22 12 11 – US Department of State – Secretary Clinton's Remarks on Women, Peace, and Security

 

 

 

There are dozens of active conflicts today, many of them
brutal civil wars. These wars often involve non-state actors and have become
increasingly deadly for civilians, especially women, who face abduction, rape
and dislocation on a massive scale.

Non-combatants represented 10 percent of the casualties
in World War I and 50 percent in World War II, but as high as 90 percent of
contemporary conflicts in Africa.

Estimates of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV)
from conflicts in the past two decades include: 250,000-500,000 women and girls
raped during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda; 20,000-50,000 women and girls raped
during the Bosnia-Herzegovina war; 50,000-64,000 internally displaced women were
sexually attacked by combatants in Sierra Leone; and more than 200,000 women and
children raped over a decade of conflict in the Democratic Republic of the
Congo.

Traditional peace-making methods are proving ineffective
at ending these smaller wars.

· Nearly half of the
agreements that ended conflicts in the 1990s failed within five years of
signing.

· According to the World Bank,
90 percent of the civil wars in the 21st century occurred in countries that
already had a civil war in the previous 30 years.

Women have been largely absent from peace
processes.

· In the past 20 years,
hundreds of peace treaties have been signed. According to an analysis of a
sample of treaties, less than 8 percent of those treaties’ negotiators were
women.

· A UNIFEM review of 585 peace
agreements from 102 peace processes revealed that since 1990, only 92 peace
agreements, or 16 percent, have contained at least one reference to women or
gender.

· A UNIFEM analysis revealed
that of approximately 300 peace agreements reviewed, only 18 mentioned
SGBV