Aid workers are investigating reports that at least 60 women have been raped near the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo town of Fizi.

The mass rapes were allegedly committed by a group of ex-rebels who recently deserted the army, which they had joined under a peace deal.

Troops from the same group were recently convicted of raping at least 50 women in Fizi on New Year's Day.

Six shelters for battered women are likely to close because the organizations running them for years did not win the tender issued by the Social Affairs Ministry to operate them.

After six months of violence, almost everyone in Côte d'Ivoire has a horrific story to tell: a loved one killed gruesomely, the memory of being raped, a house burned or pillaged of everything. I have listened to hundreds of these stories, amazed at people's strength to recount the unthinkable to a stranger as armed conflict continued.

The Minister of Justice, Tharcisse Karugarama has said that violence against women and girls in African countries is an enormous challenge that rests in the hands of regional security organs.

Karugarama said this, yesterday, while opening the 'Africa Regional Security Organs' capacity building workshop on violence against women and girls; prevention, response and peacekeeping,' held in Kigali.

The Sudanese Army and its allied militias have gone on an unsparing rampage to crush rebel fighters in the Nuba Mountains of central Sudan, bombing thatch-roofed villages, executing elders, burning churches and pitching another region of the country into crisis, according to United Nations officials and villagers who have escaped.

Bandaged and bruised, Rumana Manzur is pleading for justice after suffering a brutal assault that left her blind.

The 33-year-old University of British Columbia graduate student and assistant professor at Dhaka University in Bangladesh recently had her eyes gouged and her nose bitten by her husband, Hasan Sayeed Sumon, who claimed she was having an affair in Canada.

A draft law to protect women from domestic violence is a Western idea designed to dismantle the Muslim family, rather than improve women's status in the country, a statement released by Lebanon's highest Sunni body said Thursday.

Rosemary Gonzalez was murdered in 2009, the victim of a war that ended in 1996. One day, 17-year-old Rosemary said good-bye to her mother Betty, walked out of their small house on the outskirts of Guatemala City and was never seen alive again.

Former Prime Minister and senior leader of CPN-UML Madhav Kumar Nepal has stressed that the new constitution should guarantee proportional participation of women in every apparatus of the State.

Human trafficking is flourishing in the Democratic Republic of Congo, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Iran, with little effort by the countries' governments to combat it, the U.S. State Department said Monday.

The department's 2011 Trafficking in Persons Report assesses efforts by 184 governments worldwide to fight sexual exploitation, forced labor and modern-day slavery.