As long as we have different cultures, there is always going to be differences of opinions. When people disagree and can't come to a compromise they will start to fight and that is when we see nations going to war. There is nothing good that comes from wars because everyone looses in one form or another. The people that suffer more in wars are women and children. Women become easy targets for abuse in the form of rape. The sexual abuse of women has been a source of control and power that men have used for generations to try to maintain their dominance over them. When rape is used during war, it is taken to a whole new level of violence.
As we saw in Fires of Hatred by Naimark, rape during war has been associated with cases of ethnic cleansing throughout this century (Naimark, p.167). The goal of ethnic cleansing is to remove all traces of a certain ethnicity, religion, or national group. In order for ethnic cleansing to be achieved, everything from those particular persons need to be erased as if they never existed. Many women and young girls were raped in front of their families during war. Naimark goes to say that there was a political purpose for the rapes, multiple rapes, and gang rapes of women during war. He said it was to humiliate, intimidate, and degrade her and others that were affected by her suffering (p. 167). What the rapist hoped to achieve was to force the women and their families to flee the country and never come back. They believed that by raping the women, this then would accelerate the ethnic cleansing. Another form of ethnic cleansing was to not only rape the women but ensure that they would impregnate them and then hold them hostage to ensure that these women would carry on the population growth of the rapist nationality. What made matters worse in the cases of rape in Bosnia is that former neighbors did it from their same villages and towns. These women that were being raped grew up with these rapist and had formed some kind of friendship throughout the years. One 38-year-old Muslim woman said that she was raped by her 19-year-old neighbor who at one time had worked for her and even drank coffee with her (Naimark, p. 169).
There is a great article on this subject written by Laura Smith-Spark called How did rape become a weapon of war? In this article she states that women are not just a by-product of war but are used as a military strategy. Rape is often used in ethnic conflicts as a way for attackers to perpetuate their control over their intended victims and therefore redraw ethnic boundaries. The article that disturbed me the most was from a UN correspondent, Michelle Nichols, who wrote Babies as young as six months victims of rape in war: U.N. envoy. In this article, Bangura, a former heath minister said that while visiting the Congo, she came across 11 babies within 6 and 11 months old who had been raped by rebel groups there (Nichols, 2013). I believe this is taking war too far, when do we draw the line between casualties of war and pedophiles just raping children of all ages to satisfy their devious cravings and calling it acts of war? The United Nations needs to get involved and regulate the wars if that is even possible. These types of crimes need to stop, its bad enough that there is already a lot of killings due to war but why do women and children have to suffer repeated torture and humiliation by being raped? These rapist need to remember that they too have mothers, and children, and they need to ask themselves if they would want these things to happen to them as well, after all aren't we all one nation under God?
The following are the links to the articles in my blog:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4078677.stm
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/17/us-war-rape-un-idUSBRE93G13U20130417
No comments:
Post a Comment