How can anyone stand it? Yet somehow, no matter how devastating or varied the onslaughts against them, women endure. It may take many kinds of help extended by others who care, but women who have survived brutalizing damage to their bodies and to what were once their lives can grow strong again. Slowly they can build up a confidence that perhaps they never had before. Many eventually see a place for themselves in a world they never before imagined. They take jobs outside their homes or families. They extend help to others in need, who are experiencing the horrors they once went through. Women become heroes, because they have to, for themselves and for their children’s sake, and to build a new world in which women are honored, respected and can finally take pride in being who they are.

Women under siege

Myanmar/Burma - Aung San Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy activist and leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD), a Buddhist and an advocate of nonviolent resistance, has become a focal point for possible resolution of the recent crisis in which a repressive government has turned on it s own people. Through UN pressure, she may be the only person the military junta will talk to, albeit unwillingly, to placate the world’s protests. She has been a victim, and personally suffered much for her stand for freedom. Suu Kyi is most certainly a remarkable hero to her people and to the world, as a woman who has shown strength in the face of tremendous pressure for 18 years.

Darfur, Sudan - Over 400,000 people killed, 2.5 million displaced. It is not just the incredible numbers affected: rather, this conflict is notable for using the brutal rape of women and children as a weapon of war. It is a hellish place where sexual violence is now an integral and devastating tool of a genocidal government.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo - 27,000 sexual assaults reported in 2006 in South Kivu Province alone, just a fraction of the total number across the country.

Iraq - More than 2 million refugees, women and children among the most vulnerable, on the streets and in their temporary refuges outside Iraqi borders.

Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Kosovo, and Macedonia - Ten years of violence, marked by rape and savagery on a massive scale.

Chechnya - Officially, 7,500 Russian military dead; 4,000 Chechen combatants dead; at least 35,000 civilian deaths. The true total may be 80,000 to 100,000.

Anna Politkovskaya, an eloquent and especially articulate Russian journalist relentlessly uncovered the brutalities of the war in Chechnya. In October 2006 she was murdered in Moscow for her trouble. Execution is as violent as an act can get. This remarkable woman was bent on shining an unwelcome bright light on brutality. For that, in this case, literally, the messenger was killed.

Of the 32.9 million “Asylum Seekers, Refugees and Other displaced persons” the UN counted as of January 2007, more than half are women and children.

They are everywhere, distributed over Asia (14,910,900), Africa (9,752,600), North America (3,542,500), Europe (3,426,700), Latin America and the Caribbean (3,542,500). Even Oceania has 85,700.

The many forms of violence faced by women

Other than rape, one constantly occurring form of war violence is that women have their children torn from them: the boys are often forcibly recruited as child soldiers. Over 300,000 child soldiers are currently fighting in more than 35 countries. One boy who suffered this fate, Ishmael Beah, got out and now lives with a loving family in Brooklyn, in New York City. However, a strong, compassionate woman on staff in a hospital to which he was taken was central to his long journey from brutal and brutalized soldier to a young man with prospects and a whole new life. In a book Beah has written, “A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier,” he speaks this way of those terrible times and the woman who broke the bonds that numbed his heart so he could feel human emotions once again.

Sometimes I feel that living in New York City, having a good family and friends, and just being alive is a dream, that perhaps this second life of mine isn’t really happening. Whenever I speak to raise awareness of the rampant recruitment of children in wars around the world, I come to realize that I still do not fully understand how I could have possibly survived the civil war in my country, Sierra Leone.

Esther, who was at the mini hospital where he was brought after a serious battle injury helped bring him back from the mind-set of a child soldier. Describing Esther, he says:

…she couldn’t decide whether to rub my head, a traditional gesture indicating that things would be well, or hug me. In the end she did neither but said: ‘None of what happened was your fault. You were just a little boy, and anytime you want to tell me anything, I am here to listen.’

In the end, when he knew he was leaving forever to go on to a new life, he says,

She looked me straight in the eyes. “Come and see me next weekend so we can have more time to catch up, O.K.?” she said. She was wearing her white uniform and was on her way to take on other traumatized children. It must be tough living with so many war stories. I was living with just one, mine, and it was difficult. Why does she do it? Why do they all do it? I thought as we went our separate ways. It was the last time I saw her. I loved her but never told her.

Could there be a more moving testimonial to the women who are heroes, who touch the lives around them for the good every day and thereby effect positive changes in the world?

On the other hand, many women suffer damages almost beyond repair. This past weekend, a lead story on the front page of The New York Times was a devastating, eloquent account of the current situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo which took my breath away because of the sheer savageness against women it described. Everyone I know who has read it cannot stop talking about it. It began this way:

Soldiers and militiamen have raped women around Bukavu ... Every day, 10 new women and girls who have been raped show up at his hospital. Many have been so sadistically attacked from the inside out, butchered by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that their reproductive and digestive systems are beyond repair ... “We don’t know why these rapes are happening, but one thing is clear,” said Dr. Mukwege, who works in South Kivu Province, the epicenter of Congo’s rape epidemic. “They are done to destroy women.”

Further on, Alexandra Bilak, who has studied various armed groups around Bukavu, on the shores of Lake Kivu, is quoted,

“It’s gone beyond the conflict.” She said that the number of women abused and even killed by their husbands seemed to be going up and that brutality toward women had become “almost normal.”

The story ends with this statistic and a final chilling anecdote:

In one town, Shabunda, 70 percent of the women reported being sexually brutalized ... At Panzi Hospital, where Dr. Mukwege performs as many as six rape-related surgeries a day, bed after bed is filled with women lying on their backs, staring at the ceiling, with colostomy bags hanging next to them because of all the internal damage ... “I still have pain and feel chills,” said Kasindi Wabulasa, a patient who was raped in February by five men. The men held an AK-47 rifle to her husband’s chest and made him watch, telling him that if he closed his eyes, they would shoot him. When they were finished, Ms. Wabulasa said, they shot him anyway.

These outrages have been going on for some time in Africa. In a report titled “Darfur: Rape as a Weapon of War: Sexual Violence and Its Consequences” an incident from 2004 was reported:

"I was sleeping when the attack on Disa started. I was taken away by the attackers, they were all in uniforms. They took dozens of other girls and made us walk for three hours. During the day we were beaten and they were telling us: "You, the black women, we will exterminate you, you have no god." At night we were raped several times. The Arabs guarded us with arms and we were not given food for three days."

This was an account taken from a female refugee from Disa (Masalit village, West Darfur), interviewed by Amnesty International delegates in Goz Amer camp for Sudanese refugees in Chad, May 2004.

In a recent WIP article written by Neeta Lal, “Boys Outnumber Girls in India at an Ever Growing Rate: The Continual Abortion of Females Has Skewed the Gender Ratio. Now the Question Is, “Where Have All the Girls Gone?”" she describes another form of violence against women:

The Indian government estimates that around 10 million girls have been killed by their parents - either before or immediately after birth - over the past 20 years. There have also been recent cases in New Delhi of mothers strangling their own newborn girls! Doctors too, are partners in crime. In one case, hundreds of female fetuses were dug up from the back lawn of a New Delhi doctor’s clinic, establishing his complicity in female feticide. "There’s already a lot of sexual violence and women/child abuse across the country due to the disruptive male-female sex ratio," opines Ranjana Kumari, Director at the Centre for Social Research, a New Delhi based think-tank. “Further decline [will] only worsen the situation.”

This sort of thinking is completely incomprehensible to those of us who live under the assumption that all civilized people share the “we are all equal, at least as human beings” philosophy of the privileged world of the United States. No one here has to scramble for wood with which to cook meals; no one here has to carry heavy jugs of water on her head just to keep her family alive.

An end to rampant violence

A remarkable organization, The International Rescue Committee, has long been making a difference in areas where violence against women is frequent and growing. With 400-500 staff workers in the field(most of whom are women, although about 20% are men) living near those they are there to help, these workers experience dire and/or dangerous conditions. Few can stand the stress for long. Rotations home are critical to mental health and to being able to return and work effectively again. The IRC, particularly through its Gender-Based Violence program, works to assist women in whose world violence is or has become an expected part of life, offering whatever they need to survive and to heal. The IRC has been in Kosovo, in Darfur, Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, in Thailand, Indonesia and Iraq, among other trouble spots.

They work in the countries where they serve in partnership with the governments who rule there, so they keep a low profile. They usually remain in a country for ten years, a time frame they find necessary to make any real inroads. In order to make a difference slowly but measurably changing minds and hearts, they know men must be very much part of the solution. Besides feeding and giving medical care and counseling to women trapped in refugee camps, they fight all forms of violence against women - rape, domestic violence, unwanted pregnancies, child sexual exploitation, and slavery, in which women and children are actually bought and sold.

They observe that the one common viewpoint in all these different forms of violence is that the abusers see women as commodities. In non-war situations, they begin by approaching the men and the women of the communities, asking, “What are the problems women face” there. Once they have established some trust, they work with the abusers as well as the victims. The first step toward changing the situations is to get the abusers to admit to what they do or have done. The good news is that within five to seven years, the women who were once victims do grow more confidence and change their expectations. Many become local leaders in the IRC programs.

The new reality is that violence against women has been growing at an exponential rate. The IRC has found that war-generated violence has the same roots as domestic violence: women are not seen to be fully as human as men. Their slow, methodical approach which seeks to educate both the victims and the abusers has had a noteworthy degree of success.

Not everyone has the patience or persistence to engage in this slow and often frustrating work - two steps forward, then one back – although the work is necessary, and the progress admirable. But we can all sign petitions to the host countries and the United Nations, and we can send donations. For further ideas on how to stop one of the greatest human crises threatening women, see their website and that of the many committees of the UN.

Together, we can stop this epidemic.

To read more stories by our Managing Editor, visit Patricia's Author Page - Ed.