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Front Page > Issues > 2004> October

Keeping despair from preventing postive action

How do you rape a six-year-old girl? I can’t stop thinking about it ever since I saw the women of Danfur, Sudan on TV. Mothers with their grief so thick, their voices sagging with the weight of such unimaginable horror as they told us how soldiers came to their town and raped them, their daughters, their mothers. What did we do, they cried out to a world that continues to delay actions by debating definitions. Yes, it’s genocide; no it’s civil unrest.

How do you rape a six-year-old-girl? How. That is the word I’m so focused on. I, unfortunately, understand why those babies were raped. War has always included the penis in its arsenal of weaponry and history writers have left us shameful well-documented accounts. For thousands of years millions of women in war-torn countries have known that the penis can be mightier than the sword for the injury it inflicts never completely heals.

A brief history of rape as a weapon of war:

The Old Testament describes raping women as a type of award to the victorious army. It was almost routine for armies of men, after conquering cities, to kidnap and rape women as spoils of war. In some ways the women were almost incidental as this assault was directed towards the men who “owned” the women, their fathers or spouses.

They say that Rome was not built in a day but what is not said is that Rome was built and its future ensured by the rape of the Sabine Women. Understanding that Rome’s lack of women prevented it from becoming the great golden city of their dreams, Romulus and Remus devised a plan that would guarantee its future. Inviting citizens from the neighboring areas to come see the work that had been done in Rome, the brothers pre-arranged a signal that sent the Roman army into the crowd, grabbing women, raping and kidnapping them. (Here’s another compelling argument for the sanctity of the one man, one-woman union). This violent spectacle has been the subject of many artists including Picasso, Rubens and Poussin. Who will paint the picture of the rape of the six-year-olds?

Rape, as a systematic and organized tactic of war flourished in the 20th century. Most people now recognize the city of Nanjing, China as the site of unbelievable degradation and horror for thousands of Chinese women. Japanese soldiers kidnapped thousands of women, from age 10 to 80, to serve as “comfort women.” Comfort women — who invented that phrase? Did the Japanese government, with their honor and dignity, believe that these Chinese women were serving as a type of USO hostess? How does raping a 10-year-old girl give comfort to anyone?

In 1945 it is estimated that Soviet soldiers raped two million German women as revenge for all the destruction and death that Germany had rained down on Russia. Some historians state that every woman from age 10 to age 80 in many towns in East Prussian and Silesia was raped. Stalin’s response to complaints about the rapes yielded this response: “Can’t you understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?” Fun, comfort, trifle, synonyms for the word rape. East German (when there was an East Germany) women who survived that era referred to the Red Army war memorial in Berlin as the Tomb of the Unknown Rapist.
For me, the reality of rape as a deliberate weapon of war became ice-cold clear to me during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The mothers, once again screaming their stories, clutching their daughters, wondering why would a grown man want to rape their daughters. Human rights advocates reported that Serbian soldiers had committed mass rape as part of their expansionist policy of ethnic cleansing. The Serbs used rape as a tactic to encourage Bosnian Muslim women to leave their land. The Muslims did not take the moral high ground as they too used their penises as military hardware.

Rape as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing was also used by the Hutu men in Rwanda in 1994. Raping Tutsi women was a well-established and sanctioned component of that war. In fact Hutu soldiers were ordered to rape.

There have been reports of systematic raping of Vietnamese women by American soldiers. It is hard to unearth a lot of information about this because “security concerns” prohibit the release of these documents. There were comparatively few court-martial cases accusing American GIs of rape (of course think of these — mostly peasant — women trying to file a complaint of rape). We can credit the American Armed Forces with developing SE Asia into a swelling sex industry trade mecca where fucking teen-age girls and boys is a tourist attraction.

How do you rape a six-year-old? How do we disarm the soldiers of the world? How do we teach our sons that raping a woman here in SE Portland or in Iraq or in Kuwait or in Afghanistan does not make him a better man, a good solider, a fine American?

There is so much sorrow in this world. Massive death and destruction is engineered by profiteering cowboys and their posses of men who are rarely spurred to do the right action. These (mostly) men choose to refuse to let these mothers, mothers of raped six-year-old daughters, get in their minds, their hearts, their way. Someone needs to get in their way. Block their path, detour their plans. I know sometimes it all seems too much. We question (and with good reason) the power of our vote. We wonder what we can do that can make a fucking difference. I don’t know. What I do know is that lately when I’ve felt that the world is truly going to shit and there’s nothing me or Marcy or Deb or Holly or Thalia or Brigette or the hordes of volunteers working on campaigns can do about it, I pick up The Impossible Will Take a Little While by Paul Rogat Loeb (Basic Books, 2004). This book is full of essays and stories and poetry written by people who at many times felt hopeless yet kept moving on. My sardonic and cynical heart is truly moved and I feel like a total whiner after reading the words of Nelson Mandela, Alice Walker, Susan Griffin and Tony Kushner. Howard Zinn and Bonnie Raitt sent out a bulk email across the world and here’s what they say about this book: “If you care about change in a world where most people are told their voices don’t count, think of this book as a gift to yourself — hope for the homestretch in an immensely critical election, bread for the journey to keep on working for justice no matter what happens in November, sustenance to return to again and again at those points when your spirit begins to flag.” So vote, read, educate, activate, mobilize one more person, do your share. We can make this a world where six-year-old girls are not collateral damage in anyone’s war.

Jack Danger is the Portland Alliance Book Editor.

 

 

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Last Updated: October 4, 2004