Sexual and Gender-Based Violence

BILLIONS of dollars are spent every year developing new guns and missiles, but one of the most horrible weapons of war is also one of the oldest.

Rape and sexual violence are used frequently as instruments of war. But now there is a new global bid to end this horrific crime.

Two decades after the 1994 genocide, a television journalist returns to hear the extraordinary testimony of women who were raped during the violence – and of the children born as a result

When Josiane Nizomfura was 12, she wanted to get a glimpse of her father, so she sneaked out of school and went to the public trial where her mother was testifying against him for rape.

The Congolese soldiers march through the night, but not towards battle. In the dark, they are hunting for women who have fled their homes in Minova to hide in the bushes. The women know that if they are seen, they will be raped and maybe killed.

The army has been ordered to retreat to the town, in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Its young soldiers, 2,000 of them, fire gunshots in the air.

I have met survivors of rape, ranging from babies a few months old to elderly women: in my country, the Democratic Republic of Congo, we suffer the daily reality of sexual violence in conflict. But in addition to the inhuman cruelty they have suffered, these people all have something else in common – they have had no justice.

The Government in partnership with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) on Tuesday inaugurated a multi-functional building constructed for refugees in Nyabiheke refugee camp, Gatsibo District.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo there have been more than two decades of armed conflict, sexual violence against women and widespread impunity for their abusers in the DRC. The Survivors Speak OUT! Network, a group of torture survivors, calls upon the United Nations to encourage the DRC government to respect the human rights conventions.

Northeast India comprises the contiguous Eight States—Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura and Sikkim. The region has been facing the onslaught of multiple armed conflicts for many decades. The issues aggravated after the introduction of the Armed Forces Special Power Act. More than 50,000 lives have been lost in the violence.

Zahra said a neighbor raped her in her home on Friday. It was the most humiliating event in her unremittingly painful life, and the next day she begged her husband, Najibullah, to move their family so the man could not attack her again. He refused.

On Sunday afternoon, she poured kerosene over Najibullah and lit him on fire.

The gruesome rape and hanging of two teenage girls in the populous Uttar Pradesh state again proves how women have become the biggest victims of India's sanitation crisis.

The two girls were going to the fields to defecate when they went missing on Tuesday night.

Nearly half-a-billion Indians - or 48% of the population - lack access to basic sanitation and defecate in the open.