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The Role of Women in Wars, Part One: Women as Victims of War

Enslavement and Rape of Women in Wars as Told by the Documentary Record

What is the role of women in wars? That is the central question. War involves and affects everyone regardless of gender and affiliation. Yet the records of modern human history have so far attributed the beginning of no war to women and have most often described women in the role of victims of war. Women, however, are not only victims of war. In general, four roles can be attributed to women involved in war: 1. women as victims of war; 2. women as a fighting force; 3. women as support for the fronts of war; and 4. women as a force for peace and as those who bring war to an end.

The Role of Women in Wars — Part One: Women as Victims of War

Perhaps the most prominent image that comes to mind when we think of the relationship between “women” and “war” is “woman as a victim of war.” Why? Because historical records and documentaries made about wars show that men stand at the top of power and politics, and the combatants on the different sides are also men. Women are not only killed in war, subjected to hunger, and displaced; after attacks and the capture of one another’s territories, these same male combatants enslave women and sexually assault them.

Sexual assault, as the most horrific form of violence against women, is an event that can occur in any war. Because this article examines the role of women in the wars in Afghanistan, the Iran-Iraq war, the Vietnam-America war, and the Second World War, examples related to those wars are given.

In July 2018 Reuters reported from northern Afghanistan that fighters of the Khorasan branch of ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) had sexually assaulted women in Jowzjan Province.

Deutsche Welle Persian, citing the Reuters report, wrote that Zarifa, a middle-aged woman and mother of three children, was among the women raped by ISIS fighters. Zarifa said: “When I refused the demand of the local ISIS commander and would not accept becoming his slave, his men took my children into another room. Then the leader of the local ISIS group raised his gun at me and did whatever he wanted to me.”

After being sexually assaulted, Zarifa fled to Sheberghan, the capital of Jowzjan Province. She told a Reuters reporter: “My husband was a farmer and now I cannot look him or my neighbors in the eyes, and that is why I left there.”

In the same report, Samira tells the story of her fourteen-year-old sister, who escaped after ten months of captivity in the hands of a local ISIS commander in Darzab, Jowzjan, and recounted horrifying accounts of sexual abuse and violence by ISIS fighters.

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ISIS was not the only group in Jowzjan to treat women in this way. On April 6, 2021, hundreds of residents of the Darzab and Qush Tepa districts of Jowzjan demonstrated, saying that the Taliban had forcibly taken a sixteen-year-old girl from her home and, after gang-raping her, killed her.

The Taliban did not do this only in Jowzjan. According to a BBC Persian report, in July 2020 Taliban fighters forcibly took two sisters aged fourteen and sixteen from their home in Khwaja Ghar district of Takhar Province and gang-raped one of them.

In Asad 1394 [August 2015], the same year that news was published of the Taliban’s gang rape of a teenage suicide bomber, Taliban fighters in Warduj district of Badakhshan attacked a residential house and raped a woman in front of her husband and children.

In 2019 the Supreme Court of the country reported that during the previous four years it had registered 920 cases of rape of women, which ranked at the top of violence against women. According to Supreme Court records, most of these events occurred in areas affected by war where ISIS and Taliban groups were present and active against the government.

ISIS and the Taliban were not the only forces committing sexual violence against women in war zones. On October 27, 2020, Sina Shina Mansour, deputy attorney general of Afghanistan, announced that an Afghan army soldier in Faryab Province had raped a young girl and had been sentenced to twenty years in prison.

Although sexual violence is not the only form of victimization women suffer during war, it is the most horrifying form of violence inflicted on women in different wars.

The Vietnam War—the United States and its allies in South Vietnam attacking areas of North Vietnam and territory controlled by the Viet Cong, or the Vietnamese liberation movement—took place in 1968.

The most horrific event of that war was the My Lai massacre. According to War Without Fronts: America in Vietnam, published on Amazon in 2010, American soldiers in 1969 machine-gunned at least 500 North Vietnamese civilians at My Lai, the overwhelming majority of them unarmed women and children.

A shocking photograph of a girl at the scene was published and became known as the “Girl in the Black Blouse.” Elsewhere in Vietnam, the “Napalm Girl,” Kim Phuc, a nine-year-old Vietnamese girl whose clothing caught fire during American bombing and who fled naked, came to symbolize America’s war against the Vietnamese. The photograph of the girl in the black blouse, however, depicts the sexual assault of women and girls at My Lai by American soldiers after the attack and before the massacre.

The Persian-language outlet Mashregh, citing sources four years earlier, wrote: “What happened to the girl in the black blouse was not the only case of sexual violence at My Lai.... Research by Peers published in Military Legal Resources recorded, on the basis of eyewitness statements, a list of twenty cases of rape by American soldiers of Vietnamese women and girls under the age of eighteen.”

The photograph known as the “Girl in the Black Blouse,” during the My Lai massacre and the sexual assault of Vietnamese women by American forces.

Perhaps the use of sexual violence against women is a type of wartime policy common to all groups involved in wars in human societies. The Second World War, described in terms of the number of victims and negative economic consequences as the worst war in human history, became even more horrifying through the victimization of women by harassment, torture, and sexual assault.

According to the BBC, Vladimir Gelfand, an officer in the Soviet Army, wrote about horrifying scenes of war crimes and violations of the human rights of German women during the Second World War.

He wrote that during the first bicycle ride of his life in Berlin he saw a group of German women fleeing with tied bundles. A young German woman told Gelfand: “They [the Soviet soldiers] raped me on the first night after they arrived. Some of them had bodies covered in warts; all of them raped me. There were more than twenty of them.”

In the same BBC report, a ninety-year-old German woman recounted her memories: “The Soviet Army was bombarding Berlin. During a pause in the bombing I went upstairs to find a piece of rope to hang a lamp. Suddenly I came face to face with two Soviet soldiers who pointed their weapons at me. One of them raped me, then they changed places and the second raped me too. I thought I was going to die. For decades I did not speak to anyone about what had happened because my mother liked proudly to say that her daughter was a virgin.”

The BBC says in this report that, although reliable figures still do not exist, estimates published in reports about the consequences of Nazi Germany’s defeat say that around two million German women were raped during the defeat of Hitler’s regime by the Allies—the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France.

To be continued...

Alavardi — 1 year ago

[Reader comment:] “Is there any opinion worse than what I am writing to you now...? I read and compared all these reports and question-and-answer pieces about war and women. You read them too and see whether, among all the countries of the world that are or were involved in war, there is anyone more savage than Iraq and the lizard-eating Arabs—actually, I had better say lizard-ass eaters. See whether there is. Soldiers of what country gang-raped a little girl and afterward hanged her from a tree with her own clothes—after killing her, of course? Or what dishonorable soldier, after raping her, drove a bayonet or a large spear up between her legs so that the spear came out through her head?? I know the turban-wearers, the offspring of Arab seed, the slaves of the Arabs, and a bunch of shit-for-brains who would hand over even their sisters and mothers with both hands to their Iraqi brothers, and now to those cow Hashd al-Shaabi militias, will now begin defending them in a way they probably would not if their own family had been insulted. But I am not one of them. The whole world is left wondering when and where the Arabs ever did any good for these people who sell out their homeland and their honor for the Arabs, that...”

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