In February, the London School of Economics and Political Science announced the launch of a new Center on Women, Peace, and Security at the school. The center, which is scheduled to open in 2016, will focus on the “participation of women in conflict-related processes and on enhancing accountability and ending impunity for rape and sexual violence in war,” according to its website.
The British government is scrambling to find three of its female citizens traveling to join the ranks of foreign recruits to the Islamic State (IS or ISIS). These young women are not alone. According to one recent study, more than 500 women from Western countries have traveled to join the extremists in Iraq and Syria.
On February 24, a friend of mine posted an editorial on social media about a bill passed in the Pakistani Senate four days earlier, which punishes individuals who hinder prosecutions in rape cases or stigmatize the survivor. My friend asked: “How was this story not all over the news?”
While the news cycle in January was dominated by reports on Japanese hostages held by the militant group Islamic State and the Paris attacks on the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, some stories didn’t receive as much attention.
We know there’s a problem but we don’t know how big it is. That’s what governments, scholars, and others argue when trying to figure out how to allot funds toward this problem of sexualized violence in conflict. If we don’t know the numbers, they ask, how can we help properly? How can we mount prosecutions? Offer reparations? Put in place proper advocacy? So the thinking goes.
Following the end of the #16Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence Campaign, WMC’s Women Under Siege has gathered some of the best tweets out there in the hope that this action, this dialogue, this advocacy doesn’t stop here. We can do more. We must.
At the age of 18, Leyla’s three-year lesbian relationship was discovered. She ran away to Baghdad from her home in the conservative Iraqi city of Basra, though her girlfriend wasn’t able to escape. Staying behind turned out to be deadly.
Countless women and girls have been raped to death, held as sexual slaves, gang raped, and subjected to sexual mutilation in conflicts during the last century—in the Rwandan genocide, the Nanking massacre, the war in the former Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone’s civil war, and Burma’s long-running armed conflict, to name a few.
Just like any other population caught up in a war zone, people with disabilities suffer displacement, injury, and trauma. About 6.5 million of the 43.51 million people who have been displaced due to conflict live with a disability. Yet in conflict, when the social fabric is vulnerable and resources are limited, people with disabilities face increased violence while their protection needs often go ignored.
A young woman seems to have attached herself to me one day at Zaatari, a refugee camp holding at least 120,000 Syrians in the middle of the Jordanian desert. Her name is Abeer and she is the less obviously beautiful, older sister to a 16-year-old girl who has been married off to a much-older Libyan food distributor. He gave the girl a watch, perfume, and water when they met.
With the story of more than 200 schoolgirls kidnapped by an extremist group in Nigeria hot in the news, we spoke to the BBC about why coverage of such violence against women and girls in conflict is so sporadic—and what can be done to make a lasting difference once and for all in the media and in the lives of those affected around the world.
I’ve been reading King Leopold’s Ghost, by Adam Hochschild, which tells the utterly brutal colonial history of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Early on in the book, the author laments the lack of African voices on record that tell the history of the country. Instead it is a history told by the conquerors, as all history generally is. There is no shortage of evidence, however, that the Europeans who colonized the area inflicted terrors on black men and women that are stomach-sickening.
While the Geneva II talks about peace in Syria gear up to begin on January 22, I thought I’d put our latest numbers and information on sexualized violence in Syria up here for you to see. I recently laid out what we know about this at a talk at the Heirich Böll Foundation in Berlin, embedded below.