Angela, 15, from Hyderabad, India. Her vision of a violence-free world would be to live like the mermaid in her painting - free and happy. Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
INDIA/CAMEROON, Nov 26 2017 (IPS)

Sally Mboumien remembers the day she pressed a steaming hot stone against her chest. In Bawock, the rural community of western Cameroon where she grew up, young girls often had their young, sprouting breasts flattened with a hot iron or a hammer or spatulas that had been heated over burning coals.

This was good for the girls because it would keep them safe from men, she had often heard her elders say. So one day, when her mother had gone to visit relatives, a 11-year-old Mboumien overheated a stone and tried to iron her own breasts.“The 16 Days come as we experience a global outcry over sexual harassment and violence. Now it is time for action to end violence against women." --Nanette Braun of UN Women

The stone burnt the delicate skin and tissue, leaving deep black scars over her breasts. Her waves of pain were overshadowed with fear. Terrified, the little girl hid her scars from everyone, including her mother.

“I did what everyone said was good. But I was only a victim of ignorance,” says Mboumien – now one of Cameroon’s most vocal advocates for Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) for girls and young women.

According to the United Nations, breast ironing or breast flattening affects 3.8 million women around the world, including in Cameroon, Benin, Ivory Coast, Chad, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Togo, Zimbabwe and Guinea-Conakry. It is also one of the five most under-reported crimes relating to gender-based violence.

Although it is done in an attempt to delay puberty and safeguard the girl from unwanted sexual desire, breast ironing exposes girls to numerous health problems such as infections, cysts, permanent damage of the tissue, cancer and complete disappearance of one or both breasts. Besides which, it’s an utter violation of a girl’s sexual and physical rights and integrity.

Coinciding with UN Women’s Orange Campaign – an initiative that generates public awareness for 16 days of activities against gender-based violence from Nov. 25 to Dec. 10 – Mboumien, the Founder of Common Action for Gender Development, a SRHR Advocacy organization, is planning to hit the road. She will be seen doing what she does best: educating people in local communities on the sexual and reproductive rights of girls and women and why it is crucial for society to abandon any practices that violate these rights.

Breast ironing is embedded deep into the local culture which means people believe in their heart that this is good – and that is what makes it so hard to eradicate, Mboumien says. “The best way to fight this is that instead of focusing on one form of violence (breast ironing), we focus on educating people on SRHR in general.”

Denial of dignity amounts to violence

Thousands of miles away from Mboumien, Bharti Singh Chauhan, a girls’ rights activist in India’s Rajasthan state, is also participating in the Orange Campaign. Her plan: watch a movie.

In a state where almost 40 percent of all girls are married before 18 years of age and where it is still hard for girls, especially those from marginalized communities, to get an education, watching a film is both a symbolic and an actual move forward. At Praveenlatha Sansthan, a charity Chauhan founded, she is empowering over 100 teenage girls to fight the dual evil of child marriage and illiteracy.

All of the girls come from the most marginalized families in the city and witness violence in many forms: child marriage, physical and psychological abuse. The first casualty of this is their education, as the girls drop out of school voluntarily or their parents stop sending them. Chauhan, a fierce advocate for rights to dignity, helps the girls go back to school so that they don’t fall prey to the vicious cycle of illiteracy, poverty, abuse and child marriage.

Going out to watch a movie in a theatre is anything but a trivial matter to these girls. In fact, for them, this is a day of living free.

“It helps them get out of the four walls within which they live, it helps them feel freedom, forget the daily hardship they experience every day and it also helps them learn something from the movie, especially because we choose the movies that come with a strong social message. Finally, sitting there in the same hall with others help them feel what it is: that they are not lesser than anyone and that they have the same rights as anyone else has,” says Chauhan.

The movie the girls will watch this time is Secret Superstar, an Indian film that tells the story of a teenager from a Muslim family who strives to be a rock star but is forbidden by her father to do so. Defiant, the girl posts her own videos on Youtube, fulfilling a dream. The girls, feels Chauhan, will identify with the protagonist of the film as they have many things in common, especially the social, communal, economic and cultural struggles.

“We want the girls to believe in themselves and believe that they can have a dream and that they can realize this too, no matter what.”

GBV – a common global evil

Like Mboumien and Chauhan, thousands of other women – many of them survivors of gender-based violence – are joining the 16 Days of Orange Campaign across Africa, Asia, the Americas and elsewhere. From sexual assaults, beatings, violations of human rights, violation and denial of health rights, rights to privacy and rights to choose a partner to the right to say no to unwanted pregnancies, women activists are taking to the streets, village halls and city auditoriums to demand an end to gender-based violence.

Celine Osukwu, who champions the rights of disabled women in Abuja, Nigeria, shares her plan. “On 25 November I will be in Ibadan, Nigeria with a group of women and men. I will raise my voice on gender-based violence against women and girls with disabilities. You know December 3rd is the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, so I will take this opportunity to direct my talk ‘to leave no one behind’ and tell people that we must make education safe for all.”

In Toronto, Canada, 68-year-old school teacher Tamarack Verall is also feeling excited about participating in the Orange Campaign. Her plan is to meet indigenous women and talk about their right to a violence-free world.

The fact that the campaign has been able to strike a chord with women across the world also proves that GBV is not an academic term, but an ugly reality that women experience globally, regardless of their race, religion, culture, age, language and educational or economic status.

Nanette Braun, Communications and Advocacy Chief at UN Women, agrees. “The 16 Days come as we experience a global outcry over sexual harassment and violence. Now it is time for action to end violence against women,” she says.

Education, not condemnation

However, activists like Mboumian and Chauhan say feel that these 16 days are not the only time to talk about gender violence. There should be a sustained effort to eradicate gender-based violence in all forms.

Chauhan says fighting violence is a 24-hour a day, 365-day a year job, and one must have empathy even while opposing a social evil. “If I only say child marriage must end, I am not doing the complete job. It will stop the girl from getting married early. But to end the cycle of violence, she must also be sent to a school, and provided the freedom she needs to pursue a goal and allowed the dignity she deserves to live a happy, normal life,” says the activist, who has been given an award for her work by the office of the President of India.

Mboumien adds that social campaigns launched by Western countries often fail to understand the local history of a violent practice and the ethos attached to it. This, she feels, limits the campaign’s impacts as men start viewing women who condemn violence as rebellious and acting superior to them. Violence, she says, needs to be understood in its local context. Men need to be involved. People need to be assured that a campaign is trying not to rob them of their tradition, but to save it from becoming a tool that destabilizes the entire society.

With her favorite slogan “Don’t condemn us, educate us” Mboumien tries to spread knowledge about how gender-based violence not only harms a specific gender but weakens the cultural fabric of the enite society and prevents it from becoming progressive.

“I don’t believe in condemnation. Condemning a community or a people for a cultural practice is not the right way to rid it. What we need is make people understand why it is bad, what harm it actually causes and seek their cooperation to end this harmful practice,” she says.

Her belief is shared by Nanette Braun: “Prevention of violence must be a priority, and it must start at a young age through education. We also need laws to protect women and services for survivors so they can overcome the trauma and restart their lives.”

Participants in the 2015 New York March for Gender Equality and Women's Rights. Credit: UN Photo/Devra Berkowitz.

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
NEW YORK, Jan 20 2017 (IPS)

Just one day after the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump, hundreds of thousands of women are expected to attend one of the largest demonstrations in history for gender equality.

Starting out as a social media post by a handful of concerned women, the Women’s March on Washington quickly transformed, amassing over 400 supporting organisations representing a range of issues including affordable and accessible healthcare, gender-based violence, and racial equality.

“It’s a great show of strength and solidarity about how much women’s rights matter—and women’s rights don’t always take the front page headlines,” Nisha Varia, Advocacy Director of Human Rights Watch’s Women’s Rights Division told IPS.

Despite the variety of agendas being put forth for the march, the underlying message is that women’s rights are human rights, Executive Director of Amnesty International USA Margaret Huang told IPS.

“All people must be treated equally and with respect to their rights, no matter who is in positions of authority and who has been elected,” she said.

Organisers and partners have stressed that the march is not anti-Trump, but rather is one that is concerned about the current and future state of women’s rights.

“It’s not just about one President or one candidate, there’s a much bigger banner that we are marching for…our rights should not be subject to the whims of an election,” Kelly Baden, Center for Reproductive Rights’ Interim Senior Director of U.S. Policy and Advocacy told IPS.

“It’s about women, not Trump,” she continued.

The rhetoric used during the election is among the concerns for marchers as it reflects a troubling future for women’s rights.

During his campaign, President-elect Trump made a series of sexist remarks from calling Fox News host Megyn Kelly a “bimbo” to footage showing him boasting of sexual assault. Though Trump downplayed his remarks as “locker room talk,” his rhetoric is now being reflected in more practical terms through cabinet nominations.

Huang pointed to nominee for Attorney-General Jeff Sessions who has a long and problematic record on women’s rights including voting against the reauthorisation of the Violence Against Women Act, rejecting anti-discrimination protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people, and opposing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 which addresses pay discrimination.

During her confirmation hearing, Nominee for Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos wouldn’t say if she would uphold title IX which requires universities to act on sexual assault on campuses.

According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, one in five women and one in 16 men are sexually assaulted while in college.

The new administration has also recently announced cuts to the Department of Justice’s Violence Against Women Grants, which distribute funds to organisations working to end sexual assault and domestic violence.

“There is no question that we’re going to have some challenges in terms of increasing protections for women’s rights over the next few years,” said Huang to IPS.

Meanwhile, Varia pointed to other hard fought gains that risk being overturned including the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The ACA, which U.S. Congress is currently working to repeal, provides health coverage to almost 20 million Americans by prohibiting insurers from denying insurance plans due to pre-existing conditions and by providing subsidies to low-income families to purchase coverage.

If repealed, access to reproductive services such as contraception and even information will become limited. The health system also risks returning to a time when many insurance plans considered pregnancy a pre-existing condition, barring women from getting full or any coverage.

“Denying women access to the types of insurers or availability of clinics that can help them get pre-natal checks and can help them control their fertility by having access to contraception—these are all the type of holistic care that needs to be made available,” Varia said.

The U.S. is one of the few countries in the world where the number of women dying as a result of child birth is increasing, Varia noted.

In Texas, maternal mortality rates jumped from 18.8 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2010 to 35.8 deaths in 2014, the majority of whom were Hispanic and African-American women. This constitutes the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world, closer in numbers to Mexico and Egypt than Italy and Japan, according to World Bank statistics.

A UN Working Group also expressed their dismay over restrictive health legislation, adding that the U.S. is falling behind international standards.

Though the ACA repeal and potential defunding of Planned Parenthood, another key reproductive services provider, threatens all women, some communities are especially in danger.

Francis Madi, a marcher and Long Island Regional Outreach Associate for the New York Immigration Coalition, told IPS that immigrant and undocumented immigrant women face additional barriers in accessing health care.

Most state and federal forms of coverage such as the ACA prohibits providing government-subsidised insurance to anyone who cannot prove a legal immigration status. Even for those who can, insurance is still hard or too expensive to acquire, making programs like Planned Parenthood essential.

“I can’t even do my job as an organiser asking for immigrant rights if I’m not able to access the services I need to live here,” Madi told IPS.

Madi highlighted the opportunity the march brings in working together through a range of issues and identities.

“I’m going because as a woman and an immigrant and an undocumented immigrant as well…it’s very important to attend this march to show we can work together on our issues,” she told IPS.

“If we don’t organize with each other, we can’t really achieve true change,” she continued.

In its policy platform, organisers of the Women’s March on Washington also stressed the importance of diversity, inclusion and intersectionality in women’s rights.

“Our liberation is bound in each other’s,” they said.

This includes not only women in the U.S., but across the world.

“There’s definitely going to be an international voice in this, not just U.S. activists,” Huang told IPS.

Marching alongside women in Washington D.C. on January 21^st will be women in nearly 60 other countries participating in sister marches from Argentina to Saudi Arabia to Australia.

“Women are concerned that a loss of a champion in the U.S. government will have significant impacts in other countries,” Huang said. Of particular concern is the reinstatement of the “global gag rule” which stipulates that foreign organisations receiving any U.S. family planning funding cannot provide information or perform abortions, even with funding from other sources. The U.S. does not fund these services itself.

The policy not only restricts basic right to speech, but analysis shows that it has harmed the health of low-income women by limiting access to family planning services.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) is the world’s largest family planning bilateral donor.

Though the march is important symbolic act of solidarity, it is just the first step.

“We are also part of a bigger movement—we need to come together and be in solidarity on Saturday and then we need to keep doing the hard work [during[ the long days and months and years of organising that we have ahead of us,” Baden said.

Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, UN Under-Secretary-General and UN Women Executive Director. Credit: UN Photo/Devra Berkowitz.

By Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 1 2016 (IPS)

The drugging, abduction and violent gang rape of a 16-year-old girl in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil calls us all to turn the tide of sexual violence against women and girls in Brazil and in every country in the world.

Her silence was broken by the men who boastfully posted their images of the rape, deepening her abuse by showing her body to the world, in the confident expectation of approval by their peers and impunity from punishment. This is Brazil’s moment to shake that confidence to its core and reassert the rule of law and its respect for human rights. This is the time for zero tolerance for violence against women and girls.

The men’s casual expectation of zero retribution reflects the impunity known by most rapists across the world. Their confidence illustrates a climate of normalized abuse, a culture of daily violence against women and girls, and a stark failure of justice. It is estimated that only 35 per cent of rape cases in Brazil are reported. Even so, the Brazilian police record a case of rape every 11 minutes, every day.

The Brazilian teenager did not get medical attention until after her attack was made public. Fear, shame or hopelessness contribute to the gross under-reporting of sexual violence. Far too few women and girls are getting the help they need—and to which they are entitled—to support healing and protect them from unwanted pregnancy as well as from HIV or other sexually transmitted infections.

One simple fact illustrates this: alongside the horrifically high rates of sexual violence experienced daily by women and girls in Brazil and throughout the region, 56 per cent of pregnancies in Latin America and the Caribbean are unplanned or unintended. Women and girls need access to the full range of reproductive health services and rights at all times.

Attention to the critical lack of access to these services in Brazil and elsewhere has sharpened even further in the light of the unprecedented spread of the Zika virus. The risks are highest for the most vulnerable, who are unable to protect themselves adequately against infection, nor against unwanted pregnancy—especially in the context of rape. There has never been a more urgent time for action against sexual violence and for women and girls to be able to confidentially and easily access the health services they need. Both legal and medical structures need to be mobilized to deal with the cases that already exist and strong action taken to build comprehensive services for survivors.

This one case throws into stark relief the daily discrimination and intimidation experienced by women and girls, not just in Latin America, but all over the world. Violence against women and girls deeply damages our societies, our economies, our politics and our long-term global potential. It constrains lives, limits options, and violates human rights. In all its forms, from physical brutality against women human rights defenders like Berta Cáceres, who was murdered in western Honduras in March, to the character assassination of female political figures, it plays out daily in visible and invisible ways, and diminishes us all. It is both why increased representation of women in leadership positions is so important, and why it is so difficult to achieve.

The intensity of protest in Brazil trending through social networks reflects the deep anger against the unrecognized or undeclared abuses that have suppressed or extinguished so many women’s lives. For so many years the struggle of women’s movements, only now governments share their vision of a world without violence by 2030. The young girl in the news commented: “It does not hurt the uterus, but the soul because there are cruel people who are getting away with it.”

Zero tolerance needs the full weight of the laws already in place to track down, prosecute and punish perpetrators. From the highest levels of government, through the police, lawyers and the courts, all need to act with renewed responsibility and accountability for what is happening to women and girls and understand its real cost and consequences.

Most important of all, this is a situation for every man and boy to consider, and to decide to take a stand to change and positively evolve the ‘machismo’ culture. This must not wait another day.

Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka is UN Under-Secretary-General and UN Women Executive Director.

Excerpt:

So extreme are gender inequalities in South Sudan that a young girl is three times more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth than to reach the eighth grade – the last grade before high school – according to Plan International, one of the oldest and largest children’s development organisations in the world.

A vast majority of South Sudanese girls will have been victims of at least one form of gender-based violence in their young lives, but those living in Eastern Equatoria State face a particularly abhorrent practice which is a tradition among at least five of the state’s 12 tribes – being given away as ‘blood money’.

Dina Disan Olweny, Executive Director of the non-governmental Coalition of State Women’s and Youth Organisations, is one of the rights activists pushing for an end to harmful traditions and injustices facing young girls in South Sudan. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

“When a person kills another person, the bereaved family expects to be given ‘blood money’ as compensation,” Dina Disan Olweny, Executive Director of the non-governmental Coalition of State Women’s and Youth Organisations, told IPS.

Most tribes demand compensation when a life has been taken in one of the regular conflicts over cattle and pasture, revenge killings and other inter-village conflicts, and although 20 to 30 goats is what many tribes demand in form of compensation, Olweny explained that “most families can either not afford or are unwilling to pay so much, and prefer to give away one of their girls as compensation.”

According to child protection specialist, Shanti Risal Kaphle, “a young girl is taken as a commodity that can be given in lieu of someone’s lost life, or as ‘blood money’, to keep the family and community in peace.”

Kaphle explained that the girl’s life is negotiated “without her information and consent and is subject to violence, abuse and exploitation.”

The practice of girl child compensation has not escaped the eye of the government, which set an estimated 500 dollars as the amount for compensation for a life, but tribe people still prefer to be given a girl, saying that the figure set by the government is too little.“A young girl is taken as a commodity that can be given in lieu of someone’s lost life, or as ‘blood money’, to keep the family and community in peace” – child protection specialist Shanti Risal Kaphle

Experts say that a girl is also preferred as compensation by a bereaved family because she can either be married to one of their own without having to pay a bride price, or she can be married off when she turns 12 and attract a herd of goats.

Many of the girls handed over as compensation are often as young as five years. They are expected to forget their birth families and start afresh, severing all contacts with their natural families once the exchange has been concluded.

At this point their lives can take a dramatic turn for the worse through multiple abuse. These girls may be “subjected to child labour, and to sexual, physical and emotional abuse – to escape this hell, more of them now prefer to commit suicide,” said Olweny.

Residents here say that customary laws which perpetuate and rubber stamp these forms of abuse are seen to play a vital role in conflict resolution because they are considered cheap, accessible and the decisions are made on the basis of customs they are familiar with.

Kaphle said that customary laws and decisions are also perceived as more amicable and less time-consuming.

However, girl child compensation is just one of a multitude of abuses that the girl child in South Sudan faces.

The state of Western Bahr El Ghazal, for example, has a notorious tradition of widow compensation which has seen many young girls denied an opportunity to go to school because they are forced into early marriages.

Linda Ferdinand Hussein, Executive Director of the non-governmental organization Women’s Organisation for Training and Promotion, explained how this tradition works.

“When a man’s wife dies for whatever reasons, the man can demand to be given back the bride price that he had paid.” This price varies from one family to the next “but most families are unwilling to pay back the bride price so they give the man one of the deceased wife’s younger sisters as compensation.”

Four years after South Sudan won its independence and became the world’s youngest nation, child protection specialists like Hussein are raising the alarm. “Gender-based violence against young girls continues to be perpetrated in a variety of ways in both peacetime and during conflict,” she said.

A report released Jun. 30 by the United Nations Mission in the Republic of South Sudan (UNMISS) revealed that the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and associated armed groups recently carried out a campaign of violence against the population of South Sudan, which was marked by a “new brutality and intensity” and included the raping and then burning alive of girls inside their homes.

A report released last year by leading humanitarian organisation CARE, titled ‘The Girl Has No Rights’: Gender-Based Violence in South Sudan, highlighted the extreme injustices faced by young girls in the country.

These injustices continue to serve as obstacles towards accessing education and later exploiting the opportunities that life presents for those who have gone through school.

According to Plan International, 7.3 percent of girls are married before they reach the age of 15 years and another 42.2 percent will have been married between the ages of 15 and 18. And, although 37 percent of girls enrol in primary school, only around seven percent complete the curriculum and only two percent of them proceed to secondary school.

Edited by Phil Harris

Students at Columbia University carry mattresses on the Carry That Weight National Day of Action to show their support for survivors of sexual assault. Credit: Warren Heller

By Lyndal Rowlands
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 25 2014 (IPS)

“A recurring nightmare for me is I’m trying to tell someone something and they are not listening. I’m yelling at the top of my lungs and it feels like there is a glass wall between us.”

Jasmin Enriquez is a two-time survivor of rape. Like two-thirds of rape survivors, Enriquez knew her rapists. The first was her boyfriend when she was a high school senior, the second a fellow student she had been seeing at college."What I hear from women is that they are told to shut up: they are told to shut up during it, they are told to shut up after it, and they are told by some institutions to continue keeping their mouths shut." -- Dr. Dana Sinopoli

“[The nightmare] shows how I’ve always felt that even as someone coming forward as a survivor, as soon as I start giving details to some people, they instantly start to shut it down. As in, you’re being crazy or hyperemotional, instead of taking it as one whole piece and looking at it holistically,” Enriquez told IPS.

Women who have experienced gender-based violence are at a significantly increased risk of developing a mental disorder, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety or depression, within one to three years after the assault.

Enriquez explains, “People don’t seem to understand that after being sexually assaulted, it’s something that you have to live with the rest of your life.

“Most of the time there is an incredible amount of anxiety or depression or other mental health issues that people just don’t understand,” she says. “It’s been five years since I was sexually assaulted and I still live through the trauma.”

A special Lancet series published Friday says that one in three women have experienced physical or sexual violence from their partner.

Researcher Dr. Susan Rees from the University of New South Wales told IPS that there is strong evidence that if you are exposed to gender-based violence, you are at a much higher risk for the onset of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety and depression as well as attempted suicide.

Rees’ research into the connection between gender-based violence and mental disorders has shown that women who have been assaulted are significantly more likely to experience a mental disorder in their lifetime.

Women who have experienced one form of gender-based violence have a 57 percent chance of developing a mental disorder compared with only 28 percent of women who have not experienced gender-based violence. Significantly, 89 percent of women who have experienced gender-based violence three to four times will develop a mental disorder.

It is important for survivors of assault to get early support to help prevent the onset of an associated mental disorder, Rees said.

However, experiencing sexual assault can be confusing, especially for young women and girls, and this may prevent them from getting early intervention.

Enriquez explains that she didn’t initially realise the connection between her response to the trauma of sexual violence and the symptoms she was experiencing.

“I’ve recently been very jumpy, kind of always tense and I get startled easy, I didn’t understand why that was happening and it was very frustrating.”

Enriquez’ fiancé, who is not the person who assaulted her, used to jump out at her or play games to surprise her, and she found this really upsetting,

“I didn’t understand that it was related to me being sexually assaulted until probably my senior year of college. I feel like if I had been educated about what normal symptoms are of PTSD, I would have known that there was more to it and that it was a normal piece of it.”

Community attitudes affect prevalence

Community attitudes towards women, including strong patriarchal attitudes, power imbalance and gender inequality contribute to the prevalence of violence against women, said Rees.

“It makes sense that if you change attitudes then you can change prevalence, you can reduce the risk for women,” she said.

This is what Enriquez aims to do with her organisation Only With Consent. Together with her fiancé, Enriquez speaks with students to raise awareness and change young people’s attitudes towards sexual assault.

“I definitely think that there’s a gender piece that goes with both the mental health and the sexual assault and that it ties back to any time a woman expresses an emotion of being angry or upset we immediately call her out for being irrational or emotional.” Enriquez told IPS.

“If the majority of survivors who are speaking out are women, and they are expressing these feelings of being upset or being angry, or being really hurt, or any of those feelings, we discredit what they are saying, because we see them as irrational creatures,” Enriquez said.

Psychologist Dr. Dana Sinopoli told IPS that it is also important to consider how gender-based violence affects men, especially men who experience childhood sexual assault. She said that this should involve addressing gender stereotypes such as that men are aggressive or impulsive.

As Carry That Weight explains on its website:

“People of all gender identities can experience and be affected by sexual and domestic violence—women are not the only survivors just as men are not the only perpetrators. We strive to challenge narrow and inaccurate representations of what assault looks like and also acknowledge that these forms of violence disproportionately affect women, transgender, gender nonconforming, and disabled people.”

Sinopoli added however that changing community attitudes towards women was an important part of addressing gender-based violence.

“Consistently what I hear from women is that they are told to shut up, they are told to shut up during it, they are told to shut up after it, and they are told by some institutions to continue keeping their mouths shut.

“That is what we can link to the depression and the anxiety and a lot of the re-experiencing and retriggering that is so central to PTSD,” Sinopoli said.

Sinopoli added that “the way that society reacts, to someone who discloses or is struggling, is so important.

“The more that people speak up the more that we will actually see a decline in such significant psychological symptoms.”

Early intervention can help

When helping someone who has experienced violence, Rees said that it is important that friends and family reassure the victim that it “it is never acceptable to be hit, or to be treated violently or to be raped.”

Unfortunately, population studies show that women who have experienced gender-based violence are also at increased risk of experiencing it again in their lifetime.

“This might be the case because often men target women who are vulnerable, so if she has a mental disorder or trauma as a result of an early childhood adversity, she may be more likely to be targeted by men who in a sense benefit from powerlessness, inequality and fear.”

She said that warning bells that a relationship is unhealthy include controlling, jealous behaviour such as telling you who you should socialise with, or getting jealous because you are doing better than he is at university.

“Often women think that’s because he cares about me, he’s worried about me and that why he wants to know where I am all the time,”

But this type of behaviour should actually be seen as a warning of future emotional and perhaps physical abuse, Rees said.

Rees said that the reasons women don’t leave violent relationships are complex,

“She may be suffering depression. She may not have the economic resources to leave. She may worry about the children, and rightly so, because often people end up homeless, and she also may know that she’s at high risk of retaliation from the perpetrator if she leaves.”

Rees also explained that it is important for health practitioners to receive training so they can be confident to ask about domestic violence and respond appropriately.

She added that primary health care responses need to be integrated with community-based services to ensure that survivors have access to help that is sensitive to the complex impact of sexual violence.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Women in the north Indian village of Katra Shadatganj in the state of Uttar Pradesh, where two young girls were recently raped and hanged. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
CHIRANG, India, Sep 30 2014 (IPS)

On a bright March morning, a 17-year old tribal girl woke as usual, and went to catch fish in the village river in the Chirang district of India’s northeastern Assam state.

Later that evening, villagers found her lifeless body on the riverbank. According to Taburam Pegu, the police officer investigating the case, her assailants had raped her before slitting her throat.

The girl was a member of the Bodo tribe, which has been at loggerheads with Muslims and Santhals – another indigenous group in the region. The tragic story reveals a terrible reality across India, where thousands of girls and women are sexually abused, tortured and murdered in a tide of gender-based violence (GBV) that shows no sign of slowing.

“We have a culture of impunity. Our legal system itself negates the possibility [...] of punishment in cases of violence against women.” -- Anjuman Ara Begum, former programme officer at the Asian Human Rights Commission
Conflict and a lack of accountability, particularly across India’s northern, eastern and central states where armed insurgencies and tribal clashes are a part of daily life for over 40 million women, fuel the fire of sexual violence.

According to a report released earlier this year by the United Nations Secretary-General assessing progress on the programme of action adopted at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo, violence against women is universal, with one in every three women (35 percent) experiencing physical or sexual abuse in her lifetime.

Of all the issues related to the ICPD action plan, ending gender-based violence was addressed as a key concern by 88 percent of all governments surveyed. In total, 97 percent of countries worldwide have programmes, policies or strategies to address gender equality, human rights, and the empowerment of women.

Still, multiple forms of violence against women continue to be an hourly occurrence all around the world.

A recent multi-country study on men and violence in the Asia-Pacific region, conducted by the United Nations, reported that nearly 50 percent of 10,000 men surveyed admitted to sexually or physically abusing a female partner.

In India, a country that has established a legal framework to address and end sexual violence, 92 women are raped every day, according to the latest records published by the government’s National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).

This is higher than the average daily number of rapes reported in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which currently stands at 36.

Sexual violence is particularly on the rise in conflict areas, experts say, largely due to a lack of accountability – the very thing the United Nations describes as “key to preventing and responding to gender-based violence.”

According to Suhas Chakma, director of the Asian Centre for Human Rights in New Delhi, “There are human rights abuses committed by security forces and human rights violations by the militants. And then there is also violence against women committed by civilians. No matter who is committing the crime […] there has to be accountability – a component completely missing” from the current legal framework.

An example of this is Perry*, a 35-year-old woman from the South Garo Hills district of India’s northeastern Meghalaya state – home to 14 million women and three armed groups – who was killed by militants in June this year.

Members of the Garo National Liberation Army (GNLA), an insurgent group, allegedly tried to rape Perry and, when she resisted, they shot her in the head, blowing it open. The GNLA refused to be held accountable, claiming that the woman was an informant and so “deserved to die”.

Another reason for the high levels of GBV in India is the dismal conviction rate – a mere 26 percent – in cases involving sexual assault and violence.

In 3,860 of the 5,337 rape cases reported in the past 10 years, the culprits were either acquitted or discharged by the courts for lack of ‘proper’ evidence, according to the NCRB.

“We have a culture of impunity,” Anjuman Ara Begum, a Guwahati-based lawyer and former programme officer at the Asian Human Rights Commission, told IPS, adding, “Our legal system itself negates the possibility or certainty of punishment in cases of violence against women.”

With a declining conviction rate, armed groups have been playing the role of the judiciary to deliver instant justice. In October 2011, a kangaroo court of the armed Maoists in the Palamu district of India’s eastern Jharkhand state cut off the hands of a man accused of rape.

In August 2013, the Kangleipak Communist Party (KCP) – an insurgent group operating in the northeastern state of Manipur – launched an “anti-rape task force”.

Sanakhomba Meitei, the secretary of KCP, told IPS over the phone that his group would deliver fast-track justice for rape victims. “Our intervention [will] instill fear in the [minds of the] rapists,” said Meitei, adding, “We will deliver stringent punishment.”

This is a worrying trend, but inevitable, given the failure of the legal system to deliver justice in these troubled areas, according to A L Sharada, director of Population First – a partner of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in India.

“What we need is a robust legal system, and mob justice hurts that possibility. In fact, such non-judicial justice systems are also very patriarchal in nature and ultimately against women. What we really need are quick convictions [in] every case of gender violence that has been filed,” Sharada stated.

According to the NCRB over 50,000 women were abducted across the country in 2013 alone, while over 8,000 were killed in dowry-related crimes. More than 100,000 women faced cruelty at the hands of their husbands or other male relatives, but only 16 percent of those accused were convicted.

*Not her real name

This story originally appeared in a special edition TerraViva, ‘ICPD@20: Tracking Progress, Exploring Potential for Post-2015’, published with the support of UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund. The contents are the independent work of reporters and authors.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Twenty-one-year-old Aisha clings to her child as she recounts her tale of being trafficked. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS

By Rebecca Murray
ADEN, Yemen, Jan 2 2013 (IPS)

Twenty-one-year-old Aisha clings to her two children as she recounts her tale of horror. Growing up in the Somali capital Mogadishu, she fell in love and bore a child out of wedlock four years ago. When her family threatened her life for destroying her ‘honour’, Aisha escaped.

She braved the hazardous journey with smugglers across the Indian Ocean to Yemen, and to what she thought was a better life.

Instead, Aisha now squats with four other women in the sprawling, cinderblock slum of Basateen, in the eastern seaport city of Aden. They beg for money in the shabby southern seaport every day, often prostituting themselves for two dollars a trick. They split their meager earnings with their controlling pimp.

“I just want to go to a safer place for my children,” Aisha sighs. “In another country.”

Human trafficking networks with international reach are expanding in Yemen, and with poverty being a key factor, sexually exploited women are the most vulnerable victims.

Bleak as Aisha’s future may look, her fate is better than that of a 17-year-old Ethiopian girl who died alone in a hospital in Haradh, near the Saudi Arabian border.

Bought and sold within the trafficking network operating across Yemen, she was repeatedly raped and beaten until she died. She is now buried far from home and the trafficker who murdered her remains free.

“Between 2011 and 2012 there has been a significant increase in smuggling and trafficking, and of reported cases of violence and abuse perpetrated against new arrivals,” says Edward Leposky, an officer with the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR).

In 2011 UNHCR recorded over 103,000 new arrivals in Yemen. This is the largest influx they have seen since they started documenting statistics six years ago, and Leposky suspects an increase for 2012. The real numbers are thought to be much higher.

Female migrants, mostly Ethiopian and Somali, often flee poverty and violence at home. They fork out hundreds of dollars to reach transit points in Djibouti or Puntland, and also for the dangerous, overcrowded boat rides – which can last one to three days – to Yemen.

Their goal is to reach Gulf states like Saudi Arabia for work. But along the way migrants are frequently gang raped, suffocated from overcrowding or thrown overboard by smugglers, as well as taken hostage by traffickers once they reach Yemeni soil.

“The most trafficking we see happening here is of those coming from the Horn of Africa to Saudi Arabia,” says Eman Mashour, part of the counter-trafficking team with the International Organisation of Migration (IOM) in Yemen.

“There is a network,” she says. “Females can be badly exploited by the traffickers. Women told us they were providing sex to smugglers along the way.”

Confirmation lies in the grim findings of October’s groundbreaking study, ‘Desperate Choices’, conducted by the Danish Refugee Council (DRC) and the Regional Mixed Migration Secretariat (RMMS).

“Criminal networks extend through Ethiopia, Yemen, Djibouti, and Saudi Arabia,” the report says. “It seems highly likely that these gangs would have contacts in other countries.”

Local women fall victim to trafficking

But not all victims of sex trafficking in Yemen are migrants.

The brief marriages between young Yemeni girls and visitors from the Gulf states – a practice commonly known as ‘sex tourism’ – are the result of poverty among large Yemeni families, mostly in rural areas.

“Girls as young as 15 are exploited for commercial sex in hotels and clubs in the governorates of Sanaa, Aden, and Taiz,” says the U.S. Department of State’s 2012 trafficking report.

“The majority of child sex tourists in Yemen originate from Saudi Arabia, with a smaller number possibly coming from other Gulf nations. Yemeni girls who marry Saudi tourists often do not realise the temporary and exploitative nature of these agreements, and some are subjected to sex trafficking or abandoned on the streets of Saudi Arabia.”

A victim of another kind of sex trafficking, Leila, was 15 years old when she finally found refuge at a secret women’s shelter, tucked away in a quiet Sanaa neighbourhood.

Beaten by her family, Leila had run away from home two years before and lived off the streets. An older woman soon picked her up, bringing her to a neighbourhood brothel.

The girls were photographed having sex as blackmail to make them stay, given drugs and forced to service clients at night. The woman pocketed the clients’ cash.

Leila and the female pimp were arrested just before Leila was to be trafficked to Saudi Arabia. Leila served two years in prison for her ‘crime’. Her family disowned her, accusing her of destroying her honour, and her brother issued death threats.

Through a prison visit by staff from the Yemeni Women’s Union, Leila found out about the small women’s shelter – a rarity in Yemen – and was one of their first cases. With psychological help and class work consuming her days, Leila stayed at the shelter until the staff resolved the family dispute.

Yemen’s penal code proscribes ten years’ imprisonment for those engaged in buying or selling human beings. Although acknowledging the country’s ongoing political crisis, the U.S. State Department report stresses the utter lack of government efforts to counter trafficking this year.

“The Government of Yemen was unable to provide law enforcement data to contribute to this report, and it did not institute formal procedures to identify and protect victims of trafficking or take steps to address trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation.”

Nicoletta Giordano, the head of IOM’s activities in Yemen, warns against the inactivity. “There is a flourishing smuggling and trafficking business. It is an international business… Many Western countries are focused on piracy issues and attention to smuggling and trafficking has fallen by the wayside,” she says.

“If we were to look at border management in a more holistic way, so that those that require assistance and protection are referred, and those that might pose a threat are dealt with, this would be in the interest of all countries concerned.”

*Sex trafficking victims’ names have been changed to protect their identity.

Women demand their rights outside the government secretariat in Thiruvananthapuram, India. Credit: K.S. Harikrishnan/IPS

By K. S. Harikrishnan
NEW DELHI/THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, Oct 19 2012 (IPS)

As gender-based violence across India becomes more frequent, and more savage, increasing numbers of women are speaking out against the cruelty.

On Oct. 6, a 14-year-old girl from the Sacha Khera village in the Jind district of northern India’s Haryana state set herself on fire after a brutal gang rape.

In her statement to the police, the girl claimed that two male youngsters dragged her into a house, while the sister-in-law of one of the culprits stood guard on the terrace.

The teenaged girl doused herself in kerosene oil shortly after the attack. She was rushed to the hospital but eventually succumbed to her injuries.

In September, according to ‘oneindianews’, 17 rapes were reported in Haryana, a state infamous for so-called ‘honour killings’ of young women and girls who are thought to have brought dishonour upon their family or community.

Sonia Gandhi, chairperson of the ruling United Progressive Alliance, who met the girl’s family, told reporters in Jind on Oct. 9 that those guilty of such heinous crimes must be severely punished.

Nationwide trends suggest that the incident in Haryana, reports of which shocked the country for days, is far from an isolated case.

The annual report by the New Delhi-based National Crimes Record Bureau (NCRB) found that a “total of 228,650 incidents of crime against women were reported in the country during the year 2011 as compared to 213,585 incidents in the year 2010, recording an increase of 7.1 percent.”

The issue has also attracted the attention of government officials. Indian Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde told a conference of police director generals and inspectors in New Delhi on Sep. 6 that crimes against women were indeed on the rise and stressed the need to adopt adequate methods of dealing with the perpetrators.

Analysts point out that the violence ripping through India often takes the form of rape, kidnapping, dowry-related cruelty, molestation and harassment.

Dr. Sreelekha Nair, researcher at the Centre for Women’s Development Studies in New Delhi, told IPS that data for the period between 2007 and 2011 revealed that cruelty by husbands topped the list, with 99,135 cases reported in 2011.

Meanwhile, 42,968 molestation cases were reported to the police that same year, making it the second most prevalent crime. Police stations also registered 35,565 complaints of kidnapping or abduction.

Turning the tide

Female politicians, activists and other leading members of civil society assert that a decline in the quality of governance, lack of public awareness and lethargy on the part of internal security officials have made matters worse for women.

Member of Parliament and head of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), T. N. Seema, told IPS that both administrative and judicial institutions would have to adopt more gender sensitive policies in order to contain the wave of violence.

“The number of violent crimes is increasing every year while the number of (those convicted) for (such crimes) is decreasing. When analysing records, we can see that only one-fourth of the total accused” received any kind of punishment.

According to Seema, “The mindset of society must be changed to accommodate the heightened role of women in public life.”

The fact that a male-dominated power structure still has a strong hold over most of Indian has led to a culture of victim blaming.

Urban centres bear the brunt of this rising tide of gender-based violence, with the government recording “a total of 33,789 (reported) cases of crimes against women (in) 53 cities during the year 2011 as compared to 24,335 cases in the year 2010.”

Archana Rajeev, a senior journalist in Thiruvananthapuram, believes this could be attributed to the presence of large floating populations, comprised primarily of male migrant workers, in metropolises such as New Delhi.

However, crimes against women should not be viewed exclusively as a “law and order” problem, experts say.

The main cause is an entrenched feudal, patriarchal mindset that refuses to regard women as independent, autonomous and equal human beings.

The beefing up of policing and judicial policies has to be accompanied by a socio-cultural campaign to ensure the rights of women.

More women holding positions of power within local administrations has led to widespread awareness about crimes and abuse. Simultaneously, an increase in the number of registered complaints in police stations suggests victims themselves are becoming more vocal about the issue.

A recent joint study conducted by experts at the Harvard business school, the University of Warrick and the International Monetary Fund traced the link between the surge in the number of reported cases of gender-based violence and the impact of the 1993 self-government reforms, which introduced a quota system to boost female political representation in local bodies throughout the country.

According to the researchers, “There are two reasons behind the surge in reported crimes against women. First, greater numbers of female politicians make the police more responsive to crimes against women.

“Second, women victims who encounter more sympathetic women leaders may feel more encouraged to report crimes.”

Sociologists believe that property, education and employment are key assets for women to be able to combat violence.

Durga Lakshmi, an independent researcher in Kollam, a coastal city in the southern state of Kerala, told IPS, “Education and employment have been upgrading the status of women, helping (them) to find a solution in complex situations.”

A study on containing violence against women in rural Haryana conducted by Prem Chowdhary, former professorial fellow of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi, stated, “Once a woman’s role in the household changes from recipient to provider, her (role) as a decision maker also stands to be recognised and consolidated, erasing the social sanction for violence.”

(END)