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.
It's been less than a year since photojournalist Lynsey Addario returned from Libya, where soldiers loyal to Muammar Gaddafi sexually abused her during six days in captivity. I interviewed Addario just after she returned, and her honesty and stated intention of “shaming the Libyans” for what had been done to her evinced a remarkable personal strength.
In January 2011, The Economist published the number of women raped in six conflicts, including an estimate of 500,000 women raped in the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Many readers may have taken these statistics at face value. In fact, however, estimates of rape in Rwanda range from 250,000 to 500,000 and are based on the number of reported pregnancies from rape, which underestimates prevalence.
I was sexually abused at the age of 6. I did not know this experience was merely an initiation into sexualized violence that seems, too often, throughout the world to be as inescapable a part of becoming a woman as menstruation. My experience of sexualized violence culminated in being brutally raped while serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Niger, West Africa.
When I was overwhelmed by a mob of men in Tahrir Square in Egypt last February, I was filled with the certainty that I would die there. In my mind I could see an image of my body lying discarded in the dirt.
It struck me that it would be a truly meaningless death.
