Women Caught in Conflict and Refugee Situations - by Anne Firth Murray

A Rwandan widow describes her agony about keeping the baby of her rapist: After the genocide, I went for an HIV test and found that I was negative but I had conceived due to the killers. The child was born, but most of the time I am not happy about him, especially because he reminds me of the bad images of the people who raped me. I lost seven children [in the war] and I am now bringing up a child of bad luck.It is very hard for me.The pain never goes away.I cannot love this child.Its hell on earth and the genocide continues to live with me. (According to the New York Times, in 1996, by conservative estimates there [were] 2,000 to 5,000 unwanted children in Rwanda whose moth ers were raped during the civil war and mass killings.) War affects women intensely and disastrously. In addition to the complications of caring for a family during wartime, women may face displacement from home, separation from loved ones, and extreme abuse, including rape, torture, and death. The gender bias that fuels violence against women during peacetime boils over and intensifies in conflict situations as military officials ignore or sanction gross violations of human rights. Though war is perceived as a male activityand indeed those involved in militaristic actions are overwhelmingly menit is largely civilian women and children who bear the costs in the many civil wars of our time. The majority of the conflicts occurring now around the world are fought within the borders of countries, often fueled by religious, ethnic and tribal, economic, and political differences. These conflicts precipitate humanitarian crises, like those in regions around Afghanistan, Congo, Sierra Leone, and Sudan, where thousands of people have been displaced, affecting the social and economic situations of neighboring countries. Since 1991, such conflicts have become more numerous and more deadly, and the nature of warfare has changed. Nowadays war often involves the deliberate targeting of civilians, noncombatants, and their livelihoods. The goal of modern civil wars usually is not so much to eliminate the opponents as to destroy their culture and the very fabric of society, according to a 2002 Save the Children report, The State of the Worlds Mothers. As a result, said United Nations military adviser Major General Patrick Cammaert in 2008, It is now more dangerous to be a woman than to be a soldier in modern conflict. In Congo and Sudan, for example, thousands of civilians, the majority of them women and children, have been forced from their homes, often raped, and left to wander or to try to find help in neighboring countries. Similarly, in Afghanistan in 1999, the Taliban employed a scorched -earth policy in the Shomali plains south of Kabul, whereby they burned homes, killed livestock, uprooted orchards and vineyards, poisoned wells, and forbade the people to return. This deliberate targeting of civilians, as well as the collateral damage caused by modern weapons of destruction, means that civilians are now dying at higher rates than in any other period in the last hundred years. Civilian casualties as a result of conflict have risen from 5% at the turn of the last century to 65% during World War II, to 90% in some recent conflicts. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) reports that there were 43.3 million forcibly displaced people worldwide at the end of 2009, the highest number since the mid-1990s. In recent years, there have been major conflicts happening in Afghanistan, India, Iraq, Mexico, Pakistan, Somalia, and Sudan, as well as at least nineteen smaller-scale armed conflicts. Women and children comprise the majority of civilians killed and injured in these wars, and they make up 80% of those who have fled their homes because of conflict and human rights violations. As Vesna NikolicRistanovic writes inWomen, Violence, and War, Women are non-combatant victims in all forms of warfareinternational and internal, religious, ethnic or nationalistic, and from both enemy and friendly fire. Women suffer numerous and diverse violent actsthe majority of which remain invisible.

Only recently has it been internationally recognized that war and conflict affect women differently. The first UN Security Council resolution ever to specifically recognize the issue (Resolution 1325) was adopted in October 2000. It advocated increased participation by women in peace-keeping activities and recognized the special vulnerability of women in times of conflict. The first-ever UN study on the impact of violent conflict on women and girls was issued in 2002. Also in 2002, Secretary General Annan issued a report to the Security Council in which he acknowledged that Women and children are disproportionately targeted in contemporary armed conflict and constitute the majority of all victims, and that during conflict, women and girls are vulnerable to all forms of violence, in particular sexual violence and exploitation, including torture, rape, mass rape, forced pregnancy, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, and trafficking. They face numerous health threats grounded in biological differences, and the high rate of infection and death increases womens workload in maintaining their households and community and providing care to orphaned children. The effects of war on women arise from the social and cultural context preceding the onset of conflict. The 2002 UNIFEM Women, War, and Peace Report underscores womens essential disadvantage: The economic, social, political, legal and cultural structures that perpetuate gender inequality are still in place throughout the world, and in no nation do women have complete equality within these structures to participate as fully as men. These hierarchical structures resulting in discrimination against women and their second-class status in society during peacetime limit womens ability to cope with the consequences of war, especially in countries with a fundamentalist interpretation of religion which is repressive of womens rights. As Vesna Nicolic-Ristanovic explains: Patriarchy means that women are regarded as mens property, an addition to the territory and other things that men possess. Rape is to male-female relations what conquering troops are to occupied territories, and imperial authority is to colonialism. Simply put: women experience war differently than do men. The inequities that women around the world face during peacetime are compounded by the enacting of nationalist, social, and cultural notions of gender and state. These conditions render them especially vulnerable to stress, trauma, and disease at every time of warduring conflict, flight, displacement, and the aftermath of war. (For a discussion of womens situation during war and conflict, flight from home, displacement, and the aftermath of war in refugee situations, see Chapter 7 of Murray, Anne Firth, From Outrage to Courage, 2008.)