Honor Killings » Feminist Peace Network

Ten Years Later–The ‘Liberation’ Of Afghan Women

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Oct 052011

When the United States attacked Afghanistan ten years ago, we were told that not only were we going after those who had attacked us but also that we would liberate Afghan women from the Taliban. It was a very effective selling point, there is nothing we tend to like better than rescuing helpless women. But let’s be clear–that was not the reason we invaded Afghanistan–women had been being abused by the Taliban and the warlords before them for quite some time by then. As we observe the 10th anniversary of what now seems like an endless war, it is important to look at what Afghan women have experienced since the U.S. invasion and what needs to be considered going forward.

ActionAid and Oxfam have both issued lengthy reports addressing these issues. In a survey of 1000 Afghan women, ActionAid found that,

72% of Afghan women believe their lives are better now than they were 10 years ago, while 37% think Afghanistan will become a worse place if international troops leave. A massive 86% are worried about a return to Taliban-style government, with one in five citing their daughter’s education as the main concern…

…However women’s rights groups in Afghanistan say they are being kept in the dark regarding the talks with the Taliban, as well as being frozen out of an important international conference on the country’s future and transition of power, which will take place in Bonn, Germany in December 2011…

…Women who have stood up for women’s rights in the past 10 years are also worried about their own personal safety if the Taliban returns to power, with some activists making plans to leave the country.

The report goes on to say that today,

39% of children who attend school are girls

27% of MPs are women (higher than the world average)

5% of positions in the army and police force are filled by women

25% of government jobs are filled by women

These achievements are real and should not be underestimated. Yet huge challenges remain and too many women are still denied rights that should be taken for granted. Even now, a woman who runs away from home to escape domestic abuse is seen as dishonouring her family and often loses the right to see her children.

Forced and child marriage are common and only 13% of women are literate (the figure for men is 43%). Eighty-seven per cent of all women in Afghanistan suffer domestic abuse, according to a UN survey and life expectancy for both men and women is around 45 – more than 20 years lower than the world average. The Save the Children index this May described Afghanistan as the worst place in the world to be a mother – one in 11 women perishes in pregnancy (one every 30 minutes) while one child in every five dies before reaching its fifth birthday. This means that every mother in Afghanistan is likely to face the loss of a child. And many women remain isolated. The ActionAid poll found that four in 10 women never leave their village or neighbourhood.

It is important to note, which this report does not, that not only do women run away from home to escape domestic abuse, but all too often they attempt suicide to escape, frequently setting themselves on fire to do so. The abuse itself is often horrific beyond description, including brutal disfigurement and outright murder.

As for where we are now, ActionAid reports,

“After the fall of the Taliban things got better. But then gradually, after 2006, the situation got worse,” says Selay Ghaffar, executive director of ActionAid partner HAWCA. “All these efforts were undermined because of security and the presence of people who committed crimes and abuses in the past who are still in power. Girls’ schools shut down, acid was thrown in girls’ faces, schools were burnt down.”…

…And despite the early statements from international leaders, women’s rights seem to have been deprioritised as the military operation against the Taliban and other insurgents has been stepped up…

This is delusional phrasing–women’s rights have never been the priority in Afghanistan except to the extent that they are politically expedient towards other ends. The report continues,

…In September last year the Afghan government set up a High Peace Council – a 79-member body which is tasked with talking to the Taliban. There are just nine women on the council and many women’s rights activists say they hold merely symbolic positions and are not part of the real negotiations.

…The international community can also support Afghan women through deeper engagement with women’s civil society and community-based organisations. Direct funding to women’s organisations to build their capacity as advocates and leaders will enable funds to aid transformation to a more democratic society, not just facilitate transition without the promise of sustainable change…

…However, providing this support will require a fresh look at funding priorities, and methods to ensure aid reaches women and can address the root causes of women’s inequality. Women’s organisations working to reduce poverty and empower women and girls say they receive little or no funding, forcing them to operate hand to mouth and limit activities to practical services rather than also being able to lobby for long-term changes for women….

…In addition the international community should broaden diplomatic efforts to include consultations and information sharing with women’s organisations. Amplifying the concerns of women’s organisations and ensuring women’s voices are heard is a valuable role the international community can play.

Conspicuously absent in ActionAid’s analysis is the existence of U.N. Security Council Resolutions 1325 and 1889 as framework for conflict resolution and peace negotiating which are however addressed by Oxfam (see below).

According to Oxfam,

Western leaders have a responsibility toward Afghan women, not least because protection of women’s rights was sold as a positive outcome of the international intervention in October 2001. Ten years on, however, time is running out to fulfill these promises.

The Afghan government and the international community must:

Ensure women’s rights are not sacrificed, by publicly pledging that any political settlement must explicitly guarantee women’s rights;

Make a genuine commitment to meaningful participation of women in all phases and levels of any peace processes.

The Afghan government must:

Enhance efforts to increase representation of women in elected bodies and government institutions at all levels to 30 per cent;

Encourage religious leaders to speak out on women’s rights in Islam;

Intensify efforts to promote female access to education, health, justice, and other basic services.

The Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Defence must:

Improve awareness of women’s rights and human rights law in the justice and security sector, and ensure effective imple- mentation of these laws;

Increase substantially women recruits in the security and justice sectors.

The international community must:

Support expanded civic education programmes to raise awareness of women’s rights at community level;

Support efforts to improve female leadership;

Intensify support to promote access to education and other key services, and ensure this support will continue at current or in- creased levels even as international military forces prepare to withdraw.

The UN must:

Continue to monitor all government actions including the peace processes and provide increased support to the Afghan government on all negotiation, reconciliation, and reintegra- tion processes.

The report points to the dichotomy between the current lip-service regarding Afghan women and the realities of how the issue is being approached,

Publicly, Western politicians are still backing Afghan women. In July 2011, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reiterated her commitment to women, saying: ‘Any potential for peace will be subverted if women and ethnic minorities are marginalised or silenced…And so when we look at what will happen in Afghanistan, the United States will not abandon our values or support a political process that undoes the progress that has been made in the past decade.’ But behind the scenes it is less clear what will happen if the Taliban make demands that require compromise on women’s rights, as the US government prepares to withdraw the majority of its troops by the end of 2014 and seeks a political settlement to bring an end to the fighting. In July 2011, a Washington Post article reported one USAID official as saying ‘gender issues are going to have to take a back seat to other priorities’.This reflects ‘growing realism’ tempering expectations of what they can achieve on the ground after ten years. As one analysis puts it, ‘On this list of priorities, ‘gender’ is generally seen as a luxury to be left aside until the supposedly gender-neutral objectives in the domains of security and governance have been achieved.’ (Emphasis mine.)

Let’s be very clear here–gender issues have always taken a back seat. This isn’t a question of ‘growing realism’, it is a question of persistent, pandemic misogyny that has infested and damaged life on this planet since the dawn of patriarchy. It is precisely the stupidity of seeing these issues as a luxury that undermines any realistic achievement of security since the day men first started going to war. But as Oxfam points out,

The vital role of women in peace-building at the national level and in peace negotiations has been recognised in UN Security Council Resolutions 1325 and 1889, applicable to all UN member states, including Afghanistan. The Afghan government reaffirmed its support for women’s role in peace-building in its national peace plan, the donor-funded Afghanistan Peace and Reintegration Programme (APRP), which began to be rolled out nationwide in early 2011.

Yet women are currently under-represented or not represented at all in the APRP, which augurs poorly for female participation in any future formal peace talks with the Taliban. There are just nine women on the 70-member High Peace Council (HPC), which was created to lead the peace process. Many of the male members are former warlords and powerbrokers who do not take their female counterparts seriously. The APRP has also established provincial peace councils under the HPC, composed of between 20 and 35 members, with a minimum of three women, one of whom must be a representative from the Department of Women’s Affairs (DoWA). However, no council as yet has more than three female members. Women at the community level have little understanding of APRP; their formal role, at the moment, is unclear but is likely to be limited to involvement in community development programmes. According to a provincial DoWA head, ‘although women have great potential as negotiators and peacebuilders, the will and commitment from Kabul to involve them is almost nil.’

In their conclusions, Oxfam writes that, “words must be matched with action and firm guarantees,” and this is indeed true but not sufficient. Our words in regard to Afghan women were used in 2001 as a tool to garner support for the invasion of Afghanistan, not a call on its own merits to address Afghan human rights issues. Just bringing women to the table will not be enough–it must be insured that the women who come to the table are not puppet window dressing proxies for warlords or the Taliban and that they are allowed to safely speak freely and that their words be taken seriously.

The most crucial point to be made however is that while women’s human rights, progress and security are a huge concern, they should not be construed as a reason for continued, never ending foreign military presence in Afghanistan, which is only aggravating the continuing violence that pervades the country. Killing and maiming people does not secure human rights, it destroys them. There is no possibility of living in peace until the violence ends. It is time to disarm the warring factions within Afghanistan and for the U.S. military to leave–only then will there be a realistic chance for women’s human rights in Afghanistan.

10 Years After 9/11–The Undeclared War Against Women Rages On

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Sep 072011

Ten years ago, after the World Trade Center towers crumbled, the United States declared a war on terror. At first we were told we would defeat the enemy quickly. But that war with its ever-shifting enemies and goals continues today with no end in sight. In late 2001, we were told that one of the reasons it was imperative that we attack Afghanistan was to liberate Afghan women from the Taliban. And then a few months later we were told that we must also rescue Iraqi women.

But the truth is that women’s human rights were never a priority, merely an excuse for exerting military domination. Today in Afghanistan and Iraq, the problems faced by women are myriad, little has been improved and much has been made worse. In Afghanistan, women continue to be maimed and beaten and their maternal mortality rate continues to be the second highest in the world. In Iraq, trafficking of women has increased dramatically, women human rights defenders are attacked in public places and women’s health, jobs and education has suffered dramatically as a result of the U.S. invasion.

Looking beyond Afghanistan and Iraq, the gender-specific impact of war and violence is all too apparent throughout the world.

It is not possible to say that women’s lives are a priority while we stand by as crises like the never-ending mass rapes in the Democratic Republic of Congo continue unabated.
It is not possible to say that women’s lives are a priority while women refugees are raped in Somali refugee camps or while women are murdered in Guatemala and Mexico and their killers go unpunished.
It is not possible to say that women’s lives are a priority when women’s reproductive rights are under siege in the U.S. and throughout the world.
It is not possible to say that women’s lives are a priority when women are afraid to walk down the street for fear of being attacked and harassed or of going home and being beaten and raped behind closed doors.
It is not possible to say that women’s lives are a priority when women are more likely to be food insecure, have less access to education and earn less than men throughout the world.

The monumental irony is that it has been proven time and time again that when women do not live in fear and when they have equal access to food and education and work, we are all better off and there is less likelihood of violence. We cannot improve women’s lives by bombing their countries and when conflict does occur, we cannot truly resolve it unless women have a full and equal stake in the peace-making.

The only way to end terrorism is to quit creating terrifying conditions and the uncomfortable truth is that in the years since the World Trade Center towers fell, the U.S. has done everything in its power to create and further the conditions in which terror ferments. As long as we persist on this path, we will live in a state of terror that only exacerbates the undeclared war on women.

Rape and State Secrets–It’s All About Power

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Dec 162010

Never mind that for the most part I am a huge fan, at the moment I am just the teensiest bit annoyed with Michael Moore for having this to say about the Assange rape charges,

For those of you who think it’s wrong to support Julian Assange because of the sexual assault allegations he’s being held for, all I ask is that you not be naive about how the government works when it decides to go after its prey. Please — never, ever believe the “official story.” And regardless of Assange’s guilt or innocence (see the strange nature of the allegations here), this man has the right to have bail posted and to defend himself.

Yes, I agree, the charges do seem strange, and I do support Assange’s work (we’ll get to that in a few paragraphs) and of course he should have the right to defend himself. But treating the charges dismissively because Assange’s work is for the greater good isn’t okay because men, powerful dudes included, do have a wee bit of a history of using their penises in inappropriate ways while their accusers get trashed (1), even by so-called progressives who all too often are dismissive and trivializing of the charges (2).

As feminist author and attorney Jill Filipovic puts it,

just because the vigor with which Assange was pursued was clearly politically motivated doesn’t mean that the accusations against Assange are totally incredible, or that it’s unjust that he will have to face them.

And Feministing’s Jessica Valenti points to the absurdity of the way the case is being deliberately described,

The truth? There’s nothing in Swedish law about “sex by surprise” or broken condoms. (Here’s the penal code, see for yourself.) And despite reports to the contrary, Assange’s accusers have always said that this was not consensual sex.

For more thoughts on this, see Footnote 2 below.

Troubling as the dismissiveness of rape charges for the greater good line of reasoning is, Grit TV’s Laura Flanders makes this additional and very salient point that regardless of the integrity of the rape charges, since when did rape charges become such an almighty Interpol priority, not that it wouldn’t be a good idea if they did, but the answer of course is when they are politically expedient, and certainly not out of sudden concern for the welfare of the alleged victims:

let’s be clear, he should face the charges. But since when is Interpol [the investigative arm of the International Criminal Court at The Hague] so vigilant about violence against women? If women’s security is suddenly Interpol’s priority — that’s big news!Tell it to hundreds of women in US jails and immigration detention centers — who charge that they can’t get justice against accused rapists — or women in the US military (two of out three of whom allege they’ve experienced assault.) In Haiti hundreds of unprosecuted cases of rape in refugee camps could use some of Interpol’s attention…

…It seems we only care about women’s bodies when there’s a political point to be proved.

And there we get to another point of great dis-ease; it serves a lot of powerful agendas to prosecute Assange for rape, but for the overwhelming majority of rapes, that is not the case. As Meredith Tax points out, never mind Interpol, even the International Criminal Court which is supposed to prosecute rape cases is doing a piss poor job of it.

At the crux of it, women’s human rights are routinely and systemically ignored unless it serves the political agenda of patriarchy to shine a light on the pandemic abuse of women. We only trot out women’s rights when they are convenient. The examples are endless.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently made a surprise appearance at the TED Women conference. She told the audience that if you give women equal rights, the whole nation will be more stable and secure. Indeed. Maybe we could try that in the United States? Passing an Equal Rights Amendment, ratifying CEDAW, and insisting on equal pay would be a good place to start. Imagine if we took that approach to security instead of waging endless wars against other countries.

And what about the rights of women in Afghanistan that we are allegedly defending? As MADRE’s Diana Duarte says so succinctly,

It is not only valid but also necessary to reject the conflation of support for Afghan women’s rights with support for the war. This conflation has obstructed our view of what alternatives may exist. It has blocked us from recognizing that perpetual war clamps down on the space that women have to build solutions for their future.

And then there is the U.S. military which is being sued for access to rape records in an effort to determine the extent to which the military has addressed the appalling rates of sexual assault and lack of prosecution thereof in the ranks,

“Much of the information about the extent and cost of the (military sexual trauma) problem, along with the government’s reluctance to prosecute offenders and treat victims, is not in the public sphere,” the lawsuit states. “The public has a compelling interest in knowing this information, given the potential enormity of the problem, the emotional and financial cost that it imposes on military service members and the increasing number of women serving in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

It goes on and on–in New York, rape crimes have been deliberately covered up,

until exposed through a series of recordings as well as an FBI report, New York City police officers had been covering up sex crimes with the full knowledge and even the direction of their superiors. In fact, it seems likely it’s still happening.

So those rapes should be covered up, but the charges against Assange are the stuff of Interpol charges? Just a bit of a double standard.

———-

I have been thinking a great deal about the juxtaposition of the issue of Assange’s exposure of government and corporate secrets while being accused of a crime that all too often is also shrouded in secrecy. In the end, the common thread is power, which so often depends on secrecy at the expense of truth, be it in the personal or political realm.

Many intelligent and thoughtful people, while acknowledging that much of what has been exposed thus far is quite troubling, are concerned that Wikileaks endangers the secrecy necessary to function in the corporate and political world. (3) That however makes the assumption that keeping those systems functioning as they are is a good idea, and that is what we need to re-examine because for the most part, if there wasn’t something offensive if not illegal about what is being kept secret, those in power would not be so concerned about keeping those secrets. And in the end, wouldn’t we be better served by those in power acting honorably in a way that would pass the test of transparency?

And so we need to ask ourselves, just what is it that the powers that be are afraid will be exposed and subsequently lost by these revelations. And the answer is one word, Patriarchy, and this is why: In the process of leaking documents, Wikileaks and Assange have gifted the power and commodity of secrecy.

In an essay by Israeli writer Erella Shadmi, Trapped By Patriarchy in the anthology Women and the Gift Economy we get an understanding of why gifting secrets that are needed to maintain power is so terrifying to patriarchal structure in both the public and private realm. While she refers to Muslim and Israeli societies, her analysis is universal to patriarchy.

Muslim tradition puts revenge and honour up on the private and public agenda of every believer. And Israeli modern culture is dominated by the Culture of the Freiher. Freiher is a vulgarism meaning “sucker.” The culture of freiher defies a person that is ready to give way, to be used, to forgive. Such a person is viewed as one that does not care for his honour or power. For example: you are a freiher if you yield to other drivers. And especially, you are a freiher if you talk with “terrorists,” if you let your wife dominate you. In a culture of the freiher you do not take responsibility for your mistakes, you do not share your ideas lest they be stolen, you are never weak lest you are exploited. So you learn to manipulate, to lie, to exploit people, to hide your feelings.

Wikileaks has dared to question the culture of freiher and the very structure of patriarchy in a way that we must defend and from which we cannot go back. Yet that very act also demands that we respect and fully address the personal charges against Assange, no matter how badly brought they have been, while at the same time not allowing them to be used as an excuse to undermine the defense and imperative of freeing ill-conceived secrets.

———-

In an effort to keep the body of this essay at a manageable size, I have pulled a lot of important material into the footnotes because it is crucial to the full understanding of the issues addressed above.

(1) In this case, this has been done in particularly frightening ways. The Washington Examiner reports,

Posting their addresses and phone numbers isn’t intended to encourage vigilantism, but to send a bigger message to women like Ardin and Wilen – if you lie about being raped, this is what will happen to you. Your anonymity will be compromised, your life will be laid bare for all to see, and your name will be destroyed. No rape shield law or journalistic ethic can protect you. You will suffer as the man whose name you vindictively dragged through the mud has suffered.

I want women to see that their choices have consequences. If enough false rape accusers have their identities and personal data exposed to the jeering Internet hordes, others will think twice before they accuse men of heinous crimes for petty and selfish reasons.

(2) A few non-negotiable facts that we should get straight from the get-go in this conversation: Rape and sexual assault are the most under-reported and prosecuted crimes in the world. Yes, a few rape charges are false, most aren’t. And yes some rapes are committed by women and some of the victims are men, but mostly it is men that commit these crimes and women who are the victims. And to be clear–the basis of these claims comes from the U.S. Department of Justice, the World Health Organization, etc.

Jaclyn Friedman, executive director of Women, Action & the Media and editor of Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape, suggests that statements like Moore’s and other progressives amount to just one more incident of what she aptly calls a Rape Apology Day,

Keith Olbermann used scare quotes around the word rape as though the charges themselves (which are that Assange held one woman down against her will, and in a separate incident raped another while she was sleeping) were silly, and everyone from Glenn Beck to Naomi Wolf rushed to belittle the accusers, along the way employing every victim-blaming, rape-denying, slut-shaming trope ever invented, from “they’re just lashing out because they got their feelings hurt” (that’s both Beck and purported feminist Wolf, paraphrased) to my personal non-favorite, popular blogger Robert Stacy McCain’s suggestion that women who consent to any kind of sex are sluts who deserve whatever happens: “You buy the ticket, you take the ride.”…

…As soon as a rape accusation makes it into the news cycle (most often because the accused is famous), it’s instantly held up against our collective subconscious idea about what Real Rape (or, as Whoopi Goldberg odiously called it, “rape-rape”) looks like. Here’s a quick primer on that ideal: The rapist is a scary stranger, with a weapon, even better if he’s a poor man of color. The victim is a young, white, conventionally pretty, sober, innocent virgin. Also, there are witnesses and/or incontrovertible physical evidence, and the victim goes running to the authorities as soon as the assault is over.But let’s face it, actual rapes almost never match up to this ideal. Most rape victims know their attacker (estimates range from 75 percent to 89 percent), most rapists use alcohol or drugs to facilitate the assault (More than 80 percent, according to researcher David Lisak), not weapons, and most of the famous men whose accusers receive media attention aren’t poor men of color. But once the accusation hits the news cycle, whatever pundit gets there first uses the non-ideal details of the alleged assault to argue that surely, we shouldn’t take this seriously, and other pundits nod their head in agreement.

And investigative journalist Lindsay Beyerstein adds,

It is curious that charges against Assange were brought, dropped almost immediately, and later reinstated. The fact that authorities were so quick to charge Assange based on uncorroborated testimony should raise questions about whether prosecutors are treating him differently from your run-of-the-mill alleged sex criminal. However, it’s pure rape culture apology to argue that so-called “he said/she said” cases should be automatically dismissed in favor of the alleged rapist.

We can agree that the legal response to what Assange allegedly did reeks of politically-motivated prosecution without passing judgment on the merits of the allegations against him.

(3) Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW)’s Anne L. Weismann also makes the peculiar argument that Wikileaks endangers freedom of information by not working within the system,

At first blush, WikiLeaks’ disclosure of hundreds of thousands of State Department cables seems like a win for transparency and accountability in government. After all, these documents offer a never before seen window into U.S. diplomacy. But upon closer inspection, WikiLeaks’ document dump illustrates the perils of going outside the system, and is likely to result in less transparency in the long run.

For those of us in the transparency business, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) offers a useful tool to pierce government secrecy. Designed to let the public know what its government is up to, the FOIA mandates disclosure upon request, subject to nine limited exemptions. Those exemptions represent a congressional balancing of governmental interests, such as national security and investigative needs, against the public’s need to know. For agencies that stray off course, the FOIA provides judicial review, allowing courts to view requested documents in camera to determine if they were properly withheld. While the FOIA is far from perfect, it provides the public with a useful tool for scrutinizing government actions and policies balanced by oversight and procedural safeguards.

Also worth noting, Deanna Zandt has some excellent commentary on the issue of internet rights and access,

When we face issues of free speech on the Net, we’re confronted with a severe reality in the harshest moments: we consider this here to be public space, but in reality it’s owned and operated by private companies. There is currently no set of accepted standards that say we have a set of rights online.

This is a crucial issue and with Net Neutrality in grave peril as I write this, if nothing else, we should seriously be thinking about the issue of how we access the internet and as PayPal, Amazon, Mastercard, etc. have proven, how easily that can be cut off.

Finally, I want to point to this weird example of the oft ignored sexism of the left. CommonDreams, in its ongoing coverage of Wikileaks, ran this illustration without comment, the use of “Gentlemen” in the graphic apparently was not considered remarkable. It should have been.

–Lucinda Marshall

The ‘Other’ Terrorism: Militarism and Violence Against Women

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Apr 132010

Since beginning the Feminist Peace Network in 2001, I have written and spoken about militarism and violence against women more times than I can count. In those years I have watched too many instances of the problem becoming more exacerbated and see little to indicate substantive progress towards addressing this horrendous problem. And so I keep writing and talking about it. The following is excerpted from a recent talk that I delivered at the University of Dayton.–LM

“While bullets, bombs and blades make the headlines, women’s bodies remain invisible battlefields.”
–Margot Wallström, U.N. Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict

———-

In order to fully understand militarism, it is necessary to view it from a gendered lens and tonight I will be addressing the question of what it is about militarism that places women at particular risk.

There are essentially 3 ways in which people seek to gain empowerment:

The first is Power Among (community)—a sense that we’re all in this together.
And then there is Power Within—in other words, your own inner strength and capabilities.
Finally, many believe that you can achieve empowerment by means of asserting Power Over.

Militarism, and the patriarchy it defends, are based on the notion of power over, and place women at particular risk for victimization, violation and harm.

In order to achieve empowerment by this method, you have to have someone or something to assert that power over and to do that, you need to see that target as an other.

Creating an other is a critical defining aspect of both militarism and violence against women – creating a false distinction between two different people (or 2 different groups of people). The other then gets defined as less than. Once defined as less than, the other needs to either be destroyed, or protected.

Civilian casualties now make up as much as 70% of the total casualties of any military action. Since women and children are the majority of these civilian populations, they make up the majority of civilian casualties.

———-

What is it about military conflict that makes women particularly vulnerable?

To begin with, there is the breakdown in government and law enforcement.
Other factors include loss of homes/separation from family/especially men who may have provided protection/becoming refugees.
And finally, loss of jobs/income.

The following are the primary ways in which women are sexually victimized as a result of militarism:

Rape
Sexual Slavery/Trafficking
Forced Marriages and Pregnancies
Femicide

Several other points to consider:

Wars are not fought on battlefields anymore–they are fought in cities and towns and villages.

In warfare, women’s bodies frequently become part of the battle ground over which opposing forces struggle.

Women’s bodies are often considered the spoils of war, or invisibilized under the catchall euphemism ‘collateral damage’.

And violence against women does not end when the fighting ends. We’ve all heard reports of rapes committed by U.N. peacekeepers, of soldiers who come home and assault or murder their wives.

As you may have read recently, it was confirmed that 2 pregnant women and a teenage girl were killed in a botched raid on a family gathering to celebrate the birth of a baby in Afghanistan back in February. Not only were the women murdered in cold blood, but in the initial aftermath of the killings, NATO claimed that the women were already dead when they got there, the victims of honor killings.

It has since been proven otherwise, as one anguished relative asked, why would they be murdering pregnant women at a celebration of a birth, and there are reports by The Times of London that bullets were actually dug out of the women’s bodies and bullet holes in walls plastered over.

———-

The numbers speak for themselves:

Rwanda Genocide–As many as 500,000 women raped.
64,000 women raped during conflict in Sierra Leone.
40,000 women raped in Bosnia/Herzogovina.
4,500 rapes in just 6 months in one province of the DRC.
Hundreds of women raped every day in Darfur.

It is precisely because of these incredible, large numbers of victims that we know that violence against women is systemic to militarism.

The connection between militarism and violence against women is a global issue, however tonight I want to focus primarily on how it pertains to the U.S. There are several reasons for that.

The U.S. has the biggest military power in the world and therefore our actions, as it were, pack the biggest punch and
Most of us are U.S. citizens and I think it is appropriate to talk about that which we can be faulted for and that which we can take responsibility for changing before pointing our fingers at others.

———-

afghan_widow

Let’s talk about Afghanistan first. As I pointed out earlier, one of the justifications for our invasion was to liberate Afghan women. As Human Rights Watch pointed out last year however, that has been an abysmal failure.

“Afghan women are among the worst off in the world, violence against them is “endemic” and Afghanistan’s government fails to protect them from crimes such as rape and murder.”–Human Rights Watch, December, 2009

Today:

The majority of Afghan women are vulnerable to violence in the home.

The judiciary system provides scant recourse for survivors of that violence. If there are no witnesses to these crimes, the women can be convicted of adultery.

Victims are often jailed or murdered. Women who face domestic violence can be pushed to tragic extremes, including suicide, self-immolation is often the method of choice. The burn hospital in Herat recently reported 90 cases of self-immolation in an 11 month period.

Afghanistan is the only country in the world where the suicide rate for women is higher than for men.

70 to 80 percent of women face forced marriages often before the age of 12. There are actually markets where women are bought and sold.

Going to school is risky for girls because of fire bombings and acid attacks.

The assassinations of several prominent women leaders have gone unpunished.

———-

And then we moved on to Iraq and again used the justification of liberating women there although, while there were certainly serious problems such as the so-called rape rooms, women enjoyed one of the highest levels of freedom in the Arab world. In post-invasion Iraq however:

There are roughly three quarters of a million widows in Iraq due to the last war with little or no means of support

Many women have become refugees in Jordan and Syria, often away from families who could provide protection and support

The new Constitution, which the U.S. gave its blessing to gives precedence to Islamic law over civil law.

Honor killings have increased dramatically

Sexual trafficking, where women are being forced to prostitute themselves to feed their families, or are being sold to sex traffickers has increased dramatically.

———-

But it is not only civilian women who are at risk.

According to several studies, 30% of women in the U.S. military are raped while serving, 71% are sexually assaulted and 90% are sexually harassed. It is believed that 90% of sexual assaults in the military are never reported. As one Congresswoman noted recently, women serving in the military are more at risk of being harmed by their fellow soldiers than by any enemy.

The situation in combat theaters is so bad that women are afraid to go to the bathroom by themselves for fear of being raped.

It is important to note that there is a very poor rate of conviction of perpetrators, which effectively creates a culture of impunity when it comes to sexual assault and

A Department of Defense Task Force on Sexual Assault in the Military told a Congressional committee on February 3, 2010 that “DoD’s procedures for collecting and documenting data about military sexual assault incidents are lacking in accuracy, reliability, and validity.”

And the last point I want to make about this is that the problems described apropos of the military also apply to women working for private contractors such as KBR as the recent case of Jamie Leigh Jones has unfortunately illustrated.

———-

We also need to talk about the direct sexual victimization of civilians by the U.S. military.

Prostitution thrives near military bases, both in the U.S. and abroad. Filipinas not for sale Women and girls are brought in to entertain the troops as it were. The Pentagon drafted an anti-prostitution and trafficking policy in 2004 that would subject violators to court martials but the U.S. military is just beginning to put clubs and bars involved in prostitution off-limits and little has been done to enforce the policy.

Earlier this year, the Philippine government quit issuing work permits for women seeking to work in bars and clubs near U.S. military bases in South Korea because so many end up being coerced into prostitution.

Many of these women are solicited by recruiters to entertain the troops telling them they will sing and dance, but they end up serving expensive drinks in bars and those who fail to make their drink sale quotas incur ‘bar fines’ which they must pay off by selling sexual services.

In Japan, a year after the Defense Dept. banned the solicitation of prostitutes, Stars and Stripes reported that there was still a thriving “massagy” girl business selling happy endings for $30-$70 near U.S. bases in Japan.

It’s also important to note that the problem extends to private contractors like Dyncorp in Bosnia in the late 1990’s and earlier this year it came to light that Blackwater officials kept a Filipina prostitute on the payroll for, “Morale Welfare Recreation” in Afghanistan.

———-

Every time there is a new study or a new report to Congress about sexual assault in the military, and there have been quite a few, I almost inevitably get a call from a reporter asking whether I think this will make a difference.

The short answer is no. The rape and plundering of women is a de-facto weapon of war and always has been and the objectifying of women is still alive and well in the military.

Despite a 10 year ban on pornography being sold on military bases, the military recently did a review and decided Playboy and Penthouse should not be classified as pornography–and I don’t want to get into a debate about porn, but the point is that the objectification of women is historically implicit in militarism and no amount of Congressional testimony is going to change that.

The Strawberry Bitch is a WWII plane on display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, OH (Many thanks to a member of the audience when I spoke who told me about this unfortunate example of the implicit military misogyny of which I spoke)

The number of sexual assaults in the military that are being reported has gone up, which may in part be a function of improved reporting mechanisms, but experts still feel these are just a small part of the real number.

What is crucial to understand is that what hasn’t gone up is the number of criminal prosecutions or convictions and until that happens, substantial improvement in the situation is unlikely.

While I have focused tonight primarily on U.S.-centric militarism, clearly militarism perpetrated by other military forces, be they national militias, rebel forces or whoever is committing militaristic violence, leads to violence against women wherever it occurs and that violence needs to be addressed, whether it is in Indonesia, the Darfur region of Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo or anywhere else.

“After raping her they killed her by shooting into her vagina. No action was taken.”

– The Karen Women’s Organization (KWO), “State of Terror: the ongoing rape, murder, torture and forced labor suffered by women living under the Burmese Military Regime in Karen State (February 2007)

In addition, there is a whole expanded conversation that is more than we can address here tonight regarding the U.S. role in these situations, for instance our support of the government in Indonesia and our lack of action to help the people of Darfur and so on–just because we are not directly perpetrating violence does not mean that we are not involved in the perpetration of the problem or that we should not be involved in ending this violence.

———-

I’d like to talk now about what can be done, on both a national and international level, to change the paradigm that allows for the victimization of women as a result of militarism. There are a number of vehicles that address the issue. One of the most important is CEDAW which stands for The Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women and defines violence against women as a violation of women’s human rights and is often described as an international bill of rights for women. As of August, 2009, 185 countries had ratified CEDAW. The United States is one of the few that have not yet ratified it, along with countries such as Iran and Sudan.

CEDAW1

There are also several UN Security Council resolutions that are important to know about. The first, Resolution 1325 addresses the disproportionate and unique impact of armed conflict on women and recognizes the under-valued and under-utilized contributions women make to conflict prevention, conflict resolution and peace-building, and stresses the importance of their equal and full participation as active agents in peace and security.

The second, Resolution 1820, urges all parties to armed conflicts to immediately stop acts of sexual violence against civilians and calls for the protection of women and girls from all forms of sexual violence.

We also have the International Criminal Court which was created in 1998. Of critical importance, its statutes classify sexual violence as a war crime and provide a means by which perpetrators can be held accountable for their war crimes.

It also establishes measures to facilitate better investigation of gender-based violence as well as standards for care of victims including witness protection and legal counsel.

The U.S. however, opposes the ICC and does not participate.

IVAWA2

And finally, here in the U.S., the bipartisan International Violence Against Women Act (IVAWA) was reintroduced in February in both the US House and Senate.

It would be the first of its kind to comprehensively incorporate US foreign assistance programs to help stop gender-based violence and poverty, promote economic opportunities for women, halt violence against girls in schools, and ultimately empower women.

———-

Those are some of the tools available to us on an international and national level, but you and I—we’re not members of Congress or delegates to the United Nations. So the thought that I want to leave you with is what we—those of us here tonight—can do to change this paradigm?

In order to truly achieve a women-inclusive peace, we need to make the connection between the othering that enables militarism and the othering that enables sexual violence. Creating peace in the world must include creating peace in our homes. And finally, we need to take intimate violence as seriously as the other violences of war.We need to admit that sexual violence is a tool of war. When men go to war, women and children are overwhelmingly the innocent victims. We need to own up to this and make it a front and center issue.

And if you remember what I said when I began this evening, there are three ways in which to seek empowerment and we need to do some substantive work in moving away from Power Over to a framework that is based upon Power Within and Power Among.

We need to make a fundamental paradigm shift and move towards partnership thinking (a concept pioneered by Riane Eisler). Rather than seeing others as adversaries, let’s look at how can we partner to create solutions and make meaningful and just relationships. Then we will be truly empowered.

My goal tonight has been to try to give you a glimpse of what militarism looks like through a gendered lens. When we discuss the impact of militarism and how to end it, we are simply not looking at the full picture unless we include the ways it affects women and also listen, really listen, to women’s voices when we look towards resolution of conflict and the creation of peace.

–Lucinda Marshall, 2010

———-

My grateful thanks to Dr. Rebecca S. Whisnant, head of the Women and Gender Studies Program, for inviting me to speak, all those who provided support for this lecture and to the wonderful and inquisitive students at the University of Dayton. The slides that accompanied this lecture can be viewed in the right sidebar on the Feminist Peace Network website. You can also get more information on militarism and violence against women here.

Femicide–The Atrocity That Knows No Border

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Aug 052009

Earlier this week George Sodini walked into a health club in Pennsylvania and killed three women and injured nine more. The chilling blog he left behind makes it clear that the killings were motivated not only by his hatred of women, but issues with his family, loneliness and an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness.

“Women just don’t like me. There are 30 million desirable women in the US (my estimate) and I cannot find one. Not one of them finds me attractive.”

While we are rarely given such direct insight into why men kill women, his sentiments are shared by far too many men throughout the world. Patriarchy depends on controlling women’s lives and when they cannot be controlled their lives have no value and they must be killed. And the result is that there is not a country in the world where women’s lives are free from the tyranny of men’s quest for power.

In Guatemala where women’s lives are often seen as inferior, the number of femicides has escalated greatly in recent years.

In Mexico, women have been killed in Juarez with impunity for many years, with authorities simply looking the other way. In a report from the Council on Hemispheric Affairs we learn that,

The intrinsic value of a victim of femicide is usually questioned following her death. Members of the media and the community alike try to categorize these women as either “good girls”, fitting the archetype of a good daughter or worker, or as fallen women, usually described as prostitutes, sluts, or barmaids. By putting emphasis on the identity of the women, onlookers seem to be placing a higher value on the lives of “well-behaved women” as well as providing a twisted justification for overlooking or minimize the crimes at hand. For instance, in 1995, the then-governor of Chihuahua, Francisco Barrio, advised parents to keep an eye on their daughters and not allow them to go out at night. The implication was that good girls did not “go out” at night and since the unfortunate victims typically disappeared during the night, it followed that by objective standards they were found to not be very good girls. Likewise, when speaking to the family members of the murdered women, the police often explained the disappearance of the victims by pointing out “how common it [was] for women to lead double lives.”

And in Iraq and other countries, women are routinely killed to maintain the ‘honor’ of men. The list goes on, but the point is this: femicide is a global pandemic. It manifests itself in different ways in different places, but the cause of all these murders shares a common root and that is the cultural impunity of male power and control. In short, patriarchy.

——-

Perhaps one of the most powerful tools for ending femicide is to make it visible and call it out for what it is. In this country, all too often the murders of white women receive far more attention than the murders of women of color. Via Essential Presence comes this awesome billboard from a group called MOMS designed to bring attention to the nine black women who have gone missing or have been murdered in North Carolina in the last four years.

According to WITN,

Missing or Murdered Sisters or MOMS for short put up a billboard on Sunset Avenue in Rocky Mount. The billboard switches to a different image every 8 seconds with several being about the missing or murdered woman in the area. Over the past four years 5 black woman have been found dead, one is still unidentified. Three other woman are missing.

We thank these wonderful women for making sure these deaths are not simply disappeared. H/t to Gender Across Borders for bringing our attention to this inspiring campaign.

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Feminist Peace Network

Ten Years Later–The ‘Liberation’ Of Afghan Women

10 Years After 9/11–The Undeclared War Against Women Rages On

Rape and State Secrets–It’s All About Power

The ‘Other’ Terrorism: Militarism and Violence Against Women

Femicide–The Atrocity That Knows No Border

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