During the Balkan war of the early 90s I traveled to Croatia and Bosnia to meet refugees forced from their homes and left at the mercy of any country that would take them in. Surprisingly, they were just like me: middleclass women with homes and professions and families and dreams. Except they had just lost everything.
She was a 23-year-old physical therapy student who boarded a bus in Delhi last month. Six men locked the door, and savagely raped her for hours, including with a metal rod. They dumped her naked in the street, and after bravely fighting for her life, she died last weekend. Across India, people are responding in massive protests to say enough is enough. In India a woman is raped every 22 minutes, and few see justice.
It is difficult to differentiate between violence committed by State actors, violence supported by the State and violence committed by private security agents.
In all cases, the lack of state accountability and the failure to bring perpetrators of sexual and gender-based violence (GBV) to justice remains a critical challenge to ending this form of violence.
On 26 November, WILPF's Yemeni partners, HRITC, ran the second workshop in a series in our MENA 1325 project focusing on women, peace and security in the Arab uprisings. About 60 people attended the workshop and at least a third was men.
For millions of Burma's women, especially women of ethnic and religious minorities, life has become just that much more bizarre and dangerous in the past 18 months.
Asia Pacific Women's Watch (APWW) is a regional network representing voices from across the five sub-regions of Asia and the Pacific. APWW welcomes the priority theme for the fifty-seventh session of the Commission on the Status of Women, “Elimination and prevention of all forms of violence against women and girls'.
In the wake of recent visits to the UK by both the Indonesian and Liberian Heads of State, Equality Now highlights the importance of integrating human rights issues - particularly those which affect women and girls - into policies relating to international trade and financial aid.
Fawzia Koofi would like to be the next president of Afghanistan. But that is nearly inconceivable, because Koofi is a woman.
The Taliban has tried to kill her multiple times. When she travels for her work as a member of Afghanistan's parliament, she leaves goodbye letters for her two daughters, in the event that she does not return.
