Jocelyn Brooks
Bio:
Jocelyn Brooks is a legal fellow at the Global Justice Center, where she works primarily on its August 12th Campaign, which seeks to ensure the right to safe abortion for women and girls raped in war. She graduated from Fordham University School of Law in May 2012, where she was a Stein Scholar for the Public Interest. In the summer of 2011, Jocelyn was an Ella Baker Law Intern with the Center for Constitutional Rights, based in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where she worked on the right to housing. At Fordham, Jocelyn took part in the International Human Rights Clinic, in which she helped design and implement a mobile legal aid clinic in rural Malawi. She lives in Brooklyn and graduated from Brown University in 2003 with a bachelor's in anthropology.
Countless women and girls have been raped to death, held as sexual slaves, gang raped, and subjected to sexual mutilation in conflicts during the last century—in the Rwandan genocide, the Nanking massacre, the war in the former Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone’s civil war, and Burma’s long-running armed conflict, to name a few.
A woman sits, microphone in hand, behind a billowing, black curtain—further obscured by a black veil that hides her face, her body, and even her hands—as she finds the courage to recount her rape by government soldiers in Minova, Democratic Republic of Congo.
