Early March 2020 saw the publication of a remarkable book on a shamefully neglected subject: the brutality visited on millions of civilian women in war zones. That the book launched just as the Covid-19 pandemic swept away all other news was unlucky timing for its author, war reporter Christina Lamb. To read her harrowing account of sexual atrocities in Our Bodies, Their Battlefield—in Burma, Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, Rwanda, Bosnia, Bangladesh, and elsewhere—is to recognize the huge disconnect between the gravity of multiple events unfolding around the world and the amount of coverage they receive. Some of these atrocities have been going on for years, and they were going on in 2017, when Western media attention was suddenly mesmerized by the issue of sexual aggression—but mostly as it pertained to casting-couch exploitation in the film industry.
Lamb has a much darker tale to tell. The stories she recounts of rape, torture, and maiming on a massive scale are horrific. They leave one asking what it is about men that war or ethnic conflict can unleash such orgies of savagery in them. What can induce a soldier to force a long wooden stick into his victim’s vagina or to stamp on her baby? These are moral quandaries outside the scope of Our Bodies and from which most of us avert our attention.
Lamb’s gruesome subject is something huge and ongoing in human affairs—and not just in wartime. The United Nations International Labor Organization estimates that 3.8 million women were victims of forced sexual exploitation in 2016. According to UNICEF/DCAF, “Globally, women between fifteen and forty-four are more likely to be injured or die from male violence than from traffic accidents, cancer, malaria, and the effects of war combined.” Much of the narrative in Our Bodies is devoted to detailed accounts of the search for justice by establishing rape as a war crime and securing convictions of its perpetrators—monumental tasks, especially since any quest for progress must confront the reality that wartime atrocities of recent times have all occurred in parts of the world where misogyny is culturally entrenched. International realpolitik plus political correctness share blame for the near silence on these crimes; so, too, does the self-absorption of Western liberal elites.
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