Sexual Violence

Last week I hosted a CFR roundtable with Juan E. Mendez, the United Nations special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment or punishment, to discuss his new report on gendered aspects of torture. The groundbreaking report, released earlier this year, addresses gendered aspects of torture and other ill-treatment of persons in detention. It stresses the need to apply gender analysis to torture and cruel treatment to reveal abuses that would otherwise be invisible or normalized. During our discussion, Mendez noted that, when thinking about prisoners and torture, people often think about men—nearly ninety percent of prisoners globally are men—and the experiences of women and girls are downplayed. But torture and other abusive treatment does not only occur in detention or in formal government custody.  It can occur on the battlefield, in health facilities, and at home. The special rapporteur spoke about how domestic violence by private actors may also violate the main treaty on torture—the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment—where the state fails to punish perpetrators and protect victims, and creates “conditions under which women may be subjected to systematic physical and mental suffering, despite their apparent freedom to resist.” While the Torture Convention requires state involvement in the abusive conduct, the state can be held accountable for its failure to act. Mendez also notes that in some countries women and girls, as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex persons, face particular risks of harsh punishment or targeting for actions that are considered “moral crimes.” In one case that prompted international attention, a young Nigerian woman, Amina Lawal, was sentenced to death by stoning after she became pregnant by a man whom she said had promised to marry her—he failed to, and left her to raise the child alone without any support. When women, but not men, are sentenced to be stoned for such “crimes,” allowing for discriminatory application of harsh penalties (as in Lawal’s case, until the ruling was overturned by a higher court), it is not only grossly unfair, it can constitute torture or cruel treatment. Under the Torture Convention, severe pain or suffering that is imposed to discriminate against someone (or to intimidate, coerce, punish, or extract information or a confession) constitutes torture (or cruel treatment, if it is less severe). In his report, Mendez notes that “offences that are aimed at or that solely and disproportionately affect women, girls and persons on the basis of their perceived or actual sexual orientation or gender identity,” may contribute to the perpetuation of gender-based violence that can amount to torture or cruel treatment. The report also points out that states that fail to criminalize or enforce laws banning "cultural" practices such as honor killings or female genital mutilation and cutting (FGM/C), for example, are contributing to gender-based violence that may violate the Torture Convention.  I recently hosted a roundtable with Time magazine Person of Influence honoree, Jaha Dukureh, who spoke about her success in pressing the Gambian government to ban FGM/C, a harsh practice used to control the sexuality of women and girls. State enforcement of that legal ban will be critical. In his report, Mendez urges that “States must finally implement their heightened obligation to prevent and combat gender-based violence and discrimination perpetrated by both state and private actors against women, girls, and persons who transgress sexual and gender norms.”

Welcome to “Women Around the World: This Week,” a series that highlights noteworthy news related to women and U.S. foreign policy. This week’s post, covering April 16 to April 22, was compiled with support from Anne Connell, Becky Allen, and Alexandra Eterno. World Bank increases investment in girls’ education                   Last week, the World Bank Group announced plans to invest $2.5 billion in adolescent girls’ education over the next five years. The commitment represents a major step toward reaching the goals of the Group’s new global strategy for gender equality, and dovetails with U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama’s call to action on the first anniversary of her signature Let Girls Learn initiative, which aims to reduce barriers that prevent adolescent girls from completing their education. A staggering thirty-one million adolescent girls worldwide do not attend school. The World Bank Group’s investment will create new programs to train teachers, administer scholarships, offer conditional cash transfers to promote school retention, and equip schools with toilets and clean drinking water. The bulk of investment will be targeted at sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia—regions with the highest numbers of out-of-school girls. Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank, suggested that the investment would bear fruit for generations to come, stressing that “empowering and educating adolescent girls is one of the best ways to stop poverty from being passed from generation to generation.” Ample evidence links girls’ education with economic growth, delayed onset of marriage and pregnancy, and improved health outcomes for girls and their families. Maternal health at risk in refugee crisis                                                                        New reports find that, in a notable demographic shift since the refugee crisis began in 2014, women and children seeking asylum in the European Union (EU) outnumber men—and some reports suggest that up to one in ten women refugees are pregnant. Pregnant women and new mothers are among the most vulnerable refugees, as access to pre-natal care is limited along remote routes, miscarriages are frequent, births occur often in unsanitary conditions without  medical personnel, and physical exertion contributes to fatigue, heavy-bleeding, and other post-natal conditions. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) and other organizations providing health services also cite a scarcity of formula and other baby supplies along commonly traveled routes. The challenges of providing maternal health care services to refugees en route to Europe are markedly different than those in static refugee communities, which have seen some successes in maternal health care provision: the sprawling Za’atari camp in Jordan, for example, which is serviced by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and MSF, recently celebrated the safe delivery of its 5,000th baby. President Dilma Rousseff impeached                                                                             This week, Brazil’s lower house of Congress voted to pursue impeachment proceedings against President Dilma Rousseff on charges that she violated federal budget laws. Rousseff became the first woman to hold the Brazilian presidency when she assumed the office in January 2011. More than 500 lawmakers offered public testimony of the reasoning behind their votes, much of which detoured from the charges Rousseff faces. A significant number of the legislators leading the charge to impeach Rousseff face corruption allegations themselves. Her presidency has weathered a number of controversies—including strikes of public service employees, the banning of an HIV-prevention campaign, and involvement in the Petrobras scandal that involved kick-backs and corruption—that have contributed to her unpopularity among opposition parties and some civil society groups. The Brazilian Senate will vote by simple majority, likely next month, on whether to hear the trial against Rousseff.

Far from demonstrating a new face of empowerment, so-called “jihadi girl power” wildly overstates the power of women and girls living under the control of the self-proclaimed Islamic State. The image of women and girls joining jihad has emerged based on recent reports of a small group of Syrian women who have joined an all-female regiment of the Islamic State, as well as news coverage of dozens of European girls living under control of extremist groups in Syria—an aspect of the conflict that is starting to alarm European governments previously more focused on the flow of young men joining the ranks of the Islamic state. Notwithstanding recent reports of women pledging allegiance to the terror group in the West, the reality of women and girls living under the self-proclaimed Islamic State in Syria illustrates the stark realities of negotiating survival in territory under the group’s control. Elsewhere, I’ve discussed the plight of the Yazidi women abducted by Islamic State fighters. The experience of Syrian women in the al-Khansaa Brigade, the Islamic State’s all-female regiment, also demonstrates the terror network’s severe treatment of women, particularly those who do not conform to the extremist group’s strict ideology. In Raqqa, Syria—the Islamic State’s de facto capital—the al-Khansaa Brigade reportedly enforces the Islamic State’s harsh restrictions on women, including their dress and movement in public, and punishes violators. A report in the New York Times details how three “fairly typical young women of Raqqa” agreed to marry Islamic State fighters “to assuage the Organization and keep their families in favor” and ultimately became members of the al-Khansaa Brigade to survive. As members of the brigade, these women became collaborators and “enforcers” of the Islamic State’s harsh rules by turning in their former friends and neighbors for “violating” a strict code that penalizes women with arrests and beatings for actions such as wearing makeup, failing to fully cover in public, or going out without a male chaperone. Cynically, the Islamic State claims it is devoutly religious, even though its fighters use rape (including gang rape and rape of children), sex slavery, forced contraception, and forced marriage of women and girls as weapons of war. The three women who joined this so-called morality brigade eventually fled to Turkey, unable to bear the forced marriages to “martyrs” whose suicide deaths would leave them widowed and subject to repeated cycles of forced marriages, as the Islamic State demanded that widows remarry far sooner than is customary under Islamic law. Yet more broadly, the Islamic State has a certain appeal for some women, particularly young women. The Islamic State uses social media, including Twitter and Facebook, to recruit and radicalize women and girls, some of whom themselves play critical roles in propaganda, dissemination, and recruitment of other women and girls through online platforms. In its online messaging, the extremist group offers an opportunity for girls to serve a cause larger than themselves, a sense of belonging, and sometimes even the promise of romance or marriage to a fighter, particularly to attract young women from Europe to join the group in both Syria and Iraq. As Sasha Havlicek, founder of the London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue, noted in testimony before the U.S. Congress last year, “A jihadi girl-power subculture has emerged on social media networks, clearly rooted in western culture while simultaneously rejecting it[,]” for example, where the Islamic State has appropriated a well-know cosmetics slogan on social media, but twisted it with a photo of a completely veiled woman accompanied by a caption reading, “‘COVERed GIRL… because I’m worth it.’” In fact, Mia Bloom—a Georgia State University professor and author of Bombshell: Women and Terrorism—goes so far as to compare the recruitment efforts by the Islamic State fighters of women to online grooming by sexual predators. The experience of women living under the Islamic State demonstrates the questionable role of agency for women living under such coercive circumstances. These women—particularly those already living in Syria or Iraq—experience a Hobson’s choice: show loyalty to the terror group or suffer the consequences. To what extent is the decision to support the Islamic State a choice if the risk of not doing so is brutal punishment? If someone puts a gun to your head and tells you to rob a bank, are you truly guilty of bank robbery? So much for “girl power.” The troublesome “choices” women are left with living under the Islamic State illustrate the complexity of gender and terrorism, where women can be victims, perpetrators, or agents in combating extremism (as I’ll discuss at greater length in a follow-on post on Women Around the World).

Welcome to “Women Around the World: This Week,” a series that highlights noteworthy news related to women and U.S. foreign policy. This week’s post, covering March 11 to March 17, was compiled by Anne Connell and Becky Allen. United Nations addresses peacekeeper abuse                                        On Friday, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 2272, its first resolution addressing sexual exploitation and abuse perpetrated by some of the 100,000 United Nations (UN) peacekeepers deployed around the world. Allegations of rape and exploitation—including of children—by peacekeepers have undermined the legitimacy of operations in recent years, particularly in the Central African Republic (CAR) and Congo. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon launched an independent 10-week external panel investigation in 2015 in response to revelations about the UN’s failure to respond to accusations in the CAR, where twenty-two of the sixty-nine cases reported in 2015 took place. Over two dozen new allegations of abuse in missions around the world have surfaced in 2016. With the new resolution, the UN committed to a number of reforms: naming the origin countries of alleged perpetrators (with the intention of pressuring states to pursue allegations); accelerating investigations of blue helmets accused of abuses; and publicizing relevant information on a new website. Upon adoption of the resolution, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power declared that the United Nations “will do better to ensure that the blue helmets that we send as your protectors will not become perpetrators.” Female suicide bomber in Ankara                                                                                           This week’s deadly attack in Turkey’s capital was carried out by a woman who had trained across the border with Kurdish militant separatists. Turkey’s Interior Ministry identified twenty-four-year-old Seher Çağla Demir as the attacker who killed thirty-seven people and injured more than 125 by car bomb at a bus stop on Sunday. Initial reports suggested that she had trained with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)’s Syrian affiliate, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), beginning in 2013; the off-shoot Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK) later claimed responsibility for the attack. Women fighters have played a highly visible role in the PKK and YPG, notably in taking Mount Sinjar from the Islamic State in 2015. TAK’s statement about this week’s attack identified Çağla Demir as the first female suicide bomber in its ranks. TAK joins other extremist groups around the world that increasingly enlist women as suicide attackers: while there were only eight female suicide attackers during the 1980s, data suggest there were well over one hundred between 2000-2010. Research shows that attacks carried out by women are more lethal, due in part to their ability to move in targeted areas or populations without arousing suspicion. Women and the Islamic State                                                                                                 New reports, including footage that two Syrian women secretly filmed in Raqqa, add to the evidence that the self-proclaimed Islamic State brutally oppresses women and exerts strict control over the reproductive health of female captives. More than three dozen escaped Yazidi women described methods of contraception forced upon them, including oral and injectable birth control that were shuttled throughout Islamic State stronghold areas via organized supply chains. One physician at a UN-supported clinic in northern Iraq calculated the rate of pregnancy during enslavement of more than 700 recently freed Yazidis to be just 5 percent—substantially lower than the expected fertility rate of 20 to 25 percent—which researchers attributed to contraception. The aggressive use of birth control by the Islamic State is intended to keep the group’s robust sex trade alive: Human Rights Watch reports that “[Islamic State] forces have abducted thousands of Yazidis since August 2014 and committed organized rape, sexual assault, and other horrific crimes against many Yazidi women and girls.”        

The Five Questions Series is a forum for scholars, government officials, civil society leaders, and foreign policy practitioners to provide timely analysis of new developments related to the advancement of women and girls worldwide. This interview is with Franziska Brantner, member of the German Bundestag and spokesperson for child and family policy for the parliamentary group of Bündnis 90/The Greens. Recent reports from Amnesty International and the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) find that female refugees en route to Europe and in European shelter facilities face grave protection risks, including trafficking, abuse, and sexual violence. Can you describe the conditions of the typical refugee shelter in Germany, and what steps are taken to protect vulnerable populations, like women and children? Many shelters in Germany are horrible for women. For example, many don’t have separate toilets, and, in some shelters, we see gangs of men de facto controlling the toilets. The risks of sexual violence against women refugees fleeing conflict are not only present as they travel in the Balkans, but also within Germany. There is sexual violence in camps and no formal mechanisms to respond to it. Many women don’t even know who to go to. Then there are cases where a shelter does have a special dorm for women traveling alone, and for women with children, but the space is not lockable. Women are scared during the night and cannot sleep; they don’t feel safe. What does it say about how much we care about women’s safety if we do not have lockable rooms, toilets, or showers, or we have rooms where there are eight people per room, in mixed groups of women and men? Several experts working on refugee issues in Germany report that the shelter in Wilmersdorf, Berlin is relatively well-equipped for women, and has gender-segregated spaces, a wash salon run by women, and psychosocial support staff. What can be done to implement best practices to improve safety for women and children in other shelters? Yes, some shelters have taken steps to have separate toilets and some women-only rooms. Wilmersdorf is such a well-run center. It is certainly far from the norm. The majority of shelters have nothing prepared in terms of women’s safety. The lack of shelters’ safety measures has little to do with funding, but much to do with organization. And there is the EU reception conditions directive (Aufnahmerichtlinie) that lays out steps for welcoming refugees, so Germany is already de facto obliged by EU law to do better. I think many policymakers just do not care enough—they do not think these steps for women’s safety are necessary. It’s also about a lack of experience among those actually running the shelters—for many of them, it’s the first time they have run such shelters. And last year, men outnumbered women among the refugees served, but now the numbers are up to 50 percent women and children. Many managers simply don’t really know how to adapt shelters to that reality. I have been pushing for, on the federal level and the state level, UNICEF to advise government bodies. It was not easy to get a UNICEF coordinator for Germany, since, in theory, UNICEF is not intended to work in developed countries. But we have a coordinator now in Berlin, who brings expertise on what is necessary to protect women and children that was learned through hard experiences in refugee camps across the world. Save the Children is also now working in many shelters, in Berlin and in the state of Brandenburg. But that’s only a handful of experts covering all of Germany. In early February, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s federal cabinet approved an asylum package—referred to as “Asylum Package II”—aimed at tightening asylum legislation in Germany. This passed in the German parliament in late February following heated debate from opposition leaders. Can you describe how the new policies will affect women and children? Children’s rights are one example. Part of the issue was transposing the aforementioned EU directive on proper refugee intake into Germany’s official refugee policies—one aspect of the directive is the implementation of gender-based or age-based protection concepts in shelters. And the German government decided not to implement that EU directive. In Germany, we also have a national child protection law that sets conditions for any organization or institution where minors are living or spending time during the day, such as basic background checks on personnel to ensure they were never convicted of sexual crimes. In the new asylum laws, in Article 44, it says that this child protection law is not applicable to shelters. In October and November of 2015, the act implementing the common European asylum system proposed an extension of Article 44. And then it got stripped out of the negotiations. All this discussion about ‘our values and our standards’—and then it was out. There has been only a little improvement related to background checks for the people who work and help in the shelters. But this can’t replace the implementation of the EU directive. This is a huge problem, because all the child protection mechanisms we have in Germany that have been developed over the past years, all our years of experience, are not fully applicable to refugee shelters. The Red Cross and some other organizations are doing much more voluntarily, but there is no mandate or legal obligation, which is a problem. We have already seen some cases where convicted child abusers are volunteering in shelters. That we make a distinction between a refugee child and a German child, in terms of their basic rights and protection level, is troubling. Family reunification is another issue in the new asylum package. Refugees in Germany will have to wait two years before they can apply for their family members to join them—this will affect many minors who came unaccompanied. Another change in the new asylum package that specifically affects women and children is that Germany lowered the level of criminal offense that causes deportation. It used to be that it would take a three-year prison conviction to be deported, but now the threshold is lower and a sexual abuse case can merit being sent back to country of origin. This makes it almost impossible for women to speak out and testify against their husbands regarding abuse. If they have children, the children are often registered with the husband. What woman is going to press charges that could result in her children being sent away? I consistently get news from shelters that women no longer want to file cases. There should have been a specific clause in the asylum package to address such cases. How did the debate about the asylum package fit into the broader political landscape in Germany, and what are the barriers to passing legislation that protects women’s and children’s rights? The argument goes that it is already so difficult for people on the ground that we don’t want to make them worry about children’s rights and women’s rights. The issues seem to many like a luxury, like something nice to have if we were in normal times, but we are in times of crisis and we have to sacrifice some of our standards—at least, that was the argument in floor debate in parliament in December. This is contradictory, because we’ve also had intense public debate about refugees coming to Germany and learning values like equality and women’s rights. Many of the same people who have been so strict in their calls for refugees to understand German culture and values don’t implement those same values in policy. Looking to the future, what are your next steps in terms of legislation and advocacy for policy reforms? And how do you think the policy decisions made now will affect Germany in the long run? On a slightly positive note, in Baden-Württemberg, my state, we have a huge refugee center that used to be a barracks for 10,000 American soldiers—now it serves around 7,000 refugees. And in that entire area, there was not a single building or apartment reserved just for women. The local aid organization, local police, and women’s groups all said that they urgently needed a women’s center, and now it’s slowly moving forward. Also, now we have a childcare room there. In the future, I think we will look back and there will be reports about what happened in the shelters and people will say, how did that happen in Germany, and why did we not look after the women and children? And we will have to say, because, by law, we were not obliged to. We will pay quite a heavy price for it. Abused women and children will not learn what German values mean, and men perpetrating assaults will learn that they can get away with it.  

Welcome to “Women Around the World: This Week,” a series that highlights noteworthy news related to women and U.S. foreign policy. This week’s post, covering January 28 to February 5, was compiled by Anne Connell, Becky Allen, and Alexandra Eterno. Crackdown on women’s organizations in Beijing                  Despite the Chinese government’s recent public commitments towards advancing gender equality, Chinese authorities have reportedly shut down the operations of a prominent women’s legal aid center in Beijing. The Zhongze Women’s Legal Counseling and Service Centre, founded by lawyer Guo Jianmei after the landmark United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995, had for twenty years represented low-income Chinese women in cases related to domestic violence, child custody, land rights, and employment disputes; Guo was honored for her work by the U.S. Department of State as a recipient of the International Women of Courage Award in March 2011. The closure comes amidst a series of government actions curtailing public dissent and activism in the past year, including the arrest of women’s rights activists protesting against sexual harassment on International Women’s Day; passage of laws under President Xi Jinping’s government that strengthen censorship and surveillance; and the detention of dozens of lawyers, including three prominent human rights advocates, on political subversion charges. Legal gains for women in India                                                                                         One of the highest courts in India, the Delhi High Court, ruled that any Hindu woman can now be a karta, the legal head of a household, a position previously reserved for a family’s eldest male. Hindu women will be permitted to manage family assets and make decisions regarding sale and purchase of property. The eldest daughter in a prominent business family in Delhi brought the case to court after her father, brothers, and uncles passed away, and her nephew claimed to be the rightful karta. The new ruling follows the precedent set by a 2005 amendment to India’s Hindu Succession Act that first expanded women’s inheritance rights to ancestral property. North of Delhi, in the city of Meerut, two women have begun another legal battle: an appeal to protect access to the labor force after male elders directed village women to stop working in area factories. Though the Indian Constitution guarantees gender equality under the law, local policies and customs limit women’s economic participation: from 2005 to 2012, Indian women’s participation rate in the economy slid from 37 percent to 27 percent. Sexual violence in Guatemala                                                                                             The trial of two retired soldiers accused of grave human rights abuses against women—former base commander Esteelmer Reyes Girón and former regional military commissioner Heriberto Valdez Asij—began in Guatemala’s Supreme Court this week. The two men are accused of abducting indigenous Mayan men and enslaving and systematically raping their female relatives during Guatemala’s thirty-six year civil war. Fifteen alleged victims of sexual slavery, now women in their seventies and eighties, have come forward to testify against the accused. Experts suggest that Guatemala’s history of sexual violence in the context of civil war contributed to the normalization of abuse, reflected by high levels of gender-based violence and femicide in the country today. The landmark trial—expected to last forty days—is the first time a Guatemalan court will consider the crime of sexual violence used as a weapon of war and could set a precedent for the prosecution of similar crimes.

The experiences of women in world affairs are often invisible. We commonly see men as the central actors in the world, with women appearing only in our peripheral vision. Mainstream news, reports, and research about Europe’s migrant crisis have largely left the stories of women untold. But important new research conducted by Amnesty International reveals that women migrants fleeing from Syria and Iraq to Europe face a high risk of violence, both sexual and physical, throughout their journey. The canary in the coal mine for these recent challenges was the sexual exploitation of women from Africa and Eastern Europe in earlier waves of women escaping conflicts and economic instability—for example, in Nigeria, Libya, the former Yugoslavia, and former satellites of the Soviet Union (following the fall of the Berlin Wall). Now that the gaze of the western media (and powerful human rights groups such as Amnesty) has begun to turn to women who are fleeing Syria and Iraq, policymakers should develop more effective solutions—not only for women fleeing the Middle East, but also for those who enter Europe from more marginalized regions of Africa. According to the New York Times, “[a]mong the more than one million migrants who have entered Europe over the past year, fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and beyond, men outnumber women by more than three to one, United Nations statistics show.” But for those women who make the trip, the migration route from Turkey to Greece and then Greece north toward countries like Germany and Norway is reportedly rife with sexual abuse, exploitation, harassment, and violence. Besides lacking safety and privacy when they were forced to sleep and shower in the same quarters as men, women told Amnesty they were exploited for or pressured to have sex by smugglers, security staff within camps, and other migrants. Some women also reported being beaten or harassed by security and police officers in transit centers and along the routes in Greece, Hungary, and Slovenia. Amnesty is calling for European governments to set up better services such as single-sex and well-lit toilet facilities and separate sleeping quarters in transit camps as well as take more steps to protect women and girl migrants. A recent United Nations report suggests additional steps to prevent sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) and to protect women in refugee camps and transit centers. These recommendations call for the European Union to establish a coordinated response system across borders that protects women and girls; implement procedures and disperse personnel to prevent, identify, and respond to SGBV; ensure that there are safe spaces for women and children at transit centers and refugee camps. More broadly, policy-makers should support cross-Mediterranean economic activity and civil society exchanges to promote connectivity in ways that can address the root causes of conflict, lack of political freedoms, and economic activities. Moreover, as Amnesty International’s Crisis Response Director Tirana Hassan notes, “The best way to avoid abuses and exploitation by smugglers is for European governments to allow safe and legal routes from the outset.”

Welcome to “Women Around the World: This Week,” a series that highlights noteworthy news related to women and U.S. foreign policy. This week’s post, covering from January 1 to January 8, was compiled by Anne Connell and Becky Allen. Violence against women in Germany                                Over 120 women were sexually harassed, assaulted, and mugged during New Year’s Eve celebrations in a public square in Germany’s western city of Cologne, and two women were reportedly raped. City officials claimed the attacks were unprecedented in nature—up to 1,000 men, broken into smaller groups of ten to thirty, surrounded individual women and prevented them from escaping the mayhem in front of the city’s main train station. Local media have cited police confusion and lack of a quick response as reasons for the scale of the attacks. Authorities are scrambling to respond to heightened concerns about public safety, particularly during the upcoming—and notoriously raucous—Karneval celebrations. German justice minister Heiko Mass vowed that perpetrators would be found and prosecuted, and Cologne’s mayor, Henriette Reker, called an emergency meeting on Tuesday. Both urged caution in linking the violence to the influx of refugees to Cologne this year. The right-wing “anti-Islamisation” Pegida movement nonetheless seized upon the attacks to organize a large-scale demonstration against migration, planned for Saturday. A counter-demonstration, protesting all forms of sexism and racism, is also planned. Women underrepresented in Afghanistan, Burundi, and Syria peace talks     Burundi’s government publicly refused to join peace talks scheduled this week with the country’s opposition, voicing resistance, among other things, to the inclusion of Carine Kaneza, a representative of Burundian women’s groups. Government officials recognize neither the legitimacy of her role nor her organization’s right to participate in negotiations, despite the essential role women played during the 2000 Arusha peace negotiations and subsequent transition period. This setback threatens to escalate political violence, which has already taken the lives of more than 400 people. Women’s inclusion in the world’s other peace talks also remains in flux: in Afghanistan, President Ashraf Ghani’s promises to include women in talks with the Taliban have amounted to little, with women present on only two occasions in twenty three rounds of informal peace talks between 2005 and 2014. Syrian peace talks scheduled to begin later this month reflect a similar pattern—despite civil society activism, the December convening of global leaders in Paris to create a roadmap for the talks involved no women in positions of influence. Barriers to women’s workforce participation in Latin America and the Caribbean                                                                                                                                       A new UNDP report suggests that Latin America and the Caribbean have work to do to bring women fully into the workforce and level the economic playing field. Though some countries have made significant progress in lowering barriers over the past five years, women’s workforce participation rates lag far behind those of men in all counties examined, despite the fact that women in the region have higher levels of educational attainment than men. Closing the participation gap alone would result in an estimated 16 percent higher regional per capita GDP. But other policy reforms are also needed: women in the formal economy continue to earn an average of 19 percent less than men, and more than half of all businesses across the region lack women in management positions, thereby stifling broader economic progress.  

Voices from the Field features contributions from scholars and practitioners highlighting new research, thinking, and approaches to the advancement of women and U.S. foreign policy interests. This article is from Françoise Girard, President of the International Women’s Health Coalition (IWHC). “Tomorrow, I have to start over...it will be a long time before I come back to my parents’ home, to their neighborhood, and maybe it will be with a child," thought Danedjo Hadidja, fearfully, the night before her wedding. At 15, her uncle planned to marry her off to a man in his 30s, as his second wife. In this part of northern Cameroon, more than 70 percent of girls are married before they turn 18. These marriages occur without the girls’ consent—robbing them of their childhoods, forcing them out of school, trapping them in poverty, and putting them at high risk of dangerous pregnancy and childbirth complications, HIV infection, and domestic violence. Danedjo didn’t want this to be her fate. With the help of a social worker, she escaped before the wedding ceremony. She went to school and worked part-time. Later, she and other girls formed a community organization for girls who had avoided or survived child marriage, “so that our little sisters did not go through the same thing.” Fourteen years later, Danedjo is a respected leader in her community. She is the president of the Association pour la Promotion de l’Autonomie et des Droits de la Fille/Femme (Association for the Promotion of the Autonomy and Rights of the Girl/Woman, or APAD). The road was sometimes bumpy, Danedjo notes: “It has not been easy to stand in front of traditional leaders or parents to talk about early and forced marriage. They would insult us: ‘Oh you are young. What do you know about life? What do you know about marriage?’” But APAD’s persistence paid off. Danedjo and her peers have changed cultural attitudes and beliefs in their community, empowered girls to know their rights, and provided them with mentorship and skills to earn a living. The group has enlisted more than 150 survivors of child marriage to speak out against the practice across northern Cameroon. Earlier this month, Danedjo joined other child marriage survivors, activists, experts, and policymakers at Girl Summit DC 2015 to talk about solutions to end the practice. Youth- and women-led organizations like APAD may be best-positioned to create real transformation in their communities, but they run on shoe-string budgets. World leaders may now be speaking out about empowering girls, but this hasn’t translated into major investment or change on the ground. Momentum to change this is building in the United States. Earlier this year, President Obama and the First Lady announced “Let Girls Learn,” a $250 million initiative that brings different government agencies together to tackle the factors that prevent girls from getting an education, including: child marriage, early pregnancy, economic constraints, and physical and sexual violence. For more than three years, IWHC has called for such a “whole-of-government” approach that addresses the whole lives of girls. At Girl Summit DC 2015, the audience heard from U.S. government leaders—from the State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Millennium Challenge Corporation, Peace Corps, and PEPFAR—about their contribution to Let Girls Learn. They also addressed how their agencies are coordinating beyond this initiative to create an Adolescent Girl Strategy, which will set out a holistic approach to meeting the needs of adolescent girls for the entire U.S. Government. Child marriage is rooted in the fact that girls are not valued as much as boys. The solution to this scourge lies not only in keeping girls in schools, but also in investing in their sexual and reproductive health, building their economic and life skills, providing them with mentorship, and working with men, boys, and traditional and religious leaders to change the behaviors and norms that keep girls down. The way forward is clear; now we must turn rhetoric into action. This week, leaders and representatives of civil society organizations will gather in Zambia for the African Girls’ Summit. This summit will give impetus to the African Union’s Campaign to End Child Marriage on the continent with the highest rates of the practice.  IWHC and its partners will be there, calling on "hot spot" countries to prioritize elimination of child marriage. I have seen the difference APAD has made in Cameroon: long-lasting, generational change. Leadership from the Obama administration could take these efforts to the next level, resulting in immediate benefits to girls, their families, and communities around the world.

Welcome to “Women Around the World: This Week,” a series that highlights noteworthy news related to women and U.S. foreign policy. This week’s post,  from October 16 to October 22, was compiled by Valerie Wirtschafter and Katherine Hall. Outrage in New Delhi After Three Young Girls are Raped, One Killed A number of recent reports of rape involving very young children have shaken New Delhi, India, this week, resulting in local protests and social media outrage around the world. Police arrested two teenagers on Sunday after they allegedly raped and killed a two-year-old girl. The police also arrested a teen in a separate incident involving a five-year-old girl. This comes after a similarly disturbing report of a four-year-old girl who was raped and left badly cut near a railroad track last week. New Delhi residents have expressed outrage, accusing the government of inefficiency and failing to protect women and girls. The fatal gang rape of a 23-year-old student in 2012 sparked similar outrage throughout India. Since then, the government has attempted to strengthen anti-rape laws by doubling the maximum prison sentence for rape to twenty years and creating six new courts to prosecute rape cases more quickly. The reporting of rape cases has increased by nearly 900 percent in India, but sexual assault of women and children continues to be underreported across the country. In 2014, 13,766 rape cases of minors were reported in India, with over 1,000 cases in New Delhi alone. Women and Climate Change Earlier this week, the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security released a report, Women and Climate Change, highlighting the disproportionate impact of climate change on women, and the important role women play in contributing to mitigation efforts in many parts of the world. The report found that while women bear some of the greatest costs of climate change, they have been systematically excluded from decision-making processes. Despite formal exclusion, women are already leading climate change efforts in many parts of the world by creating innovative and localized solutions, resulting in more resilient communities. One major opportunity for greater gender inclusion in climate change discussions could come next month, as France hosts the twenty-first Session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21/CMP11), otherwise known as “Paris 2015,” with the goal of achieving a new international agreement on climate applicable to all countries. Marine Corps Study Finds Mixed-Gender Combat Units are not Detrimental to Morale or Performance Last month, the Marine Corps released a four page summary of findings from a year-long study to assess the impact of gender-integration on combat units. The summary noted that all-male units performed better than mixed squads, and that including women in these units could undermine combat readiness. The report sparked significant controversy, and Marine Corps’ leaders indicated they would use the findings to seek an exemption for opening up certain combat positions to women. Immediately following the release of the summary, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus questioned the study’s design and findings. Criticism has only grown more vocal following a leak of all 380 pages of the report earlier this week. While the full report indicates that women were not as physically strong as their male counterparts, it also demonstrates that the Marine Corps could successfully integrate women into all combat positions without harming morale or performance.