One woman is leading the fight against the scourge of child sexual slavery, writes Courtney Trenwith.

Every day some 50 girls are pulled off buses at the Nepal-India border and saved – at the last minute – from a life of the worst kind of slavery.

At least twice as many more are not.

Taken over the border, they become trapped as victims in the heinous sex trafficking industry.

When American feminist Susan Brownmiller published ‘Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape' in 1975, thousands of women all around the world who'd been victims of war-time rape were suffering pretty much in silence.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Jody Williams arrived in Ottawa this weekend with a mission for Canada: to reclaim its image as the white knight of international human rights.

A key player in a series of human-rights breakthroughs in the 1990s, including the ban on landmines that Williams spearheaded, recent setbacks such as the failure to get a seat on the UN security Council have cast doubt on Canada's international cachet.

A group of us gasped when one tiny mother of five, who looked no older than my 20-year old daughter, lamented, “When I think about my life here, I often feel I'd rather be back in the bush with the Lord's Resistance Army, at least there I had a community". While we are making some progress in fitful efforts at prosecution, we are failing victims of rape miserably, reports Susannah Sirkin.

She is a keeper of healing secrets. Every now and then Nurun Nahar would gently squeeze a woman's hand and whisper, "It will hurt; you might not recognise your face, but if I can get through, so will you."

The Gender Monitoring Office (GMO) has lauded the Ministry of Education for implementing programmes that empower the girl child.

During the Gender Budget Statement meeting on Tuesday, the ministry's financial advisor, Wilson Rurangwa, indicated that the Ministry had implemented most of its planned programmes for the 2010-2011 financial year.

‘My family and I were all sleeping when the soldiers arrived. They tied my husband's hands behind his back and then they took turns raping me. Afterward … they killed him. I spent three weeks in the forest until one night I was able to escape. When I arrived home, I discovered that my little child was dead.'

— Panzi Hospital patient, Democratic Republic of Congo

Millions of unemployed youth facing grim economic prospects have fueled the revolutions. Not surprisingly, women have played a prominent role too; across the region, they experience higher levels of unemployment than men, yet have rising economic expectations.

After the US killing of Osama bin Laden on May 1, the organization Women for Afghan Women reported an eerie quiet in Kabul, the capital of strife-torn Afghanistan.

Congo called Wednesday for the U.N. peacekeeping force in the central African nation to be gradually withdrawn "without delay," saying the security situation has been stabilized in nearly all parts of the country.