General Women, Peace and Security

The UN and human rights groups are warning of a rise in sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Earlier this month, a senior UN official said the organisation's peacekeeping mission in the country had threatened to stop supporting two Congolese army battalions unless soldiers accused of raping scores of women in an eastern town were prosecuted.

Some horrific events over the past few months, including the shooting of a Pakistani schoolgirl and the rape and murder of a young Indian physiotherapy student, should have been an alert for the world to unite in preventing violence against women.

A teenage Afghan rape victim who secured a rare conviction of her attacker has said she was assaulted this month for a second time, by a group of government employees tasked with protecting her.

A U.N. resolution passed over 10 years ago requires women's involvement in conflict resolutions. But that has little bearing on the Israel-Palestine conflict, where women are far from the power roles on either side.

The Independent Commission for Human Rights recently criticized the Hamas police for violently disbanding women protesting peacefully in front of the Palestinian Legislative Council in Gaza City on Nov. 6.

A women's parliamentary caucus in South Sudan's border state of Warrap has called for enactment of laws which upholds and respect women's rights and protects them from domestic violence, asserting that across the country women still faced considerable challenges.

Among chaos in neighboring Syria and increasing refugees fleeing to Iraq, many Iraqi women are fighting to stop brutality against them and "raise the voice of Iraqi women" in the predominately male government, a senior UN official tasked with advancing gender equality in Iraq told Xinhua.

The Obama Administration has made it clear that advancing the rights of women and girls is critical to the foreign policy of the United States. This is a matter of national security as much as it is an issue of morality or fairness. President Obama's National Security Strategy explicitly recognizes that “countries are more peaceful and prosperous when women are accorded full and equal rights and opportunity.

A group of women from North Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have demanded to be involved in the on-going peace talks and negotiations in Uganda between the M23 rebels and the DRC government.

The talks are taking place under the mechanisms and guidance of the International Conference of the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR).

The Syrian government is arming and training Syrian women to fight for President Bashar al-Assad, putting it ahead of the Pentagon when it comes to sending women to the front lines, according to video footage and activists' reports.

1 Billion Rising campaign states, "One in three women on the planet will be raped or beaten in her lifetime".