Unite to prevent violence against women

Last year, when rebels captured the main towns in Northern Mali, UN Women registered a sudden and dramatic increase in the number of rapes in the first week of the takeover of Gao and Kidal, in places where most women never report this violence to anyone, not even health practitioners. We heard stories of girls as young as 12 being taken from their homes to military camps, gang-raped for days and subsequently abandoned, and of young women being punished, flogged, and tortured for bearing children outside of marriage.

The United Nations Security Council has heard similar atrocities from other parts of the globe, and this week it adopted its fourth resolution in only five years exclusively devoted to the issue of sexual violence in armed conflict. And this is not the only policy gain achieved in recent months.

In March, the UN's Commission on the Status of Women, the principal global policymaking body dedicated to furthering the rights of women, reached a historic agreement on violence against women. This forward-looking declaration commits member states to actions that were never before so explicitly articulated in international documents, including in conflict and post-conflict situations.