"We hope that this global report will open up a conversation to bring addressing sexual violence into the very centre of our collective thinking and action and to promote the right of women and girls everywhere to equality and to be free from violence."
-Yasmeen Hassan, Global Executive Director
The World's Shame: The Global Rape Epidemic
Around the world, rape and sexual abuse are everyday violent occurrences -- affecting close to a billion women and girls over their lifetimes. However, despite the pervasiveness of these crimes, laws are insufficient, inconsistent, not systematically enforced and, sometimes, promote violence. Since Equality Now’s founding in 1992, we have worked with survivors of rape and sexual assault to help them get justice and to push for measures to bring an end to this unacceptable crime. The report looks at how laws around the world are still failing to protect women and girls from sexual violence.
By any measure, gender-based violence, including sexual violence, is being inflicted on women and girls in epidemic proportions. If it were a medical disease, sexual violence would have the serious attention and the funding to address it, from governments and independent donors alike. Everyone reading this report is likely to have either survived, or to know someone who has experienced, some form of sexual violence.
The findings and analysis in this report are a reflection of information and trends emerging from our review of surveys on sexual violence laws submitted by members of the legal profession in 82 jurisdictions-including within 73 UN member states-around the world. Information for this report was collected over a period of several months from late 2014 to late 2015 and changes may have been made to laws subsequently. We have included case studies from our work to illustrate the impact of discriminatory rape laws or weak enforcement of good laws. The report does not purport to be a definitive representation of the law in any country. Instead, it provides a general picture of laws on sexual violence in the countries surveyed and to highlight obstacles to justice for survivors of sexual violence. The findings illustrate that governments still have a long way to go to transform their laws, policies and practices into instruments to a) prevent sexual violence, b) provide better access to justice for victims (including specialised services) and c) effectively punish sexual violence crimes.