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
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
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.
WMC Women Under Siege
From the ground zero of rape in conflict: An interview with Dr. Denis Mukwege
I’ve found that there are few men who want to sit in a room and talk about how to stop rape. Few show up at panel discussions, few show up in virtual social media spaces to reflect or express outrage. Rape is a woman’s problem, they tell us implicitly.
WMC Women Under Siege
What’s in a name? The rhetoric of rape
Campaigners in Egypt have recently drawn attention to the increasingly widespread sexual harassment, assault, and rape suffered by women in public spaces. The severity of the situation there well documented and longstanding, with women suffering “violations of their human rights” in the form of intrusive virginity tests, “assault and torture,” and even “being dragged naked on the ground,” according to a 2011 press release from the Egyptian Center for Women's Rights.
WMC Women Under Siege
A crime upon a crime: Rape, victim-blaming, and stigma
In Sudan, where tens of thousands of people have been displaced from their homes by fighting and destruction, where the lives of refugees have already been devastated by the loss of their homes and families, women bear a second, enduring pain. Because for many Darfuri women, the “crime” of falling victim to rapists and sexual attackers renders them valueless, “dishonored,” and rejected.
WMC Women Under Siege
Video: WMC's Women Under Siege director tells CNN of the horrors we've documented in Syria
As the media continues to learn about reports of sexualized violence in Syria, CNN's Brooke Baldwin talks to WMC's Women Under Siege Director Lauren Wolfe about what we've documented so far.
WMC Women Under Siege
In wartime Berlin, rape took no sides
Not every survivor wants to talk about rape. We know that many women and men choose to keep their stories private, be it to move past their abuse internally or, perhaps more often, to avoid being shunned or re-attacked. We also know that open conversation about sexualized violence is something whole societies still grapple with: From Sudan to the United States, it is only in the last few decades that a respectful public dialogue has begun. It is that much more important, then, to recognize historical examples—the few instances in which women did come forward despite a climate that was likely even more judgmental than today’s.
WMC Women Under Siege
For women, there are no ‘just wars’
No one wants to go to war. Before we commit soldiers and societies to inevitable sacrifice and atrocities, we try to balance the inevitable harm against the potential good. We seek to make the wars we undertake “just” by applying defined criteria to a scale of moral weights and principled measures. Men are tortured and die, women are raped and murdered, children suffer and starve.
WMC Women Under Siege
Syrian-American tells UN of cultural reasons why rape in Syria may be underreported
Safa Sankari, a member of our Syria team, spoke at the UN on July 18 as part of a presentation of our first findings of a data analysis of our crowdmap of sexualized violence in Syria. Sankari, who is Syrian-American, is the co-founder and president of the Syrian American Medical Society’s Michigan Chapter Foundation, a nonprofit organization that helps in the humanitarian and medical needs of Syrians. WMC’s Women Under Siege Director Lauren Wolfe also spoke. You can read her testimony here.
WMC Women Under Siege
Ideas into action? A view from inside the UK's new initiative to stop rape in war
You may have heard that the UK recently launched a new initiative aimed at preventing sexualized violence in conflict. We’ve been fortunate enough to be part of the early stages of this ambitious new project, which has invited participation from NGOs and experts around the world.
WMC Women Under Siege
The number you need to know on Syria
I’ll start with a simple number: 20,000. Granted it’s rounded up a little—from 19,738. Rounding up works well on the page, but also belittles its subject. It gives us a solid number to latch on to, for the media to print, for the memory to hold. But 19,738 is the exact count of lives that have been lost so far in the war in Syria, according to a volunteer, nonprofit group called Syria Tracker. And when it comes to this conflict, every little number, every single life, counts.
WMC Women Under Siege
The ultimate assault: Charting Syria's use of rape to terrorize its people
A woman swathed in black squares her shoulders and calmly looks into a camera. She holds a Quran. Only a sliver of her face—her eyeglasses—shows. “What happened to me hasn’t happened to anyone, or if it has affected anyone else I do not know,” she says. “But I will speak and let all the people know what [Syrian leader] Bashar al-Assad and his men are doing.” Over the next four minutes, her breathing grows labored and her voice breaks as she describes how, in May 2011, five men wearing black entered her home on the outskirts of Homs and raped her.
WMC Women Under Siege
Bargaining away justice for women in Rwanda
Over the course of a mere 100 days, from April through July of 1994, between 500,000 and 1 million Rwandan men, women, and children were slaughtered during the Rwandan genocide. The United Nations and human rights groups report that anywhere from 250,000 to 500,000 women were also horrifically sexually violated. Testimonials of women given to Human Rights Watch following the end of the conflict indicate that almost every woman and adolescent girl who survived the genocide was raped.
WMC Women Under Siege
What are the solutions to wartime rape?
Part of Women Under Siege’s mission is to try to understand and share findings on the complexities of wartime rape in its varied forms in order to develop targeted solutions that would work effectively in different situations. We need to get a better grasp on what’s happening so we can stop it, and to stop it we need to think creatively and strategically. Here are some ideas on how to end or prevent sexualized violence in the context of various conflict situations.
WMC Women Under Siege
What do we mean by rape in war?
For many of us, the phrase “wartime rape” evokes blurry, broad ideas of military assault, battles, and weapons. Just like the common misconceptions that surround rape in places like the U.S. or the UK (such as the idea that rape is a crime committed by a shadowy stranger in a dark alley, when, according to UK charity Rape Crisis, “only 9 percent of rapes are committed by ‘strangers’”) it is easy to make incorrect assumptions about the causes and manifestations of wartime rape.
WMC Women Under Siege
The ongoing tragedy of India’s widows
Widows in India have a pronoun problem. The estimated 40 million women widows in the country go from being called “she” to “it” when they lose their husbands. They become “de-sexed” creatures.
WMC Women Under Siege
Women in Kenya’s slums still dealing with post-election sexualized violence
The loud, unexpected laughter stuck with me long after my conversation about sexualized violence with a women’s group from Kibera—Kenya’s biggest slum, located on the outskirts of Nairobi, and one of the hotspots for violence in the post-election conflict of 2007-2008.
WMC Women Under Siege
Walking the tightrope that is reporting rape in Syria
On May 19, Sen. Joseph Lieberman wrote a piece in The Washington Post exhorting the U.S. to “step up” efforts to provide the Syrian resistance with the “means to defend themselves against Assad.”
WMC Women Under Siege
We talk to the BBC about UK launch of anti-rape team for conflict zones
This morning brings the announcement that the UK government will be training experts (police, psychologists, doctors, lawyers, and forensic experts, according to the BBC) to deploy to conflict zones to collect evidence of sexualized violence—an initiative we can only be hopeful will do more than any government is doing now to stop the rape of women in wars.
WMC Women Under Siege
When those meant to keep the peace commit sexualized violence
A young girl walks a short distance to visit her relatives in Haiti. But she doesn’t get far before men start harassing her, asking her to come with them. Their intentions are not even thinly disguised, and this girl is just one of their many targets.
WMC Women Under Siege
Not natural, not forever: How we're trying to end rape in war
That rape is used as an actual strategy and weapon of war goes unnoticed much of the time by the media, which tends to focus on the explosions and traumas you can show in photos or film footage. But Janis Mackey Frayer, South Asia bureau chief of CTV News, has brought this subject to her readers in a two-part series that focuses on the work of Women Under Siege.
WMC Women Under Siege
Why is stopping gender violence a 'women's issue'?
The Violence Against Women Act is causing contention as it comes to Congress for the third time for reauthorization. Democrats want to extend the act, first approved in 1994, to provide protection to Native American women, victims in same-sex relationships, and undocumented immigrants—some of the country’s most vulnerable populations. But Republicans have accused Democrats of deliberately including these “controversial” issues in an attempt to lure them into blocking the bill.