Sexual violence reaching “pandemic proportions.”
The U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said that the occurrence of sexual violence against woman has reached “hideous and pandemic proportions.” Speaking at an open meeting discussing the implementation of a security council resolution passed in 2000 dealing with sexual violence, Ban said “violence against women has reached hideous and pandemic proportions in some societies attempting to recover from conflict.” The security council resolution called for the implementation of increased measures targeting the use of sexual violence as a weapon.
Sexual violence is including among the definitions of the violations of the laws of war and crimes against humanity. It has a lingering social effect of degradation on women in African cultures. Victims describe gang rapes and public rapes in the presence of family members. Young girls abducted or conscripted by rebel groups are often repeatedly raped as part of their programming. Many of the victimized women contract HIV, leaving them stigmatized in their communities.
The council statement from the meeting said that “rape and other forms of sexual abuse … remain pervasive, and in some situations have become systematic, and have reached appalling levels of atrocity.” The director of the U.N.’s Development Fund for Women Joanne Sandler said that reported levels of sexual violence mask the true nature of the pervasiveness. “Few other methods of warfare are so socially destructive as systematic sexual violence,” she said.
The U.N. plans to launch a campaign against sexual violence later this year. U.N. Assistant Secretary-General Rachel Mayanja said “If this situation is not addressed now and with urgency, thousands of woman and girls will continue to die, and tens of millions more would be sexually brutalized, traumatized, tormented, stigmatized and ostracized.”