Increasingly the issue of domestic violence in Armenia is a topic for public discussion. Yet, greater attention to the issue isn’t yet translating into an expansion of programs to alleviate suffering and address policy shortcomings.
Armenia could be facing a fight with its largest ethnic minority, the Yezidis, over the age-old, thorny question of how old a female must be before she can marry.
When it comes to earning a living, women in Tajikistan are turning to leeches, meat factories and medicine as they try to compete in today’s male-dominated business climate.
Worldwide, 222 million women want to delay or avoid pregnancy but have no access to modern contraceptives. If they did, this would help prevent 21 million unwanted pregnancies; 79,000 maternal deaths and 1.1 million infant deaths.
Allegations that a member of Kyrgyzstan's KGB-successor agency organized the brutal rape of his wife have outraged women’s rights activists in Bishkek. But what rights defenders call an ordinary crime is having an extraordinary effect because of the victim’s response: she pressed charges.
Even though she was kidnapped, pressured into marrying a man from a nearby village, and then abandoned without means to sustain herself and the couple’s two young children, Totugul can’t rely on Kyrgyzstan’s courts for help.
Is Salvador Dali a French nudist, an Italian hairstylist or a Spanish surrealist? A television quiz show that portrays the ignorant answers of long-legged, skimpily clad female contestants to trivia questions is sparking an unprecedented outcry in traditionally patriarchal Georgia.
Thirty-seven-year-old Rusudan Gotsiridze is not a man with a beard, and never wears a skufia, a traditional Christian vestment. Nonetheless, she is an ordained bishop living in Georgia, a country where, for nearly 1,700 years, the priesthood was an exclusively male domain.
