[sunnykerr]

Well, it's about freaking time:

UN committee imposes sanctions on Nigeria's Boko Haram The UN Security Council has approved sanctions against the Nigerian militant group Boko Haram, five weeks after it kidnapped more than 200 schoolgirls. It will now be added to a list of al-Qaeda-linked organisations subject to an arms embargo and asset freeze. US envoy Samantha Power said it was an "important step" in support of efforts to "defeat Boko Haram and hold its murderous leadership accountable". It was earlier blamed for the deaths of 27 people in a north-eastern village. Residents said gunmen had shot dead farm workers in Chikongudo, set fire to nearly all the homes there and stolen food in an attack on Wednesday night. The assailants stormed the village in cars and motorbikes, a trademark of Boko Haram, the residents added. It came a day after twin bombings killed 122 in the central city of Jos. The authorities suspect Boko Haram of being behind them, but there has so far been no claim of responsibility from the group. 'Al-Qaeda training' Boko Haram was added to the al-Qaeda Sanctions Committee's list of designated entities on Thursday at the request of Nigeria. "Today, the Security Council took an important step in support of the government of Nigeria's efforts to defeat Boko Haram and hold its murderous leadership accountable for atrocities," Ms Power said. The sanctions designation would help "close off important avenues of funding, travel and weapons" to the group, she added. On Wednesday, Nigeria's permanent representative, U Joy Ogwu, said: "The important thing is to attack the problem, and that is terrorism." The BBC's Barbara Plett Usher in New York says Boko Haram's links with al-Qaeda have come under scrutiny. Reports quoting a draft UN document said its members had received training from al-Qaeda affiliates and fought alongside them in Mali. Protests Boko Haram, which has killed thousands of people in Nigeria through a wave of bombings and assassinations since 2009, is fighting to overthrow the government and create an Islamic state. The government's failure to prevent attacks since launching an offensive against Boko Haram a year ago has triggered widespread anger. On Thursday, protesters demanding the return of the schoolgirls snatched from their classrooms in the north-eastern town of Chibok and taken hostage five weeks ago were prevented from reaching the presidential villa in the capital, Abuja. A statement from President Goodluck Jonathan read out to the demonstrators said the state was doing all it could to secure their release. He also urged them to ensure their "zeal is matched with a realistic understanding of the situation". The statement did little to placate the crowd, and one protester shouted: "Another small window for Jonathan and he refuses to use it." Teachers across Nigeria also held a day of protests on Thursday in support of the abducted schoolgirls. Teaching unions said they were also marching in memory of the 173 teachers killed by militants and called on the authorities to increase protection for schools, which were closed for the day.

It's a little staggering just how dense President Jonathan comes off sometimes.

I mean, for all I know he's right in asking the crowds to temper their emotions with the expectation that this won't turn out well for those poor girls.

But he could find a way to say that without making it sound like he couldn't care less.

But how interesting that it was kidnapping schoolgirls that would rile the world's ire about Boko Haram, huh?

[sunnykerr]

Nigeria army 'knows where Boko Haram are holding girls' The Nigerian military says it know where the girls kidnapped by Boko Haram are but will not attempt a rescue. Nigeria's Chief of Defence Staff said it was "good news for the parents," although he admitted the military would not risk "going there with force". More than 200 girls were abducted by Boko Haram gunmen from their school in northern Nigeria in April. Earlier, the BBC learned that a deal to release some of the girls was close but was called off by the government. The BBC's Will Ross in the capital, Abuja, says an intermediary met leaders of the Islamist group and visited the place where they were being held. He says agreement was almost reached to release 50 of the girls in exchange for the release of 100 Boko Haram prisoners. But the Nigerian government pulled out of the deal after President Goodluck Jonathan attended a conference on the crisis in Paris. The reasons for the withdrawal are unclear. Nigeria's government is under pressure to do more to tackle the group and bring about the girls' release. Thousands of people have died since Boko Haram began a violent campaign against the Nigerian government in 2009 and in the subsequent security crackdown. 'Good news' Chief of Defence Staff Air Marshal Alex Badeh said on Monday that "the good news for the parents of the girls is that we know where they are" but said he couldn't reveal the location. "But where they are held, can we go there with force? We can't kill our girls in the name of trying to get them back," he added. Mr Badeh was addressing demonstrators who had marched to the ministry of defence in Abuja in support of the military's fight against Boko Haram. "Nobody should come and say the Nigerian military does not know what it's doing," he told the crowd. "We know what we are doing. "The president is solidly behind us. The president has empowered us to do the work." The girls, who are mainly Christian, are thought to be held in a remote forested area of the north-eastern Borno state, close to the border with Chad and Cameroon. Nigeria previously insisted it would not agree to free Boko Haram members in return for their release but the information ministry insisted that all options were on the table. The UK, the US, China and France are among those countries to have sent teams of experts and equipment to help to locate the girls.

I don't understand what's happening.

Seriously, I just don't.

I can understand that certain operations demand finesse.

But exchanging 50 little girls against the release of 100 Boko Haram prisoners is a terrible, terrible solution.

What's to stop Boko Haram from kidnapping more girls to reach this sort of agreement in the future?

What happened to "the days of Boko Haram are counted?"

[sunnykerr]

Pregnant Pakistani woman stoned to death by family over marriage LAHORE, Pakistan -- A pregnant woman was stoned to death by her own family in front of a Pakistani high court on Tuesday for marrying the man she loved. Nearly 20 members of the woman's family, including her father and brothers, attacked her and her husband with batons and bricks in broad daylight before a crowd of onlookers in front of the high court of Lahore, police investigator Rana Mujahid said. Hundreds of women are murdered every year in Muslim-majority Pakistan in so-called "honour killings" carried out by husbands or relatives as a punishment for alleged adultery or other illicit sexual behaviour, but public stoning is extremely rare. Mujahid said the woman's father has been arrested for murder and that police were working to apprehend all those who participated in the "heinous crime." Another police officer, Naseem Butt, identified the slain woman as Farzana Parveen, 25, and said she had married Mohammad Iqbal against her family's wishes after being engaged to him for years. Her father, Mohammad Azeem, had filed an abduction case against Iqbal, which the couple was contesting, her lawyer Mustafa Kharal said. He confirmed that she was three months' pregnant. Arranged marriages are the norm among conservative Pakistanis, who view marriage for love as a transgression. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, a private group, said in a report last month that some 869 women were murdered in honour killings in 2013. But even Pakistanis who have tracked violence against women expressed shock at the brutal and public nature of Tuesday's slaying. "I have not heard of any such case in which a woman was stoned to death, and the most shameful and worrying thing is that this woman was killed in front of a court," said Zia Awan, a prominent lawyer and human rights activist. He said Pakistanis who commit violence against women are often acquitted or handed light sentences because of poor police work and faulty prosecutions. "Either the family does not pursue such cases or police don't properly investigate. As a result, the courts either award light sentences to the attackers, or they are acquitted," he said. Parveen's relatives had waited outside the court, which is located on a main downtown thoroughfare. As the couple walked up to the main gate, the family members fired shots in the air and tried to snatch her from Iqbal, her lawyer said. When she resisted, her father, brothers and other relatives started beating her, eventually pelting her with bricks from a nearby construction site, Iqbal said. Iqbal, 45, said he started seeing Parveen after the death of his first wife, with whom he had five children. "We were in love," he told The Associated Press. He alleged that the woman's family wanted to fleece money from him before marrying her off. "I simply took her to court and registered a marriage," infuriating the family, he said. Parveen's father surrendered after the incident and called the murder an "honour killing," Butt said. "I killed my daughter as she had insulted all of our family by marrying a man without our consent, and I have no regret over it," Mujahid, the police investigator, quoted the father as saying. Mujahid said the woman's body had been handed over to her husband for burial.

So, if the family isn't diligent in pursuing the case, honour killings go unpunished.

But whose family would be pursuing the case, here?

They're the ones who killed her.

Do they mean her husband?

He's just lost his wife. He must be in mourning.

Not to mention that he was also attacked, so maybe he's in no fit shape to begin with.

[Ann357]

^ I read about this yesterday. What do you say? Terrible.

[sunnykerr]

^ It is completely horrendous to me to think of what my life might have been, had I only been born in another country.

For instance:

India gang rapes: Arrests over hanged girls in Uttar Pradesh At least three men, including one police officer, have been arrested after two teenage girls were gang raped and hanged from a tree in India. Authorities in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh said they were looking for one more suspect and one constable. The victims' family earlier complained that police had refused to help find the missing girls, aged 14 and 16. Violence and discrimination against women in India remains deeply entrenched. But scrutiny of sexual violence has grown since the 2012 gang rape and murder of a student on a Delhi bus. The government tightened laws on sexual violence laws in India last year after widespread protests following that attack. Silent protest Police said two men had been arrested for the gang rape and murder of the two girls, who were cousins from a low caste. A constable was also detained for conspiring with the suspects and for dereliction of duty, authorities added. Earlier on Thursday, officials had confirmed that three policemen had been removed from duty for not registering cases when the girls were reported missing on Tuesday night. The bodies of the teenagers were found in Katra Shahadatganj village in Badaun district on Wednesday morning. A post-mortem examination confirmed rape and death due to hanging, police said. Hundreds of villagers held a silent demonstration at the scene of the crime in protest at the police's perceived inaction. Earlier this year, a 20-year-old tribal woman was gang raped in eastern West Bengal state - allegedly on the orders of village elders who objected to her relationship with a man.

Scrutiny may have grown for these crimes, but it has evidently not changed much in terms of their happening in the first place.

[Ann357]

^This is a sad, terrible story.

Like you, I've been thinking a lot about how lucky I was to be born here. This isn't a perfect country but as a woman, things could be much worst for me.

[sunnykerr]

The part that I really can't get over, though, is how it reportedly took police over 12 hours to respond to the families' concern for their daughters.

If India is to convince the world that they're really stepping up their efforts to curb these crimes against women and girls, they really need to do better than that.

[sunnykerr]

Rape 'routine' in DR Congo prisons Security officials "routinely" rape women in prisons in DR Congo as punishment for their political activities, a UK-based charity says. Freedom From Torture said medical reports of 34 women showed many of them had been brutally gang-raped. The women - who included traders and professionals aged between 18 and 62 - are seeking asylum in the UK. Democratic Republic of Congo government spokesman Lambert Mende told the BBC the report lacked credibility. It did not contain enough facts and details, he said. Two Congolese human rights groups told the BBC they had not received any reports of political rape in the country's prisons, although they said it might happen in secret detention centres. In its report, Freedom From Torture said one woman was arrested and raped after organising a protest against sexual violence. The group's Dr Juliet Cohen told the BBC: "There are some striking consistencies in the experiences of sexual violence and torture of the women in this report which strongly suggests that this horrific abuse is being routinely carried out in prisons in the DRC." 'Not human beings' DR Congo is often dubbed the "rape capital of the world", with rights groups saying that rape and sexual violence has become a weapon of war since conflict broke out in the early 1990s in the east of the country. In May, two soldiers were convicted of rape by a military court. Freedom From Torture said women were raped by security force members to stop "women speaking out about politics, human rights and, in some cases, rape itself". It says women were abused at several locations in the capital, Kinshasa 1,500 km (1,000 miles) from the conflict zones. One woman, named as Faith in the report, said security agents raided her home in early 2013 after she organised an anti-rape protest in the province of Bas Congo, west of Kinshasa. "One of them said: 'You are talking about rape, now we'll show you what rape means'. They raped my niece in front of us. Then they took me to prison," she is quoted as saying in the report. "Now I know, because I have been there, that it is normal for women to be sexually abused in prison," she said. "The soldiers and the prison guards, they don't see women as human beings, they don't see any value in women. I can't even remember how many times I was raped." Since her arrival in the UK, Faith has been admitted to hospital, Freedom From Torture said. "She suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and depression and she no longer likes being around other people," it added. Josephine Mfulu-Batonda, who has monitored human rights abuses in prisons for several years for the organisation ACIDH, told the BBC's Maud Jullien that, in the past year, eight of the 100 women in Kinshasa's main prison, Makala, had reported being sexually abused but these were not political detainees. Makala is one of the places where Freedom From Torture documented political rape. Ms Mfulu-Batonda said it was common for prison staff and other inmates to force female prisoners into prostitution and to share the profit. La Voix des Sans Voix (Voice of the Voiceless) works closely with inmates of visits Kinshasa's main prison and says it hasn't had any reports of rape there since 2006. The group's Rostin Manketa says if there were any cases of female activists being raped as a result of their political activity, this would be an extremely serious issue and they would have reported it.

Rape as a strategy for torture is probably not new, disgustingly enough.

And yet I never stop being sickened when we come across yet more evidence of it.

This cannot be the world we live in.

[Ann357]

Another sad story.

Were do we begin to fix this issue that seems to be happening everywhere...I don't know.

[sunnykerr]

I don't know either.

All I know is that it's not helpful to bury our hands in the sand.

We need to know what's going on.

[Ann357]

Why India's sanitation crisis kills women The gruesome rape and hanging of two teenage girls in the populous Uttar Pradesh state again proves how women have become the biggest victims of India's sanitation crisis. The two girls were going to the fields to defecate when they went missing on Tuesday night. Nearly half-a-billion Indians - or 48% of the population - lack access to basic sanitation and defecate in the open. The situation is worse in villages where, according to the WHO and Unicef, some 65% defecate in the open. And women appear to bear the brunt as they are mostly attacked and assaulted when they step out early in the morning or late in the evening. Several studies have shown that women without toilets at home are vulnerable to sexual violence when travelling to and from public facilities or open fields. The evidence is glaring. A senior police official in Bihar said some 400 women would have "escaped" rape last year if they had toilets in their homes. Women living in urban slums of Delhi reported specific incidents of girls under 10 "being raped while on their way to use a public toilet" to researchers of a 2011 study funded by WaterAid and DFID-funded Sanitation and Hygiene Applied Research for Equity. Women in one slum said when they went out in the open to defecate, local boys stared at them, made threats, threw bricks and stabbed them. Others said they faced "lewd remarks, physical gestures and rape when they relieved themselves in the bushes". "We have had one-on-one fights with thugs in order to save our daughters from getting raped. It then becomes a fight that either you [the thug] kill me to get to my daughter or you back off," a helpless mother told the researchers, pointing out to the chilling frequency of such assaults. By one estimate, some 300 million women and girls in India defecate in the open. Most of them belong to underprivileged sections of the society and are too poor to afford toilets. The two girls from Badaun, who reportedly belonged to the lower-rung of a group of castes called Other Backward Classes (OBCs), were among them and paid with their lives. "This vicious, horrifying attack illustrates too vividly the risks that girls and women take when they don't have a safe, private place to relieve themselves," says said Barbara Frost, chief executive of WaterAid. "Ending open defecation is an urgent priority that needs to be addressed, for the benefit of women and girls who live in poverty and without access to privacy and a decent toilet." Experts believe that India needs to scale up its war on sanitation with a special emphases on women. It needs to build more private toilets with sewerage connections when space is available and shared toilets when space is scarce. Community toilets have worked in many places and flopped in others like the city of Bhopal, where, a study revealed, only half as many women as men used the toilets because of their distance from home. This is not a problem in India alone: violence against women on the way to or from public toilets have been reported from countries like Kenya and Uganda. But for a country which aspires for superpower status, lack of toilets is an enduring shame. On his stump, the new prime minister Narendra Modi of the Hindu nationalist BJP had promised, "Toilets first, Temples later". He needs to do that sooner to save lives of more women.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-27635363

I found this article very interesting...and in a small why hopeful. I say this because addressing sanitation seems very doable to me. And a clear why to improve the safety of woman.

[Barstool Prophet]

It is just sad that India is not moving as quickly as they need to in order to protect women.

[sunnykerr]

I think India, taken as a whole, will always be problematic because so much of it is centred on the regions, as opposed to the country as a whole.

So it's probably impossible to implement sustained change as a whole.

But that cannot mean that the status quo is acceptable.

Especially when you consider that proper access to sanitary infrastructures should be a social priority.

[sunnykerr]

U.S. campus sex crimes on the rise, despite dip in overall crime rate WASHINGTON -- The number of sex offences reported at American colleges and universities went up in the last decade even as overall campus crime decreased, according to an Education Department survey that also suggests high schools are safer than they used to be. The report released Tuesday said 3,330 forcible sex offences were reported on campuses in 2011, the latest data available for colleges and universities that researchers have analyzed. That was a 51 per cent increase from the 2,200 reported a decade earlier. But the number of campus crimes in every other category, such as burglary and car theft, declined during the same period. The annual survey primarily focuses on crime and safety at the nation's elementary and secondary schools, where fewer crimes were reported than 20 years ago, according to the report. Of students ages 12-18, 52 per 1,000 reported being victims of a crime at school in 2012, compared with 181 per 1,000 in 1992, according to the report. Away from school that rate fell from 173 per 1,000 to 38. Males were more likely than females to be victims of crime, and students in urban and suburban areas were more likely than their rural counterparts to have experienced crime. The report draws on data from different sources, including the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and campus surveys. That means data for some statistical categories were available for as recently as 2012, while others -- such as for fatal violence in schools -- were not. At elementary and high schools, the report identified 31 homicides or suicides -- though not necessarily of students -- between July 1, 2010, and June 30, 2011, that occurred either on school grounds, on the way to or from school, or while attending or travelling to or from a school-sponsored event. During the 2010-11 school year, 11 school-age children were killed at school, and there were three reported suicides. Though the 31 violent deaths for the year represent a sharp drop from the early 1990s, Tom Snyder of the National Center for Education Statistics, an Education Department centre that collects and analyzes data, cautioned that it was hard to draw meaningful conclusions about any trend. The data were compiled, for instance, before the December 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in which a gunman killed 20 students and six educators. "If you look at the data, there's no real pattern. These are random acts of violence, and they don't seem to fall into patterns over time," Snyder said. The report also briefly analyzes crime on campuses of colleges and universities. It finds that while the number of on-campus crimes reported to police rose from 41,600 in 2001 to 30,400 in 2011 at public and private two- and four-year schools. The report is a joint publication of the National Center for Education Statistics and the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The thing that makes this study a little hard to interpret is that we all know sexual crimes often go unreported.

I'm guessing that's as true now as it was a decade ago, though the very point I'm trying to make here is that we just don't know.

Maybe they are reported more often now, maybe that plays into the incredible increase they're seeing.

Or maybe those things are completely unrelated.

It's still creepy that this is still going on.

[sunnykerr]

Egypt asks YouTube to remove Cairo sexual assault video Egypt has asked YouTube to remove a video of a woman being sexually assaulted during a rally in Cairo's Tahrir Square supporting the country's newly elected president. A spokesman for President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi said the request was made by the Egyptian embassy in Washington. The woman asked for the video to be taken down when Mr Sisi visited her in hospital on Wednesday, he said. YouTube has not yet responded to news of the request. The graphic video, which apparently shows a woman being stripped naked and attacked in the capital's Tahrir Square, went viral earlier this week. A string of assaults during the recent celebrations have caused uproar. 'Horrifying' State-run television showed the president personally apologising to a victim, whose identity has been kept anonymous, at a military hospital in Cairo on Wednesday. The woman was seen asking Mr Sisi to have the video of the attack removed from the video-sharing website. "My daughter watches it every day and collapses," she was quoted as saying by the Associated Press news agency. On Tuesday, a presidential spokesman said Mr Sisi had ordered officials to enforce a new law making sexual assault a crime for the first time. The law decrees that those found guilty of harassment in public or private will face up to five years in prison and a maximum fine of 50,000 Egyptian pounds ($6,990; £4,160). Women's rights groups have accused the authorities of failing to address the issue of sexual harassment. A 2013 UN study said that nine out of 10 Egyptian women had experienced some form of sexual assault, ranging from minor harassment to rape. Human rights campaigners have describe the extent of the problem in Egypt as "horrifying". Incidents have soared in the three years since the 2011 overthrow of Hosni Mubarak.

Obviously, and I think it goes without saying, videos of such abusive behaviour have no business being broadcasted at large like that. The dignity of the victim alone, not to mention basic decency, demand that it be taken down.

At the same time, if this is what it takes for the world to realize how horrifyingly common sexual abuse of women, and in public spaces too, appears to be in Egypt, then it will have served a grisly, but necessary purpose.

Having said that, it is incredibly unfair to ask of this specific woman to be the spokesperson for the need to change things for women in Egypt.