Human Rights Archive Zimbabwe

This was a retrospective cohort study conducted at Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, South Kivu Province. Using a non-systematic convenience sample, interviews were conducted on sexual violence survivors as they presented to Panzi Hospital requesting services from the Victims of Sexual Violence Program.

Sexual violence is the most pervasive form of violence in many of the conflict-ridden countries in Africa and continues to remain so, through various post-conflict stages even after the conflict has ended. Violence, particularly of a sexual nature and against women, that was characteristic of a prolonged conflict, comes to be accepted as the norm and part of the culture more so than it was prior to the conflict.

This report has been issued to coincide with the 16 days on gender activism, and concerns the organized violence and torture experienced by Zimbabwean women during the crisis that has engulfed Zimbabwe since 2000. The women described in this report have all fled Zimbabwe into exile in South Africa, and most are currently seeking political asylum.

This report is an analysis of the trends emerging from the annual violations reports compiled by the Association of LGBTI people in Zimbabwe (GALZ) between the periods 2012 to 2017. The analysis extensively draws data from a total of 170 violations extracted from 104 actual cases compiled and categorized by GALZ into 12 types. The 12 types of violations recorded are assault, threats, outing, discrimination, police harassment, Unlawful detention, disownment, blackmail, displacement, unfair labour practice, hate speech and invasion of privacy.

The project aims to improve the technical capacity of Linking Organisations to promote access to HIV, health and rights services for key populations; to increase the engagement of national policy makers with Key Populations issues; and to improve processes for regional knowledge sharing and learning between Linking Organisations.

The assessment focused on documenting the nature and extent of the state sanctioned and unsanctioned raids on GALZ. The assessment brings out the opaqueness of the raids, which demonstrates the precarious environment that GALZ operates in.

A community-based approach to dealing with trauma highlights issues about Trauma and complex emergencies. This report is not concerned with describing the many ways in which trauma may be inflicted during complex emergencies, but rather to very briefly describe their effects.

The article explores the effectiveness of the use of an empowerment workshop, called the Tree of Life, in the treatment of torture survivors. The approach is based on a survivor-to-survivor model of assistance.

The report contains issues like Dealing with complex emergencies,developing a community response ti trauma,state psycho-social support for victims of organised violence and torture as well as the identification of victims.

This paper falls into three sections.The first section provides a brief overview of organised violence and torture in Zimbabwe, The second section ―Developing a response: learning from experience elsewhere, presents in brief the shifts in thinking in this field.