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	Women in Papua New Guinea are suffering an epidemic of violence by HRW, MSF, Guardian News, agencies   Women in Papua New Guinea are suffering an epidemic of violence, reports Stephanie McLennan for Guardian News.   A woman is beaten every 30 seconds in Papua New Guinea, and more than 1.5 million people experience gender-based violence in the country each year.   On the 3rd of September 2021 in Mt Hagen, one of the country’s largest cities, three men were released from prison after being accused of murdering a 31-year-old woman, Imelda Tupi Tiamanda. One of the men was her husband.   The magistrate dismissed the charges, citing a lack of evidence. The decision was made even though police found the deceased woman’s body wrapped in tarpaulin in the back of her husband’s vehicle at a police checkpoint, with the other two co-accused men present, the National reported. When questioned by police, the husband allegedly confessed to the murder.   Between May and June, groups of men violently attacked at least five women they accused of “sorcery”. One of the women was killed.   In May, a special parliamentary committee on gender-based violence convened a three-day inquiry to investigate measures to prevent violence against women and girls. It heard gender-based violence had increased due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Ruth Kissam of the PNG Tribal Foundation says accusations of “sorcery” may have also increased.   The inquiry found there was lack of support, funding and coordination from the government to adequately respond to the number of cases of violence against women and girls Papua New Guinea has each year.   In 2020, 15,444 cases of domestic violence were reported but only 250 people were prosecuted, and fewer than 100 people were convicted.   Both the minister for police, William Gogl Onglo, and the police commissioner, David Manning, told the inquiry that the police force could not keep women and children safe. They also said the force did not have enough resources to ensure thorough investigations took place.   The lack of funding and services has meant police and the government rely heavily on the work of civil society, churches and volunteer human rights defenders to fill a growing gap in services. Human Rights Watch has raised this issue for many years.   The parliamentary inquiry issued a report in August and made 71 recommendations to the parliament. The inquiry and its report are a positive and long overdue step in the right direction.   Government funding is urgently needed along with a concrete plan to carry out the recommendations to ensure that women and girls in Papua New Guinea can live in safety.   The recommendations include providing adequate resources to carry out the sorcery accusation-related violence national action plan, funding additional counselling services and providing adequate resources to the country’s health department to provide family planning and reproductive health services.   The inquiry’s report also recommends fixing the justice system to ensure better police responses and investigation of gender-based violence cases, more timely prosecutions, and survivor-centred court processes.   After the committee issued its report, it met with development partners such as representatives from the UN, UK, New Zealand, US, Australia and the European Union to discuss partnerships to end violence against women and girls. Papua New Guinea’s prime minister, James Marape said at the UN general assembly on 25 September that his government was working towards implementing the committee’s recommendations. How the government is planning to do so is still unknown.   The committee plans to hold a second set of hearings late this year which will address how the government can carry out these recommendations.   The onus of implementing the parliamentary inquiry report is now with the Papua New Guinea government. The government should act on the 71 recommendations without delay to address the scourge of violence against women and girls in the country.   The governor for the National Capital District, Powes Parkop, one of the members of the special parliamentary committee, noted at the inquiry that a lack of capacity and resources in the courts “has led to a culture of impunity, with perpetrators confident they will never be brought to justice”. Imelda Tupi Tiamanda and other victims of gender-based violence deserve better.   * Stephanie McLennan is a senior manager at Human Rights Watch   http://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2021/oct/01/women-in-papua-new-guinea-are-suffering-an-epidemic-of-violence-the-government-must-act http://www.unitedforequalitypng.com/post/parliamentary-committee-on-gbv-launches-first-report-calls-for-urgent-government-action http://www.msf.org/papua-new-guinea-new-msf-report-return-abuser-reveals-cycle-abuse-survivors-family-and-sexual http://msf.exposure.co/return-to-abuser http://bit.ly/3F666rj   * March 31, 2021: Submission to the Human Rights Council - Universal Periodic Review of Papua New Guinea - Human Rights Watch. (Extract)   Human Rights Watch submits the following information regarding Papua New Guinea's implementation of recommendations it accepted through its 2015 Universal Periodic Review (UPR) as well as information about developments in the human rights situation in Papua New Guinea not addressed in the 2015 review.   This submission is not a complete review of the implementation of all recommendations either fully or partially supported by Papua New Guinea, nor is it a comprehensive review of Papua New Guinea’s protection of human rights in the domestic sphere.   Women’s rights   Despite Papua New Guinea ratifying the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women in 1995, Papua New Guinea still remains one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a woman or girl, highlighting the government’s failure to implement effective policies to prevent and respond to gender-based violence and discrimination.   During the 2015 UPR, Papua New Guinea supported 49 recommendations on women’s rights, including to “ensure access to adequate shelter, psychosocial, legal, and health-care services for survivors of domestic violence, including in rural areas”, and “to adopt measures that all cases of violence against women, including sorcery-related and sexual violence are duly investigated and the perpetrators prosecuted and punished”.   Papua New Guinea supported the recommendation to fully implement the Family Protection Act 2003 and finalize the Family and Sexual Violence Strategy without delay.   Despite the government criminalizing domestic violence in 2013, few perpetrators of violence against women and girls are brought to justice. In June 2020 alone, there were 647 cases of domestic violence reported in Port Moresby. A 2020 academic study found that in 19-months, a specialist police unit set up to receive complaints of sexual violence in Boroko, Port Moresby, averaged 27 complainants per month, 90 percent of whom were female, and 74 percent of whom were under age 18.   There remains a dire lack of services for people requiring assistance after having suffered family violence. Shelters are absent in most areas and in short supply everywhere, qualified counsellors are rare, case management is barely provided, legal aid is almost entirely absent, and there is no safety net to assist survivors, especially those with children, who need temporary support and assistance to leave their abusers.   Much of the effort on the ground to try to end family violence in Papua New Guinea seems to be coming from activists outside the government.   Failure to protect women and girls from domestic violence, offer adequate services, and ensure access to justice puts Papua New Guinea at odds with its binding international human rights obligations, but also its national constitution. The Papua New Guinea Constitution, adopted in 1975, emphasizes equality, including between women and men.   Sorcery related violence   Sorcery related violence is rampant in Papua New Guinea, usually targets women, and often goes unreported. Women accused of “sorcery” are often attacked by violent mobs, risk being tortured and killed, yet the perpetrators are rarely held to account.   Ruth Kissam, a sorcery related violence activist, was reported in 2019 in The National calling the current laws ineffective and calling on the government to enforce the law and prosecute both the perpetrators and instigators.   Papua New Guinea supported a recommendation to “take steps to investigate all reports of gender-based violence, including accusations of sorcery, that perpetrators are brought to justice in fair trials, and that victims receive reparation and are given access to healthcare and other relevant services”. There have been some recent investigations and prosecutions, but they are rare. http://bit.ly/39U06Uh
	Sexist and incomplete data hold back the world’s COVID-19 response by ONE, Unicef, agencies   Sep 2020   Moving Beyond the Numbers: What the COVID-19 pandemic means for the safety of women and girls. (UNICEF)   Since the beginning of the lockdowns and quarantine restrictions enacted by Governments to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, the world is witnessing a horrifying surge - a surge of what was already an epidemic - in gender-based violence (GBV), particularly intimate partner violence.   A plethora of reports from across the globe have indicated an increase in reported cases, as well as deaths. Yet at the same time, some of the figures actually show the opposite – that fewer GBV survivors are contacting service providers than before the pandemic.   In order to make effective policy and programming decisions, governments, policymakers and donors must go beyond the numbers and aim for a more comprehensive understanding of dynamics driving pre-existing violence against women and girls and how the current environment exacerbates these risks.   The increased threat to women and girls is predictable based on patterns of abuse and violence that existed before the COVID-19 pandemic. Quarantine and confinement measures increase the risks of GBV and, as a result, will worsen the severity of the violence experienced by women and girls.   This article illustrates some of the limitations of the statistics that have been widely publicized in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, provides additional contextual information to better understand the risks women and girls are facing, and outlines some priority recommendations to Governments, policy makers, donors and key humanitarian and development actors for addressing gender-based violence in the context of COVID-19.   http://www.corecommitments.unicef.org/covid19db/Moving-Beyond-the-Numbers-2.pdf http://www.one.org/international/blog/womens-economic-empowerment-covid-19/ http://www.one.org/stories/facts-gender-equality http://www.ipsnews.net/2020/08/opinion-women-girls-forced-trade-sex-water/ http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/10/09/918815890/portraits-of-resilience-how-19-women-around-the-globe-face-the-pandemic http://www.iied.org/addressing-gendered-other-inequalities-will-be-central-covid-19-recovery http://www.genderandcovid-19.org/resources-page/ http://worlds-women-2020-data-undesa.hub.arcgis.com/ http://data.unwomen.org/COVID19 http://data.unwomen.org/stories
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