Yes, this slight, shy girl talking with me in the schoolyard killed four people. The rebel soldiers had given her the dictum so many warrior Ugandan children live under: “Kill, or we will kill you.” She tells her story in a rapid-fire, hushed monotone—as if rushing to deliver a memorized passage from a tale too awful to really think about. And that it is. She is only now 16 years old: as an 11-year-old soldier she killed grown men. I don’t give her name because life is still too dangerous for her. Abducted from her school by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) as a small child, she is now rebuilding her life in northern Uganda—a student at a boarding school for girls in Kitgum, near the Sudanese border. In the run of her life, she managed to escape from the brutality of the rebel army only to return to her village to find her parents dead.

The brutal killings of 400 women began mysteriously in 1993 and continued until about 2005. Or so we thought. In early 2007, National Public Radio’s Lourdes Garcia-Navarro found still more recent ...

During the long days of the rape and murder court-martial of Sgt. Jesse Spielman at Fort Campbell where I was reporting a story for the Women’s Media Center website—I was struck by the language I was hearing and the apparent meaning of the words.

A third soldier, Private Jesse Spielman, 23, was sentenced Saturday night to 110 years in prison after being convicted Friday of the rape and murder of 14-year-old Abeer Qassim Rasheed Al-Janabi. However, like Sergeant Paul Cortez and Specialist James Barker, who were also convicted in the case, Spielman will, says the Associated Press, be eligible for parole after only 10 years in prison.

According to testimony at his court-martial, which began Monday at Fort Campbell, Private Jesse Spielman went with Sergeant Paul Cortez, Specialist James Barker and Private Steven Green on March 12, 2006, to the home of the Al-Janabi family in a village south of Baghdad. He watched while they raped 14-year-old Abeer Qassim Rasheed Al-Janabi and murdered her and her family.

Dua Khalil is stoned to death in Iraq for being seen with a man of another religion. A woman is shot dead in Jordan after her photo appears on her brother’s friend’s cellphone. Muqadas Bibi’s throat...

When speaking to Americans, Yanar Mohammed is confronted repeatedly with the belief that Iraqi women’s rights are protected under occupation by the United States. In reality, says Mohammed, director...

In just one year of obfuscation and several apparent lies to a judge, defense attorneys and the public in a single case, a North Carolina prosecutor has undermined decades of progress toward justice...

In the years following World War II, we are in what legal scholar Eric Yamamoto has called a global “Age of Reparations.” Yet reparations claims and settlements have until recently ignored harms uniquely experienced by women.

The account below is compiled from testimony given at the courts martial of Paul Cortez and James Barker, from accounts of the Article 32 Hearing and other court proceedings in the cases, and from previous WMC and newspaper reports. Former Pfc. Steven Green, Pfc. Jesse Spielman and Pfc. Bryan Howard are still awaiting trial. References to them are to alleged actions on their part according to the above sources.

Sandwiched between International Women’s Day on March 8 and the fourth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq on March 19 is another date that marks a tragic nexus of the two: the day one year ago when 14-year-old Abeer Qassim Al-Janabi was stalked, gang-raped, shot in the head and her corpse burned in her own home in Mahmoudiya, Iraq. Four U.S. soldiers and one former soldier are charged with the crimes committed March 12, 2006.

“I’m down with that.” According to prosecutors, this was Pfc. Jesse V. Spielman’s response when hearing of a plan to rape 14 year-old Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi. Spielman is undergoing court martial on various charges involving her rape and murder and the murder of her mother Fikhriya, father Qassim, and little sister Hadeel.

Sgt. Paul Cortez, the second soldier to plead guilty to the rape and murder of Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi, as well as the murder of her parents and sister, was sentenced on Thursday, February 22, to 100 years in prison and a dishonorable discharge. Under the terms of a plea agreement made before the court martial took place, Cortez avoided life imprisonment without possibility of parole in sentencing handed down by the judge, Colonel Stephen Henley.

“She screamed and cried and tried to keep her legs together.” That is how Sgt. Paul Cortez described the reason he was fully aware that his premeditated rape of 14-year-old Abeer Qassim Rasheed Al-Janabi was not consensual but criminal.

The first day of the court martial of Sgt. Paul Cortez began in the small courthouse near the Burger King on Ft. Campbell, at the border of Kentucky and Tennessee. Only a few onlookers, mostly reporters and military escorts, were on hand to watch as the military judge quizzed the tall, thin Cortez about the multiple charges to which he pled guilty.

U.S. Army spokesmen and defense attorneys keep talking about a possible death penalty for defendants in the gang rape and murder of 14-year-old Abeer Al-Janabi and her family in Mahmoudiyah, Iraq, in March 2006. Yet the death threat is inconsistent with recent history in U.S. military courts.

A military judge in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, yesterday sentenced U.S. Army Spec. James P. Barker to life in prison with the possibility of parole. Barker had pled guilty to 16 crimes related to the gang rape and premeditated murder of 14-year-old Abeer Al-Janabi and her family in Mahmoudiya, Iraq, earlier this year.

U.S. Army Spec. James P. Barker on Wednesday pleaded guilty to 16 crimes related to the gang rape and premeditated murder of 14-year-old Abeer Al-Janabi and her family in Mahmoudiya, Iraq, earlier this year. He is to be sentenced today, Army officials and his civilian defense attorney said.

While most of the country was focused on the election aftermath, former U.S. soldier Steven D. Green was quietly arraigned today at a U.S. courthouse in Louisville, Kentucky, three blocks from the Show n’ Tell Lounge advertising “girls, girls, girls.”

The life stories of Jessica Brakey and Abeer Al-Janabi unfold a half a world apart. Yet the former Air Force Academy cadet and the dead Iraqi girl are both powerful symbols of women’s experience of sexual assault. The legal tales of both are curiously juxtaposed this fall in the military’s sprawling criminal justice system.

Abu Ghraib. Haditha. Guantanamo. These are words that shame our country. Now, add to them Mahmudiya, a town 20 miles south of Baghdad. There, this March, a group of five American soldiers allegedly ...

Two young girls lost. The name of one, Jon Benet Ramsey, is etched in the collective U.S. consciousness. The other, Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi, barely registers—if it registers at all.

In the displacement of Lebanese civilians due to the current conflict, women are suffering the most, said Lina Abou-Habib, speaking from Beirut on a marathon broadcast by FIRE (Feminist Internationa...