Warning: This review contains details of really disgusting and evil sexual violence perpetrated against women and girls that goes far beyond rape. If you’re of a sensitive disposition or prone to nightmares, don’t read it.
The more places I went to, the more prevalent I found rape was.
‘It is an everlasting nightmare.’
(Lola Narcisa Claveria, Filipino survivor of Japanese sex slavery, page 351)
This is a deeply upsetting but profoundly important book, often devastatingly depressing but sometimes genuinely inspiring. Christina Lamb is an award-winning journalist who has covered a variety of warzones in her career as well as writing 10 factual books. From early in her career she realised just how prevalent rape was as a weapon of war, not just as random outrages, but used systematically to demoralise enemy forces and terrorise entire populations. What she learned about the vicious sexual abuse of women in conflict after conflict was sickening and disgusting. But she also came to realise that the scale of the violence and abuse against women was often overlooked in journalism and history books overwhelmingly written by men (p.459); and by international bodies and courts more often than not run by men.
Everything has to start with the evidence and this means the first-hand testimony of the survivors. Telling their stories not only offers some form of closure for the victims, and the psychological validation of knowing someone believes them. It is also the start of gathering evidence, for use not only in possible court proceedings but to begin to be used in larger historical narratives, to begin to redress the gaping silence about one of the most overlooked and neglected parts of war and conflict – the unspeakable crimes, violence and abuse directed against women and girls, often on an industrial scale.
‘When I saw them laughing and humiliating us, I decided we needed to break the silence. If we didn’t talk about what we went through, and if they were not punished, what could we expect from their children but the same or greater evil?’ (Bakira Hasecic, founder of Association of Women Victims of War in Bosnia, p.167)
And so this substantial book (474 pages) records Lamb’s odyssey, over a seven year period, to track down, interview and record the testimonies of women who have suffered unbelievable horrors in conflict after conflict around the world.
Destinations
Lamb goes to:
2016 August: Leros, Greece The Greek island of Leros was used to house refugees from war in the Middle East including Yazidis who had been enslaved and trafficked by Islamic State.
2016: Baden-Wurtenberg The German province which took in 1,100 Yazidi women and children who had been treated as sex slaves by ISIS.
2016: Northeastern Nigeria: On 15 April 2014 the brutal Islamic terror group Boko Haram kidnapped 276 mostly Christian schoolgirls from the town of Chibok and carried them off into sexual slavery. #BringBackOurGirls or #BBOG went viral. Hardly any of the girls have been recovered.
2017 December: Bangladesh: Kutupalong To interview survivors of the 2017 massacres and mass rapes of Rohynga women by Burmese soldiers. In three months more than 650,000 were driven out of the west Burmese state of Rakhine, two-thirds of the Rohynga population.
Every single shack had terrible stories and I had never come across such widespread violation of women and girls. (p.75)
Bangladesh: Liberation War Museum, Dhaka and Sirajganj Up to 400,000 were women raped by Pakistani soldiers in Bangladesh’s war of independence as official Pakistan military policy. Lamb learns that the survivors were called birangonas from the Bengali word bir meaning war heroine (p.92).
‘Often when the women were raped the soldiers had grabbed their babies and stomped on them to death or thrown them so hard their brains had come out.’ (Safina; p.110)
Rwanda Aftermath of the 1994 Hutu genocide of Tutsis, itself the sequel to the 1959 Hutu Revolution, and pogroms of 1963 and 1973.
‘Of course they raped me… Wherever you were hiding under a tree a man would find you and rape you and sometimes kill you. There were lots of different men doing this and they used sticks and bottles into the private parts of many women right up to their stomach…’ (Serafina Mukakinani, p.132)
2018, March: Yugoslavia: Sarajevo The appalling atrocities of the Serbs in Bosnia, and the heroic efforts of Bakira Hasecic and her Association of Women Victims of War, founded in 2003, to bring the Serb torturers, murderers and rapists to justice.
Yugoslavia: Srebrenica Dragana Vucetic, senior forensic anthropologist at the International Commission of Missing Persons. On 11 July 1995 Serb militias took away about 8,300 Muslim men and boys, drove them out into fields or football grounds, then massacred them, shooting or bludgeoning them to death. Dr Branca Antic-Stauber who runs a charity for rape survivors and uses horticulture therapy.
2018, October: Berlin Stories of the vast mass rapes of German women and girls during the Red Army’s conquest of eastern Germany and Berlin at the end of the Second World War. In towns and villages every woman from eight to eighty was raped multiple times. ‘It was an army of rapists’ (Natalya Gesse, Soviet war correspondent, p.194) It is estimated that up to 2 million women and girls were rapes and scores of thousands of Germans committed suicide, and killed their children, rather than fall into the hands of the Russians.
2018, November: Buenos Aires In 1976 a military junta seized control of Argentina and rules for 7 years during which up to 30,000 leftists, trade unions and activists were kidnapped off the streets and ‘disappeared’. Estela Barnes de Carlotta, president of the Grandmothers or Las Abuelas (p.214).
2018, March: Mosul Lamb attends the hurried trials of a handful of the 30,000 or so people charged with being members of ISIS. Justice is a farce. The court doesn’t consider rape as a separate offence, all offences are grouped together as terrorism.
2018, April: Iraq: Dohuk The prevalence of suicide among Yazidi survivors of ISIS sex slavery.
2019, February: Democratic Republic of Congo: Bukavu In 2010 Congo was called the rape capital of the world. Lamb interviews Dr Denis Mukwege, founder of the Panzi Foundation, who has treated more rape victims than any other doctor in the world.
- Panzi Foundation (Congo)
In the Second Congo War stories of women who were not only gang raped but then shot in the vagina, or had bayonets shoved in their vagina, or sticks soaked in fuel which was then set alight. Lamb discovers that Dr Mukwege’s clinic is seeing more and more raped babies. Some men believe that raping babies will give them magical powers; they are told this by witchdoctors (p.337).
In a gruelling book this chapter (chapter 13, pages 300 to 334) contains probably the worst atrocities (the 86-year-old who was raped, women’s vaginas set alight or hacked off, the mother who was forced at gunpoint to eat her own baby); but also the most inspiring moments. Lamb meets the inspiring Christine Schuler Deschryver, founder of City of Joy, a safe haven for survivors in Congo.
‘It’s about giving a woman value… I hug them and then they are healed and people say I have magic hands but it’s just love… I’m convinced you can change the world only by love’ (p.330)
It also contains the most telling evidence of the way rape used as a weapon of mass terrorisation is tied into broader economic and political structures. Because Deschryver points out that 1) Congo contains more of the rare metals needed to create mobile phones and batteries (cobalt, coltan) than any other country on earth; 2) if you drew a map of the rapes you’d see they cluster around mining areas, and so 3) rape is used as a strategy of terror by the militias and groups who control the mines and the regions around them. Which leads her onto her fourth point, 4) if the international community really wanted to end conflict in the Congo it could but, in Deschryver’s view, it suits multinational corporations to preserve Congo as an unstable mess the better to plunder the country of its cobalt, coltan and gold (p.331).
Democratic Republic of Congo: Kavumu Village where scores of babies and very small girls have been abducted, raped and their genitals destroyed, allegedly by the ‘Army of Jesus’, a militia controlled by a local warlord whose members have been told by a witchdoctor that the blood from raped and mutilated babies will make them invulnerable in battle (p.339). Although the warlord was eventually taken to court and convicted, the case went to appeal and none of the villagers knows whether he and his henchmen are in prison or not. Meanwhile, having lost all faith in the justice system, they have started to take the law into their own hands with lynchings and beheadings of suspect young men (p.348). Thus, chaos.
Manila Lamb meets surviving ‘comfort women’, enslaved by the occupying Japanese Army during the Second World War. They prefer to the term lolas which means grandmother in the local Tagalog language and which they use as an honorific, hence Lola Narcisa and Lola Estelita.
Concluding chapter 2020
Sexual violence against men
- in eastern Congo a quarter of men in conflict zones have experienced sexual violence
- in Afghanistan bacha bazi or the abuse of boys is common
- in Syrian prisons under Bashar al-Assad, men and boys were submitted to horrifying sexual violence
The challenge of achieving justice Lamb jumps between a number of cases, showing the dedicated work of investigators, researchers, lawyers, prosecutors and judges, but how gruellingly slow it is and how pitifully few convictions are achieved. The Yazidis wait, the Rohingya wait for justice.
Guatemala During the 36-year-long civil war over 100,000 women were raped, mostly Mayans in an attempt to exterminate their ethnicity (p.387). In 2016 11 Mayan women secured the conviction of a retired army officer for sexually enslaving them.
Peru Over 5,000 women raped during the 11-year-long civil war with Shining Path guerrillas.
Colombia Sexual crimes have been included in crimes heard by the tribunal set up at the end of the 52-year-long civil war with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
Chad Successful conviction of Chad’s despicable sadist president, Hissène Habré, who ruled through a reign of terror till his overthrow in 1990. In 2000 he was arrested and put on trial in neighbouring Senegal. In 2016 he was convicted of crimes against humanity, torture and rape and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Women in charge Lamb makes the telling point that most of these convictions were only secured when women were judges or prosecutors in the case.
2025 update
2022, May, Ukraine: Berestianka The Russians are back and they’re raping again. And looting everything they can to take back to their pitiful slum of a country. Gang rapes, torture, rape in front of the rest of the family etc (p,409). Rewarded by Putin on their return home. According to Lamb domestic violence is not criminalised in Russia and widely accepted. Figures. Whenever I read about Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky despising the decadent West, this is what I think of. Russia, home of domestic violence, epidemic alcoholism and rapists.
For the first time Ukraine established a court and started prosecuting Russian war criminals while the war was still ongoing (as it is today).
2023, autumn, Tel Aviv On 7 October 2023 Hamas fighters broke through the wall dividing Gaza from Israel and went on a rampage at multiple sites, massacring 1,200 civilians and taking 251 others back to Gaza as hostages. Lamb meets survivors, and speaks to the many first responders, therapists and women’s activists regarding the widespread evidence of sexual violence against the women victims: gang rapes and sexual mutilation i.e. shooting women in the vagina. In her interviewees’ opinion the intention was the most primitive one imaginable of attacking your enemies’ procreative ability, plus the more modern one of spreading not just terror but horror. The barbaric cruelty was exemplary in the sense that it was intended to traumatise an entire nation (which, arguably, it did).
Hebron in the West Bank. Lamb meets Palestinians who live under extraordinarily tight Israeli supervision, and then survivors of sexual violence inflicted by the Israeli Defence Force, and lawyers and NGOs who have reported on it. Interestingly, the main targets have been men and boys, designed to cause maximum humiliation in revenge for 7 October. The accusations of sexual humiliation in captivity sound identical to the Americans at Abu Ghraib.
‘It was me and two other prisoners and three border police. They filmed us naked then began to touch our bodies and make jokes and insulted us. One of them had a metal detector which he tried to put in our anuses.’ (Palestinian Thaer Fakhoury, p.448)
Avignon, December 2024 Lamb is introduced to Gisèle Pelicot, the woman drugged by her husband who then invited men from a website group to come to their home and rape her. The police found thousands of videos on her husband’s laptop clearly identifying the men which allowed a trial to go forward with 50 accused. The key thing is she waived her right to anonymity in order to speak out and so became a heroine to anti-rape activists, feminists and ordinary people around the world.
Summary When she completed the first edition in 2020 Lamb couldn’t imagine that sexual violence in conflict would return to Europe, in the form of Russian soldiers raping Ukrainian women, or the horrors of the Hamas attack on Israel, or the eruption of brutal civil war in Sudan. Every year the UN presents a report on conflict-related sexual violence. The 2024 report concluded that conflict-related sexual violence is increasing.
Historical retrospective
Spain The really systematic mass rape of large populations of women probably first occurred in the Spanish Civil War 1936 to 1939. It was carried out by General Franco’s Falangist forces. ‘Not just rape but appalling evisceration of peasant women of Andalucia and Estremadura’, including the branding of their breasts with fascist symbols (historian Antony Beevor, quoted p.203).
Nanking The rape of Nanking, December 1937 to January 1938, where the Japanese accompanied mass murder of Chinese civilians with mass rape of women and girls.
Comfort women Euphemism for the hundreds of thousands of women and girls, predominantly from Japanese-occupied Asian countries, who were forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces before and during World War II.
Vietnam War 1961 to 1973: My Lai massacre and Tet Offensive.
Khmer Rouge 1975 to 1979. Cambodians murdered 2 million other Cambodians accompanied by mass rape.
Turkish invasion of Cyprus 1974, triggered widespread Turkish soldier rape of Greek women.
Timeline
1863 Abraham Lincoln issues general order 100 making rape carried out by soldiers of the Union Army punishable by death.
1919 Commission of Responsibilities established with rape near the top of the list of 32 war crimes.
1946 but at the war crimes tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo not a single prosecution for sexual violence.
1949 Geneva Convention, Article 27:
Women shall be especially protected against any attack on their honour, in particular against rape, enforced prostitution, or any form of indecent assault.
1973 Bangladesh declares rape a crime against humanity.
1993 International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY):
Men and women came forward to recount evils beyond imagining – women and girls locked up in schools and suffering repeated anal, oral and vaginal rape, people having their tongues cut off, or being burned alive as human torches as they ‘screamed like cats’ (p.160)
1994 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) established in Arusha in Tanzania: Lamb interviews raped Tutsi women who testified in the first rape-as-war-crime trial. It was the first time rape was recognised as an instrument of genocide and prosecuted as a war crime.
‘I was raped countless times. The last group that raped me were so many people and one man shouted, “I can’t use my penis in that dirty place so I’ll use a stick.” I know many women who died like that. They sharpened the sticks and forced them right through their vaginas.’
(Cecile Mukurugwiza, p.141)
1998 first conviction for rape as a war crime.
1998 Rome Statute which established the International Criminal Court defined rape as a war crime.
2000 UN Security Council Resolution 1325 was the first formal and legal document from the Security Council that required parties in a conflict to prevent violations of women’s rights, to support women’s participation in peace negotiations and in post-conflict reconstruction, and to protect women and girls from wartime sexual violence; for ‘the greater inclusion of women in peace and security’.
2008 UN Security Council passed Resolution 1820 stating that ‘rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity or a constitutive act with respect to genocide’.
2009 established the office of the Special Representative of the UN Secretary General on Sexual Violence in Conflict.
2010 Bangladesh sets up an International Crimes Tribunal. As of 2019 88 collaborators and party leaders had been tried for torture, murder and rape.
2011 In a video sent to a Nobel Women’s Initiative conference about sexual violence, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi said:
‘Rape is used in my country as a weapon against those who only want to live in peace, who only want to assert their basic human rights. Especially in the areas of ethnic nationalities, rape is rife. It is used as a weapon by armed forces to intimidate the ethnic nationalities and to divide our country.’
2014 then UK Foreign Secretary William Hague organised a four-day conference calling for the end of sexual violence in conflict.
2016 International Criminal Court convicts Pierre Bemba of murder, rape and pillage carried out by his men during the 2002-3 war in the Central Africa Republic.
2018 Nobel Peace Prize awarded jointly to Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad “for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict”
2019 first conviction by the International Criminal Court for rape in wartime.
2019 report of the UN Special Representative listed 19 countries where women are being raped in war, by 12 armies and police forces and 41 non-state actors.
2019 Gambia took Myanmar to court over the Rohingya genocide, the first time one state had taken another to court over war crimes it had committed. Tried at the International Court of Justice in the Hague, resulting in orders against Myanmar carrying out any further genocide.
2020 first criminal trial of a member of Islamic State for crimes against the Yazidi, held in Germany, resulting in conviction and life imprisonment.
Learnings
Systematic mass rape, sexual violence, sexual torture and sexual mutilation are far more widespread than the bleakest pessimist could ever have expected.
Rape in conflict is rarely ad hoc, random and incidental. More often it is the result of encouragement or orders from the highest levels of military and political leadership, as in: mass rapes in Germany; mass rapes in Rwanda; mass rapes in Bosnia; mass rapes in Syria, and so on.
These kinds of mass rapes are now recognised, not as accidental by-products of the chaos of war, but as conscious war strategies, and as such, defined as war crimes. They are also associated with genocide, the conscious attempt to wipe out a people or group.
The genocidal intent is demonstrated in cases like the mass rape of Bangladeshi women and girls by the army of Pakistan, or the mass rapes of Bosnian Muslims by Bosnian Serbs, or the mass rape of Rohingya women by Burmese soldiers. In each instance the intent wasn’t sexual per se, the intent was to wipe out the victims’ ethnic group by breeding a new generation with the blood of the conquerors in them. In Bangladesh:
‘They had orders of a kind from Tikka Khan [Pakistan’s military governor in the East]… What they had to do was impregnate as many Bengali women as they could… so there would be a whole generation of children in East Pakistan that would be born with blood from the West.’ (p.97)
In Bosnia:
The victims ranged from between six to seventy years old and were raped repeatedly and often kept captive for several years. Many women were forcibly impregnated and held until termination of the pregnancy was impossible. The women were treated as property and rape was used with the intent to intimidate, humiliate and degrade. (p.156)
This same motive – ethnic triumphalism – explains why foetuses were cut out of pregnant women, babies were bludgeoned to death, and children were shot or had their throats cut.
Speaking about it helps. Sharing their stories in safe, supportive environments helps the survivors.
‘It’s all about giving them respect and them owning their stories. After a month, when they begin to tell their stories, sometimes OMG… and the transformation after six is huge. We turn pain into power and give victims strength to be leaders in their communities.’ (Christine Schuler Deschryver, founder of City of Joy, Congo, p.327)
But it never goes away. These women are profoundly damaged forever, as are their families, all their relationships, and their wider communities. And that was the intention.
‘That’s why rape really was a calculated weapon. The fellows who raped them and planned to rape them: they knew you either die now or die later but you’ll never be human again after this ordeal.’ (Rwanda Justice Minister Johnston Busingye, p.153)
As much or more healing comes from having the state formally recognise their plight, a formal recognition that it happened and that it was a crime.
‘It’s not possible to heal from this forever but it helps to speak about it as soon as possible and to share the story with someone compassionate. What I have seen definitely helps their healing is when perpetrators get punished because that gives the victim confirmation by authority she was not the one at fault for what happened to her and that she’s innocent.’ (Dr Branca Antic-Stauber, p.190)
‘Talking to the judges was the beginning of my rehabilitation. For so many years society did not want to listen… But now we could tell our side of the story… Seeing the life sentences at long last, after all they did to us, truly, it gives you your life back.’ (Graciela Garcia Romero, p.238)
In conservative societies state recognition can support recognition at local, village and family level. A striking example is the way the first president of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who recognised the horrific scale of the mass rapes carried out by the Pakistan army and coined a term of praise for the victims, calling them Birangona, or ‘war heroines’.
Better still, though, is the healing effect of watching their perpetrators brought to justice, tried and convicted of their crimes. This validates the victims’ experiences and assures them that the world around them understands and values their suffering.
‘Their actions changed the law and criminal justice for every woman. The women showed you can take the worst trauma and turn it into a story of strength and victory.’ (Erica Barks-Ruggles, US ambassador to Kigali, on the rape survivors who travelled to the Rwanda genocide tribunal to testify against the perpetrators, p.149)
The only problem is it happens pitifully rarely.
Meanwhile, many of the women interviewed wanted their perpetrators to be killed (p.119).
‘I want the worst things to happen to the men that did this to me. I want them to die not in a quick or humane way but slowly, slowly, so they know what it’s like to do bad things to people.’ (Naima, a Yazidi enslaved by ISIS, p.264)
‘I feel so angry at what those Japanese did to me and my family, that if I saw them today I would kill them.’ (Lola Narcisa Claveria, Filipino woman enslaved by the Japanese p.357)
‘I hate them so much and wish death to all of them and Putin.’ (Vika, Ukrainian woman raped by Russian soldiers, p.403)
Charities have discovered that a good way to draw survivors out of their often disastrous mental suffering is to give them tasks, jobs, skills training and agency. Like the farm bought by Christine Schuler Deschryver, to be run by rape survivors in Congo (p.329) or Dr Branca Antic-Stauber’s idea of setting up a rose-growing business to employ survivors in Bosnia (p.185)
No index
There’s no index. Why?
Similarly no list of the organisations mentioned in each country, or organisations addressing sexual violence generally. I supply my own list below.
Human history
Well, I’ve explained my view of human history in a separate blog post:
History is an abattoir. What was written down is a tiny fraction of what happened, and it was written by the educated and privileged, mostly sucking up to kings and khans. The reality of human existence for most humans for most of human history has been unspeakably brutal.
Last thought
In his brilliant series of books about conflict and international order in the 1990s, Michael Ignatieff divides the world into zones of conflict and zones of safety. Every day I thank my lucky stars that I was born and lived all my life in what he calls a ‘zone of safety’. Way before you get to my white privilege or my male privilege, I give thanks for my safety privilege.
Credit
‘Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women’ by Christina Lamb was first published by William Collins in 2020. I read the updated 2025 paperback edition.
Organisations mentioned in the text
- Gabriela Women’s Party (Philippines)
- International Commission on Missing Persons (Bosnia)
- One Billion Rising (South East Asia)
- The Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan
- Physicians for Human Rights
- TRIAL International
- Yazda (Iraq)
Support organisations
At the end of the Unsilenced exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, the curators give a list of support organisations, which I repeat here:
- End Violence Against Women Coalition
- Global Survivors Fund
- The Havens
- LGBTQ+ Rape and Sexual Abuse Helpline
- National Association for People Abused as Children
- No Means No Worldwide
- Rape Crisis (England and Wales)
- Refuge
- Safeline National Male Survivor Helpline
- The Survivors Trust
- Survivors UK
- UK War Crimes Team
- Women’s Refugee Commission
- Women’s Aid UK
- Women and Girls Network Ascent Helpline
Books & Boots 