On Friday, the United Nations Security Council is meeting in New York, to debate the findings of the UN Secretary General about conflict-related sexual violence. This report, conducted during the year of 2013, documents some of the horrible conditions that women and girls around the world have to live in, in terms of the threats to their sexuality.
South Sudan, Somalia, Mali, Yemen, Central African Republic, Columbia, and Afghanistan were among the worst of the places for a woman to live. In these areas, rape is used as a weapon for a multitude of reasons. Whether as a instrument of war, terrorization, or influence, sexual violence constitutes an extreme threat to the livelihood of woman throughout the world, highlighted especially in these seven places.
Conflict and violence have become a regularity in places like South Sudan. As a fight between civilian rebels and active national army has broken out, regulation of sexual violence has fallen to the wayside. Not only are the women in these areas having to worry about the threats to their lives on a daily basis, their own sexuality is in danger at the hands of their own national army and government officials.
In Somalia, the biggest offenders of sexual violence against women were found to be armed men in uniform, like those cases in South Sudan. Although the report did not provide an exact measure of the scales of these sexual crimes due to the inability to even calculate the multitude of them, women were found as constantly vulnerable to exploitation in a sexual nature due to forced evacuation due to war and fighting.
Forced marriage has always been a major human rights concern in Yemen, but now the rate of sexual abuse and child abduction in Yemen has rose an incredibly alarming rate. Since no actual protocol is currently in place to deal with sexual abuse cases, women and girls are left vulnerable without any way to find reprieve.
In the Central African Republic, violence has unfortunately become an every day occurrence, with rape and sexual violence constituting a large majority of this violence. With an increase in the amount of door-to-door interrogations by the armed forces on both sides of the violence, the UN found reports of at least 146 pregnancies from conflict-related rape due to the sexual violence associated with these interrogations. This alone stands as a direct example of the kind of sexual violence the women in this area deal with on a daily basis. Not only this, but these women have no one to stand up for them, as female politicians and public officials are raped, kidnapped, and tortured.
The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission recorded a 25% increase in sexual violence and abuse against women, which comes from Afghanistan’s parliament’s attempt to undo the protocol currently protecting this type of violence against women. Military commanders, ex-warlords, tribal leaders, and armed groups have been found as the biggest offenders against these women.
As a community, Notre Dame has done an increasingly great job at attempting to protect it’s students against sexual crimes, but we should look to extend our reach beyond our South Bend borders. Not only do we, as a student body, need to look for ways to reduce sexual violence on campus, but we are called as females to protect our own all over the world.
Creating awareness of these horrible crimes is the first step in arming these women against offenders, but we have to look to do more going forward. With increased awareness, we can start to investigate ways to extend the Notre Dame philosophy of protecting the community against sexual violence and bring about a better future for the women in countries like the ones above.
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