Blogs

Ending violence against women: A public health imperative

By Amanda Klasing Women’s Rights Division, Human Rights Watch Sixteen-year-old Florence was an orphan doing domestic work when the January 2010 earthquake hit Haiti. She moved with the family she worked for to a displacement camp, where her…

Book Brief: A Plague of Prisons

Ernest Drucker The New Press, September 2011 ISBN 978-1-59558-497-7 240 pages $26.95 Reviwed by HHR editorial assistant Judith Fitzpatrick Ernest Drucker’s A Plague of Prisons: The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America analyzes a pressing social…

Chronic zinc deficiency among children in Andean region

Children in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia suffer from chronic zinc deficiency, says Dr. Fernando Sempértegui, leader of several landmark studies on the effects of zinc deficiency. He tells IPS that the deficiency “is related to chronic infections like…

PBS NewsHour: Senegal’s FGM intervention strategies

One hundred and forty million women around the world are presently living with the effects of female genital mutilation, a practice that has proven difficult to abolish. In Senegal, however, intervention strategies are in place that are proving…

Child brides face ‘silent health emergency’

In an August 4 article, Trustlaw’s Lisa Anderson exposes the “silent health emergency” faced by child brides around the globe. According to Plan UK, a children’s rights organization, the marriage of a girl under 18 occurs every three seconds. This means…

A rights-based approach to fighting HIV/AIDS in Ugandan prisons

Over at Global Pulse, Human Rights Watch researcher Katherine Todrys guest blogs on the HIV epidemic in Uganda’s penitentiaries. Uganda, she explains, has often been presented as a success story in the global fight against HIV/AIDS, and has…

Somali women attacked on journey to refugee camp

Lily Boisson of CBC News writes that Somali women fleeing drought and famine in their home country face sexual and gender-based violence as they journey to the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya. Women traveling to the camps with only their children and few…