WMC Women Under Siege

Not natural, not forever: How we're trying to end rape in war

That rape is used as an actual strategy and weapon of war goes unnoticed much of the time by the media, which tends to focus on the explosions and traumas you can show in photos or film footage. But Janis Mackey Frayer, South Asia bureau chief of CTV News, has brought this subject to her readers in a two-part series that focuses on the work of Women Under Siege.

In this piece, Mackey Frayer puts the spotlight on the remarkable effectiveness of sexualized violence in ripping apart women and communities, but also highlights our efforts and that of the Nobel Women’s Initiative’s new campaign to stop rape and gender violence in conflict (of which we are an advisory committee member) to stop it through awareness and cultural change. Below are a few questions from a Q&A Mackey Frayer did with Women Under Siege Director Lauren Wolfe.

Janis Mackey Frayer: How is rape a ‘tool’ of war? Is it about hate? Strategy? Control?

Lauren Wolfe: It’s so complex because of the many ways it is utilized and how diverse the fallout is, but then again, it’s very straightforward: The violation of women’s bodies is another battleground on which wars are fought—so yes, it is used as a means of control and expressing hate for “the enemy” in war. Soldiers and governments use dehumanizing terms to make women less than they are, and therefore objects meant for violation; in Rwanda, Hutu media outlets called Tutsi women “cockroaches.”

Sometimes it is an actual strategy ordered and propagated from above (as it was in Rwanda and appears to have been in Guatemala, and is currently being used in Burma), but whether it is government-ordered or haphazardly employed, what our founder, Gloria Steinem, calls the “cult of masculinity” takes over.

It is a cultural concept that means that in war, “men act violently and risk their lives against their own self-interest as human beings.” We have seen peer pressure place a role in rape in various conflicts. And I would argue that war creates conditions that push men to punish women, who are often unarmed noncombatants, in their fight for battlefield control. It is an unnatural expression of an unhealthy need to dominate, and part of stopping it requires us to not accept that rape is a natural, forever part of war.

JMF: From the offenders’ perspective ... what’s the advantage of advocating (or mandating) rape or other forms sexualized violence?

LW: Sexualized violence obliterates the enemy in a way that is often more effective than killing. Survivors often go silent and this plus fear of further terrorization can inhibit them and their families from either continuing to fight or resisting. It demeans women and entire communities—it’s like taking away a limb from a body. But it’s worse in that the psychological after-effects are multipronged and destructive in so many ways. The body in this case is more than the woman. It is everyone who cares about her and everyone who fears suffering the same act.

JMF: How are stories of sexualized violence covered in mainstream media (if at all)?

LW: They’re covered, but usually as a line in a story about war in general. Also, the U.S. media tends to fetishize stories of women raped, focusing on the women instead of the rapist. Read this piece on Women Under Siege by journalist Cara Hoffman, which addresses this issue so well. Cara asks, “What if the data focused on the perpetrator? What if the numbers were turned around so that we knew what percentage of men are rapists?”

Another problem we’re up against is the continued relegation of “women’s stories” to something other than front-page news. As Gloria told me for a Q&A we published in The Atlantic: “In the past, what happened to men was political, but what happened to women was cultural. The first was public and could be changed, and the second was private, off limits, even sacred. By making clear that sexualized violence is political and public, it breaches that wall.”

When the media starts treating rape as a public issue, and as a story that affects all of humanity, we can start to get to the root of why rape is so ubiquitous in war. Only then can we begin to put an end to it.

For the rest of this Q&A, please click here.



More articles by Category: International, Media, Violence against women
More articles by Tag: Trauma, War, Sexualized violence, Rape
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