SGBV

As the report (S/2017/249) of Secretary-General makes clear, we are also confronted by new challenges. Sexual violence is increasingly used as a tactic of terrorism, employed by extremist groups in places such as Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Nigeria and Mali to advance their military, economic and ideological ends. The same litany of horrors echoes across the accounts of the Yazidi captives of Da’esh, Nigerian girls who fled from Boko Haram, the tales of Somali women liberated from Al-Shabaab and depictions of women’s lives in northern Mali under the extremist group Ansar Eddine. These groups are using sexual violence for strategic purposes. They are obscenely incentivizing the recruitment of young men through the promise of wives and sex slaves. They are outrageously boosting profiting through the sale, trade and trafficking of women and girls. It is therefore essential that considerations of protecting and empowering women and girls feature in our counter-terrorism and our countering violent extremism architecture.