In December of 2008, the United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women published a report entitled The Role of Men and Boys in Achieving Gender Equality. The report recognizes that the pursuit of gender equality requires the efforts of both men and women, and that achieving meaningful social change necessitates the involvement of both genders.

Sharaf Heroes is an anti-‘honour violence’ project launched in 2003 by the feminist, antiracist, Swedish organisation Electra. It seeks to educate young men from different backgrounds and religions in human rights and equality. Sharaf means honour in Arabic. It is in its original meaning a beautiful word but today, in the western world, it has come to be associated solely with violence and patriarchal oppression. Sharaf Heroes want to reclaim the word and its positive meaning.

HONOR KILLING: A Misclassification under the Gender Nexus.

Ms. Darnell argues in her paper that the threat of honor killing provides potential victims the opportunity to make asylum claims in the United States.

The present report, submitted in accordance with General Assembly resolution 62/168, is intended to reflect the broader patterns and trends in the human rights situation in the Islamic Republic of Iran on the basis of that country’s international treaty obligations and the observations made by treaty monitoring bodies and the special procedures of the Human Rights Council.

Dr Azza Baydoun has analysed every ‘honour killing' in Lebanon that has gone before the courts since 1999 and found that behind the plea of offended honour lies the crime of femicide. She describes the patriarchal concepts of ‘deviant women' and ‘deficient men' in her research. Here she outlines some of her findings.

From the article:

"Intense and widespread social concern over crimes of passion exploded in brazil in the 1910s and lasted through the 1930s. (This term refers to homocides resulting from conflicts related to love and/or sexual relations. In pradctice, the crime was generally a male crimes, involving the killing of women -- and/or their suitors -- by husbands, fiances, lovers, or fathers and brothers.) Crimes of passion were by no means a new phenomenon in Brazil, according to Portuguese law (to which Brazil was subject during the colonial period), a married man who discovered his wife in the act of committing adulery had the elgal right to kill bother her and her suitor, and the social custom of doing do did not die with the formal abrogation of this 'right'. Suddenly, however, these crimes began to be experiences as particular threatening."

Learn Without Fear:The Global Campaign to End Violence in Schools

Cruel and humiliating forms of psychological punishment, gender-based violence and bullying remain a daily reality for millions of children.

Guatemala: No protection, no justice: killings of women (an update)

http://www.amnesty.ca/resource_centre/reports/view.php?load=arcview&arti...

At approximately 9:30 pm on 27 July 2005, 20-year-old university student Cristina Hernández(1) was forced nto a grey car outside her home by four men. Neighbours witnessed the abduction and immediately alerted her father who later related:

This 185-page report is published by Plan International for the purpose of bringing global attention to the fact that progress towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is being hampered