Reminders of women's rights plight in 2012

After a Taliban gunman shot her in the head Oct. 9, teenage schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai is taken from the military hospital in Rawalpindi for a flight to a British hospital. /Image via indiatimes.com


The year closes with grim examples of the weak status of women's rights around the world.

On Dec. 29, an Indian medical student who had been gang raped on a New Delhi bus died in a Singapore hospital, where she had been flown for treatment of mortal injuries. Six men are accused of attacking and beating the 23-year-old and her male companion, then throwing them off the moving bus. Reuters reported: "The attack has sparked an intense national debate for the first time about the treatment of women and attitudes towards sex crimes in a country where most rapes go unreported, many offenders go unpunished, and the wheels of justice turn slowly, according to social activists."

On Oct. 9, a Taliban gunman shot Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai point blank in the head. Soon after the attack, The New York Times reported: "She had become a symbol of resistance against the Taliban, advocating access to education for girls in an area that has been one of the Taliban’s main strongholds in Pakistan." Malala remains in the U.K. recovering from injuries to her head and neck. She "will have lifetime security" when she returns to her homeland, according to the Pakistani Interior minister.

Rape continues to be a weapon of war in the Congo, where Mother Jones reports about a half million women have been raped since the country's second civil war began in 1997. On Dec. 15, The New York York Times reported: "Many of these rapes have been marked by a level of brutality that is shocking even by the twisted standards of a place rived by civil war and haunted by warlords and drugged-up child soldiers. What’s the strategic purpose of putting an AK-47 assault rifle inside a woman and pulling the trigger? Or cutting out a woman’s fetus and making her friends eat it?"

Protecting women from this kind of abuse is a global challenge. In the United States, where sexual assault remains one of the top crimes against women and girls, there is much more that can be done at home and voices that must be raised against atrocities abroad.

Hundreds of thousands of women have been raped as part of the violence unleashed in Congo's second civil war. Rape is a weapon of war in conflicts around the world. /Image via care2.com