Sexual and Gender-Based Violence

Windhoek — Gender Based Violence (GBV) is one of the greatest threats to achieving some of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015, the Director of Gender Equality and International Affairs in the Ministry of Gender Equality and Child Welfare, Victor Shipoh, said.

A mother of a three year old baby identified as Kadiatu Momoh Sheriff, a resident of Mobi Village in Sierra Leone has been arrested by officers of the Women and Children Protection Section of the Liberia National Police and charged with endangering the welfare of a child and illicit trafficking of humans in Liberia.

The South African government announced this week that it will reintroduce 22 sexual offences courts by the end of 2014, with the first opening on August 16.

The idea for courts that deal specifically with cases of sexual offence was first seen in South Africa in 1993, and grew to become 74 established courts across the country by 2005.

As Mogadishu's Liido beach became a popular spot, where young men and women are predominant during the holidays, women began last Friday to carry axes to the beach for protection, Garowe Online reports.

The National Research Council has begun an intense gender-based violence campaigned in several communities in Paynesville.

The campaign cross cut on religious lines, gender and status. Young men and women were seen with placards and public announcement system [PA system] in various communities sending out messages aimed at ending gender base violence.

Women political activists in rural Zimbabwe have told Amnesty International they have been threatened with violence and forced to flee with their children for refusing to reveal their vote to supporters of Robert Mugabe's party during harmonised elections.

At the Bas Fond landfill in Mopti, residents sift through the rubbish, the dregs of other people's consumption. In a country as poor as Mali, they have to dig deep to find something for the keeping. The people living around this squalid waste disposal area are the poorest of the poor. Yet 16-year-old Fatoumata Traoré* would rather stay here than return to Tonka, the town in Mali's Timbuktu region she was forced to flee.

More than 38,000 children have taken part in Liberia's war as fighters, porters, and slaves throughout the country's bloody conflict. But stories of the former child soldiers of Charles Taylor's armies almost always focus on the boys. What has been largely unrecognized is that a significant number of these soldiers were girls.

Hundreds of women Thursday marched along the streets of the Sierra Leonean capital, Freetown, to protest against an increasing spate of rape cases in the country.

Headed by Women in the Media Sierra Leone (WIMSL), an affiliate body of the Sierra Leone Association of Journalists, the protesters who included non-media women were clad in symbolic black dresses. They marched through the streets with banners denouncing rape.

Inside a brightly painted Mogadishu clinic, Salim (not her real name) sits alongside her seven-year-old son, waiting for a check up. Opposite them, a health professional listens to their nightmarish ordeal.