girl and her allegedly sexually abusive father. Morgan was jailed in Washington DC for two years when she refused to reveal her daughter’s whereabouts. A TV movie about the story aired in 1992.

Morgan’s story inspired Holly Collins when a Minnesota family court granted her allegedly abusive ex-husband custody of their children in the early 1990s and denied Holly’s requests for unsupervised visits, Collins told the Guardian. Collins coordinated an escape with her kids and flew to the Netherlands in 1994, where she and her children were granted asylum in 1997. About a decade later, Chere Lyn Tomayko became the first person granted asylum in Costa Rica on the grounds of domestic violence after her two daughters accused her ex-boyfriend of abuse. Tomayko initiated the move after a Texas court granted her ex-boyfriend joint custody of their shared daughter.

Wariness of child sexual abuse allegations also has roots in Child Protective Service workers’ training. According to Meier, CPS workers are taught to scrutinize child sexual abuse claims more closely when families are going through custody litigation, and to flag claims they believe are fishy. “In such cases, I call it taxpayer-funded child abuse,” says Meier, “because they are basically helping abusive fathers keep custody.”

“I’ve been accused by the judge that I’m doing all this because I like to fight,” Marissa says. So as not to jeopardize the ongoing court case, the Guardian did not contact the people on Marissa’s witness list for the upcoming trial, and instead verified accounts through court documents, including witness testimony, police reports, emails, photographs and attendance at a parentage case hearing.

Marissa has spent hours learning to represent herself in court in the midst of her rigorous medical school schedule. She has also had to pay thousands in fees to her ex’s attorney and court-appointed experts. His lawyer successfully argued, on several occasions, that filings Marissa made while representing herself created more work for their team.

“I’m losing everything,” Marissa says.

Crushed by legal fees

Legal experts say that when a partner is abusive, the realm of their control can often include the family’s finances — which can leave them better suited to pay for lawyers and endure longer legal battles. Most attorneys bill by the hour. Months or years of responding to lengthy court filings add up. Marissa estimates she has spent $150,000 on her defense, including on payment to join the nearby law library, parking fees and fees awarded to Carter’s counsel.

Stephanie, a mother of two teenagers, has been stuck in a costly, ongoing legal battle with her ex-husband, Luke, since she filed for divorce in 2014. Multiple police reports dating back to 2002 — first from Florida, then from their subsequent home in New Jersey — say that Luke threatened to murder Stephanie, fractured her arm, “grabbed her throat” and pushed her while she was pregnant with their first child. (The Guardian did not contact Luke for comment due to Stephanie’s concerns for her and her children’s safety but instead reviewed multiple police reports, emails, court documents and photos to corroborate Stephanie’s story. Both Stephanie and Luke are pseudonyms.)

Police have been called to Stephanie’s homes in Florida and New Jersey — by Stephanie and her children — close to 30 times over the past 19 years, according to those police reports, and Luke has been arrested six times. One 2014 police report mentions Stephanie’s youngest child, then seven years old, “punching” Luke to “get him away” from Stephanie. In May 2020, Stephanie’s chiropractor wrote in a letter provided to the court that Stephanie had visited his office 157 times in nearly four years and that he finds her injuries to be consistent with domestic violence.

Related coverage: How domestic abusers weaponize the courts

In 2020, Stephanie spent months filing motions in court and emailing New Jersey child protective services and police to try to protect herself and her children from her ex after he allegedly threw their 16-year-old son down the stairs and against a wall. As of April 2021, Luke is seeking “reunification therapy” with his son and also plans to seek increased custody should Stephanie not agree to his requests, per a letter to Stephanie from Luke’s lawyer.

But Stephanie says that the judge hearing her case did not consider the New Jersey child protective services report concerning her son’s allegations. Instead, she says, he urged her to “put aside [her] differences” with her ex and work things out for “the sake of [their] kids”. New Jersey’s child protective services department declined to comment on Stephanie’s specific case, but a representative told the Guardian that judges generally consider “recommendations or reports offered by” their staff in custody decisions.

Last year, Stephanie filed for a restraining order against Luke. She estimates she has spent nearly $200,000 in legal fees fighting him in court over the years.

“The biggest problem I have isn’t the fact that I have an abusive ex-husband,” says Stephanie. “It’s the fact that the courts have not only not done anything, but they’ve penalized me and … my children.”

Accusations of coaching

Peter Favaro is a court-appointed forensic evaluator who has been on the job for 37 years in Brooklyn, New York. His job is to conduct multiple interviews with parents and children, speak with teachers, doctors and other adults in children’s lives, and conduct psychological tests. An evaluator does not tell a judge whether a child has been abused, he says, but they can testify to “signs and symptoms”. Child sexual abuse allegations are particularly tricky, because there are often no physical signs of abuse, Favaro says.

Evaluating allegations as serious as child abuse takes time and careful deliberation, says Favaro. But he acknowledges that his work is also lucrative – his evaluations cost between $8,000 and $10,000, but he says other forensic evaluators can charge more than $100,000.

Favaro also sees the evaluations as an “income source” for lawyers, “because attorneys get paid money to attack experts in court”. In addition to lawyers and parental evaluators, guardians ad litem (GAL), who are appointed to represent the interests of children, stand to make money in high-volume court cases involving children like Marissa’s and Stephanie’s. In Stephanie’s case, the GAL first charged a $6,000 retainer when appointed to the case in late 2020, and later requested additional fees. As of last year, Carter had paid $14,000 to the appointed parenting evaluator.

Favaro has worked on “hundreds” of cases with child abuse allegations, he says, and can’t say how often children falsely allege abuse by relatives. He says he witnessed one scenario in which a mother “coached” a daughter to lie about sexual abuse by a male family member, later adding, “I’m not sure I would disagree that [false allegations] rarely happen … but my job is to take a neutral position.”

After Marissa’s son Zachary told his counselor in September that he’d been abused by Carter, child protective services began an investigation into his claims. In February 2021, CPS investigators determined Zachary’s allegations to be “founded” — meaning that an evaluator deemed the allegation to be more likely true than not. The Washington department of children, youth and families, which oversees these investigations in the state, does not decide whether to remove a child from a parent, though its reports may factor into decisions ultimately made by law enforcement or courts.

A month earlier, in January 2021, the King County prosecutor’s office had declined to press criminal sexual abuse charges against Carter. A representative from the prosecutor’s office told the Guardian that they declined to file charges because “from the information we received from police investigators, there was insufficient evidence to establish the suspect’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt” — but that the police could resubmit the case should “additional information come to light”.

The Guardian reached out multiple times to Carter’s attorney for comment about the case and Zachary’s specific allegations. She referred us to hundreds of pages of publicly available court filings. In a filing from March 2021, Carter points to “the likelihood of [Marissa] coaching [Zachary]”, a concern the GAL appointed to Eli’s parentage case also mentions in another case filing. (The idea of mothers “coaching” children to report abuse by fathers comes up in many cases like Marissa’s, including in the above-mentioned case of Holly Collins, who was granted asylum in the Netherlands.) A police report showed Carter took four polygraph tests last year in which he denied Zachary’s allegations. The tests inquired about several different allegations made by Zachary, and all found Carter was “not attempting deception”.

Although the prosecutor’s office filed no criminal charges against Carter, the court overseeing Eli’s parentage case says it “requires additional information from CPS regarding their findings of sexual abuse by [Carter] of [Zachary]”. This information will probably be presented in Eli’s parentage trial, which is scheduled for September, and will help determine the role both parents will play in Eli’s life.

Eli is now six years old. Carter can have visits with him once during the week and on weekends, but is not allowed overnights. According to a court document from March, Zachary is not supposed to be present when Marissa and Carter meet to exchange Eli. The visits with Eli are supervised by several court-approved associates of Carter, including his mother.

Women are ‘routinely deemed hysterical’

The former Connecticut state senator Alex Kasser had hoped to give intimate partner violence survivors more resources in court with Senate Bill 77, which passed earlier this year. The bill expands the definition of domestic violence in family court to include “coercive control”, a strategic pattern of behavior used to oppress and control a partner, and sexual assault or related threats. The bill was inspired, in part, by Kasser’s own experience. In June, she resigned from the Connecticut senate due to her contentious divorce with her husband, whom she called “coercive” in a 2020 op ed.

Kasser’s definition of domestic violence also includes “threatening a victim to prevent them from reporting child abuse”, she says. Her bill would ensure judges consider child safety as the number one factor in custody decisions (currently in Connecticut, judges can choose how they weigh various factors, like the child’s “temperament”, “cultural background” and the “willingness” of each parent to facilitate a relationship between their child and the other parent).

“I think that there is confusion and disbelief about what the real outcomes are in family court,” says Kasser. “Generally, women are still not believed. They are routinely discredited. They are routinely deemed hysterical.”

Marissa relates to that. “I am a damn good mom,” she says. “It’s not always easy to stay grounded, and I don’t always feel grounded … but I’m not crazy.” She attributes “any mental health I’m struggling with right now” with the ongoing stress of facing her ex in court.

As of May, Marissa says she still hadn’t been able to find a pro bono attorney to take her case. “The amount of stuff opposing counsel does is too much for her,” Marissa wrote in a text to the Guardian about one potential pro bono attorney. “So I’m back to being on my own.”

This ongoing legal battle has drained her emotionally and psychologically while she cares for two young children as a single mother. “I want to move forward, and the case is just so much,” she says. “I’m trying to do what I think is best.”

Correction (10:07 a.m. Aug. 17, 2021): An earlier version of this story referenced 2015 census data that said courts award custody to mothers more than fathers. In fact, more mothers have custody than fathers as a result of out-of-court settlements, not court decisions.

This story was published in partnership with The Guardian and The Fuller Project.

Sofia Huston panted heavily as she pushed to close the gap between herself and the colleague in front.

Clad in bright yellow heavy-duty uniforms, hard hats and gloves, the crew trudged up “Cardiac Hill,” a grueling terrain southeast of Santa Clarita, in Los Angeles County, and so steep “you could kiss the ground in front of you.”

The 50 minute-long training session left Huston, who weighs 113 pounds and wears 45 pounds of line gear plus a 25-pound chainsaw strapped to her back, exhausted beyond anything she’d felt before. “I could feel the fatigue literally in my womb,” the 23-year-old says. 

Huston is a hotshot—a firefighter who battles wildfires. She hasn’t had a period in three years, something she attributes to the physical intensity of the job, and the brutal training sessions crews are put through.

“I know it’s because of this job. I know I’m a little bit leaner than is healthy,” she tells The Fuller Project.

“I think about how this will affect my chances of getting pregnant all the time,” she adds. “Not just because of my lack of period, but also hormonal issues — not to mention smoke inhalation, lack of sleep.”

Researchers do know that women firefighters — both volunteer and career — who make up approximately 8 percent of firefighters nationally, experience reproductive issues including a higher rate of miscarriage, as well as increased mental stress caused by gender discrimination. A lack of access to properly fitting gear also puts them at risk of exposure to toxic chemicals. But a dearth of women in the force means few individuals to research, leaving major gaps in  knowledge about how wildfire management impacts their health, especially maternal health. These women, who are working in an already labor-intensive, frontline and dangerous industry, face an uncertain future with little knowledge about how this work could have negative effects on their own reproductive health. 

Women in Fire, an organization representing and advocating for women in the industry including hotshots, is working to promote policies around light duty for pregnant women and breastfeeding for new mothers, says its president, Amy Hanifan.

When Hanifan, operations chief at the McMinnville Fire Department in Oregon, became pregnant seven years ago, she was concerned about how her work would impact the fetus. “I certainly did feel like there was a lack of information about being pregnant and breastfeeding,” she says.

Being a hotshot is one of the most physically demanding jobs in the U.S. Unlike stationed firefighters, more than 100 hotshots crews nationally, mostly based in the western US, travel throughout the country to tackle wildfires, sleeping outdoors, and working 16 hour-long shifts, for days in a row, with little time to eat or rest. 

In an increasingly hotter climate, wildfire season has grown so long it’s now known as fire year, making the job even harder. Hotshot crews work more hours now and are under extreme stress. Many hotshot crews are all-male, and those that do recruit women often have one or two on the team, often making the experience an isolating one. There are no changing or restroom facilities out in the field and women change clothes in their sleeping bags. 

Women firefighters are  already a small minority. In 1999, women made up around 2 percent of career firefighters. More than two decades later, the total number has limped to a measly 4 percent—excluding volunteers—compared to 12.8 percent of police and 31.7 percent of paramedics. The share of women firefighters is even lower than in the U.S. Marine Corps, where women were legally excluded from combat roles until 2013.

Gina Allbright, a former hotshot based in Colorado, recalls nothing but good experiences during her 10-year career, but there was still little support for her to become a mother.

“When you get a dispatch, you leave and you’re gone for anywhere from 14 to 21 days out on the road,” Allbright explains. “You have two days off, then you repeat. And you do that for six months a year. You just can’t have a baby. Especially with the wildfire season getting longer, that would be impossible.”

Knowledge of how fire impacts expectant mothers and breastfeeding women, and women’s bodies in general, is limited. 

“Women are being failed by a system that is intrinsically built around, and for, men,” says Dr. Sara Jahnke, the director and senior scientist at the National Development & Research Institutes, which focuses on public health.

Since starting to research firefighter health approximately 15 years ago, Jahnke has noticed a lack of gender data. “We’d have these huge studies of 800 firefighters, but only 35 of them were women,” she says.

When Jahnke went out to collect data, she recalls being pulled aside by female firefighters concerned about the risks they were taking. “Women would ask me, ‘Do you have any research on women in the fire service?’ and the answer was always no,” she says. “We quickly saw this group had to be looked at separately.”

Research Jahnke conducted in 2018 surveyed 1,821 women in the force. The report found 27 percent of firefighters’ pregnancies ended in miscarriage, while rates of pre-term birth were up to 16.7 percent, higher than the national average of 10 percent.

It also noted that despite increasing attention being paid to the impact of firefighting, “little is known specific to the health of women firefighters,” and data is lacking on the impact firefighting has on maternal and child health for women who become pregnant while working.

Firefighters are regularly exposed to chemicals like carbon monoxide, ammonia and known carcinogens, which are, according to the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics, linked to early miscarriage, birth defects, slowed fetal growth, impeded brain development and preterm labor. 

In 2020, Jahnke received a $1.5 million grant from FEMA to explore stress, cancer risks and the effect of toxins on reproductive health among women. She is leading a three-year project at the University of Arizona to learn more about how firefighting impacts women’s bodies and hopes to both fill research gaps and raise awareness among women in the industry about the risks they take.

Jeff Burgess, a University of Arizona professor of public health, worked with Jahnke to conduct a first-of-its-kind study of firefighter breastfeeding, which showed firefighters are absorbing chemicals from the fire.

The study’s findings, which the team will publish later this year, indicate breastfeeding women should avoid nursing for 72 hours after a fire, and pregnant firefighters should be removed from the field for the entire pregnancy term to avoid exposing their fetus to toxins. Burgess hopes his team can provide recommendations to reduce the amount of chemicals that get into lactating firefighters’ breast milk.

Hazards for female firefighters beyond maternity run the gamut. A 80 page-long document published in 2019 by the U.S. Fire Administration detailed women’s experiences in fire, including mental and physical health. A status check of 10 recommendations the agency had made in 1996 showed little progress had been made in over two decades.

Another USFA check in 2019 found female firefighters did not even have correctly fitting uniforms, noting that, typically, their “hands [are] too small to fit on the glove sizing chart.”

In Hanifan’s experience, well-fitting gear is “an issue” because uniform manufacturers tend to make clothes in men’s sizes. Hanifan’s department has begun custom-fitting its firefighters, but this is rare. Most female firefighters wear protective equipment that doesn’t fit properly—which has been linked to safety hazards associated with exposure to fires and dangerous chemicals. 

“There is no room for sexual harassment or gender-based discrimination in the fire service,” USFA fire administrator Tonya Hoover tells The Fuller Project. She added there would “always be more to do on this topic” and that USFA is committed to recruiting more women. Huston’s hotshot crew administrator did not respond to requests for comment on the work and adverse health effects described by Huston.

As for what needs to be done to initiate change, the women firefighters The Fuller Project spoke to agreed accountability needs to start at the local level, starting with cultural changes. And Jahnke stresses that change must come on all fronts—from national and international organizations, from local department chiefs, and especially from male firefighters. “The people who need to be beating the drum on this issue more than anyone else need to be the people in the majority,” she says.

For Huston, who has been fighting fires since she was 18, this season may be one of her last. Her next day off will come after a 31-day straight shift spent across Northern California and Oregon in triple-digit heat, on top of more than 200 hours of overtime.

“I know this is not sustainable. Honestly, I don’t know how much more my body can take.”

This story is published in partnership between The Guardian and The Fuller Project.

Deanna Miller Berry first learned of the scores of complaints about Denmark, South Carolina’s water supply, during her 2017 mayoral campaign.

For at least a decade, residents of the rural, predominantly Black and lower-income town “knew something was happening” and tried to sound the alarm, said Berry. “A lot of folks [were] complaining that they were starting to get sick, hair loss and skin issues.”

Berry lost that mayoral race, but has continued to fight for access to clean water and sanitation. After teaming up with a group from Flint, Michigan – another predominantly Black and lower-income community with a history of contaminated water – Berry learned that Denmark was allowing HaloSan, a non-EPA-approved pesticide, to be pumped into the city’s water supply. Although Denmark told residents in 2018 they discontinued the use of HaloSan, Berry said the work to ensure residents have access to clean and affordable water isn’t over.

More than 2 million people living in the United States lack access to safe drinking water and sanitation, according to a report from the US Water Alliance, a non-profit organization focused on sustainable water access in the country. Experts say that extreme weather events associated with the climate crisis are likely to exacerbate existing issues with the water infrastructure in the US, and that poor communities are likely to feel the effects of climate change on access to clean water first.

The pandemic has made the issue of lack of access to clean water and sanitation even more glaring and pressing, said Maureen Taylor, a lifelong activist in Detroit, Michigan, who has been fighting against similar price hikes and shutoffs in the city, which she said have greatly affected lower-income residents. “You have to wash your hands,” she said. “How are you going to do that if your water is turned off?”

Women, in particular women of color, have been deeply embedded in the water justice movement even before the movement’s official origins in the early 1990s, when a national coalition of activists and academics came together for the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership summit, said Dr Dorceta Taylor, a professor at Yale’s School of the Environment and an expert on the Environmental Justice movement.

“Even though you see many kinds of references to the fathers of environmental justice, there are grandmothers, mothers and women that have been doing it from the very onset in every aspect of it,” said Taylor.

Many of these women have banded together to share strategies, support each other and fight the larger national battle for water justice in ways they couldn’t as individuals, experts say.

“If the toilet or the sewage flows back into the house it’s women dealing with it and trying to protect themselves and their children too,” said Catherine Coleman Flowers, founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice and an activist in Lowndes county, Alabama. “So, I’m not surprised that most of the water warriors I’ve met have been women.”

“There are multiple families who live in this city who do not have water in their home right now because we cannot afford the drinking water,” said Berry, who herself hasn’t had running water for three weeks since the beginning of March because she can’t afford to pay her water bill.

Berry said that the cost of getting her water turned back on after not being able to afford the payments in January or February would be nearly $2,800, which is four times her rent. Each day, she receives anywhere from 25 to 60 calls a day from residents unable to pay their own water bills who fear drinking the water even if it was affordable. “We’re not going to believe what the heck tells us,” she said. “They felt comfortable poisoning this city for 10 years.”

Although Covid-19 has put a pause on many of the larger gatherings between activists in places like Detroit and Denmark, South Carolina, the relationships between women working on water activism in different communities have continued to be central to their organizing. And, the fact that advocates like Berry, who lives in a small southern town, have deep connections with activists in places like Flint isn’t an accident.

From the very beginning, there was a collective understanding that to prevent bad actors from simply shifting the problem from one marginalized community to the next, water justice activists needed to communicate and work together, said Taylor. “Everyone understood to build a movement you needed to know each other,” she said. “What might look local, or hyper-local on the surface is actually connected.”

For activist BarbiAnn Maynard, in Martin county, Kentucky, a poor and predominantly white, rural county, according to the US Census, which has had decades of issues with drinking water pollution, the fight for water equity has always stretched beyond the problems in her community. “We have a major US water crisis,” she said, “and just because it isn’t in the news in all of these small towns doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.”

Maynard, who has been working alongside other activists such as Flowers for more than 20 years, said that she is contacted by activists in small towns just like hers, looking for advice multiple times a week.

“They’re like, ‘You’ve been doing this for so long … we want to learn from you and your experiences that way we don’t have to do the same things and go through that whole long, 20-years process. We want to start where you are now.”

For younger female activists like 31-year-old Calandra Davis in Jackson, Mississippi, which was recently in the news after residents went weeks without running water, even if they aren’t in direct contact with “water warriors” in other cities, they’re still building off previous water and environmental justice efforts. “A lot of people have been doing this work for years,” said Davis. “So, we’re building on decades of movement work.”

Back in Denmark, Berry said that she’s confident that together women like herself can use their coalition to push for water and environmental justice on a broader scale despite her circumstances.

“We know the only way we can do it is together,” said Berry. “Women know how to work together and make it happen … we have a certain level of fight in us and we’re just not willing to back down when it comes to what we believe in.”

At least 11 migrant women were dropped off in Mexican border towns without birth certificates for their days-old US citizen newborns since March of last year, an investigation by the Fuller Project and the Guardian has found.

Based on multiple conversations with lawyers who work with asylum seekers at the border and a review of hospital records and legal documents, multiple US citizen newborns were removed to Mexico after their mothers were subject to a Trump-era border ban that the Biden-Harris administration has been slow to rescind.

Advocates suspect the actual number of such cases could be higher because the vast majority of these fast-track “expulsions”, as the administration calls them, have occurred away from the public eye and without the involvement of lawyers.

This recent pattern of removal of US citizens without birth certificates has occurred against the backdrop of immigration policies and practices in recent years that have harmed already vulnerable women and children, advocates and lawyers say.

Former president Donald Trump’s administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, which resulted in more than 5,000 children being separated from parents, and the rise in prolonged detention of children were the most visible policies, but represented only the tip of the iceberg. Homeland security agencies also detained 4,600 pregnant women between 2016 and 2018, with the number increasing by 52% between those two years. Several detained women have also complained of miscarriages and intrusive medical procedures.

Hélène*, a 23-year-old woman from Haiti, was nine months pregnant when she crossed into the United States in July 2020. She was in the custody of the US border patrol when her water broke. Agency officials transported her to a local hospital in Chula Vista, California, to give birth. She was happy when her baby girl was born – that everything went smoothly, she told the Fuller Project and the Guardian in a phone conversation through a translator.

Three days later, they were discharged. Hélène remembers thinking that she would be released to family and allowed to pursue her asylum case, she said. But 25 or so minutes later, she was back in Mexico, at the very border she arrived at a few days ago, pregnant at the height of summer, after a journey that lasted one month and three days. Panicking, she began to cry. She pleaded in Spanish to the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers who had driven her across the border. She knew they understood, she says. The officers did not respond.

They dropped her off across from the San Diego-Tijuana border, on the side of the road. She had no idea what to do or where to go. She also didn’t have her newborn’s birth certificate. When night fell, she and her baby slept right there on the street, on the other side of safety.Advertisement

Hélène was subject to Title 42, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention order issued during the beginning of the government’s federal actions against the Covid-19 pandemic last March. The rule allowed CBP officials to summarily “expel” all migrants who entered the US without authorization, instead of letting them access the legal avenue to request protection, even those seeking asylum.

Fast deportations have happened before at the border but typically immigrants have had the right to be screened for asylum claims and to see an immigration judge if they are likely to face harm upon removal. Title 42 allows authorities to turn away people summarily. However, officials can exempt people on a case-by-case basis and grant entry in case of humanitarian or public interest considerations.

“Immigration [agencies have] the authority to be able to prevent that from happening but they’re refusing to do that,” said Luis M Gonzalez, a lawyer with the Jewish Family Services, who has represented two cases in which migrant mothers and their US citizen newborns were expelled. “They are placing [the] lives of US citizens in danger. In this case, newborns.”

In fiscal year 2020, CBP reported over 200,000 expulsions — including unaccompanied children — were turned back under the Title 42. In the first three months of fiscal year 2021 alone, expulsions have exceeded 190,000, to date. The Trump administration hailed Title 42 as “tremendously effective”.

On 2 February, Joe Biden issued an executive order directing his officials to “promptly review” Title 42 among other border policies. But advocates have been frustrated that more decisive, quicker action hasn’t already been taken. On 29 January, a three-judge panel comprising conservative judges appointed by Trump overturned a lower court decision to block the rule from applying to unaccompanied minors.

In a statement Tuesday, Omar Jadwat, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, called it “troubling” that Biden’s orders “did not include immediate action to rescind and unwind more of the unlawful and inhumane policies that this administration inherited – and now owns”.

A CBP spokesperson, who asked the information she provided be attributed to the agency, said the agency does not track how many women with US citizen newborns were subject to Title 42 and declined to answer other questions about such cases. “Per policy, CBP does not comment on individual cases due to privacy reasons,” the spokesperson, who asked not to be named, said via email.

They added: “Hospitals are responsible for providing birth certificates and CBP does not hinder individuals, regardless of immigrations status, from acquiring birth certificates for US citizen children.”

CBP also told a local reporter last year that at least one new mother from Honduras was given the option to give her baby up to US child services before returning to Mexico.

“That’s not really a choice,” said Mitra Ebadolahi of the American Civil Liberties Union of San Diego, who along with Gonzalez from Jewish Family Services, filed a complaint to the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General last summer asking for an investigation into the case of this Honduran mother.

The Honduran woman, her husband and their nine-year-old, had turned themselves in to border patrol agents last June when the woman was nine months pregnant. The family had already been turned back to Mexico once in March before Title 42 came into effect. During their time in Mexico, they were threatened by armed men and “endured significant personal and material insecurity”, according to the 10 July complaint.

The woman, experiencing acute pain due to her late-term pregnancy, was taken to the hospital in Chula Vista, California, while her partner and son were expelled to Tijuana, Mexico, a city the state department itself notes is a hot spot for targeted homicides and turf wars. Two days later, the woman and her baby were also sent to Tijuana.

In another case Gonzalez represented, a migrant woman who had undergone a C-section, an invasive procedure that takes weeks to heal, was nevertheless removed to Mexico within the week of her surgery, along with her newborn. Gonzalez later successfully petitioned authorities to allow both families to enter on humanitarian grounds.

“I know it’s cliche, but there’s a very Kafka-esque quality to these processes that really scrubs out the humanity of the migrants’ experiences,” Ebadolahi said. “I have struggled to come up with language that adequately conveys the harm and the damage done.”

Natalia*, 24, wakes up in her apartment in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, across the border from McAllen, Texas, where she gave birth to her baby girl last April. Throughout the day, she takes care of the baby and her four-year-old son. If she is able to get to America in the future, the first thing she wants to do is get her hands on her toddler’s birth certificate, which she still didn’t possess in early January when she last spoke to the Guardian.

Issues can arise for mothers in her position: they can have a hard time getting their children vaccinated and registered for early education, and have issues obtaining food assistance and other government benefits, said Nicole Ramos, director of Al Otro Lado’s Border Rights Project, a legal services organization for migrants.

“For all intents and purposes, that child is stateless, which is going to create a whole host of barriers … because they’re unable to establish citizenship,” said Ramos, who says her organization has dealt with nine such cases including Hélène’s and Natalia’s.

In the last two years, camps have mushroomed along the US-Mexico border to house families stuck in limbo due to Trump’s border policies, who struggle with access to basic services like food, clean water and medical help.

Human Rights First, an advocacy organization, has documented more than 1,300 cases of violent assaults, kidnappings, rapes and murders among migrants placed in the Migrant Protection Protocols – through which migrants are made to wait in Mexico for their US court hearings, now suspended during the pandemic.

Through this time, border shelters in Mexico have become more strained and hospitals more crowded. Desperate, many migrants have tried to cross into the United States again, only to be sent back under Title 42.

All of these policies put people who have already suffered significant trauma through repetitive cycles of harm, advocates say.

“It has become really clear that the right to life protection of the children is about protecting white, Christian children … not about brown children born to immigrant mothers,” Ramos says.

On 3 February, the Washington Post reported Mexico revealed, not publicly, they would stop accepting Central American families expelled by the US, but would continue to accept single adults.

In January, as Natalia’s baby girl cooed and fussed, she said she’d like Americans to know: border officials told her before her expulsion to Reynosa that her daughter would not be able to get a birth certificate because she was born to parents who were migrants without rights. Her daughter would not have rights either, they said.

*Names have been changed on the request of immigration lawyers, because both women are fleeing persecution.

Every morning, Rowena wakes early on the pile of blankets where she sleeps, curled up against a desk in the corner of the office she used to clean. It’s not yet 7am, but if her manager catches her alone in her pyjamas, he’ll try to grope and stroke her, as he’s tried to do several times a week for the past six months.

Rowena, who is 54 and asked to be identified only by her first name, left the Philippines for Bahrain in April 2019. After she had been in the Gulf country for a year, her boss told her that due to the pandemic, he could no longer pay her monthly salary of 120 Bahraini dinar (£240). Instead, he would provide her and the three other migrant domestic workers he employed with 10 Bahraini dinar (or £20) for food every fortnight, to be split between four.

The same month, Rowena’s flight out of the country was cancelled, and she found herself trapped. In September, her employer stopped giving the women their food allowance too, leaving them with nothing.

Rowena and her housemates are not alone: the pandemic has left domestic workers like them further exposed to exploitative working conditions and abuse. The Guardian has interviewed more than a dozen Filipina women across Asia, Europe and the Middle East since April. Most have lost jobs or had salaries cut by their employers since the start of this year. Others have also found themselves suddenly subjected to physical abuse.

As Covid started to spread worldwide, the Philippine government organised repatriation flights from Manama to Manila. But Rowena didn’t know about them. In July, three months after her boss first stopped paying her, she wrote on the Philippine government’s Overseas Foreign Workers Help Office’s public Facebook page to ask for help, along with dozens of other Filipina women and men stranded abroad. She also applied for financial support from the Philippine Department of Labor and Employment. Months passed by, but no one replied.

“I don’t want to make trouble,” she says via a call over Facebook Messenger. “I want to go home.”

Government: Nearly one out of every four migrant domestic workers are Filipina

The Philippines government says that approximately one third of its 10 million citizens overseas are women working in “elementary” jobs — a term widely interpreted as referring to domestic workers like Rowena who are paid low wages to clean homes, and cook meals and care for wealthy families under often horrendous conditions. Human Rights Watch has long described migrant domestic workers, thousands of miles away from home and hidden out of sight in strangers’ houses, as one of the world’s most vulnerable demographics. Now, nearly a year into a global pandemic, thousands of Filipina women are stranded with even fewer options to flee exploitation.

According to the International Labor Organisation, there are 11.5 million migrant domestic workers worldwide. By the Philippine government’s own estimate, approximately one in four is a Filipina woman. International advocacy organisations believe the number would likely be higher if those who are undocumented were taken into account.

Together, the women form a scattered community, the majority spread across the Middle East and East Asia, followed by Europe and the United States. Recruited by international agencies who favour English-speaking nannies and cleaners, the women are charged exorbitant fees to find work overseas. For the 60% of Filipina women who work in the Middle East, they’re also subject to the “kafala” system, which generally binds a migrant worker to their employer, resulting in the confiscation of their passports until their contracts come to an end.

Maria, 43, is a single mother from the Philippines who has been working in Hong Kong since 2019. In August, her employer lost her temper after Maria (who agreed to speak on the condition of her anonymity) didn’t cook a bell pepper for the family’s baby. “She slapped me on my face, on the right side of my face with her hand, and beat me on [my] bottom [ I think] around three or four times,” she says. “I felt that I was unworthy for her.”

In Singapore, Robina Navato hears similar stories daily. A domestic worker for almost 25 years, she also volunteers for the Humanitarian Organisation for Migration Economics (HOME), counseling her peers across the city on their rights. At the start of the outbreak, she received calls late into the night from Filipina domestic workers trying to leave their abusive employers. “I told them that the shelter is packed with people already and we cannot accept [them],” she remembers. “So if you can hold on, for like another month, and then run away after that?”

Researcher: ‘They’re really pushed to the brink of destitution’

The UK issues approximately 23,000 visas to foreign domestic workers every year, half of whom come from the Philippines, according to reports. British laws enabled their abuse before the pandemic, migrant rights advocates say. But research shows illegal, exploitative working conditions have multiplied in recent months. “They don’t have any access to public funds, or furlough schemes or anything like that. From the perspective of the state, they just don’t exist,” says Dr Ella Parry-Davies, a postdoctoral fellow at the British Academy researching the lives of Filipina domestic workers in Lebanon and the UK. “They’re really pushed to the brink of destitution.”

In the first two months of the coronavirus outbreak, more than half of the Filipino migrant workers surveyed in the UK had lost their jobs, according to a report compiled in June by Dr Parry-Davies and the Kanlungan Filipino Consortium—a London-based consortium of grassroots organisations advocating for Filipino migrants’ rights. Others saw their wages drop to less than £2 per hour, less than a quarter of the UK’s statutory minimum wage. Of those who were infected by the coronavirus, one in four were too scared to ask the NHS for help in case it affected their immigration status in the future.

“They’ve got no support whatsoever,” says Dr Parry-Davies, adding that the Filipina women, who clean, nanny and take care of disabled or elderly people, are essentially key workers. “They’re just completely abandoned by the nation.”

RELATED: Fuller Project coverage of human trafficking

In 2014, Mimi (who asked to go by a different name to avoid jeopardising her safety) arrived in West London, brought over to the UK by a European family she’d previously worked for in Hong Kong. Today, she works from 8am until 8pm, Monday to Friday, taking care of two children under the age of 10, earning approximately £5 per hour. After finishing her day’s duties, the 52-year-old often crosses High Street Kensington and cleans a neighbour’s house from 8:30pm until one or two in the morning. Then she walks for 30 minutes back to the boarding house she shares with four other Filipina women. Her monthly rent is almost half her salary.

“When I am working in the wee hours I am crying, and I am saying, ‘Why am I doing this?’” she says over the phone, late one Friday night. “I know I am being abused. But I cannot complain.”

As the country moves in and out of COVID-19 lockdowns, her employers have insisted she continue working, coaching her on what to say to the police if she’s stopped on the street. Their demands have also increased: she has to disinfect the house from top to bottom, clean their three toilets every day and sanitise the kitchen. But although Mimi fears for her safety, she can’t afford to quit.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte says his administration is helping Filipino citizens stranded overseas, but such support is limited. In April, the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) released a one-off grant of up to 10,000 Philippine pesos (£156) for displaced foreign workers, and the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) has repatriated 277,320 Filipino citizens from countries including Lebanon, Turkey and Bahrain since February.

Risk of deportation looms for foreign domestic workers in UK

Each of the women The Guardian spoke to sends the majority of her disposable income back to the Philippines.

Filipina migrant workers wire back more than £26 billion to support their families every year, accounting for 8.8% of the Philippines’ total GDP, according to the World Bank. Since the start of the year, unemployment in the Philippines has doubled and the pressure to send money home is greater than ever. Without Mimi’s income, her 19-year-old daughter won’t be able to finish her civil engineering degree. “There’s nothing left for me,” Mimi says. “I’m working here with no [money] for myself, just for my family.”

Even if Mimi did decide to hand in her notice, she would risk deportation. Until 2012, an “Overseas Domestic Worker Visa” allowed Filipina women to quit their jobs and find a new employer within the UK without it affecting their immigration status. “But when [Prime Minister David] Cameron and the Conservatives were in power, they removed the rights of the domestic workers to change their employers,” says Phoebe Dimacali, who heads up the Filipino Domestic Workers Association UK, a volunteer organisation of more than 80 women from the Philippines in the United Kingdom. “Once they leave their employers they will automatically become undocumented.”

In 2020, foreign domestic workers can legally change employers in the UK within the first six months of their arrival. After six months, the only way they can stay in the country is if he or she can prove they have been trafficked. “The reason why that is a problematic response is because we have lots of people that come to see us who have been exploited but haven’t been trafficked,” says Avril Sharp, legal policy and campaigns officer at Kalayaan, a London-based non-governmental organisation advocating for migrant domestic workers’ rights. “But they may well be trafficked later in the future, because their visa—if it hasn’t already—will expire, and then they will lose a lot of … the basic fundamental rights that will keep them safe in the UK.”

Many of the women who say they have been trafficked are not allowed to work and have to survive on the national asylum support allowance of £39.60 per week until their visa application is processed, which can take up to three years.

Human rights campaigners, along with Labour MP for Birmingham, Yardley Jess Phillips, are urgently calling for 2012’s Overseas Domestic Worker Visa to be reinstated during the pandemic, and to allow thousands of women the right to escape abusive working conditions. “They’re not being fed, they sleep on the floor, they’re not being given the right amount of wages that they need,” says Dimicali. “Nobody knows what is happening inside these big houses in Knightsbridge, inside these big houses in Kensington, in these very wealthy places in London.”

A Home Office spokesperson said: “We are committed to protecting migrant domestic workers from exploitation and have already made a number of changes to better protect workers. This includes allowing workers to switch to a different employer and explaining how to raise concerns. We are also proud to provide world-leading support for victims of modern slavery so they can rebuild their lives, including by providing accommodation, financial support and counselling.”

‘I’m alone here’: Mother faces uncertain future in Bahrain

After her employer stopped paying for her food in Bahrain in September, Rowena found part-time work cleaning houses in the neighbourhood, earning approximately 16BHD (£30) every week. Her visa has expired, and she’s worried that if she’s caught, she might be sent to jail. “It’s useless,” she said. “Because I’m alone here. This is not my country.”

On December 4, Rowena received 75BHD (£147) in financial support from the Philippine government, seven months after she first applied. The cheapest ticket from Manama to Manila costs more than twice as much as she received. Her boss has promised to pay for her flight home, but he hasn’t told her when.

The Phillipine Department of Foreign Affairs did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

As rates of COVID-19 continue to climb across the world, neither she nor Mimi have told their children the reality of their lives abroad. When Rowena’s 24-year-old daughter and two-year-old grandson ask how she’s doing, she lies.

“She’s asking me, ‘Mama, what date do you come back?’ I say, ‘Very soon…’ But I don’t know, because my boss never says ‘OK, your ticket is ready now’.”

Until he does, Rowena lies on her pile of blankets behind the desk and waits.

Even before networks projected the presidential race for former Vice President Joe Biden Saturday morning, Wanda Mosley, a 50-year-old organizer based in Atlanta, Georgia, began to prepare to mobilize voters for her  state’s two critical Senate run-off elections on January 5. 

And after one of the most turbulent Presidential elections in  U.S. history, the two races in the battleground state will determine if the balance of power in Washington will fall to President-elect Biden once he is sworn into office. Georgia has yet to be called for Biden, a Democrat, though he leads President Donald Trump currently, which motivates organizers like Mosley who continues to register voters who want to vote in the January run-offs until early December.

We understand fully how important these races are, says Mosley, the Senior State Coordinator for Georgia’s Black Voters Matter, a non profit dedicated to voter engagement. 

“We’re still here. We’re still working,” Mosley says.

Democrats have long pointed to Black voters, more specifically, Black women as a crucial voting bloc,  decisive to elections since former President Bill Clinton’s victories in the 1990s. But this November, successfully flipping the southern, Republican-led state of Georgia  to the Democrats for the first time in 28 years has drawn attention to the organizational power of Black women, whose large-scale mobilization efforts appears to have resulted in massive turnouts among people of color in those cities, experts say. 

“What might have been different is the greater role of on the ground mobilization and voter registration efforts in states like Georgia, and I think that that was the effort that was largely built by Stacey Abrams and others on the ground,” says Jamil Scott, assistant professor, in the Government Department at Georgetown University.

Rather than rely on outside political consultants swarming into so-called battleground states,  Abrams who lost to Republican Governor Brian Kemp in 2018, led that charge in Georgia this year, says Aimee Allison, founder of She the People, a national network advocating for women of color in politics. There was a 69% increase in voter turnout among women of color in Georgia this year compared to 2016, according to Allison, who cites data She the People analyzed from progressive data firm Catalist.

“You have a group of voters of Black women who are the most effective organizers on the ground because they are trusted voices and are working in organizations year round. They don’t come in six weeks before and kind of rent out a storefront they’re actually invested in, long-term, empowering the community through civic and political action,” she says.

In America, this election year has not played out in a vacuum. Rather, it has been met with — and compounded by — America’s year of reckoning with police brutality and systemic inequality that has driven even more people to vote.

Thousands of Americans took to the streets to protest police brutality in the wake of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s deaths earlier this year as the Black community also  shouldered the disproportionate impact of COVID-19. The meeting of those moments spurred political mobilization among Black voters, says Tim Stevens,  CEO of Pittsburgh’s Black Political Empowerment Project, an nonprofit voting rights organization based in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, where President Trump was swiftly defeated last week. 

“The tragedies…made what was already present in the heart of black people and people of color even more evident and more urgent,” says Stevens.  

And those mobilization efforts were evident as ballots are counted in diverse urban centers in key states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania where large populations of Black voters in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Atlanta and Detroit  helped push Biden towards victory. 

Then there were a number of prominent  Black women in leadership roles — like Abrams, Nikema Williams, who took on John Lewis’ congressional seat and is chair of Georgia’s state Democratic Party, and Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms — helped fuel mobilization efforts among Black women this election, suggests Dianne Pinderhughes, professor of political science and chair of the department of Africana studies at the University of Notre Dame.

One organizer in Pennsylvania points to the most prominent one: the  first-Black and South Asian American Vice President-elect, Kamala Harris. “We had the same feelings we had when Obama was first elected,” says Brittany Smalls, Pennsylvania State Coordinator for Black Voters Matter. “We just never thought we would see the day that a woman in leadership looks like us.” 

Now, as Americans  across the country shift their attention away from the Presidential race and onto the run-off elections in Georgia, organizers like Mosley say they are keen to build on their success, in an election that could ultimately determine what kind of presidency Joe Biden will have. 

“This is the culmination of years and years and years of work, when other people didn’t think it was possible,” says Mosley. 

“We know how important the Senate is, and so if we can play a role in getting one — or possibly two seats — to try to shift that balance of power, you need to understand that black women will do whatever it takes.” 

In his final moments of life, George Floyd called for his mother as a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck in the street.

Floyd’s death has sparked a now worldwide anti-racism movement, huge anti-police brutality protests across America, and a national conversation that is reckoning with the US history of racism.

But Floyd’s finals words have also rallied women who have grieved the death of their own children, the victims of police brutality, for years. 

These mothers of Americans killed by police have watched as tens of thousands recently mourned the deaths of another three black children: Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and Floyd. 

But sometimes their own grief stretches for many years. Since her son Amadou Diallo’s death in a hail of 41 bullets from police in 1999, Kadiatou Diallo has watched black mothers grieve. So has Valerie Bell, since police shot her son Sean Bell 50 times hours before his wedding in 2006. As has Constance Malcolm, after police followed her 17-year-old son, Ramarley Graham, into his home in 2012, shooting him in front of his six-year-old brother after alleging they saw a gun on the unarmed teen.

The four women spoke to a reporter ahead of a march in New York last week, organized by the families who have lost loved ones to police killings, as part of the ongoing protest movement triggered by Floyd’s death.

“There’s no change,” Diallo said. Nearly at the same time, Malcolm added: “If anything, it got worse.”

A changed nation?

For years, these women marched through the US streets demanding justice within the system. All three mothers still hesitate to proclaim a changed nation as the country is gripped by weeks of protests. It’s too soon, they say. 

All of the women agree that their call for changes to police protocols is one they have demanded for years. What’s different this time, Malcolm says, is a generation hungry for change.

“We have young people that want change. And they’re on the frontline [and] they’re willing to, basically, to me … they were willing to die, because if you see them up in these cops’ faces, they have guns. And we know what they do when they have guns,” she said.

“It’s been a long time that we’ve been struggling as a people,” Bell agreed.

As a group, these women have called for a special prosecutor to investigate all officer-involved deaths since 2015, the repeal of a New York state law protecting police from the release of their disciplinary records, and defunding the police.

“Our surviving children and grandchildren deserve to have a better future,” said Diallo. “The only change I noticed,” she added a little later, “is the camera. The videos, that is educating people, showing them the truth.”

The video documenting Floyd’s death has now been watched millions of times around the world, renewing calls for change, spurring protests and calls for changes to police departments nationally. Millions saw Garner’s death, too, along with his final words: “I can’t breathe.”

“Our surviving children and grandchildren deserve to have a better future,”

Kadiatou Diallo

The officer involved in Garner’s death was not indicted by a Staten Island grand jury. He was fired five years later.

But this week, New York state legislators passed a law criminalizing the chokehold. State senator Diane Sabino credited Garner’s mother for this change.

Our strength is to really push forward the change we need, because we’re not going to give upKadiatou Diallo

The movement to defund the police nationwide might have gained traction in recent days, but it is something most of the women have called for well before the conversation seeped into American homes. Bell spent the previous weekend calling her local officials well into midnight along with Malcolm. 

“You have to keep on, and so many of them are out there who have it in their mind that they want to make the change, but they’re afraid to make that change,” Bell said. Some police forces have addressed those calls, taking moderate steps to reform policies.

The four women are a tight-knit group.

We are a team, Diallo said. One that won’t stop.

“When George Floyd called his mama, all of the mothers were summoned to push forward and make things happen. Our strength, our strength is to really push forward the change we need because we’re not going to give up. Like I said, nothing changed.” 

The week before New Zealand went into full lockdown on 26 March, Lana*, 28, had taken a break from work at the high-end Wellington brothel where, since September, she had made around NZ$2,200 a month seeing two or three clients a week.

On 23 March, her university announced courses would move online. The following day she decided to stay with her parents in Auckland, and applied for New Zealand’s emergency wage subsidy for all workers whose earnings have fallen by at least 30% due to coronavirus.

Just two days later the money – a lump sum of NZ$4,200 covering 12 weeks of lost part-time earnings – was in her account. Full-time workers, who average more than 20 hours a week, get a lump sum of $7,029.

“The form only took about three minutes to fill out and I didn’t need to disclose that I am a sex worker,” Lana said. “I only needed to disclose that I am self-employed.”

In New Zealand, sex work is seen as any other form of work under the country’s decriminalisation model, which was developed with input from sex workers themselves and became law in 2003. As the coronavirus impacts country after country, exposing deep-seated inequalities and further marginalising vulnerable workers, New Zealand’s policy framework has helped sex workers, in contrast, find financial security and safety during this time of crisis.

“Because [sex work] is not criminal, in my experience, I think that just creates an environment where you are respected,” says Lana, who studies politics and languages. “You’ve got so much behind your back.”

She’s using the time to focus on her studies, and volunteer with a community justice organisation, writing on social and human rights issues.

There’s perhaps no country in the world in which the government and the sex worker community, which in New Zealand numbers around 3,500 people, have as robust and productive a relationship.

“The fact that the sex industry in New Zealand has been decriminalised has a lot of advantages, and it proves itself now with this virus issue, in the sense that all sex workers in New Zealand get their access to benefits,” says Joep Rottier, a criminology researcher at Utrecht University, whose dissertation looked at the New Zealand model.

In addition to the emergency wage subsidy, which is available to all New Zealand workers just by providing a national ID number and basic personal information, sex workers are also immediately eligible for job-seekers benefits, a weekly payout that for other workers typically requires a waiting period (the exemption, part of the 2003 legislation that fully decriminalised prostitution, was intended to ensure sex workers could leave the industry at any time and would not be forced into sex work for financial reasons).

Dame Catherine Healy, a campaigner, former sex worker, and founding member of the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective (NZPC), says she has seen applications for both the emergency wage subsidy and job-seekers benefits processed within days, thanks to assistance from government outreach workers who, until the coronavirus crisis struck, regularly made in-person visits to a sex worker community centre in Auckland.

“We had a cluster of nine dealt with promptly on Wednesday and sorted by Friday,” Healy says. “We had to get IDs and in one case there was no bank account to pay the subsidy to and this has been sorted too, with the officials’ help.”

Rottier says that thanks to the New Zealand sex work community’s robust relationship with law enforcement, police officers have taken over outreach activities from NZPC, finding sex workers who are working in the street and directing them to groups like NZPC which can help them get financial assistance.

By contrast, in neighbouring Australia, a statement from an alliance of sex workers groups condemned police for fining sex workers who continued to work in New South Wales. “This does nothing to promote the public health measures that are currently in place, and instead serves to punish those who have already been left behind by federal income relief measures,” they wrote.

Reports from the US suggest that sex workers, while able to earn some money from non-contact work such as peep shows and webcam streaming, are turning to GoFundMe campaigns because their off-the-books work makes them ineligible for government unemployment benefits.

In the Netherlands, Rottier is concerned some sex workers find it difficult to observe social distancing measures designed to prevent the spread of the virus. “They have to live, they have to pay the rent, they have to eat, so they are forced to continue working,” he says.

The same may also be true in New Zealand. Mary Brennan, who has run Funhouse, a high-end Wellington brothel, for 15 years, said there may also be sex workers in New Zealand who are still working to survive, “just like any other humans in this massive international tragedy we find ourselves in”.

While street work has gone down dramatically since the 2003 decriminalisation (and thanks to sex workers being able to advertise online and contact clients through their phones), there is still a small population of street workers, as well as migrant sex workers who move from town to town. Healy noted that the benefit amounts are not enough to live on in a country where there is a housing crisis, and the cost of living is amongst the most expensive in the world. She recently helped a sex worker locate a place to get tested for coronavirus, and afterwards the woman told her she didn’t have any toilet paper or food, so NZPC helped her.

Healy says some were already receiving their assistance before the crisis hit and that it had not been enough at less than NZ$250 a week, which is why they also moved into sex work.

Freed up to help

Thanks to the government benefits, several of the highly paid women who worked out of Funhouse are using the hiatus to volunteer and do charity work. One offered sexy photos on Twitter to anyone who donates a night at a women’s refuge for someone in need.

“We have women on social media not having to fight for pennies who are using their skills and their bodies to raise money for those more vulnerable,” says Brennan, who goes by “Madam Mary”.

Healy says it is unlikely sex workers will be able to return to normal work until New Zealand reaches level one restrictions – on Tuesday it moved from level 4 to level 3.

Alice*, 23, was earning around $1,200 a week at Funhouse in January and February, before she returned to Auckland, where she works through another agency on Fridays and Saturdays, while studying science during the week. She applied for the part-time subsidy on 30 March, and received it on 6 April. Although she hasn’t worked since mid-March, she feels financially secure, and is spending her free time studying, watching movies, and taking an online psychology course.

Although she used to have very minimal contact with clients outside the brothel, she has allowed some to contact her via Twitter.

“I’m kind of happy to spend a bit more time messaging people and keeping in touch,” she says. She also created a photo set to sell to clients, whose physical and intellectual companionship she misses.

“I think it’s kind of something I took for granted; it just becomes such a normal part of our lives to spend so much time around people in an intimate setting, and now it’s a little bit of a shock to the system to not have that kind of closeness with people,” she says. “I was spending a lot of time with people that I don’t see in my day-to-day life. I used to have a lot of interesting discussions, get a lot of different opinions on things. Now I’m kind of closed off to this small group of people I live with.”

Naima Said stands back and studies her handiwork. “Not quite,” the self-taught beauty therapist mumbles, her forehead furrowed in frustration. Then she delicately dabs her client’s eyelid with a squishy makeup sponge. She’s not finished yet.

Several years ago Said, 31, used YouTube videos to train herself in everything from dying hair to pedicures. Now she runs the Beauty Corner – a small but perfectly formed parlour in Mombasa on the Kenyan coast. Every weekday at 8am, she lays out her equipment and waits for women to walk through the door. Like Said, those who seek out her services are addicted to heroin, or in recovery.

Housed in the Reachout Centre Trust, a Kenyan organisation that helps Mombasa residents to fight drug addiction, the parlour opened last year with the aim of attracting more female users to its services, which include HIV testing, counselling, methadone treatment and cervical cancer screening.

Said was a heroin user for 10 years. After her father ran out of money to pay for private school, she was at a loose end, she says. Aged 17, she started smoking marijuana with her friends. By 21, she was a “full=blown” heroin addict.

“I was half-dead, half-alive,” she says. “I started selling sex to pay for my next hit. On the streets, you need to look beautiful but I looked dirty. I was a junkie. People would see me and get scared.”

Until recently, hard drugs – especially heroin – were rare in Africa. Since 2010, however, heroin use has increased faster across the continent than anywhere else in the world, according to the 2017 report of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

There are two reasons. First, despite the billions of pounds spent by the US and its allies to curb the production of opium poppies in Afghanistan, the amount grown has seen an “almost continuous rise”, says Simone Haysom of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime (GIATO).

Opium cultivation reached record high

In 2017, opium cultivation reached a record high (jumping 87% in one year). It has since fallen by 20% but Afghanistan still produces 82% of the world’s heroin.

Second, Africa has become an attractive drug transit route. Historically, most of the heroin trafficked to the west from Afghanistan came overland via the “Balkan route”. But after conflict and increased security made this path trickier to navigate, according to a report by the GIATO, smugglers took to the seas.

Since 2010 the “southern route” – also known as the “smack track” – has grown in popularity; heroin is trafficked from Afghanistan via the Indian Ocean into east and South Africa. From there it makes its way to Europe, Asia and North America. As more heroin has washed into east Africa, more people have become hooked.

“Instead of the drug just moving through the region, the region itself is now a destination,” says Haysom.

In 2017, the UNODC said heroin addiction appeared to be on the rise in Kenya, particularly along the coast. As east Africa’s largest port, Mombasa has borne the brunt of this increase, but usage has spread to other areas, including Nairobi and Kiambu county. Data is patchy, but it is estimated that between 18,000 and 55,000 Kenyans use heroin.

While help is available at more than 50 registered treatment and rehabilitation centres across the country, rehabilitation is rarely free. Women are falling through the cracks.

“Female drug users have very specific needs,” says Faiza Hamid, Reachout’s programme manager, “and their needs aren’t being met.”

A key problem is stigma: many participate in sex work to fund their drug habit (a single heroin dose costs between 150-200 Kenyan shillings, roughly £1.50) and this prevents them from accessing treatment. Concerns about childcare, hard-to-reach treatment centres and relationship issues – the women often live with a partner with their own substance problem – also stop many coming forward for help.

If women do seek out treatment, they are likely to drop out faster, and experience higher risks of HIV infection. Women constitute the minority of users, but experts say that the numbers on female drug use are underreported and likely to be much higher.

At the same time, there is a clear lack of services tailored to women’s needs and the majority of rehabilitation centres are aimed at men. While research on female drug addicts in Kenya is limited, studies have indicated that women enrolled in gender-specific treatment programmes have better outcomes and improvement than those who are not, according to the UNODC.

That is where the Beauty Corner comes in. “I talk to these girls,” says Said, Reachout’s first female methadone patient, who was chosen by the clinic’s director to manage the parlour after attending counselling sessions. She has been clean for five years.

“I say to them: ‘What you see on the outside is drug addiction, and self-loathing. You are beautiful. You’re a mother, a daughter, a sister.’ As I paint their nails, I say, ‘why don’t you start methadone? Why don’t you check your [HIV] status?’ When it works, it’s like magic.”

Female heroin users

For years few female users showed up for Reachout’s services – they simply didn’t see the point of coming. “The women told me they felt everything at the drop-in centre was designed for male addicts,” says Hamid. “They already knew their HIV status, what more did they need?”

So she came up with the idea of the Beauty Corner. The aim was to get women through the door and to make them feel special – even for a short while – before bringing up other, more difficult issues.

It seems to be working. In under a year, 453 women have come to the parlour, and there has been a “big uptake” of women using the clinical services, says Hamid. Cervical cancer screenings, for example, have risen by 34%. Said now sees on average 15 women every day.

As the parlour fills up, a sticky midday heat settles in. Three women sit side-by-side, chatting quietly. One of them is 34-year-old Elizabeth Yieko, her hair a tangle of brightly coloured rollers. A former addict, she was introduced to the Beauty Corner by a friend.

“I could not believe it,” she says, after seeing her friend. “She was so clean, had makeup on, nicely done hair with red lipstick. I saw how women who have sold their lives to drugs can still have a life. I felt transformed.”

Yieko had already stopped smoking heroin. Today she visits hotspots frequented by female users to spread the word about the Beauty Corner. So far she has brought 10 women to the parlour.

Said would like to do more. “I’m happy I’m helping people,” she says, “but it’s not good enough for me. I think about the future. What about life after the methadone? Where are we going to go? For people born and raised in the drug dens, their home is the drug den.

“We need to find a place for women.”

After five years in the brothel, Labonni stopped dreaming of being rescued. Ever since she had been sold to a madam at 13 years old, customers had promised to help her escape. None had followed through. Over time, their faces began to blur together, so she couldn’t remember exactly who had visited before, or how many men had come by that day. There’s usually one every hour, starting from 9am.

“Sometimes I wake up and I don’t understand why I’m not dead yet,” she says.

Now 19, Labonni says she’s resigned to life – and death – in Mymensingh, a brothel village in the centre of Bangladesh. Here, between 700 and 1,000 women and girls are working in the sex trade – many of them against their will.

Girls as young as 12 sleep five to a room; their beds only cordoned off by torn cotton curtains. Music blares from heavyset sound systems and homemade liquor is poured from plastic bottles to numb the pain. Men swagger shirtless down the alleys looking for girls. Ten minutes of sex will cost them TK400 (about £3.66) – but it’s money that mainly lands in the pockets of those running the brothel.

Like the majority of girls in Mymensingh, Labonni was trafficked into sex work. On the run at 13 years old, she left her six-month-old daughter behind to flee the abusive husband she had been made to marry the year before, in a ceremony that took place on the same day she started her period. “I didn’t know where I was going,” she remembers. “I thought maybe I could find work in a garment factory.”

A woman saw her looking tearful in Dhaka railway station, and offered her food and a place to sleep for the night. Two days later, Labonni was sold by her to the brothel for about £180 and forbidden to leave.

Overnight, she became a chukri, or bonded sex worker – imprisoned within the brothel until she repaid hundreds of pounds in fabricated debts. “The madam who bought me said that I had to pay her back,” Labonni says in a flat voice. “She’d bribed the police to say I was 18 [the legal age for a registered sex worker] and told me I owed her more than £914. Then she confiscated my phone and locked me in my bedroom. She said that she’d hurt me if I tried to run away.” After two or three months, Labonni gave up trying to escape. “They always find you,” she adds.

A quick breakdown of the figures involved shows how girls like Labonni are a vital part of a hugely profitable business model for brothel owners in Bangladesh. For the past six years, since being trapped in the brothel, she has worked continually to pay off her phantom debt. Yet over those six years she has earned upwards of £46,500 for madams who enjoy lives of considerable luxury.

Until last year everything Labonni earned went to her madam. All she was given back was a £37 as a monthly allowance for food, clothes and toiletries. Labonni has now paid her original £914 “debt” back 50 times over.

Last year she was finally told she had paid off her debt, but she has yet to move on. Her mental strength is worn down by years of abuse. “I feel worthless,” she says. “My daughter doesn’t even know I’m her mum.” Even with her “debt” gone, she’s still obliged to pay half of her weekly earnings – approximately £78 – to the madams in exchange for electricity and a place to stay.

One of her regular customers, Mohammed Muktal Ali, is 30 years old. A married bus driver from the nearby town, he has been visiting Labonni every day for four and a half years, since she was 14. “All the girls here are helpless,” he says. “You can’t sell a boy to a brothel, but you can sell a girl because she has monetary value.” He doesn’t feel guilty for paying for sex with a trafficked teenager. “I am in love with Labonni. I’m 70% sure that one day I will rescue her.” Labonni doesn’t look up. “I don’t believe anything the men say to me any more,” she says later. “They all lie.”

Four floors down from Labonni’s bedroom, Farada, 33, says the number of trafficked girls has increased since she arrived at the brothel in 1999. She knows, she says, because she buys them. After 12 years entrapped in sexual slavery herself, she was given a girl as a gift by a customer eight years ago, moving from exploited to exploiter overnight. When the girl escaped, she bought a second, called Moni, for £137. “I paid £27 on cigarettes for the police, and they sorted all the paperwork,” she says, referring to the government-mandated certificates that state every sex worker is at least 18 and consents to engaging in prostitution. “Now the police charge more. It’s at least £450, which is very expensive, so the girls have to pay me back.” The younger the girl, the higher the bribe required by law enforcement, she adds.

These days, she makes about £187 every week from two girls, but says a third of that goes to local gang members who control the brothel.

The money being made in this single brothel is an indicator of the vast profits generated by the global trade in women and girls. Sex trafficking is an enormously lucrative business.

Academic Siddharth Kara advises the United Nations and the US government on slavery and has shown through his own research that sex trafficking is disproportionately lucrative compared with other forms of slavery. He estimates that sex trafficking creates half of the total profits generated globally by modern slavery, despite only accounting for 5% of all trafficking victims worldwide.

He told the Observer: “The return on investment for sex trafficking is around 1,000% compared with much lower returns in exploitation for construction, agriculture or mining. The immense profitability of sex trafficking is … driven by the minimal expense associated with acquiring victims and the fact that the victim can be sold up to 20 times a day, generating tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars in profit per victim.”

Prostitution was legalised in Bangladesh in 2000, after the year-long detention of 100 sex workers by police sparked protests calling for the women’s freedom and equal rights. The women’s release heralded a new legal framework, but few protections.

Instead, the business of sexual exploitation has thrived in a country where women are oppressed in many ways. Across the country, one in five girls is married before her 15th birthday and only a quarter finish secondary education. Choice is a luxury few women here can afford.

While prostitution is legal, trafficking and forced labour are not. But poor enforcement of legislation in a country where women are easy prey means traffickers act with impunity. The Bangladesh government estimates that 100,000 women and girls are working in the country’s sex industry and one study reports that less than 10% of those had entered prostitution voluntarily. This investigation found hundreds of girls who spoke of being sold by strangers, family members or husbands without their consent.

In April the Dhaka Tribune reported that the conviction rate for people arrested in connection with trafficking is less than half a percent. While more than 6,000 people have been arrested in connection with human trafficking since 2013, only 25 were convicted. Last year only eight traffickers were convicted in Bangladesh.

While many girls sell sex from their homes or the street, more than 5,000 women and girls are split between 11 huge brothels countrywide. Some dating back hundreds of years, each brothel is registered with the government and monitored by the local police. Here, a triumvirate of powerful institutions – government, police and religion – watch over and approve the rape, enslavement and abuse of hundreds of thousands of prepubescent girls.

“The Bangladeshi police know everything that takes place in the brothels,” says Azharul Islam, programme manager of Rights Jessore, a local non-governmental organisation working to rehabilitate trafficked children working in the sex trade and return them to their families. “The brothel owners are involved in gangs, and our political leaders and law enforcement are involved in those gangs, too.” Corrupt government officials profit by accepting bribes and sexual favours in exchange for turning a blind eye to the abuse.

As part of this investigation, more than 20 underage girls in four of the brothels showed us their notarised certificates stating they were over 18. One girl admitted she was still 13. “It’s law enforcement, it’s the local mafia,” says Mahmudul Kabir, Bangladesh country director for the Netherlands-based NGO Terre des Hommes. “And it goes through the entire chain of power.”

The steady stream of women and children being trafficked into Bangladesh’s sex industry means that the girls are disposable to those making money out of them. The numbers killing themselves has reached a point where at least two brothels in central Bangladesh – Kandapara, on the on the outskirts of Tangail, and Daulatdia, on the banks of the Padma river – have had to built private graveyards to cope with the dead.

“There’s about one death a month,” says Shilpi, 57, who was sold to Daulatdia brothel in 1977. “It never used to be this many.” These days she conducts the funerals: washing each body before leading a team of 12 brothel guards through the thicket of weeds that shrouds the burial grounds; finally reciting a short prayer over the grave. She doesn’t know how many girls are buried there. She lost count after 100. “For a while, we tied a stone around their necks and threw the bodies in the pond,” Shilpi adds. “But sometimes they floated to the surface, so we had to find land.”

In Mymensingh, there’s no such graveyard – but not from lack of need. Instead, bodies are carried out to the countryside at nightfall; buried in unmarked graves by torchlight.

Public graveyards aren’t an option: the stigma that surrounds sex workers in Bangladesh forbids their burial in municipal ground. “Here we are shameful, bad women,” says Shilpi. “If a girl kills herself, people say it’s good riddance – it’s just a quicker way for them to get to hell.”.

Labonni has also tried to kill herself several times. “I’ll probably try again one day,” she says, sitting on the floor of the concrete cell that passes as a bedroom: her customers’ phone numbers are scratched into the wall. Meanwhile, she cuts herself daily.

Such deep-rooted mental health problems are endemic among Bangladesh’s bonded brothel workers, and make it harder for them to move on even when their “debts” are paid. Though there is little mental health support for the women, there is evidence that when it’s provided, it helps. One organisation working to rescue and rehabilitate underage trafficking victims is the Bangladesh National Women’s Lawyers’ Association. “When they first arrive at the home, they’re scared,” says BNWLA psychologist Sadia Sharmin Urmi. It takes consistent counselling to help them move forward, but within three months, she sees progress. “They know they are safe. That means a lot.”

For Labonni, the idea of ever getting help feels unlikely. “All my life, people tell me to have sex so that they can make money from it. How much do I have to earn to be free of this life?”

Escape now takes the form of daily video calls with her daughter, who lives with her elder sister in Dhaka. “I can’t raise her here and that hurts me, but I know she’s happy,” Labonni says. “One day, when she’s old enough, I would like her to know I’m her real mum.”

Outside Palacio Verde, in the centre of Guatemala City, a woman stands on a pile of ash and scattered flower petals. Near her feet is a circle of wooden crosses, each marked with the name of a girl killed last month in a fire at Virgen de la Asunción, an orphanage in San José Pinula.

Three people have since been arrested in connection with the fire, which killed 41 girls between the ages of 14 and 17. The girls were among those locked in a room as punishment for a recent escape attempt. The fire started when one of the girls set fire to a mattress in protest at their treatment; survivors said the girls had pleaded to be released from the room, but their cries were ignored.

The former minister of social welfare, along with his deputy and the director of the orphanage, have been charged with negligent homicide. But lawyers representing the families of the dead girls are now pushing for charges of femicide to be brought.

They argue that the girls were subjected to abuse and neglect indicative of wider state failings on the protection of women in Guatemala. Lawyers and campaigners are also calling for an investigation into the failure of the police to act on accusations of abuse made by the girls.

“This has been the responsibility of the state for a long time,” said Paula Barrios, a lawyer involved in the case who represented women from Sepur Zarco when they successfully took the military to court over allegations of sexual slavery during the country’s long civil war.

“The state did not guarantee an effective protection mechanism, nor take the urgent and necessary measures to guarantee the life and integrity of these girls following many allegations of rape, mistreatment and disappearance of girls from the home.”

Though Guatemala introduced legislation outlawing violence against women in 2008, the country still has one of the world’s highest rates of femicide and an impunity rate – 98% – to match. For crimes committed against children – including sexual abuse, rape and murder – 88% of cases go unpunished.

The San José Pinula orphanage, which lies south-west of the capital, has a capacity of 400 children. At the time of the fire, however, it was home to about 750 children. Many of the girls who perished in the fire came from poverty-stricken families who placed their children in the home in the hope that they might find a better life.

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As a journalist, it is Aline’s job to report on her country and president, but she doesn’t know how to without getting killed.

Pierre Nkurunziza is Burundi’s fearsome, undemocratic president who stands accused of inciting ethnic tensions while dismissing any negative stories on him as lies.

Intimidation of the press is a professional operation, according to Aline, who says a member of the president’s communications team regularly sends her WhatsApp messages telling her to stop writing and reporting. “I know him – he used to be my friend,” she adds.

Since Nkurunziza announced that he would run for a third term in April 2015, Burundi has been plunged into chaos, with many warning of a return to civil war. The president, his party and the police have been accused by orchestrating a campaign of violence and intimidation, where targeted assassinations, torture and sexual violence are daily occurrences.

Underpinning this has been a war on independent media. Following a failed coup attempt in May 2015, Nkurunziza declared journalists were “fighting the government” and marked them as an enemy of the people. Journalists were detained and killed, newspaper offices and radio stations were set on fire and radio signals were cut.

The Burundian government and its supporters deny wrongdoing. They say people are leaving the country because of hunger, not because of ethnic targeting or violence. They also say reports of sexual violence and human rights abuses were made up by Human Rights Watch, the UNHCR, and the European Union, and protested their findings in the capital in February 2017, citing the coverage as “fake news”.

“They keep lying and saying it’s fake and none of these things are happening,” Aline said from neighbouring Rwanda where she has sought refuge. “This is why I have to keep reporting, to tell the truth.”

Aline now runs a cafe in Kigali’s Muslim district with two former colleagues, Chanise and Jeanette. By day they serve ugali, beef and vegetable dishes, and by night they revert to their old lives.

The exiled Burundian journalists in the cafe they run in Kigali. Photograph: Rossalyn Warren for the Guardian

The trio, who are all in their mid-20s, are part of a secret network called Humura Burundi that works under the radar of Nkurunziza’s control.

Their reports cover everything from the harassment of women by the security forces, to ”disappearances” – such as the ongoing case to find missing journalist Jean Bigirimana.

As one of the only lifelines for accurate, truthful reporting, they are widely read by exiled Burundians in refugee camps and those still living in Burundi who oppose Nkurunziza.

Through the network, exiled journalists, and those operating in the country, monitor what is happening in Burundi, and use Facebook, Twitter, SoundCloud and WhatsApp to share their reports. The journalists all file under anonymous bylines to protect their identities and their families.

“We do our stories in secret,” said Jeanette. “This is the only way we can report on what’s happening in our country without ending up dead.”

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