The 75-page report, “No Money, No Care: Obstetric Violence in Sierra Leone,” documents cases of verbal abuse, medical neglect, and abandonment of women and girls facing serious obstetric complications, practices that experts interviewed say are common. Many women interviewed said they were shamed and mistreated by healthcare providers for expressing pain, needing help, or for not having enough money to pay fees. Others described humiliating experiences in which healthcare providers treated them brusquely or withheld important health information. Some cases documented constitute obstetric violence, a largely unaddressed form of gender-based violence prevalent across the world.
A Policy of Fatal Neglect in China’s State Orphanages
China’s claim to guarantee the “right to subsistence” conceals a secret world of starvation, disease, and unnatural death a world into which thousands of Chinese citizens disappear each year.
The new South African government has pledged to ensure women a full and equal role in every aspect of the economy and society. Yet South African women continue to face extraordinarily high levels of violence which prevent them from enjoying the rights they are guaranteed under the new dispensation.
Since January 1990, the north Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir has been the site of a brutal conflict between Indian security forces and armed Muslim insurgents demanding independence or accession to Pakistan.
The vicious conflict in Kashmir, now in its fourth year, is characterized by the Indian army’s and other security forces’ blatant disregard for international norms of medical neutrality.
Over 70 percent of women in jail in Pakistan report sexual abuse by police officials. Despite the high incidence of rape and sexual torture of female detainees, no police official has been subjected to criminal punishment for these abuses.
The Brazilian government is failing to prosecute violence against women in the home fully and fairly. Despite ever-increasing domestic violence (particularly wife-murder, battery and rap) impunity and discriminatory treatment in favor of the perpetrators of domestic violence are still the rule in the Brazilian justice system.
Shortly after Nicolar Ceauscu was overthrown on December 22, 1989, the world was exposed for the first time to the shocking images of Romania's orphans, expecially its handicapped children and babies with AIDS.
