An estimated four million women and girls are bought and sold into marriage, prostitution or slavery each year, according to a United Nations report on gender inequality and population trends around the world.
The report, "Living Together, Worlds Apart: Men and Women in a Time of Change", says perhaps as many as 5,000 women and girls a year are murdered by members of their own families in so-called "honour" killings. These are inflicted as "retribution" for having been raped: the rapist is often a member of the victim's own extended family.
The report details the case of a 12-year-old girl in Jordan who was beaten to death by her father with sticks and chains for taking a walk with friends without permission. A Jordanian woman was shot dead by her brother for the "crime" of marrying a Christian.
These "honour" killings, which take place mainly in western and southern Asia and North Africa, are on the increase. At least 1,000 women were murdered in Pakistan in 1999, the report claims.
Rape and other forms of sexual violence were also increasing but many continued to go unreported, partly because of unsympathetic treatment by the legal system. Estimates of the proportion of rapes reported to the authorities varied from less than 3 per cent in South Africa to about 16 per cent in the US.
The report says two million girls between the ages of five and 15 are introduced into the sex market each year. At least 130 million women are forced to undergo genital mutilation each year: the report calls it a "degrading and dangerous practice".
The report continues: "In the United States, a woman is battered, usually by her intimate partner, every 15 seconds. Physical violence is nearly always accompanied by psychological abuse, which can be just as demeaning and degrading."
A nationwide survey of domestic violence in Canada found that one-third of women who were subjected to domestic violence had feared for their lives at some point in the relationship.
Some 20 million of the estimated 50 million abortions each year were unsafe and 78,000 women died as a result. Sexually transmitted diseases afflicted five times more women than men.
Women were more vulnerable to HIV/AIDS than men and were becoming infected at a faster rate. Overall, AIDS was spreading at a rate three times faster than the growth in funding to control it. In Africa, HIV-positive women outnumbered infected men by two million.
"In several African populations, girls aged 15 to 19 are five or six times more likely to be HIV-positive than boys of that age. Clearly, older males are infecting teenage girls, the report states. The director of the UN Population Fund, Dr Nafis Sadik, said the basic message of the report could be summed up as: "The price of inequality is too high to pay."
She said the report showed that "in countries all over the world, inequality, discrimination and violence are holding back women and society in general. This is a massive violation of human rights."