Contrary to conventional wisdom, rape in conflict zones is far from universal:
A recent study by the Peace Research Institute of Oslo of all 48 conflicts and all 236 armed groups – including state, rebel groups, and pro-government militias – in Africa between 1989 and 2009 found that 64 percent of armed groups were not reported to have engaged in any form of sexual violence. Of course, in most contexts, especially war, sexual violence is underreported. But even after 2000, when wartime rape became a highly salient public issue actively investigated by NGOs, more than half of armed groups were not reported to have engaged in sexual violence.
Why does this matter? Instead of framing rape as an inevitable outcome of war, by understanding which groups engage in sexual violence – and which do not – and what accounts for the difference, advocates and policy makers will be far better positioned to limit – and perhaps even to end – this scourge of war.
The above video is the trailer for the Oscar-nominated live-action short film “Aquel No Era Yo” (That Wasn’t Me), which contains a brutal rape scene. Update from a reader:
While everyone can agree that raising awareness of the horrible physical and sexual abuse of child soldiers and women in civil wars, particularly in Africa over the past 30 years, is a good thing, my partner and I just had to write in to let you know that Aquel no era yo has major, major issues.
We attended a screening of all of the Oscar-nominated shorts a few weeks ago, and while four of them were very interesting and well-done (our pick for the winner is the French Avant que tout perdre, an amazingly tense snapshot of a woman and her children fleeing an abusive husband/father), Aquel left an extremely bad taste in our mouths.
Awareness is a good thing, but not this type of awareness. Not a film which – spoiler alerts – so crudely portrays African blacks as aggressors and European whites as victims; not one in which the white man screams “You have lost your humanity!” just before the black child shoots him; not one where the army storms in and shoots all the rebels, but, apparently to keep from offending an audience’s sensitivities, we see no bodies of children among the slain; and not one where the young black protagonist and narrator, a child “saved” by the courageous white woman who overcomes her rape to take him to safety, redeems himself only by telling his story, contrite and eventually understanding of the “wrong” he did, to an auditorium full of white/Spanish teenagers while his benevolent saviour looks on, smiles, and knows she did the right thing.
This story should not be about the white woman who gets raped by a black man in the Congo. It should be about the children. Though it would no doubt have been agonizing, in that movie theater at that moment, we would have far preferred to see documentary footage of the multiple recovery programs for child soldiers in Africa – or perhaps, yes, even footage of the horrible events themselves if such a thing existed.
Aquel is propaganda, pure and simple. At first we were very surprised to see from the credits that Save The Children and Amnesty International had attached their names and presumably their funding to it; in hindsight, it feels like the cynicism and scaremongering of Kony 2012 all over again. The victims deserve better.
The Dish 