There are approximately 50 million uprooted people around the world – refugees who have sought safety in another country and people displaced within their own country. Between 75-80 percent of them are women and children.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees cares for 21.8 million of these people. Around half of them are women and girls.

The majority of people flee their homes because of war and the proportion of war victims who are civilians leaped in recent decades from five percent to over 90 percent of casualties. Eighty percent of casualties by small arms are women and children, who far outnumber military casualties.

Domestic violence is the most widespread form of abuse against women with between one quarter and one half of women having been abused by a partner. Only 44 countries specifically protect women against domestic violence.

Females are subject to widespread sexual abuse. In Bosnia and Rwanda rape became a deliberate aim of war. More than 20,000 Muslim women were raped in Bosnia in a single year, 1992, and a great majority of female survivors of Rwanda's 1994 genocide were assaulted.

One in five women worldwide are victims of rape, many by known attackers. Between 40-60 percent of sexual assaults are committed against girls younger than 16.

More than 300,000 youngsters, many of them female refugees, are currently serving as child soldiers around the world. The girls are often forced into different forms of sexual slavery.

More than 16.4 million women today have HIV/AIDS and in the last few years, the percentage of women infected has risen from 41 to 47 percent of the affected population. In sub-Saharan Africa, teenage girls are five times more likely to be infected than boys.

The introduction of sex education and safety procedures can have dramatic results. In Uganda, the rates of sexual infection among educated women dropped by more than half between 1995 and 1997.

Around 170 countries are party to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and its Optional Protocolmajor instruments to protect women's rights and to achieve gender equality.

The Statute of the International Criminal Court was adopted in 1998, giving it power to adjudicate a wide spectrum of offenses including rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution and forced pregnancy.

The majority of trafficked people are women, especially those bound for the world's sex industries. Females are particularly vulnerable to trafficking because many have little individual security, economic opportunity or property or land ownership. The largest numbers of trafficked women are from South-East and South Asia and the former Soviet Union nations. Many victims are kidnapped or sold into slavery by their own families.

An estimated 45,000 households in Rwanda are headed by children, 90 percent of them girls.

An estimated 1.3 billion people worldwide, 70 percent of them women, live in absolute poverty on less than $1 per day.

Source: Refugees Magazine Issue 126: "Women – Seeking A Better Deal" (April 2002). Download the complete issue (pdf, 1.3Mb) here