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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