A/HRC/11/6 page 16 49. Research in Kerala found that women’s independent ownership of property strengthens their fall-back position, thus playing a crucial preventive role in deterring domestic violence.33 In Kenya, as in many other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, a woman’s access to property hinges on her relationship to a man. When she separates from her husband or when he dies, she risks losing her home, land, household goods and other property. Failure to ensure equal property rights upon separation or divorce discourages women from leaving violent marriages, as women may be forced to choose between violence at home and destitution in the street.34 Women who lack independent resources for survival may also yield to demands for unprotected sex, despite the danger of contracting HIV/AIDS and other diseases.35 Rural women in South Africa frequently live in female-headed households, in chronic poverty and are subject to spiralling levels of violence, as well as a disproportionately high prevalence of HIV. Many of these women were forcibly evicted from their ancestral land by the apartheid system.36 50. Women’s difficulty in claiming their rights to property and land is linked with other sex-discriminatory laws including male-biased marriage and divorce laws, and biases within land dispute bodies which are made up of men and exclude women from the decision-making process. Situations of violent conflict reveal in a more blatantly direct way how violations of the right to property and land are inseparable from acts of physical VAW. In the Ugandan armed conflict militarized rape was used strategically in order to acquire women’s assets, including land and homes, some of which were needed for the war effort, or indeed, were among the reasons for the conflict. Forced into poverty and often, displacement, women are far more vulnerable to ongoing violence.37 3. Right to food and food security 51. Women’s right to food is impaired by their limited access to and control over other productive resources as a result of discrimination in education, lower incomes, inequality in 33 Agarwal, B. and Panda, P., “Towards freedom from domestic violence: The neglected obvious”, Journal of Human Development and Capabilities: A Multi-Disciplinary Journal for People-Centered Development, Vol. 8, No. 3 (2007), pp. 359-388. 34 Human Rights Watch, Double Standards: Women’s Property Rights Violations in Kenya, 3 March 2003, p. 25 (available at http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2003/03/03/doublestandards). 35 Dennis, Suzanna and Zuckerman, Elena, Gender Guide to World Bank and IMF Policy-Based Lending. Washington: Gender Action, 2006, p. 43 (available at http://www.genderaction.org/ images/GA%20Gender%20Guide%20to%20World%20Bank%20and%20IMF%20FINAL.pdf). 36 The South African Civil Society Information Service, “South Africa: Rural Women and Land Reform: When Will We move beyond the rhetoric?” 3 September 2008 (available at http://www. sacsis.org.za/site/news/detail.asp?iData=161&iCat=253&iChannel=1&nChannel=News). 37 Turshen, Meredeth, “The political economy of violence against women during armed conflict in Uganda”, Social Research, Fall 2000, p. 804.