The Sri Lankan government by ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in 1981 and the United Nations declaration on Violence against Women in 1993 has the necessary legal frame work to deal with cases of violence against women. However, it has become necessary to pay attention to reporting and documentation of the instances of violence against women. One of the major impediments faced in Sri Lanka in combating violence against women is lack of statistics and lack of social awareness.

In addition to this the northeast province has experienced more than two decades of armed conflict which has severely affected women. This was further exacerbated by the tsunami waves that hit the island in 2004. Women experience armed conflicts mainly as civilians and constitute the majority of refugee population. They are subject to many forms of violence during war.

The goal of this project is to document all the incidents of violence against women and violation of women’s rights in an organized way and to encourage the victims to report incidents of violence arising as a result of domestic violence, due to social and cultural taboos, armed conflict, discrimination in employment and other sectors to relevant authorities and get relief. This reporting mechanism will facilitate better interaction between various agencies, governmental as well as non-governmental agencies including law enforcement authorities. As a result of this, the likelihood of perpetrators being punished will increase many fold. In addition, authorities will be in a better position to compensate the victims, prevent such occurrences in future and analyse statistical data.

The objectives of this project are;

  1. to create awareness about gender based violence as a human right violation in the community and to disseminate information regarding women’s rights and other related information.
  2. to share information about gender based violations among national and international women rights and human rights groups.
  3. to provide a discreet mechanism for the victims to report incidents of violence.
  4. To build capacity among the women organizations in the usage of ICT.

The main objective of this Web Portal is to record all the incidents of violence and violation of women’s rights in a logically categorized manner. This will include information on victim, perpetrator, intervening parties, source of information and national & international laws governing women’s rights. It will also contain information on social, cultural and Economic rights of women. In addition, this web portal contains information regarding the rights of women, the legal avenues that an affected woman can take to report, how to get help, description of various forms of violence, signs of abuses, articles and etc. in English and Tamil.

This project has been funded by the World Bank through the Information Communication Agency of Sri Lanka as a part of their eSociety initiative.