However, all too often, far from providing adequate protection to women, governments have connived in these abuses, have covered them up, have acquiesced in them and have allowed them to continue unchecked. Violence in the home is truly universal. Official reports in the US say a women is battered every 15 seconds and 700,000 are raped each year. Some groups of women are particularly vulnerable to torture and ill-treatment and face multiple discrimination. They are not only tortured because they are women but also on the grounds of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, social status, class and age.
Many domestic workers are foreign nationals who are frequently ill-treated by their employers.
They are unlikely to be able to obtain redress because of their immigration status. Nasiroh, a young Indonesian woman went to work in Saudi Arabia in 1993. She told Amnesty International that she was sexually abused by her employer, falsely accused of his murder and then tortured and sexually abused by police officers during two years' incommunicado detention. Officials from her embassy did not visit her once. The mere perception that a woman has damaged a family's honour can lead to torture and ill-treatment.