They are punished for behaviour that’s said to bring shame on their families, and the price can be severe.
It could be theft, drugs, sex outside marriage or just marriage without the familys consent, but for some Yemeni women, such issues will remain with them for their whole life.
Al Jazeera’s Mohamed Vall travelled to southern Yemen to visit one woman whose determination to help those she sees as victims of injustice is making a real difference.
Super Ladies is a documentary film that follows three Ugandan female rally-drivers, competing to beat their male counterparts in The Pearl of Africa Rally – one of Africa’s toughest motor races. The three women, Rose, Susan and Leila, exemplify changing gender dynamics in Africa – and not just on the racecourse: businesswomen, pop-singers, teachers & mothers, they also have to battle for the respect of their male competitors.
The three “Super Ladies” face the double challenge of achieving sporting success while fighting prejudice and sexism in the male world of motor rallying. The independent film Super Ladies offers a fascinating insight into the heart of modern Uganda.
The efforts of the Feminine Solidarity Association are especially noteworthy in assisting single mothers in conservative Morocco. The organization was founded by Aicha Ech Chana.
The Moroccan NGO Feminine Solidarity Association offers legal support, housing and employment training to unwed mothers. Recent figures show that marriage to minor girls is on the rise – according to the Justice Ministry, family-court judges received 30,312 requests for marriages to minors in 2006.
In 2007 the number of applications went up to 39,000, of which 68 percent were approved. One in 10 marriages in 2007 involved underage girls. The numbers for 2008 have not yet been published.
At Feminine Solidarity in Casablanca, 65 percent of the incoming women are pregnant girls who were abandoned when they told their partner about their pregnancy. Other than that, the NGO receives victims of rape, group rape and incest. The women are lodged at the NGO from their seventh month of pregnancy. They are later given professional training to earn a living.
“Despite the reform of the family code, being a single mother remains a very big taboo in Morocco,” Soumia Idman notes. “In the Moroccan mind, all relationships outside of marriage are considered acts of prostitution, so the girls we receive are automatically considered to be prostitutes. They are still not protected enough by the law, cannot go back to their families, and are condemned by society.”
In 2005, Aicha Ech-Channa, the founder, was awarded the “Elisabeth Norgall 2005″ prize from the International Women’s Club of Frankfurt.
After years of war and economic decline, the picture of education is bleak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC): 4.6 million children are out of school, of which 2.5 million are girls. The country is one of the 25 countries where UNICEF has intensified efforts to accelerate girls’ education.
One of the main reasons why children, especially girls, do not go to or stay at school, is that the family has to pay for educational supplies such as pens, slates, notebooks, crayons, etc. Since 2005, UNICEF has taken on a huge challenge: to provide 2.5 million children – 50% of them girls – and 55,000 teachers with educational supplies. This involves the procurement, production and distribution of 36,000 educational kits. Each student kit contains crayons, exercise books, pens, a ruler, a pencil sharpener and an eraser, as well as a bag to carry the items. Teachers’ kits contain exercise books, pens, white and coloured chalk and a bag.
Primary school education in the Democratic Republic of Congo is neither compulsory, free nor universal, and many children are not able to go to school because parents were unable to pay the enrollment fees. Only half of all children in the DR Congo ever attend school. Half of these won’t finish the fifth grade.
The film shows the hidden reality of rural India. A world of child marriage, child labour and domestic abuse. It also shows how some women use video cameras to challenge traditional ways of life.
India introduced laws against child marriage in 1929 and set the legal age for marriage at 12 years. The legal age for marriage was increased to 18 years in 1978.
While the practice of child marriage has decreased slowly, its prevalence remains unacceptably high, and rural, poor, less educated girls and those from central or eastern regions of the country were most vulnerable to the practice, the researchers wrote.
Such findings indicate that child marriage affects not only adolescents aged 16 to 17 years, but also large numbers of pubescent girls aged 14 to 15 years, and show that existing policies and economic development gains have failed to help rural and poor populations, the researchers wrote.
They attributed the high numbers of sterilization in young women married as children to them having their desired number of children at an earlier age.
But it was also indicative of inadequate fertility control, which was evident from the high numbers of unwanted pregnancies among these women.
They also warned that sterilization might reduce condom use in such couples, which would heighten the risk of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections.
Child-marriage prevention programmes should be broadened to include interventions for women married as children and men who might pursue children for marriage, the researchers added.
UNICEF defines child marriage as marriage before 18 years of age and such a practice has been increasingly viewed as a violation of human rights.
Marriage at a very young age carries grave health consequences for both the girl and her children and it is well documented that adolescent mothers are more likely to experience complications such as obstetric fistula.
Researchers analyzed data from a national family health survey that was conducted from 2005 to 2006 in India. The survey involved 22,807 Indian women who were aged between 20 and 24 at the time of the survey.
Of these, 22.6 percent were married before they were 16, 44.5 percent were married when they were between 16 and 17, and 2.6 percent were married before they turned 13.
“Women who were married as children remained significantly more likely to have had three or more childbirths, a repeat childbirth in less than 24 months, multiple unwanted pregnancies, pregnancy termination, and sterilization,” wrote the researchers, led by Anita Raj at the Boston University School of Public Health.
Across much of the Arab world, women married to foreigners are typically barred from passing their nationality to their children.
In Lebanon, however, one woman, Samira Soueidan, has taken her fight to court and won. But her landmark case is now being challenged because it sets a precedent which could alter the make-up of the Lebanese population.
Female infanticide in India has led to an alarming gender gap in the population with experts estimating 50 million more males than females. 101 East investigates why India cannot or will not protect its baby girls.
Generally, the normal sex ratio at birth (SRB) is between 103 and 105 males per 100 females, and in rare cases 106 or a bit more than that.
Countries that are known to have or have had higher sex ratio at birth numbers include South Korea, which peaked at 115 in 1994, Singapore where the SRB registered 109 in 1984 and China, which has seen the numbers increase over the past two decades.
Published reports in China show the gender ratio for newborns in 2005 was 118 boys for every 100 girls, and in some southern regions like Guangdong and Hainan, the number has reached 130 boys for every 100 girls.
The 2000 Chinese census put the average sex ratio at 117, with Tibet having the lowest number at 103 and Hainan registering the highest at 136. The problem is not just a rural issue, with the newborn gender imbalance also widening in cities. In the first 11 months of 2006, there were 109 boys born in Beijing for every 100 girls.
Many fear poor security, rampant fraud and not enough female election staff will keep many women away from the polling stations in next week’s presidential election in Afghanistan.
While the female vote has emerged as a potentially powerful bloc in some areas, it is unlikely the majority of women will exercise their right to vote in the violent south and east, where weak governance has allowed the Taliban to extend there influence.
Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr reports from Helmand province.
On Tuesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country with vast natural resources that for years has been plagued by civil war and sexual violence.
Clinton visited a clinic and a large refugee camp in the eastern town of Goma, where she pledged $17 million to deal with sexual abuse.
Severinne Autesserre, an assistant professor of political science at Barnard College, joins Martin Savidge to discuss the conflict in Congo and how the countrys government and people will respond to Clintons message.
The Enough Project is helping to build a permanent constituency to prevent genocide and crimes against humanity. Too often, the United States and the larger international community have taken a wait-and-see approach to crimes against humanity. The Enough Project works on humanitarian crises world wide including the on-going crisis in the DR Congo.
Guatemala’s murder rate is one of the highest in Latin America. Official figures show that an average of 17 people are killed there every day. The number of women murdered is also rising rapidly. Authorities blame the killings on street gangs.
Rights groups say the government is not doing enough to protect women. Culturally, women are seen as inferior to men, so there are fewer consequences for crimes against them. In the past seven years, there have also been over 140,000 reported cases of domestic violence, 6,025 reported cases of rape and 3,281 women have been murdered, according to official statistics in Guatemala. More from IPS News:
“Unfortunately, in Guatemala, killing a woman is like killing a fly; no importance is assigned to it,” complained local activist Hilda Morales, who argued that “the perpetrators are encouraged to continue beating, abusing and killing because they know that nothing will happen, that they won’t be punished.”
A report by the Coordinadora 25 de Noviembre, an umbrella group made up of nearly 30 local women’s organisations, said that in the last seven years, only two percent of crimes against women have been solved.
In 2006, judges handed down a total of 12 sentences, one for 60 years and the rest for 50 years. And of the few cases that are actually brought to justice, some take up to three years to make it to court.
Díaz, who went to live with her parents after her husband beat her, filed a complaint without much hope, “because our laws are not enforced.”
Although this impoverished Central American country has laws aimed at protecting women from violence and has signed international conventions on the issue, there is a “continuing lack of will to recognise and respect human rights, which translates into silence in the face of a scourge that should be classified as a crime against humanity,” says the study by the Coordinadora 25 de Noviembre.
Morales, an activist with the Network of Non-Violence Against Women, which forms part of the umbrella group, complained that in Guatemala, “domestic violence and sexual harassment, the forerunners of the current wave of murders of women, are not even classified as crimes.”
She pointed out that until last year, a law was on the books that allowed a rapist to escape charges if he married his victim, even if she was only 12 years old.
The lawyer also noted that not until the late 1990s were discriminatory laws, like one that allowed husbands to keep their wives from working outside the home, amended.
Giovana Lemus, director of the Guatemalan Women’s Group (GGM), said violence against women “is deep-rooted” in the country, based on historically unequal power relations reflected in the oppression, discrimination and subordination of women.
“The education that we receive is at fault. From a young age, women are raised to see violence as a normal part of marriage,” said Díaz, who got married at the age of 21, and believes dependence on men forces many battered women to keep silent.
For Morales, a recipient of Amnesty International’s Ambassador of Conscience award in 2004, “a lack of confidence in the system, compounded by the economic, social and emotional dependence in which these women live and are raised, makes it very difficult for the majority of them to report the violence.”
Friendship Bridge is a non-profit, non-governmental organization that provides microcredit and educational programs so that Guatemalan women and their families can create their own solutions to poverty.