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24 October 2017 - NPWJ News Digest on FGM & women's rights
Articles
My Interview With a Rohingya Refugee: What Do You Say to a Woman Whose Baby Was Thrown Into a Fire?
The New York Time , 24 Oct 2017
As I walked out of the refugee camp, my phone rang. The instant I said hello, my wife could hear it in my voice.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I just finished the worst interview of my life,” I said.
I was standing near the border of Myanmar and Bangladesh, where half a million Rohingya people, probably one of the most unwanted ethnic groups on the planet, fled after government massacres in Myanmar. I had just said goodbye to a young woman named Rajuma and watched her — a frail figure in a red veil — disappear into a crowd with one of the most horrible stories I had ever heard.
Media advisory: UN Women highlights the voices of women building sustainable peace and mobilizing for justice and equality
By UN Women , 23 Oct 2017
On 27 October 2017, the UN Security Council will convene its annual Open Debate on Security Council resoultion 1325 on Women, Peace and Security. UN Security Council resolution 1325 recognized for the first time in 2000 the role of gender equality and women’s leadership in international peace and security. Today the world is grappling with rising violent extremism that places the subordination of women at the centre of the ideology and war tactics. In 2015 alone, the world spent an estimated US $34 billion on UN peacekeeping and humanitarian aid for victims of conflict and refugees. In the same year, experts also estimate that the total global cost of violence and conflict around the world was US $13.6 trillion. This is a cost of more than US $1,800 per person on the planet.
Women Still Face Abuse After Indonesia’s Ban on Migrant Work in Gulf
By News Deeply Women & Girls, 23 Oct 2017
PUYUNG, INDONESIA – Hotimah has lost her teeth and her hair. Covered in purple blisters, she sits in her parent’s one-room home as flies perch on her motionless body. The 26-year-old is recovering from severe abuse, which she incurred as a migrant domestic worker in Saudi Arabia. She seems to have forgotten how to cough; her parents mime the action for her benefit. Twenty minutes after starting to talk about her previous life, she rolls on to the floor, clutching a pillow, and falls asleep.
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SENEGAL – A young couple, both school students, sent to prison for a month for abortion
By International Campaign for Women's Rights to safe abortion, 20 Oct 2017
In Senegal, abortion is illegal in all cases except to save the woman’s life; approval for inducing “therapeutic abortions” must come from three doctors, one of whom is independently assigned by the courts. Giving advice on where or how to access abortion is a criminal offence. There were an estimated 51,500 abortions in Senegal in 2012, and virtually all of them were clandestine and unsafe, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Seventy-three per cent of poor, rural women who underwent abortions had complications, compared to a third of non-poor, urban women. According to the Senegalese Association of Women Lawyers (AJS), 16% of women in prison in Senegal are there for infanticide – including some who got pregnant following rape. One example is Ina, who was working as a domestic at the age of 16 and was raped by a security guard in the neighbourhood where she worked. She delivered alone in her mother’s home and left the dead baby in an unfinished building nearby. The police knocked on her door a few days later. She spent five years in jail.
Risk of Sexual Violence Around Kenya’s Repeat Election
By Human Rights Watch, 19 Oct 2017
Human Rights Watch research confirms that, once again, there was sexual violence against women and girls during the most recent post-election violence in Kenya. I interviewed over 50 victims and witnesses in Mathare, Kisumu, Bungoma, and Dandora. They told me about rape, gang rape, attempted rape, unwanted sexual touching, and beatings on their genitals, including by members of security forces and militia groups and civilians.
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