COPENHAGEN, Denmark, Nov. 26 (UPI) -- Human rights violations against Syrian women have ramped up since the start of the Syrian conflict nearly three years ago, a human rights group says.
Thousands of women there have been killed in indiscriminate shelling while at least 28 women have been killed in detention, the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network said in a report released Tuesday.
"Women of various ages have always been the main victims of the consequences of the destruction of utilities and the disruption of food supplies, alongside killings and arrests and taking them as hostages to pressure their husbands or brothers, and been used as human shields at times," the report says.
The report cites figures from the Syrian Network for Human Rights that show the number of deaths of women increased dramatically in 2013. At least 7,543 women, including 2,454 girls and 257 females under the age of 3, have been killed in indiscriminate shelling.
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Between March 2011 and April 2013, SNHR told researchers more than 5,400 women were arrested by the Syrian government and the whereabouts of many of them was still unknown
Women have also been deliberately targeted. As of August, 421 women had died in targeted killings by snipers, the report said.
"Despite all these atrocities," the report added, "crimes committed against Syrian women are largely missing in the agenda of politicians and human rights activists while the media tend to ignore the complex dimensions of their sufferings."
The report is based on first-hand testimony gathered between January and June by Sema Nasar, a Syrian human rights and women's rights activist.
Documenting the violations has been complicated by the social stigma attached to violations against women that involve sexual assault and beliefs by families that arrested females are "raped and harassed" in prison, the report said. Further clouding documentation is the "overwhelming lack of confidence in the utility of documenting violations," because of the lack of action by the international community, particularly the United Nations Security Council.
The Denmark-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network is a coalition of more than 80 human rights groups based in 30 countries.
