WMC Women Under Siege
As violence soars, a photographic look inside the Zaatari camp in Jordan
Recently, the Obama administration announced a decision to allow 2,000 Syrian refugees to settle permanently in the United States. The refugees would include the most vulnerable—women and children who had been “exposed to everything from torture to gender-based violence to serious medical conditions,” Foreign Policy reported.
WMC Women Under Siege
Tips for interviewing survivors of sexualized and gender-based violence
Recently, the U.S. media has been full of accounts of rampant sexualized violence and intimidation across all branches of the U.S. military. In Egypt, we hear how sexual violence is used against female activists during and around protests in the country. A major reason these systemic human rights violations are coming to light is because brave survivors of sexualized violence were willing to speak out and share their experiences.
WMC Women Under Siege
August 12, 2013 International,
Violence against women
How US policy denies life-saving care to women raped in war
Angelina Jolie doesn't mince words.
“Let us be clear what we are speaking about,” the award-winning actress and humanitarian said in June as she addressed the United Nations Security Council session on sexualized violence in conflict. “Young girls raped and impregnated before their bodies are able to carry a child, causing fistula; boys held at gunpoint and forced to sexually assault their mothers and sisters; women raped with bottles, wood branches, and knives to cause as much damage as possible; toddlers, even babies, dragged from their homes and violated.”
WMC Women Under Siege
‘He bonked them’: Making light of rape in the West African media
Yvonne Ntiamoah, a resident in the Ghanaian capital, Accra, was driving her two daughters home when she heard something on a local radio station that she could simply not endure.
WMC Women Under Siege
Can tracking rape in conflict prevent genocide?
Just as rape and other forms of sexualized violence have historically been viewed as a “natural” part of war, they have often been recognized as occurring in genocide but not necessarily as an act of genocide in itself.
WMC Women Under Siege
Forgotten girls: How one child in Yemen is drawing attention to underage marriage
Eight million people and counting have watched a video featuring an 11-year-old Yemeni girl named Nada al-Ahdal. From what looks like the seat of a car, she talks about why she left home because, she says, her parents tried to marry her off. Al-Ahdal talks about the “innocence of children” and the consequences—including suicide—of being force-married to an older man at such a young age.
WMC Women Under Siege
Sexual assaults, victim-blaming continues in Peace Corps
On November 21, 2011, President Barack Obama signed into law the Kate Puzey Peace Corps Volunteer Protection Act. The act aims to reform Peace Corps’ policies and procedures for preventing and responding to sexual assault. Its passage was intended to end the epidemic of sexual assault against Peace Corps volunteers and endemic culture of victim-blaming in the agency. But the success of the Kate Puzey Act is threatened by the Peace Corps’ use of outdated, victim-blaming definitions of sexual assault.
WMC Women Under Siege
'Survival sex': How NGOs and peacekeepers exploit women in war
It’s easy to associate rape with the Democratic Republic of Congo, a region torn by conflict since 1996. Dubbed the “rape capital of the world,” the country sees four women raped every five minutes, according to a 2011 study published by the American Journal of Public Health.
WMC Women Under Siege
Creating heaven 'in a place called hell’: DRC activist responds to US tabloid
Sometimes I read something that makes the movement of the world, the very air in the room, freeze to a stop. That’s what happened recently when I read a letter written by an activist in the Democratic Republic of Congo named Neema Namadamu. I read it once, then I read it again. Instead of describing why it had such a profound effect on me, I’m pasting it in full below.
WMC Women Under Siege
The topsy-turvy world of men who oppose anti-violence campaigns
At the start of this year, my friend and WMC’s Women Under Siege director, Lauren Wolfe, started a Twitter hashtag, #2013EndRape, to highlight the epidemic of sexualized violence against women. While the hashtag has seen success, one of the unintended consequences has been its trolling and attacks on it by various “Men’s Rights Activists.”
WMC Women Under Siege
Hope for a better life leads to torture for Ethiopians
When there’s not an acute famine in the Horn of Africa, the media tends to leave the misery in that part of the world unreported. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t heard much about Ethiopia specifically in awhile, minus a few international journalist friends mentioning that there is a migration problem for women who are seeking better lives in the Arab peninsula. As of this morning though, I can’t pretend to ignore what’s going on in the region any longer.
WMC Women Under Siege
No, war doesn’t have to mean rape
Almost every day, readers write to tell us that women will always be targeted in conflict. Rape, they say, is just a natural part of war, and there’s no way to stop it. Yet research shows that this isn’t actually the case.
WMC Women Under Siege
Rape accounts still surface from India’s partition 65 years on
War stories are often framed by convenient lines, two clear-cut sides, campaigns and directives. Partition in India reads very differently. In the aftermath of the 1947 declaration of Indian independence, the roughly drawn new state boundaries triggered what may have been the biggest migration in human history.
WMC Women Under Siege
'Take your portion': A victim speaks out about rape in Syria
Alma Abdulrahman is lying gaunt and unable to move anything below her diaphragm in a hospital bed in Amman. Some bedsores have become so deep she’s having surgery tomorrow. Screws hold together her upper vertebrae, and cigarette burns pock her right shoulder. Her voice fades in and out, hoarse from either weakness or morphine.
WMC Women Under Siege
The G8’s PR strategy on rape in conflict
On the same day in April that I listened to the harrowing stories of Syrian women over endless glasses of tea in Jordan’s Zaatari refugee camp, leaders of the world’s eight richest countries promised to take action against rape as a weapon of war. But the high-profile statement failed to offer a deadline, measurable metric, or concrete plan for a single recommendation it put forward.
WMC Women Under Siege
Nicaraguan women could be forced into mediation with their attackers
In June 2012, a Nicaraguan law aimed at protecting women from gender-based violence took effect. Called Law 779, it “stipulates that the state and its institutions have a duty to guarantee the physical, psychic, moral, sexual, patrimonial, and economic integrity of women,” Inter Press Service reports. But since last year, the law has been jeopardized by opponents, including the vice president of the country’s Supreme Court.
WMC Women Under Siege
Inching forward against military sexual assault
U.S. legislators voted Wednesday to help stanch the overwhelming problem of sexualized violence in the armed forces, Reuters reports. The idea is to make it easier for victims of sexualized violence to come forward while decreasing the threat of retaliation from superiors in the chain of command.
WMC Women Under Siege
Mali conflict is latest to employ forced marriage as tool of war
Saran Keïta Diakité painted a dismal reality for women in Mali in a speech she gave to the UN Security Council in April. “They carry out a form of ‘marriage’ so that, at night, you can be treated as a sexual slave,” Diakité said. “During the day, you are there to serve tea to the men and attend to their every need. This is why I always say that what’s happened in Mali is unprecedented."
WMC Women Under Siege
Tracking a rumor: Is there a sugar factory in Syria being used as a rape house?
We were seated on a scratchy nylon mat with “UNHCR” written all over it. Children with the same beautiful, olive-complexioned face stared big-eyed at me from every corner of the furniture-less room, and their mother cried as she talked about the many massacres her family had fled in Homs five months previously.
WMC Women Under Siege
The long struggle against systematic rape in conflict-ridden Kashmir
Just a few weeks ago, some 50 Kashmiri women came together to demand that police reinvestigate a well-known case of mass rape. The women—teachers, students, journalists, human rights workers, lawyers, and other professionals—filed a public interest litigation case before India’s Jammu and Kashmir high court. The alleged set of crimes, known as the Kunan Poshpora case, happened more than 20 years ago, on February 23, 1991, when armed forces allegedly raped at least 32 teenaged, adult, and elderly women.
WMC Women Under Siege
The legacy of silence: Why we ignore the rape of women from Guatemala to Syria
Just before 2 a.m. and nearly half a world away, I watched a guilty verdict from Guatemala scroll by tweet by tweet on my phone. Former President Efrain Rios Montt was convicted on May 10 of genocide and crimes against humanity and given 80 years in prison. As the news came through, I felt a satisfied chill—17 years after the murder of 200,000 Guatemalans and the rape of 100,000 women, mostly Mayans, justice has actually come in our lifetime.
WMC Women Under Siege
Q&A: A fresh look at rape during the U.S. Civil War
Crystal N. Feimster is no stranger to uncomfortable narratives. A feminist scholar in the department of African-American studies at Yale University, Feimster has spent much of her academic career addressing and unpacking the often-controversial stories woven through racial and sexualized violence. She has found 450 court martial cases from the Civil War related to rape and other sexualized violence, but says that, as we still find today, the crime was “overwhelmingly underreported.”
WMC Women Under Siege
From Morocco to Denmark: Rape survivors around the world are forced to marry attackers
In March 2012, a 16-year-old girl named Amina Filali killed herself by drinking rat poison. She had been raped and forced—by Moroccan law—to marry the man who had raped her.
WMC Women Under Siege
Lack of clean water tied to rape in the Solomon Islands
On any given day, women around the world will find themselves in danger of rape while performing the most basic acts of survival. Acts borne of necessity, such as fetching clean water for cooking or washing, or gathering firewood, often leave women vulnerable to rape and gender-based violence as they are forced to venture to remote areas. In the Solomon Islands, the problem is severe.
WMC Women Under Siege
A needed controversy over sexualized violence in Democratic Republic of Congo
In August 2010, reports began trickling out of Democratic Republic of Congo about another tragic episode of mass sexualized violence perpetrated by rebel troops over four days in the eastern town of Luvungi. But in a recent issue of Foreign Policy, a debate sprang up about the way outsiders have portrayed the attack. The controversy highlights the need for a more candid discussion about Congo.