'Invisible War' exposes widespread rape in US military

Picture from Kirby Dick's film 'Invisible War'

Πηγή: yahoonews
By Sharon Waxman (Reuters)

Jan 23 2012

PARK CITY, Utah, Jan 22 (TheWrap.com) - Rape in the American armed forces is an issue that has quietly been gathering attention over the past decade. But it exploded with the power of suppressed fury at the Sundance festival's Friday afternoon screening of the documentary "The Invisible War," a devastating indictment of the government's inaction on the issue.

Director Kirby Dick brought a powerful weapon to his film: victim after eloquent victim, Navy, Marine, Coast Guard, Army and Air Force veterans who were assaulted by fellow officers, supervisors or recruits.

They tell their stories in courageous detail, and it quickly becomes clear that these are not isolated incidents but a pattern reflective of a widespread rot within America's military institution, one that betrays its essential values.

The individuals Dick chose as the principal characters in his film -- there were so many to choose from -- were among the best of their class. They were women (and in some cases, men) who joined the military out of devotion to country and a desire to serve.

One Marine, Ariana Klay, was raped by a fellow officer in the elite Marine Barracks in Washington, D.C.

A Navy officer, Trina McDonald, was drugged and raped repeatedly by fellow officers on a remote base in Alaska.

Coast Guard recruit Kori Cioca was raped and then assaulted -- smacked so hard in the face that it dislocated her jaw, causing her permanent damage and pain for which the Veterans Administration declines to provide medical coverage.

One woman who was assaulted had previously been a military investigator of crimes. Rape investigations were always steered away from the women, she recounted, because they would be "too sympathetic."

Every woman in the film has had her life shattered by this event -- not necessarily because of the rape, but because of the response by the military establishment.

After lodging complaints, the women were met with indifference or targeted retaliation. They have had to leave the military. Some were threatened with violence.

For each, the betrayal by their colleagues and by an institution they trusted deeply has been a wound that, as one military psychologist affirms, cuts to "the soul."

Almost none of the alleged perpetrators were brought up on charges or punished in any way. Some have gone on to rape again, in the military or the private sector.

Kirby, who took on the Catholic Church's indifference to sexual abuse in "Twist of Faith," hopes the film will mobilize change in a way that lobbying and newspaper journalism so far have not.

Two obvious policy changes are necessary: better screening of new recruits to winnow out potential predators, and moving the authority for investigating and prosecuting rape into indendent hands. At the moment, local commanders have nearly all the power in these matters.

The military "has to admit they have a problem," Dick said at the Q&A after the screening, where more than a half-dozen victims stood and received applause.

"They need another mind-set to attack this issue."

The movie, which does not yet have distribution, profoundly shocked the audience. One military recruiter stood and asked for the names of the bases involved so she could steer female enlistees away from known risk areas. A 17-year-old girl stood up in tears and thanked the women for speaking out.

But there was one inspiring surprise after the screening. A couple in the audience approached Cioca and told her they will pay for the surgery to repair her jaw, which causes her pain every day. The cost is around $60,000, and without V.A. medical coverage she cannot afford it.Cioca was overwhelmed. The couple, an investment banker and his wife, said they preferred to remain anonymous.

African women say rebels raped them in Libyan camp

Πηγή: McClatchy
By David Enders and McClatchy Newspapers
Wednesday, September 7, 2011

JANZOUR, Libya — When the sun sets on the refugee camp for black Africans that has sprung up at the marina in this town six miles west of Tripoli, the women here brace for the worst.

The rebels who ring the camp suddenly open fire. Then they race into the camp, shouting "gabbour, gabbour" — Arabic for whore — and haul away young women, residents say.

"You should be here in the evening, when they come in firing their guns and taking people," one woman from Nigeria said Wednesday as she recounted the nightly raids on the camp. "They don't use condoms, they use whatever they can find," she said, pointing to a discarded plastic bag in a pile of trash.

As she spoke, other women standing nearby nodded in agreement.

There is no way to know how many women have been raped here, where hundreds of Africans have settled in and around the boats of a marina. No one keeps statistics in the camp, and foreign aid workers say they are prohibited from discussing the allegations on the record. International Red Cross representatives say only that they have spoken to rebel leaders about "security concerns."

But the story that women tell is part of a larger picture of abuse of black Africans in Libya that is emerging in the wake of the rebel victory, born of allegations that Gadhafi often hired sub-Saharan Africans to fight for him.

Hundreds of black Africans have been swept up and are being held in makeshift prisons awaiting some sort of judicial finding of whether they were mercenaries or not. Thousands more are trapped in refugee camps. They can't leave the camps, they say, for fear they'll be targeted on the streets. They do not feel safe inside the camps, either.

Human rights advocates have decried what appears to be mistreatment of black African workers, and U.S. Ambassador Gene Cretz, speaking in Washington on Wednesday, admitted it's a growing problem.

"We've seen fairly credible reports that there has been some mistreatment of African migrants," Cretz told McClatchy. He said the U.S. was trying to work with rebel leaders to prevent abuse, which he blamed on young rebels who are confusing Africans who might have fought as mercenaries for Gadhafi with the hundreds of thousands of sub-Saharan Africans who were working in Libya when the rebels took over.

"We don't think it's a systematic or intentional problem on the part of the Libyan authorities," Cretz said. "It's something that's happening at levels below that, which is of considerable concern to us."

Cretz said the rebels' National Transitional Council is working with the United Nations and other international relief organizations to ease the situation.

There was little evidence of such efforts at the marina here, however. At the nearby headquarters of the revolutionary forces in the area, Mohammed Abdullah Fatouri, the head of the military council, said that he was unaware of any problems in the camp.

"Have them bring a letter," he said. "If they tell us this is happening, we will protect them."

At the camp itself, fear is pervasive. When a car bearing two armed rebels drove into the camp, both men and women scattered.

It was not clear what the rebels wanted. Someone said they were looking for laborers. Perhaps emboldened by a pair of European TV camera crews, however, some of the camp's residents confronted the rebels. An older man, apparently the translator for one of the European TV crews, intervened, and after a few minutes, the militiamen got back in the car and drove off.

Tensions here have been made even worse, the camp's residents said, because Libyan fisherman whose boats have been turned into dwellings want them back.

Life in the camp has been difficult. Only on Monday did the Red Cross deliver aid packages.

"They brought us shampoo and some medical supplies, but not enough," the woman from Nigeria said. "We can't eat shampoo. There's no water for showers."

"Until two days ago we had no water," one man said. "People were drinking the seawater."

Relations between Libyans and black African workers have long been troubled. Many Africans came here without official documentation from the Libyan government and grew accustomed to abuse as a part of life, something they accepted in trade for employment in oil-rich Libya.

"Sometimes your boss beats you or doesn't pay you," said Stacey Alexandra, 26, who said she had spent the last three years in Libya cleaning private homes and hotels and sending money back to family in Cameroon. "Now everyone here wants to leave. This country is too racist."

Alexandra showed a scar on her arm that she said had come from an assault on the street as she was leaving her home last month as the fighting intensified.

"It was a group of young men," she said, adding that they did not appear to be a faction fighting for either side.

"The (revolutionaries) forced us to work for 10 days, cleaning up one of their barracks," said a man named Eddy. "Yesterday, two people went out to get bread. They have not come back."

"I fled with nothing," said a man named Nelly, pointing to the mismatched flip-flops on his feet. "When (the revolutionaries) took over Tripoli, they drove us out of our homes. I lived with my uncle in Souk al Jumaa. My uncle was not home. As I ran away, I saw many blacks. They said this was a safe place, so I followed them. I can't find my uncle. The war has taken my uncle."

For Nelly to look for his uncle in Tripoli on Wednesday would have been unthinkable. At a revolutionary base in Souk al Jumaa, one of the first neighborhoods in Tripoli freed from Gadhafi's control, revolutionary commander Jamal Ibrahim Safar offered advice, in English, to a Ghanaian citizen who had been detained by his men at a checkpoint.

"Stay off the street," he said to Essau Abdou Mohamed, who identified himself as a barber who lost his passport three months ago. Mohamed said that in the last three weeks, he hadn't left his house after dark.

"This is the third time I've been detained," said Abdou Mohamed. His saving grace had been a letter, now well-worn, from the revolutionary military council in Misrata, 160 miles east of Tripoli, explaining that he had lost his passport but that he was not suspected of being a pro-Gadhafi fighter.

Rape Reporting During War: Why the Numbers Don't Mean What You Think They Do

Πηγή: Foreign Affairs

By Amber Peterman, Dara Kay Cohen, Tia Palermo, and Amelia Hoover Green

August 1, 2011

Reports of sexual violence during the ongoing unrest in Libya have captured headlines across the world. Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi's forces, some have alleged, were given Viagra to facilitate their rape of hundreds, if not thousands, of victims. Recently, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton both expressed outrage at what was apparently a purposeful campaign. Yet recent reports by the U.N. and by advocacy groups shed doubt on these claims. Amnesty International, for example, has been unable to locate a single rape victim, or even anyone who knows a victim.

As the veracity of stories about sexual violence in Libya came into question, the American Journal of Public Health published a study estimating that the prevalence of rape in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was far worse than previously documented. The article estimated that between 2006 and 2007 more than 400,000 women between the ages of 15 and 49 were raped during the war there -- 26 times the U.N.'s official count.

So what are we to make of these two cases -- a possible exaggeration of rape in Libya and a gross underestimation of it in the DRC? Wartime sexual violence has rightly been called a hidden epidemic; in truth, we know very little about its actual magnitude and impact. Reports of rape are increasingly common in countries wracked by conflict, such as Colombia, the DRC, East Timor, Côte d'Ivoire, Libya, and Sudan, but no one knows what the relationship is between increased reports and increased rape. Even in peacetime, sexual violence is severely and unevenly underreported. Beyond prevalence, patterns of where, when, and by whom rape is committed -- not to mention why it is committed -- are even less clear. War exponentially worsens these problems. As a result, estimates of rape in prominent conflicts are often unreliable.

The lack of clarity about wartime sexual violence is hardly surprising. Wartime rape is violent and brutal. Few of us want to think about it, talk about it, or read about it. Even when it does make headlines, it is the sensational details, not meaningful analysis of patterns and causes, that are often reported. And researchers are as apt as anyone to look away. The study of wartime rape has been marginalized as a "feminist" or "gender" issue. For many years, research on sexual violence was considered too unseemly a topic for top academic publications. Social scientists and statisticians rarely collect systematic data on wartime rape; instead, they frequently rely on victim narratives recorded by human rights advocates, aid workers, and journalists; as well as law enforcement reports; and hospital records.
A 2002 BBC article stated that "a girl born in South Africa will have a greater chance of being raped than learning how to read." It is almost certainly not true that the rape rate there surpasses 97.5 percent, the U.N. estimate for literacy among South African females aged 15 to 24.