WUNRN
Women Under Siege
By
Zaynab, 16, comes from the Khalidiya
neighborhood of Homs,
A woman swathed in black
squares her shoulders and calmly looks into a camera. She holds a Quran. Only a
sliver of her face—her eyeglasses—shows. “What happened to me hasn’t happened
to anyone, or if it has affected anyone else I do not know,” she says.
“But I will speak and let all the people know what [Syrian leader] Bashar
al-Assad and his men are doing.” Over the next four minutes, her breathing
grows labored and her voice breaks as she describes how, in May 2011, five men
wearing black entered her home on the outskirts of
“This is my message to
the world,” she says. “Let all the world hear what is happening to us. And I
might not be the first one nor the last who was treated in this way.”
The still-unidentified
woman posted the video to YouTube on February 11, 2012. It is one of the
earliest reports on our live, crowd-sourced map of
sexualized violence in Syria. The Women’s
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To step back from the red dots on our map
and try to understand the sexualized violence of Syria’s war, our team of doctors,
activists, and journalists has taken the 81 stories we’ve gathered so far, from
the onset of the conflict in March 2011 through June 2012, and broken them down
into 117 separate pieces of data on everything from rape to the consequences of
sexualized violence, such as depression, HIV, and pregnancy. Many more victims
are included in these reports, but the vagueness of much of the information
does not allow us to give an estimate of the total number. For example, one report
tells of an incident in which the Syrian army allegedly raped 36 women while another
speaks of a doctor who is treating some of the “2,000 girls and women raped
throughout
“The data we have so far
suggest sexualized violence is being used as a tool of war, although possibly
haphazardly and not necessarily as an organized strategy,” said Dr. Karestan
Koenen, associate professor of epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health
at Columbia University and the lead epidemiologist on the mapping project.
“These reports indicate that post-conflict intervention will need to address
the consequences of sexualized violence for victims.”
Government perpetrators
have committed the majority of the attacks we’ve been able to track: 61
percent, including attacks against men and women, with another 6 percent
carried out by government and shabiha
forces together. These soldiers or officers have allegedly carried out 58
percent of rapes against women; shabiha
(plainclothes militia) attackers 14 percent; government and shabiha working together 5
percent; and another or unknown attacker 26 percent. In 42 percent of the
incidents of sexualized violence against women that we found, the victims were
allegedly attacked by multiple people at once, suggesting a disturbingly high
rate of gang rape.
There are
well-documented challenges and limitations when it comes to studying sexualized
violence in conflict, and our data is not meant to represent the Syrian
conflict in its entirety. All of our reports come second- or third-hand, and
can’t be independently confirmed. Still, the data provides a small but critical
window into
“These new data drawn
from reports of sexualized violence crimes in the
“The fact that a large
portion of the alleged crimes involved multiple attackers indicates possible
coordinated, orchestrated, or systematic violence without restraints on the
behavior of government and other forces,” Sirkin said. In other words, either
Syrian leaders appear to be instructing soldiers to violate women, or the
Syrian armed forces have descended into such a Lord of the Flies-style chaos that rape is
becoming more routine.
Of the 117 reports, 80
percent of them include female victims, with ages ranging from 7 to 46. Of
those, 89 percent reported rape; 6 percent reported groping; 6 percent include
sexual assault without penetration; and 11 percent of reports include detention
that appears to have been for the purposes of sexualized violence or enslavement
for a period of longer than 24 hours. It’s difficult to know intent, but some
soldiers have
described being ordered to detain women to rape them. We’re keeping an eye
out for similarities to
Syrian women are
suffering more than just sexualized violence itself, with 20 percent of reports
leading to the victim’s death, 10 percent to anxiety and/or depression, and 5
percent to pregnancy. “Death” means that women were found dead with signs of
sexual assault or they were raped and then killed in front of witnesses, as in this
report in which a mother describes watching her three daughters stripped,
raped, and murdered by knife-wielding security forces. “You could only hear the
screams and the cries of the little ones asking for help, but this did not make
them show any mercy,” she recalled.
So far, we’ve found 24
incidents involving men and boys between the ages of 11 and 56 who have also
reported sexualized violence as a consequence of the Syrian conflict.
Thirty-three percent of reports with male victims allege rape and 38 percent
include sexual assault without penetration. Almost 17 percent include multiple
attackers. In all but one case, the perpetrators of sexual violence against men
were reportedly members of government forces. This is likely due to the fact
that most—75 percent—of the reported sexual torture has occurred in detention
facilities, staffed and run by the government, where rape and sexual assault
appear to be used as a tool of torture. The other 25 percent of reports do not
specify the exact location, in many cases because the attack was in the
victim’s home—in a number of these, the male victim is forced to watch as his
wife or daughter is raped.
“The fact that about a
fifth of the reports involve male victims also points to unbridled terror,
given the enormous stigma and silence that typically surrounds mass rape of
men,” said Sirkin.
The one city that has
produced the most reports is
Our numbers tell us that
there is a potentially tremendous human rights crisis unfolding for women, men,
and children in