While Colombian media covers stories of sexualized violence in almost exploitative detail, it fails to highlight the victims’ ethnicity and race, thereby following a long tradition of obscuring who in the country is disproportionately victimized, as well as hiding the underlying structural causes that leave them most vulnerable.
While Greece has slowly begun to reopen, overcrowded refugee camps on the Greek island of Lesbos are still under lockdown. And without government intervention, experts and activists say that residents there are just sitting ducks waiting for an outbreak of the coronavirus to sweep through the camps like wildfire.
Years after Marawi was liberated from jihadists loyal to the Islamic State, thousands of residents have not been allowed to return to their own land. Now, they face the government’s backhoes contracted to flatten the remnants of their ancestral property to commercialize the city and make it a tourist destination.
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.
Cases under India’s Protection of Children from Sexual Offenses Act are meant to be fast-tracked, but the reality of the judicial system's backlog often means that those cases can drag on for years. One of Delhi's most infamous and horrific rape cases is among them. Amid the long slog of court appearances, postponements — and now, the pandemic — a child victim grows up.
Women survivors of sexual torture under Augusto Pinochet's 17-year dictatorship in Chile never felt that the horrors suffered during that time have ever been adequately confronted, allowing his legacy to remain intact. Then his relative was appointed to a political role protecting women's rights.
On July 6, the federal Student and Exchange Visitor Program announced that international students had to enroll in in-person classes if they wanted to legally remain in the U.S.
Since the University of Zimbabwe was founded in 1952, no woman had ever been elected to the position of student representative council president. That changed in 2019, when 22-year-old Abiona Mataranyika was elected to the position.
When an Instagram private group of twenty schoolboys from Delhi's elite schools fantasizing and degrading their female classmates went viral, it was supposed to offer a cultural reckoning for India's teens about misogyny and gendered violence. Then, it took a dark turn.
Women Under Siege speaks with Masrat Zahra, a Kashmiri photojournalist and recent awardee of IWMF's Anja Niedringhaus Courage in Photojournalism Award, over the phone about her terrorism charge and the work she sees for herself ahead.
Rallies across Nigeria's northern states push for protections for victims of sexual and gender-based violence, led by young women who are challenging the roles they occupy in a deeply conservative society.
During the pandemic, governments have been curtailing rights—but activists are fighting back.
A spoken-word performance takes aim at the pervasiveness of gender-based violence in South Africa, inspiring community activism from the grassroots and demanding that the government confront its failure to protect women.
Medical nonprofit Medecins Sans Frontieres announced it is suspending its maternity ward operations in a Kabul, Afghanistan, hospital in the wake of the systematic killing of 16 women in the ward. All the women were mothers or soon to be.
Since India went under a strict countrywide lockdown, the mostly women who make their living selling flowers, fruits, and fish every day on thoroughfares and platforms don’t know how they’ll feed their families.
Now in its third year, the Aurat March is raising the call of Pakistan's women to abolish systems built on hegemony, patriarchy, and neo-colonialism.
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.
In five years of war in Yemen, more than 100,000 people have been killed and the country’s medical system has been shredded. Now the United Nations Population Fund is warning that reproductive health care for women and girls in Yemen is about to collapse entirely.
A presidential decree announced in Afghanistan at the end of March allowed for the release at least 10,000 prisoners over the age of 55 but there are still more than 100 women in a Kabul prison, now at great risk of becoming infected with coronavirus.
Despite their disproportionate vulnerability, the Indian government has largely ignored commercially sexually exploited people in its response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Last August, India's Hindu nationalist government scrapped Articles 370 and 35A of the Indian constitution, stripping the state of Jammu & Kashmir of its special constitutional status. What followed is only the latest chapter in a documented history of sexualized violence by security forces as a means to quell dissent in Muslim-majority Kashmir.
"We're one of the most vulnerable populations, and it's the government that makes us vulnerable. During this pandemic especially, we need maximum protection."
In early 2018, the story of a baby who was raped by a relative sent shockwaves around the world. Two years later, the world has moved on, but she is no closer to receiving justice.
Countries like New Zealand, Germany, and Finland have had striking success in fighting the coronavirus. What do they have in common? For one, they all have women leaders.
Pandemic-related lockdowns disproportionally burden women. By asking the right questions, policymakers can create policies that alleviate that burden.