Military Violence

“War is Hell. You can’t photograph a flying bullet, but you can capture genuine fear.”

Numerous innocent citizens get adversely impacted during war. Whether it be the loss of life, a broken family, whether it be loss of property, or just pure chaos, war has a knack of wreaking havoc in the lives of innocent citizens. However, it doesn't end here, though not spoken much off, the rates of sexual crime amidst war are surprisingly high.

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One of the most known, gruesome, violent, and evil acts from all of the world’s history was the Rape of Nanjing. According to numerous eyewitness reports and later analyses, between 20,000 and 80,000 Chinese women were brutally raped and tortured, including young girls and elderly women by the Japanese Imperial Army during the Sino-Japanese War that preceded the second world war. Many of them—including victims of gang rapes—were mutilated and killed after being assaulted. This unfortunately isn't even the worst. The Rape of Naking-Iris Chang- the mass raping that was conducted in China by Japanese troops, till-date has been considered the “single worst instance of wartime rape inflicted on a civilian population”.

Acts of sexual violence took place at all locations, all hours of day and night. It didn’t matter who the victim was, it went from young girls to old grannies, farm wives to Buddhist nuns who were sworn to chastity. The Japanese sliced open the vaginas of preteen and teenage girls to “ravish them more effectively”. This didn’t stop there, pregnant women who were going in labor, in labor, or who had just given birth were raped too, after the raping was over, the Japanese soldiers sliced open their stomachs and ripped out the fetus for their amusement. Teenage girls were handcuffed and tied to beds, chairs, poles, whatever the Japanese could find in order to use them as sex objects, and were raped at all times of day. They found pleasure in degrading entire families, forcing fathers to rape their daughters, brothers rape their sisters, and sons to rape their mothers. Women that were raped were eventually looked-down by society and were highly ostracised. As if it was not bad enough having been raped and humiliated to the worst point possible, the society as a whole put-down such survivors and made them feel guilt and shame of what they had been through. Between 1937 and ‘38, a german diplomat at Nanjing had stated that the “uncounted” women had taken their own lives by flinging themselves into the Yangtze river to avoid the misery, shame, and agony of the rape and having to live with it.

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Another such situation took place during the Bangladesh- Pakistan war. In March of 1971, the Bangladesh Liberation War began. By December of the same year, more than 25,000 women had been forcibly impregnated through a common, yet unspoken tool of war: rape. The Butcher of Bengal was the nickname given to Pakistan’s military commander, Gen. Tikka Khan, notorious for overseeing Operation Searchlight, a murderous crackdown on Bengali separatists. Alongside the killings, many historians believe the violent campaign of mass rape to have been a direct policy under Khan’s command to impregnate as many women as possible with “blood from the west”. During the conflict, military-style rape camps were set up across the country.

Noor Jahan and Razia Begum are among the women abducted during this time. Jahan was just 14- years-old when she was taken from her home and held captive at one of the barracks dedicated to mass rape. Begum had gone looking for her husband when she found herself face to face with a group of soldiers. She tried to run but was struck on the head with a rifle; a scar she still bears. Begum was then dragged to a nearby forest where she was raped repeatedly over a period of weeks before being thrown into a shallow ditch. “They tied me to a tree and took turns raping me during their breaks,” said Begum, now 78.

Official estimates put the number of Bengali women raped at between 200,000 and 400,000, though even those numbers are considered conservative by some. Harrowing details from living survivors have emerged, detailing women being tied to trees and subjected to rape for days, tortured by bamboo sticks and set on fire. Many of the women would also find themselves battling with the stigma of unwanted pregnancies.

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Rape continues to be deployed in war as a tool of fear, a military strategy to terrorise communities and destroy their dignity. A recent report by the UN special representative on sexual violence in conflict listed 18 countries where women were being raped in war. The report also named 12 armies and police forces and 39 non-state actors.

Unfortunately, these sort of incidents extend to the military workplace as well. Nearly one in four U.S. servicewomen reports being sexually assaulted in the military. Florence Shmorgoner was raped by a fellow Marine in 2015. After she reported it and N.C.I.S. investigated, a commander decided not to press charges against her assailant. Florence, a 19 year old recruit was playing video games one afternoon with her fellow marine when she woke up in his whilst being groped by him. She also didn’t know what resources were available to Marines in the aftermath of sexual assault. “I don’t remember that we were told who the victim advocate was when I was in Twentynine Palms,” she says. “I really didn’t have the resources to report if I wanted to.”She hadn’t been able to fully register the fact that she had been raped and touched without any consent. This pulled Shmorgoner down into depression. Regular everyday activities had started becoming difficult and became a physical and mental stress on her. Over the next four years, Shmorgoner tried to kill herself six times. Later she had coincidentally befriended another rape victim who had been harrassed while on active duty. Learning about the rape of her friend, Shmorgoner was encouraged by her friend to report it. The NCIS has managed to get Shmorgoner an apology over a phone call from her perpetrator and had discouraged any further actions against him. The entire investigation had been closed by 2018 and the perpetrator had an honourable discharge from service. Women remain a distinct minority, making up only 16.5 percent of the armed services, yet nearly one in four servicewomen reports experiencing sexual assault in the military, and more than half report experiencing harassment, according to a meta-analysis of 69 studies published in 2018 in the journal Trauma, Violence & Abuse. (Men are victims of assault and harassment, too, though at significantly lower rates than women.)

This narrative needs to change. People need to be made aware of these situations. We need to stop hiding away from discussing this. We are the change.

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By Writer Sanah Ramchandani and Researcher Mihika Gupta