Global Feminism in the News: Women & War

Global Feminism in the News is a monthly column discussing recurring themes in international news stories concerning women. This month we will focus on women and war.

I read through several news sources a day looking for news stories about women. Often our struggles are documented, and sometimes our victories our celebrated. Recently I have noticed many articles about the gender specific struggles of women living in conflict zones.

On April 6, Irin News (A source of humanitarian news published by the UN) ran this story about the struggles of pregnant Sri Lankan women caught in the crossfire between the government and the LTTE (aka Tamil Tigers). According to the UN Population Fund (The UNFPA):

…pregnancy-related disabilities and death often rise in conflict situations when reproductive health services, including pre-natal care, assisted delivery and emergency obstetric care are disrupted and often unavailable. At the same time, many women lose access to family planning services, exposing them to unwanted pregnancies.

Then on May 11, the Christian Science Monitor published a story documenting the use of rape as a weapon of war in Colombia. (This article is no longer available on line.) This is not the only country to have used this tactic; one among many example estimates that during the civil war in Liberia 3 out of 4 women were raped by soldiers from both sides. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, it is estimated that over 500,000 women and girls have been raped, forced into sexual slavery, impregnated, and genitally mutilated by soldiers. (For more information on sexual violence in the DRC, go to vday.org).

On May 16, Nicholas Kristof (who has written extensively on sexual slavery in the world today) published a piece about maternal mortality rates in Sierra Leone, a country riddled with a civil war that was officially declared over in 2002, but left the country so devastated that instability continues to rule. One in ten women dies in childbirth in Sierra Leone. That statistic absolutely astounds me.

And yet, the UN Security Council Resolution passed last year acknowledged for the first time the tactical use of sexual violence as a weapon of war.

UN and military officials met with women’s rights activists this week in New York City to discuss the importance of addressing and solving the epidemic of sexual violence during wartime- an important step towards acknowledging women’s gender specific struggles during war. Leymah Gbowee of the organization Women, Peace and Security Africa, particularly wanted to raise awareness of sexual violence as a deliberate and systematic military strategy, not just a social or a humanitarian problem. In her own words,

This kind of meeting backs up the quest for justice. It emboldens mediators and gains greater respect for women’s groups, which the parties to peace talks can often ignore.

Looking at the overwhelming crises women in conflict zones must face, it is astonishing to me that so many of these problems are dismissed as “women’s issues”. We must acknowledge the imbalanced health and safety risks to women during wartime, including young girls, expectant mothers, and elderly women. We must also acknowledge that this problem affects a country, and our world’s greater population, and is thus a human rights issue. I am baffled when deaths, disease, and violence are dismissed or diminished because they happen to the female half of the population. Have these deaths gone unnoticed? Has this sexual violence gone undistinguished from other forms of violence? Is the suffering of women less visible than the suffering of men?

When we speak of the feminization of poverty, we might also speak of the feminization of war casualties.

Colleen is a paralegal at a non profit that serves domestic violence survivors. She graduated from Georgetown with a degree in Spanish and Women’s Studies. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

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