The INFO Project Blog

As featured in this month’s End Violence against Women newsletter, the video “Honor Killings and Suicides,” brings to light the major issue of honor killings as predicated, gender-specific murders, taking a look at the practice specifically within Turkish society today.

This short video speaks to the experiences of several Turkish women who have been literally threatened to death by their own families and in-laws. Many times these women are victims of sexual violence or accused of adultery, and are then terrorized with threats of murder by their own relatives in an effort to preserve family honor. Read the rest of this entry »

I saw just the recent BBC article called UK Indian women ‘aborting girls,’ documenting the current realities of systematic, sex-selective abortion among groups of British women of Indian descent. This form of “gendercide” has also been called female infanticide/foeticide, and it is thought to account for 1,500 “missing girls” from the total number of births expected in the UK from 1990-2005.

The BBC interviewed one woman who admitted to aborting her baby girl for reasons of gender, who said,

Unfortunately it was another girl. My husband and I thought the burden would probably be too much and the pressure when I got back home. So we decided to terminate.

Read the rest of this entry »

Looking through a new UNICEF photo essay on the life cycle of girls, I couldn’t help but begin to think about the little girl from Haiti staring back at me through the screen. “Will she survive and thrive? Will her life be shaped primarily by gender discrimination or by the progress girls and women have made over the last century?”

After having spent part of last year in the Dominican Republic, I remember all the visits I made to the campo to visit a group of Haitian girls I played soccer with on the weekends. Their families had come to DR to look for work and better opportunities for their children…and some of them had found it. One of my Haitian soccer friends, Milanda, had won a scholarship from a Dominican university to study medicine—a clear example, to me, of some of the progress that has been made for women, regardless of race, in the Dominican Republic. And yet, there are plenty of stories and plenty of pictures that continue to show us the steps that still need to taken.      - Johanna

Click here to view “The life cycle of girls: Early childhood”
Photo Essay.