This week, no one signed up for our series. Tara is away and I have only limited internet access, so I can’t do the research I normally would for one of these diaries. But I did not want a week without anything going up, and there is a subject I’ve been thinking about recently and I’d like to share some thoughts about it.
The subject is war and its effect on women.
I have been reading a lot about the war in Gaza, and there is also Syria. In addition, the refugee problem on our southern border is the result of gang wars in Central America as well as our own disastrous war on drugs.
We are not the only species that makes war, though for a long time we thought we were. Chimpanzees, it turns out, send troops into neighboring territories which causes border wars that are violent and bloody, and result in one troop or the other claiming the disputed territory. These are not merely fights over food or mating rights, though land is desirable because it means more area to forage. And those of us who watched Meerkat Manor years ago watched as one family made war against another, generally also over land. As with humans, the same piece of land might be fought over several times. With chimps only the males fight; meerkats, being matriarchal, fight with all hands.
So war itself may be terrible, but it seems to be a very fundamental process and not simply a human invention.
Human cultures over millennia have glorified war, glorified the physical prowess of fighters. Canny strategists have also been lauded for thousands of years – the Trojan Horse is one example, and the Biblical Book of Joshua includes the conquest of the city Ai by deception and ambush.
Fights over land are part of our animal nature, and of course they still go on; only look at the Middle East and what has been called the “much too promised land.” And the conquest of territory brings with it the acquisition of women, widows, sisters, daughters of the vanquished. Women were part of the spoils of war, rape and pillage being part of the same process. The Hebrew Bible uniquely requires that war widows be allowed a period of mourning before being taken sexually. (I couldn't find the citation, and there is just so much Leviticus and Deuteronomy I can read at once.)
Modern warfare has changed some basic things about war. Since the invention of the bow and arrow, the distance between fighters has increased. Today pilots are able to drop bombs from high above using electronic equipment to hit targets rather than looking out the window, and with unmanned drones, giving a feeling of unreality to the bombers, though to the victims of the bombs it is all too real. In Gaza, the total of dead just passed 1400, about 70% or 80% of them civilians. When I looked yesterday, 56 Israeli soldiers have been killed, plus 3 civilians whose ages and sexes were not reported.
Civilians often means women and children.
In fact, one of the reasons Gaza is so densely populated is from displacement after Israel's War of Independence. Displacement is often one of the major ways women are affected by war. Syrian civilians have spilled into Turkey in greater-than-expected numbers, and conditions in displaced persons camps are desperate.
Women and children in DP camps are often victims of abuse, physical and sexual.
In Africa, rape is used as a form of warfare. In the Congo, for example, rape and sexual slavery are used as weapons to destabilize the social fabric of an entire social group - very effective methods.
And let's not forget the rapes in Tahrir Square, during the original uprising as well as the more recent chaos.
Soldiers' sexual needs are often seen as needing regular release. In WW II, the Germans established houses for "perfect Aryan" women to mate with soldiers on leave. The Japanese provided comfort women. I remember an article speculating that US soldiers would find warfare in Muslim countries difficult because of restrictions on alcohol and sex workers; certainly prostitutes were part of the recreating available to US soldiers in WW II and Vietnam.
The women and children arriving recently from Central America can actually be considered people displaced by war, though in this case it is not a declared war between countries or a regular civil war. This is why we must treat them as refugees rather than ordinary immigrants.
I have no answers to any of this, but women are victims of war in so many ways, that all war must be considered in some ways as part of the war on women.