Demonstrators hold signs against what they describe as international silence over sexual violence perpetrated against Israeli women by Hamas, in Jerusalem, on Oct. 7.DEDI HAYUN/Reuters
Mellissa Fung is a Canadian journalist based in London, and the author of Between Good and Evil: The Stolen Girls of Boko Haram.
“The bodies were mutilated tremendously,” Tal Hochman tells me, her voice catching, from her office in Tel Aviv. As the Israeli Women’s Network’s government liaison, Ms. Hochman is a member of the civil commission that has been formed to investigate all the gender-based crimes reported to have occurred during Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on kibbutzim and towns in southern Israel – and so she has seen the mounting evidence that the group committed horrific sexual crimes, mostly against women, that day.
She has seen footage from Hamas fighters’ body cameras, heard testimonials from survivors, and spoken with members of the military assigned to help identify the bodies and prepare them for burial. Those sources tell of horrific instances of sexual abuse. Gang rapes, genital mutilation and necrophilia have all been reported. Women were found naked or stripped from the waist down, she said, and – in one particularly sadistic incident, captured on a body camera – a breast was cut off and thrown around like a tennis ball.
“It feels like they were sent on a mission to do these terrible things, and also to enjoy them,” Ms. Hochman added. “The survivors say they were laughing and shooting.” She stops and I can hear a sharp intake of breath.
Despite the brutality of these crimes, however, they initially received scant coverage outside the country – and there is concern from women’s rights groups and rape survivor networks that they could go unpunished. “We were even asking ourselves, ‘What’s going on? Why isn’t anyone talking about this?’ "
But Hamas fighters are hardly alone in the way they have wielded gender-based violence within a wider conflict. In October, the United Nations released a report documenting alleged war crimes committed by Russian soldiers who occupied villages in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia provinces last year. According to the section dedicated to sexual and gender-based violence, girls as young as 16 and as old as 83 were reportedly subjected to rape – sometimes repeatedly, and sometimes by more than one soldier. The stories are all horrific, including one from a 75-year-old woman who, in July, 2022, was beaten while being interrogated by a Russian soldier who then ordered her to undress – “and when she refused, he ripped off her clothes, cut her abdomen with a small sharp object and raped her several times,” the report said. “The victim had several broken ribs and knocked out teeth as a result.” Another survivor told investigators that, while she was being gang-raped, she was just “hoping for a rifle shot, so that I wouldn’t have to suffer any more.”
Meanwhile, amid their fight against government forces, Sudanese militias have waged war on civilian women’s bodies, raping and killing with impunity. Since April, when the country was plunged into civil war, the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa (SIHA) has been struggling to keep track of the sexual violence inflicted on women. Their report, also published in October, reads much like the UN’s dispatch about Ukraine: “Many of these cases [of rape and gang rape] occurred when armed parties … came to homes or shelters for looting purposes or as part of neighbourhood raids, and raped the women and girls in their homes. Other cases came when civilians fled, with women separated from men in public and taken elsewhere to be raped.”
If we take all this to conclude that one of war’s oldest and most silent weapons is being used at an alarming rate and with impunity today, the UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict would agree. Pramila Patten told the security council this July that the trend is “worsening.” Despite all the reporting that NGOs and governments are trying to do, she reminds us that “for every woman who comes forward, many more are silenced by social pressures, stigma, insecurity and the paucity of services.”
Too often, violence against women and gender-based violence in conflict is seen as a sidebar to the bigger issue; what’s more, when the world’s eyes are clearly looking elsewhere, it can feel like we haven’t made any progress at all in the understanding that women and children bear the brunt of war. How is it that we continue to fail to recognize and report this horrible reality?
If we look at how this issue – and our apparent apathy – plays out in postconflict countries, it’s even more depressing. In Afghanistan, an entire population of women is now living under what amounts to gender apartheid. Most women have been confined to their homes, many of them trapped in abusive relationships upheld by the Taliban state; human-rights organizations are warning that suicide rates among Afghan women are rising steadily.
A friend of mine in Kabul, who is still waiting to hear back about her application for refugee status in Canada, told me that most women in Afghanistan “are living, but we are not alive.” She feels that women are now more vulnerable because there appear to be no criminal consequences for harming them – and she says that victims of sexual assault, forced marriages and abductions thus believe they have no recourse but suicide.
Women’s rights groups say the lack of international pressure on the Taliban to reverse its policies on women have emboldened misogynists the world over. “What we’ve seen in terms of the international response to the Taliban’s abuses has been incredibly discouraging,” says Heather Barr, a veteran Human Rights Watch researcher who has borne witness to a disturbing regression of women’s rights around the world. “The overall pattern we’re seeing right now is not one of forward motion, it’s one of backward motion in a lot of places on a lot of issues.”
Abuses against women have never been easy to prosecute. Rape and sexual assault committed in conflict are considered crimes against humanity under the Geneva Convention, but it wasn’t until the International Criminal Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda that the first prosecutions for sexual violence took place. And it took until 2016 for the International Criminal Court to achieve its first conviction of rape as a war crime, in the trial of former Congolese vice-president Jean-Pierre Bemba, who commanded a militia that committed mass murder, rape and pillage in the Central African Republic. Just two years later, however, Mr. Bemba’s convictions were overturned, with an appeals court ruling that he had a limited ability to know about and punish his soldiers’ crimes in a different country.
Tal Hochman, the Tel Aviv government liaison, says that the stigma and shame attached to sexual violence still prevents many survivors from coming forward to tell their stories. Sometimes religious and cultural norms make these subjects taboo as well. In Israel, where predominantly female hostages are slowly being released from Gaza, the government has asked witnesses and survivors to come forward to tell their stories, but she senses a reluctance. “This is not something that is easy to talk about and confess,” she said.
Some activists believe women need to be empowered to tell their stories, and the more stories are shared, the less shame survivors might feel. I witnessed this in northeastern Nigeria, where trauma therapy held in groups with the survivors of Boko Haram gave girls and women some of their agency back, knowing they were not alone in their experience. That initiative was led by a woman – the psychologist Dr. Fatima Akilu, one of the country’s foremost experts on trauma.
“Unless the women and girls start to heal,” she once told me, “the country really cannot.”
Many advocates also say that if we really take to heart UN Resolution 1325, which states that women must be full participants in peacebuilding, security and conflict resolution, we might have better outcomes.
“We know that if women actually were at the table and discussing how to deal with conflict,” Ms. Barr says, “we’d likely see some quite different approaches and maybe ones that would bring more accountability for sexual violence in conflict.” Perhaps we’d also even see less conflict.
But until then, the least we can do is listen to the survivors of sexual violence, validate their pain, and amplify their stories.
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