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Saturday Vids: The Invisible War
"From Oscar®- and Emmy®-nominated filmmaker Kirby Dick (This Film Is Not Yet Rated; Twist of Faith) comes The Invisible War, a groundbreaking investigative documentary about one of America's most sham...
WMC News & Features
June 01, 2012 | Elayne Clift |
Violence against women
When “Jane” Comes Marching Home Again
In May the Army began a new Defense Department policy that will open an additional 14,000 positions for women. Will we be ready for them when they come home?
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."
WMC FBomb
Saturday Vids: Women, War and Peace
Starting on October 11th, PBS launched a fascinating 5-part mini-series entitled "Women, War and Peace." As they describe it: "Women, War & Peace challenges the conventional wisdom that war and pe...
WMC FBomb
Saturday Vids: A Soldier Comes Out Live
If you haven't seen this video in which a soldier films his experience coming out to his father, you have to. All I have to say is thank God DADT was repealed.
...
WMC FBomb
Rebuttals to Sexist Arguments
I have this friend who's in the year below me who insists that certain sexist institutions within society should be tolerated based on the fact that a couple million years ago there was a biological b...
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The Future West Point Cadet and Military Axe Grinding
Not a single female was to be found in my first semester history course.
Our class discussed this curious state of affairs extensively, and it was decided after much deliberation that another history...
WMC News & Features
How War Trounces Women's Rights
In her new book "Unmaking War, Remaking Men," feminist sociologist Kathleen Barry argues that by demanding a violent and aggressive masculinity—literally making men expendable—war precludes equality for women.
WMC FBomb
Military Draft and Reverse Sexism
One or two years ago, I was taking my first Women’s Studies class at my college and it began my infatuation with feminism. Naturally, I had mixed feelings at first between agreeing with my teacher’s p...
WMC News & Features
At War at Home
The Veteran Affairs Department defines a service-connected disability as "an illness or injury incurred in or aggravated by military service." As author and advocate Stacy Bannerman argues, the military spouses of those injured are on their own when it comes to treatment.
WMC News & Features
Military Moms, Still Fighting
The promise of a homecoming next week for all combat troops stationed in Iraq is not the end of the struggle for commentator Cynthia Benjamin and other such mothers, whose sons and daughters still suffer the trauma of engagement.
WMC News & Features
Remembering Abeer: Anatomy of a War Crime
In 2006, WMC began a media campaign to ensure that the girl who fell victim to a heinous U.S. war crime in Iraq would not be forgotten. Here, the writer of previous WMC Exclusives about the case describes new information from a recent book by Time magazine’s Jim Frederick.
WMC FBomb
Coming of Age
I have always thought the Jewish coming of age ritual for a girl was a Bat Mitzvah, the grasp of the Torah in ceremoniously manicured hands a rite of passage. Rachel Papo's photographs show me that th...
WMC FBomb
WWII Women Pilots Honored
The New York Times reports that the members of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (W.A.S.P.) will receive the Congressional Gold Medal, one of America's highest civilian honors. Out of more than 1,000 ...