rape being used as a weapon of war is so heart wrenching. it was used during the partition of india, the french used it in algeria, serbians used it against bosnian women, it’s being used right now in syria and what’s so heart breaking is the fact that women choose to commit suicide because of the possibility of being raped. humanity never learns, we really have failed.
i read a case study of a french soldier raping an algerian woman, he said [to his victim] “we can tell your filthy husband what we got up to when we find him”. she asked to be killed before they found her husband. in bosnia, serbian men raped women systematically so that the child would have “serbian blood”, ‘to weaken bosnian men’. during the partition women were raped in revenge attacks or deliberately raped because they [both hindus and muslims] knew how important ‘honour’ was to the other party, hence if their daughter was raped by ‘the other’ they would end up abandoning her or killing her. so this is why it’s so hard to see it happening again in syria because of the pain it has caused in the past for women.
I’m really tired of MRA’s bringing up war as a reason men are more victimized than women and have it harder than women, they really believe only men see and experience the horrors of war while all women are safely and comfortably tucked far away from war zones. In most wars civilians make up a large chunk of the casualties, often even the majority of casualties, and mass rape / torture of civilians as a terrorizing tactic has always been a major component of most if not all wars.
I’m reading Svetlana Alexievich’s “The unwomanly face of war”, and so far none of the women she talked to –women who served in the Soviet army during WWII– says anything about rape, though they tell other horrible, unimaginable things. But one man tells this: “We advance… The first German villages… We’re young. Strong. Four years without women. There’s wine in the cellars. Food. We’d catch German girls and… Ten men violated one girl… There weren’t enough women, the population fled before the Soviet army, we found very young ones. Twelve or thirteen years old… If she cried, we’d beat her, stuff something into her mouth. It was painful for her, but funny for us. Now I don’t understand how I could… A boy from a cultivated family… But I did it… The only thing we were afraid of was that our own girls would find out about it. Our nurses. We were ashamed before them…”
A female soldier tells her this: “The Germans didn’t take women soldiers prisoner… They shot them at once. Or led them before their lined-up soldiers and showed them off: look, they’re not women, they’re monsters. We always kept two bullets for ourselves, two –in case one misfired. One of our nurses was captured… A day later we took back that village. There were dead horses lying about, motorcycles, armored vehicles. We found her: eyes put out, breasts cut off. They had impaled her on a stake… It was freezing cold, and she was white as could be, and her hair was all grey… She was nineteen years old. In her knapsack we found letters from home and a green rubber bird. A child’s toy…”
I don’t know if in WWII rape was used deliberately as a weapon of war, or was just a consequence of misogyny and desensitisation to violence combined. Still, this illustrates what women are subjected to in war. War is hell, but especially for women.
