Protecting the Rights of Women and Girls
Every woman and girl has the right to live without fear, violence, discrimination, or exploitation. Yet across the world, millions continue to experience abuse in their homes, workplaces, schools, communities, and public spaces.
Every Woman and Girl Deserves to Live Safely and with Dignity
Violence may be physical, sexual, emotional, psychological, or economic. It can affect women and girls of any age, background, or financial situation. In many cases, the person responsible is someone the survivor knows and trusts, such as a partner, relative, colleague, or community member.
The effects rarely end when the violence stops. Survivors may live with physical injuries, fear, emotional trauma, financial hardship, social isolation, and difficulties continuing their education or employment.
According to the World Health Organization, around 840 million women worldwide have experienced partner or sexual violence during their lifetime.
At Benefits for Ummah, we believe that every woman and girl deserves safety, respect, equal opportunity, and the freedom to build her own future.
What Forms Can Violence Take?
Violence against women and girls is not limited to physical assault. It can take many forms, and some may remain hidden for years.
Domestic and Intimate Partner Violence
Domestic violence may include hitting, threatening, humiliating, controlling, isolating, or financially restricting a woman. It may also involve preventing her from working, studying, receiving healthcare, or communicating with family and friends.
Sexual Violence and Harassment
Sexual violence includes any sexual act or behaviour imposed without free and informed consent. It may occur within marriage, relationships, workplaces, educational institutions, public spaces, or online.
Emotional and Psychological Abuse
Constant insults, threats, intimidation, humiliation, manipulation, and controlling behaviour can seriously damage a person’s confidence and mental well-being, even when there are no visible physical injuries.
Economic Abuse
Economic abuse occurs when someone controls a woman’s money, prevents her from earning an income, takes away her property, or deliberately makes her financially dependent.
Child and Forced Marriage
Child marriage takes away a girl’s freedom to make informed decisions about her future. It often interrupts education, limits economic opportunities, increases social isolation, and places girls at greater risk of early pregnancy and domestic violence. UNICEF estimates that around 640 million girls and women alive today were married during childhood.
Female Genital Mutilation
Female genital mutilation is a harmful practice that violates the health, dignity, and human rights of girls and women. More than 230 million girls and women worldwide are estimated to have undergone the practice.
Trafficking and Exploitation
Women and girls may also be trafficked for sexual exploitation, forced labour, domestic servitude, forced marriage, or other forms of abuse. Poverty, displacement, conflict, discrimination, and limited access to education can increase their vulnerability.
How Violence Affects Women and Girls
Violence can affect almost every part of a survivor’s life.
Physical abuse may cause injuries, disabilities, chronic pain, and long-term health problems. Sexual violence can result in unintended pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections, and serious reproductive and mental-health consequences.
Survivors may also experience anxiety, depression, fear, shame, sleep problems, loss of confidence, or post-traumatic stress. Some withdraw from family and community life because they fear judgment, retaliation, or further abuse.
Violence can also affect a woman’s financial independence. She may lose her job, be prevented from working, or struggle to continue working in an unsafe environment. Women globally continue to earn less than men on average, while unequal access to employment, property, finance, and social protection can make it harder for survivors to leave abusive situations.
How Violence Affects Children
Children may be directly harmed by violence or deeply affected by witnessing violence against their mothers and other family members.
Living in a violent environment can create constant fear and insecurity. It may affect a child’s emotional development, behaviour, physical health, ability to concentrate, and performance at school. Exposure to violence during childhood can also have consequences that continue into adulthood.
Girls may face additional risks, including child marriage, school dropout, trafficking, harassment, and gender-based discrimination. Protecting women and protecting children are therefore closely connected.
Preventing Violence Before It Happens
Ending violence requires more than responding after someone has already been harmed. Prevention means addressing the conditions that allow abuse and exploitation to continue.
Poverty, inequality, social exclusion, lack of education, harmful gender norms, and weak protection systems can all increase vulnerability. Effective prevention therefore requires families, communities, schools, religious leaders, organisations, and public institutions to work together.
Important actions include:
Teaching children and adults about dignity, consent, healthy relationships, and personal safety
Keeping girls in school and preventing child marriage
Expanding women’s access to education, training, income, and employment
Helping communities recognise abuse and respond safely
Ensuring survivors can access healthcare, counselling, shelter, social support, and legal assistance
Challenging beliefs that treat violence as normal or acceptable
Supporting men and boys to become part of the solution
Violence should never be treated as a private family matter that must remain hidden. Survivors deserve to be heard, believed, protected, and treated without blame.
How Benefits for Ummah Supports Women and Girls
Benefits for Ummah works to address some of the social and economic conditions that leave women and girls vulnerable to violence, exploitation, and neglect.
Our aim is to help women and girls live more safely, develop greater independence, and access the support they need to rebuild their lives.
Essential Support for Survivors
We aim to help vulnerable women and families access food, clothing, safe accommodation, healthcare, and other essential needs during periods of crisis.
Meeting immediate needs can give survivors the stability required to consider their next steps safely.
Education for Girls
Education can protect girls from exploitation, expand their choices, and give them greater control over their future.
We support educational costs such as school fees, books, uniforms, learning materials, and other necessities for girls from disadvantaged families.
Skills and Livelihood Assistance
Financial dependence can make it extremely difficult for a woman to leave an unsafe situation.
Through vocational training, livelihood resources, and small-business assistance, we seek to help women develop practical skills, earn an income, and support themselves and their children.
Support Against Child Marriage
We support awareness and community initiatives that explain the risks of child marriage and encourage families to keep girls in education.
Child marriage can interrupt schooling, limit future employment, and increase the risk of violence and poor health outcomes.
Access to Professional Services
Where possible, we help survivors connect with appropriate healthcare, counselling, protection, shelter, rehabilitation, and legal services.
These services should be confidential, respectful, centred on the survivor’s choices, and provided by qualified professionals.
Community Awareness
We support programmes that help families and communities recognise violence, understand women’s and children’s rights, and reject harmful practices.
Open and respectful conversations can challenge the silence that often allows abuse to continue.
How Your Support Can Help
With your support, we can help more women and girls access:
Emergency food, clothing, and essential supplies
Safe and appropriate temporary accommodation
Healthcare and emotional support
Education for girls at risk of dropping out
Vocational and livelihood training
Resources for small income-generating activities
Community programmes addressing child marriage and violence
Referrals to qualified protection and legal services
Your donation may help a survivor meet her immediate needs, allow a girl to remain in school, or give a woman the resources she needs to begin earning an independent income.
Help Create a Safer Future for Women and Girls
No woman should have to remain silent because she fears blame or rejection. No girl should lose her education, safety, or childhood because of violence, poverty, or forced marriage.
By supporting the work of Benefits for Ummah, you can help women and girls access protection, education, essential assistance, and opportunities to rebuild their lives with dignity.
Donate today and help create a future where every woman and girl can live safely, freely, and with hope.