One third of Afghan women get married before the age of 18.

When the Taliban were in power, Afghan women were denied many basic human rights. They were not allowed to work, needed a male escort if they wanted to leave the house and were forbidden from consulting a male doctor.
The recently adopted Afghan constitution says men and women have equal rights but, as Zeina Khodr reports, this is far from the case.
For the women in Kabul’s Pol-i-Charki prison, their only crime is running away from an abusive husband. But in Afghanistan, it is enough to keep a woman behind bars.
Massouda Hashimin, a 30-year-old mother of seven, told Al Jazeera she ran away because she was desperate.
“My husband was not a good person. He brought women home and he drank alcohol,“ she said. “He took me to the police and the police told me that the allegation against me was kidnapping the children and moral crimes.“
“Moral crimes“ means simply defying their family’s wishes. Most of the women in the prison have been locked up, accused of adultery or of marrying a man of their own choosing.
Still, some women see prison as a better alternative to their lives. They are protected from family members who would kill them for making their own choices.
“What happens in prison [is that] she loses her credibility within her family and there is no one to support her,“ says Orzala Ashraf, founder of Hawca (Humanitarian Assistance for Women and Children).
“That woman is always at risk from her family--they are the ones who forced her from her home.“
This is why Ashraf’s organization has set up a few safe houses to help these victims of domestic violence.
Afghanistan’s girls are likely to be forced into marriage at a very young age and most of the time to much older men.
Families chose this option for many reasons--to settle disputes, for example, or even to pay off debts.
One third of Afghan women get married before the age of 18. Of these, more than half involve girls below the legal age of 16. Around 60 to 80 percent of them are forced.
The doors to better lives have still not swung open for many Afghan girls. They are still not free, and it may be a long way before they will be able to choose their own paths.

The position of women in Chinese society, particularly in politics, is improving and other countries should follow China’s good example, a senior government official said.
Decades after Mao Zedong famously remarked that women “hold up half the sky“, no female has yet made it on to the country’s all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee--although Vice Premier Wu Yi is on the 24-member Politburo--and academics continue to point out the inadequacy of women’s rights, reported Reuters.
A preference for boys and easy availability of abortion has distorted the birth rate, with about 119 boys born for every 100 girls, an imbalance that has grown since China introduced a one-child policy more than 25 years ago to curb the population.
But Huang Qingyi, vice chairwoman of the State Council’s National Working Committee on Children and Women, defended China’s record and pointed to new and revised laws, saying even the United Nations recognized the country’s success.
“They consider that China has achieved obvious results in promoting women’s development and protecting their rights and is a model for other countries to use,“ Huang told a news conference.
Gender equality was enshrined as a “basic national principle“, Huang said, pointing out that women make up 45 percent of the national workforce--a proportion that is rising.
Indeed, last year a woman topped a list of China’s richest people for the first time, elbowing past two-time leader Huang Guangyu of GOME Electrical Appliances and a coterie of CEOs at old-economy government enterprises.
Newly minted billionaire Cheung Yan, 49-year-old founder and chairwoman of Chinese paper packager Nine Dragons Paper (Holdings) Ltd., saw her fortune balloon nine-fold to $3.4 billion, boosted by her firm’s March initial public offering in Hong Kong.
Yet many Chinese women face discrimination in pay and treatment and it was only in 2006 that commercial hub Shanghai said it would outlaw sexual harassment in rules that authorize lawsuits against perpetrators.
Huang largely avoided mentioning the problems women still face in a society where traditionally they were valued less than men, sold off as wives and not educated.
Instead, Huang concentrated on accentuating the positive, such as the 241 women who held provincial or ministerial level leadership positions at the end of 2005, though she did not say what proportion this made up.

India will ban women under 30 from emigrating to work as domestic help in the Persian Gulf Arab states and parts of Africa.

India will ban women under 30 from emigrating to work as domestic help in the Persian Gulf Arab states and parts of Africa and Southeast Asia in a bid to curb sex trafficking, a report said.
The move came after Renuka Chowdhury, the minister for women and children, said overseas domestic workers had complained of being pushed into prostitution after their employers had seized their passports, reported AFP.
A ban will be “imposed on granting emigration clearance to women below 30 if they are seeking employment as housemaids,“ Chowdhury, who recently returned from Kuwait, was quoted by the Times of India as telling parliament.
An exception will be made for women who return to India on leave from their jobs and who wish to return to their employers, the ministry for Indians working abroad said.
Some 17 countries will be covered by the ban, which was aimed at halting the trafficking of women for prostitution, the newspaper reported.
Chowdhury said she was considering a move to require overseas domestic workers to deposit their passports with the local Indian embassy or consulate, aping a model used by Singapore for its citizens, according to the report.
As many as six million Indian expatriates send home $20 billion a year from Persian Gulf states.
But reports abound that the migrants are mistreated, according to workers’ associations and human rights groups.
“Reports of foreign women working in domestic positions being beaten or sexually abused by their employers and recruiting agents were common (in 2006),“ said a US State Department report on Bahrain, where 130,000 Indians work.

A tribal woman in IranÕs northwestern city of Ardebil

Rocked in recent years by kidnappings and street robberies, desperately poor Haiti is caught in the grip of a new violent scourge--a rising number of sex assaults against women.
As recently as a decade ago, violence here almost always was of the political variety. But today, the Caribbean island nation is wracked by street-level brutality, sometimes by individual attackers, sometimes by roving gangs, visited more often than not against women, reported AFP.
Researchers said about 80 percent of victims of violence in Haiti are women, of whom about 40 percent were attacked within their own homes. And in the capital city Port-au-Prince, gang rape has become a shockingly familiar phenomenon.
Robed Congo Noel, a social worker with the Medecins du Monde nonprofit group observed that violence here is linked in large part “to the inferior station of women in our society.“ In addition to women, minors also are at risk: more than 55 percent of sex assault victims are between the ages of 10 and 17.
Because the phenomenon is so new and because Haiti’s other needs are so great, there is little in the way of a support system for the sexually abused.
The upsurge of violence in many ways is not surprising. This impoverished country for generations has suffered through coups, violence and unspeakable poverty.
But the violence has mushroomed in the wake of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s 2004 ouster. According to statistics compiled by the United Nations, there were 142 kidnappings in November and December 2006 alone.
The lawlessness also is fed by the lack of a functioning criminal justice system, the continuing poverty and a flood of some 200,000 illegal weapons that have deluged the country in recent years, according to some estimates.
“Violence is everywhere in our society--but (speaking about it) is also taboo,“ said Emmanuel Joseph who runs a crisis intervention center in Carrefour, a poor section of the Haitian capital.

A Polish government minister said she will fight against discrimination under which women receive 35 percent less pay than men for the same job. Joanna Kluzik-Rostkowska, deputy employment minister, said Poland’s women not only earn less pay but the employment ratio for women in their 50s is one of the lowest in the European Union, Polish Radio reported, said Upi.com.
Kluzik-Rostkowska also referred to the unemployment problem among disabled saying out of 5.5 million handicapped people, 8 percent have jobs.
She said the government is determined to tackle these problems, the Polish daily Dziennik reported.
A public poll conducted by Poland’s Pracuj.pl Internet portal indicated the people who had the toughest time finding jobs were, in order: women in their 50s, disabled people, young mothers and people seeking jobs for the first time.
More than 90 percent of Poles said they have experienced discrimination at work but only few of them would go to seek justice in courts, the report said.

The percentage of women in employment has risen from 56 percent in 1971 to 70 percent in 2005, official figures show.
According to a government report, there are now some four million more women in work in Britain than there were 35 years ago, said Managingdiversity.co.uk
Data from the Office for National Statistics indicates that, over the ten years to spring 2005, employment rates for married or cohabiting mothers increased by 6 percentage points, while the percentage of lone mothers in work increased by 14 percentage points.
The rise in working mothers in both full-time and part-time employment reflects changes in maternity rights, flexible working and child care provision for women over the past 35 years.
The Labor Market Review 2006 also reveals that the gender pay gap has narrowed over the past decade, with hourly pay for female workers now 87 per cent of men’s, up from 80 per cent in 1998.
According to the ONS, there are almost twice as many women (65.2 per cent)working in the public sector as men and the proportion of older workers is higher than in the private sector. The proportion of women working in the private sector has remained largely unchanged since 1997, at 41.1 per cent.

Pregnant women restricted to bed rest can and should do safe, specially-designed physical activity, say experts at the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA).
Each year in the United States, an estimated 700,000 women with high-risk pregnancies (including nearly all those carrying triplets or more) are put on bed rest, the APTA said. But, in many cases, the incapacitating effects of total bed rest are not being addressed, leaving some expectant mothers ill-prepared for pre-and post-partum physical and psychological challenges, said HealthDaily News.
“As a result of prolonged bed rest, pregnant women experience an array of symptoms ranging from cardiovascular deconditioning, musculoskeletal discomforts, stressful postures and positions, skin breakdown, muscle weakness, as well as psychological issues such as guilt, stress, and depression,“ Jean Irion, a professor of physical therapy at the University of South Alabama in Mobile, said in a prepared statement.
Irion teaches physical therapists across the United States to develop safe physical activity programs for pregnant women on bed rest.
“Physical therapy is often equated with exercise, and many physicians equate exercise to a strong potential for exacerbating a given high-risk condition, so they don’t suggest pregnant women restricted to bed rest see a physical therapist. This is a huge mistake,“ according to Irion.
She said physical therapists work to minimize loss of muscle tone and strength and to make the women as comfortable as possible.
“We’re not training these women to compete in a triathlon following delivery. Our aim is for these women to maintain some strength, flexibility and range of motion in the upper and lower extremities, so they’ll be prepared for the demands of lifting carrying, and holding their babies,“ Irion said.