In Lebanon, where it’s not against the law for men to physically or sexually abuse their wives, about 300 people rallied over the weekend “to raise awareness of Lebanon’s lack of laws protecting women from domestic abuse,” says Brooke Anderson’s report on Lebanon’s Dailystar.com. The country’s legislature has been sitting on a domestic violence bill since 2010.

In Turkey, where 40 percent of women have reported experiencing violence at some point in their lives, the Istanbul

police department “has established a new special female police force in Istanbul to protect women against prevailing gender-based violence,” says a report on Onislam.net.

In London, a man whose daughter, Clare, was murdered by her boyfriend is campaigning for “Clare’s Law”, which would  “allow women to find out if their boyfriends or husbands had a previous history of domestic violence,” according to  a report on Guardian.com.

SFGate.com’s Heather Knight did a great overview of how San Francisco, after doing everything wrong by not protecting a woman who was brutally stabbed to death by her ex-boyfriend in front of her two children 12 years ago, is now “a national model in handling domestic violence cases, though advocates add that more work – including launching a long-delayed computer system to allow law enforcement agencies to easily share data – needs to be done.”

And in Iowa, where 12,000 children were reported being abused or neglected in 2010, Council Bluffs Police Chief Ralph O’Donnell encouraged legislators to beef up support for families, including home visiting programs by nurses, which can reduce child abuse and neglect by 50 percent. According to a report by Chad Nation on Omaha.com, O’Donnell, who represents 150 state police chiefs, said: “I support evidence-based programs. I’ve been in police work for 35 years, and I see patrolmen arresting people with the same names; it’s just the next generation. It’s a cycle that we have to stop.”