Today sees the launch of a new Global Campaign to Stop Stoning. Rochelle Terman examines the history of this gendered practice of violence against women. With stoning, as with all forms of culturally-justified violence against women, it is very difficult to see where culture ends and politics begin.

Human rights instruments have enabled women’s movements to access a normative and analytic framework for fighting discrimination, and rights discourses have been deployed to legitimise women’s demands for social and economic rights, political representation and well-being. Maxine Molyneux spoke to Deniz Kandiyoti about the new trends and threats to women’s rights and UN frameworks.

There is uproar in India at the brutal gang rape of a 23 year old student on her way home from the cinema. Can we harness the international attention to this case to demand that the world's leaders commit themselves to a policy of zero tolerance of violence against women in the post-Millennium Development Goals agenda?

Lack of funding for women’s rights is a form of gender-based violence which is so pervasive that it goes largely unnoticed. Alice Welbourn says it is critical for us to hold governments and the UN to account for gender equitable budgeting.

Leading Turkish women’s rights activist and lawyer Canan Arin was unlawfully detained on 23 June 2012 for speaking out against child marriages. While her trial continues, she is living under permanent threat, but refuses to be silent. Bingul Durbas spoke to her.

A poem by Marwa Sharafeldin. Part of a series of poems by African feminist writers for 16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence.

A poem by Virginia Phiri. Part of a series of poems by African feminist writers for 16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence.

Women in Kenya's second largest slum, Korogocho, face forced evictions, domestic violence and rape as a weapon of gang war on a daily basis. Naomi Vulenywa reflects upon her experience of living in the slum as a women human rights defender.

No woman, no matter what her immigration status, should have to choose between violence in her country and violence in Britain, says Anna Musgrave