WMC Women Under Siege
Bargaining away justice for women in Rwanda
Over the course of a mere 100 days, from April through July of 1994, between 500,000 and 1 million Rwandan men, women, and children were slaughtered during the Rwandan genocide. The United Nations and human rights groups report that anywhere from 250,000 to 500,000 women were also horrifically sexually violated. Testimonials of women given to Human Rights Watch following the end of the conflict indicate that almost every woman and adolescent girl who survived the genocide was raped.
WMC Women Under Siege
What are the solutions to wartime rape?
Part of Women Under Siege’s mission is to try to understand and share findings on the complexities of wartime rape in its varied forms in order to develop targeted solutions that would work effectively in different situations. We need to get a better grasp on what’s happening so we can stop it, and to stop it we need to think creatively and strategically. Here are some ideas on how to end or prevent sexualized violence in the context of various conflict situations.
WMC Women Under Siege
The best they can be? How the Army chain of command fails women
A dark screen accompanies the sounds of rhythmic drums and sinister music. The darkness fades into a chronological montage of U.S. Army propaganda, leading a viewer through an overview of military aesthetic dating from the newsreel era to the videogame epoch. From the opening frame, a new documentary called “The Invisible War” establishes the realm of an alternate military reality, far from civilian life. A woman explains in voiceover: “There’s a right way, a wrong way, and the Army way.”
WMC Women Under Siege
CPJ: Another journalist reports sexual assault in Tahrir Square
The story sounds hideously like another—one of a chaotic, predatory attack on a woman journalist in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Clothes torn from her body, hundreds of men surging to grab her breasts and claw at her. A woman wondering, “Maybe this is how I go, how I die.” It has been almost a year and a half since CBS correspondent and CPJ board member Lara Logan endured an attack like this. Now, an independent journalist and student named Natasha Smith reports that it has happened to her.
WMC Women Under Siege
What do we mean by rape in war?
For many of us, the phrase “wartime rape” evokes blurry, broad ideas of military assault, battles, and weapons. Just like the common misconceptions that surround rape in places like the U.S. or the UK (such as the idea that rape is a crime committed by a shadowy stranger in a dark alley, when, according to UK charity Rape Crisis, “only 9 percent of rapes are committed by ‘strangers’”) it is easy to make incorrect assumptions about the causes and manifestations of wartime rape.
WMC Women Under Siege
The ongoing tragedy of India’s widows
Widows in India have a pronoun problem. The estimated 40 million women widows in the country go from being called “she” to “it” when they lose their husbands. They become “de-sexed” creatures.
WMC Women Under Siege
Swept under the pew: Stories of sexualized violence in the Mennonite community
Silence: A symptom that plagues all scenarios of sexualized violence, rape, and abuse, no matter what communities we’re addressing. In the Sudan conflict, rape was used to silence women. When a woman named Safiya Ishaq unashamedly spoke about her rape, she was forced to flee the country for fear of retribution. The potential of being stigmatized has prevented women in the Democratic Republic of Congo from seeking medical treatment for rape.
WMC Women Under Siege
Sudan’s activists face rape, one fights back
In many regards, Safiya Ishaq is an unremarkable 25-year-old. She is excellent at braiding hair but terrible at being on time. She studied fine arts at Khartoum University in Sudan. Not unusually for a student, Ishaq became involved with politics.
WMC Women Under Siege
It's not a revolution for those left behind
“Who should I blame for this? Mubarak for destroying my country’s education so those men have no respect for women and have become just animals … our useless police who are incapable of defending us…our religious leaders who claim that they want what’s best but they don’t go to these young men and teach them what’s right…. Who? … I am sorry for the women of Egypt… . I am angry but I am not broken.”
WMC Women Under Siege
Seeking justice for girl child soldiers in the Lubanga case
“I sometimes heard the cries of the girls with my own ears…there were girls who made food that I saw, but also sometimes at night there were commanders…and you could see the girls prepare the food, and at night you could listen to the girls even saying, ‘I don’t want to.’”
WMC Women Under Siege
Women in Kenya’s slums still dealing with post-election sexualized violence
The loud, unexpected laughter stuck with me long after my conversation about sexualized violence with a women’s group from Kibera—Kenya’s biggest slum, located on the outskirts of Nairobi, and one of the hotspots for violence in the post-election conflict of 2007-2008.
WMC Women Under Siege
‘On the Media’: Balancing advocacy and accuracy
After Sen. Joseph Lieberman published this Washington Post op-ed advocating for the U.S. to step up its efforts to topple the Syrian regime last month, Jackie Blachman-Forshay and I wrote a response.
WMC Women Under Siege
Walking the tightrope that is reporting rape in Syria
On May 19, Sen. Joseph Lieberman wrote a piece in The Washington Post exhorting the U.S. to “step up” efforts to provide the Syrian resistance with the “means to defend themselves against Assad.”
WMC Women Under Siege
We talk to the BBC about UK launch of anti-rape team for conflict zones
This morning brings the announcement that the UK government will be training experts (police, psychologists, doctors, lawyers, and forensic experts, according to the BBC) to deploy to conflict zones to collect evidence of sexualized violence—an initiative we can only be hopeful will do more than any government is doing now to stop the rape of women in wars.
WMC Women Under Siege
When those meant to keep the peace commit sexualized violence
A young girl walks a short distance to visit her relatives in Haiti. But she doesn’t get far before men start harassing her, asking her to come with them. Their intentions are not even thinly disguised, and this girl is just one of their many targets.
WMC Women Under Siege
Justice remains elusive for victims of Egypt’s ‘virginity testing’
It’s been more than a year’s worth of legal battles, and Samira Ibrahim is still fighting to see that justice is served against the perpetrators of her painful and humiliating sexual assault.
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The fine line between 'obedience' and rape in North Korea
When Shin Dong-hyuk was 10 years old, he watched his mother be raped by her boss. In an attempt to fetch her for dinner, Shin approached the office where he had been told she would be. The door was locked. Through a window he saw her kneeling as she washed the floor, then saw her boss approach and grope her. Shin’s mother and the man took off their clothes, and the boy watched the rest unfold.
WMC Women Under Siege
For Bosnia's women, a slow justice
The first day of the Ratko Mladić war crimes trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was covered in many major news outlets on Wednesday. Interestingly, while The New York Times pointed out that Mladić is the "last of the major figures in the Balkan wars to face trial" at the ICTY, the Times piece contained no mention of the rampant torture and rape of women during the Bosnian War.
WMC Women Under Siege
Not natural, not forever: How we're trying to end rape in war
That rape is used as an actual strategy and weapon of war goes unnoticed much of the time by the media, which tends to focus on the explosions and traumas you can show in photos or film footage. But Janis Mackey Frayer, South Asia bureau chief of CTV News, has brought this subject to her readers in a two-part series that focuses on the work of Women Under Siege.
WMC Women Under Siege
Why is stopping gender violence a 'women's issue'?
The Violence Against Women Act is causing contention as it comes to Congress for the third time for reauthorization. Democrats want to extend the act, first approved in 1994, to provide protection to Native American women, victims in same-sex relationships, and undocumented immigrants—some of the country’s most vulnerable populations. But Republicans have accused Democrats of deliberately including these “controversial” issues in an attempt to lure them into blocking the bill.
WMC Women Under Siege
Who is Congo?
We know that victims of wartime rape are not just victims, or even survivors. They are mothers, fathers, children, grandparents, teachers, advocates, cooks, helpers, and dreamers. A new video series about Congo offers a fuller story of the country and its people than what we usually see.
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Going down the rabbit hole: Cara Hoffman interviews Women Under Siege Director Lauren Wolfe
What can women do right now to get involved in ending violence against women? How do you deal with feelings of discouragement and anger in this work? Cara Hoffman, author of So Much Pretty (Simon & Schuster) speaks with Women Under Siege Director Lauren Wolfe about this and more.
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Defining justice when the law is unjust: How gender imbalance affects women around the world
Justice is supposed to confer equality, impartiality, protection for victims, and punishment for perpetrators. Yet as recently as the 1970s, spousal rape was not considered a criminal offense in some U.S. states.
WMC Women Under Siege
April 24, 2012 International,
Violence against women
Obama includes sexualized violence in U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum remarks
On April 23, President Barack Obama delivered an address at a ceremony at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. He intended both to commemorate the Holocaust and to outline his administration's efforts to honor the pledge of “never again” by developing a comprehensive strategy to prevent and respond to genocide and mass atrocities.
WMC Women Under Siege
Afghan women face horrors for ‘moral crimes’
A cab driver abducted Marya, 15. He and another man raped her. Tahmina, 18, was trying to find the boy she liked in the hopes of escaping domestic violence and forced marriage. Two men she didn't know found her instead. They raped her. Malalai invited the guy she was seeing over to her house when she was alone, but he proved to be a mistake and raped her.