Fear of sexual violence amid militarisation of North-East – UN official

A survey by the UNHRC in parts of Sri Lanka’s Northeast found nearly 40% of women feel they are not safe at home, with militarisation being a key reason, press reports quoted the UN Population Fund’s representative in Sri Lanka, Alain Sibenale, as saying.

Sibenale was speaking Wednesday at an event at the British High Commission in Colombo to mark the ‘End Sexual Violence in Conflict’ conference being held in London.

See reports by Daily Mirror and Colombo Telegraph.

 

“This [sexual violence] is an issue that has affected every part of Sri Lanka but at the same time, we need to recognize that the North and East have specific degree variations of vulnerability that do differ from the rest of the country,” he said.

 

Women in the former warzones in Sri Lanka were more vulnerable to sexual violence due to several factors, including the continued militarisation, lack of adequate electricity and sanitation facilities, he said.

 

He also expressed concern over the lack of data on the occurrence and nature of incidents of sexual violence.

 

Statements by Sri Lankan government officials at the highest levels of decision making “point to potential difficulties in pushing for progressive policies and implementing programmes which address sexual and gender based violence,” he said.

 

Add new comment

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • Web page addresses and email addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Global and entity tokens are replaced with their values. Browse available tokens.