WMC Women Under Siege
Reports surface of rape and torture in Iraq
It has been 10 years since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and stories of torture and sexualized violence are still coming to light. As Al-Jazeera reported Tuesday, Amnesty International’s recent publication, “Iraq: A decade of abuse,” is a horrifying, pain-filled heap of rape, sexualized torture, and other forms of sexualized violence. And the rights group is still gathering evidence.
WMC Women Under Siege
Poynter: CNN’s Steubenville coverage called too sympathetic to teens found guilty
Journalists took to Twitter Sunday to criticize the the media’s coverage of the two teenage boys who were found guilty in the Steubenville, Ohio, rape case. Lauren Wolfe, Xeni Jardin and others called out CNN’s Poppy Harlow and Paul Callan for sympathizing with the men and highlighting that the woman who was raped was “allegedly drunk.”
WMC Women Under Siege
March 13, 2013 International,
Violence against women
International campaign asks 57th Commission on the Status of Women to uphold women's rights
The International Campaign to Stop Rape & Gender Violence in Conflict, on whose advisory committee WMC's Women Under Siege serves, sent the following letter to the delegates of the 57th United Nations Commission on the Status of Women today. The letter calls on member states to conclude negotiations with a strong statement that will prioritize action to end violence against women.
WMC Women Under Siege
Why I work with rape survivors in Africa
“Has the world forgotten about us?” These words from Fatima, a Darfuri rape survivor, still haunt me. It was the summer of 2006 and I was collecting interviews as part of my research-based activism with 25 Darfuri genocide survivors at a refugee camp in Chad.
WMC Women Under Siege
New Holocaust findings highlight larger gap in conflict and rape research
One of the most emailed New York Times stories over the weekend was a piece about the Holocaust. In it, Eric Lichtblau explains new findings from experts at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: that the number of Nazi ghettos, camps, and other sites of systematic human misery is six times what the study authors had predicted.
WMC Women Under Siege
Salacious, voyeuristic, insensitive: How the media harms one survivor of rape
Context. It’s a simple word that requires its own set of words to make clear: Context, according to Merriam-Webster, contains “the parts of a discourse that surround a word or passage and can throw light on its meaning.” Everything has it. But that doesn’t mean it’s in great supply, whether in how we speak about the world or in how we are presented with the news.
WMC Women Under Siege
Kenyan rape survivors sue government for inaction
Imagine if rape survivors held politicians accountable every time their government failed to protect them. In Kenya, eight survivors of sexualized violence are suing their country for its “non-action” in response to attacks following Kenya’s 2007 general elections. As we’ve written about previously, the post-election violence took place during a dispute over who had won, which developed into tribal clashes.
WMC Women Under Siege
The media and violence against women: A conversation with Maria Hinojosa
On January 25, I moderated a panel on the media and sexualized violence as part of our symposium, “Global sexualized violence: From epidemiology to action,” with Columbia University. The panel, with journalists Helen Benedict, Maria Hinojosa, and Jenny Nordberg, was lively, to say the least, with hot debate between the audience and speakers as to what the media is doing badly and needs to do better when it comes to covering rape.
WMC Women Under Siege
February 13, 2013 International,
Violence against women
Gender justice group urges South Africa's Zuma to create commission to stop sexualized violence
After the gruesome rape and murder of 17-year-old Anene Booysen, South Africans are wondering how to put an end to their country’s high levels of sexualized violence. In an open letter, the Sonke Gender Justice Network, a human rights group based in the country, calls on South Africa’s president to act.
WMC Women Under Siege
Placing blame: Report debunks misconceptions about wartime rape
The media loves to generalize about war, and with it, wartime sexualized violence. But ignoring nuance does nobody any favors—neither the survivors themselves, nor those who are trying to stop it.
WMC Women Under Siege
The devil’s in the data: How rape culture shapes rape stats
If you follow debates about sexualized violence in the United States or elsewhere, in war or in peace, then you’ve probably heard at least some of the following statistical (or quasi-statistical) claims about patterns of rape: One in three U.S. women has been sexually assaulted. Seventy-five per cent of Liberian women were raped during the civil war there. Sexualized violence is declining (or increasing). Intra-military rape in the U.S. is down.
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
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
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
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
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
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.