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RIGHTS: U.N. says More Countries Fighting Violence Against Women
By Ushani Agalawatta
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 26 (IPS) - Rakiya Omaar works with some of the estimated 250,000 women who saw their loved ones killed, and then were raped during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
Today, Omaar helps the survivors tell their stories on videotape in an attempt to ensure the prosecution of the men who raped them.
The project is paid for by a special trust fund of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), which has provided more than seven million dollars in grants to 73 countries to help eliminate violence against women since 1996.
On Monday - a day dedicated to commemorate the elimination of violence against women worldwide - activists from around the world described efforts to combat and overcome violence against women in their communities.
Not only are Rwanda's genocide survivors facing poverty and the loss of their families, many carry another burden, said Omaar, a Somali human rights activist and director of the non-governmental organisation (NGO) African Rights.
"Given that AIDS was a widespread problem even before the genocide, it is not surprising that many of these women are living with the death sentence of HIV/AIDS,'' she said.
Investing in adequate resources, political will and creative partnerships are the keys to ending violence against women, UNIFEM head Noeleen Heyzer told delegates and activists here.
"Today the message is that we know how to end violence in women's lives and we have effective strategies. We want a greater investment, and we want these strategies to be scaled up."
"We don't need to invent the wheel again; what we need is a sharing of experiences worldwide. We need a world community that is committed to ending violence against women because we know how to do it."
Every 15 seconds a woman is battered in the United States, reports the U.N. Study on The World's Women, 2000. In India, most reports of "accidental burns" are incidents where women were deliberately doused with kerosene and set on fire, says the World Health Organization (WHO).
In Egypt, a study of female murder victims found that family members perpetrated 47 percent of the deaths as honour killings after the women were raped.
A UNIFEM project on the West Bank and Gaza tries to sensitise the legal systems to these so-called 'honour' killings.
The project researches "not the question of why they kill women but the question of what can we do in order to stop sexual abuse and basically choosing the issue of killing her as a way of solving the problem," says Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a professor of criminology at Hebrew University and director at the Women's Center for Legal Aid and Counselling.
UNIFEM now runs 18 projects in 22 countries, with funding from the governments of Japan, Italy, Denmark, Finland, Austria, the United Kingdom, Germany, and private foundations.
The Trust fund allocates one million dollars worth of grants each year; so far in 2002, funding requests total more than 15 million dollars.
According to UNIFEM, more than 45 countries now have specific laws governing violence against women. Eleven of the 12 South East Asian countries have national plans to end violence, and 22 countries have revised existing laws to uphold women's human rights.
Changes have also been made at the local level.
In Cuenca, Ecuador, an equal opportunities plan has strengthened legal and health services, trained law enforcement officers and helped institute municipal laws to protect women's human rights.
"The people in my community, with the support of the local government, have experienced the possibility to know their rights and many have eliminated the circle of violence from their lives," said Vice Mayor Doris Solis Corrion.
"We need to voice the violence, to hear the stories of all those affected by violence,'' said WHO Director General Gro Harlem Brundtland.
''Spreading the word, breaking down the taboos and exposing the violence,'' she added, ''is the first step towards effective action to reduce violence in our own societies". (END/2002)
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