Sexual and Gender-Based Violence

Nearly six months after the earthquake in Haiti, those of us involved in the UN humanitarian response are still struggling to provide those who have survived sexual violence with access to services they need–not an easy task, since there wasn't much in the way of services for them to begin with.

Twelve-year-old Rama* in Senegal's Sédhiou region is still in school instead of wedded to a man in his 40s, after community members convinced her father to abandon the family's plan to give her away.

But in most cases family or social pressure to marry off young girls still wins out in many regions of the country, researchers and educators say.

Anat Hoffman, leader of the Women of the Wall prayer group, was arrested at the Western Wall on Monday for holding a Torah scroll. She is suspected of violating a High Court ruling which prohibits women to read the Torah at the holy site. Hoffman was taken to a nearby police station, while her fellow group members protested outside the building.

Over the past weeks Amnesty International and other human rights organizations have been highlighting the plight of two women sentenced to death in Iran. Both of them have suffered incredible injustices, but their stories are actually very different and while one of them has received a great deal of publicity, the other has failed to attract the attention that her case deserves.

In recent decades, human rights advocates have won passage of a system of international human rights treaties, helping to address a wide range of social justice concerns. More and more, local activists are devising ways to use these international standards to make real change at home.

(Chicago) - The vast majority of DNA evidence collected from rape victims in Illinois cannot be confirmed as tested, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today and based on data collected across the state.

Food is scarce in Ethiopia, where most of the population lives in rural, drought-prone areas in a state of chronic poverty. In 2010, the Government of Ethiopia identified 5.2 million people in need of emergency food aid. Not surprisingly, this hunger crisis also impacts the thousands of refugees living just within Ethiopia's borders.

179 SGBV incidents were reported in Kakuma as at 31 May 2010.Domestic violence is the highest reported among SGBV cases. KAKUMA, 1 July 2010 (IRIN) – Mariam* is one of about two dozen female refugees who have been subjected to sexual or domestic violence and who, in many cases shunned by their families, now live in a safe haven inside a camp in Kakuma, in northwest Kenya.

Human rights organisations in Cambodia have called for the government to tackle the rising incidence of rape. A report by Amnesty International says victims have limited access to justice, medical services and counselling. It claims that rape cases are often settled by cash payments to the victim - or bribes to the authorities.