In 2014, the so-called Islamic State abducted thousands of women and children when they invaded large parts of Iraq and tortured, enslaved, and killed many people affiliated with the Yazidi religious group. In response, in November 2015, the Jiyan Foundation for Human Rights, an Iraq-based organization that helps victims of human rights violations, opened a trauma clinic for women in the Kurdish city of Chamchamal.
Women around the world continue to struggle not only with draconian laws that deny them ownership of their own bodies, but also the threat of hard-won rights being rolled back. Here, we take a look at some of the places around the world that are playing the long game for abortion reform.
In September 2016, when I arrived at a gloomy, two-star Econo Lodge hotel in Fort Lee, New Jersey, Daey*—which means “mother” in Kurdish—was sleeping.
Almost every hour, the men run to the Serbia-Hungarian border crossing, shouting together, “Open the gate! Open the gate!” But the Roszke Horgos border remains guarded by Hungarian police after the government of Hungarian President Viktor Orbán ordered it shut on Tuesday.
With the story of more than 200 schoolgirls kidnapped by an extremist group in Nigeria hot in the news, we spoke to the BBC about why coverage of such violence against women and girls in conflict is so sporadic—and what can be done to make a lasting difference once and for all in the media and in the lives of those affected around the world.
A woman sits, microphone in hand, behind a billowing, black curtain—further obscured by a black veil that hides her face, her body, and even her hands—as she finds the courage to recount her rape by government soldiers in Minova, Democratic Republic of Congo.
There were so very many stories. Stories of women physically torn apart, leaving stains of urine on chairs from fistula they suffered from violent rape. Stories about sexual enslavement that left teenage girls hysterically crying and unable to finish speaking. Stories of erasure—of women who had been left by their husbands and shunned by their own children because men had raped them.
I spent much of June in Turkey, ostensibly. But in the south, at the Syrian border, where Arabic is the language of choice, women wear traditional Syrian hijabs, and families live in the strange half-life of an open-ended nightmare of exile, I was, in some ways, in Syria.