General Women, Peace and Security

Women and girls face daily threats from both combatants and non-combatants, including rape, trafficking, and other rights violations as they flee conflict-related violence. They are at risk in displacements camps, and when leaving camps to conduct essential livelihood activities. In many of these settings, gender-based violence is also perpetrated by intimate partners, family members, and civilians including humanitarian aid staff. 

UN Member States must fulfill their obligations to those fleeing conflict-related violence. There is much talk today about strengthening international collaboration, on protection strategies and accountability mechanisms. At the same time, Member States are closing their borders to those fleeing violence. These contradictory actions cannot stand. 

Sexual violence and other gender-based crimes are a constant threat for many local women’s organizations, and activists working on the front lines of conflict, while survivors of this violence face immense obstacles accessing life-saving services. Impunity for these crimes remains the norm.

This year, in the case of Burundi which appears in the Secretary-General’s report for the first time, we received information of the targeting of women and girls on the basis of actual or perceived political affiliation or ethnic identity, with rape employed as a tool of political repression by arms bearers, including members of the national security forces.

As the report notes, “counter-terrorism strategies can no longer be decoupled from efforts to protect and empower women and girls and to combat conflict-related sexual violence”

Sexual violence is still the only crime that stigmatizes the victim, rather than the perpetrator. We must not only “bring back our girls”; we must bring them back to an environment of support, equality and opportunity. Social and economic reintegration is imperative, and must become a more integral part of our programmatic response and post-conflict development frameworks.  

When we think of terrorism, we think of destruction of property, killing, bombing or hostage-taking. But we cannot deplore the public violence of terrorism, while ignoring the violence terrorists inflict on women and girls in private, behind closed doors.

Sexual violence is not merely incidental, but integral, to their ideology and strategic objectives. They are using sexual violence as a means of advancing political, military and economic ends. They have used rape and forced marriage as part of the systems of punishment and reward through which they consolidate power, and to build a so-called ‘state’ cast in their own image and beliefs.

Without exception, the first sign of rising violent extremism has been the restriction on women’s rights. Extremists know that to populate a territory, and control a population, you must first control the bodies of women

Social media platforms are being used to facilitate trade and trafficking – women and children are offered in the same online forums as rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.