WMC Women Under Siege
New report details ongoing sexualized violence in Burma
On November 27, 2012, a 26-year-old woman was gang-raped by seven Burmese soldiers. When the woman’s husband returned home, the soldiers threatened to kill him. “Even if you tell other people, there is no one who will take action,” they said. “We have the authority to rape women.”
WMC Women Under Siege
December 23, 2013 International,
Violence against women
2013 #MustReads on WMC’s Women Under Siege
We started off the year with a call to end the “culture of rape in 2013,” leading to a widely used hashtag offering ideas as to how at #2013EndRape. From there, we looked at the big picture of violence—why it’s so widespread and continues unabated, who it affects and how it is measured—in a number of pieces including...
WMC Women Under Siege
What does it mean when women perpetrate gang rapes?
When I research rape in war, particularly gang rape, three thoughts prevail: First, the repeated illustration that rape is the expression of dominance, a vicious and complex way of ensuring that certain people and institutions function and thrive; second, that sexualized violence is not inevitable; and third, that women in the world experience life the way that imprisoned men do.
WMC Women Under Siege
In CAR, ‘If they saw a woman they wanted, they just took her’
Natacha Indzabingui is one of thousands of women hiding in the bush in the Central African Republic. The 32-year-old told me that when armed men attacked her village, “everyone tried to escape. Those who couldn’t were attacked. If they saw a woman they wanted, they just took her. If she had a child, it was just thrown to the side.” Thirty people were abducted that day, Indzabingui said, including 12 women and girls, some as young as 7.
WMC Women Under Siege
When we focus on rape, what do we miss?
It’s been 20 years since the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women. Despite this, it doesn’t seem like the Western mainstream media have figured out how to represent more than a narrow definition of the types of violence women experience during conflict. Too often the focus is only on rape and other forms of sexualized violence.
WMC Women Under Siege
Taking away their guns: A move toward protecting women and girls?
Rape turns bodies into weapons. But in many cases, literal weapons facilitate the act itself. As one Congolese woman told Amnesty International in 2011: “A guy with a machete in a village can rape one woman. Two guys with a machine gun can rape the whole village.” Guns not only facilitate rape but also heighten its danger. With guns, women are shot in the vaginas, leading to death or debilitating injuries such as fistula. With guns, and other weapons, rape “is often used as a predecessor to murder.”
WMC Women Under Siege
10 wars to watch (and that the media ignore)
Bloodshed, famine, rape, internal displacement. There are truly few things as awful as the reality of living through modern warfare. The horror, suffering, and pain caused by war are acutely felt on an individual level. Often though, that pain is endured quietly, out of view, while the media focuses on bombs falling and guns firing.
WMC Women Under Siege
November 08, 2013 International,
Violence against women
Women under siege (and on the Web) this week
Our roundup of what's happening around the world and around the Web when it comes to women, war, and sexualized violence this week.
WMC Women Under Siege
U.S. steps up protection of women in war
One of the first things that happens when war breaks out is that the rule of law crumbles. Women become targets of violence—whether through rape or sexual exploitation as food and other resources quickly become scarce. This can have critical consequences not only for the women themselves, but for the escalation of the war.
WMC Women Under Siege
November 01, 2013 International,
Violence against women
Women under siege (and on the Web) this week
Our roundup of what's happening around the world and around the Web when it comes to women, war, and sexualized violence this week.
WMC Women Under Siege
What's going on in Syria is about a lot more than chemical weapons
We're off talk of "intervention" in Syria, and on to trying to get everyone to the negotiating table. It's not going very well.
WMC Women Under Siege
October 25, 2013 International,
Violence against women
Women under siege (and on the Web) this week
Our roundup of what's happening around the world and around the Web when it comes to women, war, and sexualized violence this week.
WMC Women Under Siege
The Index: Rape in War
Number of countries that signed the UK and UN’s Declaration of Commitment to End Sexual Violence in Conflict: 128. Countries that refused to sign the declaration at the UNGA on September 24: 80...
WMC Women Under Siege
October 11, 2013 | Fariba Nawa |
International
Afghanistan’s widows of the disappeared
Sabah Mohammed sat at the dining table where she worked in Fremont, Calif., her gaze distant and lost. She wondered if her husband was out there somewhere with another wife and family. Or maybe he was dead. Or maybe he was in a prison camp in Siberia.
WMC Women Under Siege
10 must-read books on sexualized violence in war
Our mission here at WMC’s Women Under Siege is to add to the public record on sexualized violence in conflict. But if you’re just setting out to learn more about a topic as complicated as this, figuring out where to begin might seem a bit daunting.
WMC Women Under Siege
Burma refuses to relinquish rape as weapon of war
On September 24, British Foreign Secretary William Hague’s initiative to end sexualized violence in conflict zones took the 2013 UN General Assembly by storm. The event was hosted by Secretary Hague and Zainab Hawa Bangura, special representative of the Secretary-General on sexual violence in conflict, and included speakers from 27 member countries.
WMC Women Under Siege
‘I Can Still Smell the Dead’: Central African Republic's crisis worsens
Virtually unnoticed in September amid news of back-to-school sales and Miley Cyrus twerking at the Video Music Awards was a report released by Human Rights Watch called “I Can Still Smell the Dead.”
WMC Women Under Siege
Where is 'red line' on rape in war?
I remember a chalk line drawn on blacktop by a group of kids at recess when I was young. The message was clear: This is the line you do not cross. If you stepped over it, you would face the wrath of those kids in whatever game we were playing. Now turn that line crimson and color it toxic. This is the adult version of "do not cross."
WMC Women Under Siege
Sick, injured, untreated: Syrians suffer fallout of assault on medical care
When I was at the Syrian border in Turkey in July, I went to a public park where I heard 4,000 refugees were living. I was told it was not a UN-supported camp, that these Syrians had come over the border because they’d heard there was going to be a camp nicer than the UN one in Kilis, where most people are stuck in tents, rather than the box-like structures known as “caravans.”
WMC Women Under Siege
Rape, murder, forced recruitment overwhelms Central African Republic
A tweet from the London-based online newsmagazine ThinkAfricaPress, posted on September 3, reads: “Central African Republic Moves to Disarm Rebel Fighters. Some of those will be children.”
WMC Women Under Siege
As violence soars, a photographic look inside the Zaatari camp in Jordan
Recently, the Obama administration announced a decision to allow 2,000 Syrian refugees to settle permanently in the United States. The refugees would include the most vulnerable—women and children who had been “exposed to everything from torture to gender-based violence to serious medical conditions,” Foreign Policy reported.
WMC Women Under Siege
August 12, 2013 International,
Violence against women
How US policy denies life-saving care to women raped in war
Angelina Jolie doesn't mince words.
“Let us be clear what we are speaking about,” the award-winning actress and humanitarian said in June as she addressed the United Nations Security Council session on sexualized violence in conflict. “Young girls raped and impregnated before their bodies are able to carry a child, causing fistula; boys held at gunpoint and forced to sexually assault their mothers and sisters; women raped with bottles, wood branches, and knives to cause as much damage as possible; toddlers, even babies, dragged from their homes and violated.”
WMC Women Under Siege
Can tracking rape in conflict prevent genocide?
Just as rape and other forms of sexualized violence have historically been viewed as a “natural” part of war, they have often been recognized as occurring in genocide but not necessarily as an act of genocide in itself.
WMC Women Under Siege
Creating heaven 'in a place called hell’: DRC activist responds to US tabloid
Sometimes I read something that makes the movement of the world, the very air in the room, freeze to a stop. That’s what happened recently when I read a letter written by an activist in the Democratic Republic of Congo named Neema Namadamu. I read it once, then I read it again. Instead of describing why it had such a profound effect on me, I’m pasting it in full below.
WMC Women Under Siege
No, war doesn’t have to mean rape
Almost every day, readers write to tell us that women will always be targeted in conflict. Rape, they say, is just a natural part of war, and there’s no way to stop it. Yet research shows that this isn’t actually the case.