EL FASHER, 3 Mar 2006 (IRIN) - During a meeting on violence against women in Kabkabiya town, North Darfur, participants cannot agree whether a person who falls pregnant after being raped should be charged with adultery.

The discussion takes place during a training programme organised by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Participants include Sudanese policemen, local administrators, civil society representatives and members of the African Union police.

The consensus is that, if immediately reported, the crime should not lead to any charges, but some feel she should be arrested for adultery if she fails to report the rape before giving birth.

The trainer refers to the legal precedent of the High Court of El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, which acquitted a woman of adultery charges in January. Not all participants are convinced, however.

With a relatively stable humanitarian situation in many camps for the internally displaced across Darfur, UNFPA says more needs to be done to protect women from violence Training programmes on combating violence against women and ensuring access to healthcare and legal assistance are part of this effort.

According to UNFPA, approximately 80 percent of the encamped populations in the strife-torn western Sudanese region of Darfur are women and children.

"We're talking about a significant and potentially vulnerable population in IDP [internally displaced persons] settings," said Maha Muna, UNFPA emergency coordinator for Sudan.

"This means that almost the entire camp population is potentially at risk of gender-based violence [GBV], and we know what those risks are," she added.

GBV, Muna noted, was an anticipated outcome of conflict all around the world. In some cases, rape was used as a strategy of war, but where communities' support structures had been eroded by displacement, violence occurred within the community as well.

"It is a critical issue, and we need to do a better job at monitoring how often we're having gender-based violence, under what circumstances," she said.

Prevention

One measure that has proved to be successful over the past year has been the organisation of joint patrols by the Sudanese police and the African Union, which accompany women outside IDP camps when they look for firewood.

Another strategy that has worked is the development of fuel-efficient stoves that reduce the amount of firewood women need to burn for household needs.

"The fuel-efficient stoves decrease the amount of trips outside the camp," Muna said.

Women do not necessarily go out to collect firewood for their own use, however, and many sell it in order to be able to buy things that are not available through distributions, such as okra, a high-nutrient staple food.

"So one strategy that we need to develop more is to develop income generation projects," Muna noted.

One non-governmental organisation has started providing sewing machines, which will be used to make sanitary napkins that can be sold or become part of camp distributions.

"The distributions are not then just helping women to have an income, they are also allowing for women's mobility, because without it, you're basically in jail in your home until your menses ends," Muna explained.

"It has a tertiary impact. We are not just talking about income for the household but we are also talking about women's mobility, which reduces her vulnerability," she added.

As many income generation projects were organised around women's centres, it also encouraged women to share information and come together in a form of psychosocial support.

"Sharing information is an important protection mechanism, in terms of what is your right for food distribution, what can you expect, what is the process, so that exploitation is decreased," the UNFPA emergency coordinator said.

Knowing that distributions could sometimes - when not managed well - result in exploitation or gender-based violence, Muna also urged for additional protective measures governing distributions.

"We need to make sure that female single heads of households are recognised as the heads of their household and are able to have a [ration] card," she noted. "We need to recognise that sometimes you have elderly women who are maybe taking care of orphaned children."

Response

Sudan has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world. Given that an estimated 25 percent of female IDPs are pregnant at any time, according to UNFPA, access to and quality of reproductive healthcare is a life-saving issue.

Given the low availability of doctors, especially in some of the rural IDP camps, much of the response focuses on training midwives.

"We need to ensure quality of care and at the centre of that is the midwife" Muna said.

The availability of equipment and supplies was another area of concern, including family-planning tools such as condoms and pills, because being pregnant could potentially be a life-threatening condition.

"We need to make sure that every pregnancy is a wanted pregnancy, one where a woman is able to have a safe delivery," Muna stressed.

The provision of basic equipment for referral hospitals, some of which were located close to an IDP camp and had experienced a 60 percent increase in the number of patients they treated, was another priority.

One example was the provision of health kits that would support a caesarean delivery, as an estimated 5 to 15 percent of pregnancies result in a caesarean delivery in the Sudanese context.

"They need sterilising equipment," Muna said. "Equipment that is not rusted and overused, because there aren't enough of the supplies available in the referral hospital to manage this huge bubble of caseload population."

Government response

In a growing recognition of the problem of gender-based violence, all three Darfur states have established a state committee on combating violence against women that is charged with identifying GBV and ensuring prevention and response.

Joint action groups, consisting of local and international NGOs, UN representatives and government officials, are providing the committees with analysis and suggestions of priority areas for response.

On 25 November 2005, on the international day to eliminate violence against women, a national action plan for eliminating violence against women was launched, with specific targets for the training of police and the provision of healthcare provision.

"Ultimately we know it's the government that is responsible for ensuring protection in IDP situations," Muna said. "Our challenge now is to figure out how to support those mechanisms to carry out their mandates."

Two of the women on the state committee in North Darfur had also recently attended the Darfur peace negotiations in the Nigerian capital of Abuja, supported by UN Development Fund for Women.

Ensuring women's voices are heard early on in this process was crucial, Muna noted, so that issues of gender-based violence in conflicts could be addressed as negotiations were being carried out.

"It is important that women's experience of conflict is not forgotten at the negotiating table, because it is certainly there at the battle-field," she said.

"So long as we neglect it," she added, "we are only empowering half of the population to cope, overcome conflict and to bring about peace."