Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women

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Back in his clinic in west Africa, he tells Lamb that numbers of young children who have been raped is rising. She has been named Foreign Correspondent of the Year five times in the British Press Awards and What the Papers Say Awards and in 2007 was winner of the Prix Bayeux Calvados - one of the world's most prestigious prizes for war correspondents, for her reporting from Afghanistan. It made me very upset, very angry, and also baffled, because it wasn’t as though people didn’t know. Before I get into the review I’d like to disclaim that this is probably the hardest book I’ve ever read, a lot of stories in this book are to put it simply absolutely horrific. Her mother, resting against a stone wall next to the girl whose sister was burned alive, stares blankly ahead.

Our Bodies, Their Battlefield by Christina Lamb | Waterstones Our Bodies, Their Battlefield by Christina Lamb | Waterstones

With truly international scope, Christina Lamb's book asks we recognise that if these events are difficult for us to hear, they are far harder for the people who lived them to forget. Rape is as old as armed conflict but Lamb’s account amounts to much more than simply “bad things happen”.

Working as a female journalist in conflict zones, these were the stories I most dreaded covering, with their bleak facts and bleaker outlook. It is hard to find out what really happened, and Lamb doesn’t shy away from the difficulty of simply asking questions. How does someone rate a book that talks about the most gruesome rape and cruelty meted out to women and children across continents and time periods.

Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women eBook Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women eBook

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. In this new book, the first major account to address the topic, Lamb sets out to redress that balance. If you can make it through the harrowing accounts of sexual violence in Our Bodies, Their Battlefield, it is a question you will find yourself asking, too. Her compassion for those she talks to and deep understanding of how to tell their stories makes this a book that should be required reading for all – even though (and perhaps because) it is not an enjoyable experience. Może to egoistyczne, ale czytałam ją z myślą "matko boska, jaką ja jestem szczęściarą i jak bardzo kocham moje życie".

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. In the modern world, our new technologies sometimes facilitate the suffering, with Facebook being accused of helping incite racial hatred in Burma.

Our Bodies, Their Battlefields: War Through the Lives of Women Our Bodies, Their Battlefields: War Through the Lives of Women

At the City of Joy rehabilitation centre in the Democratic Republic of Congo, rape survivors are taught to look after themselves and go back to their communities with a new sense of purpose. It was an unexpected invitation to a wedding in Pakistan in 1987 that led to Lamb becoming a “war correspondent by accident. In 2018 he accepted Nobel Peace Prize together with an ex-slave of ISIS and Yazidi human rights activist Nadia Murad. Their experiences, she says, were worse than anything she had heard in more than three decades of working as a foreign correspondent. During their three year rampage through northern Iraq and Syria starting in 2014, the Islamic State leadership declared that fighters could sexually enslave Yazidi women because they were not Muslims.She is getting closer and closer to a large crater in the floorboards until, in panic, I yank her away. Broken people, the women with thin wavy bodies and long purplish hair framing faces drained of light, it seemed to me they were neither living nor dead. Ką rašo, ką vis kartoja Lamb - kaip nesuvokiama, kad po vieno, antro, trečio karto, vieno, antro paviešinimo, kaltinamojo nuosprendžio, viešo pasmerkimo, Nobelio premijos - tie nauji skyriai vis dar randasi. She has since been awarded Foreign Correspondent of the Year five times as well as Europe’s top war reporting prize, the Prix Bayeux and was recently given the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award by the Society of Editors. She also co-wrote the international bestseller I am Malala with Malala Yousafzai and The Girl from Aleppo with Nujeen Mustafa.