Today, 25th November, marks the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. Through the work of our partner organisations such as AVEGA Agahozo and Kanyarwanda, Survivors Fund (SURF) is working towards that end. This work is made possible through an array of our donors, but most notably Comic Relief, Charities Advisory Trust and Sigrid Rausing Trust.

In the most recent issue of The Parliament Magazine we publish an advert reproduced below (made possible through the generosity of the publishers DODS). The magazine is dedicated to the issue of Violence Against Women. We focus on the remarkable work of AVEGA to support women survivors who endured extreme violence during the genocide in Rwanda, such as Daphrose.

About the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women (source: wikipedia)

Women’s activists have marked November 25 as a day to fight violence against women since 1981. On December 17, 1999, the United Nations General Assembly designated 25 November as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women (Resolution 54/134). The UN invited governments, international organizations and NGOs to organize activities designated to raise public awareness of the problem on this day as an international observance. Women around the world are subject to rape, domestic violence and other forms of violence, and the scale and true nature of the issue is often hidden.

This date came from the brutal assassination in 1960 of the three Mirabal sisters, political activists in the Dominican Republic, on orders of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo(1930–1961).