“It is more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier,” says Pan African Parliament Women’s Conference President, Mavis Matladi of South Africa as she leads the call for the inclusion of more women in UN peace and reconstruction negotiations.

According to Matladi, there has never been a female U.N. chief peace negotiator, fewer than eight percent of all negotiating delegations in U.N. mediated peace processes are women, and only three percent of all peace agreement signatories are women.

The need is clear. Marie Louise Baricako, the Chairperson of the Femmes Africa Solidarité claims that the use of rape and sexual violence as a weapon remains a neglected topic. “It goes unpunished, and unrecognized,” she emphasizes, leaving the perpetrators free to inaugurate a new culture of rape and violence.

As the U.N. Women’s War and Peace page reports:

While women remain a minority of combatants and perpetrators of war, they increasingly suffer the greatest harm.

In contemporary conflicts, as much as 90 percent of casualties are among civilians, most of whom are women and children. Women in war-torn societies can face specific and devastating forms of sexual violence, which are sometimes deployed systematically to achieve military or political objectives. Women are the first to be affected by infrastructure breakdown, as they struggle to keep families together and care for the wounded.

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