Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women

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You write that “women have long been seen as spoils of war.” What has been the historic attitude towards rape in conflict, and are these attitudes are changing? In Our Bodies, Their Battlefields , longtime intrepid war correspondent Christina Lamb makes us witness to the lives of women in wartime. An award-winning war correspondent for twenty-five years (she’s never had a female editor) Lamb reports two wars—the “bang-bang” war and the story of how the people behind the lines live and survive. At the same time, since men usually act as the fighters, women are rarely interviewed about their experience of wartime, other than as grieving widows and mothers, though their experience is markedly different from that of the men involved in battle. Lamb has done an astounding job in writing this book. Her sensitivity towards the survivors and her documentation of rape as a war weapon has been nothing short of marvellous. I was honestly expecting a tone of condescension and superiority and even pity, but the language betrayed none of these emotions. Lamb has neither exalted the women nor pitied them - she has rightly expressed the women’s anger at being violated. I can only imagine the toll it must take on someone’s mental health to be exposed to such horrors day in and day out. I read a lot of different stuff when I’m cooking plot points for the books I’m writing. This was one that flew across my radar a few weeks ago, and as soon as I saw it, I knew it was a book I absolutely had to read. I also knew it would be brutal, and difficult to get through, and I was not wrong. This might be one of the most important books I have ever read, but it is also one of the most harrowing, and one of the only books I’ve had to put down and walk away from before I could continue reading it.

Our Bodies, Their Battlefields: War Through the Lives of Women Our Bodies, Their Battlefields: War Through the Lives of Women

At times, Lamb worries that she is being intrusive, but she is also careful not to be credulous. An experienced journalist, she can tell when something doesn’t smell right – one Rohingya woman in a camp in Bangladesh has a long story that doesn’t add up. In the age of #MeToo, the impetus is to believe women and on the whole, she – quite rightly – does, while never losing her journalistic rigour. The litany of pain she recounts is all too believeable. I know because I have heard it too. Lamb’s attempts to interview perpetrators don’t get very far. The Isis prisoners she meets deny that they raped – it’s always someone else who kept a Yazidi slave, although, suspiciously, they seem to know a lot about the practice. Lamb asks why some armies rape and some do not. The British raped less than other armies during the second world war, mainly due to their military culture. Despite the brutality of the conflict, there are few reports of Israeli soldiers raping Palestinians, possibly because one-third of the soldiers in the Israeli Defence Forces are women, a far higher proportion than in most armies. The mother of the little girl who almost walked into the hole was from Kocho. She was thirty-five, her name was Asma Bashar, and her voice was staccato like a machine gun. The others called her Asma Loco because they said she had lost her mind. She told me that forty members of her family had been slaughtered, including her mother, father, and brothers. Four sisters and twelve nieces had been taken as sex slaves. “I have no one left but one sister who managed to escape from captivity and is now in Germany,” she said. “I take pills to try and blot out what happened.” Rape may be as old as war but it is a preventable crime. Bearing witness does not guarantee it won’t happen again, but it can take away any excuse that the world simply didn’t know. Knyga mano rankose kaip tik atsidūrė tuo metu, kai prasidėjo karas Ukrainoje, kai nesinorėjo jokios pompastikos, jokio saldumo, o tikrų istorijų, realių faktų.You meet these women, here in the city, or go out to the village, to Taba, and meet them and they seem normal. But I think when they go home and close their doors at night, there is a space inside them which no one can break into, no matter what you do.” It led, in 1998, to rape being recognised as an instrument of genocide for the first time if there was a specific intent to destroy a particular group, and its first prosecution as a war crime in an international court. Trauma leaves its mark, and it spans generations. In these stories, Lamb does not just discuss what happened to the women during these fraught, impossible times, but also to the children, to those who survived. The story of survival is often as brutal and heartrending as the war, the rapes, the abuse itself. There are no happy endings, or at least, there are very few. The war for some might end, but it seems as though it continues relentlessly on, carving a niche out of each woman's life, every day it is lived. An echo, a palimpsest of pain. In some places, the story is more hopeful than others, but the thread of misery is woven throughout. Broken people, the women with thin wavy bodies and long purplish hair framing faces drained of light, it seemed to me they were neither living nor dead. All had lost parents, brothers, sisters. In whispery voices like wafts of wind, they told of their beloved homeland of Sinjar, which they pronounced as Shingal, and the mountain of the same name which they thought would give sanctuary but where many perished of hunger and thirst. They told of a small town called Kocho, which ISIS had kept under siege for thirteen days then slaughtered all the men and older women and captured the virgins. And of the Galaxy Cinema, on the east bank of the Tigris River, where girls—some of them their sisters—were divided into ugly and beautiful then paraded to ISIS fighters in a market to be bought as their sex slaves.

Our Bodies, Their Battlefield - Booktopia Our Bodies, Their Battlefield - Booktopia

Through the window’s bars, I can see down below, row upon row of white prefab containers surrounded by wire concertina fence, and beyond that the Aegean Sea, jarring in its deep blue perfection. Christina Lamb’s “Our Bodies Their Battlefield” is an extensive (but barely) record of what women go through during wars and genocides. It focuses on the hidden victims of conflicts who are subjected to sexual violence and how these victims are unable to even seek justice because of the stigmatisation of rape. It is hard to read this book and feel any hope for humanity. There is much work for us to do. Are we willing to step up and do our part to bring redemption and break the cycles of violence? Are we willing to pay the price?

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Around the world, a woman's body is still very much a battlefield and hundreds of thousands of women bear the invisible wounds of war.” Ir nors vietomis yra siaubingai sunku skaityti, vietomis daug faktų ir nežinomų pasakojimų, bet perskaičius požiūris pasikeičia, akys atsiveria kitu kampu ir jeigu iki šiol atrodė tolima, nesuprantama, po knygos taip nebeatrodys. The author also explains that this rape and sexual enslavement is all part of the systemic genocide and ethnic cleansing taking place – to dehumanize and destroy. She also points out that in war it may at times be necessary to kill – but rape is a deliberately vicious act. Speaking to survivors first-hand, Lamb encounters the suffering and bravery of women in war and meets those fighting for justice. From Southeast Asia where 'comfort women' were enslaved by the Japanese during World War Two to the Rwandan genocide, when an estimated quarter of a million women were raped, to the Yazidi women and children of today who witnessed the mass murder of their families before being enslaved by ISIS. Along the way Lamb uncovers incredible stories of heroism and resistance, including the Bosnian women who have hunted down more than a hundred war criminals, the Aleppo beekeeper rescuing Yazidis and the Congolese doctor who has risked his life to treat more rape victims than anyone else on earth. In Our Bodies, Their Battlefields, longtime intrepid war correspondent Christina Lamb makes us witness to the lives of women in wartime. An award-winning war correspondent for twenty-five years (she’s never had a female editor) Lamb reports two wars—the “bang-bang” war and the story of how the people behind the lines live and survive. At the same time, since men usually act as the fighters, women are rarely interviewed about their experience of wartime, other than as grieving widows and mothers, though their experience is markedly different from that of the men involved in battle.

Our Bodies, Their Battlefields | Book by Christina Lamb

Nonostante i crimini di guerra a sfondo sessuale restino spesso nell'ombra qualcosa sta cambiando. E' un percorso lungo, pieno di ostacoli e sicuramente non semplice. Ma qualche vittoria è stata ottenuta e l'indagine portata avanti da Christina Lamb ha anche lo scopo di far conoscere queste storie, di portare alla luce le voci femminili e di renderle importanti quanto quelle degli eroi di guerra. Perchè anche loro sono eroine, anche loro hanno sofferto e meritano giustizia, almeno meritano la nostra attenzione. SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2020 SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2021 Rape, writes Christina Lamb at the start of this deeply traumatic and important book, is “the cheapest weapon known to man”. It is also one of the oldest, with the Book of Deuteronomy giving its blessing to soldiers who find “a beautiful woman” among the captives taken in battle. If “you desire to take her”, it says, “you may”. Many of the experiences shared with you in the book are traumatic, and we know from studies, even studies that have focused on COVID-19, that there is a psychological toll of covering trauma on journalists. What has the impact been like for you? Rape is the only crime in which society is more likely to stigmatize the victim than punish the perpetrator.”

Christina Lamb has worked in war and combat zones for over thirty years. In Our Bodies, Their Battlefield she gives voice to the women of conflicts, exposing how in today’s warfare, rape is used by armies, terrorists and militias as a weapon to humiliate, oppress and carry out ethnic cleansing.

Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women

She speaks with women in Bangladesh (Rohingya refugees), Argentina, Guatemala, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Nigeria, and Rwanda. There have been a number of successes in different places, in recent years: Guatemala, Colombia, Chad. But each time it’s been where the woman or women involved have been incredibly courageous, and incredibly persistent. There isn’t any institutional change, or major international movement to try and help these women. That’s what we need to be doing. It’s not enough that you occasionally get a success because somebody fought endlessly. You mention in the book one example of a Rohingya refugee woman living in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, who had been raped. A queue of journalists were lining up to hear her story. What would you say about the ethical responsibility of foreign correspondents when covering crises like those you have covered? It must be hard to read,” remarks the woman sitting across from me on a flight when she spies the title of the book in my hand. And I am ashamed to admit that I identified one area of complete ignorance. Before I started reading this book, I knew about crimes of ISIS and Boko Haram, I had a lot of information about wars in Yugoslavia and Rwanda and related international tribunals, I read books and watched documentaries about Rohingya crisis in Myanmar and Bangladesh, but I had zero knowledge about an ongoing war in Congo and about multiple victims of rape in this country.

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Our Bodies, Their Battlefields spans several different countries and instances where rape has been used as a weapon of war and conflict, whether it’s in the case of Yazidi women imprisoned by ISIS, or the Chibok schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram in Northern Nigeria, or the Rohingya women fleeing genocide in Myanmar. With each of these cases, Lamb interviews survivors of atrocities, dedicating space to their harrowing individual stories in their own voices. She speaks to doctors, experts, lawyers and ordinary people, all pursuing justice for crimes that have for too long and too often gone unpunished. TIME spoke to Lamb about her experience of foreign reporting, survivors’ pursuit of justice, and what gives her faith in humanity. TIME: Histories and contemporary reporting on conflict is usually dominated by white men. What gets lost when we only have one set of voices telling these stories? It was the same in Bangladesh in 1971 and in Argentina under the military junta in 1976-83. And it is the same in the world around us today. As Lamb takes us through the trauma and suffering of women in the Middle East or in Burma, we are chillingly reminded that despite legislation being passed to classify rape and sexual violence (against women and men) as a war crime, the International Criminal Court has not made a single conviction for war rape; that there have been no prosecutions for the abduction of Yazidi women or of young girls in Nigeria.