General Women, Peace and Security

What do we know about women caught up in conflicts?

That they're often subjected to rape, abduction and sexual violence. That just to collect water, they sometimes take desperate measures which expose them to even more danger - like aligning themselves to one of the warring factions.

It's been documented again and again that women suffer disproportionately to men in times of conflict.

A man in a mask opens a door. The smell of rot hovers in the air and everywhere there are piles of paper -- pink, yellow, white, all a bit aged and possibly very important. When searching through the 80 million documents dumped in the archives of the Guatemalan National Police, it's never clear what will turn up.

Would the world be more peaceful if women were in charge? A challenging new book by the Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker says that the answer is yes.

WFP has rapidly scaled up food assistance to more than 80,000 people forced from their homes and farms by an outburst of fighting between rival groups in the South Sudan state of Jonglei.

“The violence in Jonglei is only one of the many challenges that South Sudan is currently facing,” said WFP Deputy Executive Director Ramiro Lopes da Silva during a visit to the region.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has urged the Government of South Sudan to take decisive action to identify and prosecute those responsible for recent violent attacks in the Jonglei region.

The First Lady of Somaliland Amina Sheikh Mohamed Waris inaugurated an international conference on the theme of “Women's Leadership for Peace and Security in the Greater Horn of Africa” on Friday in Hargeisa.

The 40 women conference participants dubbed G40 will in the five days of their discussions come up with an action plan that strategizes on enhancing the status and role of women in the Horn of African region.

It doesn't matter where you look; sexualized violence is intrinsic to conflict. Qaddafi's soldiers committed rape in the last days of Libya's regime. The Egyptian military has been sexually violating female journalists and protesters in that revolution.

In January 2011, The Economist published the number of women raped in six conflicts, including an estimate of 500,000 women raped in the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Many readers may have taken these statistics at face value. In fact, however, estimates of rape in Rwanda range from 250,000 to 500,000 and are based on the number of reported pregnancies from rape, which underestimates prevalence.

We first thought about starting this piece with the story of Saleha Begum, a survivor of Bangladesh's 1971 war in which, some reports say, as many as 400,000 women were raped. Begum had been tied to a banana tree and repeatedly gang raped and burned with cigarettes for months until she was shot and left for dead in a pile of women. She didn't die, though, and was able to return home, ravaged and five months pregnant.