The Human Impact

The thought of spending just one day with a full stomach compelled Shin Dong-hyuk to take the biggest risk of his life.

In 2005, he escaped North Korea’s Camp 14, a prison holding political enemies of the state. He was 23, and all he had ever known of life was the labour camp – its conditions likened to a Soviet gulag or Nazi concentration camp.

The subject of “Escape from Camp 14“, a book by former Washington Post journalist Blaine Harden, Shin is thought to be the only person born in one of these camps to have escaped.

“I never felt resentful about the way I had to live. I never thought there could be another way of life,” Shin said at London’s Frontline Club where he appeared with Harden this week.

Shin was born in a “complete control district”, about 30 miles long and 15 miles wide, in the mountainous centre of the country, and grew up among an estimated 15,000 prisoners who were put to work in the camp’s coal mines, farms and factories.

Is marriage a guarantee that a woman won’t be prostituted?

It’s a question that played heavily on my mind recently when I went to the remote village of Wadia in India’s western region of Gujarat to cover a mass wedding and engagement ceremony of 21 girls, which was aimed at breaking a centuries-old tradition of prostitution.

I arrived in the small, neglected hamlet on the eve of the big ceremony. Preparations were well underway.

Soon-to-be-brides sat inside the mud-walled compounds of their homes surrounded by singing female relatives, with “haldi” or turmeric paste smeared on the faces and arms – a South Asian pre-wedding ritual believed to make the skin “glow”.

The U.N.’s latest report on the state of the world’s 1.2 billion adolescents gives food for thought, especially on the plight of India’s girls aged between 10 and 19.

The report explores a range of issues affecting teenagers around the globe, from nutrition and health to sexual behaviour, knowledge on HIV/AIDS, attitudes towards gender violence and access to education.

Data from surveys of adolescent girls in India, and South Asia in general, are once again a reality check – which we shouldn’t need but unfortunately still do.

In an Istanbul conference room of sex workers and women’s rights experts, a black and white silent film sparks waves of laughter.

Instead of the likes of Charlie Chaplin, the film’s star running across the screen to upbeat music is a woman escaping police as they raid a bar for sex workers. After chasing her in circles, the police arrest her, only for her to return to the bar again anyway.

But laughter is absent in the room during the next short clip – a short film purportedly showing a real raid on sex workers.

Worldwide, women battle patriarchal systems daily to own what is rightfully theirs, be it their right to land or household finances – as highlighted by delegates at the world’s largest global women’s rights conference in Istanbul this week.

Yet when it comes to women and girls who have suffered sexual violence, the property they often strive to reclaim is their own body.

So how can women regain a sense of ownership over bodies that have been physically and emotionally shattered?

Disconnected approaches to water security are hindering efforts to launch more effective talks on providing universal access to fresh water and sanitation, an expert said at an international conference this week.

The division between discussions on boosting access to water for the poor and those on the challenges of managing water as a resource was plain to see at the water security conference at Oxford University, according to Tom Slaymaker, a senior policy analyst at WaterAid.

“The dominant narrative on water security reflects rich-country concerns and we mustn’t forget that in developing countries huge amounts of people still lack basic facilities,” Slaymaker said.

People funding initiatives to tackle climate change effects would channel money towards the worst-affected people, right? And towards those who play key roles in mitigating the effects of climate change?

It certainly sounds logical. But in reality, many donors aiming to help communities to weather climate change often overlook the needs of women. So says Mariama Williams, a senior fellow at the Geneva-based South Centre, an intergovernmental think tank of developing countries.

Distributing funds in the area of climate change “has to have a gender dimension,” Williams told delegates at a women’s rights conference in Istanbul on Thursday.

The lives of 2.5 million people could be saved every year if governments committed to universal access to safe drinking water and improved sanitation, charity WaterAid has said.

Citing the latest data from the World Health Organization (WHO), WaterAid said in a report that boosting access to clean water and sanitation could save people by reducing deaths from diarrhoea, malnutrition and related diseases.

Although the global Millennium Development Goal (MDG 7) water target to reduce by half the proportion of people living without safe water by 2015 has now been met, many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, Southern Asia and Oceania are lagging behind, WaterAid said.

Aid agencies and donors should develop a “tool box” for the use and distribution of cash transfers to improve effective aid delivery, according to a new report from the Cash Learning Partnership (CaLP).

Cash and voucher programmes are increasingly being used in regions where security problems interfere with the delivery of such traditional forms of aid as food.

An estimated 4 million people in the Horn of Africa are now receiving famine assistance via cash and voucher programmes from non-governmental charities and United Nations (U.N.) agencies, according to CaLP.

“Finding Fernanda: Two Mothers, One Child and a Cross-Border Search for Truth (Cathexis Press 2011).” It is journalist Erin Siegal’s chronicle of the terrible personal cost to two families ensnared in the corruption and human trafficking that fueled the Guatemala’s booming adoption industry until 2008.