LOOK AT HOW A SINGLE CANDLE CAN BOTH DEFY AND DEFINE THE DARKNESS||
TITLE, ANNE FRANK | WRITING RACHEL BLACKBURN
Foreword: Todays writing is likely to make you feel uncomfortable, but I urge you to read on. I myself, as I researched and read papers to write this, felt at times, I needed to walk away from the screen. I felt uncomfortable - as I should. This isn’t about enjoyment. This is about education and awareness. If you feel uncomfortable, I urge you- read on.
The walls start shaking. Your ears start ringing. Fists are pounding on the door and the air is filled with screams. The adrenaline pumping through you is suffocating. You find it hard to see or even breathe. Gunshots sound like fireworks in the distance. In an instant you realise, if you don’t run now you’ll be taken. If you’re taken you’ll be raped, tortured and sold or killed. You grab your children. You run. The phone lines are down. You don’t know where your friends are or if they’re safe. You don’t know if your parents are ok and you know your grandparents won’t be able to run. But you run.
You run for your life.
Every minute 28 girls will be married. By the time you finish reading this, 42 young girls will be married. War, sexual violence, conflict and genocide have infected the lives of millions around the world. This isn’t a choice. This isn’t a bad dream or movie script. This is the life and a memory in the minds of some 60 million refugees and internally displaced people around the world today.
The word rape makes women and most men uncomfortable by its mere mention. The implications linked with such a word are clear to any who here it. We teach our children not to joke about it and we teach our children to be respectful of their own and others bodies. We feel empathy towards women we haven’t met. We ridicule those who are perpetrators in the media and demand justice - as it should rightly be served. In school we talk about consent and we talk about healthy relationships. However, the phrase genocidal rape and sexual violence in conflict is not often mentioned and rarely understood for its actual significance. Lets talk about it.
Genocidal rape is the controlled and systematic intention of impregnation by one group against another. Men rape and sexually assault women (and sometimes other men) in groups because they are ordered to or because they are systematically permitted to do so. “Men rape not as individual men, but as members of their race, ethnicity, religion or nationality” (USDA, 2012). Sexual violence in war is not a new concept. The use of rape as a weapon has occurred to hundreds and thousands of women around the world for centuries, “…dating from the very first wars and civil disturbances, “rape and pillage” of the losing force has been one of the “spoils of war” taken by the victors” (Chowdhury & Lanier, 2012, p. 47). Yet, despite the detrimental effects genocidal rape has had on women, their families and their communities, only recently have the international courts begun to address rape as both crimes of humanity and crimes of genocide.
Sexual violence in war has been repeatedly used as a strategic and deliberate action to gain control through physical and mental harm. Over one hundred thousand reported rapes in Berlin alone occurred at the end of World War II and during the Rwandan genocide at least a quarter of a million women were raped and many subsequently infected with HIV (Askin, 1997; Chowdhury & Lanier, 2012; Schott, 2011). A human rights watch specialist noted that women have had their lips and ears cut off and eyes gouged out, making it impossible to identify and testify against their attackers (Schott, 2011, p. 7). Evidently, wars produce an environment for mass rape to occur, and with rape so frequently used in wartime highlights the “unique power” it holds over women and the power it gives to the rapists (World news network, 2010). The physical, mental and social impacts of sexual violence are markedly evident, although sexual violence and genocidal rape is an often-invisible crime against humanity that continues to happen around the world.
“THERE IS NO GREATER PILLAR OF STABILITY THAN A STRONG, FREE AND EDUCATED WOMAN | AND THERE IS NO MORE INSPIRING ROLE MODEL THAN A MAN WHO RESPECTS AND CHERISHES WOMEN AND CHAMPIONS THEIR LEADERSHIP” | ANGELINA JOLIE PITT
“… men are killed to expose women and children, women are raped to humiliate men, children are tortured to destroy parents… this is the core of genocidal violence”. | Forgey, 2010, p. 13.
Sexual violence against women was used adamantly to ensure an understanding was had of the insignificance they now were; no one was coming to help them, no one cared; their feelings, bodies and rights were no longer valid. Their rights as human beings were now void. Sokolovic (2005) explains that the sexual violence which occurred in Bosnia as not a crime against humanity but: “… a crime against life itself. It is a crime the intention of which was not the humiliation of women as human beings, since that can also be achieved by “ordinary” rape. The intention was to produce in woman, as the source of life, hatred against life in her own womb, hatred towards herself as the assumption of life, to deprive her of the noblest pleasure one can achieve, the pleasure of having a child”. Those affected by genocidal rape are not only hurt individually but also their family and their community. Mentally women suffer loss of self-respect, depression, shame, heightened fear, anxiety, anger, feeling of isolation, phobia, withdrawal, flashbacks, substance abuse disorder and even expulsion from their homes and communities (WHO, 2005; Sharlach, 2000). Women suffer economically from such atrocities, well after the event has occurred, as “women who are raped or sexually tortured lose economic and material rights… and the displacement of women as refugees, can increase their sexual vulnerability” (Schott, 2011, p. 10). The particular evil of genocide is not just physical death, but ‘social death’, which can take place even when physical death does not. Social death harms the strength of a group, the relations of family and community that give meaning to one’s identity and links one to both past and future (Card, 2008).
As a young women, living in a country where women are respected and have rights over their own body- I feel obligated to shed light on these issues. These are my hands, my legs, my mouth and my eyes and only I should decide who is allowed to touch them. For many women and girls around the world, their rights are stripped and they become lifeless objects.. The tribunal for the Rwandan genocide took a major step by defining rape as ‘a physical invasion of a sexual nature committed on a person under circumstances which are coercive” (Goldstone, 2002, p. 278), however the Bosnian war and the atrocities of mass rape lead to the first conviction of sexual violence on its own as a crime against humanity (ILBH, 2011). “It is absolute terror, committed against humanity by humanity” (Murigande, 2004, p. 3) for which continues to happen. We must educate ourselves and understand what was once thought of as war stories, is in fact happening right now as we read. And 42 girls are now child brides.
“Where the majority live on less than one dollar per day, and a small minority is very rich, is very unsafe. Such a world is dangerously prone to manipulation by those whose interest in violence, terror and genocide outweighs their interest in humanity” | Murigande, 2004, p. 7.
HOW WONDERFUL IS IT THAT NOBODY NEED WAIT A SINGLE MOMENT BEFORE STARTING TO IMPROVE THE WORLD | Anne Frank
