WMC Women Under Siege
Can media keep violence against women in focus for at least #16Days?
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.
WMC Women Under Siege
Why soldiers rape — and when they don’t — in diagrams
Men came while she was working in her field. Twice. Like so many women I met a few months ago in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the woman telling her story explained how men wearing uniforms appeared as she worked her land and dragged her to a tree and tied her to it, raping her, cutting her, terrifying her. They wanted her money and they wanted her gone from her field.
WMC Women Under Siege
July 18, 2014 | Cara Hoffman |
Violence against women
Giving women a fair fight in the US military
It’s unfathomable to think that in 2014 half the global population will be prevented from a full range of occupations because of their gender. This kind of prejudice is broadly seen as a throwback to a distant and unenlightened era—which is why the findings of a recent study of the best U.S. colleges was surprising to many.
WMC Women Under Siege
New report details ongoing sexualized violence in Burma
On November 27, 2012, a 26-year-old woman was gang-raped by seven Burmese soldiers. When the woman’s husband returned home, the soldiers threatened to kill him. “Even if you tell other people, there is no one who will take action,” they said. “We have the authority to rape women.”
WMC Women Under Siege
October 11, 2013 | Fariba Nawa |
International
Afghanistan’s widows of the disappeared
Sabah Mohammed sat at the dining table where she worked in Fremont, Calif., her gaze distant and lost. She wondered if her husband was out there somewhere with another wife and family. Or maybe he was dead. Or maybe he was in a prison camp in Siberia.
WMC Women Under Siege
Burma refuses to relinquish rape as weapon of war
On September 24, British Foreign Secretary William Hague’s initiative to end sexualized violence in conflict zones took the 2013 UN General Assembly by storm. The event was hosted by Secretary Hague and Zainab Hawa Bangura, special representative of the Secretary-General on sexual violence in conflict, and included speakers from 27 member countries.
WMC Women Under Siege
A competition of suffering: Male vs. female rape
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.
WMC Women Under Siege
Inching forward against military sexual assault
U.S. legislators voted Wednesday to help stanch the overwhelming problem of sexualized violence in the armed forces, Reuters reports. The idea is to make it easier for victims of sexualized violence to come forward while decreasing the threat of retaliation from superiors in the chain of command.
WMC Women Under Siege
Placing blame: Report debunks misconceptions about wartime rape
The media loves to generalize about war, and with it, wartime sexualized violence. But ignoring nuance does nobody any favors—neither the survivors themselves, nor those who are trying to stop it.
WMC Women Under Siege
The best they can be? How the Army chain of command fails women
A dark screen accompanies the sounds of rhythmic drums and sinister music. The darkness fades into a chronological montage of U.S. Army propaganda, leading a viewer through an overview of military aesthetic dating from the newsreel era to the videogame epoch. From the opening frame, a new documentary called “The Invisible War” establishes the realm of an alternate military reality, far from civilian life. A woman explains in voiceover: “There’s a right way, a wrong way, and the Army way.”
WMC Women Under Siege
License to rape: How Burma’s military employs systematic sexualized violence
Last week, a young woman from the Karen ethnic minority in Burma reported being “beaten, drugged, and sexually assaulted by two men wearing army fatigues.” In November 2011, reports emerged that four women were being kept as sex slaves by the Burmese military near the Kachin-China border; forced to cook and clean during the day and gang-raped at night by the soldiers in the Light Infantry Battalion 321. These reports, unfortunately, are not rare.
WMC Women Under Siege
Guatemala’s war may be over, but the battle continues to be fought on women’s bodies
Guatemala City—There’s a heavy green to this place, layered. Clouds weigh on the hills and seep into the trees and grass and leaves and bushes. Every clearing we pass turns to depths, and in those reaches lie the dead.
WMC Women Under Siege
February 24, 2012 | Javier Zurita, Ofelia de Pablo |
International,
Race/Ethnicity,
Violence against women
The invisible genocide of women
More than 100,000 women were raped in the 36-years Guatemalan genocide—at least 200,000 people died. In this video, photojournalists Ofelia de Pablo and Javier Zurita interview survivors and document the ongoing forensic and legal investigation that recently indicted former Guatemalan President Efraín Ríos Montt.
WMC Women Under Siege
The safest prey: When refugee camps become sites of violence
Even war is safer than this. Imagine it: Your family attacked. Your house teeming with soldiers. Your options running out. A protected area for victims of war sounds like a wise place to flee.
WMC Women Under Siege
Are atrocities inevitable? A conversation with "NewsTalk" Radio Ireland
Click through to listen to a live interview I did with Sean Moncrieff on Radio Ireland’s “NewsTalk”—he asks solid questions about whether rape has always been used as a weapon of war, and whether men are targeted the same way. Maybe most interestingly, Moncrieff wonders: “Given that atrocities inevitably take place in conflicts, so will rape?”
WMC Women Under Siege
Can we end rape as tool of war?
We first thought about starting this piece with the story of Saleha Begum, a survivor of Bangladesh's 1971 war in which, some reports say, as many as 400,000 women were raped. Begum had been tied to a banana tree and repeatedly gang raped and burned with cigarettes for months until she was shot and left for dead in a pile of women. She didn't die, though, and was able to return home, ravaged and five months pregnant. When she got home she was branded a "slut."