Sexual and Gender-Based Violence

The PSNI is becoming increasingly concerned that dangerous crime gangs involved in human trafficking are targeting Northern Ireland because of a highly lucrative demand for prostitutes.

The force's Organised Crime Branch has warned there is a growing interest in the province for traffickers because of a gap in the vice market.

Nearly 2,000 Ethiopian migrants trapped in violence-hit Yemen are being evacuated, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) says.

It said it had so far flown out 275 Ethiopians, some of whom had gun-shot wounds.

Yemen has been hit by months of instability, caused by the president's refusal to bow to opposition demands to quit.

Two Somali migrants were killed in the capital, Sanaa, last month.

Josephine, from Masisi in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC, says that she chose to join the National Congress for the Defence of the People, CNDP, militia in order to escape a marriage that was being forced upon her by her parents.

"I joined the CNDP to avoid revenge from [the man that was to be] my husband," Josephine said. Her parents had wanted her to marry a widowed man when she was just 16.

Korlu, a young mother of two, lives on the outskirts of Monrovia, the capital here.

A high school dropout, Korlu, who declined to give her last name for safety reasons, says when she was a teen, she became pregnant.

"My parents put me out of their house because they couldn't bear the shame of me getting pregnant," she says.

After years of campaigning by women's organizations, the Kurdish Parliament has finally passed a tough anti-domestic violence law that will create a special court to address domestic violence cases.

November is hot in Congo. Every month is hot in Congo.

So it's likely their faces shone with sweat when the first residents of Duru, in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo, raced from mud hut to mud hut with a warning that sounded like, “El are ah!” That's “LRA,” in French or the Congolese dialect Lingala.

This is the first of two stories focusing on rape as a tool of war. The second story looks at the untold stories of rape in the Holocaust. Both stories contain graphic language; discretion is advised.

The envoy spearheading United Nations efforts to combat sexual violence during conflicts has strongly condemned the mass rape of more than 150 civilians in the far east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) earlier this month.

Sixty-five-year-old Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, who has been sentenced to life in prison, has been described as a tyrant and one of the key players in instigating the Rwandan genocide in the south-western border town of Butare.

This once powerful politician came from humble beginnings - she was a social worker and obtained a university law degree at the age of 44.

The UN says it is sending a team to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to investigate allegations of rape.

The French aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF, has said that more than 100 people in Niakiele village, in Sud-Kivu province, were raped or beaten in an attack which took place between June 10 and 12.