violence against women

urmese women’s rights activists and government officials aim to finish drafting a bill by the end of the year to prevent violence against women, activists say.

“Once enacted, it would be the first law to ensure the protection of women from all forms of violence, including physical, mental, sexual and verbal violence,” May Sabe Phyu, a peace activist and coordinator of the Gender Equality Network (GEN), a large network of civil society organizations, told The Irrawaddy on Friday.

Iraq has been pitched into a new civil war. After a lightning-quick advance, an extremist Sunni group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) now controls much of northern and western Iraq.

On June 23, a middle-aged male Japanese politician, dressed in the traditional dark suit and '80s-retro haircut, walked in front of a waiting line of news cameras, to where a younger female politician waited. As the cameras flashed, he apologized to the woman, and bowed deeply; she looked on gravely.

A prominent Libyan human rights lawyer and activist has been assassinated in her home in Benghazi.

Armed men fought their way into the house of Salwa Bughaighis before shooting her.

Ms Bughaighis was an outspoken critic of many of the armed groups, which still control much of Libya.

Her husband Issam has disappeared, and relatives believe he has been kidnapped.

While we were meeting with women journalists in Afghanistan this past May, another group of Afghan women journalists were in Washington, D.C., meeting with congressional staff members. The overlap was coincidental, but both groups of Afghan women recounted similar stories of their growing role in Afghan media and, more importantly, the fight for Afghanistan’s democracy.

Political power has not insulated women from facing gender-based violence. A recent report by the United Nations (UN) has found that verbal-sexual abuse and character assassination of women are rampant in South Asia politics. Worse, Karnataka is one of the three states in India affected by such behaviour.