Godeliève Mukasarasi promised God that if her children survived the Rwandan genocide of 1994, she would perform charitable acts. They lived. Soon after, the then 35-year-old social worker and mother founded SEVOTA, or Solidarity for the Development of Widows and Orphans to Promote Self-sufficiency and Livelihoods, a support group for women in the small Rwandan village of Taba.
Number of historic armed conflicts around the world in which sexualized violence against men—including rape, sexual torture, mutilation of the genitals, sexual humiliation, sexual enslavement, forced incest and forced rape—has been reported: 25
This year has been especially horrific for the women of South Africa. On October 15, two little girls, aged 2 and 3, were found in a public toilet in Diepsloot, a settlement in the north of Johannesburg, according to news reports. The girls, both cousins, who had been abducted in broad daylight, had been raped and strangled.
One of the main components of our project at WMC’s Women Under Siege is to educate the public about how rape is used not only as a crime of war but also as a strategic tool. During our research on systemic sexualized violence in wartime, we have found that rape disproportionately affects women. But the key term here is disproportionately.
At the start of this year, my friend and WMC’s Women Under Siege director, Lauren Wolfe, started a Twitter hashtag, #2013EndRape, to highlight the epidemic of sexualized violence against women. While the hashtag has seen success, one of the unintended consequences has been its trolling and attacks on it by various “Men’s Rights Activists.”
No one wants to go to war. Before we commit soldiers and societies to inevitable sacrifice and atrocities, we try to balance the inevitable harm against the potential good. We seek to make the wars we undertake “just” by applying defined criteria to a scale of moral weights and principled measures. Men are tortured and die, women are raped and murdered, children suffer and starve.
“You smell soooo good, I could just eat you up.”
“Here, sit on my lap.” “No, mine!” “I get her first!”
“Putting him alone in a room with a woman is like giving an alcoholic a bottle of booze—he just can’t help himself.”