The War on Women’s Bodies
Rebel soldiers burst into the house in the town of Goma in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo where 12-year-old Eleonore was
staying with her family in August 2001. Tying up her father, the
soldiers hit her mother and stole goods from the house as Eleonore
hid in fear. Upon finding her, the men beat her and raped her. She
required transfusions, injections and a series of pills.
A horrific and startling scene reported by Human Rights Watch
during its investigation into war crimes in the Congo, one would
hope that this is a horrible isolated incident during a single
troubling war.
It is not.
According to any number of human rights groups, the United
Nations and women’s groups, this terrible crime of sexual and
physical violence perpetrated on women both young and old
throughout war-torn areas is terrifyingly common.
With the trial of Slobodan Milosevic underway at The Hague, and
reports of rape and abuse in the Sudan pouring in daily, it is
vital that we all turn our attention to stopping this crime against
humanity.
“Rape as a tool of war is nothing,” stated the National
Organization of Women in a report on the subject. “Marauding armies
have always used rape as a means of controlling the minds and
bodies of those they sought to conquer.”
In recent times, stories from places such as the Congo, the
Balkans, Rwanda, Indonesia, the Sudan and a multitude of other
war-torn places have shown that this war crime is still taking
place.
Former Yugoslavia, for example, “was the site of systematic rape
and sexual enslavement by the Bosnian Serb and Yugoslav armed
forces starting in 1992,” as a way of “ethnically cleansing” the
Bosnian Muslim and Croat women in the area, according to Human
Rights Watch. While it is unknown how many women suffered such
attacks, it is estimated by UNIFEM (the U.N. branch that deals with
women’s issues) that more than 20,000 women were raped during the
war. In the Rwandan genocide, UNIFEM estimates at least 250,000
(perhaps 500,000) women and girls were raped.
In the current conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan, “girls as
young as 8 and women of 80 have been raped,” Amnesty International
reports in a BBC story.
In a startling recent report by the Denver Post, the crisis of
rape during times of war strikes even closer to home. Not only
perpetrated by opposing forces who are trying to take over their
land, female troops service in Iraq are, according to Miles Moffeit
and Amy Herdy, “reporting an insidious enemy in their own camps:
fellow American soldiers who sexually assault them.” Rape and
sexual assault during wartime, it would seem, is not limited to the
enemy forces.
Such atrocities have dire consequences even after the conflicts
have ended. Women raped by both enemy and familiar forces face
serious post-traumatic stress disorders, being ostracized by their
families, communities or military units, unwanted pregnancies or
disease. In places such as the Congo, the latter is especially
troubling for victims of sexual assault, since Cesar Chelala, an
international health consultant, said in the Seattle Post
Intelligencer that an estimated 60 percent of combatants in the
region are HIV-infected.
What can be done to address such a horrible problem? UNIFEM,
NOW, Amnesty International and other organizations hope to find
funding to create programs to help women attacked during times of
conflict. Tough prosecutions under the guidelines of the Geneva
Conventions are needed for anyone perpetrating this crime against
humanity, something that is not done today. Similarly, crackdowns
in the American military system to deal with rape are direly
needed.
Beyond these ideas, it seems to get at the root of the problem,
the status of women must be raised. As the World Health
Organization says, “gender-based inequality is usually exacerbated
during situations of extreme violence such as armed conflict.” By
ending pre-conceived ideas of inequality worldwide, perhaps we can
see an end to such gender-based violence.
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