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All I Want Is Equality
All I want is equality.
Because yes, that is what feminism is all about. Equality for women. No, we feminists are not asking for better treatment under the law for women. Anyone who does is not truly...
WMC Women Under Siege
Creating heaven 'in a place called hell’: DRC activist responds to US tabloid
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.
WMC Women Under Siege
The topsy-turvy world of men who oppose anti-violence campaigns
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.”
WMC Women Under Siege
Hope for a better life leads to torture for Ethiopians
When there’s not an acute famine in the Horn of Africa, the media tends to leave the misery in that part of the world unreported. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t heard much about Ethiopia specifically in awhile, minus a few international journalist friends mentioning that there is a migration problem for women who are seeking better lives in the Arab peninsula. As of this morning though, I can’t pretend to ignore what’s going on in the region any longer.
WMC Women Under Siege
July 09, 2013 | Lauren Wolfe |
International
Photos from a border life: Syrian refugees live in limbo in southern Turkey
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.
WMC Women Under Siege
No, war doesn’t have to mean rape
Almost every day, readers write to tell us that women will always be targeted in conflict. Rape, they say, is just a natural part of war, and there’s no way to stop it. Yet research shows that this isn’t actually the case.
WMC News & Features
Action Alert & Interview Transcript: Saudi Activist Women Facing Jail for Bringing Abused Woman Food
Two Saudi women’s rights activists, Wajeha Al-Huwaider and Fawzia Al-Oyouni, have been sentenced to 10 months in prison plus a two-year travel ban thereafter—for “encouraging" a French Canadian woman "to defy" her allegedly abusive Saudi husband.
WMC Women Under Siege
Rape accounts still surface from India’s partition 65 years on
War stories are often framed by convenient lines, two clear-cut sides, campaigns and directives. Partition in India reads very differently. In the aftermath of the 1947 declaration of Indian independence, the roughly drawn new state boundaries triggered what may have been the biggest migration in human history.
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The Indomitable Female Fortress: Queen Elizabeth I
When I think of Elizabeth I, Queen of England from 1558 to 1603, I think of a beguiling and Machiavellian woman who, against all odds, led her country to a golden age while battling against the acute ...
WMC Women Under Siege
'Take your portion': A victim speaks out about rape in Syria
Alma Abdulrahman is lying gaunt and unable to move anything below her diaphragm in a hospital bed in Amman. Some bedsores have become so deep she’s having surgery tomorrow. Screws hold together her upper vertebrae, and cigarette burns pock her right shoulder. Her voice fades in and out, hoarse from either weakness or morphine.
WMC Women Under Siege
The G8’s PR strategy on rape in conflict
On the same day in April that I listened to the harrowing stories of Syrian women over endless glasses of tea in Jordan’s Zaatari refugee camp, leaders of the world’s eight richest countries promised to take action against rape as a weapon of war. But the high-profile statement failed to offer a deadline, measurable metric, or concrete plan for a single recommendation it put forward.
WMC Women Under Siege
Nicaraguan women could be forced into mediation with their attackers
In June 2012, a Nicaraguan law aimed at protecting women from gender-based violence took effect. Called Law 779, it “stipulates that the state and its institutions have a duty to guarantee the physical, psychic, moral, sexual, patrimonial, and economic integrity of women,” Inter Press Service reports. But since last year, the law has been jeopardized by opponents, including the vice president of the country’s Supreme Court.
WMC Women Under Siege
Mali conflict is latest to employ forced marriage as tool of war
Saran Keïta Diakité painted a dismal reality for women in Mali in a speech she gave to the UN Security Council in April. “They carry out a form of ‘marriage’ so that, at night, you can be treated as a sexual slave,” Diakité said. “During the day, you are there to serve tea to the men and attend to their every need. This is why I always say that what’s happened in Mali is unprecedented."
WMC Women Under Siege
Tracking a rumor: Is there a sugar factory in Syria being used as a rape house?
We were seated on a scratchy nylon mat with “UNHCR” written all over it. Children with the same beautiful, olive-complexioned face stared big-eyed at me from every corner of the furniture-less room, and their mother cried as she talked about the many massacres her family had fled in Homs five months previously.
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Forced Prostitution During World War II
I recently read an article posted on Yahoo News about prostitution during World War II in Japan. Prostitution is a difficult and controversial subject for feminists, but what most can agree on is tha...
WMC Women Under Siege
The long struggle against systematic rape in conflict-ridden Kashmir
Just a few weeks ago, some 50 Kashmiri women came together to demand that police reinvestigate a well-known case of mass rape. The women—teachers, students, journalists, human rights workers, lawyers, and other professionals—filed a public interest litigation case before India’s Jammu and Kashmir high court. The alleged set of crimes, known as the Kunan Poshpora case, happened more than 20 years ago, on February 23, 1991, when armed forces allegedly raped at least 32 teenaged, adult, and elderly women.
WMC News & Features
African Women Lead: A Pan African Dream
Africans cannot sacrifice democracy for economic gain for the few and pittance for the many. The author—a New Yorker born in Nairobi—says paternalistic male leadership must come to an end, and women lead instead.
WMC Women Under Siege
The legacy of silence: Why we ignore the rape of women from Guatemala to Syria
Just before 2 a.m. and nearly half a world away, I watched a guilty verdict from Guatemala scroll by tweet by tweet on my phone. Former President Efrain Rios Montt was convicted on May 10 of genocide and crimes against humanity and given 80 years in prison. As the news came through, I felt a satisfied chill—17 years after the murder of 200,000 Guatemalans and the rape of 100,000 women, mostly Mayans, justice has actually come in our lifetime.
WMC News & Features
The Power of Mothers: A History of Disappearance
In Juárez, mothers of disappeared and murdered daughters from the last two decades are following in a long tradition of Latin American mothers who have taken to the streets to protest the disappearance of their children.
WMC Women Under Siege
From Morocco to Denmark: Rape survivors around the world are forced to marry attackers
In March 2012, a 16-year-old girl named Amina Filali killed herself by drinking rat poison. She had been raped and forced—by Moroccan law—to marry the man who had raped her.
WMC Women Under Siege
Lack of clean water tied to rape in the Solomon Islands
On any given day, women around the world will find themselves in danger of rape while performing the most basic acts of survival. Acts borne of necessity, such as fetching clean water for cooking or washing, or gathering firewood, often leave women vulnerable to rape and gender-based violence as they are forced to venture to remote areas. In the Solomon Islands, the problem is severe.
WMC News & Features
Delivering the News—Ghana’s "Maternal Health Channel"
Expectant mothers and their caregivers in Ghana can now look to the airwaves for critically important information.
WMC Women Under Siege
A needed controversy over sexualized violence in Democratic Republic of Congo
In August 2010, reports began trickling out of Democratic Republic of Congo about another tragic episode of mass sexualized violence perpetrated by rebel troops over four days in the eastern town of Luvungi. But in a recent issue of Foreign Policy, a debate sprang up about the way outsiders have portrayed the attack. The controversy highlights the need for a more candid discussion about Congo.
WMC News & Features
Yangon Bakehouse Empowers Women of Myanmar
As the people of Myanmar celebrate their new year beginning April 12, a handful of Myanmar women are beginning a new life thanks to an expat run social venture called The Yangon Bakehouse.
WMC Women Under Siege
Report: Sexualized violence may disproportionately affect children in war
“They didn’t hit her, but they ruined her.” That’s how a young woman named Maimouna described the gang rape of her 16-year-old neighbor in Mali, according to a new report from Save the Children. The NGO has transcribed interviews with witnesses such as Maimouna and with dozens of firsthand survivors to illustrate their latest findings.