Archive for the 'Africa' Category
The moral imperative to end this brutal practice exists – now we need the leadership and political will to consign it to history
In countries all over the world today, women live with the threat, or consequences, of female genital mutilation.
In Africa alone an estimated 3 million girls and women are subjected to the practice each [...]
More than half of Ugandan girls who enrol in grade one drop out before sitting for their primary school-leaving examinations.
The fact that girls are dropping out between age 11 and 13 is being linked to the beginning of the menstruation cycle and its associated challenges.
Research conducted by a non-government organisation, the Forum of African Women [...]
Somalia’s hardline al Shabaab insurgents closed three grassroots women’s organisations in the rebel-held town of Balad Hawa on Monday to stop women from going to work, a rebel leader said.
The group wants to impose its own version of Islamic law on areas it controls, and Washington says it is al Qaeda’s proxy in the Horn [...]
A single clinic in the capital, Harare, says it has treated nearly 30,000 girls and boys who were abused in the past four years ‑ an average of 20 per day. Experts believe that the country’s economic collapse under Robert Mugabe has led to widespread family breakdown and left many children vulnerable.
Dr Robert-Grey Choto, a [...]
While medical and psychological care are being provided to survivors of sexual violence in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where 7,000 women and girls have been raped this year alone, UN and aid workers on the ground say the funding response has been too narrow, leaving key issues inadequately addressed.
“Increased international attention to sexual violence [...]
A countrywide survey of the incidence of rape in Cameroon has returned disturbing statistics: 20 percent of the nearly 38,000 women surveyed reported having been raped; another 14 percent said they had escaped a rape attempt.
Echoing findings elsewhere in the world, the survey, carried out in all ten of Cameroon’s regions by the German Technical [...]
Over the past few years, health workers in Malawi have noticed an unforeseen consequence of the availability of free antiretrovirals: more rape victims are showing up in hospitals.
Since 2005, when the Global Fund began providing AIDS drugs to the country, word has been spreading that Post Exposure Prophylaxis, a 30-day preventative combination of the medication, [...]
Somalia’s hardline Islamist group al Shabaab has publicly whipped women for wearing bras they say violate Islam by constituting a deception, north Mogadishu residents said last week.
The insurgent group, which seeks to impose a strict form of sharia Islamic law throughout Somalia, amputated a foot and a hand each from two young men accused of [...]
* Humanitarian workers call for accountability for crimes
* 110,000 return to homes in volatile Rwanda border zone
* Concerns about cross-border expulsions in Angola, Congo
Some 5,400 women have reported being raped this year in one province of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the United Nations said last week.
Elisabeth Byrs, spokeswoman for the U.N. Office for the [...]
At an 8 October gathering of Guinean women beaten or raped during the recent military attack on demonstrators, all wept as one young woman presented torn clothes soldiers had ripped off of her.
“We all collapsed in tears. It is unspeakably painful what happened here in Guinea,” Aïssata Daffe of the Union des Forces Républicaines political [...]
Calls are growing for South Africa to legalise prostitution ahead of next year’s football World Cup in an effort to limit HIV infection among millions of fans visiting the country for the tournament.
A leading health specialist told the Observer that the World Cup presented a huge risk and said there was an urgent need to [...]
Darfuri refugee women and girls face high levels of rape and other violence on a daily basis both inside and outside refugee camps in eastern Chad, despite the presence of UN security forces, a new Amnesty International report reveals.
In ‘No place for us here: Violence against refugee women in eastern Chad’, Amnesty International documents [...]
In 2003, the African nation of Liberia was in turmoil; its president Charles Taylor was involved in a vicious civil war with war lords who wanted to take his place. Caught in the middle were innocent civilians who bore the brunt of the violence.
One woman, Leymah Gbowee, had had enough and she and her [...]
Rioters attacked and stripped about 20 Ugandan women who were wearing trousers last week during deadly riots in Kampala. The humiliations were part of a major confrontation between a traditional kingdom and President Yoweri Museveni’s government.
Male rioters in a suburb here on September 11 attacked about 20 women wearing trousers.
The men, in Rubaga, a Kampala [...]
Amnesty International has launched a new campaign to reduce maternal deaths in Sierra Leone.
The accompanying report Out of Reach: The Cost of Maternal Health in Sierra Leone uses graphic and personal testimonies to show how women and girls are often unable to access life-saving treatment because they are too poor to pay for [...]
Women are well represented in newsrooms but struggle to find a place in senior management or on boards, said Business Day in a report on a study by Gender Links.
Women also still earn less than their male counterparts in the media, according to the survey conducted in South Africa and the Southern African Development Community [...]
Themba Mvubu, 24, from Kwathema, was found guilty of murdering, robbing and being an accessory to the rape of 31-year-old Eudy Simelane.
Activists at the magistrates court in Delmas, Mpumalanga province, hailed the judgment as “extremely important” in drawing attention to cases of murder and so-called “corrective rape” against lesbians in South Africa.
Simelane was one of [...]
From Monrovia’s highest hill, the long sliver of Atlantic Ocean shoreline at the mouth of the Mesurado River, with its aqua blue waves, golden sand and wooden fishing boats, looks like paradise. But this is West Point; one of Monrovia’s most impoverished and polluted slums, and it is not paradise.
It is a world where justice [...]
When health officials talk of the need for “behaviour change” as the only way to end the AIDS onslaught, they are not just talking about change in sexual behaviour, but change in the way men treat women and girls in our society.
The more “in control” a woman or girl is of her life, the [...]
Recent postings- Trafficking Victims at UN Highlight Need for Recognition
- END FGM European Campaign launches web site
- Rid the world of female genital mutilation
- Lifting Silence on Menstruation to Keep Girls in School in Uganda
- Obama’s attack on abortion rights
- Differences between men’s and women’s health
- WHO calls for action beyond the health sector to improve the health of girls and women
- Malaysian Women’s Groups say Abolish Section 498
- Politics can be a Risky Business for Women in Bolivia
- Somali rebels close women’s organisations
- new on womensgrid
- Rape Crisis Centres Westminster Hall debate 10 November 2009 at 12:30 pm
- Grassroots Co-ordinator – Women for Refugee Women – 23rd November 2009
- Jenny Okojie is doing a 7.2km sponsored walk for CRASAC – Please sponsor her!
- 16 days of action event Greater Manchester
- Football teams needed for special tournament against domestic violence in Barnet
- Be a judge for a day in Truro as part of Domestic Violence Awareness Week
- The right of murder suspects to use their partner’s sexual infidelity as a partial defence in court is set to end
- 100 rapists are let off with a caution: The serious offences that never come to court
- Scotland Yard has instructed officers not to use the phrase ‘gang rape’ to describe such crimes because it is too ‘emotive’ a term
- Government Shelves Measures To Restrict Paedophiles On Facebook because of Human Rights concerns
- new on women in london
- Information added to website September 2009
- Information added to website August 2009
- Information added to website July 2009
- GLDVP January-April 2010 open training programme is now available
- Prostitution Clauses Policing And Crime Bill 2009 – ECP
- Head of Communications – Women’s Resource Centre – 23rd November 2009
- Mrs Goundo’s Daughter – Free Event – Forward – 7th December 2009
- New European Campaign on FGM – Forward
- FORWARD releases an Information Services and Support Guide for Young People in the UK
- FGM is always with us – experiences perceptions and beliefs of women affected by female genital mutilation in London – Forward
Libya should drop charges against journalist who reported allegations of sexual harassment
28 October 2009 in Africa, Government, Media, Opinion Comment, Rape and Sexual Assault
The Libyan government should investigate allegations of sexual harassment in a state-run residence for women who had been orphaned instead of charging the journalist who reported the story with criminal defamation – Human Rights Watch
Mohamed al-Sareet, a Libyan journalist, wrote on Jeel Libya, an independent news website based in London, about a rare demonstration in [...]