Sexual and Gender-Based Violence

Government forces in Syria are targeting women for rape and assault as the conflict between President Bashar al-Assad and anti-government forces continues to escalate, according to a report released by a human rights group on Wednesday.

In a grainy video that shocked viewers around the world, a young woman named Najiba shrouded in a gray shawl sits alone on a hillside surrounded by men with guns and waits to be executed. Now Afghan activists are stepping out and speaking out in solidarity with the murdered young woman to press their government to take violence against women far more seriously—and to demand some say in whatever peace with the Taliban might come.

Almost unnoticed, Nepal's burgeoning adult entertainment industry has been drawing young girls away from being trafficked across the border to the fleshpots of India's big cities.

Rights activists are worried that the issue of internal trafficking has not received the kind of legislative attention that resulted in laws, passed in 2007, to prevent and punish trafficking of young girls across Nepal's borders by prostitution rings.

Shanta Chaudhary was eight years old when her parents sold her into effective slavery for $75, sending her to scrub, cook and sweep for 19 hours a day at the house of a stranger in southwestern Nepal.Now a strident rights campaigner, politician and one of the country's most influential women, she weeps as she recalls 18 years spent as a "kamlari", rising at 4:00 am, receiving regular beatings and witnessing rape and abuse.

“Rape is being used as a tool of war in Syria, and, in most cases, it is allegedly being carried out by government perpetrators,” says new findings from a live crowd-maps project highlighted by Women Under Siege, a new project by the U.S. New York based feminist organization WMC – Women's Media Center.

Allegations that a member of Kyrgyzstan's KGB-successor agency organized the brutal rape of his wife have outraged women's rights activists in Bishkek. But what rights defenders call an ordinary crime is having an extraordinary effect because of the victim's response: she pressed charges.

When Navi Pillay, the UN high commissioner for human rights, visited South Sudan in May, she heard first-hand about the precarious situation many women face on a daily basis, from domestic violence to rape.

The Mexican authorities have failed to protect women from increasing levels of violence and discrimination or to ensure those responsible face justice, said Amnesty International in a report handed to a UN body due to examine the state of women's rights in Mexico.

Since the "Northern Triangle" of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala emerged as the main corridor for US-bound drugs, it has become one of the deadliest places in the world to be a woman, and the killings show little sign of abating.

Convicted Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga Dyilo has been sentenced to 14 years in jail, but he will have six years knocked off his sentence for the time he has already served in detention in The Hague.