Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives held a hearing to shine light on the global epidemic of violence against women. Women for Women International submitted the following testimony to the Congressional Record offering 16 years of experience on how violence impacts women, their families and communities around the world...

I'm sitting by the Tigris River in Baghdad on a hot July evening. The air is still, the dust has settled, and the call for prayers is echoing over the river as it reflects lights from relatively new restaurants. I visited my mother's grave yesterday and learned that her tombstone...

I spent my twenty-fourth birthday in the refugee camps in Split, Croatia. The camps were filled with Bosnian refugees from a war that lasted four years, killed a minimum of 250,000 people and led to the rape of between 20-50,000 women. I had recently founded my organization, Women for Women...

In 1951, Ali Al-Wardi, one of Iraq's most respected historians and social anthropologists, wrote about the need to lift women's seclusion and the necessity of women's full inclusion in all aspects of the public life in Iraq. He argued that gender equality was one of the major prerequisites for a...

Today I would like to bring you the story of my friend and colleague Sweeta Noori, an Afghan woman working with me to empower women survivors of war through Women for Women International's Afghanistan Chapter. Through her life we see how, despite decades of political shifts in Afghanistan, the symbolic...

By Sara Sykes
Women for Women International

In the Women for Women International headquarters office in Washington DC, I sit in a small office everyday.
I type on my computer.
I answer the phone.
I rush down the hall, eager to finish a...

Throughout Afghanistan's history, negotiations over women's status and
rights in Afghan society have occurred largely in the context of political
struggles to take power or to hold on to power. We can see from President
Karzai's recent authorization of the Shiite Personal Status Law--a move
pleasing...

We all can feel it. Between the financial crisis and a looming recession sits the fear of worse things to come. It makes even those among us who have not yet felt the pinch of it think twice about whether we can afford to spend.

I am deeply worried...

I hadn't been to my homeland, Iraq, since so many professional Iraqi women started to be assassinated, including one of my good female friends, in fall of 2004. In February I traveled the country to visit with Women for Women International's courageous Iraqi staff -- who have served nearly 4,000...

Tensions continue to build in the Balkans and the threat of conflict looms. The UN deadline of December 10th has come and gone and negotiations over Kosovo's future are still deadlocked. Perhaps most troubling is the fact that once again negotiations impacting the future of an entire region have failed...

I will never forget the day that two turbaned, bearded strangers approached me as I stood in the midst of a camp for internally displaced people on the outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan. My mind instantly flooded with stereotypes of the Taliban -- whose misogynist interpretations of Islam resulted in the...

As a teenage daughter of Saddam Hussein's pilot, I attended his palace parties and called him uncle. Yet, he was the demon of my life as he was for most Iraqis. Like a poisonous gas, he leaked his way into my family's home. He took over our lives as we...

As the daughter of Saddam Hussein's pilot, as someone who grew seeing him and calling him "uncle," Saddam has been my demon for most of my life. Everything about me was associated to him. My family's home in Iraq was referred to as the pilot's home, the street I lived...

I just finished scrubbing my fingernails for the fifth time today. No matter how many times I scrub I just keep finding more and more layers of dirt. Yesterday I left Sudan. There are so many layers to the complex life in Sudan. It is a huge country the size...

The liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein should not mean the restriction of rights for women. Unfortunately, this might be the case if the reports of the new Iraq Constitution allow broad interpretations of Islam to govern women’s lives.

From my experience in Iraq and conversations with Iraqi women...