Violence against women

When armed Islamist fighters arrived in the northeastern Malian village of Haribomo near Timbuktu, one of the first things they did was sip sweet tea with the local imam. They then told him how they expected the village women to behave.

“The Islamists met with the imam and they said, ‘Let us tell you our rules’,” said Adane Djiffiey Djallo, a coordinator at Aide et Developpement au Mali, a Timbuktu-based non-governmental organisation. “They said women would no longer be allowed to go to work, to the market or wash in the river.”But the imam turned to the Islamists and said: “‘Let me tell you my rules’”.

تدير الناشطة السورية لينا الطيبي التي تعيش في القاهرة شبكة لدعم اللاجئات السوريات ومساعدتهن على التكيف مع الحياة في مصر، وتحاول إقناعهن بعدم السماح للفقر بأن يدفعهن إلى العمل في الجنس أو الزواج غير المرغوب فيه. 

Violence against women and girls is both a global and local societal ill—global because its perpetrators and victims are in every corner of the world, and local because its forms differ from one place to the next depending on specific cultural, political and socio-economic circumstances.

The crackdown on Nuba Women Human Rights Activists in Sudan is escalating.  Khadija, Awatif, and Amira are all former or current detainees who have faced extreme psychological and physical torture on the hands of the Sudanese security forces! 

Khadija Mohamed Badr, a Nuba woman, was put into detention in Kadugli on November 11, 2012 in the course of a large campaign of arrests of Nuba women in late 2012. Khadija was detained with more than 30 other women because of her suspected relationship with the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army/North-SPLM/N and their activities in the Nuba mountains.