Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women

Product Information

Slowly, attitudes to rape in conflict are changing. In 2018 the Nobel peace prize was awarded to the Yazidi campaigner Nadia Murad – herself a victim of battlefield rape – and Dr Denis Mukwege, a surgeon from the DRC. At Panzi hospital in Bukavu, Mukwege has pioneered a holistic approach that starts with surgical procedures to repair physical damage done to women, and proceeds to psychotherapy, financial support and legal advice. Mukwege is clear that in the DRC, soldiers rape as much as irregular bandit forces. As a result, his life is in constant danger. “It takes time, but the only way we can change society is to end impunity,” he tells Lamb. Christina Lamb has worked in war and combat zones for over thirty years. In Our Bodies, Their Battlefield she gives voice to the women of conflicts, exposing how in today’s warfare, rape is used by armies, terrorists and militias as a weapon to humiliate, oppress and carry out ethnic cleansing.

Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women

There have been a few trials. Sadly, this seldom happens – and the process to get it done can be very excruciating for the women as they have to tell over and over again the events that forever traumatized them. The mother of the little girl who almost walked into the hole was from Kocho. She was thirty-five, her name was Asma Bashar, and her voice was staccato like a machine gun. The others called her Asma Loco because they said she had lost her mind. She told me that forty members of her family had been slaughtered, including her mother, father, and brothers. Four sisters and twelve nieces had been taken as sex slaves. “I have no one left but one sister who managed to escape from captivity and is now in Germany,” she said. “I take pills to try and blot out what happened.” Rape is the only crime in which society is more likely to stigmatize the victim than punish the perpetrator.” At the very end of Christina Lamb’s devastating account of rape in modern conflict, she wonders why women’s names are not written on war memorials. If you can make it through the harrowing accounts of sexual violence in Our Bodies, Their Battlefield, it is a question you will find yourself asking, too.The camp where these Yazidis are living is more than a thousand miles from their homeland under the tall sacred mountain between Iraq and Syria on which they believe Noah’s Ark came to rest.

Our Bodies, Their Battlefield by Christina Lamb | Waterstones Our Bodies, Their Battlefield by Christina Lamb | Waterstones

Accounts of rape are often doubted and dismissed. For journalists, the only weapons are questions and facts. It can be complicated; Lamb mentions the case of a Rohingya man in a squalid refugee camp in Bangladesh who made up an account about his family. Blame is not straightforward in such traumatic times: people are desperate for help, and the press is searching for stories.Here is like a prison, everyone fighting each other,” said Ayesha, the very still girl who seemed to have stepped out of a painting. “We have nothing left, no money, we spent everything to get here and the world does not care about us.” Prisiekiu, rašau ir man oda šiurpsta kūnas vėl ir vėl. Baisu yra realiai suvokti tokius faktus, priimti tokias specialias organizacijas kaip, kad Kongas, baisu yra pagalvoti ir tai, kad 21a. tai vyksta!

Our Bodies, Their Battlefield : What War Does to Women Our Bodies, Their Battlefield : What War Does to Women

Lamb wonders, as we all do, what drives men to this kind of bestial behaviour. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, victims are as young as four months and as old as 86. This is not just about sex. Casting her subjects as survivors rather than victims, Lamb gives life to individual stories without neglecting the larger picture ... [ Our Bodies, Their Battlefields] casts vital light on a subject that has been long, and shamefully, ignored."

Also Enjoy…

PDF / EPUB File Name: Our_Bodies_Their_Battlefield_-_Christina_Lamb.pdf, Our_Bodies_Their_Battlefield_-_Christina_Lamb.epub This has been in many ways a journey through the worst depravities of man and I thank you for bearing with me, for I know it has not been an easy read,” she writes. But silence is the women’s worst enemy, and that’s why, while some may be tempted to turn away from the horror, this is such an important book. Skaitant apie jau pasibaigusius karus (Antrąjį pasaulinį ir kitus), norėjosi lengviau atsikvėpti, kad daugiau taip niekada nebebus, žmonija jau pasimokė iš savo klaidų. Tačiau beviltiškiausia, jog moterys, vaikai prievartaujami ir dabar, o mes nieko negalime padaryti, jog jų kančios pasibaigtų.

Our Bodies, Their Battlefield by Christina Lamb | Waterstones

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2020 SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2021 For millennia mass rape has been a weapon of war. But the testimony of abuse is almost entirely absent from all recorded history. At last this brave, beautiful and brutal book allows victims to speak — devastatingly, inspirationally." It is hard to read this book and feel any hope for humanity. There is much work for us to do. Are we willing to step up and do our part to bring redemption and break the cycles of violence? Are we willing to pay the price? It must be hard to read,” remarks the woman sitting across from me on a flight when she spies the title of the book in my hand. Our Bodies, Their Battlefields spans several different countries and instances where rape has been used as a weapon of war and conflict, whether it’s in the case of Yazidi women imprisoned by ISIS, or the Chibok schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram in Northern Nigeria, or the Rohingya women fleeing genocide in Myanmar. With each of these cases, Lamb interviews survivors of atrocities, dedicating space to their harrowing individual stories in their own voices. She speaks to doctors, experts, lawyers and ordinary people, all pursuing justice for crimes that have for too long and too often gone unpunished. TIME spoke to Lamb about her experience of foreign reporting, survivors’ pursuit of justice, and what gives her faith in humanity. TIME: Histories and contemporary reporting on conflict is usually dominated by white men. What gets lost when we only have one set of voices telling these stories?You write that “women have long been seen as spoils of war.” What has been the historic attitude towards rape in conflict, and are these attitudes are changing? This is a really important issue. We’re not trained as psychologists or trauma specialists, but very often, we’re the first people to speak to victims or survivors of terrible things. A good example is the Rohingya. They’re fleeing into Bangladesh, and we’re all there taking notes on all these terrible atrocities. I think it’s actually really important that there is some training for journalists, because the last thing you want to do to these people is re-traumatize them. They’ve already been through the worst possible thing that could happen to them. Is there a responsibility for readers, too, when reading these stories? She speaks with women in Bangladesh (Rohingya refugees), Argentina, Guatemala, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Nigeria, and Rwanda. The author also explains that this rape and sexual enslavement is all part of the systemic genocide and ethnic cleansing taking place – to dehumanize and destroy. She also points out that in war it may at times be necessary to kill – but rape is a deliberately vicious act.