Violence against women during conflict has reached epidemic proportions. Civilians, and especially women, have become the primary targets of armed groups and rape is increasingly being used as a weapon of war. Women human rights defenders are being persecuted, imprisoned and killed for speaking out on behalf of the victims. Violence against women and girls in conflict is “one of history’s great silences”, as the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women called it.

RAW Facts:

• 80% of the world’s refugees are women and children. (UNHCR 2001)
• In 85% of the conflict zones, trafficking of women and girls was reported. (Save the Children, 2003)
• By 1993, the Zenica Centre for the Registration of War and Genocide Crime in Bosnia&Herzegovina had documented 40,000 cases of war-related rape.
• Of a sample of Rwandan women surveyed in 1999, 39% reported being raped during the 1994 genocide, and 72% said they knew someone who had been raped.
• An estimated 23,200 to 45,600 Kosovar Albanian women are believed to have been raped between August 1998 and August 1999, the height of the conflict with Serbia.
• Every two days in Colombia, a woman dies from "political" causes - murder by armed groups, disappearances, illness caused by displacement and malnutrition.

RAW’s Chechnya Project

Since 1999, nearly a million Chechens have been displaced and more than 100,000 killed. Forced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, torture and rape are continuing with impunity. Women victims have been particularly vulnerable. Every fifth woman in Chechnya is a widow. Women applicants to the European Court of Human Rights have suffered persecution by the authorities. Most women are unemployed and survive in harsh living conditions. Women also led peace activism in Chechnya during the war. A number of Chechen women activists were detained and tortured by Russian and pro-Moscow Chechen forces; some lost their lives.

The Chechen organization, “Women’s Dignity”, founded in 2002 by human rights advocate, Libkan Bazaeva, runs a Women’s Rehabilitation Centre in Grozny. This is the only women’s centre still operating in Chechnya – previous attempts ended with the authorities closing them down. In 2004, more than 1000 women sought advice and help in the Centre. However, women who suffered rape and other torture while in detention have not been treated. Shame and fear of further violence prevented women from seeking medical or psychological help upon release. The Women’s Centre has limited capacity to treat these women, with only one gynaecologist, one lawyer, one psychologist and a physical therapist on staff.

• RAW will resource & train 5 Chechen women psychotherapist to join the Centre.
• RAW will increase the number of lawyers on staff & provide legal training to staff and women survivors on seeking justice and obtaining redress.

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