“Violence against women and girls, in all its many forms, shames us all,” Yury Fedotov, Executive Director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), said in a statement issued in Vienna on Tuesday during the 24th Session of the Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice, which opened on Monday and runs through 21 May.
According to UNODC, women and girls continue to be killed in large numbers worldwide. In 2012, for example, at least 43,000 women were murdered by their intimate partners or family members.
Yet such crime is only the most visible and brutal sign of what is happening to millions of women. Hidden from our view, Fedotov said, are the dreadful daily experiences of violence that blight the lives of women and girls.
Such experiences, including terrible sexual violence, occur in the countryside and cities; as well as in schools, work places and especially the home.
“We must also acknowledge that, just as no society is immune from these violent acts, we are all part of the solution,” Fedotov underscored.