A ban on female healthcare workers is leaving women’s health and maternity services in a dire situation under Taliban rule
Afghanistan’s silent healthcare crisis
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CATEGORY: Magazine
Corruption in Nigeria silences healthcare whistleblowers
A lack of protection for health workers is widening the West African country’s inequality gap
Donna Ockenden: “There has got to be an absolute commitment to listening to women”
The senior midwife speaks to Index about the culture of silence surrounding maternity care failures in the National Health Service
The female keyboard warriors taking on Myanmar’s military junta
Inside and outside the country, digital activists are using the power of the internet to expose human rights abuses
Greek democracy is being dismantled
Greece has been rocked by accusations of government corruption and a phone-tapping scandal involving opposition politicians and journalists
Left speechless: How trauma is leaving children in Gaza unable to communicate
The psychological toll of living in a warzone is causing young people to lose their ability to speak
The silence around sexual assault in India’s universities
Rape victims on campuses are being urged to keep quiet, with people’s reputations prioritised over stopping sexual violence
RFK Jr could be a disaster for American healthcare
It is deeply troubling that the USA’s new health secretary believes in conspiracy theories and is hostile towards modern medicine
Whistleblowers silenced over failings in NHS pregnancy care
Index investigates the culture of secrecy shrouding maternity services and women’s healthcare in England
The forgotten patients: Lost voices in the global healthcare system
Volume 54.01 Spring 2025
A quarterly journal set up in 1972, Index on Censorship magazine has published oppressed writers and refused to be silenced across hundreds of issues.
The brainchild of the poet Stephen Spender, and translator Michael Scammell, the magazine’s very first issue included a never-before-published poem, written while serving a sentence in a labour camp, by the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who went on to win a Nobel prize later that year.
The magazine continued to be a thorn in the side of Soviet censors, but its scope was far wider. From the beginning, Index declared its mission to stand up for free expression as a fundamental human right for people everywhere – it was particularly vocal in its coverage of the oppressive military regimes of southern Europe and Latin America but was also clear that freedom of expression was not only a problem in faraway dictatorships. The winter 1979 issue, for example, reported on a controversy in the United States in which the Public Broadcasting Service had heavily edited a documentary about racism in Britain and then gone to court attempting to prevent screenings of the original version. Learn more.