Ten things I’ve learned in my years of extensive reporting on sexualized violence that may help you navigate this most sensitive kind of reporting.
A year following revelations in The New York Times about decades of allegations against movie producer Harvey Weinstein, the #MeToo movement has led to a significant change in the way media covers stories about sexual assault and harassment, a new report from the Women’s Media Center shows.
Media coverage of U.S. campus rape and sexualized violence is significantly skewed toward the bylines and voices of men, according to a Women’s Media Center report.
Azuma Shiro, one of the first Japanese war veterans to discuss his participation in the Nanking Massacre, said in the 1998 documentary called In the Name of the Emperor: “It would be all right if we only raped them—I shouldn’t say all right. But we always stabbed and killed them. Because dead bodies don’t talk.”
Untangling the conflict in Colombia can be particularly challenging, given the wide variety of actors and structures at play. Cleavages between left- and right-wing factions in the society, as well as confrontations with the government, have led to decades of political violence, fighting, and ethnic violence.
An estimated 250,000 people died in Liberia’s civil war, which began in 1989 and lasted until 2003—about a century and a half after the country was founded by freed slaves from the United States and the Caribbean. According to the United Nations, some 40,000 women were raped during the conflict.
To begin chronicling the history of sexualized violence in Burma, you have to go back through 50 years of accounts of women suffering subjugation through rape, mutilation, gang rape, and sexual slavery.
In 1888, while Jack the Ripper went about sadistically murdering a number of lower-class London sex workers, halfway across the world in the northern suburbs of Mexico City, a lesser-known man named Francisco Guerrero, a.k.a. “El Chalequero,” was preying upon poor women in a similarly vicious and calculated manner. Few remember Guerrero; his crimes hardly garnered the same attention as the British serial killer’s.
North Korea’s government has been enslaving citizens roughly 12 times longer than the Nazis held prisoners in concentration camps. Yet in most circles, the concentration camps run by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea are far less talked about than the quirks and nuclear capacities of the regime. Due to a combination of distraction and difficult reporting, the systematic sexualized violence that occurs within those camps rarely garners attention.
Sierra Leone’s civil war began in 1991, spanned 11 years, and left hundreds of thousands displaced and more than 50,000 dead. Yet the toll for women and girls was much higher than the war dead: Physicians for Human Rights estimates that during the conflict, between 215,000 and 257,000 of them were subjected to sexualized violence.
The Bangladesh War of 1971—in which up to 3 million people were killed, and hundreds of thousands of women raped—seemingly has its roots in strange cartography. As University of Chicago professor Rochona Majumdar puts it, the 1947 Partition between India and Pakistan was geographically “very weird,” with the nation of Pakistan split into two noncontiguous land masses.
Four women are raped every five minutes in the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to a study done in May 2011 by three researchers, including SUNY’s Tia Palermo. “These nationwide estimates of the incidence of rape are 26 times higher than the 15,000 conflict-related cases confirmed by the United Nations for the DRC in 2010,” says Palermo.
In February 2011, protests broke out in Benghazi, the second largest city in Libya, against the more than 40-year rule of Muammar Gaddafi. During the protests, security forces fired on civilian protesters, causing a broader uprising that led to the establishment of the National Transitional Council (NTC), an interim governing body in opposition to Gaddafi’s regime.
The Egyptian Revolution began on January 25, 2011, with millions of Egyptians demanding the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak. The revolution, while predominantly nonviolent compared to other Arab Spring protests, saw a number of violent clashes between security forces and protesters.
In March 2003, after decades of tension, fighting erupted in Sudan’s western Darfur region between Sudanese government forces and rebel groups such as the Sudanese Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement. Over the next few months, tens of thousands of Darfuris fled. Government troops and allied militia forces, called the Janjaweed, attacked villages and internally displaced persons (IDP) camps, systematically raped women, and murdered whole communities.
The Rwandan genocide, which took the lives of an estimated 800,000 people, the majority of whom were Tutsis, erupted on April 6, 1994. Fueled by ethnic divisions between Hutus and Tutsis dating back to Belgium’s colonial rule, which began after the First World War, the killing was complete in just 100 days.
The 1990s war in the former Yugoslavia was marked by intense sexualized violence that ruined the lives of old women and young girls alike. One hallmark of the terror was the creation of “rape camps” in which women were tortured and violated repeatedly. The fractured history of the Balkans led to three years of war from which the region is still recovering today.
Virtually unexplored until recently, sexualized violence in the Holocaust took many forms, faces, and insidious paths. Among the more than 6 million Jews killed were an unknown number of women, probably thousands, who were raped—in camps, in hiding, in ghettos. The perpetrators were Nazis, fellow Jews, and those who hid Jews. There are few records of this particular form of suffering for many reasons, including no records being kept of rape, that few women survived, and that Nazis were specifically forbidden from sexually touching Jewish women because of race defilement laws called Rassenchande—hence, some scholars have been loath to believe sexualized violence was extensive.