War and Rape

Ruth Rosen has published an important article called “A Wave of Sexual Terrorism In Iraq” at Alternet. Here is an excerpt:

Like women everywhere, Iraqi women have always been vulnerable to rape. But since the American invasion of their country, the reported incidence of sexual terrorism has accelerated markedly — and this despite the fact that few Iraqi women are willing to report rapes either to Iraqi officials or to occupation forces, fearing to bring dishonor upon their families. In rural areas, female rape victims may also be vulnerable to “honor killings” in which male relatives murder them in order to restore the family’s honor. “For women in Iraq,” Amnesty International concluded in a 2005 report, “the stigma frequently attached to the victims instead of the perpetrators of sexual crimes makes reporting such abuses especially daunting.”

Rosen observes that “rape is now considered a war crime by the International Criminal Court,” which I cannot resist pointing out is due to the difficult and largely unsung work of feminists like Catharine MacKinnon. Here is another excerpt:

Amal Kadham Swadi, one of seven Iraqi female attorneys attempting to represent imprisoned women, told the Guardian that only one woman she met with was willing to speak about rape. “She was crying. She told us she had been raped. Several American soldiers had raped her. She had tried to fight them off, and they had hurt her arm. She showed us the stitches. She told us, ‘We have daughters and husbands. For God’s sake don’t tell anyone about this.'”

Professor Huda Shaker, a political scientist at Baghdad University, also told the Guardian that women in Abu Ghraib have been sexually abused and raped. She identified one woman, in particular, who was raped by an American military policeman, became pregnant, and later disappeared.

Professor Shaker added, “A female colleague of mine was arrested and taken there. When I asked her after she was released what happened at Abu Ghraib, she started crying. Ladies here are afraid and shy of talking about such subjects. They say everything is OK. Even in a very advanced society in the west it is very difficult to talk about rape.”

Shaker, herself, encountered a milder form of sexual abuse at the hands of one American soldier. At a checkpoint, she said, an American soldier “pointed the laser sight [of his gun] directly in the middle of my chest… Then he pointed to his penis. He told me, ‘Come here, bitch, I’m going to fuck you.'”

Writing from Baghdad, Luke Hardin of the Guardian reported that at Abu Ghraib journalists have been forbidden from talking to female detainees, who are cloistered in tiny windowless cells. Senior US military officers who have escorted journalists around Abu Ghraib, however, have admitted that rapes of women took place in the cellblock where 19 “high-value” male detainees were also being held. Asked how such abuse could have happened, Colonel Dave Quantock, now in charge of the prison’s detention facilities, responded, “I don’t know. It’s all about leadership. Apparently it wasn’t there.”

Read the whole article here.

–Ann Bartow