Saudi Arabia has banned its citizens from marrying foreigners from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Chad. The administration says that the number of expats from these communities has exceeded the government’s limit of 500,000. But for one Pakistani woman, this is a blessing in disguise!

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Attention please: Girls and women of all age groups are requested to keep at least two adult men or four adult women with them, regardless of whether they are at home or elsewhere. This measure will help in case the woman in question is raped. The witnesses can then testify in court and help the victim get justice. Rapists are also requested not to harm these

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Evan Grae Davis’s new film entitled It’s a Girl has been a great success since its launch in September 2012. The film has hit a nerve amongst those in India and China advocating dignity and equality for women. Indeed the film has become part of a campaign on Twitter and Facebook which has “gone viral” – to use the language of social media networks. Meanwhile, the film has been screened for lawmakers in Europe and is enjoying great success with universities and NGOs in the battle to end gendercide. WomenTalkOnline’s reporter Roma Rajpal had the opportunity to speak to director Evan Grae Davis. 

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It’s been a very bad year indeed for women in India. As the world settles into the New Year, India’s daughters are mourning the death of their “braveheart Nirbhaya,” the 23-year-old who was brutally raped and has now succumbed to her injuries.  This is symptomatic of the agony, pain, humiliation and wretchedness that Indian women suffered in 2012.

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As a journalist you often read and write about crime and a point comes when writing the number of dead becomes a routine and you do not feel the loss anymore. In fact you do not find it interesting enough or you do not even consider it a story worth mentioning, if the number of casualties were too low or if the violence was not too brutal. But also there comes a time when words fail you, something so horrendous happens that it does not just touch you; rather it shakes you

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On 16 December 2012 six men abused and raped a female student in New Delhi. Their victim is now dead. The unbelievable brutality of the attack has unleashed a nation-wide debate. But that’s not enough. Now, after the death of the 23-year-old student, the young, urban middle class in particular is out on the streets. Many are demanding the death penalty for the six imprisoned rapists, one of whom is a minor. And many are also urging the state to finally do something to better protect women. India’s urban middle class views the state as void of ideas, deeply corrupt and unable to act – as a way for those in power to enrich themselves. 

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There is a lot common between Pakistan and India, after all the two nations have hundreds of years of shared history. But while partition of British India in 1947 gave India and Pakistan separate identities, 65 years later, the two nations are still striving to achieve a major goal: the protection of their women citizens from rape.

While activists in Pakistan mourned the recent killing of nurses carrying out a polio vaccination programme, the gang-rape of a 23-year-old medical student in a Delhi bus on December 16 has shaken the Indian nation and touched what the International Herald Tribune called the “deepest chord of discontent”.

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