by Kylie Thomas

In January of this year Nomawethu Ngalimani, a woman I would call my friend if that were not to disavow all that made real friendship possible between us, was stabbed to death in her home in Khayelitsha, a township outside of the city of Cape Town in South Africa.

I met Nomawethu in 2002 while I was working on a book project that told the stories of the lives of 13 HIV positive South African women. Over the course of several months Nomawethu was one of the participants in an art and narrative therapy workshop process through which she shared the narrative of her life. She also created a life-size self-portrait that conveys how the context of extreme violence in which she lived has made its marks on her body.

She had always been a loud-mouth, a fighter, confident and self-assured. As a teenager she had been attacked by a group of men. She had been stabbed but she refused to give them the money she was carrying. She had been carrying a knife of her own and she wounded one of the men in his chest and they had run away.

The last time I saw her, in December 2006, she had had an operation to remove the cancerous growth in her eye and it had been successful. She seemed different - she looked happy, more at ease in herself. She was wearing a green dress.

by Cath Elliott

There have been a number of articles in the UK press over recent weeks highlighting the increasing prevalence of sex selective abortions. Even though abortion on the grounds of gender is not permitted under UK law, there is currently nothing to stop women from travelling overseas to deal with unwanted female foetuses.

Female foeticide is illegal in India, but it still appears to be easily accessible, as this report from the BBC illustrates:

"Sex selective abortion - female foeticide, as it is known - has been illegal in India since the early 1980s. Having a scan to find out the sex is also against the law.

But the law has simply forced the practice underground and UN figures state that 750,000 girls are aborted every year in India."

I can understand why, in certain cultures, women are driven to female foeticide. In patriarchal traditional societies it's easy to see how girl children come to be considered a burden: when marriage still means a dowrie to be paid; when the family business is still the son's inheritance, and when the care and financial security of the elderly is the responsibility of sons and not daughters, what possible motivation can there be for families to cherish their baby girls?

by Marufa Akter

Ms. Marufa Akter is Field Researcher for the Pathways of Women's Empowerment Development Studies Programme at BRAC University Bangladesh.

Bangladesh is one of the signatories of the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women signed in 1993. Yet today it is known that about 47% of women in Bangladesh are being subjected to different kinds of violence by men and male relations. Bangladesh is a country in which the structure of the society strongly upholds patriarchal values, norms and traditions. Women here have been subjected to exploitation and negligence for centuries. The status of women has been ranked the lowest in the world on the basis of twenty indicators related to health, marriage, children, education, employment and social equality.¹ Women in Bangladesh are victims of inequality, abuse, oppression and exploitation, social customs and traditions, illiteracy and face a lack of employment opportunities which have hampered the total integration of women in the mainstream development activities in Bangladesh.

All these aspects have made women more vulnerable and maintained the unequal status between men and women. The value of women's unpaid work in Bangladesh needs to be critically addressed.

by Huda Jawad

Unlike other parts of the Middle East, Iraq was a country with significant advances in the spheres of health, education and academia, business, the arts and an expanding middle class: that is, up until the imposition of UN sanctions. Women's status and accomplishments in every sphere of life was something that was noted as a beacon for all the Middle East and the West to aspire to. Not only did they excel at the traditional roles of employment such as nursing, teaching and administration, but were found in significant numbers in non-traditional roles such as engineering, pharmaceuticals, medicine, science, the telecommunications industry, politics, the military - and they were entrepreneurs in their own right.

Huda Jawad is Program Director of Forward Thinking

As war gripped the country and the vacuum of power created opportunities for all kinds of desperate and fundamentalist doctrines, the horrors being inflicted on women and girls became increasingly apparent. But the violence and oppression of women in Iraq is not a new phenomenon. Whether administered by the state or ‘the clan' directly against women, or indirectly through violence committed against their husbands and sons, the often cited progress of women in Iraq was made despite such violence, not because of its absence.

Violence and fear aimed specifically against women was a form of torture that was professionalised and refined by the regime of Saddam and some Western countries are implicated in the supply of torture ‘products' and training to the regime. It is notable that the silence of Saddam's former allies on such abuses did not break until late 2002 when the drums of war were being heard.

by Joanne Miller

WAITS' mission is to enable women disadvantaged by low self-esteem, status, poverty and domestic abuse to take a positive step forward in their lives and become role models in their communities.

Although violence against women and children is widespread, it is especially hidden in Black and Minority Ethnic women in the UK. Many of them still find it difficult to receive appropriate support, information and access to services. Many encounter specific barriers such as language needs, immigration and lack of financial status. Asylum Seekers and Refugee women are usually in total dependence on their spouse/partners or families because they do not having any recourse to public funds. These women may seek low paid work, or beg on the streets to support themselves and children. As the children are usually with their mothers they also suffer because of the mother's status and sometimes end up in care. When the woman leaves her husband, protection, housing and welfare benefits are restricted, hence they end up in the community living destitute lives.

Joanne Miller is WAITS' Women's support and Development Officer I am a survivor of domestic violence for 24 years and I have worked at WAITS as a lead support worker for nine years I now. I have developed many life-skills and self-awareness training programme and deliver the workshops to women WAITS supports - women who have left violent partners or husbands, and have said that they feel abused all over again - but this time by the system. Violent partners have been given access to their children through the court system, even if the children have witnessed abuse and said that they don't want to have contact because they are afraid. When the non-violent parent expresses this concern to the local authority they are sometimes blamed for leading the child's thoughts and emotionally abusing the child and risk the child being put on the Child Protection (CP) register or removed from the non-violent parent. CP is one of the main issues that is affecting the women we support - nearly 80% of our clients have CP orders against them. One result of this is that when we meet women who are suffering domestic violence, we are unable to get down to the issues of her experiences and why her self-esteem and confidence is low because her main issues are everything but! Straight away we are having to deal with CP and civil courts actions, housing, and financial issues, rather than with her safety and well-being.

By Farah Mihlar

Earlier this year I was in my home country Sri Lanka on research. The little Indian Ocean Island in the last year has plunged back into war leaving more than 3500 civilians dead and hundreds of thousands displaced. The recent battles fought mainly in eastern Sri Lanka between the government and the Tamil Tigers - the militant group fighting for a separate state for ethnic Tamils - shattered a five year cease-fire that had given a breather to the country plagued by over two decades of conflict.

In the outskirts of the eastern town of Batticaloa the bare land is lined with thousands of tiny white tents housing some 290,000 people who fled their homes. Families, some with four of five kids, live cramped in each one of the tent.

When we visited the camps it was mostly women who were there. They talked of their harrowing experience of fleeing their homes dead at night whilst explosives rained down on them. As we spoke explosions could be heard in the nearby villages. At the time, the government faced with severe criticism over the huge numbers of displaced and the subsequent humanitarian crisis, had decided to repatriate these families to some villages deemed safe. The women told us they did not want to go back. 'As long as the army is there we don't want to go back. They have in the past attacked us and raped women....and as long as they are there the Tigers will try to attack them and we will be in the middle,' they said.