Despite the indisputable gains over the years, women and the girl child are still being raped, violated and discriminated against – not just in Uganda but even in the rest of the world. And it’s not just strangers who are abusing women; so many women are abused by their partners, friends and relatives. The distressing statistics don’t stop with just rape but so many other forms of violence; physical violence, verbal abuse, emotional torture, economic abuse and sexual abuse besides various acts of harm and harassment.

On a daily basis, the media is filled with disturbing headlines;

Defiler accused of murder over bride price
“THE Police in Lira are looking for a 42-year-old man who allegedly killed his wife for denying him family resources to pay bride price for a P.6 pupil he defiled…..”
http://www.newvision.co.ug/D/8/16/757474 By Bonney Odongo

Two men murder wives in Kibaale NewVision Wednesday, 20th July, 2011
“Two women have allegedly been murdered by their husbands in Kibaale district in two days.
In the first incident, Emmanuel Munyaneza, 35, allegedly murdered Donanta Mukamaana. The incident took place in Nyamarunda sub-county on Sunday night.
The district Police commander, John Elatu Ojokuna, said Munyaneza allegedly killed Mukamaana after a domestic quarrel at their home late in the night………….” http://www.newvision.co.ug/D/8/18/760678

6-year-old defiled child found HIV-positive New Vision Thursday, 4th August, 2011
By Paul Watala
“A 6-year-old girl who fell victim of a 39-year-old man’s sexual appetite has tested HIV-positive………”

http://www.newvision.co.ug/D/8/12/761828

Women deliberately targeted for rape – report By Al-Mahdi Ssenkabirwa Monitor Monday, July 18 2011 at 08:14
“Women from minority and indigenous communities are targeted for rape and other forms of sexual violence, torture and killings, a new report has shown.
According to the State of the World’s Minorities and Indigenous Peoples 2011 Report released online by Minority Rights Group International last week, the degrading acts are meted out against women because of their ethnic, religious or indigenous identity……..” http://www.monitor.co.ug/News/National/-/688334/1202944/-/bl5ushz/-/

The stories go on and on and the statistics and facts are distressing. It is so sad that some women are too good to complain, they do realize how dire their situation is but because they have grown to believe that there is no other option they have in life but to suffer in silence. Children growing in such houses which are infested with the syndrome of domestic violence usually may also continue the cycle of violence in their adult life by either being willing victims of abuse or perpetrators.

Some perpetrators of domestic violence however are not charged by the police because the police do not think cases of domestic violence are criminal; they call them family issues that can be settled by the family members. In addition to the human damage, domestic violence also takes a huge toll on a nation in terms of its various resources. The economic damage of domestic violence is truly enormous – but a broken life cannot be measured with any currency.

The truth is that most women don’t have the privilege of being able to look at gender injustice from a distance; they have no choice but to live it every day. There is so much work to be done. Vibrant feminists and activist movements are taking on issues from domestic violence, abuse and reproductive health rights, but they cannot pick up the fight on their own if the law does not back up in terms of implementing punishment to the perpetrators.

The fight also calls for men to build partnerships with women to end such injustices but above all domestic violence can never be eliminated from society unless society refuses to tolerate it. Speak out today; everyone has a right to live a life free from violence.

Ntunga Dorah

(Kampala) – Women with disabilities in northern Uganda experience ongoing discrimination and sexual and gender-based violence, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Many are unable to gain access to basic services, including health care and justice, and they have been largely ignored in post-conflict reconstruction efforts.
The 73-page report, “‘As If We Weren’t Human’: Discrimination and Violence against Women with Disabilities in Northern Uganda,” describes frequent abuse and discrimination by strangers, neighbors, and even family members against women and girls with disabilities in the north. Women interviewed for the report said they were not able to get basic provisions such as food, clothing, and shelter in camps for displaced persons or in their own communities. One woman with a physical disability who lived in such a camp told Human Rights Watch that people said to her, “You are useless. You are a waste of food. You should just die so that others can eat the food.” The research was conducted in six districts of northern Uganda – a region recently emerging from over two decades of brutal conflict between the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army and the government.
“One of the untold stories of the long war in Northern Uganda and its aftermath is the isolation, neglect, and abuse of women and girls with disabilities,” said Shantha Rau Barriga, disability rights researcher and advocate at Human Rights Watch. “As Ugandans in the north struggle to reclaim their lives, the government and humanitarian agencies need to make sure that women with disabilities are not left out.”
The report is based on interviews with 64 women and girls with a wide range of disabilities, some caused by diseases such as polio and others by landmines or gunshot wounds during the protracted conflict. According to a 2007 national survey, approximately 20 percent of people in Uganda have disabilities. However, northern Uganda is believed to have higher disability rates because of war-related injuries and limited access to treatment or vaccinations for illnesses.
Human Rights Watch’s research suggests that women with disabilities are particularly vulnerable to sexual and gender-based violence. More than one-third of the women interviewed told Human Rights Watch that they had experienced some form of sexual or physical abuse. None had been able to press criminal charges or pursue prosecutions of their attackers.
“Women with disabilities are often not given any information about sexual or reproductive health and HIV,” Barriga said. “But they have real sexual health needs, and they also need to be protected from sexual violence and be able to get justice if abused.”
Women with disabilities, the report notes, are especially vulnerable to HIV because of poverty, difficulty in negotiating safe sex, lack of accessible information, and susceptibility to violence and rape. Many of the women could not reach health centers or police stations, which are often situated far away or are inaccessible for lack of sign language interpreters, Braille signage or ramps for physical access. Others encountered discriminatory attitudes by staff and could not get assistance even from family members.
“I cannot bathe near others,” Candace, a woman with HIV and who has an amputated leg from a landmine, told Human Rights Watch. “My neighbors think that the water that comes off of me has HIV in it. They say I will get the community sick if they touch the water. There has been HIV sensitization in the community but there is no real change in attitudes.”
Among the recommendations in the report is that the Ugandan government should adequately address the needs of women with disabilities in post-conflict development plans and programs. The report also calls on the government to ensure access for women with disabilities to mainstream government programs, particularly with regard to sexual and gender-based violence, reproductive health, and HIV.
Human Rights Watch found that the vast majority of humanitarian aid organizations do not have specific programs to meet the needs of people with disabilities. The report recommends that humanitarian aid organizations partner with organizations representing people with disabilities to ensure that information about the resettlement process and available support services reach them.
One of the key problems is the lack of data on the number of women with disabilities in northern Uganda and their access to services, Human Rights Watch said. The government and humanitarian agencies need to collect this information and use it to develop more inclusive programs for women with disabilities.
The government of Uganda has an obligation to respect the rights of persons with disabilities under international and regional laws, the national constitution, and other domestic legislation. As a state party to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Uganda should ensure that women with disabilities enjoy all human rights on an equal basis with others. In practice, the government of Uganda needs to do more to implement its laws to protect women with disabilities in northern Uganda from violence and to ensure their access to basic services, Human Rights Watch said.
“The war has hidden and compounded the isolation and discrimination against women and girls with disabilities,” Barriga said. “But now the government has a special opportunity – and a special responsibility – to meet their needs.”

Selected Accounts from Individuals Interviewed for “As If We Weren’t Human”
“There were 12 people in the house on the day it was burned down [by the Lord's Resistance Army]. Those of us closer to the door survived. I lay on my stomach and protected my heart. My head got burned, and I lost my sight. I don’t hear well.”
- Edna, a 29-year-old woman who fled her rural village for Lira town in 2004. Edna is also HIV-positive.
“I was raped three times in this house one week ago. The man came at night, so I was unable to recognize him. I have not told anyone, not even my mother. I was thinking of bringing a panga [machete] to bed with me in case he comes again. I fear that if I report, then I will need to know my HIV status. I want to check my HIV status at a health center but I do not have transport to town. The hospital is far and my [hand-crank] bicycle is broken. Others in the community will say that it’s my fault and that I run around with men.”
- Angela, a 20-year-old woman born with a physical disability, Amuru district
“If I go back to my original home, I’ll be like a child, waiting to be fed.”
- Mary, woman with physical disability living in a displaced persons camp, Amuru district
“Delivery beds are extremely high and have wheels. [The nurses] tell you to get on the bed. You try to get on, but the bed is rolling. They say, ‘You get on the bed! How did you get on the bed where you got pregnant?’”
- Hon. Nalule Safia Juuko, member of parliament representing women with disabilities
“The neighbors beat my children. When they played with the neighbors’ children, they were told to go away. They said, ‘You’ll spread deafness to my family.’”
- Erica, a deaf woman who lost one of her children during childbirth because the nurse did not communicate to her that she was going to have twins, Lira district

http://www.hrw.org/news/2010/08/23/uganda-women-disabilities-barriers-and-abuse

By Lisa Anderson
Thu Aug 4, 2011 12:04pm EDT
NEW YORK (TrustLaw) – Child marriage, which steals the innocence of millions of girls worldwide and often condemns them to lives of poverty, ignorance and poor health, is one of the biggest obstacles to development, rights groups say.
A girl under the age of 18 is married every three seconds — that’s 10 million each year — often without her consent and sometimes to a much older man, according to the children’s charity Plan UK. Most of those marriages take place in Africa, the Middle East or South Asia.
“This is one of the biggest development issues of our time and we’re committed to raising the voices of millions of girls married against their will,” Plan UK head Marie Staunton said in her introduction to “Breaking Vows,” a recent global report on child marriage.
From horrific childbirth injuries to the secret sale of “drought brides,” the consequences of child marriage are explored in a multimedia documentary by TrustLaw, a legal news service run by Thomson Reuters Foundation (childmarriage.trust.org).
“Young children have babies — your life is ruined, your education is ruined,” said Kanta Devi, who was 16 when she married in Badakakahera village in India’s Rajasthan state.
“You become upset with everything in your life,” she told TrustLaw.
The U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child considers marriage before the age of 18 a human rights violation.
But according to the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), there are more than 50 million child brides worldwide, a number that is expected to grow to 100 million over the next decade.
RIPPLE EFFECT
Rights activists say six of the eight U.N. Millennium Development Goals to be achieved by 2015 are directly affected by the prevalence of child marriage — the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger; achievement of universal primary education; promotion of gender equality and empowerment of women; reduction in child mortality; improvement in maternal health; and combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases.
The ripple effect is devastating, experts say.
Girls forced into early marriage rarely continue their education, denying them any hope of independence, the ability to earn a livelihood or of making an economic contribution to their households.
The practice also reinforces the concept of girls as worthless burdens on their families to be jettisoned as soon as possible.
Girls who complete secondary school are six times less likely to become child brides than contemporaries with less or no education, according to the ICRW, a Washington-based think tank.
But distance from schools and a lack of school fees often preclude education for the poorest girls, who are twice as likely to marry young as those from wealthier homes.
In Niger, Chad and Mali, more than 70 percent of girls are married before the age of 18, according to ICRW analysis of demographic and health data last year.
Bangladesh, Guinea, Central African Republic, Mozambique, Burkina Faso and Nepal have child marriage rates over 50 percent, the data showed.
Ethiopia, Malawi, Madagascar, Sierra Leone, Cameroon, Eritrea, Uganda, India, Nicaragua, Zambia and Tanzania are all above 40 percent.
The reasons child marriages occur vary with the country and are rarely simple.
“Very often people are sort of quick to demonise, in some ways, the family members and the people who make the decisions about the marriage of girls,” Jeffrey Edmeades, a social demographer with ICRW, told TrustLaw.
“But we’re finding, for the most part, that people are making these decisions because they feel it’s best for their daughters. Parents love their children and they do want the best for them. They’re just not sure what the best is.”
Edmeades, who has been working with aid agency CARE on a project to tackle child marriage in Ethiopia, gave the example of children in that country being betrothed before birth to cement strategic alliances between families.
In other cases, girls are married off early to ensure that their virginity, and thus their economic value as brides, is intact and the honor of the family is protected.
Meanwhile, debts and natural disasters, such as tsunamis and drought, can lead to girls being sold off as brides as families scramble for survival.
‘SILENT HEALTH EMERGENCY’
Girls under 15, their bodies still developing and their pelvises narrow, are five times more likely to die during pregnancy or childbirth than women over 20, the U.S. Agency for International Development estimates.
The vast majority of those deaths are in the developing world, where a lack of pre- and post-natal care and advanced procedures such as Cesarean sections makes pregnancy and childbirth far more risky than in rich countries. In Africa, for example, 60 percent of women and girls give birth without a skilled medical professional present, according to the U.N. World Population Fund.
Worldwide, 70,000 girls aged 15-19 die each year during pregnancy or childbirth, UNICEF says. The U.N. World Population Fund considers pregnancy the leading cause of death in that age group, citing complications of childbirth and unsafe abortions as major factors.
Children of child brides are also at risk. Babies born to mothers younger than 18 are more likely to be underweight or stillborn, Plan UK says.
Girls forced into early marriage are also at an increased risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases and HIV/AIDS because they are unlikely to be able to negotiate safe sex with their husbands.
“Child marriage is a silent health emergency in the sense that it’s often overlooked as a root cause of maternal mortality and morbidity (illness),” the ICRW’s Edmeades said.
DRAWING MORE ATTENTION
While it is a subject still little known and rarely discussed in much of the Western world, the issue of child marriage is drawing greater attention from international aid and humanitarian organizations, as well as governments.
In the United States, where child marriage is rare, the U.S. Senate has reintroduced legislation aimed at curbing global child marriage that was unanimously passed in the Senate in 2010 but blocked in the House of Representatives.
The International Protecting Girls by Preventing Child Marriage Act would establish a strategy over several years to prevent child marriage in developing countries.
It would also require the State Department to report on child marriage in its annual human rights report and integrate efforts to prevent the practice into current development programs.
The bill will be reintroduced in the House this autumn, according to Betty McCollum, a Democrat representative from Minnesota, who is its lead sponsor there.
It was blocked in the House last December primarily due to Republican concerns that it would help organizations supplying abortions, which “couldn’t have been farther from the truth,” McCollum told TrustLaw.
“It has nothing to do with abortion,” she said. “It has everything to do with saving 12-year-old girls from being sold into slavery or sold to settle a family debt.”
Not only will it make aid dollars more effective, she added, but “it’s a win for the child, it’s a win for the community the child lives in and it’s a win for the international community.”
The Elders, an influential group of global leaders founded in 2007 by former South African President Nelson Mandela, gathered dozens of organizations for a two-day meeting in Ethiopia in June and have launched a campaign called “Girls Not Brides: the Global Partnership to End Child Marriage.”
(For more on child marriage, including info-graphics, videos, stories and blogs, visit childmarriage.trust.org)
(TrustLaw is a global news service run by Thomson Reuters Foundation, covering women’s legal rights, good governance and pro bono law. Visit www.trust.org/trustlaw)
FACTBOX: Child marriage threatens girls’ health and rights
LONDON (TrustLaw) – Every day, more than 25,000 girls under the age of 18 are married worldwide, rights groups estimate. For many child brides, a future of poverty, exploitation and poor health awaits.
Following are key facts on child marriage around the world.
* Every three seconds, a girl under the age of 18 is married somewhere in the world, mostly in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.
* The practice affects a third of girls — and some boys — in developing countries, according to UNICEF, which describes child marriage as “perhaps the most prevalent form of sexual abuse and exploitation of girls.”
* The U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child says 18 years should be the minimum age for marriage.
* Child rights activists say marriage at a young age violates a child’s basic human rights because they are too young to be able to give “free and full consent” — a right enshrined in Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
* Child marriage is most common in South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.
* In many developing countries the practice is illegal but the law is often not enforced or it operates alongside customary and religious laws.
* Girls younger than 15 are five times more likely to die as a result of pregnancy and childbirth than women in their 20s. If they are 15-19, they are twice as likely to die.
* Girls under the age of 18 are more likely to develop obstetric fistula, which causes severe incontinence. This condition occurs during childbirth when a hole develops between the vagina and bladder or rectum.
* Girl brides are more likely to be infected with the HIV virus by their older husbands. A study in Kenya and Zambia by University of Chicago researchers found that among 15- to 19-year-old girls who are sexually active, being married increased their chances of having HIV by more than 75 percent.
* A girl bride is more likely to be beaten or raped by her husband and experience abusive relationships with her in-laws.
* The babies of child brides are 60 percent more likely to die before the age of one than children of women older than 19.
* Child brides are rarely allowed to go to school. Many are expected to bear and raise children and carry out domestic work for their in-laws.
* Girls from poor families are nearly twice as likely to marry before 18 than girls from wealthier families.
* The number of child marriages often increases during conflicts or natural disasters.
* Some families use marriage to build and strengthen alliances, to seal property deals, settle disputes or pay off debts.
(Sources: The Elders, International Center for Research on Women, International Planned Parenthood Federation, Plan UK, UNICEF)

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/04/us-child-marriage-idUSTRE7734QI20110804