“I was raped by an Israeli soldier” Gaza Flotilla Survivor Breaks Silence

 

Patriarchy, give me my country back

 

I was four years old when it first happened. A middle-aged man, who ran a small departmental store in the Dhaka neighbourhood I lived in, was babysitting me while my mother went out to fetch some notes from her university. It was difficult raising a child all on her own, and my single mother was grateful that she could leave me in safe company.

I was sitting cross-legged on the floor opposite my babysitter when he pulled me close to his body and put his tongue down my mouth. At first, I was fascinated—I had seen adults kiss each other in tv shows and films. Children, at that age, are curious about the liberties that adulthood offers. But soon after, a dirty feeling came over me. My mouth froze. He attempted to force his tongue on me a few more times before I pulled away and rushed to the bathroom. I had a rabid compulsion to clean my mouth; I brushed my teeth, again and again, hoping to remove his traces so that my mother would never know, and I could pretend it never happened.

For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.
Two years later, a security guard at the apartment complex we shared with my aunt groped my chest and motioned that he would put his "thing" inside me. I thought I should stay quiet, because I was ashamed, but the constant touch from him and the resulting pain became so unbearable that I rushed to my mother as she was boarding a rickshaw to go to the supermarket. "He's hurting me," I told her. She looked at me in surprise. Hurting? How? Where? I eventually revealed all the details to her, and he was dismissed shortly after.

I used to be a very talkative child, but with every experience of physical violation, I grew quieter, more watchful of my words, more concerned about what I could talk about to anyone.

When I was seven, I realised that my parents had separated because my father would physically abuse my mother, the floor frequently turning bloody.

When I was eight, a law enforcement officer asked my mother to sleep with him. She refused and was sanctioned.

When I was nine, a male relative lay down beside me while I was resting and put his arms around my waist. He turned me around, and there it was, again, a foreign tongue inside my mouth, unwelcome, unwanted. I flinched and immediately left the room.

When I was eleven, construction workers next door would make untoward gestures every time I went to the veranda, and I eventually completely stopped going outside.

When I was 13, I was severely bullied about my weight and the lack of feminine curves—disparaged for not meeting societal beauty standards.

When I was 14, a teenage crush of mine spread stories about being physically intimate with me, and my classmates hurled numerous insults my way while somehow, in their eyes, he was now "cooler."

When I was 15, my friend's boyfriend locked the room behind us and attempted to pinch my private parts, but I immediately unlocked the door and left the room.

When I was 16, my male cousin confessed that his peers could not see their female counterparts as anything more than sex objects.

When I was 17, a man older than my father proposed a sexual relationship with me in exchange for expensive gifts and financial security.

When I was 18, my school's principal, upon my insistence on wearing shorts while playing sports, gawked at me and said, "What will I do if one of the security guards rapes you?"

When I was 19, I left Bangladesh, and I have not returned since.

Begum Rokeya, the prominent feminist thinker and social reformer, once dreamt of a world led by women in her famous short story "Sultana's Dream." Kazi Nazrul Islam, the national poet of Bangladesh, wrote, "I sing the song of equality; in my view, there is no disparity between man and woman." Why, then, according to Bangladesh Mahila Parishad, were there 2,711 incidents of violence against women and children, including rape, between January and October in 2020?

Why, according to a 2015 survey by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), did more than 70 percent of married women or girls face intimate partner abuse, including physical violence? Why indeed, according to Ain o Salish Kendra (ASK), were at least 235 women murdered by their husbands or members of his family in the first nine months of 2020? How, in the country of Begum Rokeya, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Sufia Kamal, can rape be justified because of what a woman is wearing?

The consequences of patriarchy are a pervasive reality in Bangladesh. According to a 2018 study by Brac, 94 percent of Bangladeshi women report being sexually harassed while commuting via public transport. Poor women, including those from rural areas, face multiple forms of oppression, including lack of access to quality education and unpaid productive work. Women from religious minorities continue to be persecuted for their beliefs. As part of a community facing landlessness issues and a lack of civil rights, non-Bengali indigenous women in particular face further challenges at the intersection of indigeneity, gender, and food insecurity. Gender-variant people are not spared from these challenges either: hijra people are marginalised in social and economic spheres. In 2015, they were denied government jobs because they "failed" a genitalia-based medical examination.

Despite my personal experiences and the grim statistics on gendered oppression in Bangladesh, I have begun to speak up. I am fortunate to have had the opportunities to study around the world and grow as a person, but I still feel the wound of being a second-class citizen in my own country. I want to reclaim my home. I ask the women reading this article, what about you? 

Link

Brides to Brothels: The Rohingya Trade

They have survived rape and the slaughter of their families. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya girls and women fled Myanmar to escape a military crackdown.
In Bangladesh's refugee camps they thought they would be safe. But inside the tents that house almost a million Rohingya refugees, women and girls are being bought, sold and given away.
Girls are being forced into marriage because relatives can't afford to feed them, or are being lured to brothels with the promise of good jobs. We investigate the dangers still facing Rohingya women and meet the people seeking to exploit them.

Myanmar forces believed using rape as weapon of war against Muslim Rohingya women, girls

Rape is being used as a weapon of war in the Rohingya crisis, with no woman safe from the risk of sexual attack as Myanmar’s Muslim minority is driven out of its homeland, according to experts in the field and those caught up in the crisis.

Doctors treating some of the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims who have fled to Bangladesh from Myanmar in recent weeks have seen dozens of women with injuries consistent with violent sexual attacks, according to U.N. clinicians.

And women interviewed by the Thomson Reuters Foundation tell of violent rape by Myanmar security forces as they flee their homes, part of a mass Rohingya exodus.

“The Burmese (Myanmar) military has clearly used rape as one of a range of horrific methods of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya,” said Skye Wheeler, a sexual violence expert with Human Rights Watch who has assessed the fast-filling camps.

“Rape and other forms of sexual violence has been widespread and systematic as well as brutal, humiliating and traumatic,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Myanmar dismisses all such accusations of ethnic cleansing, saying it has to tackle insurgents, whom it accuses of starting fires and attacking civilians, as well as the security forces.

Yet villagers fleeing the violence say rape is a routine weapon in the military’s armory, with the United Nations now deliberating whether the violence amounts to genocide.

Whatever the legal definition, 18-year-old Nurshida knows only too well what happened to her.

Speaking to Thomson Reuters Foundation from the relative safety of her camp, Nurshida recalled how her class of 30 was marched in silence to their school last month, held at gunpoint by uniformed soldiers, then manhandled into the main auditorium.

The schoolgirls, she said, cowered as one in a corner; the men — breathing heavily and dripping sweat — occupied another.

The gang rape began immediately.

Fair-skinned Nurshida, with bangles looping her wrist and a loose scarf shrouding her hair, said she was chosen first by the group, six clean-shaven soldiers carrying guns and machetes.

“One of the men held me tightly on the floor. I started screaming, but a second soldier hit me in the face with his hand and undressed me fully. I was silent when they raped me, there was nothing I could do,” Nurshida said.

Her two friends were thrown to the floor next. As they were raped, smoke was rising in the distance — her native Naisapru village was on fire, one of many set alight in the exodus.

“All of the schoolgirls were raped and there were loud screams everywhere,” said Nurshida, sitting in a mud hut in Bangladesh’s Kutupalong camp where she is waiting to register as a refugee.

Authorities say her story fits a horribly familiar pattern.

“The stories we hear point to rape being used strategically as a weapon of war,” aid Rashed Hasan, a lieutenant colonel in the Bangladesh army.

Women of all ages and backgrounds have reported similarly brutal sexual assaults — as well as witnessing family killings, losing children and being forced from their homes.

“Rape is an act of power. It knows no discrimination in terms of age, sex or ethnicity,” Saba Zariv of the United Nations Population Fund told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

At 9 months pregnant, Jannet says she was brutally tortured and raped at her home in Myanmar.

“My husband was killed five days before soldiers attacked our village. Our three children have never been seen again since,” she said, cradling 5-day-old Fatima in the flimsy makeshift tent she now calls home.

Fatima, who was delivered in a rice field, is her only remaining family member.

Late into her pregnancy, Jannet said she was alone when the army marched into Fakira Bazaar village. While everyone scattered into the jungle, the 22-year-old chose to hide.

“Several soldiers broke the door. They saw that I was pregnant, but they all raped me.” At the end of the day she was left naked, beaten, her children gone.

“I cried and screamed for them, but I still don’t know where they are,” she said. “I never want to go back to Myanmar. … I have lost everything.”

Yet safety is not guaranteed in the chaotic Rohingya refugee camps that are quickly becoming the world’s largest.

Parvin, 20, said she has been rejected by her in-laws after soldiers beheaded her husband and raped her while she was 5 months pregnant.

“They beat me unconscious,” she said. “I woke up to an empty village and my in-laws searching for me. I was lying naked on the floor of their house.”

The last thing Parvin’s mother-in-law did for her was help her wash after the rape. “They told me they didn’t want to take responsibility for me and rejected me.”

Now she lives alone in a bamboo house, terrified of men.

“I can never get married again now that I was raped. I have no choice but to raise my baby alone,” she said. “That’s all that drives me now. I have lost all else.”

Link

Rohingya refugees share stories of sexual violence (Trigger Warning)

Rajuma Begum, 20, survived the August 30 massacre in Tula Toli, believed to have been one of the most brutal incidents of Myanmar army violence. Villagers were taken to a beach by the river where the men were separated from the women and children and then gunned down, hacked to death and bayoneted.

Rajuma was holding her son, Mohammed Saddique, in her arms, when four or five soldiers began taking women away in groups of five to seven.

"They took me along with another four women inside a house," Rajuma recounted, speaking at a school in Kutupalong refugee camp.

"They ripped my son from my arms and threw him [on the ground] and cut his throat," she said, before burying her head in her hands and starting to wail.

"I am thirsty to hear someone calling me 'ma'," Rajuma said between sobs. "I had a younger brother who is 10 years old. I'm sorry to him because they took him and I couldn't save him."

Full article

Ross Kemp Extreme World - India

This was hard to watch, because well it is India. The way women are dehumanized and murdered for the pleasure and profit of men, yet another side of the evil that is patriarchy. The trafficker admits he targets Advasi and Muslim girls, it made me think all the men that care so much about cows or are obsessed with hijab/purdah why does this not concern you? 

Dozens of Syrians forced into sexual slavery in derelict Lebanese house

No words, just horror.

Police and judicial officials say the women were trafficked from war-torn Syria and Iraq, recruited by agents of the network for supposedly legitimate jobs such as restaurant workers, before being imprisoned at Chez Maurice.

“They were perhaps looking for weaker families, where nobody is going to ask about the woman, such as if her father died in the war,” said Mousallam. “They are hunters. They did not for a moment treat them as humans.”

Those who resisted working as prostitutes were raped and beaten, and then forced to have unprotected sex with customers. They were sometimes electrocuted or whipped, in an environment that judges described as “a journey to hell”.

The indictment said the women were forced to have sex with customers more than 10 times a day, making between $30-70 per session, all of which was taken away by the guards, including any tips, in effect making them sex slaves.

Jabbour said she hoped the Chez Maurice case would act as a model for similar situations in the future, with women treated as victims rather than being on par with those who run any network.

But she said there would also have to be a cultural shift in the way Lebanese society looks at prostitution. Kafa is not in favour of legalising prostitution, saying it legitimises exploitation and the treatment of women as commodities. Instead, it advocates punishing human traffickers and sex buyers.

Though Lebanon is one of the more liberal Middle Eastern societies, domestic violence and gender inequality are still pervasive. A one-of-a-kind survey carried out by Kafa, which interviewed sex buyers in Lebanon, found that many thought that if prostitution was completely prohibited, rates of rape would increase, and so it was necessary to have a sub-class of women who would shield the rest of society from male sexuality. Most of the interviewees felt entitled to have sex whenever they pleased, and also believed that the prostitutes enjoyed having sex with them, on top of being reimbursed.

“Everything evolves around the sexuality of men,” she said. “We raise boys and men with the idea that it’s very normal to buy sex and to have sex whenever they want, not to control their sexuality.”

Full article

Muslim Leader Shaykh Umar Al-Qadri responds to Migrant sex attacks in Cologne

Great perpective from this shaykh.

‘No to Sexism, No to Racism’: Syrian refugees

 

The heinous attacks on women in Cologne cannot be condemned enough. More should have been done to prevent them and more must be done to bring perpetrators to justice. This is an expression of rape culture, of patriarchy, misogyny that exists in all cultures and all places. But here it is only being discussed because of the Arab or North African appearance of the attackers. Even the victims themselves are being ignored. 

The attacks are being exploited by anti-refugee/right-wing protesters to malign and stereotype all refugees. Organisations like Pegida say sex attacks were "in principle bad for the women, but good for us, because the people are being woken up." Indeed no one is more pleased with such a backlash against the refugees than Daesh themselves. It completely reaffirms their agenda and their attempts to alienate and polarize Muslims in Europe. 

Morever people like the Czech President Milos Zeman further assist Daesh by making statements like “The experience of western European countries which have ghettos and excluded localities shows that the integration of the Muslim community is practically impossible,” Ignoring the fact that there are many well integrated Muslim communities in Europe indeed European countries like Bosnia and Kosovo are Muslim!

Therefore is is imporant to not give in to the steretypes and to share news which also shows refugees in a postive light.

In Cologne, Syrians gathered with plaques condemning the attacks that took place in the city, and to thank the country for taking them in.

Refugees also gave out flowers to passers-by, and held signs saying: ‘We respect the values of German society’ and ‘We are all Cologne’. 

An American woman has told how she was rescued from being sexually assaulted on New Year’s Eve in Cologne by a group of Syrian refugees. She remains friends with one of her rescuers, a refugee who condemned the attackers saying they had “lost their minds” on drink and drugs.