In early September, a story emerged about an 8-year-old girl who bled to death on her wedding night after she was raped by her new husband, who is in his 40s. Since then, activists across the region have been discussing on various social media platforms how to combat the practice of child marriage.

A new Human Rights Watch video documents the psychological and physical harm that child marriage causes to girls. In the video, a father expresses his regret at having chosen to give up his two young daughters to marriage, and two members of the religious community and a Nobel Laureate speak about the need to abolish the practice.

“Thousands of Yemeni girls have their childhood stolen and their futures destroyed because they are forced to marry too young,” said Liesl Gerntholtz, women’s rights director at Human Rights Watch. “The Yemeni government should end this abusive practice.”

Members of the Rights and Freedoms Committee in the country’s National Dialogue Conference should recommend prohibiting child marriage during its final plenary session in September 2013, Human Rights Watch said.

When the committee charged with drafting a new constitution as part of the transitional period is convened, it should consider including an 18-year age minimum in the new constitution Human Rights Watch warns, adding that if no minimum age is included, parliament should pass a law setting the minimum age at 18.

The Friends of Yemen should at its meeting in New York consider increasing support for programs that boost girls’ and women’s access to education, reproductive health information and services, and protection from domestic violence, both in cities and rural areas, Human Rights Watch added.

Tawakkol Karman, the Yemeni activist who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011, has criticized the transitional government’s failure to ban child marriage. She told Human Rights Watch that: “[Yemen’s] popular, peaceful revolution came about for the sake of fixing these societal problems. It didn’t happen just to solve political problems, but also to address societal problems, the most important being child marriage.”

A 2011 Human Rights Watch report documented severe and long-lasting harm to Yemeni girls forced by their families to marry, in some cases when they were as young as 8. Human Rights Watch spoke to 34 Yemeni girls and women. They said that marrying early meant that they lost control over their lives, including the ability to decide whether and when to bear children. They said that it had cut short their education, and some said they had been subjected to marital rape and domestic abuse.

There is no legal minimum age for girls to marry in Yemen and the only legal protection for girls is a prohibition on sexual intercourse until the age of puberty. In some cases documented by Human Rights Watch, however, girls were married before their first menstrual period and were raped by their husbands.

Yemen’s transitional authorities have failed to seriously address child marriage, Human Rights Watch said. The transition period, which began after Ali Abdullah Saleh stepped down from the presidency under popular pressure in February 2012, will culminate with presidential and parliamentary elections in February 2014. As part of the transition, the six-month long National Dialogue Conference began on March 18. During the conference’s second plenary in June, it passed 363 directives, but not a single one referred to the practice of child marriage.

Yemeni government and United Nations data from 2006 shows that approximately 14 percent of girls in Yemen are married before age 15, and 52 percent are married before age 18.

Yemen has backtracked on protecting girls from forced marriage. In 1999, Yemen’s parliament, citing religious grounds, abolished the legal minimum age for marriage for girls and boys, which was then 15.

Yemen is party to a number of international treaties and conventions that explicitly – or have been interpreted to – prohibit child marriage and commit governments to take measures to eliminate the practice, including the Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage and Registration of Marriage.

UN treaty-monitoring bodies that oversee implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and the Convention on the Rights of the Child have recommended a minimum age of 18 for marriage.

“The protesters in Change Square in 2011 risked their lives to demand equal rights for all Yemenis, and girls should be no exception,” Gerntholtz said. “Child marriage is a violation of their human rights and should be ended.”

The report, which details victim and eyewitness accounts of mass rape, killings, arbitrary executions and other gross violations of human rights, was authored by the UN Joint Human Rights Office comprised of the UN Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) and the office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in the DRC.

While the report also cites M23 rebels for committing atrocities, it notes that the serious rights violations committed by FARDC soldiers, in particular, were “perpetrated in a systematic manner and with extreme violence” and may constitute international crimes under human rights law, as well as crimes under Congolese criminal law.

“Those responsible for such crimes must know that they will be prosecuted,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said in a statement, calling the sexual violence outlined in the report “horrifying” in scale and systematic nature.

The joint investigation attributes poor discipline among soldiers and officers, as well as improper training and inadequate vetting mechanisms for what happened.

The investigation also expresses serous concern about the failure of the Congolese army to protect civilians, which it says stems from a lack of vetting procedures which allowed former rebels to integrate into the national army without verification of the human rights records.

Most of the cases documented happened on 22 and 23 November 2012 in and around the town of Minova in South Kivu and followed a similar modus operandi: “FARDC soldiers entered houses, usually in groups of three to six, and, after threatening the inhabitants, looted whatever they could find. One or two of the soldiers would leave with the looted goods and at least one would stand guard as the remaining FARDC soldiers raped women and girls in the house.”

“Victims were threatened with death if they shouted; some were raped at gunpoint. Most victims were raped by more than one soldier. Almost all cases of rape documented by the UNJHRO were accompanied by death threats and additional acts of physical violence,” the report continued.

During the period of their occupation of the towns of Goma and Sake in North Kivu, M23 combatants also perpetrated serious violations of international humanitarian law and gross human rights violations, according to the report. The UN investigation documented at least 59 cases of sexual violence, 11 arbitrary executions, recruitment of children, forced labour, cruel inhuman and degrading treatment and looting by M23 combatants.

Noting that the DRC authorities have made efforts to investigate the violations, Ms. Pillay urged DRC authorities do more to ensure justice for the victims and re-establish the confidence of the civilian population in the Congolese justice system.

Authorities suspended for further investigation the commanding officers of two of the battalions implicated in the rapes after MONUSCO sent a letter to FARDC’s chief of staff requesting the formal suspension of support to these units.

Since then, the Government said it had launched investigations and recorded some 400 testimonies from victims, witnesses and suspects. It added that several arrests had been made as an interim internal disciplinary measure, and a number of officers allegedly involved in these acts had been suspended and put at the disposal of the Military Prosecutor for the purposes of the investigation.

Among these officers are the commanding officers and deputy commanding officers of the two main battalions suspected of committing these acts, as well as officers of eight other units.

The head of MONUSCO and the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative in the DRC, Roger Meece welcomed the measures taken by the authorities and affirmed UN’s continued support for an independent, credible judicial investigation and the Congolese armed forces.

Mr. Meece added that future efforts to reform the security sector must include a systematic verification of the human rights records of combatants and their commanders in order for the Congolese army to fully ensure the protection of civilians.

On 30 March, Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Zainab Hawa Bangura, signed an agreement with Prime Minister Augustin Matata Ponyo Mapon to prevent sexual violence.

The Joint Communiqué lists commitments made by the Government, including fighting impunity for crimes of sexual violence, accelerating security sector reform efforts, creating vetting mechanisms when integrating former combatants into the national army, ensuring a better control of mineral resources, and greater support for services to survivors.

In a post published to the Internet, the writer known as Heba El-Shamiri revealed that the reason she had been missing for several years was because she was imprisoned. She stated that the name she is known by is a pseudonym she uses and that her real name is Hanan El-Meshadani. She added that she is a doctor and not a journalist.

“If her allegations are true, then we are facing a serious violation of human rights and a crime that must not be tolerated,” stated ANHRI, “the writer said she was imprisoned for exercising her right to freely express her opinions and criticize the government of her country. It is not clear whether her imprisonment followed legal procedures or whether she was illegaly jailed, which would add enforced disappearance to the list of crimes allegedly committed against her.”

ANHRI added, “Although the Iraqi government’s record with regards to press freedom and attacks on journalists places Iraq among the most dangerous countries for the press, we will not rush to condemn the government based on allegations that have not been investigated yet. However, we do emphasize that these allegations are serious and require urgent attention and a neutral and transparent investigation in order to reveal the truth.”

ANHRI calls on the Iraqi government to quickly investigate the circumstances of imprisoning El-Meshadani and to publish the details of her trial and allow observers from inside and outside Iraq to participate in the fact-finding committee digging into allegations of rape and torture. The organisation repeats its previous demands of the Iraqi authorities, asking it to respect the Iraqi Constitution and the international treaties of which Iraq is a signatory.

“The global pandemic of violence against women and girls thrives in a culture of discrimination and impunity,” Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a message for the occasion. “We must speak out.”

The One Billion Rising campaign, sponsored by the V-day Organization, seeks to mobilize men and women around the world on Valentine’s Day – observed annually in various countries on 14 February – to raise their voices to stop violence against women and girls, including rape, battery, incest, female genital mutilation (FGM), and sex slavery. Dances, protests and panel discussions are being held around the world to mark the event.Each of us has to do our part. Men must respect women as equals and show solidarity with women combating this scourge of violence. All of society will benefit when men and women unite and rise together.

Ban said must be “more than a day of advocacy” and must trigger action. “On this special day, I urge all governments to send us a Valentine message: a concrete commitment of action to end violence against women and girls,” he said in his message, delivered by Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson at an event held at UN Headquarters in New York along with the UNiTE to End Violence against Women campaign and V-Day.

He added that in less than three weeks, States will have the chance to address this cause at the meeting of the UN Commission on the Status of Women. So far, 18 countries have pledged to contribute new initiatives to stop gender-based violence as part of the COMMIT campaign organized by the UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women).

“By standing together we can end violence against women and girls and build a world where all live free from harassment and fear,” Ban said. “This will have benefits that reverberate far beyond the affected individuals as they become empowered to help create a better world.”

Adding a few remarks of his own, Eliasson underlined that women are disproportionately the victims of attacks but many times are left out of decision-making processes to respond to gender violence.

“Women bleed and hurt and struggle. We should acknowledge the special qualities that women can bring to our collective fight against violence,” he said.

“Each of us has to do our part. Men must respect women as equals and show solidarity with women combating this scourge of violence. All of society will benefit when men and women unite and rise together.”

The report by IRC, “Syria: A Regional Crisis” details horrific levels of sexual violence, describing “rape as a significant and disturbing feature of the Syrian civil war.”

In the course of three IRC assessments in Lebanon and Jordan, Syrians identified rape as a primary reason their families fled the country. “Many women and girls relayed accounts of being attacked in public or in their homes, primarily by armed men. These rapes, sometimes by multiple perpetrators, often occur in front of family members,” the report states.

The IRC was also told of attacks in which women and girls were kidnapped, raped, tortured and killed.

Because of the stigma and social norms around the “dishonor” that rape brings to women and girls and their families, Syrian survivors rarely report rape. Many interviewed by the IRC also said survivors fear retribution by their assailants, being killed by “shamed” family members, or in the case of girls, being married off at an early age “to safeguard their honor.”

For survivors who manage to flee, there is a shortage of medical and counseling services to help them recover in the communities where they have settled and even there, challenges continue. Many women and girls face unsafe conditions in refugee camps as well as elevated levels of domestic violence.

According to IRC, more than 600,000 Syrians have fled to over-burdened neighboring countries and the UN anticipates that number could soon exceed 1million if the exodus continues at its current pace of about 3,000 refugees a day. Inside Syria, more than 2 million civilians are displaced and the UN estimates that 4 million are in dire need of assistance.

“The Middle East is once again facing a human displacement tragedy,” the commission states in its new report. “Current assistance levels are drastically insufficient to address existing needs, let alone the barest requirements to respond to a lengthy humanitarian emergency and post-conflict recovery.”

A retired major general from the Netherlands and the former division commander of UN forces in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, Patrick Cammaert made it clear to Michele Lent Hirsch, who interview him for the Women under Siege organization, that an overwhelming number of blue helmets have no idea how to deal with witnessing rape.

“If peacekeepers are not prepared during their pre-deployment training for action to prevent and stop sexual violence, then when they are confronted with it, they don’t know exactly what to do,” Cammaert explained. “And then they freeze and they pretend not to see it, or they think that they should not intervene, or they come from a background where beating up women is more acceptable than in other cultures,” he said.

It seems alarming that those trained by the UN to work in hot spots such as Sudan and DRC, where a woman is reportedly raped almost once every minute, freeze when confronted with rape.

This is the reason why, in 2008, after hearing the confusion among his peers on an issue he found quite clear, Cammaert began training peacekeepers on how to stop rape. He took real cases of sexualized violence from areas with UN forces and then formulated questions for the trainees in his audience. He developed a five-minute video showing DRC, Ivory Coast, and Haiti, “so that the audience, before they get those questions, have an idea of what the mission looked like, and they can hear survivors tell their stories,” he said.

Once the peacekeepers watch a video of rape survivors describing their ordeals, “they can hear it, they can sniff it, they can feel emotion about it,” Cammaert said. The exposure, he hopes, propels them to intervene in future scenarios.

Cammaert said he also trains peacekeepers to look out for warning signs, so that rape is not just something they stumble onto but something they can actually prevent. He gave an example: “If you hear from female committees that the females are going from their IDP camps back to their village to work in the fields, but they still sleep in the forest,” he said, something is amiss. Once peacekeepers ask women what they’re afraid of they’ll usually discover that there have been men roaming near the village, or other conditions that the women thought unsafe.

Until they’re trained, these peacekeepers don’t always realise that they must actively search for signs of future violence, Cammaert said to Michele Lent Hirsch, especially if they’ve been told they’ll be far from conflict.

“If you have not been told during your pre-deployment training, you might be shocked that you are facing these types of situations,” he said. “During my training, I had to work hard to convince these people that this is what is required of you, and you do not have two days to think about it, but two seconds to think about it.”

As for the effectiveness of these measures nothing has been tested, yet; however, Cammaert said that he hopes the training program will move out of UN Women, where it’s currently housed, and into mainstream UN activities. He is clear when he speaks about rape in conflict that it should concern all genders. This is not just a “women’s issue,” Cammaert said. “This is a security issue.”

In the case of India, the attitude of the police towards rape was put under scrutiny when two undercover Tehelka’s reporters posed as research scholars to interview 30 police officers in the Delhi–National Capital Region. Tehelka reported that senior cops of a dozen police stations across Gurgaon, Noida, Ghaziabad, and Faridabad were caught on camera blaming everything from revealing clothes to having boyfriends as the main reasons for rape. Further more, some of them believed that if a woman has consensual sex with one man, then she can’t complain if his friends  join in.

Therefore, as for India, any investigations following a case of rape can be expected to be driven by prejudice, a lack of accuracy and respect, and a low rate of conviction of the perpetrators.

The situation is not different in other countries. A 2012 report by Human Rights Watch on the “Imprisonment of Women and Girls for ‘Moral Crimes’ in Afghanistan” describes similar injustices perpetrated against female victims of rape or sexual assault. The report states that prejudices of those entrusted with enforcing the law help male perpetrators of sexual violence to get away with it. The report reveals that “when women decide to leave because of abusive relationships and unhappiness,” male family members control them by making false accusations and the “ authorities [are] too willing to accept their allegations at face value.”

The report analysed three dozen cases and in most cases the judges allowed their own discretion to prevail: in the case of Tahmina J., 18, instead of pursuing her allegations of rape, the court’s decision warned that women should know that it is not safe for them to go out at night. As a result, she was convicted of zina, a broad meaning that indicates any haram (prohibited) act, and sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison.

The problem touches every continent. For example, violence against Native American women in the United States is perpetrated at an astronomical level. The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs described the plight of Native American women as a human rights crisis. Amnesty International reported that Native American women are 2.5 times more likely to be stalked and their murder rate is 10 times the national average. Most disconcerting is that Native women report that the perpetrators of more than 85 percent of sexual assaults are non-Native men, as stated by the U.S. Department of Justice.

In Colombia at least two women are raped every hour, according to the Instituto Nacional de Medicine Legal y Ciencias Dorenses (National Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences of Colombia). In 2011, a number of groups, including Oxfam and the Casa de la Mujer, a non-profit Bogota-based aid organization, teamed up to produce a report called the “First Survey on the Prevalence of Sexual Violence Against Women in the Context of the Colombian Armed Conflict 2001-2009.” The study showed that from 2001 to 2009, in the 407 municipalities that have an active presence of armed forces, 18 percent of women reported a form of abuse, from rape to forced prostitution. “This means that during the nine years in which the study was carried out, 489,687 women were victims of sexual violence. This is an average of 54,410 women per year, 149 per day, or 6 women per hour,” the report states.

It might come as a surprise that similar cases of prejudice can be found also in Europe, like in the case of the 15-year-old rape victim in Rochdale, England, who had appealed for help through her parents to the social services. She told reporters that the “Social services told my Mum and Dad that I was a prostitute and it was a lifestyle choice and that because I was only six months off turning 16, they weren’t going to do anything.”

This event happened after the Council of Europe via the Committee of Ministers issued the European Assembly Recommendation 1887 (2009) on ‘Rape of women, including marital rape,’ which drawn the attention of member states’ governments for its implementation.

The situation is not necessarily better in Greece, where beside the normal routine of the Greek society where a heavy patriarchy rules, the Sharia law is applied to the Muslim women of Thrace. With the application of Sharia law by the Mufti, which is often ratified by Greek courts despite the conflicting Greek constitutional provisions and international obligations of Greece, an effective gray area is created on matters of sexual violence and rape.

Finally, Roma women not only confront multiple kinds of discrimination as women in Greece, but also as members of the Roma minority in Greece, a community with its own discriminatory patriarchy traditions and practices. Racism, patriarchy and economical disadvantages contribute to underplay any matters of sexual assault, and rape.

A panorama beyond all words horrible. There is nothing else a woman might add here.

What triggered interest and attention, as judge Richard Joseph Goldstone stated when serving as first chief prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, was evidence on the magnitude of rape in Bosnia. In fact, the European investigators calculated that during the Yugoslavian wars all parties committed sexual abuses; however, 20.000 Muslim women and girls were raped by Bosnian Serbs as a strategy to terrorize people in 1992, and the number in itself was alarming. Hence, only shocking numbers persuaded the court to focus on sexual assaults and organized rape, and to give it a place in international laws as a crime against humanity.

At the present time, the news talks about the use of rape in Syria, where government forces and pro-government militia members assaulted women and girls during home raids, and use rape as a form of torture on people detained in prisons. As a result, questions arise about the contemporary use of rape – a weapon able to hit its victim on several levels, and for a prolonged time.

It is a fact that rape has historically been used as a weapon of war, but also of intimidation. And if rape is always appalling, it is damaging in a very specific way within conservative communities, where women who have been raped are cast aside as socially unfit, and often murdered to ‘clean’ what is perceived as dishonour to their relatives. This tragedy hits many families, within and outside the borders of Europe.

In the Middle East, rape often seems to be a tool of social repression, and it is hardly considered an act of warfare, or a crime against humanity. For example, rape was used excessively during Moammar Qaddafi’s attempt to remain in power in Libya, and it was hardly spoken of. Only the desperate act of Ms Iman Al-Obeidi, the lady who walked into a Tripoli’s hotel filled with foreign journalists and revealed she was raped by government authorities, brought the Qaddafi regime’s use of rape as an instrument of political repression to international attention.

In another case, when in January 2011 activists began to call for democracy in Khartoum, Sudan, rape as a weapon to intimidate was not far behind. Safiya Ishaq, a 25-year-old fine arts student, attended the rallies and handed out flyers on campus. A couple of weeks later, she was kidnapped by National Intelligence and Security Services (NISS) agents. She was tortured and gang raped multiple times as a punishment for her activity, and a message to others. The fact that a Sudanese woman spoken publicly about being raped shocked the country’s conservative society. As a result, Ishaq was forced to flee Sudan for her own safety.

In another case, on March 2011, when Egyptian protesters returned to Tahrir Square and expressed frustration with the slow pace of reforms, the Egyptian military not only arrested several women, and charged them with prostitution since they mingled with men in the crowd, but forced them to submit to ‘virginity checks.’ The same authorities, in November 2011, arrested Egyptian-American journalist Mona Eltahawy, broke her left arm and her right hand, and sexually assaulted her. Another case of soldier’s misbehaviour, or an act of war against freedom?

Often people assert that sexual violence is a natural part of any conflict situations, and rape springs from a wish of men to humiliate enemies by raping ‘their’ women, implanting sperm, and wiping out the enemy’s ethnicity. This kind of thinking do not consider women as autonomous human beings; on the contrary, it focuses on their bodies as commodities. It justifies violence, and the tyrannical wish to control women, humiliate them, and violate them. What is more, it confines women to a condition of submission dictated by men’s functional necessities, which is hardly conceivable or acceptable today.

Thus, in the end, the proclamation of rape as a gender-related crime in 1996 was a great step forward, but it can not put our hearts at rest.

What about countries like Yemen, where rape is felt as irrelevant, almost natural? Before the uprising of February 2011, violence against women was not a public issue, and it was the norm. Women’s role in society was clear, and it still is; article 32 of Yemen’s Constitution describes women as ‘sisters of men’, subsidiary to men rather than persons in their own right. An Amnesty International report in 2009 found out that violence against women was heavy, persistent, and socially acceptable. Therefore there existed no provision in Yemeni law covering any kind of violence against women. Fortunately, when the uprising began, issues of gender-based oppression were forced to the surface, and taken into account, due to the presence of women among the activists.

More attention to woman’s condition in Yemen might be paid in the near future due to the fact that in 2011 Tawakkul Karman was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The female Yemeni activist has been jailed many times, faced repercussions after publishing a paper condemning ultra-conservative party members for blocking a bill to make it illegal to marry girls under the age of 17, and narrowly escaped with her life when a female assassin tried to stab her.

To her, and to many women, the key to the problem seems to be what people are educated to consider natural before any social riots, or war destabilises their world. For example, it’s true that men rape in groups out of social pressure to prove their masculinity, and that this conduct can be anticipated in case of war; especially if officers order men to rape as proof of loyalty, or to share culpability. However, it is profoundly horrid that nowadays a human being can still feel the need to hurt another one, to prove himself to others.

As for the victims, in between the helpless expression of men who love them and the fact that men hardly understand what happened to them, the hardest thing seems to be the doubt women read in their men’s eyes on a daily basis. Even if these men understand the women’s intention to take the case to court, and make it a matter of principles and justice, they still remain somehow detached, somehow partisans of a male comradeship hard to crack.

It is arguable that society, no matter the country, crashes against rape as if against something rather ineffable; silence dominates, indifference covers what goes unseen and surfaces in the victim’s life only with time. Sometime for a victim of rape, there is only the consolation of knowing she is not alone: as for some women survivors of brutal rape in Congo, who were rejected by their families, and resolved to emigrate to Italy. There they met some Italian women victims of rape, who were divorced by their husbands or left by their boyfriends since they became socially unfit; the sharing of rage and pain made them feel better.

As a woman, I find no pity in my heart for the man who rapes, no justification, or pardon. As Christy Leigh Stewart stated: “You keep the title of ‘president’ even if you served only one term. The same goes for rapists,” and there is no prison, or punishment, able to take off them the shame of being so disgustingly weak.