Can we end
rape as tool of war?
By Gloria
Steinem and Lauren Wolfe, Special to CNN
February 8,
2012 -- Updated 1317 GMT (2117 HKT)
(CNN) -- We first thought about starting this piece with the
story of Saleha Begum, a survivor of Bangladesh's 1971 war in which, some
reports say, as many as 400,000 women were raped. Begum had been tied to a
banana tree and repeatedly gang raped and burned with cigarettes for months
until she was shot and left for dead in a pile of women. She didn't die,
though, and was able to return home, ravaged and five months pregnant. When she
got home she was branded a "slut."
We also thought of starting with the story of Ester Abeja, a
woman in Uganda who was forcibly held as a "bush wife" by the Lord's
Resistance Army. Repeated rape with objects destroyed her insides. Her captors
also made her kill her 1-year-old daughter by smashing the baby's head into a
tree.
We ran through a dozen other stories of women like Begum and
Abeja, and finally realized that it would be too difficult to find the right
one -- the tale that would express exactly how and in what ways sexualized
violence is being used as a weapon of war to devastate women and tear apart
communities around the world, conflict by conflict, from Libya to the
Democratic Republic of Congo.
Gloria Steinem
Gloria Steinem
It is because of this complexity that we must understand how
sexualized violence is being used. We must understand in order to stop it --
just as, when seeking to defuse a bomb, it is crucial to know its components.
Both the World Health Organization and the U.N. Security Council have
recognized that there is a lack of research on the nature and extent of
sexualized violence in conflict, even as there is increasing demand from U.N.
bodies, donors, and others for better analysis to work toward prevention and
healing.
Lauren Wolfe
Lauren Wolfe
All of this is why we have begun a new project at the
Women's Media Center that breaks down the specifics of sexualized violence into
areas such as its motives and patterns, its fallout, and the gender and
cultural attitudes that may have led to it. We're calling our project Women
Under Siege, because with four women being raped every five minutes in Congo
alone, we can say it is nothing less than that -- an ongoing siege. And it's
time we began to put an end to it.
Sexualized violence may be the only form of violence in
which the victim is blamed or is even said to have invited it. In war, rape
shames women, men, children, entire societies. The stigma imposed on all who
are touched by this violence makes this weapon incredibly effective as a means
of destroying the enemy.
But it is crucial to remember that it wasn't always like
this, nor does it have to be. Sexualized violence isn't a "natural"
part of conflict. For the first 90% or more of human history, females and males
had roles that were balanced and porous. Our societal positions weren't based
on the domination of females by males. Humans and nature, women and men, were
linked rather than ranked. The circle, not the hierarchy, was the organizing
principle of our thinking.
By analyzing how sexualized violence was used to ethnically
cleanse, as it was in Bosnia; to force pregnancies that would literally change
the face of the next generation; or, as in Egypt, to stop dissent, we can look
to future wars and possibly prevent a reoccurrence.
For generations, we have ignored or been denied knowledge of
the mass sexualized violence inflicted on Jewish women in the Holocaust. Women
who survived brutal attacks have even been accused of collaborating in order to
survive, just as, say, a raped woman in the Congo may never be accepted back
into her village or family because she is considered culpable.
Last year, a book called "Sexual Violence Against
Jewish Women During the Holocaust" brought to light how the Nazis
perpetrated rape and sexual humiliation on a tremendous scale. Yet none of this
had been revealed or tried at Nuremburg. If we'd known about this earlier,
might it have helped prevent rape camps in the former Yugoslavia? Or rape as a
weapon of genocide in the Congo?
Naming sexualized violence as a weapon of war makes it
visible -- and once visible, prosecutable. What happened to men in the past was
political, but what happened to women was cultural. The political was public
and could be changed; the other was private -- even sacred -- and could not or
even should not be changed.
Making clear that sexualized violence is political and
public breaks down that wall. It acknowledges that sexualized violence does not
need to happen. When masculinity is no longer defined by the possession and
domination of women, when femininity is no longer about the absence of sexual
experience or being owned, then we will have begun.
But first, we have to stop saying sexualized violence is
inevitable, or allowing its victims to be blamed. We have to imagine change
before we can create it.
