Rape as a weapon in Darfur

[believe09]

China-oh China- please step up to the plate and take care of this before the Olympic Games, seeing as how the West has no impact on this situation and no appetite for taking a stand...

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/06/19/darfur.rape/index.html

Hmm...100 percent of the women being raped...some as young as 4. Imagine living in that kind of world...babies who are the product of rape being dumped regularly.

 

[Karole28]

China-oh China- please step up to the plate and take care of this before the Olympic Games, seeing as how the West has no impact on this situation and no appetite for taking a stand...

What stand should the US take?

Hmm...100 percent of the women being raped...some as young as 4. Imagine living in that kind of world...babies who are the product of rape being dumped regularly.

How in the he11 can they call a 4 year old a woman?!?

 

[Paladin]

I don't get the 4 year old thing either. If they are trying to ethnically cleanse them, then someone should tell these people you can't impregnate a 4 year old.

 

[Karole28]

I don't get the 4 year old thing either. If they are trying to etnically cleanse them, then someone should tell these people you can't impregnate a 4 year old.

That is really bothering me.

 

[Rino]

U.N. officials calling for more female officers to better educate women against rape

Just how stupid is this?!?

 

[Karole28]

Just how stupid is this?!?

No kidding.

:doh:

 

[Karole28]

Just how stupid is this?!?

From a thread I started in the PP several days ago:



Children as young as six are being sexually abused by peacekeepers and aid workers, says a leading UK charity.

Children in post-conflict areas are being abused by the very people drafted into such zones to help look after them, says Save the Children. After research in Ivory Coast, southern Sudan and Haiti, the charity proposed an international watchdog be set up.
Save the Children said it had sacked three workers for breaching its codes, and called on others to do the same. The three men were all dismissed in the past year for having had sex with girls aged 17 - which the charity said was a sackable offence even though not illegal.

The UN has said it welcomes the charity’s report, which it will study closely.

Save the Children says the most shocking aspect of child sex abuse is that most of it goes unreported and unpunished, with children too scared to speak out.

A 13-year-old girl, “Elizabeth” described to the BBC how 10 UN peacekeepers gang-raped her in a field near her Ivory Coast home.

“They grabbed me and threw me to the ground and they forced themselves on me... I tried to escape but there were 10 of them and I could do nothing,” she said. “I was terrified. Then they just left me there bleeding.”

No action has been taken against the soldiers.

Click

 

[Pandora]

I recently had a professor from Penn State in to speak with my Honors 11 graders about the situation in Darfur. (We had just finished reading Night, and I wanted them to understand that while the world said, "never again," that has not been the case.)
The professor spent 10 days in a refugee camp in Chad documenting women's stories. (She teaches women's studies.) As a result, this article was no surprise to me.
She recommended getting involved in whatever way we could and introduced us to a program which trains the few men in the camp as security officers and pays them--there are few jobs available in the camps. You can find more here: http://www.genocideintervention.net/fundraise/cprotection

Other tidbits we learned:
Each person is allotted one gallon of water/day. This one gallon is for cooking, drinking, bathing, watering a garden, watering animals/livestock, etc. . . in 130 degree heat.
There is very little firewood and the women are going further and further from the camp to gather it to cook, putting themselves in more danger. Solar Cookers are $15 each and can be used for 6 months eliminating the need for gathering firewood. http://www.jewishworldwatch.org/donate/solarcookerproject.html
Water is life. A one liter bottle costs $4 for the refugee workers and tastes like gasoline as the day goes on and the heat rises. The plastic bottles are petroleum based and leach the petroleum into the water as the heat rises. You drink it because you have to to stay alive, even as it poisons you.
This is the first time a sitting president has recognized and labeled a genocide while it is occurring rather than in retrospect, yet we are doing little because the government of the Sudan has info on Osama bin Laden that we need.

 

[Autumn2004]

I don't get the 4 year old thing either. If they are trying to ethnically cleanse them, then someone should tell these people you can't impregnate a 4 year old.

I would imagine at age 4 its that scary myth going around in Africa that having sex with a virgin takes away hiv Its just absolutely heartbreaking!

 

[believe09]

I recently had a professor from Penn State in to speak with my Honors 11 graders about the situation in Darfur. (We had just finished reading Night, and I wanted them to understand that while the world said, "never again," that has not been the case.)
The professor spent 10 days in a refugee camp in Chad documenting women's stories. (She teaches women's studies.) As a result, this article was no surprise to me.
She recommended getting involved in whatever way we could and introduced us to a program which trains the few men in the camp as security officers and pays them--there are few jobs available in the camps. You can find more here: http://www.genocideintervention.net/fundraise/cprotection

Other tidbits we learned:
Each person is allotted one gallon of water/day. This one gallon is for cooking, drinking, bathing, watering a garden, watering animals/livestock, etc. . . in 130 degree heat.
There is very little firewood and the women are going further and further from the camp to gather it to cook, putting themselves in more danger. Solar Cookers are $15 each and can be used for 6 months eliminating the need for gathering firewood. http://www.jewishworldwatch.org/donate/solarcookerproject.html
Water is life. A one liter bottle costs $4 for the refugee workers and tastes like gasoline as the day goes on and the heat rises. The plastic bottles are petroleum based and leach the petroleum into the water as the heat rises. You drink it because you have to to stay alive, even as it poisons you.
This is the first time a sitting president has recognized and labeled a genocide while it is occurring rather than in retrospect, yet we are doing little because the government of the Sudan has info on Osama bin Laden that we need.

Ethnic cleansing is not just about impregnating the women, but breaking the will of the people being cleansed. The culture believes that women who have been bedded by someone other than their husband, and non virgins, are unclean and they are to be ostracized. This accomplishes the dual purpose of the females being silent regarding the rape and if they become pregnant it magnifies the horror of course. They cannot hide the fact that they have been raped, so the culture ostracizes their own. peel away the layers...On top of this there are some who believe that rape of a virgin will cure HIV-we have dealt with the subject here on WS when we are discussing infant rape on the Crimes In The News board.

Bringing up the sexual abuse by a percentage of the peacekeepers across the world has a place somewhere I am sure...I am not sure it's place is here.

I am of the belief that to a person we are citizens of the world and we certainly carry enough clout to stop what is going on in Darfur if we had a mind to. If it were a country rich in something that we needed or wanted, we would certainly take issue with the imbalance of power and the actions being taken against the people. It isn't, so we don't give two sh**ts. IIRC the government of Darfur telegraphed their intentions, waited until the West and the "coalition" were otherwise occupied in the Middle East, and began it's scourge.

I have seen statistics regarding fistulas because of the repeated assaults against the females-traumatic fistulas have been designated a war injury. It is not enough that you are violently raped you see; depending on your age (if you are a child), what is used to assault you and how vigorously or how frequently you are assaulted, your bladder, intestines, cervix and or vagina can tear and in time you will die of the infection. It requires repeat surgery to repair, but then you would have to confess to being assaulted...

Saying that this is someone else's problem, or something we can ignore just doesn't cut it for me.

 

[thefragile7393]

ITA to the above....it's about power over a "lesser" being.

 

[gaia227]

This is a subject near to my heart.
I went and saw a talk on this given by Eve Ensler and a woman who was from Darfur. She saw her entire family butchered in front of her, she and her mother and sibilings were gang-raped by up to 50 men for hours and hours. Her mother and three sibilings were then murdered. A lot the time the women are taking prisoner to be sex slaves until the next village and the next group of victims.

The rape these women endure are of the most brutal kind and not just women - many of them are young girls. This particular women spent weeks in the hospital and had to have an operation to sew the rips in her vaginal canal - it is called Fistula. Fistula is the result of brutal rapes like this and it can cause infertility, women often cannot control their bowels anymore and risk infection and death.
It is that brutal and it is being ignored on an international level. China's support of Sudanese gov't is helping to fund this brutality.
Eve Ensler has been instrumental in funding the Panzi Hospital in Congo (different place, same situation) which specializes only in women who are victim of rape. They have one doctor who works around the clock performing operations on women with Fistula as a result of their rape. It also houses the City of Hope which provides a safe haven for women refugees and women who are victims of rape from Congo and Darfur.
Many women die as a result of these rapes because they cannot get the care they need, they are shunned by their families as a result and kicked out to survive in the war torn region. Many, many babies in Darfur are a result.

Unfortunately too many people think: not my problem. Or simply fail to understand the proportions of these crimes against humanity. This is not about impregnanting women. This is about be-littleing them, torturing them, tainting them, controlling them and showing them and the rest of their people they are nothing but pieces of meat to be used and discarded.

It is an absolute epidemic. I am glad this thread is here but I would like to say that this is happening all over war-torn regions, not just Darfur and the Congo. I included a link below about women in Burma who are facing this Femicide as well.

Great article about the Rape epidemic in Darfur:
http://www.artsenzondergrenzen.nl/usermedia/files/Report%20Sexual%20Violence%20march%202005.pdf

Here is an article about the Congo:
http://www.glamour.com/news/articles/2007/08/reallifedrama

Article about Fistula and how it can effect women's lives.
http://www.engenderhealth.org/our-work/maternal/fistula.php

http://burmalibrary.org/docs/Shattering_Silences.htm

http://www.womenofthecongo.com/

 

[absinthe]

Thank you, Believe and Gaia, for the links!

 

[julie2]

I feel so completely overwhelmed reading this! What can we do to help? It seems impossible, but I know that someone has to start.

This is completely horrifying.

 

[believe09]

www.savedarfur.org is a great resource-this is the organization George Clooney worked with when he and his father made their documentary about the camps. You can advocate as little or as much as you wish, from signing petitions and sending online memos to your congresspeople to making donations...whatever. I have worn a green "Not On Our Watch" wristband for years.

If nothing else, educating yourself to the where's, why's and how's is a great step towards helping..

 

[southcitymom]

www.savedarfur.org is a great resource-this is the organization George Clooney worked with when he and his father made their documentary about the camps. You can advocate as little or as much as you wish, from signing petitions and sending online memos to your congresspeople to making donations...whatever. I have worn a green "Not On Our Watch" wristband for years.

If nothing else, educating yourself to the where's, why's and how's is a great step towards helping..

Thanks, believe.:blowkiss: