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Tag: sexual violence

  • John Kerry Seeks to End Sexual Violence in Warfare

    Speaking before the largest such convention of all time, John Kerry called for the end of sexual violence in warfare at the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict, an event co-hosted by British Foreign Secretary William Hague and special envoy of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Angelina Jolie.

    The four-day long summit in London had four explicit goals: 1) Institute practical training for soldiers and peacekeepers to help protect women from abuse; 2) End the culture of impunity surrounding sexual violence within the context of warfare by instituting consistent and effective legal protocols; 3) Increase support given to survivors of sexual assault; and 4) Eradicate the culture of acceptance surrounding sexual violence in warfare through a paradigm shift in beliefs.

    While most people believe the feat to be impossible, stating that rape is ingrained in warfare, Kerry and others believe quite the opposite, with Kerry likening the banning of sexual violence to the Chemical Weapons Convention, stating that, after World War I, “people, particularly veterans, were so horrified that, except for the most depraved exceptions we’ve seen once or twice since, chemical and biological weapons were banned from battlefields within a decade of that war. That speaks to possibilities.”

    In order to “write a new norm, one that protects women, girls, men and boys, from these unspeakable crimes,” Kerry envisions a five-part plan:

    1) Institute the use of a “mobile court” in order to bring swift and immediate justice to perpetrators.

    2) Increase funding for “Safe from the Start”, a program which educates refugee workers and others in how to prevent violence.

    3) Expand the “Together for Girls” program, whose goal is to end violence against young girls through education.

    4) Increase the amount of money US Embassies have to help people during times of emergency.

    5) Hold other countries to the standards of the United States and encourage them to stop giving visas to those accused of sexually violent crimes.

    “Thousands of years after rape was written into the lexicon of warfare, we know that it is time to write it out and to banish sexual violence to the dark ages and the history books where it belongs,” stated Kerry.

    In her opening remarks on Tuesday, Angelina Jolie had a very similar message to send to those in attendance: “It is a myth that rape is an inevitable part of conflict. There’s nothing inevitable about it. It is a weapon of war aimed at civilians. It has nothing to do with sex, everything to do with power.”

    Along with Kerry, Jolie, and Hague, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and former US President Jimmy Carter sent video messages to be shared at the conference, a conference which was attended by representatives from more than 100 countries.

    Kerry ended his speech by reading “Still I Rise”, a poem by the late Maya Angelou: “We came here to send a message: We rise, we rise . Let’s get the job done,” Kerry announced before leaving to a standing ovation.

    Image via Twitter

  • For First Time, U.N. Study Highlights Pacific-Asian Rape Culture

    A multi-country survey recently conducted by the U.N. of Asian countries near the South Pacific sheds a terrifying light onto rape culture as it exists in nations far less fascinating to the media than India.

    The abstract is here, and the study is to be published in the medical journal The Lancet. A little over 10,000 men were asked about their lives through a questionnaire that conveniently omits the words “rape” and “violence” because the researcher hypothesized that most men do not believe their actions amount to rape. Instead, questions were more carefully phrased like asking if the reader “had sex with a woman who was too drunk or drugged to indicate whether she wanted it” or if the reader ever “forced a woman who was not your wife or girlfriend at the time to have sex?”

    The numbers, frankly, will terrify and astonish for all the wrong reasons: on average, 24 percent of the men questioned admitted to raping a partner, while 10 percent admitted to subjugating an unwilling non-partner at least once. The overwhelming reason for these horrific acts of violence: sexual entitlement (also known as “the right to have sex”) at 73.3 percent, followed by boredom at 58.7 percent. 28.3 percent of respondents admitted to being multiple rapists, and 30.2 percent of respondents confessed to raping both men and women in a group (CNN notes that poor, uneducated men were statistically more likely to engage in violence in a group setting).

    Now, at this point, you must be wondering how many of these people were caught or punished for their violence. 35.7 percent claimed that friends or family chastised them where 32.5 percent said they were arrested. Only about 23 percent of respondents ever did time in a prison cell, and a remarkable 55.2 percent of respondents said they “felt guilty.” In countries like Sri Lanka, 96.5 percent of respondents got away with their crimes completely unpunished.

    Why should the rest of the world care about these statistics? The answer could not be more obvious: the people of these nations represent half the world’s population! At this rate, nearly one out of eight human men is predisposed to sexual violence.

    The Guardian spoke with Dr. Emma Fulu, who works with the Partners for Prevention, the UN-connected group that helped manage the study. Dr. Fulu called the work “unprecedented and ground-breaking,” saying that “this is really the first time we’ve had data on rape perpetration on this scale, not just in the region but in the world, and I think it probably suggests rape is more widespread than we had thought, and the perpetration of rape starts earlier than people perhaps thought, which really highlights the need to start working with younger boys and girls to stop the violence.”

    [Image via CNN’s terrifying graphical breakdown]