Women

A year after the earthquake that killed over 230,000 people, women and girls living in Haiti’s makeshift camps are facing an increasing risk of rape and sexual violence. The January 2010 devastating earthquake was the beginning of a nightmare. For Guerline, her travails only began with the death of her husband and home in the quake. In March 2010, her 13-year-old daughter was raped by four men. She was threatened with dire consequences if she spilled the beans to the police. Scared even to take...

In the next ten years, 100 million girls will be married off against their consent before the age of 18. Their chance of dying in childbirth is five times those aged 20-24, and their risk of contracting HIV is significantly high. That's what the law of averages say. Their plight could have been better, even so marginally, had the US House of Representatives passed a particular Bill on Thursday night. The US State Department could have helped fight child marriage by expanding investments in other...

Twenty-year-old Nita was caught on an isolated road on a motorcycle with her boyfriend. She was whisked away by the Sharia police. The next morning the head lecturer at her campus lectured her, and told her mother that Nita should be stoned to death. Nita blurted out, “Sir, I was only trying to look for a shortcut, and I should be stoned for that? What about the officers who raped me last night?” Nita was apprehended by the Sharia police (Wilayatul Hisbah, WH) in January 2010 for the crime of...

The outrage in the Western world over the Sakineh Ashtiani issue increasingly seems like an outrage that is directed more at Iran, than any real concern over human rights. US President Barack Obama, who only the other day, lectured India on human rights, so far has not been able to utter a single world against a similar case in Saudi Arabia, where another young woman is on a death row. Last month, the Supreme Court in Riyadh endorsed the death sentence imposed on Sri Lankan maid Rizana Nafeek...

When the burqa debate was raging across the world, a young Pakistani women's rights activist, who doesn't wear a headscarf as a rule, travelled to Jalalabad in Afghanistan to see for herself what it meant to wear one. This is her story. Gulalai Ismail, a 24-year-old university student in Islamabad, needed to go to Afghanistan in August on an assignment. The consultancy on the evaluation of a gender-based violence project made her fly to Kabul. And then onwards to Jalalabad. For someone who does...

An unprecedented number of women will be in positions of power, Muslim immigration to the West will rise, and office workers will be unchained from their cubicles ― all in the next 40 years, says a consultancy set up by the author of Future Shock. Toffler Associates has released its predictions for the next 40 years to mark the 40th anniversary of Future Shock, in which author Alvin Toffler studied the 1970s to see what would happen in the future. Some of the predictions that the consultancy...

Nordic countries continue to show the world how to bridge inequality between men and women. Iceland, Norway, Finland and Sweden are the top four, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2010. The index’s scores can be interpreted as the percentage of the gap that has been closed between women and men. The 2010 report features a total of 134 countries, representing over 93% of the world’s population. Others in the Top 10 are New Zealand (5), Ireland (6), Denmark (7)...

Here comes another report that shames India. The World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report 2010 says India’s position is abysmal. Out of 134 countries surveyed, India is among the lowest ranked countries at the 112th position, with a score of 0.6155. The index ranks 134 economies according to the size of the gaps between men and women. India (112) occupies one of the last places in the regional rankings. India and Pakistan perform above average on the political empowerment of women...

French authorities have arrested in Paris the alleged leader of a Rwandan rebel group accused of mass rapes in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the International Criminal Court (ICC) said on Monday. Callixte Mbarushimana, described as a leader of the rebel group Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda, FDLR), was held after a sealed warrant was issued for his arrest on allegations the rebel group was involved in hundreds of rapes in DRC's...

A Brazilian student of tourism who was expelled from her university for wearing a minidress that was deemed too short has won $23,800 as compensation from her university. Geisy Arruda, now 21, was thrown out of Bandeirante University in Sao Paulo last year for wearing the short, pink dress to class. She was expelled for her lack of "ethical principles, academic dignity and morality" by wearing provocative and "inadequate clothing," the Associated Press has reported. Arruda was jeered by male...