By: Lauren Wolfe And Catherine M. Mullaly
When we hear about conflicts in foreign countries and imagine
terrible acts, our thoughts don’t turn immediately to rape. We think of
bombings and refugees and government suppression. If we think of
sexualized violence at all, we may imagine a faceless, powerless woman,
one unfortunate person who will eventually become a statistic—400,000
raped in Rwanda, 100,000 in Guatemala. When we hear about conflicts, we
don’t imagine these stories. Or we consider them to simply be part of a
larger horror.
But at Women Under Siege, our mission is to show the world that each
woman raped is a person who has been illegally brutalized against her
will, that she is part of a family and a community that may now be
shredded. We aim to show that this woman, wherever she is, matters.
As part of this mission, we’re trying something new: telling
egregiously underreported stories from Syria as they happen, with as
much accuracy as possible. The blurred suffering of women who have been
sexually violated in the raging but opaque Syrian conflict is now being
made visible on our site, WomenUnderSiegeSyria.crowdmap.com.
We are gathering reports of rape, sexual assault, and groping—as well
as the consequences of sexualized violence, including mental health
issues and pregnancy. By utilizing Ushahidi crowdsourcing technology,
which allows survivors, witnesses, and first-responders to report via
email, Twitter (#RapeinSyria), or directly to the site, we are able to
get these stories to you in real time.
A map points to where the attack happened, while we give deeper
context when you click on the report. One report already on the map is
headlined “Multiple government attackers rape 36 women near Kurin/Sahl
Al-Rawj.” That takes you to the story of a woman who left her hiding
place to try to save the life of her son and husband as the army
advanced on her town. Soldiers bashed her with a rifle and tore at her
clothes wildly, she said, taking turns raping her while she watched her
husband die.
Our effort is being undertaken at many levels and with great caution
to protect the vulnerable: We’re working with refugee communities in
countries surrounding Syria to safely measure the exposure women may
have had to sexualized violence before fleeing. We’re categorizing their
stories by degrees of violence and by perpetrators (government forces
or otherwise). As part of the collection and verification process, we
are collaborating with Dr. Karestan Koenen, a professor and
epidemiologist at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health,
and Jackie Blachman-Forshay, a student at the Mailman School.
We have also partnered with Syrian activists living outside of the
country (who we will not name for their safety), as well as various
journalists and human rights and aid workers working with refugees in
Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. They are helping us gather the stories—from
relatives and friends, from news reports and Facebook—in an
ever-widening network that reaches from the Middle East to the U.S.
This method of information-gathering—crowdmapping—allows the voices
of the victims to be heard across the ether so they remain anonymous yet
strong. (For a crowdmap of human rights violations that fall outside of
sexualized violence, visit the nonprofit, volunteer
effort SyriaTracker.crowdmap.com.)
By plotting each story on a map, we are not only making clear that
these women’s stories are being heard, we are gathering valuable data
that can help us detect the vital signs of the Syrian conflict zone.
There is an old idiom in medicine that says, “You can’t diagnose a fever
without taking a temperature.” So just as taking a temperature tells us
so much about the health of a person, taking in the rate of sexual
assault can quickly, quantitatively, and objectively tell us valuable
information about the health of a whole population. This information can
be used to pinpoint where and when survivor services need to be
offered, from internally displaced persons camps to the conflict area
itself. It has “the potential to make a critical impact on the
collection of evidence of sexual violence in situations where access to
victims is highly constrained,” says Susannah Sirkin, deputy director of
the Cambridge, Mass.-based human rights organization Physicians for
Human Rights.
Historically, sexualized violence has been reported months, years,
and decades after a conflict, if at all, and justice has been slow to
come with evidence uncollected. Our hope is that by gathering statistics
and individual stories, we will be able to paint a clearer picture of
this aspect of the humanitarian crisis. Not only will we show whether
and how women are suffering from rape and its fallout—we will hopefully
provide reporting that can become the base for potential future
prosecutions, helping to hold perpetrators accountable.
Now when we imagine these conflict zones, we can see tangible
numbers and stories that are not gathered when it’s too late and
evidence has been destroyed. We can read live reports of suffering made
plain to the world, and we can imagine immediate attention being paid to
women who are being raped.
We can imagine this, but not without your help. Please spread the
word so we can make it happen: WomenUnderSiegeSyria.crowdmap.com.
Source: Women Under Siege
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