Sexual and Gender-Based Violence

Amnesty International says rape and sexual crimes committed mainly against women and children has become a growing problem in Cambodia. To mark the 100th International Women's Day, the human-rights group Amnesty International is releasing a report on the scourge of rape and sexual violence in Cambodia.

Cambodia's new penal code, which comes into force later this year, should be accompanied by stronger law enforcement measures if the country's women and girls are to be better protected from rape, says the global rights lobby Amnesty International (AI).

The World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT) has been informed by reliable sources of the imminent execution of Ms. Zeynab Jalalian, a 27 years old Kurdish political prisoner, who was arrested in 2007 and sentenced to death for “enmity against God” in January 2009, after having been accused of connections with Kurdish opposition groups. OMCT calls upon the Iranian Judiciary to immediately suspend the execution sentence of Ms.

An interview with Suraiya Kamaruzzaman, a human rights activist and one of the founders of Flower Aceh, the first women's group set up by Acehnese women to deal with the consequences of the Indonesian army's violent crackdown on the Aceh Freedom Movement (GAM).

AWID: Why did you start the organization Flower Aceh (FA)?

Living in Westlands, Nairobi, my neighborhood is filled with expats and fancy malls. However, on June 24, 2010 I boarded my first matatu (a 14 passenger van that is the common form of public transportation around here) and met Anne, the SGBV Training Coordinator, to go to Kariobangi, a large slum about an hour away where many Ethiopian refugees currently reside.

In one of the more prominent of a series of recent rape scandals in Kurdish dominated southeastern Turkey, at least four girls aged between 12 and 14 were found to have been sexually exploited by state officials, including an assistant headmaster at a school and an employee of a local police department, over a period of two years in Siirt, a town located in a province plagued by fighting between the Kurdish insurgency and Turkish army.

The United Nations on Wednesday launched its first compilation of the best practices for its peacekeepers and other workers to prevent, deter and respond to the use of rape as a war tactic.

The booklet, titled: "Addressing Conflict-Related Sexual Violence - An Analytical Inventory of Peacekeeping Practice", was launched at the UN headquarters in New York, US.

A 17-fold increase in civilian rape between 2004 and 2008 in the Democratic Republic of Congo underscores the wartime legacy of sexual violence. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, sexual violence has become so common that the eastern provinces are sometimes called "the ground zero of rape."

Hundreds of thousands of Haitian families are sleeping on the streets of Port-au-Prince. Each night, women rock their babies to sleep, hush their children, and try to rest. Many nights, worries keep these women awake: the children are hungry; the rains are coming; the baby is sick.In this broken city, women also fear violence. Husbands, brothers, and neighbors patrol the makeshift camps to protect them from strangers.

“Sexual Assaults Add to Miseries of Haiti's Ruins” (front page, June 24) was timely. As Nancy Dorsinville, a policy adviser in the United Nations' Office of the Special Envoy to Haiti, recently told a gathering of experts in New York, there is an urgent need for training peacekeepers, humanitarian aid staff, local law enforcement and social workers to prevent gender-based violence in refugee camps and other vulnerable areas.