"After HIV/AIDS, injury and violence are the biggest threats to life we have to face in South Africa. The MRC/UNISA Crime, Violence and Injury Lead Programme works to improve the safety and quality of life of South Africans through research. We aim to prevent death, disability and suffering arising from crime, violence and unintentional injury.

"One of the projects that we are involved with is the recording of death statistics collected from mortuaries throughout the country. It is called the National Injury Mortality Surveillance Study (or NIMSS for short). The latest findings of NIMSS show that, in 2002, nearly five thousand women died as the result of injuries. Half of these women died from unintentional injuries, such as traffic accidents. However, around one thousand two hundred women were murdered - nearly a third of all the women who died that year. In addition, one in ten women committed suicide.

"Over forty percent of the women who were murdered were shot, while another third were either stabbed to death or beaten with a blunt object.

"An overwhelming two-thirds of these murders were committed in and around where the women lived. Half of the women murdered were younger than 32, and a large percentage of all the murder victims were also found to have alcohol in their bloodstreams.

"Although these statistics are horrifying, women are oppressed and victimised in less obvious ways, every day:

• Two thirds of the world's illiterate are women and girls.
• Women make up 70% of the world's poor.
• Almost 99% of all the cultivated land in the world belongs to men, whereas women produce 70% of the crops.
• More than 80% of the parliamentarians in the world are men, while women make up more than half the electoral body.
• On average, men in western countries earn 15% more than women for equal work.
• On average, men in western countries do only 20% of housework and childcare, or care for the sick and the aged.
• On average, at least one home out of ten is a place of serious violence. Ninety-five percent of the time the victims of this violence are women and children.
• Advertising often represents women, and relationships between men and women, in a degrading manner.
• Every year, two million women and girls in the world are brutally circumcised, adding to the hundreds of millions of sexually mutilated women in the world.