Archive - May 16, 2013

[NB: This piece is taken from a diary entry from 2010 when I was briefly interning for a charity. Sadly, the contents still remain relevant.]

I'm drafting a consultation paper for DFID (Department for International Development) on maternal mortality. Doing the research has been difficult. It has been pretty damn awful really. I've basically spent the last couple of days going through a catalogue of all the horrific atrocities inflicted on women and young girls across the world, all in the name of tradition, custom, honour, religion. There may not be much in common between the troubled Somalia and the up-and-coming-nearly-developed India, but one thing that connects the two is the fact that women and girls of both the countries continue to face violence. The forms may vary wildly from female genital mutilation to sex-selective abortion, but the victims are the same group of human beings - women.