WMC Women Under Siege
May 13, 2012 | Laura Bates | International, Violence against women
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.
WMC Women Under Siege
May 01, 2012 | Rachel Halder | International, Violence against women
Who is Congo?

We know that victims of wartime rape are not just victims, or even survivors. They are mothers, fathers, children, grandparents, teachers, advocates, cooks, helpers, and dreamers. A new video series about Congo offers a fuller story of the country and its people than what we usually see.

WMC Women Under Siege
April 27, 2012 | Cara Hoffman | International, Media, Violence against women
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.
WMC Women Under Siege
April 25, 2012 | Laura Bates | International, Violence against women
Defining justice when the law is unjust: How gender imbalance affects women around the world
Justice is supposed to confer equality, impartiality, protection for victims, and punishment for perpetrators. Yet as recently as the 1970s, spousal rape was not considered a criminal offense in some U.S. states.
WMC Women Under Siege
April 24, 2012 International, Violence against women
Obama includes sexualized violence in U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum remarks
On April 23, President Barack Obama delivered an address at a ceremony at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. He intended both to commemorate the Holocaust and to outline his administration's efforts to honor the pledge of “never again” by developing a comprehensive strategy to prevent and respond to genocide and mass atrocities.
WMC Women Under Siege
April 23, 2012 | Josh Shahryar | International, Misogyny, Violence against women
Afghan women face horrors for ‘moral crimes’
A cab driver abducted Marya, 15. He and another man raped her. Tahmina, 18, was trying to find the boy she liked in the hopes of escaping domestic violence and forced marriage. Two men she didn't know found her instead. They raped her. Malalai invited the guy she was seeing over to her house when she was alone, but he proved to be a mistake and raped her.
WMC Women Under Siege
April 17, 2012 | Lauren Wolfe | International, Violence against women
Lost in a life outside Syria

I met photojournalist Matilde Gattoni very recently on Facebook, which is to say we haven’t actually met in person. Even so, she’s already made an impression on me. Her work has a way of highlighting humanity—literally in chiaroscuro but also figuratively.

WMC Women Under Siege
April 16, 2012 | Rachel Halder | International, Violence against women
Photography as a baton: Spreading the message of Congo's women

It’s easy to get bogged down in statistics of women who experience sexualized violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The numbers are staggering: A study published in the American Journal of Public Health in May 2011 showed that 12 percent of women in Congo had been raped at least once in their lifetime.

WMC Women Under Siege
April 09, 2012 | Lauren Wolfe | International, Violence against women
Judgment call: Survivors of rape in Rwanda find themselves at odds with courts
Everyone wants justice. Don’t we? It seems easy—a crime is committed so we bring a lawsuit. Witnesses testify and justice is either served or punted over some kind of event horizon, never to be seen clearly again.
WMC Women Under Siege
April 06, 2012 | Michele Lent Hirsch | Feminism, Misogyny, Violence against women
Q&A: How Susan Brownmiller fought the media on rape in war, and won
Back when the media was writing about the rape of a woman in war by describing the shape of her buttocks, Susan Brownmiller was busy preparing her offensive to change how we talk about this atrocity.
WMC Women Under Siege
April 02, 2012 | Michele Lent Hirsch | Immigration, International, Violence against women
For women displaced by war, can a new stove spell safety?
Usually, headlines about women and kitchen appliances conjure anti-feminist rhetoric. But as we've reported previously, the cooking tools that women in refugee camps use—and lack—may have a key effect on whether they're targets of rape.
WMC Women Under Siege
March 28, 2012 | Catherine Mullaly, Lauren Wolfe | International, Violence against women
The cartography of suffering: Women Under Siege maps sexualized violence in Syria
When we hear about conflicts in foreign countries and imagine terrible acts, our thoughts don’t turn immediately to rape. We think of bombings and refugees and government suppression.
WMC Women Under Siege
March 14, 2012 | Michele Lent Hirsch | Girls, International, Violence against women
13-year-old rape survivor struggles to care for baby in Malawi
“I have lost hope,” a 13-year-old rape survivor tells Inter Press Service. After fleeing war in Congo, she was attacked by her own stepfather in a Malawi refugee camp, where she lives with 11,000 others. Now, she must care for the baby produced by the rape.
WMC Women Under Siege
March 09, 2012 | Lauren Wolfe | International, Violence against women
Guatemala’s war may be over, but the battle continues to be fought on women’s bodies
Guatemala City—There’s a heavy green to this place, layered. Clouds weigh on the hills and seep into the trees and grass and leaves and bushes. Every clearing we pass turns to depths, and in those reaches lie the dead.
WMC Women Under Siege
March 08, 2012 | Michele Lent Hirsch | Girls, International, Violence against women
Ask before you tell: How to make the world better for girls in conflict areas
The most positive, most productive way to improve the lives of girls in conflict areas may appear to be to sharply steer them away from stigma and violence. But as researchers and fieldworkers, advocates and policymakers, we have to consider the pitfalls of thinking we know best.
WMC Women Under Siege
February 29, 2012 | Lauren Wolfe | International, Violence against women
Secret Holocaust files may finally see the light of day

We know that thousands of women were raped during the Holocaust. We also know that rape was never part of any charges against anyone responsible for the era’s atrocities. In a thrilling new turn of events, files long locked away at UN headquarters in New York have revealed details of investigations into the use of rape by Nazis. Could this lead to justice for women brutalized in other wars?

WMC Women Under Siege
February 28, 2012 | Yifat Susskind | International, Violence against women
Haiti’s women face echoes of a violent past

After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, stories of the disaster dominated international news media. Journalists rushed to report on the wreckage. Photographers scrambled for shots of the rubble. Aid agencies struggled to overcome obstacles to sending humanitarian aid.

WMC Women Under Siege
February 26, 2012 | Lauren Wolfe | Feminism, Online harassment
A hacker told me to return to the kitchen; I didn’t go
It’s been an interesting couple of days. Gloria Steinem (our project’s founder) and I wrote an op-ed for The Guardian about what we’re calling the “cult of masculinity” and its role in rape in conflict and gang violence. The reaction to the op-ed, however, wasn’t pretty.
WMC Women Under Siege
February 24, 2012 | Gloria Steinem, Lauren Wolfe | Gloria Steinem, Misogyny, Violence against women
Sexual violence against women is the result of the cult of masculinity
Gangs of young men rape girls. They also sometimes act as pimps that seduce a girl, then subject her to gang rape or otherwise insist that she sexually service gang members. Some girls are so desperate for acceptance and so convinced by sexual abuse that they have no other value: they see this as inevitable.
WMC Women Under Siege
February 22, 2012 | Cara Hoffman | Feminism, Media, Violence against women
Bringing the war home: How perpetrators from the U.S. to DRC get away with rape

I worked for many years as a reporter in upstate New York, where I covered local news like school board meetings and did features on things like watercolor exhibits at one-room libraries in one-traffic-light villages.

WMC Women Under Siege
February 21, 2012 | Michele Lent Hirsch | International, Violence against women
The safest prey: When refugee camps become sites of violence

Even war is safer than this. Imagine it: Your family attacked. Your house teeming with soldiers. Your options running out. A protected area for victims of war sounds like a wise place to flee.

WMC Women Under Siege
February 21, 2012 | Lauren Wolfe | International, Media, Violence against women
CPJ: More discussion but few changes on sexual violence
When word went around that a mob had sexually assaulted CBS correspondent and CPJ board member Lara Logan, at left, in Cairo's Tahrir Square in February 2011, the media jumped on the specifics: Why was the press release about her assault so precise?
WMC Women Under Siege
February 15, 2012 | Lauren Wolfe | Feminism, Violence against women
Where do men stand in all this?

Let’s blame men. Many of us do—many women and even men blame men for the mass rape of women in war. It’s easy to point our fingers and name the perpetrator. But what if we were to step back and ask how men can actually be part of the solution? It requires a couple of basic assumptions.

WMC Women Under Siege
February 14, 2012 | Maria Hinojosa | International, Media, Violence against women
Women, words, and violence in Mexico
Femicidio. Femicide. The female counterpart to homicide. It is a concept our country has been less exposed to than, for example, Mexico, Honduras or Guatemala, where the word femicidio is seen on the front pages of newspapers much too often.
WMC Women Under Siege
February 13, 2012 | Lauren Wolfe | International, Violence against women
Are atrocities inevitable? A conversation with "NewsTalk" Radio Ireland
Click through to listen to a live interview I did with Sean Moncrieff on Radio Ireland’s “NewsTalk”—he asks solid questions about whether rape has always been used as a weapon of war, and whether men are targeted the same way. Maybe most interestingly, Moncrieff wonders: “Given that atrocities inevitably take place in conflicts, so will rape?”

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