Gathering Strength: Women from Burma on Their Rights

Tuesday, January 1, 2002
Asia
South Eastern Asia
Myanmar

WOMEN OF BURMA
• Women are unprotected from physical and sexual violence at work, in public places, and in their own homes
• Women continue to organize and fight for their rights. Women's publications and documentation of human rights abuses have brought international attention to their situation
• Girls are leaving school to take care of younger siblings, and working to help feed their families.
• Women and girls are being forced into exploitative sex work, unprotected from violence and sexually transmitted infections
• Women are conscripted to forced labor by the military, forced to carry heavy loads, do dangerous unpaid work, and to leave their children unsupervised.
• Military personnel continue to rape women, without fear of retribution.
• Shamed by their communities and not able to afford the bribes necessary for a hospital abortion, women are going to traditional healers, risking death, infection and disease.
• While the regime has signed up to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), women are getting hungrier, sicker and dying younger.

To read the book, pleace klick on: http://www.burmalibrary.org/docs/Gathering_Strength.htm