Widney Brown is senior director for international law and policy at Amnesty International. She will attend the diplomatic conference on the arms trade treaty taking place in New York this month.
That women and girls are singled out during armed conflicts is well documented — what is less well known is that once hostilities cease the undeclared war on women can continue for years on end.
Even though officially the fighting has ended, the proliferation of weapons, a culture of violence and the objectification of women continue to wreak havoc.
As a Bosnian women’s rights activist put it when she was talking to a group of human rights researchers documenting the horrors meted out in the early 1990s civil war: “There is no peace time for women.”