Almost
one third (32%) of women aged 20 to 24 in Eastern and Southern Africa - around 50 million – were married before 18 years old. To address this pervasive problem, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Parliamentary Forum has adopted the
SADC Model Law on Eradicating Child Marriage and Protecting Children Already in Marriage, a legal framework providing a comprehensive, integrated approach to ending child marriage and protecting children already married.
Marital rape has now been criminalized without exception in the Maldives, as part of a raft of significant amendments to the Sexual Offences Act (2014). The First Amendment to the Sexual Offences Act was ratified on 6 December 2021 by President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih.
Early in 2018, India was shaken by the horrific details surrounding the abduction, gang rape, and murder of an 8-year-old girl in Kathua, a district in the north Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir.
In an historic first, thousands of people participated in a 10,000-kilometre long
Dignity March across India to raise awareness about sexual violence, bring an end to stigma faced by survivors, and highlight the barriers women and children face in accessing justice.
According to official data on the global prevalence of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) released by UNICEF there are
200 million women and girls in the world who have been cut. Shocking though this statistic is, it seriously underestimates the nature and scale of the problem.