Jul 2007 - Jan 2008

Ongoing and planned UNODC projects on juvenile justice in Afghanistan, Burundi, Egypt, Haiti, Jordan, Lebanon and Yemen pay particular attention to the situation of girls and to awareness raising and training on the special needs of girls. A global project on implementation of the Guidelines on Justice in Matters involving Child Victims and Witnesses of Crime is ongoing and gives special consideration to the situation of girl victims and witnesses of crime.

In Afghanistan, UNODC supported training for prison staff on the special needs of preparing women and girls for release and several tools developed.

OHCHR provided training for representatives from human rights organizations in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), on women’s rights in general and violence against women in particular.

DAW, now part of UN Women, in cooperation with ESCWA’s Centre for Women, convened a regional capacity building workshop on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women for judges and parliamentarians from 13 countries in Western Asia, in Amman, Jordan, in October 2007. The meeting focused on follow-up to the Secretary-General’s study on violence against women and General Assembly resolution 61/143, and on family law.

The Civilian Police Section of DPA/United Nations Peace-building Office in the Central African Republic (BONUCA) conducted training for national gendarme officers on human rights issues and gender-based violence. DPKO Gender Advisers have partnered with UNPOL to highlight gender-based violence in training for National Police.

UNFPA is working in collaboration with a wide range of stakeholders to address gender-based violence, including training of uniformed personnel, health workers and law enforcement.

In partnership with Gender Links, UNIFEM, now part of UN Women, in its capacity as Chair of the Southern African Gender and Human Rights Advisory Group, promoted the development of score-cards to measure progress in ending violence against women in the context of the SADCC Gender and Development Protocol.

The World Bank “The Measuring Empowerment in Four Countries” programme is piloting a mixed-method (qualitative and quantitative) approach to measuring empowerment in different contexts. The study is being implemented in Ghana, Ethiopia, Jamaica, and Bangladesh. The study focuses on the empowerment of women, and the questionnaire that is administered to women only includes questions on domestic violence and violence against women outside of the home. In Bangladesh, the partner for the implementation of the programme was the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics.

WHO is continuing the analysis from the database of the WHO Multi-country Study on Women's Health and Domestic Violence against Women. Results of research on the obstetric complications of female genital mutilation from 6 African countries were published.. WHO has continued to provide technical support to Member States on request, including on data collection and violence against women surveys, health sector response, and primary prevention.

In 2007, UNFPA, in collaboration with the International Centre for Research on Women (ICRW), developed a model for costing violence against women, to be used for Bangladesh, Uganda, and Morocco. Data collection has commenced.