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. Here are selected parts of the interview; for the whole thing, please click over to Hoffman’s blog.

Cara Hoffman: What is the mission of Women Under Siege?

Lauren Wolfe: Our mission is to document and analyze how sexualized violence is used as a tool of war—inherent in that is advocating against it. Women Under Siege’s founder, Gloria Steinem, wanted to ensure that we never again ignore what happened to women in war in such a tremendously callous way as was done after the Holocaust… .

As a journalist, a woman, and an advocate, I deeply believe we must document and talk about a problem in order to fix it. Women’s suffering is historically silenced—through shame, stigma, and cultural ideas that what women endure is somehow lesser than what men do—yet today women and children are the central victims of war. It’s an irony that actually keeps me up at night. That our suffering goes unnoticed, and women who are brutalized are dismissed.

The World Health Organization and the UN Security Council have identified that there remains a crucial lack of analysis about how rape is used as a weapon of war: Its methods, its applications, its fallout are just not easily seen, and therefore not easily fixed. My hope is that Women Under Siege helps us better understand the means, patterns, and motivations behind these mass atrocities. Until we realize that this is a global public health crisis—and a human rights issue for all of us—we’re not going to see the end of it.

CH: Rape is a tool of war but it is also a tool of coercive social control on a global level. How are crimes committed in Darfur for example connected to the seemingly unrelated "personal" crimes against women committed in the developed world?

LW: Violence in the home normalizes violence in the street and in foreign policy. We are forced to fight against not just the mass atrocities of rape in war, but against the attitudes of men in the developed world who are still blaming women for the violence they endure. As long as a large part of society thinks it’s our fault that we’re raped, then we are shouting for change at a brick wall.

CH: You write about some of the most horrific crimes that have been committed against women and you yourself have been a target of harassment for bringing these crimes to light. How do you keep going? What do you do after a long day of researching and writing about misogynistic (and often socially sanctioned) violence. How do you deal with feelings of discouragement and anger?

LW: There are days I don’t realize how deeply I’ve gone into the rabbit hole of horror, and I forget to take care of myself. After 10 days in Central America recently talking to survivors of rape and other kinds of violence, my body gave out in a sudden panic attack. I didn’t see it coming, but it was my body’s way of telling me that when you do this work, you have to be mindful of your own health. It took me a couple weeks to recover my stability after that incident, and ever since, I’ve tried to pull back at the end of the day and step away from the computer, the phone, and the thoughts of what I’ve been reading and writing.

It’s hard though. It’s very hard. Because you do feel that whatever you are hurting about is nothing in comparison to the women you are reporting on—and it is your duty to honor their experience and the trust they have placed in you to tell their story.

Please click here to read the rest of this interview.