Never Be Silent

ceruleanprotazoa:

danniedorko:

-cafelife-:

heartisbreaking:

jcullo:

sidneydane:

holy shit guys. sign & reblog please. don’t read the entire description of what he did to NaYoung if you can’t take graphic descriptions. but please do sign.

this is disgusting ..

everyone reblog and sign!

mothafucker u will pay. sign and reblog everyone.

From allAfrica.com, excerpt:

Lagos — More condemnations at the weekend, greeted the recent killing and alleged rape of women by the military in Conakry stadium, Guinea, with a call for an international commission of inquiry to probe the immediate and remote causes of the protest, following allegations that the head of the military junta, Captain Moussa Dais Camara, was planning to contest the presidential election in the country, scheduled for January, 2010.

The protest, which followed repeated assurances by Camara that he would organise the presidential elections, without participating in it, however, led to the condemnation of the actions of the military by the Women Advocates Research and Documentation Centre (WARDC), Lagos, and Justice, Development and Peace Commission (JDPC), Ijebu-Ode, Ogun State, in the wake of the protest by Guinean nationals.

In a statement jointly signed by the Executive Director of WARDC, Abiola Afolabi-Akiyode and JDPC Director, Rev. Fr Patrick Ngoyi, “demanded that the capital city and the entire country be demilitarized for peace to reign.”

“We believe that the military junta cannot investigate the murders carried out by his men without being partial. It is unfortunate that this repressive act took place at a time when the international community, human rights institutions and government institutions in Africa are trying to eliminate all forms of discriminations against women and encourage their political participation using instruments such as the Campaign against all Forms of Discriminations Against Women (CEDAW), International Violence Against Women Act (I-VAWA) among others,” the statement stressed.

The two groups further stated that “an international commission of enquiry be set up to examine the evidence of crimes against humanity and other violation of international human laws including rape and murder as well as bringing the perpetrators of the attack on civilians, including sexual violence against women, to justice in trial that meets international standards of fairness.”

From CNN, in its entirety:

AMMAN, Jordan (CNN) — A 12-year-old Yemeni girl, who was forced into marriage, died during a painful childbirth that also killed her baby, a children’s rights group said Monday.

Fawziya Ammodi struggled for three days in labor, before dying of severe bleeding at a hospital on Friday, said the Seyaj Organization for the Protection of Children.

“Although the cause of her death was lack of medical care, the real case was the lack of education in Yemen and the fact that child marriages keep happening,” said Seyaj President Ahmed al-Qureshi.

Born into an impoverished family in Hodeidah, Fawziya was forced to drop out of school and married off to a 24-year-old man last year, al-Qureshi said.

Child brides are commonplace in Yemen, especially in the Red Sea Coast where tribal customs hold sway. Hodeidah is the fourth largest city in Yemen and an important port.

More than half of all young Yemeni girls are married off before the age of 18 — many times to older men, some with more than one wife, a study by Sanaa University found.

While it was not immediately known why Fawziya’s parents married her off, the reasons vary. Sometimes, financially-strapped parents offer up their daughters for hefty dowries.

Marriage means the girls are no longer a financial or moral burden to their parents. And often, parents will extract a promise from the husband to wait until the girl is older to consummate the marriage.

Children’s organization UNICEF issued a statement Monday saying: “Child marriages violate the rights of children in the most deplorable way. The younger the girl is when she becomes pregnant, the greater the health risks for her and her baby.

“Girls who give birth before the age of 15 are five times more likely to die in childbirth than women in their 20s. Child marriage denies girls of their childhood, deprives them of an education and robs them of their innocence.”

“More must be done to address the underlying causes in order to prevent tragic deaths like those of 12-year-old Fawziya and her baby,” the statement added.

The issue of Yemeni child brides came to the forefront in 2008 with 10-year-old Nujood Ali.

She was pulled out of school and married to a man who beat and raped her within weeks of the ceremony.

To escape, Nujood hailed a taxi — the first time in her life — to get across town to the central courthouse where she sat on a bench and demanded to see a judge.

After a well-publicized trial, she was granted a divorce.

The Yemeni parliament tried in February to pass a law, setting the minimum marriage age at 17. But the measure has not reached the president because many parliamentarians argued it violates sharia, or Islamic law, which does not stipulate a minimum age.

Learn more about child brides and maternal mortality from the following organizations:

CARE

The White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood

UNICEF

From Kansas City InfoZine, excerpt:

Kansas City, MO - infoZine - Matt J. Whitworth, Acting United States Attorney for the Western District of Missouri, announced that a Kansas City, Mo., man pleaded guilty in federal court today to the attempted commercial sex trafficking of a child.

This conviction is the result of Operation Guardian Angel, a unique undercover law enforcement investigation targeting the demand for child prostitutes in the Kansas City metro area. As a result of this investigation, a total of seven defendants were indicted in the nation’s first-ever federal prosecution of the alleged customers of child prostitution under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act.

Steven C. Albers, 40, of Kansas City-North, pleaded guilty before U.S. Chief District Judge Fernando J. Gaitan this afternoon to the charge contained in a March 10, 2009, federal indictment.

During the weekend of March 5 to 7, 2009, the Human Trafficking Rescue Project, led by the Independence Police Department, conducted a sting operation targeting local customers who solicit pimps to engage in commercial sex acts with children. The “children” were advertised online at Craig’s List. No real children were actually involved in the sting.

At approximately 9:33 a.m. on March 5, 2009, Albers responded via e-mail to an ad that advertised “little girls available.” The ad’s content clearly advertised the children for sex. Albers requested a lunch hour meeting so that he would have time to drive from his office near the Country Club Plaza. The undercover officer responded that he had an 11-year-old girl and a 15-year-old girl available for sex. In a follow-up e-mail, Albers said he wanted to spend an hour with an 11-year-old girl at a cost of $100. In an e-mail later that morning, Albers said he wanted to spend half an hour with the 11-year-old girl but would pay an extra $20 to go “bareback,” referring to sexual intercourse without a condom, for a total price of $80.

From the BBC, excerpts:

Across sub-Saharan Africa, women have a one in 13 lifetime chance of dying in pregnancy and childbirth.

In DR Congo’s North Kivu, where the basic kits and tools can be in egregiously short supply, the odds are often far worse.

Like Claudine, Esther Maombi (no relation) was on the point of delivering her baby as she fled the fighting.

But she was not so lucky.

“The clinic had given me an emergency birth kit, which I put in my bag. But we were robbed as we ran,” she says.

Her baby died soon after birth.

The two women tell their experiences - all too commonplace in DR Congo - to Dr Grace Kodindo, an obstetrician and gynaecologist from Chad.

She became something of an iconic figure after appearing in a BBC Panorama documentary Dead Mums Don’t Cry in 2005 about her struggle to stop mothers in her country dying.

It led to her being invited to address the UN and she was awarded for her work in championing the Millennium Development Goal of cutting maternal mortality - particularly in Africa…

Twenty-year-old Yvonne tells Dr Kodindo how she was raped by soldiers from one of the warring militias as she made her way to her parents’ field.

“I hid myself away because I didn’t want anyone to know,” she says.

“Only when I found I was pregnant did my parents send me to the clinic.”

Dr Kodindo knows it would not take much more to transform lives - for example making post-exposure prophylaxis (Pep) kits available, an emergency cocktail of drugs to protect rape victims from infections (including HIV) and unwanted pregnancy.

Even where there is good news, it can be misleading - the first clinic Dr Kodindo visits has very few cases of HIV, and no recorded maternal deaths.

It seems that while some medicines are available here, the ability to keep accurate records may be lacking.

But Dr Kodindo does come across one sign of hope, a story that has not been much reported in the West.

She sees an an army court marshal where soldiers found guilty of rape have their insignia ripped off their uniforms and are handed down life sentences of hard labour by be-gowned judges.

Together, justice and access to better medicine could help the plight of women caught on both front lines.

“By far the biggest casualties of this conflict are civilians - not the fighters. And the women and children suffer the most - their need is greatest,” Dr Kodindo says.

“Reproductive health care must be seen as a frontline priority - not something to think about only after the fighting is over.”

From the Huffington Post, excerpt:

PADUCAH, Ky. — A former soldier received five consecutive life sentences Friday for his role in the rape and murder of an Iraqi teenager and the slaying of three of her family members.

“What the defendant did was horrifying and inexcusable,” U.S. District Judge Thomas Russell said in sentencing to Steven Dale Green, 24, of Midland, Texas. “The court believes any lesser sentence would be insufficient.”

A civilian jury in western Kentucky convicted Green in May of raping Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, conspiracy and multiple counts of murder.

Green shot and killed the teen’s mother, father and sister, then became the third soldier to rape her before shooting her in the face. Her body was set on fire March 12, 2006, at their rural home outside Mahmoudiya, Iraq, about 20 miles south of Baghdad.

The panel couldn’t reach an unanimous decision about whether Green should get a death sentence, automatically making Green’s sentence life in prison. Barring a successful appeal or presidential pardon, Green will not be eligible for release from prison.

Green told the judge he merely followed orders from other soldiers involved in the attack.

“You can act like I’m a sociopath. You can act like I’m a sex offender or whatever,” Green said. “If I had not joined the Army, if I had not gone to Iraq, I would not have got caught up in anything.”

At a hearing in May, Green repeatedly apologized to the al-Janabi family, saying he knew little about Iraqis and realizes now his actions then were wrong. Green described the attacks as “evil” and said when he dies “there will be justice and whatever I deserve, I’ll get.”

This is absolutely horrifying. From Human Rights Watch, excerpt:

In 2004, a teenage girl incarcerated at the Illinois Youth Center in Warrenville was sexually abused by a male employee at the facility. The abuse consisted of repeated acts of oral sex and sexual intercourse. There was no doubt that the abuse occurred, and the employee ultimately pleaded guilty to two counts of criminal sexual assault.

The girl, identified in court documents as “B,” eventually filed suit in federal court, seeking compensation. But in July, a federal judge in Chicago dismissed her case. Why? Because she had failed to comply with the technical requirements of a little-known federal law called the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA).

This law, passed in 1996, creates a separate and unequal legal system for the more than 2.3 million prisoners in the United States. It singles out their lawsuits for a host of burdens and restrictions that apply to no one else. These restrictions cover not only those who have been convicted of crime, but also pretrial detainees, who are presumed innocent, and-as B discovered-youth in juvenile facilities. Human Rights Watch is unaware of any other country in which national legislation singles out prisoners for a unique set of obstacles to vindicating their legal rights in court.

So what did B do wrong? Among its many other requirements, the PLRA requires that before a detained person may sue over the conditions of her confinement, she must first take her complaints through all levels of the facility’s grievance system, complying with all deadlines and other procedural rules. If the detained person fails to comply with all technical requirements, or misses any deadlines, her right to sue may be lost forever.

B testified that she did not file a grievance about the abuse because she was afraid of retaliation. She did eventually give investigators a written statement saying that the employee had sexually assaulted her. But that wasn’t good enough. According to the court, giving a written statement is not the same as filing a formal grievance, and under the unforgiving standards of the PLRA, the young woman’s claims were dismissed.

Even discounting the well-justified fear of retaliation, it’s unrealistic to expect an incarcerated teenager who is being sexually abused by staff to navigate the deadlines and procedural requirements of a multi-step grievance system. These rules are difficult enough for adult prisoners to follow, and as any parent knows, many teenagers are less capable than adults of carrying out tasks that require sustained attention and compliance with deadlines. In addition, incarcerated youth suffer from high rates of mental illness, learning problems, impulse-control disorders, and other disabilities that make pursuing a complex task challenging or impossible. Add to that the well-established fact that many victims of sexual assault suffer from post-traumatic responses that make it impossible for them to report the assault immediately.

From Human Rights Watch, in its entirety:

(Los Angeles) - Sheriff Lee Baca of Los Angeles County has agreed to direct over $3 million in his FY 2010 budget to testing physical evidence in rape cases for DNA matches, Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky has announced. The announcement came in a letter to Human Rights Watch, which has been researching the backlog in untested evidence in rape cases.

The funding commitment is an essential step for the county to eliminate its backlog -currently estimated at 4,071 cases - in testing the collections of evidence, known as rape kits. But a comprehensive plan on rape kit testing and increased oversight from the County Board of Supervisors are also essential to successful testing of the kits, Human Rights Watch said. The letter from Yaroslavsky was dated September 1, 2009.

“The sheriff’s commitment of vital funds for rape kit testing, especially in the midst of a significant budget crisis, sends an important message to rape victims that seeking justice in their cases matters,” said Sarah Tofte, US Program researcher at Human Rights Watch and author of “Testing Justice: Untested Rape Kits in Los Angeles City and County.”

In the letter, Yaroslavsky wrote that Baca would apply $2.3 million of his budget to rape kit testing, and an additional $700,000 to hire crime lab staff necessary to increase the county’s testing capacity. Yaroslavsky also noted that he has asked the county to find matching funds in its FY 2011 budget for the sheriff’s rape kit backlog testing program.

In “Testing Justice,” released in March, Human Rights Watch reported that at least 5,000 untested rape kits were in the Sheriff’s Department’s evidence storage facilities. Testing a rape kit can identify a suspect, connect evidence from apparently unrelated crimes, corroborate the victim’s account, and exonerate innocent suspects. It can bolster investigations, and move more rape cases through the criminal justice system.

In June, the Sheriff’s Department announced it had suspended rape kit testing due to a lack of funds, and that, of the 200 kits that had been tested prior to June 2009, only six profiles were entered into the DNA database for possible criminal and crime scene matches. On September 1, the Sheriff’s Department announced that, of the 283 rape kits tested so far from the backlog, 42 profiles had been entered into the DNA databank, leading to eight arrests.

Human Rights Watch urged the Sheriff’s Department to develop a detailed plan for rape kit testing and the County Board of Supervisors to enhance its oversight of the department’s progress.

While the sheriff is clearly making progress on rape kit testing, a public, detailed, and comprehensive testing plan is still needed, Human Rights Watch said. Such a plan would lay out meaningful benchmarks and explain how the department will develop investigative leads from the testing results.

“Eliminating the rape kit backlog is the first step in trying to obtain justice for rape victims,” Tofte said. “Then it’s essential to follow up the leads from test results with an effective investigation.”

From the NY Times, a Q&A with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the only female head of state in Africa. Excerpt:

You took office in January 2006, in a kind of feminist fantasy come true.

People didn’t think it would happen in Liberia because we are a poor, war-torn country that they thought required a man and a macho person — but the women showed differently, and I must say that I hope we’re proving them wrong.

On her trip to Africa earlier this month, which included a stop in Monrovia, your nation’s capital, Hillary Clinton railed against the rape epidemic in eastern Congo. Is that also a problem in Liberia?

Absolutely. It certainly is a big problem in Liberia. It still is because for one thing there’s a culture of silence — silence because of shame to the families.

If women ran the world, would wars still exist?

No. It would be a better, safer and more productive world. A woman would bring an extra dimension to that task — and that’s a sensitivity to humankind. It comes from being a mother.

But if women had power, they would be more likely to acquire the negative traits that power breeds, like selfishness and territorialism.

It would take a very long term of women absolutely in power to get to the place where they became men.

From the Huffington Post/AP, excerpts:

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - An Iranian opposition leader on Monday released what he said was an account by a prisoner raped by his jailers in a challenge to the country’s leadership which has sought to silence claims of torture and abuses in the postelection crackdown.

The allegations of torture and even rapes against imprisoned opposition protesters have become a source of embarrassment to the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Iran’s clerical leadership as they try to put behind them the turmoil of the disputed June presidential election.

Hundreds of protesters and opposition politicians and activists were arrested when security forces crushed the mass protests that erupted after the opposition claimed the June 12 vote was rigged in favor of Ahmadinejad and that pro-reform challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi was the true winner. The opposition says at least 69 people were killed in the crackdown, including some who died from torture in prison.

In recent weeks, hard-line government supporters have fiercely denounced senior opposition figure Mahdi Karroubi after he announced earlier this month that he had received reports that detainees were raped and tortured to death.

On Monday, Karroubi responded by making public for the first time details of one of the accounts. In a statement on his party’s Web site, he warned he would release more accounts unless authorities stop denying his claims…

The abuse issue is particularly sensitive for Ahmadinejad’s government and the clerical leadership because even some conservatives have joined in the criticism of alleged mistreatment of prisoners.

Senior police and judiciary officials have acknowledged that some detainees were abused and called for those responsible to be punished, apparently in an effort to calm public outrage. Also, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ordered the closure of Kahrizak prison, where at least three prisoners are known to have died.

The issue could also become a weapon in an ongoing split within the conservative camp between Ahmadinejad and his rivals, who have shown increasing tensions since the election.