Last November, Libya’s interior minister Emad al-Trabelsi announced a series of measures posed as a return to “society’s traditions,” but for many onlookers inside and beyond the country, they signaled a crackdown on individual freedoms — particularly for women.

A network of 47 midwives across Mexico is stepping in to provide essential prenatal care to pregnant migrants along their journey north.

Two high-profile murders were among at least 21 femicides across Kenya in January, but amid the nation’s shock and outrage, media, members of the public, and even parliamentarians (including women) excused the murders by maligning the women as “slay queens” putting themselves in harm’s way for social media clout.

India's judiciary may finally be experiencing a long-overdue reckoning on the hostile environment for women civil servants, one marked by systemic harassment, intimidation, institutional abandonment, and arbitrary dismissal.

While women’s inheritance and property ownership are protected by the Lebanese Constitution, inheritance laws differ based on religion and sect, leaving disputes to religious courts and personal interpretations — and biases — of those laws

Since the collapse of the Lebanese Pound in 2019, social workers in Beirut say that migrants and Lebanese alike have turned to the sex trade to cope with the increased costs of living.

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.

Between 1996 and 2000, former President Alberto Fujimori oversaw a family planning program under which more than 280,000 women and men were sterilized in Peru — mainly in poor, rural areas. Decades later, victims are still awaiting justice.

Around 70 percent of those killed in Gaza the last few months have been women and children, with two mothers killed every hour, and one child estimated to be killed every 10 minutes, according to UN sources.

There is plenty of warranted criticism of the New York Times investigation into sexual violence on October 7, but for all the exposé’s ethical shortcomings, its greatest failure was its lack of consideration for the safety, trauma, and dignified treatment of the victims.

In the last decade, an estimated 15,000 women across the globe have been accused of abducting their own children. They are all foreigners who tried to relocate with their children — oftentimes back to their home countries — but the other parent disagreed. Not all countries criminalize abduction, but the repercussions for the child’s custody are far-reaching.

The global attention of the #MeToo movement prompted the aid sector to acknowledge its own #AidToo crisis, but, half a decade later, the spotlight has dimmed, and sadly, the aid sector has seen minimal substantive changes.

It may surprise many that women like Farida — who once dreamed of being a nurse — would join a violent extremist group, but their reasons are varied and complex. And it takes a holistic state response not only to stop them from joining but also to pull them out.

After nearly two years since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the unchecked exploitation of Ukrainian women abroad — who are still displaced in different European countries, as well as internally, in Ukraine — is poised to create a crisis of sexual abuse and sex trafficking.

Villagers often work in the mines, one of the only employers in Budhpura, and nearly all of them are eventually diagnosed with silicosis, a fatal and incurable lung disease. With their husbands gone and no alternative income sources to support themselves and their children, widows join the same profession that killed their husbands.

In most present-day Igbo communities, caste ranking is a core concern for both families and couples.

A Colombian peace court is opening a new legal case that could bring justice for the first time to thousands of victims of gender-based crimes committed by the FARC and the military during decades of bitter conflict.

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.

Not only does Turkey’s recent offensive endanger civilians and critical infrastructure and facilities, but it also threatens the achievements—and very survival—of the women’s revolution that has been taking place there for over a decade.

The Taliban's decrees over the past two years have resulted in the severe marginalization of women and girls in all aspects of Afghan society, which they exploit to gain attention on the global stage.

At long last, same-sex marriage could soon be recognized under Indian law. As of April 18 of this year, a total of 18 petitions have now been introduced to the high court to legalize same-sex marriage.

In October, the United Nations Committee Against Torture issued a final decision in Elizabeth Coppin v. Ireland that once again dashed hopes of justice for survivors of one of Ireland’s worst regimes of torture and abuse.

While abuse and discrimination against women and persons with disabilities is punishable by law in Malawi, in a patriarchal culture with a pronounced belief in the existence of witchcraft, men are at liberty to abandon their families on the basis of disability alone.

A look back on 10 years of a revolution centered on the liberation of women.

While India is one of the few countries yet to criminalize marital rape, the high court recently ruled that victims of marital rape are entitled to a safe and legal abortion, establishing in Indian law that non-consensual sex can and does exist among married partners.

As men migrate north to the United States in search of better lives for their families, the women left behind are taking on many new community responsibilities once occupied by their husbands.

Women Under Siege spoke with American anti-war activist Jody Williams, Yemeni human rights activist Tawakkol Karman, and Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee about their trip with Nobel Women's Initiative to Ukraine, the stories they heard there, and how Ukrainian women are fighting for peace in their country.

On August 15, as India was celebrating the 75th anniversary of its independence, 11 men convicted of gang-raping a Muslim woman in 2002 were granted premature release from their life sentences.

In the Philippines, there aren't enough resources to go around to support a coordinated strategy against child sex trafficking in online spaces.

After a scathing experience in one of India's top media houses, Meena Kotwal, a Dalit journalist, founded The Mooknayak, an independent online media outlet that reports on caste oppression and systemic violence against marginalized communities across India.

Caught in the throes of overlapping social and economic crises, women in Venezuela there have almost no resources to protect themselves or their children from harm. Violence against women and girls — including incest — remains prevalent, and invisible, throughout the country.

In her upcoming memoir “This Arab Life: A Generation’s Journey into Silence,” Amal Ghandour weaves personal history to offer a thoughtful meditation on the veil's place within a modern Middle East.

Survivors of brutal violence by Islamic State militants played a central role in advocating for reparations from the Iraqi government that failed to protect them, and though they question its ability to implement a reparations program, they have little choice but to hope.

It has been five years since the Marawi Siege ended, and while the government has steadily completed infrastructure projects at the former heart of the firefights, the Maranao people have not been able to return to their ancestral lands. Many suspect that the government’s plans to commercialize the city are what's really preventing the IDPs from returning.

Anti-Muslim violence and hate speech have become normalized under the ruling Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), but activists say that the attacks against India’s Muslims have ratcheted up over the last year — particularly, against Muslim women.

The legal challenge against Turkey’s largest women’s rights group is suspected of having political motivations, appealing to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s conservative voter base while distracting from the country’s economic challenges.

Using funds from her own pocket, one retired schoolteacher has been providing free education for children in one Indian slum for the last 13 years.

On March 25, the Islamic Republic of Iran began its four-year term as a new member of the United Nations’ Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) — “the principal global intergovernmental body dedicated to promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment” — after being elected by secret ballot last year.

The competition for the presidency, between the only son of a “strongman” and a widow, resonates with the enduring friction between a woman-centered native culture and the infrastructure of patriarchal political dynasties bred by colonialism in the Philippines.

The WHO's new guidelines can serve as an authoritative confirmation for what American reproductive rights activists have always known: abortion is essential healthcare.

Last September, as India braced itself for another deadly Covid-19 wave amid the upcoming festival season, “La Beauté & Style salon” — the country’s first-ever salon run and managed by trans men — quietly opened its doors in the heart of a bustling market in Ghaziabad, in the capital of New Delhi.

The events following the February 24 Russian invasion of Ukraine brought despair for thousands of elderly and disabled civilians who were unable to flee. Russia has been claiming strikes on cities all around the country, and the fighting has left countless civilians injured, helpless, and desperate in a war zone.

In a culture that can see girls as a burden, many women opt to abort their female fetuses — even though it's illegal.

Child rape is increasing in Nepal, but many girls are dissuaded from reporting it.

International Women’s Day marches mark how feminist movements have exploded across Mexico, as elsewhere in Latin America — a region with some of the highest rates of sexualized violence in the world.

In Lebanon, where childbirth care is highly medicalized and dominated by obstetricians in private hospitals, women are often persuaded to have cesarean sections, the revenue for which procedure is key for hospitals struggling to survive amid economic collapse.

In a landmark case for justice in Guatemala, five former paramilitary soldiers were convicted by a special tribunal of crimes against humanity for sexualized violence committed against five indigenous Maya Achí women during the country’s 36-year internal armed conflict.

About 400 women on average are prosecuted every year in the Andean country, blocking eligible women from accessing safe, timely, and free abortions. Underage girls are not exempt from such criminal prosecution and face sweeping sanctions, from restricted movement to mandatory community service, if convicted.

Sanitation work in India still involves illegal manual labor, with as many as 1.3 million Indians from certain caste groups employed as 'manual scavengers,' who load waste onto baskets or metal troughs to carry off for disposal. Not only is the work detrimental to their long-term health, but it’s also a cause for inhumane discrimination, which not only affects how they’re treated out in society but also their pursuit of alternative livelihoods.

Camps for internally displaced persons in conflict-rift states in Nigeria have been known to provide fertile ground for trafficking.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's "heavy-handed and punitive" — and exceedingly militarized — pandemic strategy largely accounts for why the Philippines continues to suffer nearly two years on.

Only one gynecologist serves the 8,000 to 13,000 people of reproductive age who need those services in the municipality of Shuto Orizari in North Macedonia’s capital city, the only municipality with a Roma majority in the country. And as of last month, he’s no longer on duty.

With an ongoing civil war that’s worsening a dire humanitarian crisis, women in Yemen are challenging societal rules in order to provide for their families.