Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women

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There were others too: even those of us who have spent years working in South Asia don’t know much about the calculated campaign by the Pakistan military to rape thousands of women of all ages in the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. And for all the focus on the Vietnam War, “multiple rapes hardly got a line in any reporting”.

Our Bodies, Their Battlefield by Christina Lamb review – the

Cristinos Lamb, karo žurnalistės ir knygų autorės, bandymas atkreipti dėmesį į prievartavimus, kurie vyksta konfliktų zonose. Teroristai ir armija naudoja prievartą kaip ginklą, siekdami sužlugdyti ir pažeminti žmogų, sunaikinti bendruomenes, vykdyti etninius valymus. Išprievartautos moterys negali pasilikti savo namuose, jų nesupranta vyrai ir aplinkiniai, jos išvaromos. Kai kurių vienintelis būdas išgyventi telieka gatvė. Jos neturi kur grįžti, yra atstumtos. It’s not just Rwanda. “Everyone applauded but nothing happened,” regrets the Congolese doctor Dr Denis Mukwege, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018 along with the Yazidi activist Nadia Murad, who survived being sexually enslaved and many of her family members murdered by Islamic State in 2014. Dr Mukwege, known as “Doctor Miracle”, is said to have treated more rape victims than anyone else on earth. They celebrated the Nobel award at his hospital in Bukavu, but women and young girls are still showing up with savage and systematic damage to their genitalia, the result of rape so aggressive that it needs another name. This book shattered my world. Before you read it, beware. It is brutal, sad, barbaric, and full of stories of extreme injustice. Superb... perhaps the most important work of nonfiction about rape since Susan Brown Miller's Against Our Will (1975). A searing, absolutely necessary expose of the uses of rape in recent wars and of global injustices to the survivors." I read a lot of different stuff when I’m cooking plot points for the books I’m writing. This was one that flew across my radar a few weeks ago, and as soon as I saw it, I knew it was a book I absolutely had to read. I also knew it would be brutal, and difficult to get through, and I was not wrong. This might be one of the most important books I have ever read, but it is also one of the most harrowing, and one of the only books I’ve had to put down and walk away from before I could continue reading it.This has been in many ways a journey through the worst depravities of man and I thank you for bearing with me, for I know it has not been an easy read,” she writes. But silence is the women’s worst enemy, and that’s why, while some may be tempted to turn away from the horror, this is such an important book. Given these legal advances, it’s disturbing to note that no one has yet tried Isis members for the rape of Yazidi women. At the international court of justice in The Hague last December, the former political prisoner and darling of the human rights community, Aung San Suu Kyi, now State Consellor and effectively prime minister of Myanmar, said her country’s military courts could handle any alleged atrocities by soldiers against the Rohingya. She made no mention of rape. Nor has there been any effective action against members of the Nigeria-based jihadi group Boko Haram, who continue to kidnap and enslave women. The fate of the 219 schoolgirls kidnapped from the village of Chibok in 2014 reveals the limits of international pressure. Despite hashtags and outrage from celebrities, including Michelle Obama, then US first lady, the Nigerian government failed to mount a rescue when it might have been possible. Negotiations resulted in the liberation of some girls, but most are missing to this day. It is more or less and introduction to many of the conflicts and wars of history that used sexual assault as a weapon. One of the earliest events mentioned in the Sabine women all the way up to what is happening in Burma.

Our bodies, their battlefield: What war does to women Our bodies, their battlefield: What war does to women

I know I’ve said this before for many of the books I’ve read, but this one in particular is the most bone-chilling book I’ve ever read. The stories of violence depict incidents that you may not even be able to conjure in your most horrifying of nightmares. The disdain for human life is the underlying current of all the interviews that Lamb conducts. Even an eighteen-month old girl is not spared from this. What I have seen [that] definitely helps their healing is when perpetrators get punished because that gives the victim confirmation by authority she was not the one at fault for what happened to her and that she’s innocent.”The island had once been central to Mussolini’s plans to create a second Roman Empire. Leros, along with all the Dodecanese, had been seized from the Ottoman Turks in 1912, becoming part of an Italian colonial empire that included Libya, Somalia, and Eritrea. When Mussolini took power in the 1920s, he decided its deep natural harbor made the ideal naval base from which to establish control over the entire eastern Mediterranean. So he sent in naval forces and administrators, as well as architects, to plan a modern city in the fascist style the Italians call razionalismo.