The systematic use of sexual violence along with torture, cruel and degrading treatment – such as the common use of flogging - continue to be one of the major security threats and tools of repression targeting women and communities all over Sudan. Amel Gorani reports on those who are daring to spe
A key reason for the seeming ubiquity of sexual violence in war is not its inevitability, but the impunity associated with it, says Maria Neophytou
How far do our post-conflict reconstruction efforts go when it comes to addressing the trauma and loss that women and girls experience during conflict? Jessica Horn reports ahead of the Nobel Women’s Initiative conference on ending sexual violence in conflict
Nairobi Women's Hospital treated more than 300 women who had been gang raped in the aftermath of the contested Presidential election. Speaking from personal experience, Wangu Kanja reports on the challenges these women now face
It would not be possible to rape women in front of their communities and families, on such a large scale in much of the world’s conflicts, if the availability of small arms and light weapons was controlled, says Sarah Masters
Security is impossible without people’s freedom to organize and defend their rights, a cornerstone of the exercise of citizenship. History gives us ample evidence of this, say Lydia Alpizar and Masum Momaya
From May 23-25, women activists and scholars from around the world will gather in Quebec at the invitation of the Nobel Women’s Initiative to discuss 'Women Forging a New Security: Ending Sexual Violence in Conflict'. Jenny Morgan and Jessica Horn will be reporting for openDemocracy 50.50
The gang-rape of Mukhtaran Mai launched a nine-year court battle that concluded with a verdict by the Supreme Court of Pakistan acquitting all but one of the accused. Her case illustrates how both the formal and informal systems of justice share the same hostility to women who defy social norms an
Many commentators have dismissed the French ban on wearing the niqab as a xenophobic reaction, writes Marie Gilbert. Hinging on French understandings about state, religion and women, the debate is in fact more sophisticated. It deserves to be heard rather than caricatured
Orthodox Jewish feminists may seem to outsiders to be a contradiction in terms. But as Cassandra Balchin discovers while talking with Israeli Orthodox Jewish feminist, Dr. Debbie Weissman, Jewish politics in Israel is anything but straightforward.
"The essential problem in relation to our predicament as women, but also with our world, is the architecture of human relations - a system of social organization that is based on hierarchy. This architecture is all pervasive from the family to the state and it holds across the world. We decided th
