Sexual and Gender-Based Violence

When men could not leave their homes for fear of beating and arrest, women used their apparent harmlessness to transport food, books, and medicine to freedom fighters and communities under siege. They organized the underground Albanian language educational system when their children were ousted from public schools. They held secret elections in homes and shops.

Please join the Harriman Institute for a talk by Igballe Rogova, Executive Director, Kosova Women's Network. Igo will talk about the struggle to ensure women's voices were heard during and after the conflict in Kosovo. When Igballe ("Igo") Rogova first heard that Serbian women protested regularly against the human rights abuses perpetrated by the Slobodan Milosevic-led regime against Kosovo Albanians, she had to see for herself.

In recent years there has been a marked increase in international attention to sexual violence in conflict and post-conflict settings. While several policy initiatives to prevent or mitigate such violence have been advanced, each has fallen short. Dr. Chantal de Jonge Oudraat argues that it is of the utmost importance to understand why this “missing peace” continues to evade our best intentions.

The 57th session of the Commission on the Status of Women will take place at United Nations Headquarters in New York, 4 - 15 March, 2013. The provisional theme will be "Elimination and prevention of all forms of violence against women and girls". Representatives from Member States, UN entities, and NGOs in consultative status with the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) from all regions of the world will attend the session.

Panel series on Women, Peace and Security:
Fighting impunity for sexual and gender-based crimes

The Chief Prosecutor of International Criminal Court, H.E. Ms. Fatou Bensouda will speak about the work of the International Criminal Court to prevent and prosecute sexual and gender-based crimes.

On 13 and 14 December 2012, UN Women will convene a forum to engage a range of stakeholders in the preparations for CSW57 at United Nations Headquarters in New York. The stakeholders' forum will consist of five inter-active panel discussions with participants from different institutional backgrounds and a range of experiences relating to elimination and prevention of all forms of violence against women and girls.

In March 2013, CSW will meet for its fifty-seventh session.To involve key stakeholders in its preparation – particularly civil society and women's groups, policy makers and other experts – UN Women will use a two-week online discussion (23 July – 3 August) on the critical gaps and challenges facing women and girls in the priority area: the elimination and prevention of all forms of violence against women and girls.Within this

The uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region came with a promise of equality and freedom. That did not happen. Today, the women in the region find themselves even more excluded from the formal decision-making in a region with an increase of militarism, arms flow and gender related violence.

The AWID International Forum on Women's Rights and Development is both a conference and a call to action. The largest recurring event of its kind, the AWID Forum brings together women's rights leaders and activists from around the world every three to four years to strategize, network, celebrate, and learn in a highly charged atmosphere that fosters deep discussions and sustained personal and professional growth...

The NNVAWI conference brings together an exemplary group of scholars and advocates engaged in anti-violence work around the globe. Prior to the official conference kick-off, NNVAWI's Pre-conference Symposium on Global Violence against Women will be held on March 4, 2012.