Steinem website fights rape in war zones

Women Under Siege to draw attention to crime

Feminist and activist Gloria Steinem is the brains behind Women Under Siege, a newly launched website designed to draw attention to the fight against sexualized violence as a tool in genocide and conflicts zones around the world.

The website, part journalistic, part advocacy, details horrific stories of rape and sexual violence in places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Libya and Bosnia as well as long-unspoken cases from the Holocaust.

“This particular form of violence seems profoundly invisible and therefore it continues to punish the victim and rarely punishes the criminal,” said Steinem, who cofounded Ms. Magazine.

But what drew Steinem to the project?

“It (sexualized violence) is a perennial longstanding deep issue,” she said. “We’ve been working on it as long as I can remember, in the first instance explaining rape was not sex, it was violence.”

Steinem got the idea for the project after reading the anthology Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the Holocaust, by Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle Saidel and At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance — a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to Black Power, by Danielle Mcguire.

Steinem knew there were lessons to be learned from those experiences and the stories of women in conflict zones.

Would the experiences of women raped during the Holocaust have helped society understand and perhaps prevent further sexualized violence in Bosnia and the Congo, she wondered.

Women Under Siege is an offshoot of the Women’s Media Centre — a non-profit media advocacy group which Steinem began in 2005 along with actress Jane Fonda and writer Robin Morgan. “There are many heroic organizations working against women’s violence,” Steinem said. “What we hope to contribute is connections among and between these outbreaks of violence. “Making connections is crucial. Also for the women so they don’t feel isolated and alone and can share across boundaries and cultures to see they’re not alone and not at fault.” The hope is the world will see the connections and do something. Steinem’s goal is to see the day when society doesn’t see sexualized violence as inevitably part of war. So far, Women Under Siege has documented eight case studies of sexualized violence and rape. Myanmar, Honduras, Sierra Leone are possible countries where the researchers may look for stories. “I think it (sexualized violence in war) is under reported and a remarkably widespread problem and it’s the thing that nobody likes to talk about. But it’s really destroying women’s lives in conflict areas,” said

“We’ve been working on it as long as I can remember . . . explaining rape was not sex, it was violence.” GLORIA STEINEM AUTHOR, FOUNDER OF MS. MAGAZINE

Lauren Wolfe, director of Women Under Siege. “I think women are lost in the picture. But, more than ever, women and children are the central targets and central victims of war.” Wolfe and other staff at the web- site plan to continue researching and building cases studies in other conflict zones. She’s just back from Guatemala, Mexico and Honduras and will be writing about experiences there soon.

The website features a blog of guest essays and first person accounts of sexualized violence, including an essay by CBS reporter Lara Logan, who was sexually assaulted while covering protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square last year.

The website, launched thanks to a donation by Bonnie Schaefer, an American philanthropist, hopes to mount both a public education campaign as well as push for legal diplomatic and public interventions by the UN and other international agencies and groups.

“I think perhaps for each of us the key message is this is not a distant struggle. In our own community there are probably forms of it. So I think each of us can approach the process of de-normalizing sexual violence — that violence and sex is two different things. Sex is about pleasure. Violence is about pain.”