You can only hear so many stories before you reach the limit of your own endurance. My moment came on a visit to a refugee camp in Chad, where Hawaye, a beautiful Darufi woman holding her newborn baby, told me hers.

The Jangaweed - armed mercenaries - had ridden into her village, killed her husband and decapitated their baby in her arms. They had taken her captive and kept her as a sex slave.

As Colonel Gaddafi continues his pillage in North Africa, harrowing skeletons from his closet remain buried deep in the soil along the continent's western edge. The brutal conflicts of West Africa -- in Liberia and Sierra Leone -- were led by men, like Charles Taylor, who trained in camps sponsored by Gaddafi in the 1980s.

Much attention has been focused on the process of radicalisation of young men in the areas of Pakistan that border Afghanistan. Peshawar, the town near the border between the two countries, is infamous for being the centre of a vibrant industry and trade in homemade guns.

When Toronto police Const. Michael Sanguinetti told a safety forum at Osgoode Hall Law School that women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized, he could have had no idea how far those words would echo.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, was ordered on Monday to be held without bail over allegations that he had sexually assaulted a housekeeper in a lavish suite at a Midtown hotel.

A local women's rights group has called on authorities to tackle sexual exploitation of trafficked women by prosecuting purchasers instead of prostitutes, applying trafficking law to strippers and offering gender sensitivity training to police, journalists and children.

Jess Smochek arrived in Bangladesh in 2004 as a 23-year-old Peace Corps volunteer with dreams of teaching English and “helping the world.” She left six weeks later a rape victim after being brutalized in an alley by a knife-wielding gang.

Come rain or shine, single mother of five, Sylvia Mathebula,* can be found selling fruit and cigarettes at the roadside because it is the only way her family can survive. "Since the government is not helping us with jobs, rather than work as a maid for a white person I decided to start this little business by myself," she says lamenting the lack of opportunities for unskilled women.

Michelle Bachelet has many firsts on her CV.

Members from the Women of Zimbabwe of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA) were indiscriminately beaten by police in Bulawayo yesterday, 10 May during their demonstration against Zimbabwe Electricity Transmission and Distribution Company (ZETDC), who they claimed are short-changed the public.