The Human Impact

By Maria Caspani

The accounts of women sexually assaulted during protests in Egypt’s Tahrir Square are horrific not just for their sheer brutality but for the apparent level of organisation among huge gangs of assailants.

The degree of premeditation was revealed this week when state-run Ahram Online reported shocking details of mob assaults in the Cairo square where the country’s uprising began two years ago.

“All I remember is hands all over my body, grabbing under the layers of pullovers I was wearing, touching my breasts, opening my bra,” Ahram Online quotes an unidentified woman as saying.

“More hands on my back and legs, my trousers being pulled down … my empty hand tried to pull my trousers back up when I felt fingers inside my butt and shortly after in my vagina,” said the woman who reported her attack to the activist group OpAntiSH.

Finger-rapes appear to be common during attacks on women protesters in Cairo.

They are part of a recurrent pattern the Egyptian news site called the “circle of hell”. A mob of 200 or more men forms two lines and advances through the square, in search of one or two isolated women.

A cast-off bra can do more to change the world than you might think.

CNN Freedom Project, which shines the spotlight on the perils of modern-day slavery and human trafficking, aims to show us how in a 30-minute documentary airing on Feb. 15, 2013, at 11:30 a.m. EST on the CNN television network.

“Mozambique or Bust”, narrated by actress Mira Sorvino — who also serves as U.N. goodwill ambassador against human trafficking — tells the tale of how Denver-based charity Free the Girls collected 34,000 donated bras and recruited help from Truckers Against Human Trafficking and other volunteers to transport them via Chicago to Mozambique.

The bras, considered a luxury item in the African country, are given to sex-trafficking survivors who sell them in used clothing markets.

Global development goals due to replace current anti-poverty Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) when they expire in 2015 could be unified by a concept that calls for an integrated view of economic growth and development, said Helen Clark, head of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The concept — the water-energy-food nexus – aims to create a sustainable economy and a healthy environment by considering how each of the three elements interrelate and are affected by decision-making.

“It’s a more holistic approach  –  without water you can’t farm, without clean water you can’t be healthy, without ways of allocating and looking after the water supply there won’t be enough to meet our needs — it’s got many dimensions,” Clark said.

Although it is a war crime to conscript or use child soldiers under age 15 in active hostilities, the practice continues in at least 19 countries, Amnesty International said on Tuesday, citing the charity Child Soldiers International.

Amnesty has documented the recent use or allegations of use of child soldiers in Mali, Central African Republic, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sri Lanka, Somalia, and Yemen.  As well as perpetrating human rights abuses themselves, many child soldiers are killed, maimed or become victims of rape and other sexual violence.

Poorly regulated weapons sales continue to contribute to the use of boys and girls in hostilities by armed groups and government forces, despite the protective Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child agreed by 150 countries, the rights group said in a statement issued to mark International Day against the Use of Child Soldiers.

More than 300 million women and girls in India do not have access to safe menstrual hygiene products, endangering their health, curtailing their education and putting their livelihoods at risk, say experts at the Geneva-based Water Supply & Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC).

At least 23 percent of girls in India leave school when they start menstruating and the rest miss an average of five days during each monthly menstrual period between the ages of 12 and 18, according to WSSCC, a partnership run by government, non-governmental organisation (NGO) members and a United  Nations-hosted secretariat.

“From a taboo standpoint they are ostracised – it’s an awkward situation to be in if you are having your monthly period and you simply do not want to be seen by others because they may perceive you as either dirty or unhygienic in some way,” said Chris Williams, executive director of WSSCC.

Policymakers debating water security must consider how the world’s most vulnerable people cope with variable access to water or the next global development goals will fail to lift rural areas out of poverty, say the authors of a new study.

Ignoring the humanitarian aspects of water security sidesteps important socio-political, economic and environmental factors related to rainfall levels, according to the report from international charity WaterAid and the UK’s Overseas Development Institute (ODI).

Often the term “water security” refers to global water availability shortages or reflects concerns about securing water for companies or at a national level, WaterAid’s Daniel Yeo told AlertNet.

Changing attitudes have resulted in a decline in female genital mutilation in Africa and the Middle East, where the practice is most prevalent, according to United Nations data released on Wednesday.

In 29 countries in those two regions, an average of 36 percent of girls aged 15-19 have been subjected to FGM, the partial or total removal of the external female genitalia, compared with an estimated 53 percent of women aged 45-49.

In Kenya, women aged 45-49 are three times more likely to have been cut than girls aged 15-19, the U.N. data, released on the International Day of Zero Tolerance to Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting, show.

If toilets meet children’s needs, this will keep them in school longer, reduce the spread of life-threatening diarrhoeal diseases and help meet development goals, according to the charity Water For People.

At least 2.5 billion people worldwide do not have proper sanitation facilities. The combined effects of improper sanitation, unsafe water supply and poor hygiene are estimated to cause almost 2,000 child deaths per day, the U.N. children’s agency, UNICEF, reports.

“Allowing youth to become comfortable using toilets and practising good hygiene from a young age, means that as they grow up there are fewer people to educate and convince of the reasons that improved toilets are important,” said Kate Fogelberg, Water For People’s regional manager in South America.

A new online mapping tool for monitoring global water resources will improve water-risk management by showing patterns of water stress, flooding, drought and areas of water access, its creators say.

The Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas, developed by environmental think-tank World Resources Institute (WRI) and an alliance of businesses and governments, can be customised by users to reflect a range of data with a few clicks of a computer mouse.

It combines 12 water-risk indicators to create maps showing where water problems might exist.

Poor access to sanitation and clean water costs the global economy $260 billion each year, according to Liberia’s president who is leading work to craft proposals for a new set of global anti-poverty goals.

They are intended to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which were agreed in 2000 and expire in 2015.

“$260 billion in economic losses annually is directly linked to inadequate water supply and sanitation around the world,” Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf told a meeting on the post-2015 development agenda in the capital Monrovia this week. “We must take this issue more seriously.”