Only days before, I’d heard exactly the same words from pro-choice organisers in Dublin, where I travelled to report on the feminist fight to legalise abortion in Ireland. I had thought that I was covering two separate stories — so why were two women from different countries and backgrounds repeating the same mantra against fear, and against shame?

From India to Ireland to Egypt, women are on the streets, on the airwaves, on the internet, getting organised and getting angry. They’re coordinating in their communities to combat sexual violence and taking a stand against archaic sexist legislation; they’re challenging harassment and rape culture.

Across the world, women are fighting back in unprecedented ways. Men and boys, too, are involved as allies — not in large numbers, but enough to make their presence impossible to overlook.

This is not 2011. The mood of hope that so recently swept Europe, America, the Middle East and cyberspace is collapsing into confusion and social tension. Sexism often functions as a pressure-release valve in times of social unrest, and when it does, it takes different forms, depending on local values. Right now, in Egypt, it’s groping, heckling and mob attacks; in Ireland, it’s rape apologism and a backlash against abortion and sexual equality; on the internet, it’s vicious slut-shaming and “revenge porn”. But this time, women are refusing to take it any more.

Like the Arab Spring and Occupy in 2011, local movements are exchanging information and taking courage from one another’s struggles. The fight against misogyny is spreading online and via networks of solidarity and trust that develop rapidly, outside the traditional channels. What’s fascinating about these new feminist movements is their independence. They’re developing organically, outside the well-worn circuit of NGOs, government lobbying and quiet petition-signing that has been the proper format for feminist activism for more than two decades.

This month the government of India was frightened into taking a stand on rape culture by the very real prospect of riots. On the internet, where misogynist abuse has often been accepted, vigilantes are systematically exposing bullies and harassers.

In Cairo last week, women yelled for the Morsi administration to acknowledge and deal with street harassment — but they also brandished knives. I interviewed a rape survivor in her early 20s who told me that if anyone tried to hurt her or her friends again, with no rule of law protecting women, she was prepared to inflict pain.

These women are doing what worthy campaigns like Eve Ensler’s ambitious “one billion rising” campaign cannot manage: they are making men afraid.

It’s too early to say whether the mood of mutiny will last. When people fight misogyny, they aren’t just fighting governments and police forces, religious organisations and strangers in the streets — they also have to deal with intolerance from their loved ones, from their colleagues, from friends and family members who can’t or won’t understand.

Over the last few weeks I have been humbled by the bravery of the activists I’ve met, particularly the women. It takes a special sort of courage to cast off shame, to risk not just violence but also intimate rejection for the sake of a better future. And the thing about courage is that it’s contagious.— The Guardian, London

Only a short time ago, there might have been a functioning mental healthcare system to help young people like him, a safety net to fall back on. But that’s not the country the UK is anymore.

Suicide is not a logical response to debt, but fear is. Fear of failure, fear of never making the leap to adulthood successfully. For every young person like Toby Thorn who takes their own life in despair — nearly 2,000 every year and rising — there will be tens of thousands more who fall into anxious depression, who hurt their bodies, who fail to thrive.

Some months ago the prime minister David Cameron spoke contemptuously of people moving from college or university straight on to the welfare rolls. It’s beyond hypocrisy that those in power still treat this as a lifestyle choice for the feckless rather than a cruel necessity brought about by the spending choices of the prime minister and his pals.

Plans to remove social benefit for rent from the under-25s are due to be quietly shelved this week. They are being shelved because they are financially unworkable — something that was obvious from the start to anyone with a functioning calculator — and not because they are unjust; something that was obvious from the start to anyone with a functioning conscience.

Debt, student loans and housing insecurity. Never knowing when or if you’ll ever have a roof over your head, or enough money at the end of a precarious working week to buy decent food. That’s the reality of life for millions of people in Britain today, sapping our energy and sucking away our youth, and it’s fortunate for all of us that some are still finding the strength to organise.

UK Uncut, a protest group established to challenge cuts to the UK’s public services, are taking over stores to raise awareness of corporate tax avoidance, and this week, students occupied rooms in University College London in protest at the college’s plans to build high-end accommodation in east London, a move that will force the eviction of local residents.

Rent is at the centre of it all. Rent and the impossibility of paying it. Rents in some places in London have risen 20 per cent in the last year, while wages for under-30s have fallen by between six and 10 per cent in real terms over the last decade.

In major cities, many of those who haven’t been forced out by soaring prices are living two or three to a room or attempting to camp in empty buildings — of which there are thousands in London, since speculation has continued unabated in the recession.

This year the coalition government has criminalised squatting in residential buildings and plans to extend the legislation to commercial properties, a move that may force 20,000 people to choose between homelessness and prison.

At least 75,000 young people in the UK are going to be homeless this Christmas — and those numbers have soared, according to housing charities. It’s going to be a cold, hard, angry winter.— The Guardian, London