War has been raging for 11 months in Sudan. Amid the horrific wave of violence that has led many people to flee West Darfur, women and girls have described being raped, beaten, detained, and forced to witness the killings of loved ones by groups of armed men.
In most present-day Igbo communities, caste ranking is a core concern for both families and couples.
The risk of intimate partner violence is consistently higher among women living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa than among those living without it — even for pregnant women, who are often first informed of their status during prenatal screenings.
Camps for internally displaced persons in conflict-rift states in Nigeria have been known to provide fertile ground for trafficking.
Uganda's new Sexual Offenses Bill, which passed in parliament in early May, is meant to strengthen existing protections against sexualized violence, but feminists and human rights advocates have criticized the new legislation as a veiled attack against LGBTQ+ Ugandans and those in the sex industry.
In a country with one of the highest HIV prevalence rates in the world, a sex worker-led health care model succeeds in serving its own community.
A group of researchers have turned to traditional coffee ceremonies to help stem intimate partner violence (IPV) in Ethiopia and educate about HIV in the country’s more rural areas.
The Al Hassan case has the potential to shine light on the unique harm perpetrators commit against individuals based on their gender, which enforces patriarchal social norms and increases the potency of their crimes. It could also chart a path forward for international criminal law to define gender.
Some of the workers at Zimbabwe’s Hwange Colliery Company haven't been paid wages for years. Fearing reprisal if they tried to fight for them, their wives, mothers, and sisters have adopted their grievances, protesting for the wages and laying sporadic sieges at the mine’s gates.
Gender inequality and stringent cultural beliefs left women most vulnerable to the HIV epidemic. With the coronavirus, Malawi mustn't repeat the same mistakes.
As climate change and the pandemic inflate food sales, families in Kenya's slums, already sunken into poverty, are resorting to marrying off their young daughters.
Continuous attacks by machete-wielding gangs against artisanal miners in Zimbabwe disproportionately affect women miners, highlighting longstanding impediments for women to access the sector and threatening the government's target for an annual mining revenue of $12 billion by 2023.
Zimbabwe's economic crisis has forced women working in informal setups to the fringes, where they're often rendered vulnerable to physical and sexualized violence.
This is the first time a mastermind of mass rape has been held legally responsible in DRC. But the story doesn’t end here. There are still a few major issues to watch.
Today a historic conviction came down in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was the first time an official or commander has been convicted of masterminding rape in the country.
U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley is going to Africa. South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Ethiopia, specifically. She says in an October 22 CNN op-ed that President Trump is sending her “to get a first-hand picture of what can be done.”
In the violence that rocked Kenya following the disputed elections of 2007, the media reported hundreds of cases of sexualized violence. Jane’s was one of them. Today, Jane grapples with HIV, trauma, and empty promises of reparation. Her husband was killed in the violence, but his body has never been found.
Grace sits staring vacantly ahead, her hands tightly clasped in her lap. She is 16 years old but has a tiny frame that makes her look no older than 13. Underneath her checkered school dress, a small bump sticks out. In four months’ time, she is due to give birth to her stepfather’s child.
After her husband died, Margaret, 55, saw no alternative but to sell her body in order to feed her four children. She would walk down to Lake Victoria every day to buy fish to sell in the market. But first she had to have sex with a fisherman. For at least the past two decades, fishermen at Lake Victoria have demanded sex before selling their catch to female fish traders.
Once known as a refugee-friendly nation, Kenya is becoming more resistant to taking in people who have been forced to flee their homes. That means added challenges for the nonprofit Heshima and the refugee girls it supports, says executive director Alisa Roadcup.
Throughout the conflict in DRC, children have been abducted and made to serve as soldiers. While most are male, it is estimated over a third are female, used mainly as domestic and sexual servants, but sometimes as fighters. Now an NGO has released a report showing that many of the girls weren’t enlisted by force.
Wars fought because of ethnic hatred often seem to be more brutal than others. This is just a personal observation, having studied many. Just look at Rwanda, whose 1994 war saw between 250,000 and half a million women raped, often with objects and often publicly, in order to spread maximum humiliation and terror.
Mary Elias, of Laje village in Malawi’s southern Zomba district, speaks in metaphors. “We are carrying both water cans,” she says of the situation for single mothers in drought-ridden Malawi—meaning that women with children but without partners are solely responsible for feeding, clothing, and educating their progeny. Already a Sisyphean task in a country the United Nations Development Program regularly ranks in the top 20 poorest on earth, this has become nearly impossible in the past few years.
Yagna Ibrahim is a woman who has a presence that is difficult to ignore. She strides into the room with grace and confidence, pulls out a chair, and sits down next to her friend and fellow women’s rights activist, Rabia Musa.
Six years after one of the worst single incidents of mass rape ever recorded in the 21st century, no perpetrator of the Walikale mass rapes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has ever been brought to trial in either a domestic or international forum. The attacks were condemned at the time by the United Nations Security Council, which urged swift prosecution. The hundreds of victims have never received any acknowledgment or reparation from the Congolese state.