… women activists from different parts of the globe with varied experiences combating sexual violence in conflict-affected countries and shattering the silence that surrounds it. While the shape of struggles, hopes and victories was drawn by participants in terms of their own country contexts, common threads and questions emerged to weave the sessions together. Here are 10 burning questions that came up:

1. How to straddle the yawning divide between traditional, customary and/or religious justice systems and legal ones?
2. How to raise awareness among community leaders and elders without being perceived as importers of ‘Western ideas’ or being enemies to men?
3. How to deal with impunity in societies where victims are stigmatized and shamed, and the crime of sexual violence is rather dealt with behind closed doors? Further, how to deal with perpetrators who often receive blanket amnesty as part of community rites of reconciliation?
4. How to reconcile the need for evidence-based data collection with the need to provide health and medical services to victims of sexual violence?
5. How to protect women human rights defenders who stand up, speak out and make deep inroads for change, at great cost to themselves and their families?
6. What happens to the vast funds that are raised for reconstruction? Who decides where they go? Where do they go?
7. What are the dimensions and roles that countries bring in conflict and its management – as parties to conflict; mediators; troop-contributing countries; refugees-hosting countries… – and how can women’s NGOs collaborate across countries that are playing these different roles?
8. What can countries who have been at peace (both in the North and South) learn from countries that have already developed national plans? What can countries in the North learn from women’s groups in the South?
9. What value does an international law like SCR 1820 hold for women who have been advocating in conflict, transitional, post-conflict countries, as well as in those which have been at peace?
10. How to use existing reporting mechanisms and forums for tracking international human rights conventions, like CEDAW, the Torture Convention, the Convention on the Rights of the  Child, the Human Rights Council, to pin governments down on their compliance with SCR 1820?