women in armed conflict amnesty international

She added, however, that conflict or post-conflict violence against women is not isolated to domestic situations.īrown said that governments and private brokers should be aware that the weapons they sell could end up in the wrong hands. And in these cases, what happens, it’s often in the private sphere of the family that you end up seeing a lot of violence against women,” she said. And so violence becomes rather normative in their societies. But they’ve also been living sometimes for months, sometimes for years, in which using their weapon is sort of the solution to the problem. And, if you think about it, a lot of them are themselves traumatized. “Many of the men, who were combatants, often keep their weapons.

Just because a conflict has ended, does not mean violence has stopped.

“We’ve done a lot of research in which we’ve understood how much women, as civilians, are often caught in the middle of a conflict – sometimes the unintentional victims and sometimes the targeted victims,” she said.īrown, Amnesty International’s senior director of international law and policy, said, “Where I first became aware of it was in Bosnia, in the former Yugoslavia, where I think the women’s rights activists were very well organized – were very articulate – in talking about this.” Widney Brown says the effects of conflict on women and girls have been well-documented.

Women in armed conflict amnesty international