Violence Against Women

Harmful attitudes towards women are reinforced by certain religious beliefs. Some religious and other community leaders exhort women to stand by their husbands under all circumstances, whereas at the same time they fail to take a clear stand against domestic violent acts such as wife battery and marital rape.

Preston Women's Refuge has won a grant which will allow it to help female immigrants trapped in violent marriages.
The refuge is already supporting two such women and has had 30 phone calls from other immigrants in just four weeks.

The free and confidential service, offered in English, Gujarati, Punjabi and Urdu, is thought to be the first service of its kind offered by a Women's Aid organisation.

FRUSTRATION AT "delay after delay" in the opening of two new sexual assault treatment units in the west and midlands was expressed yesterday by the chief executive of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre.

Speaking at the unveiling of a new campaign to raise awareness of the centre's helpline, Ellen O'Malley-Dunlop said €2.4 million had been made available in budget 2006 to update existing units in Dublin, Letterkenny, Waterford and Cork and to open two new units in Mullingar and Galway.

Currently the Letterkenny unit was closed and the Mullingar and Galway units had not come on stream

A man in a bar gets progressively more drunk and disorderly, his speech growing more slurred and his sexual advances to a waitress becoming more aggressive as he tries to get her to go home with him.

The scene is from a sketch at the second national bar hostesses' conference in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, where bar staff told the gathering they often had to deal with sexual violence and harassment.

"People don't respect you as a bar worker; they treat you badly and expect that you are an easy target for sex because of your job," Catherine Wacira, a bar hostess in Nairobi, told the conference on 27 October.

"Our managers rarely take our side when we are being harassed because the customers are paying a lot of money; they prefer to keep them happy rather than defend us."

Participants at the conference on preventing HIV and sexual violence among bar hostesses said their working conditions sometimes made it difficult for them to refuse punters' sexual advances.