Assads forces using Rape and Sexual Slavery Against Sunni Women and Girls

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Salem9022

Junior Member
(Reuters) - A U.S. women's group is using new crowd-sourcing techniques to track rape and other sexual violence across Syria in one of the first efforts to monitor assaults against women during military conflict in real-time.

The effort by the Women's Media Center aims to shed light on such assaults and provide possible evidence to prosecute future human rights violations and war crimes. The group launched its website on Wednesday and said it was working with multiple Syrian activists whom it did not identify.

So far, the group has posted more than 20 reports, including deaths, from May 6, 2011, to March 17 and is verifying others.

Among incidents reported are undated allegations, labeled unverified, from a Palestinian news outlet that Syrian army forces raped 36 women near the villages of Kurin and Sahl Al-Rawj and from a YouTube video in which a man identified as a Syrian military volunteer says government forces kidnapped and raped 25 girls in Homs.

Crowd-sourcing allows the general public to provide information and report events very quickly. Reports can be made on the website, WomenUnderSiegeSyria.crowdmap.com, via e-mail or on Twitter using the hashtag #RapeinSyria.

Syria faces intense international criticism over its government's violent crackdown on a popular uprising against the government that began a year ago. More than 9,000 people have been killed, and violence continues despite peace efforts.

Violence against women has been particularly underreported, something the online project aims to change, said Lauren Wolfe, director of the advocacy group's Women Under Siege project that launched the website.

"The stories are more atrocious than I could have imagined. We have evidence that there's possible sexual enslavement going on, mutilation -- really horrific atrocities," Wolfe said.

"No one has ever measured sexual violence in conflict during the conflict. It's always after the fact," she added.

The Arabic-English website uses technology from Ushahidi, a global nonprofit technology company, and allows anonymous reports.

So far, reports to the site have come mostly through media outlets. The center said it cannot independently verify all of those stories because the Syrian government has widely blocked access to the country.

Other reports from individuals are currently being assessed, the center's Wolfe said.

BUILDING A PICTURE

"That can start to give a picture of the scale and scope of the violence and the human rights violations," said Physicians for Human Rights Deputy Director Susannah Sirkin, who is collaborating with the center on the project and has worked on sexual violence issues in Sudan, Sierra Leone and Bosnia.

Cristina Finch at the international human rights group Amnesty International's U.S. unit said there are reports of men being raped in Syria as well. Her group tracks torture, harassment and deaths at www.eyesonsyria.org.

"Any tool that we can use to highlight what's happening on the ground and document human rights abuses, atrocities and incidences of sexual violence is useful for accountability," she said.

Ushahidi, which specializes in developing free and open source computer software to collect information, began in 2008 as a website mapping reported violence in Kenya amid a post-election crisis. Its name means "testimony" in Swahili.

The Women's Media Center was founded in 2005 by women activists Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda and Robin Morgan and monitors women's issues in media.


http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/28/us-usa-syria-rape-internet-idUSBRE82R1F120120328
 
S

Salem9022

Junior Member
The cartography of suffering: Women Under Siege maps sexualized violence in Syria

By Lauren Wolfe and Catherine M. Mullaly — March 28, 2012

When we hear about conflicts in foreign countries and imagine terrible acts, our thoughts don’t turn immediately to rape. We think of bombings and refugees and government suppression. If we think of sexualized violence at all, we may imagine a faceless, powerless woman, one unfortunate person who will eventually become a statistic—400,000 raped in Rwanda, 100,000 in Guatemala. When we hear about conflicts, we don’t imagine these stories. Or we consider them to simply be part of a larger horror.

But at Women Under Siege, our mission is to show the world that each woman raped is a person who has been illegally brutalized against her will, that she is part of a family and a community that may now be shredded. We aim to show that this woman, wherever she is, matters.

As part of this mission, we’re trying something new: telling egregiously underreported stories from Syria as they happen, with as much accuracy as possible. The blurred suffering of women who have been sexually violated in the raging but opaque Syrian conflict is now being made visible on our site, WomenUnderSiegeSyria.crowdmap.com.

We are gathering reports of rape, sexual assault, and groping—as well as the consequences of sexualized violence, including mental health issues and pregnancy. By utilizing Ushahidi crowdsourcing technology, which allows survivors, witnesses, and first-responders to report via email, Twitter (#RapeinSyria), or directly to the site, we are able to get these stories to you in real time.

A map points to where the attack happened, while we give deeper context when you click on the report. One report already on the map is headlined “Multiple government attackers rape 36 women near Kurin/Sahl Al-Rawj.” That takes you to the story of a woman who left her hiding place to try to save the life of her son and husband as the army advanced on her town. Soldiers bashed her with a rifle and tore at her clothes wildly, she said, taking turns raping her while she watched her husband die.

Our effort is being undertaken at many levels and with great caution to protect the vulnerable: We’re working with refugee communities in countries surrounding Syria to safely measure the exposure women may have had to sexualized violence before fleeing. We’re categorizing their stories by degrees of violence and by perpetrators (government forces or otherwise). As part of the collection and verification process, we are collaborating with Dr. Karestan Koenen, a professor and epidemiologist at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, and Jackie Blachman-Forshay, a student at the Mailman School.

We have also partnered with Syrian activists living outside of the country (who we will not name for their safety), as well as various journalists and human rights and aid workers working with refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. They are helping us gather the stories—from relatives and friends, from news reports and Facebook—in an ever-widening network that reaches from the Middle East to the U.S.

This method of information-gathering—crowdmapping—allows the voices of the victims to be heard across the ether so they remain anonymous yet strong. (For a crowdmap of human rights violations that fall outside of sexualized violence, visit the nonprofit, volunteer effort SyriaTracker.crowdmap.com.)

By plotting each story on a map, we are not only making clear that these women’s stories are being heard, we are gathering valuable data that can help us detect the vital signs of the Syrian conflict zone. There is an old idiom in medicine that says, “You can’t diagnose a fever without taking a temperature.” So just as taking a temperature tells us so much about the health of a person, taking in the rate of sexual assault can quickly, quantitatively, and objectively tell us valuable information about the health of a whole population. This information can be used to pinpoint where and when survivor services need to be offered, from internally displaced persons camps to the conflict area itself. It has “the potential to make a critical impact on the collection of evidence of sexual violence in situations where access to victims is highly constrained,” says Susannah Sirkin, deputy director of the Cambridge, Mass.-based human rights organization Physicians for Human Rights.

Historically, sexualized violence has been reported months, years, and decades after a conflict, if at all, and justice has been slow to come with evidence uncollected. Our hope is that by gathering statistics and individual stories, we will be able to paint a clearer picture of this aspect of the humanitarian crisis. Not only will we show whether and how women are suffering from rape and its fallout—we will hopefully provide reporting that can become the base for potential future prosecutions, helping to hold perpetrators accountable.

Now when we imagine these conflict zones, we can see tangible numbers and stories that are not gathered when it’s too late and evidence has been destroyed. We can read live reports of suffering made plain to the world, and we can imagine immediate attention being paid to women who are being raped.

We can imagine this, but not without your help. Please spread the word so we can make it happen: WomenUnderSiegeSyria.crowdmap.com.

Lauren Wolfe is the director of Women Under Siege.

http://www.womenundersiegeproject.o...s-sexualized-violence-in#.T3NiTlT57BY.twitter
 
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