This week's programme reports on appalling violence against women in South Africa, the trafficking of women in Lithuania for sex, and inequality in Sweden, where foreign-born wives can find themselves thrown out of their home - and the country. Five years after the Beijing Women's Conference, there's still a long way to go.

This report based on contributions by mainly women film-makers from around the world starts on a positive note: what women have contributed to the reduction of violence in the apparently intractable political situation of Northern Ireland. Women formed a new political party - the Women's Coalition Party - to "talk together and work together and plan together for a common approach, for a common future, for peace", according to Jane Morrice. Now they have their place in the new Northern Ireland Assembly.

But in Nigeria it's a different matter - there only 3 per cent of the parliament are women. And one of them, Temi Harriman, tells of the male opposition to her election, which was at first annulled and only finally confirmed by the appeal court. "I think that there's an ego problem here - it must have been very difficult for them to accept being defeated by a woman, and by a very wide margin."

Only five countries around the world today have met the Beijing Conference's goal of having one out of every three government positions held by women. Some progress is being made: Fiji now has its first woman judge; but women police officers in the same country find it hard to get promoted.

And over the last five years, poverty among women has actually increased - women still make up two-thirds of the world's poor and two-thirds of the world's illiterates. In Brazil, 65-year-old Gabriela Silva makes a living by collecting waste paper - and she is also the sole guardian of her three granddaughters as well.

Government delegations in Beijing pledged themselves to tackle increasing violence against women. But in South Africa, police and judiciary still don't regard rape and domestic violence as serious crimes - with only one in 20 rapists receiving a conviction, and the punishment for wife-killing equal to that for fraud. A 24-year-old woman, Makhosi, was brutally raped and horrifically disfigured by her former boyfriend and his friends who remain at liberty and still pose a threat to Makhosi. She's angry with the apparent police apathy. Rape is more prevalent in South Africa than almost anywhere else, but only one in 20 men arrested are convicted.

In Lithuania, violence takes a more subtle form, with economic hardship forcing many young women into the hands of unscrupulous mafia traffickers who sell women into the sex industry in Europe and the Far East. Virginija, an orphan who wanted a better life, ended up in a brothel in Tel Aviv. "Later they told me they'd paid ten thousand dollars for me which I would have to work off," she says. Ona Gustiene, of the Lithuanian Support Centre for Missing Persons' Families, says: "The girls working abroad are deprived of all their civil rights. . . In theory there is ground-breaking legislation that states that traffickers can be sued for damages." But up to now no one has been prosecuted.

In Sweden, the law itself means immigrant women are vulnerable to abuse. One Senegalese immigrant was thrown out by her Swedish husband when she refused to work as a prostitute to earn money for him. "He treated me like an animal," she says. But now it is she who faces expulsion from the country because she is an immigrant.

Across the water from Scandinavia, Life analyses the soaring rate of teenage pregnancies in Scotland - Britain has the highest rate in Europe. According to the UN, more than 500 million teenagers become pregnant every year. Most of them regret it - like Melanie: "It's very hard and I wouldn't advise anybody at this age to go and do it." As Dr Nafis Sadik, Executive Director of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), points out, teenage pregnancy is a reproductive health issue which affects rich and poor countries alike. Much of it could be avoided by sexuality education, sometimes resisted by parents and teachers who wrongly think it will encourage sexual activity.

All in all, Life suggests that there's still a long way to go before the commitments made at Beijing become reality. With contributions by film-makers in Brazil, Fiji, Ireland, Lithuania, Mexico, Sweden, Scotland and South Africa.

All Different, All Equal features elements from the 32 part Rhetoric to Reality: Broadcasting for Change series. This series is the result of Women broadcasters and film makers from 26 countries participating in a spirited discussion on issues affecting them today, at UNESCO, Paris this February. The resulting programes examine gains made by women in areas such as politics and non traditional careers as well as troubling developments such as the increasing feminisation of poverty and women's struggle in todays more fundamentalist societies.

Versioned into Spanish, French and English it is available from TVE for non-broadcast use.

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