The Spoils of War
Since time immemorial women have been considered chattel, objects of desire to be controlled by men, to be acquired for the assets of their physical attraction and utility, for their incomparable comforts, and above all for their fecundity in bearing the next generation.Objects of desire, of scorn, of ownership. They have been exploited and victimized throughout history. Victorious armies would dispatch the men and make off with the women, to be sold into slavery, or to become part of the campaign's brothel.
While much has changed in the civilized world where, on the surface, women are now respected as equals in every conceivable way with their male counterparts, in the developing world where tribalism still orders society, women's place is a demoralized, miserable existence.
The civilized world's attention has been brought to focus on the demonstrated fact that women are disproportionate victims of war. That war itself is waged in large part on women. That men, surfeit with hormonal excitation, demand that women sacrifice themselves on their demand. Resisting, they die, complicit they emerge tortured and a fragment of their original selves.
Throughout the two great world wars, conquering armies descending on the conquered, raped women in a gesture of celebration and domination and the deliverance of humiliation. In every war, those fought internationally, those fought by neighbours, and those fought internally, women's plight remains as it always has; they're fragile and disposable.
Even United Nations peacekeepers, installed to keep the peace in Africa, have done their part in victimizing vulnerable women and children, raping at leisure, repenting when caught. Rape became a weapon against the male opposition between armies, where impregnation of an enemy's women would perpetuate their genetic line, not that of the enemy's.
The women were routinely disowned, found repugnant, held as hostile interlopers in the society once theirs. Victimized and then doubly victimized. Now, in Congo, as in Sudan and Somalia and elsewhere in Africa, women are horrendously raped, not only gang-raped by rapacious groups of men, but brutally, mechanically raped, that torture inflicted on them as a lesson learned to their tribe.
Rape has become an accepted version of combat, the sporting element of warfare. The military as well as the opposing militias in Africa, in Democratic Republic of Congo, go about their business of rape where women are horribly mutilated in the process, and where often their fearful families are forced to give witness to the unspeakable brutality.
Children are also raped, their lives taken from them; either murdered or left to recover physically if they can, but never psychically, their mental state in an arrested state of blank-eyed trauma.
An adviser for Oxfam in Goma has testified that "I've worked in Angola and Darfur and the situation there was horrific, but in Congo the scale and brutality is a whole different level."
Labels: Societal Failures, Terrorism, World Crises
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, November 06, 2008
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