Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women

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Our Bodies, Their Battlefields spans several different countries and instances where rape has been used as a weapon of war and conflict, whether it’s in the case of Yazidi women imprisoned by ISIS, or the Chibok schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram in Northern Nigeria, or the Rohingya women fleeing genocide in Myanmar. With each of these cases, Lamb interviews survivors of atrocities, dedicating space to their harrowing individual stories in their own voices. She speaks to doctors, experts, lawyers and ordinary people, all pursuing justice for crimes that have for too long and too often gone unpunished. TIME spoke to Lamb about her experience of foreign reporting, survivors’ pursuit of justice, and what gives her faith in humanity. TIME: Histories and contemporary reporting on conflict is usually dominated by white men. What gets lost when we only have one set of voices telling these stories? Unfortunately it’s very easy to use rape or sexual violence as a weapon of war. It’s very effective, and it’s very cheap: it doesn’t cost anything. In the last few years, I’ve just seen much more horrific brutality against women than I had seen in all the previous years and decades I had been reporting. That seemed really odd to me, that in the 21st century, this is a war crime and yet it seems to be happening more and more. It was the Yazidis that really impacted me, because those girls had been taken very young, and had been traded in latter day slave markets with ISIS fighters who had come and chosen them. Some of the answers, of course, must come from the perpetrators. And it is mainly – but not only – men who descend to this depravity, although we read about a women’s development minister who facilitated rape in Rwanda. And, increasingly, men are also targeted; reports reveal Syrian prisons daubed with the blood of countless victims of torture, including sexual abuse. Lamb turns to the accused she can find. But prisoners in Iraqi jails, the young Islamic State fighters awaiting trial, are, perhaps understandably, selective in their memory. At times, Lamb worries that she is being intrusive, but she is also careful not to be credulous. An experienced journalist, she can tell when something doesn’t smell right – one Rohingya woman in a camp in Bangladesh has a long story that doesn’t add up. In the age of #MeToo, the impetus is to believe women and on the whole, she – quite rightly – does, while never losing her journalistic rigour. The litany of pain she recounts is all too believeable. I know because I have heard it too. On my last day on the island the Yazidis told me of a secret village in Germany where they said more than a thousand of the girls kept as sex slaves were being sheltered after having escaped or been rescued. I was intrigued.

Our Bodies, Their Battlefields: War Through the Lives of Women Our Bodies, Their Battlefields: War Through the Lives of Women

And I am ashamed to admit that I identified one area of complete ignorance. Before I started reading this book, I knew about crimes of ISIS and Boko Haram, I had a lot of information about wars in Yugoslavia and Rwanda and related international tribunals, I read books and watched documentaries about Rohingya crisis in Myanmar and Bangladesh, but I had zero knowledge about an ongoing war in Congo and about multiple victims of rape in this country.For millennia mass rape has been a weapon of war. But the testimony of abuse is almost entirely absent from all recorded history. At last this brave, beautiful and brutal book allows victims to speak — devastatingly, inspirationally."

Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women

In Our Bodies, Their Battlefields, longtime intrepid war correspondent Christina Lamb makes us witness to the lives of women in wartime. An award-winning war correspondent for twenty-five years (she’s never had a female editor) Lamb reports two wars—the “bang-bang” war and the story of how the people behind the lines live and survive. At the same time, since men usually act as the fighters, women are rarely interviewed about their experience of wartime, other than as grieving widows and mothers, though their experience is markedly different from that of the men involved in battle. Speaking to survivors first-hand, Lamb encounters the suffering and bravery of women in war and meets those fighting for justice. From Southeast Asia where 'comfort women' were enslaved by the Japanese during World War Two to the Rwandan genocide, when an estimated quarter of a million women were raped, to the Yazidi women and children of today who witnessed the mass murder of their families before being enslaved by ISIS. Along the way Lamb uncovers incredible stories of heroism and resistance, including the Bosnian women who have hunted down more than a hundred war criminals, the Aleppo beekeeper rescuing Yazidis and the Congolese doctor who has risked his life to treat more rape victims than anyone else on earth. Oggi, grazie alle nuove tecnologie e ai mezzi di comunicazione, nessuno può dire di non aver saputo. Chiudere gli occhi di fronte a questo dramma significa esserne complici. I responsabili di questi crimini non sono solo gli esecutori, ma tutti coloro che scelgono di voltarsi dall'altra parte."No one is safe, as Lamb shows: under the wrong circumstances, in all corners of the world, communities who used to have drinks together and celebrate one another’s children’s birthdays and achievements turn on their friends and neighbours’ wives, sisters and daughters in an orgy of brutal violence. In many cases, it is not coincidental: rape is perpetrated systematically and deliberately, such as in the war in Bosnia where one European council report stated that it was being used in “particularly sadistic ways to inflict maximum humiliation on victims, their families and on the whole community”. I know I’ve said this before for many of the books I’ve read, but this one in particular is the most bone-chilling book I’ve ever read. The stories of violence depict incidents that you may not even be able to conjure in your most horrifying of nightmares. The disdain for human life is the underlying current of all the interviews that Lamb conducts. Even an eighteen-month old girl is not spared from this. Kai kur (pvz Kongo organizacijoje "Jėzaus kariuomenė") specialiai ieškoma kūdikių paprievartauti, nes yra tikėjimas, kad tas kraujas (ne, ne "mergystės plėvės", o visų dar nesusiformavusių organų, vietoj kurių lieka tiesiog skylė) atneša nesužeidžiamumą.

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Award-winning war correspondent Christina Lamb gives voice to the voiceless in this harrowing testimony from women in war zones ... [Lamb] posits a path forward to justice.

You meet these women, here in the city, or go out to the village, to Taba, and meet them and they seem normal. But I think when they go home and close their doors at night, there is a space inside them which no one can break into, no matter what you do.” In Our Bodies, Their Battlefield, Christina discusses the experience of women in conflict and how rape is used in modern warfare to humiliate, terrify, and carry out ethnic cleansing. She speaks to survivors across four continents, from “comfort women” in Southeast Asia during the Second World War to 1990s Bosnia, where 20,000 women were forced into camps and sexual slavery by Serbian soldiers. She also analyses the experience of the Yazidi women and children enslaved by ISIS and that of the 219 Nigerian schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram in 2014. Anyone who cannot understand why we ought to help as many refugees as possible should read this book.

Our Bodies, Their Battlefields : War Through the Lives of Women

The atrocities in Our Bodies, Their Battlefields horrify, as they should. Lamb...does society a service by forcing us to look."Our Bodies, Their Battlefield provides a corrective that is by turns horrific and profoundly moving. Lamb, the chief foreign correspondent of the Sunday Times whom I have known and admired for years, is an extraordinary writer. Her compassion for those she talks to and deep understanding of how to tell their stories makes this a book that should be required reading for all – even though (and perhaps because) it is not an enjoyable experience. As a junior researcher on a TV documentary in Uganda in 1986, I was told to ask a question that was the dark cliche of war reporting: “Anyone here been raped and speak English?” To my horror, a teenage girl stepped shyly forward, eyes cast downwards. Since then, I have come across hundreds of women raped in wars around the world – and I have found kinder ways of establishing if they want to tell their story. Pati kraupiausia ir labiausiai sukrėtusi knyga, kurią skaičiau. Tai ne siaubo romanas, ne grožinis kūrinys. Tai tikri įvykiai, kurie vyksta mūsų Žemėje ir padaryti mūsų, žmonių. Tiesiog, neįmanoma ramiai skaityti protu nesuvokiamus dalykus, kai pažiūrėjus pro langą - karšta vasara, gali stebėti vienas kitą vaikančius paukščius, kai guli po medžiu, besisupdama hamake, įsikandus smilgą, tačiau atvertus knygą, iš jos veržiasi siaubas ir baimė. Kai kur išgyvenusios moterys gyvena netoli, nuolat susiduria su jų šeimas prievartavusiais, žudžiusiais žmonėmis.