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UNODC, with its Global Programmes against trafficking in persons, smuggling of migrants and field based projects, follows a victims'/migrants' rights-centred and gender-specific approach, aiming to ensure protection of human rights of trafficked persons and smuggled migrants. With women and girls being a particularly vulnerable group, UNODC seeks to contribute to gender equality by strengthening the rights and the position of victims and smuggled migrants during investigation and prosecution by competent authorities. The Global Programmes seek to ensure, where possible, a gender balance in the different activities, notably with regard to participants in capacity building activities/workshops. Performance indicators are, where possible, disaggregated by sex and age. Also, gender is incorporated into questionnaires given to participants (e.g. country assessments, training questionnaires, etc).
In Egypt, UNODC contributed to the government's strengthening of its response to violence against women and girls and began developing training manuals on the appropriate handling of such cases by police and prosecutors.
In Afghanistan, with support from the WHO, the Ministry of Public Health is training nearly 7000 health providers and upgrading health facilities in all provinces over the next 5 years to deliver Gender Based Violence services to survivors based on implementation of a national treatment protocol and the WHO clinical handbook for responding to intimate partner violence or sexual violence. In Uganda, health providers in 3 districts were trained based on updated national training guidelines to deliver care and services for GBV to survivors. Similar efforts are underway in India and Namibia.
In Viet Nam, UN Women supported capacity building to better respond to violence against women by assisting the Judicial Academy, the national judicial training institution. With UN Women’s support, the Judicial Academy now has a training modules which will be used to train prospective judges, prosecutors and lawyers on international standards to address VAW. To accompany the training module, a casebook containing 100 cases of domestic and sexual violence and video clips were finalized after being piloted with lecturers, trainers and practitioners from multiple institutions.
Within the framework of UN Secretary-General’s campaign “UNiTE to End Violence against Women”, UNIC (United Nations Information Centres) Beirut, Lebanon in partnership with the Theatre Club at the Balamand University in Lebanon produced a theatre play on the issue of violence against women targeting school students - a work that was fully supported and sponsored by the Lebanese Minister of Education and Higher Education. The play, entitled “We Are All Humans”, presented real cases of violence against women within families in Lebanon through a vibrant script and a combination of gestures, songs, music and dance performed by university students. It tackles the hereditary violence against women and sheds light on physical and moral violence practiced directly or indirectly against girls in society. UNIC took part in the script drafting and the directing process to reflect the real objectives of the UNiTE campaign aiming to prevent all forms of violence against women and girls and eliminate this scourge.
OHCHR provided technical assistance and capacity-development to states and civil society groups on using a human rights-based approach to address trafficking in persons in Belarus, Thailand and other countries in South East Asia.
In Mexico, UNODC continued to provide normative assistance on criminal justice and prison reform with emphasis on training and awareness-raising on violence against women.
In Belarus, in partnership with UNFPA, UNICEF and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, IOM provided tools and technical assistance to NGOs to improve national capacity to counteract and prevent domestic violence, especially against women and children. This project launched a Pilot Seminar on the relationship between domestic violence and trafficking in women and children. Counter-trafficking NGOs, judges, prosecutors, law-enforcement officials and representatives of the border troops of Belarus participated in this event. The seminar has brought the attention to and initiated a dialogue among the relevant actors on this topic. It established a forum for relevant parties to work together and improve various legal and support provisions for victims of trafficking and domestic violence. Overall, ten NGOs, 75 NGOs’ staff members, 45 law-enforcement officials and over 40 other specialists received training as part of this project. The project also referred at least 700 victims of domestic violence for specialized assistance.
As part of the Phase II of the UNFPA-UNICEF Joint Programme on FGM/C, to strengthen the inter-linkages between VAWG and harmful practices such as FGM/C, and address the root causes of such violence, UN Women has developed is developing policy document on essential elements to end FGM/C as a form of VAWG, in addition to a training module on gender and FGM/C, to accompany the UNFPA-UNICEF Manual on Social Norms and Change.