Lauren Wolfe is an award-winning journalist who has written for publications from The Atlantic to The Guardian. She publishes a Substack called Chills, where she pulls back the curtain on her many years of international investigative reporting. She is also a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and an adjunct professor at NYU’s graduate school of journalism. She is the founding editor of WMC Climate. Previously, she was the director of WMC Women Under Siege and a columnist at Foreign Policy magazine. Before that, Wolfe was senior editor at the Committee to Protect Journalists, where she broke ground on the issue of journalists and sexualized violence. She has also worked at The New York Times covering September 11 and, later, Covid and the 2020 elections. She studied at Wesleyan University and Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. Foreign Policy named her one of its “FP Twitterati 100,” and Action on Armed Violence listed her as one of the “Top 100 Most Influential Journalists Covering Armed Violence.” Find her at laurenmwolfe.com and on Twitter at @Wolfe321.
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" The Ultimate Assault: Charting Syria's use of Rape to Terrorize its People"
WMC's Women Under Siege and The Atlantic [July 11, 2012] -
" Sexual Violence Against Women is the Result of the Cult of Masculinity," with gloria Steinem
The Guardian [February 24, 2012] -
"The Silencing Crime: Sexual Violence and Journalists"
Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) [June 7, 2011] -
"Reckoning with a Genocide in Guatemala"
The Atlantic [February 10, 2012] -
"One Victim's battle to End Sexual Violence Against Journalists"
The Atlantic [November 4, 2012] -
"On the Media" radio segment
NPR - WNYC [June 2, 2012] -
"Launch of UK initiative to stop rape in conflict, Syria"
BBC World Service (radio) [May 29, 2012] -
"Sexual violence against journalists"
NPR- WHYY [June 20, 2011] -
"Female journalists under attack"
CNN International [June 8, 2011] -
"Rape, assault are weapons of war in Syria - rights group"
Reuters [July 11, 2012] -
"Is the Syrians Regime Using Rape as a Tactic of War?"
Time Magazine [July 12, 2012]
Medical nonprofit Medecins Sans Frontieres announced it is suspending its maternity ward operations in a Kabul, Afghanistan, hospital in the wake of the systematic killing of 16 women in the ward. All the women were mothers or soon to be.
In five years of war in Yemen, more than 100,000 people have been killed and the country’s medical system has been shredded. Now the United Nations Population Fund is warning that reproductive health care for women and girls in Yemen is about to collapse entirely.
A presidential decree announced in Afghanistan at the end of March allowed for the release at least 10,000 prisoners over the age of 55 but there are still more than 100 women in a Kabul prison, now at great risk of becoming infected with coronavirus.
A documentary airing today reveals that the plaintiff in the 1973 Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade, later revealed as Norma McCorvey, lied when she said she’d become pro-life in 1995.
Countries like New Zealand, Germany, and Finland have had striking success in fighting the coronavirus. What do they have in common? For one, they all have women leaders.
As men have increased their research while home these past couple months, women have lowered their submissions to academic journals, indicating that women are less able to do their research while in stuck in the house.
Countries like Spain, France, the UK, Argentina, and Norway have devised schemes that allow women to seek help without alerting their partners.
The coronavirus pandemic has led to a massive surge in child abuse material being uploaded, according to a story from the Fuller Project for International Reporting co-published with the UK Telegraph.
It’s taken nearly 100 years, but the Land O’Lakes company has finally removed the image of a kneeling Native American woman—nicknamed “Mia”—from its packaging.
In a country not known for its empowerment of women—or for its health system—five teenage girls are tackling Afghanistan’s coronavirus outbreak head-on.
As the economy continued to tank amid the coronavirus pandemic, job losses rose to more than 700,000 in the month of March—and women were disproportionately affected.
Even with a zillion variations of “lockdown” and other measures being taken around the world to contain the spread of coronavirus, Panama has managed to find its own unique way of doing things.
A number of conservative U.S. governors are using coronavirus as an excuse to shut down all abortion services in their states, calling them “non-essential” procedures.
In Australia, a government-supported initiative that provides “safe phones” to women stuck in violent homes is seeing a serious uptick in requests attributed to the virus, the Thomson Reuters Foundation reported Wednesday.
Stories about something that is “still” happening don’t get many eyeballs. But there is no way around what is still happening to Syrian women and girls as the conflict enters its 10th year, and the United Nations is sounding the alarm.
While countries across the world celebrated International Women’s Day on March 8, dozens of women in Kyrgystan were detained for “violating public order” after coming under attack by masked men.
Nearly 90 percent of people in 75 countries demonstrated at least one bias against equality—with 91 percent of men and 86 percent of women showing bias in one of the four areas studied.
On Tuesday, the Arizona House banned transgender student athletes from participating on teams that align with their gender identity. All 31 Republican representatives supported the bill, which now moves on to the state Senate.
In the UK, toilet paper is considered a “necessity,” unlike tampons, which are taxed like a luxury item.
When it comes to reproductive rights, the United States is flunking. A report card from the nonprofit, Washington-based Population Institute has given the U.S. an F for the first time in the eight years it has graded the country’s record.
Now that the UK has officially left the EU, the government has decided to overhaul its immigration system, and women are about to become the big losers in the process.
As of Monday, women will be afforded equal rights to men who serve, in that they can finally receive equal pay and benefits, achieve command positions, and make the army their career—rather than being forced out after 10 to 14 years.
A shocking new report from Women for Refugee Women, a UK-based nonprofit, says one-third of women they interviewed who had been raped or sexually assaulted in their home countries have faced further rape or sexual abuse while destitute in the UK.
India’s government said early last week it thinks women are not fit to serve in ground combat roles—citing reasons that are embarrassingly regressive.
As of January 29, there is a code of conduct set in writing for how simulated sex scenes in movies and TV should be conducted.
A study published Wednesday confirms “extensive direct links” between environmental pressures and gender-based violence.
A new ad campaign from feminine hygiene brand Kotex has decided that using blue liquid to demonstrate the efficacy of its menstruation products in commercials is outdated and, well, absurd.
A study out this month in the American Economic Journal says married women who reach the corporate pinnacle are twice as likely to be divorced three years after their promotion to CEO as compared to their male counterparts.
Thousands of women repped the resistance front and center at the fourth annual Women’s March taking place in cities across the U.S. on Saturday.
It’s awards season. Which means it is again the time of year in which women realize they’ve been snubbed, blocked, ignored, skipped over…however you want to put it, it’s the season in which women are consistently losers to the patriarchy, and this year is no different.
An opinion issued Wednesday from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel may scuttle an effort to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment.
A court in India issued a death warrant Tuesday for four men convicted of gang-raping a 23-year-old physiotherapy student in 2012. They are set to be hanged on January 22.
Victoria’s Secret is still busy making life for women and girls about being their thinnest possible selves.
Korean women are still—nearly 75 years later—fighting to gain restitution from the country that forced them into sexual slavery, despite a “final and irreversible” deal reached between Korea and Japan in 2015.
While Harvey Weinstein’s accusers are figuring out whether to take a proposed multimillion-dollar settlement, Japan’s version of Harvey Weinstein has been ordered to pay just 3.3 million yen ($30,000) in damages in a very public rape case.
As if being pursued by an enemy isn’t traumatic enough, women in the military are also being stalked by their own..
In 2019, across the world, the number of years it will take women to reach equal pay and opportunities with men increased by 55 years.
iI’s been a troublesome week filled with reports that migrants and refugees being held in U.S. detention are being refused medical care they desperately need.
On November 18, the body of Jennifer Rothwell, 28, was found near a state park outside of Troy, Mich. Her own husband led police to her remains after they accused him of murder. Now, news outlets are reporting that Rothwell, who was six weeks pregnant when she was killed, had searched “what to do if your husband is upset you are pregnant” on her cell phone before she went missing.
While she may have escaped the horrors of North Korea, one woman who defected to South Korea says she has been forced into a new nightmare.
“When women die, the man gets to tell the story,” said Fiona Mackenzie, founder of British advocacy group We Can’t Consent to This.
The United States has not had a working Violence Against Women Act since February, when VAWA lapsed during a rush to pass legislation to (unsuccessfully) avoid a partial government shutdown. And now, while the House has already passed a version of the act earlier this year, the Senate is refusing to take up the bill because of pressure from the National Rifle Association.
In the ever-intensifying war on women’s reproductive rights in the U.S., Republican Ohio lawmakers have managed to take things to a new, frightening low. A bill introduced this month would criminalize all abortion and includes a provision requiring doctors to try to “re-implant” ectopic pregnancies, despite the fact that no such procedure exists.
In a stunning display of greed—or possibly deep ignorance—two popular Japanese clothing brands have purposely turned a human rights tragedy into a selling point: Muji and Uniqlo have both been touting the fact that the cotton for their clothing comes from Xinjiang, China, an area in which a million Muslim Uighurs have reportedly been detained in “reeducation” camps.
The first rule of reporting on sexual assault is to get consent from survivors that you can use their name, image, or identifying details. Australian public broadcaster ABC screwed that up pretty badly when it began early embargoed distribution of a documentary that is actually about—seriously—#MeToo.
As absurd or 1950s as it sounds, women across various work sectors in Japan are being told to take off their glasses.
Amid ongoing violent demonstrations against the re-election of Bolivian President Evo Morales, masked protesters on Wednesday kidnapped the mayor of a small town in central Bolivia.
With the election of a Democratic plurality on Tuesday, Virginia is poised to become the 38th—and final—state to ratify the ERA and make it a reality.
As states move toward ever-more-restrictive abortion regulations, Missouri has really gone over the edge. At a hearing on Tuesday, the state’s health director told lawmakers that he had been tracking the periods of women who’d been to the state’s only Planned Parenthood clinic, in St. Louis.
In a country as staunchly anti-abortion as Argentina, Sunday’s presidential election outcome signals a potential sea change for women’s rights in the notoriously restrictive country.
This is the first time a mastermind of mass rape has been held legally responsible in DRC. But the story doesn’t end here. There are still a few major issues to watch.
Today a historic conviction came down in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was the first time an official or commander has been convicted of masterminding rape in the country.
It is 9 a.m. on November 9, and hundreds—maybe 1,000—people have gathered to watch something many believed would never happen: the trial of a group of men who allegedly gang-raped approximately 50 little girls, aged 18 months to 11 years, in a village called Kavumu. Justice has been four years in the making.
U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley is going to Africa. South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Ethiopia, specifically. She says in an October 22 CNN op-ed that President Trump is sending her “to get a first-hand picture of what can be done.”
As the Caribbean and Florida have been pummeled by Hurricane Irma these past few days, people around the world have been desperate for news of their loved ones, while those stuck on battered islands and coasts with no electricity, no information on rescue activities, and little hope that their lives and property will make it through this A-bomb-level storm are left trying to find cell phones that work to learn what they can.
No, Donald Trump is not Adolph Hitler.
That this horrific idea exists, floating in our collective ethos and demanding a refutation is shocking. But this is where we are, and the failure to address the horror only means a greater evil is sure to come.
In November 2016, a scholar named Sebastian Schutte—a Marie Curie fellow at the Zukunftskolleg and the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Konstanz in Germany—wrote an interesting article in The Washington Post. In it he argued that Trump had not reached Hitlerian heights. Not yet.
With this morning’s news that the Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing at the UK’s Manchester Arena Monday night, the obviousness of the target begins to make a sick kind of sense.
This is meant as an informal guide for journalists who cover sexualized violence or want to, mainly in an international context.
With Tuesday’s gruesome chemical attack in Syria all over the news, attention has suddenly turned toward the crimes of Bashar Al-Assad’s regime—and away, for a moment, from those of the Islamic State. It is about time.
In the Trump administration’s proposed mass slaying of any and all programs the United States financially supports in terms of human rights, one in particular is troubling for women around the world—and it’s an angle media have missed in their reporting.
“No hate! No fear! Refugees are welcome here!” Shouts are rising into the night sky in Brooklyn as I write this. I just left the Brooklyn federal courthouse, where hundreds of people are chanting that and more, some slogans more angry and profane than others.
Wars fought because of ethnic hatred often seem to be more brutal than others. This is just a personal observation, having studied many. Just look at Rwanda, whose 1994 war saw between 250,000 and half a million women raped, often with objects and often publicly, in order to spread maximum humiliation and terror.
The air is stuffy by default. Soap, especially laundry soap, is usually a rare commodity among refugees. Add to the muddle of unwashed smells a buzzing from black flies, nearly 100 degree heat, and dark, polyester clothes that cover from head to toe, and life inside a makeshift container on the Greek island of Samos is an unpleasant one, thick with defeat.
Tucked away in the graffitied center of Athens is a soothing example of 1920s architecture. High ceilings and arched doorways lead to a stone-walled patio. The feeling inside is fresh on a sweaty day in Greece, with a breeze winding through tall, paneled windows. But it is the life inside, the laughter and chatter, that makes this a truly calming place.
Here was yet another family flung across the sea from Syria sitting in an air-conditioned, yet still stuffy, container that is their temporary home on the island of Samos in Greece. With so many of them having made it to the country together, the Al-Ghateb family stood out from the hundreds of single men and mothers with children at the camp.
When the Democratic Republic of Congo was dubbed the “rape capital of the world” in 2010 by Margot Wallström, the former UN special representative on sexual violence in conflict, understandably the government of DRC was not happy. Besides that, putting one country above all others when it comes to violence against women is a debatable move: So many places have horrifying records of rape and impunity for such cases. But Wallström had good reason for aiming her words at what is unambiguously a truly terrible place for women.
There’s a darkish room, maybe 12 feet by 13 feet, tucked into the back area of the ground floor of a school called Lycée Wima. Seated along walls of peeling paint are more than a dozen women sewing patterned bags, shoes, dresses, and dolls on elegant Singer sewing machines from the time between the last world wars. The work is exacting.
Colonel Magistrate Freddy Mukendi is an imposing man who speaks from behind darkly shaded eyeglasses. He takes up the full space of a lounge chair, giving off a breezy, if formal, comfort in his own skin. Considering his high-level position in the DRC, this may not be entirely unexpected.
Dirty white gates fronted the detention center on the Italian island of Lampedusa, a tiny speck between Sicily and Tunisia, where 71 women were being held. Beyond the bars, I could just make out laundry hanging from the building in which they were housed—maybe 100 yards away—a yellow scarf, a hot-pink piece of cloth.
The end of June was hot and dry in Lampedusa, as summer always is. The week I spent on the island of an estimated 5,000-6,000 Italians there was a very separate center of town for a population of 771 people.
Often stories on the “Mediterranean migrant crisis” use shots of the rescue at sea: A rickety boat overfilled with desperate people wait to board some kind of Navy boat. But what happens to them next?
Twenty-five years of breathing in dust has led Mireille Mbale to drink milk when she can afford it; it is what she believes will guard her against lung disease. She makes less than $5 a day. Years of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo’s brash sun have dried her exposed skin.
We know there’s a problem but we don’t know how big it is. That’s what governments, scholars, and others argue when trying to figure out how to allot funds toward this problem of sexualized violence in conflict. If we don’t know the numbers, they ask, how can we help properly? How can we mount prosecutions? Offer reparations? Put in place proper advocacy? So the thinking goes.
With the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence starting tomorrow, November 25, I thought I’d share some of my favorite recent reads on gender-based violence, whether close to home or far afield.
A young woman seems to have attached herself to me one day at Zaatari, a refugee camp holding at least 120,000 Syrians in the middle of the Jordanian desert. Her name is Abeer and she is the less obviously beautiful, older sister to a 16-year-old girl who has been married off to a much-older Libyan food distributor. He gave the girl a watch, perfume, and water when they met.
The war in Congo is like a snake. Sometimes it slithers by and you see it and feel terror; other times, it hides in the trees, waiting. Everywhere I traveled in the country with the Nobel Women’s Initiative in February, I felt that ever-present fear—and exhaustion from so many years of being either attacked or on the lookout.
There were so very many stories. Stories of women physically torn apart, leaving stains of urine on chairs from fistula they suffered from violent rape. Stories about sexual enslavement that left teenage girls hysterically crying and unable to finish speaking. Stories of erasure—of women who had been left by their husbands and shunned by their own children because men had raped them.
I’ve been reading King Leopold’s Ghost, by Adam Hochschild, which tells the utterly brutal colonial history of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Early on in the book, the author laments the lack of African voices on record that tell the history of the country. Instead it is a history told by the conquerors, as all history generally is. There is no shortage of evidence, however, that the Europeans who colonized the area inflicted terrors on black men and women that are stomach-sickening.
While the Geneva II talks about peace in Syria gear up to begin on January 22, I thought I’d put our latest numbers and information on sexualized violence in Syria up here for you to see. I recently laid out what we know about this at a talk at the Heirich Böll Foundation in Berlin, embedded below.
Bloodshed, famine, rape, internal displacement. There are truly few things as awful as the reality of living through modern warfare. The horror, suffering, and pain caused by war are acutely felt on an individual level. Often though, that pain is endured quietly, out of view, while the media focuses on bombs falling and guns firing.
Sometimes I read something that makes the movement of the world, the very air in the room, freeze to a stop. That’s what happened recently when I read a letter written by an activist in the Democratic Republic of Congo named Neema Namadamu. I read it once, then I read it again. Instead of describing why it had such a profound effect on me, I’m pasting it in full below.
I spent much of June in Turkey, ostensibly. But in the south, at the Syrian border, where Arabic is the language of choice, women wear traditional Syrian hijabs, and families live in the strange half-life of an open-ended nightmare of exile, I was, in some ways, in Syria.
All across the war-torn country, regime soldiers are said to be sexually violating women and men from the opposition, destroying families and, in some cases, claiming lives.
The father of the woman gang-raped and killed in Delhi in December has told the media that the crime against his daughter is “an awakening” for India. It certainly has been an awakening for much of the world, as I wrote in this op-ed for CNN. The local and international media have been cracking open issues from dowry-related burnings of women to street harassment, asking exactly what is wrong with men in India to have created such a culture of hate and violence against women. It is heartening to watch the introspection.
On Tuesday, I wrote a piece for CNN calling to make 2013 The Year to End Rape. I know it’s wishful—there’s a lot to try to end: global legal failings that allow rapists to commit crimes with impunity; attitudes that blame the victim, leading to suicides and honor killings; misogyny that conditions men (and women) to view women and girls as less than human, as objects to be controlled.
Women describe their rapes from behind black face scarves in videos on our site that documents sexualized violence in Syria. We have no photos of women whose faces aren’t covered. We have few photos of survivors of rape even with their faces covered.
There is little violence on earth more merciless than what is happening to women in the Democratic Republic of Congo. “When you talk about rape in New York or Paris, everyone can always say, ‘Yes, we have rape here too,’” Dr. Denis Mukwege, the founder of Congo’s Panzi Hospital, told Jeb Sharp, a producer at PRI’s “The World,” in 2008.
A woman swathed in black squares her shoulders and calmly looks into a camera. She holds a Quran. Only a sliver of her face—her eyeglasses—shows. “What happened to me hasn’t happened to anyone, or if it has affected anyone else I do not know,” she says. “But I will speak and let all the people know what [Syrian leader] Bashar al-Assad and his men are doing.” Over the next four minutes, her breathing grows labored and her voice breaks as she describes how, in May 2011, five men wearing black entered her home on the outskirts of Homs and raped her.
After Sen. Joseph Lieberman published this Washington Post op-ed advocating for the U.S. to step up its efforts to topple the Syrian regime last month, Jackie Blachman-Forshay and I wrote a response.
I met photojournalist Matilde Gattoni very recently on Facebook, which is to say we haven’t actually met in person. Even so, she’s already made an impression on me. Her work has a way of highlighting humanity—literally in chiaroscuro but also figuratively.
We know that thousands of women were raped during the Holocaust. We also know that rape was never part of any charges against anyone responsible for the era’s atrocities. In a thrilling new turn of events, files long locked away at UN headquarters in New York have revealed details of investigations into the use of rape by Nazis. Could this lead to justice for women brutalized in other wars?
Let’s blame men. Many of us do—many women and even men blame men for the mass rape of women in war. It’s easy to point our fingers and name the perpetrator. But what if we were to step back and ask how men can actually be part of the solution? It requires a couple of basic assumptions.
GUATEMALA CITY — A man in a mask opens a door. The smell of rot hovers in the air and everywhere there are piles of paper -- pink, yellow, white, all a bit aged and possibly very important. When searching through the 80 million documents dumped in the archives of the Guatemalan National Police, it's never clear what will turn up.