At least one in three women around the world has been beaten, coerced into sex or abused in some way, most often by someone she knows, says a United Nations report that decries ongoing prejudice against women.

Despite the tremendous gains of the 20th century, discrimination and violence against women and girls ``remain firmly rooted in cultures around the world,'' says the UN in its annual report on the State of World Population, released today.

While many countries have started taking steps to protect women's rights, ``actual progress has been slow,'' the report says, chronicling a host of abuses:

Around the world, there are 80 million unwanted pregnancies, 20 million unsafe abortions, 500,000 maternal deaths and 333 million new sexually transmitted diseases each year. Adolescent girls are particularly at risk.

• Women are becoming infected with HIV at a faster rate than men and in Africa they outnumber infected men by 2 million. Older men are infecting teenage girls at a rate that is five or six times higher than the rate among teenage boys.

   

• Two million girls aged 5 to 15 are taken into the commercial sex trade every year.

   

• Sexual assault and violence take away almost one in five healthy years of life of women aged 15 to 44. In Canada, the health-related costs of violence against women are estimated at $900 million a year.

   

• Some 130 million girls and young women have undergone female genital mutilation.

   

• Women and girls worldwide ``across lines of income, class and culture are subjected to physical, sexual and psychological abuse.''

   

• An estimated 4 million women and girls are bought and sold worldwide each year, either into marriage, prostitution or slavery.

   

• A total of 1,400 women a day still die in childbirth, the equivalent of four jumbo jets crashing.

   

• Canada's record of physical assault against women by a male partner is higher than in many other countries. Nationally, 29 per cent of women in an intimate relationship have been assaulted, compared to 22 per cent in the United States and 20 per cent in South Africa and 16 per cent in Cambodia.

  It won't be known until the report's official release how these abuse statistics were gathered.

  Alanna Armitage, a UN program officer who is in Ottawa, found the number of deaths during childbirth ``still so shocking, especially since we know how to prevent it.''

  The report is both optimistic and pessimistic, she said.

  ``We have come really far in some areas, like female genital mutilation, which we couldn't even speak about 10 years ago. Now six or seven countries have outlawed it.

  ``But all of us in the development community realize that, unless we make progress in gender equality, we can't make progress in any of these areas,'' she said.

  The complete report can be read at http://www.unfpa.org/swp/swpmain.htm