WMC Women Under Siege
Why treating rape survivors is so complicated
As a clinician engaged in the evaluation of sexually and physically abused and tortured populations, I have often quietly pondered this question: Compared with victims of purely physical violence and torture, why do victims of sexualized violence frequently have such long-lasting effects?
WMC Women Under Siege
Covering rape responsibly
In the light of the recent coverage of the rapes in India, it’s time to talk about how we cover rape in this country. For some 20 years now, I have been criticizing the press for never asking why men rape. Now, with the rapes in New Delhi gaining so much attention, I ask it again.
WMC Women Under Siege
January 29, 2013 | Sanam Naraghi Anderlini, Sussan Tahmasebi |
International,
Violence against women
Voices from the ground: How to help Syria’s humanitarian crisis
In recent months, the International Civil Society Action Network’s (ICAN) staff have held regular in-person and online consultations with Syrian civil society activists based inside the country or those who have recently left. They are providing relief and development support to refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs). This brief summarizes key priorities and recommendations on immediate humanitarian issues that must be addressed by the international community.
WMC Women Under Siege
Why I’m breaking the cycle of violence in Afghanistan
I never realized how devastating our culture was for women until my brother-in-law tortured my sister. Growing up in Afghanistan, I had already watched my father beat my mother—but that was seen as just another part of daily life. Then the cycle of violence continued when I myself became an abuser.
WMC Women Under Siege
January 23, 2013 Media,
Violence against women
Women’s Media Center, Columbia University sponsoring symposium on sexualized violence
The Women’s Media Center and Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health on Friday are sponsoring a free symposium to discuss how to end global sexualized violence.
WMC Women Under Siege
When will I 'earn' my right to safety?
Delhi. Ohio. Nepal. Around the world, women are suffering sexual assaults so heinous that they are making the headlines on an almost daily basis. And yet, almost inconceivably, governments, members of the judiciary, and authority figures around the world continue to advocate that the solution lies with women—that their behavior is to blame and that their behavior has the power somehow, magically, to prevent rape.
WMC Women Under Siege
Why Steubenville is not Delhi: How we are failing in this country
The father of the woman gang-raped and killed in Delhi in December has told the media that the crime against his daughter is “an awakening” for India. It certainly has been an awakening for much of the world, as I wrote in this op-ed for CNN. The local and international media have been cracking open issues from dowry-related burnings of women to street harassment, asking exactly what is wrong with men in India to have created such a culture of hate and violence against women. It is heartening to watch the introspection.
WMC Women Under Siege
Video: Tracking violence against women in Syria—CNN
With Syria's war taking the lives of women at an average rate of 9 percent across the country, I spoke to CNN International's Hala Gorani about the terrible price women and children are paying as noncombatants.
WMC Women Under Siege
Video: WMC’s Women Under Siege director talks about the roots of rape on HuffPost Live
In this video hosted by HuffPost Live’s Abby Huntsman, our director, Lauren Wolfe, cites a finding that may get you riled up: that 65 percent of men surveyed in the Democratic Republic of Congo believe women should accept partner violence to “keep the family together.” More shocking is the finding she cites next: that 53 percent of girls in India think wife-beating is justified—girls who may one day be those very wives.
WMC Women Under Siege
January 03, 2013 | Lauren Wolfe |
Violence against women
What can we do to end rape in 2013?
On Tuesday, I wrote a piece for CNN calling to make 2013 The Year to End Rape. I know it’s wishful—there’s a lot to try to end: global legal failings that allow rapists to commit crimes with impunity; attitudes that blame the victim, leading to suicides and honor killings; misogyny that conditions men (and women) to view women and girls as less than human, as objects to be controlled.
WMC Women Under Siege
End culture of rape in 2013
On December 16, a young medical student in one of India's major cities was gang-raped, her body destroyed by the bodies of the men who allegedly assaulted her and also by the rusting metal bar doctors say they used to penetrate her. The bar removed part of her intestines. The rest were removed in a hospital far from home where she struggled for her life for just a few days.
WMC Women Under Siege
An open letter to the chief minister of Delhi, Sheila Dixit
Dear Mrs. Dixit: I have read your comments on the Delhi gang-rape. I applaud your honesty in admitting failure, in admitting the dangerous condition of Delhi for women and your determination that there must be change. In a more cynical mood, I think that it is easy for you to make these admissions considering that you are not in charge of security. However, you are in charge of the city and the mindset thriving in it makes this your responsibility.
WMC Women Under Siege
A garden in Afghanistan: Women, roses, and guns
Sometimes an image comes across my desk that really grabs me. I was lucky enough to have this happen recently when I received a holiday card from a Belgian photographer named Wendy Marijnissen in my email. I clicked and found a strange twilight enveloping a garden of soft trees and red roses. In the middle of the picture a guard stands awkwardly with a gun. Plastic tents billow in the background. What exactly was I looking at? I asked Marijnissen to tell me more:
WMC Women Under Siege
Redefining the rapist: The line between 'nice' and wrong
It takes a lot to make me angry. My patience is so legendary, this one time a partner couldn’t take it anymore and threw a chair at me for not getting angry at her for something she’d done. On Tuesday, however, something really got to me.
WMC Women Under Siege
Sexualized violence in Syria: Keeping track of a crisis in motion
On a still warm day in October, I sat on a panel of mostly Syrian women at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. One woman wore a wool scarf draped around her shoulders in the black, red, and green of the Free Syrian Army. Most wore a hijab, the Islamic headscarf. Turn by turn, we described our work documenting and assisting Syrian women and children who were drawn into the ongoing Syrian conflict.
WMC Women Under Siege
Eight reasons why victim-blaming needs to stop: Writers, activists, and survivors speak out
About once a day someone comes to this website by searching “Are rape victims to blame?” I hope when these visitors arrive they find some solace in the message they find here that rape victims are not culpable, ever, no, never. Unfortunately, they will also find information on how rape survivors are blamed mercilessly around the world for the violence perpetrated against them.
WMC Women Under Siege
Are women being targeted in Syria?
The baby's body was found near a checkpoint on the road that connects Homs with the ancient city of Palmyra, in central Syria, in January. At four months old, she was said to have been given over to a paternal uncle, dead, with bruises on her back, abdomen, and hands.
WMC Women Under Siege
Revealing rape: How to illustrate a crime
Women describe their rapes from behind black face scarves in videos on our site that documents sexualized violence in Syria. We have no photos of women whose faces aren’t covered. We have few photos of survivors of rape even with their faces covered.
WMC Women Under Siege
Rape is shredding Syria's social fabric
A woman approached me as I was rushing toward the D.C. Metro after giving a talk on rape in Syria last month. She asked in a low voice if she could share some information. She had DVDs, she said. On them were testimonies of Syrian women who'd been raped; in particular, a mother, a daughter and a sister all in one family.
WMC Women Under Siege
Does the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ matter?
You, as a reader, may not care about the behind-the-scenes debates over word choice, grammar, and punctuation that get journalists like me riled up. But readers and reporters alike are caught in an unusually public semantics discussion this week now that The Associated Press’ stylebook editors have announced that they’re dropping certain words.
WMC Women Under Siege
How one (female) CIA operative would fix our wars
Nada Bakos isn’t allowed to share most of what she learned in the CIA. But after nearly 10 years of working with classified intelligence, she can point squarely to one unfortunate lesson: Rape is used globally as a tool of war, and the United States tends to ignore it.
WMC Women Under Siege
What the UK can do to stop sexualized violence in Syria
I twisted around in the passenger-side seat in a red compact to Heathrow yesterday to trade ideas with a colleague. In the back of the car was Sanam Naraghi Anderlini, the executive director of the International Civil Society Action Network. We wondered aloud whether our discussion on Syria in the last few days at Wilton Park, a stygian but elegant castle on the English South Downs, might have any real-world impact.
WMC Women Under Siege
History repeats itself in Sudan
Jalila Khamis Koko and Nadia Teia Kafi are just two of the thousands of victims of Sudan’s war against the people of South Kordofan, which has seen starvation used as a method of warfare, the bombing of civilian targets, and the employment of rape as a weapon. Especially startling is how sexualized violence in South Kordofan mirrors the destruction we’ve already seen in Darfur.
WMC Women Under Siege
One man’s struggle to teach UN forces how to stop rape
Patrick Cammaert is often quoted as saying that it is now more dangerous to be a woman than it is to be a soldier in war. But perhaps he should be quoted more widely on another startling fact: that UN peacekeepers the world over turn away when they witness rape.
WMC Women Under Siege
Shocking attitudes point to deep misogyny in Congo
There is little violence on earth more merciless than what is happening to women in the Democratic Republic of Congo. “When you talk about rape in New York or Paris, everyone can always say, ‘Yes, we have rape here too,’” Dr. Denis Mukwege, the founder of Congo’s Panzi Hospital, told Jeb Sharp, a producer at PRI’s “The World,” in 2008.