From battlefields to backstreets and bedrooms, women across the world are being subjected to terrifying levels of abuse, human rights pressure group Amnesty International said yesterday.
"This is not something that just happens `over there.' It happens here," said Amnesty's secretary general, Irene Khan, launching a campaign to end violence against women.
"It is not something that only happens to other people. It happens to you, your friends and your family," she added. "Until all of us, men as well as women, say `no, I will not let this happen' it will not stop."
In a report "It's in our hands. Stop violence against women," Amnesty said up to 1 billion women -- one in every three -- had been beaten, forced to have sex or otherwise abused, often by a friend or family member.
In Zambia, five women a week were murdered by a male partner or family friend, while around the world one woman in five would suffer a rape or attempted rape at some point, and the practice had even become a weapon of war.
"Armed conflict is having a devastating and desperate impact on women that goes far beyond the inherent violence of war," Khan said.
Each year 2 million girls between the ages of five and 15 were forced into prostitution and the traffic in women was worth up to US$7 billion a year, Amnesty said.
The problem was by no means confined to developing regions.
In the US, a woman was beaten by her husband or partner on average every 15 seconds and one was raped every 90 seconds, while in France 25,000 women were raped each year, the report said.
But such was the stigma attached to rape victims -- some of whom might later be murdered by a family member in so-called honor killings -- that the level of reporting was a fraction of the truth.
"Behind closed doors and in secret, women are subjected to violence by their partners and close relatives, too ashamed and afraid to report it and so seldom taken seriously when they do," Khan said.
In sub-Saharan Africa, the epicenter of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, nearly 60 percent of infected people were women -- a rising trend exacerbated by the belief in some countries that raping a virgin would cure the perpetrator of the disease.
Worldwide more than 135 million girls and women had undergone female circumcision, and the number was rising at a rate of two million a year, Amnesty said.
"The effects of economic globalization are leaving more and more women trapped in poverty on the margins of society," Khan said.
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