Asia

Guns may have fallen silent in Indian-administered Kashmir but the fallout of the conflict, particularly on the health of the people, is showing up by the day. A recent study has indicated that the conflict is now taking its toll on the reproductive health of Kashmiri women; many of whom are unable to conceive.

More policies and programmes must address the needs of female-headed households in Sri Lanka's former conflict zone, experts say. "Most programmes don't take into account the unique role of women here," Saroja Sivachandran, director of the Center for Women and Development (CWD), an advocacy body based in northern Jaffna, told IRIN.

At the start of the summer, Israel's social protest movement looked like it would represent a real turning point for women in the public sphere. The face of the movement was indisputably female. The story began when a young filmmaker, 25-year-old Daphne Leef, pitched a tent in downtown Tel Aviv to protest the lack of affordable housing.

It took almost 11 years to establish but it's better late than never.

Veteran, award-winning women's rights activists have set up the first-ever regional advisory group on women, peace and security in Asia Pacific, an area where millions of women have been affected by conflict.

Just as staff at the maternity clinic in the Mae La refugee camp began learning about special care for newborns, a baby was born six weeks premature, weighing 1.3kg.

The medics and nurses - all ethnic Karen refugees from Myanmar - were anxious about treating the tiny boy. Resigned to his fate, the family decided to take him home for his last hours or days. The staff agreed.

Rania was 16 years old when officials raped her during Saddam Hussein's 1991 crackdown in Iraq's Shia south. "My brothers were sentenced to death, and the price to stop this was to offer my body," she says.

Cast out for bringing ‘shame' to her family, Rania ran away to Baghdad and soon fell into living and working in Baghdad's red light district.

“Necessity is the mother of Invention” is a well proven fact; similar has been the case with the women of Kashmir. The armed conflict has imposed on them new, alien roles, which they have readily accepted and are fulfilling the responsibilities of the same.

Lebanon's repeal of a criminal code provision that mitigates sentences for so-called honor crimes is an encouraging step to address gender-based violence. The Lebanese parliament should remove and amend other criminal provisions that discriminate on the basis of gender, and enact a law to protect women from domestic violence, Human Rights Watch said.

When a middle-aged mother took a taxi alone from Baghdad to Nasiriyah, about 300 kilometres south earlier this year, her 20-year-old driver stopped on the way, pulled her to the side of the road and raped her. And that began a telling legal struggle. "She is not a simple case," says Hanaa Edwar, head of the Iraqi rights-based Al-Amal Association, established in Baghdad after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

For Maria Saifuddin Effendi, it began with a bar of chocolate. As a Pakistani, Maria's first experience of India was her Indian roommate at a South-Asia workshop: a roommate who greeted an irritable and jetlagged Maria with a warm smile and a bar of Cadburys' chocolate. The following year, a second workshop brought her to New Delhi, to another Indian roommate, another series of midnight conversations, and another set of Indian friends.