Launch of the Gender in Conflict and Security Webinar Series - Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women

Feb 8, 2021 | RUSI
Online
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The war crime few want to talk about: rape is used as a weapon to humiliate, oppress, seize territory, and carry out ethnic cleansing. Following an encounter with terrified Yazidi survivors in a dilapidated asylum place on a tiny Greek island, war correspondent Christina Lamb was so outraged at what she was hearing that she began collecting accounts from women and girls around the world.

 "Our Bodies, Their Battlefield" is the first book to confront the long history of rape in warfare with the harrowing contemporary stories of women in 12 countries. From Nigerian girls abducted by Boko Haram fighters to be ‘bush wives’, to Argentinian women forced to have sex with their military captors, Rohingya women tied to banana trees and gang-raped by Burmese soldiers or grandmothers in the Philippines still trying to get justice 75 years after they were used as ‘comfort women’ by Japanese soldiers, this is their story, told for the generations to come. As one 16-year-old Yazidi girl puts it in the book, ‘no one should be able to say they didn’t know’.

In this webinar, Christina will discuss the scale of rape and the suffering and bravery of women in modern conflict.

Who: RUSI

Where: Online

When: 8 February 2021   Time: 04:00 PM (London Time)