Women and girls continue to be killed based on sex and gender
“Women and girls continue to be killed on the basis of their sex and gender, rendered more vulnerable to femicide when being women and girls intersect with other grounds or identities,” said Reem Alsalem, UN Special Rapporteur on the issue, whose mandate includes looking into the reasons behind attacks as well as their effects.
According to her, “they continue to be unable to organize freely, believe, and speak without suffering the consequences.” After presenting her report to the UN General Assembly’s Third Committee in New York, Ms. Alsalem made her remarks. “In some nations, we have seen alarming regressions in people’s access to sexual and reproductive health care, education, and freedom of movement.
Ms. Alsalem continued, “These regressions are taking place as the world navigates many crises of war, climate change, poverty, and pandemics that clearly have a gendered impact and affect women and girls unequally.
The abuse of women
We have painfully recognized that we are nowhere near attaining Sustainable Development Goal 5 (on female equality and empowerment) as we approach the halfway point of the race to meet the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the expert added.
Around 736 million people are victims of physical or sexual violence by an intimate relationship or sexual assault by a non-partner, according to the World Health Organization, a statistic that has stayed fairly stable over the past ten years.
The majority of women who experience abuse do so in intimate relationships; there are 641 million victims worldwide.
According to the organization, younger women are still more vulnerable to this type of abuse, with one in four of them experiencing it from an intimate partner by the time they are in their mid-twenties.
gender-based prejudice
“Gender equality cannot be achieved without ensuring that women and girls can enjoy their fundamental human rights and can participate in society equally and without discrimination,” said Ms. Alsalem.
She claimed that 50 nations still have nationality rules that discriminate against women, and that in 24 of those nations, women are not allowed to confer nationality on their children on an equal footing with men.
Statelessness
The unaffiliated expert continued by stating that one of the main factors contributing to statelessness is the discrimination based on sex and gender in nationality rules.
Without a doubt, statelessness and laws that discriminate against women’s nationality are types of serious discrimination against women and girls as described by the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women.
According to Ms. Alsalem, “they produce a vicious cycle of human rights failures and violations, directly and indirectly escalating psychological, sexual, and physical violence.”
States were urged by her to “uphold the objective, spirit, and meaning of fundamental human rights obligations”. Special Rapporteurs and other UN experts are independent of all governments and organizations and are not employed by the UN. They work without being paid and represent themselves alone.
