War: Women in Crisis Zones

         Women in countries experiencing conflict are especially vulnerable to acts of violence in addition to having to deal with taking care of families in unstable conditions. “Most armed conflicts today are civil wars, and most of these involve the deliberate targeting of civilians,” (Seager, p.100). Women are often subjected to wartime rape. This is “endemic and often systematic,” (Seager, p.101). Military forces will fight in an area and “systematically’ rape and kill as a show of force and power. Wartime rape is used as a military tactic to terrorize the population “through the symbolic (i.e. destruction) of the community, culture, or nation,” (Coomaraswamy and Kois, p.213). Countries in Sub-Saharan Africa have experienced systematic rape of women by soldiers in armed conflict from 1980s to 2008 include: South Africa, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi, and Somalia, among others (Seager, p. 101).

Citation

Coomaraswamy, Radhika, and Lisa M. Kois. "Rape of Women in Situations of Armed Conflict." Women

and International Human Rights Law. Ed. Kelly D. Askin and Dorean M. Koenig. Vol. 1.

Ardsley: Transnational, 1999. 213-14. Print.

Seager, Joni. The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World. 4th ed. New York: Penguin, 2009. Print.