Friday, October 11, 2013

Rape as a Weapon of War

     
   
 It is shocking to me that the raping of women in warfare has only recently been acknowledged in the news. An article by BBC News elaborates by saying, “The strategic use of rape in war is not a new phenomenon but only recently has it begun to be documented, chiefly in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Colombia and Sudan….” However, a clear example of the horrors and reality, and rape as a weapon in war is the case of Bosnia. It is the first recorded case where rape was used as used as a tool to gain power and control. Most of the rapes occurred between Muslim women and the Serb army in an attempt to not only socially shame them into leaving, but also to impregnate them and force them to carry the baby to term so that they were forever haunted by the ordeal. To put this idea in perspective, rapes similar to the ones in Bosnia occurred in Congo just a few years ago. I recently read an article from 2011 by Huffington Post that stated the statistics for rape in Congo; a reminder that the prevalence of rape in times of turmoil is present even today. The article gives an appalling statistic from “the American Journal of Public Health [that] shows that more than 400,000 women [out of a population of 7 million] had been raped in Congo during a 12-month period between 2006 and 2007”. This means that over 1100 women were raped every day.

These statistics and the general use of women’s bodies for political gain bring some interesting questions/ideas to my mind. War as a whole seems to be a misogynistic construction, and the reports that have been written focus almost solely on the raping, humiliation, and dehumanization of women. It is as if the women in these war-soiled nations are the play things of men high off of power and position. Many cases in Fires of Hatred mention that the orders that were given out by Serbian officers forced the family or husband of the woman to watch while a soldier of the army raped her – these soldiers were oftentimes neighbors or friends of the woman as well. It is clear in examples such as this that the orders were carried out by men to threaten or humiliate not only the woman, but her man as well. Perhaps in cultures such as these, the woman is already seen as a lesser being to men, so her rape is her fault? I find myself trying to find justifications for actions such as these, but I cannot find any. And how could I when “even in the parts of Congo that are not affected by war, a woman is 58 times more likely to be raped than a woman in the United States” (Huffington Post)? Ethnic cleansing in and of itself more often than not leads to physical violence, but rape pushes it to a whole new level bordering on psychological warfare. It is not only a physical violation but a mental violation. The victims of these rapes will be continuously haunted by the brutality for the rest of their lives.
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