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.
WMC Women Under Siege
With our campaign partners, we call on DRC to address increased insecurity in eastern Congo
We of the International Campaign to Stop Rape & Gender Violence in Conflict stand with the women and men who are protesting today by organizing a ville morte in Bukavu. Last week, we were shocked to learn about the apparent assassination attempt on world-renowned surgeon, anti-rape activist, and our esteemed colleague: Dr. Denis Mukwege.
WMC Women Under Siege
How the UK rejects refugees fleeing sexualized violence
A native of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angelique had already lived through horror. Her father had been a politician. During the civil war, rebel soldiers had come to the family compound, burned their house, and killed Angelique’s parents. She had been taken to prison, where she was made the sex slave of the prison governor. Despite the persecution she’d experienced, she was refused asylum.
WMC Women Under Siege
Abused from Ethiopia to England: My story as a raped refugee
The day my life changed I was 23 years old. I come from Ethiopia. I always loved writing, and as soon as I finished high school I started to work at a newspaper. In 2001, I was reporting a student demonstration. The police came and started shooting people.
WMC Women Under Siege
Beneath the law: When the system inherently favors the rapist
Back in April, I wrote for WMC’s Women Under Siege about the legal gender imbalance female victims of sexualized violence face around the world. But a disturbing recent investigation by the independent Indian weekly newsmagazine Tehelka suggests that the miscarriage of justice in some cases of rape and sexual assault might be linked to prejudice on the part of those delivering justice, rather than bias within the law itself.
WMC Women Under Siege
It’s not what women wear, it’s how we treat them: Revisiting the hijab
In September, I wrote a piece for WMC’s Women Under Siege about the hijab, or headscarf, and sexual assault against women in conservative Muslim societies. I chronicled the experiences of my sister Neelo, who experienced sharp harassment as a young girl while wearing a hijab in Pakistan. The premise of the piece was simple enough.
WMC Women Under Siege
Rape in war: Are we getting it wrong?
Good news! We were wrong! Women are not being raped in terrible numbers around the world in conflict! I wish I could really say that. All day I’ve been hearing how a new report out today “upends” conventional wisdom on sexualized violence in war—that we’ve all got it wrong, that the media is misleading the world into thinking all conflicts are laden with rape, that statistics have been badly skewed in ways that make the problem seem worse than it is.
WMC Women Under Siege
No more moments of silence: How do we get from 'Take Back the Night' to 'Taking Down Rape Culture'?
On October 4, I gave the keynote address at St. John’s University in Queens, New York, for “Take Back the Night,” an international yearly march that began in the 1970s to protest violence against women. This is a version of that address.