Rape’s vast toll in Iraq war remains largely ignored
November 26th, 2008This is a report by Anna Badkhen, a correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor, who highlights the sort of news that has too often gone unreported. I felt it was important to also share here for the sake of awareness:
Many rape victims have escaped to Jordan but still don’t have access to treatment and counseling.
AMMAN, JORDAN – As though recoiling from her own memories, Khalida shrank deeper into her faded armchair with each sentence she told: of how gunmen apparently working for Iraq’s Interior Ministry kidnapped her, beat and raped her; of how they discarded her on a Baghdad sidewalk.
But her suffering did not end when she fled Iraq and became a refugee in Jordan’s capital, Amman. When Khalida’s husband learned that she had been raped, he abandoned her and their two young sons.
Rumors spread fast in Amman; soon, everyone on her block knew that she was without a man in the house. Last month, her Jordanian neighbor barged into her apartment and attempted to rape her.
Khalida never reported the incident. Like tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees in Jordan, she does not have a permit to live or work here, and she is afraid that if she turns to authorities for help she will get deported. So instead of seeking punishment for her assailant, she latched the flimsy metal door of her apartment and stopped going outside.
Her story sheds light on a problem that is little researched, poorly understood, and largely ignored: Iraqi rape victims who now live in Jordan illegally and without protection. Sexual assault is heavily stigmatized in the Middle East, and victims are often afraid to talk about it to anyone, fearing that their families will abandon them. And their shaky status in Jordan leaves them afraid to seek help and vulnerable to new assaults and abuse. They fear persecution by Jordanian immigration authorities almost as much as they fear returning to Iraq.
“The lack of legal status does lead to these sorts of protection issues [and] puts them in very exploitative situations,” says Imran Riza, who heads the mission in Jordan of the United Nations’ High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the main international agency that assists Iraqis in Jordan. Women like Khalida, he says, “are certainly vulnerable, and much more vulnerable than others.”
Rape is a common weapon of any war; no one knows how many Iraqi women have been raped since the war began in 2003. Most crimes against women “are not reported because of stigma, fear of retaliation, or lack of confidence in the police,” MADRE, an international women’s rights group, wrote in its 2007 report about violence against women in Iraq. Some women, like Khalida, are raped by Iraqi security forces. A 2005 report published by the Iraqi National Association for Human Rights found that women held in Interior Ministry detention centers endure “systematic rape by the investigators.”
A handful of organizations are working to help rape victims in Iraq. MADRE, together with the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, operates several shelters and safe houses in Baghdad for Iraqi rape victims, where the women have access to healthcare and counseling.
But militias often target women’s rights advocates in Iraq, so these facilities are “a clandestine network,” operated by “mostly somebody who at a great risk to themselves has opened a room for these victims,” says Yifat Susskind, MADRE’s communications director. The shelters have helped several thousand Iraqi women since 2003. Most rape victims learn about the shelters from other women.
Documenting sexual assault in Iraq by international researchers remains complicated because of widespread violence. “There’s been a security issue, so we haven’t been able to get people on the ground to look at the issue for a long time,” says Marianne Mollmann, who leads women’s rights advocacy at the New York-based Human Rights Watch, which published its last report about rape in Iraq in 2003.
Similarly, no one has tried to estimate how many Iraqi refugees have been raped while in Iraq or in Jordan, says Mohamad Habashneh, a Jordanian psychiatrist who works with Iraqi rape victims.
Mr. Habashneh has treated approximately 40 Iraqi rape victims for clinical depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. But he estimates that they are just a fraction of Iraqi refugees who had been raped.
Psychiatrists like Habashneh charge between $25 and $40 per visit, too expensive for most Iraqi refugees, who, like Khalida, live hand-to-mouth on monthly handouts of about $100 from international agencies.
Many victims are afraid to go outside or travel to a clinic out of fear of being detained by Jordanian authorities.
To help these women, women’s rights organizations in Jordan must coordinate with larger agencies, such as UNHCR, to provide care and programs that would help the victims earn money “because rape survivors are alienated from their family and therefore have no way to sustain themselves,” Ms. Susskind says.
But so far, these resources are not available for most Iraqi rape victims in Jordan. There are no support groups, no counselors, no hot lines, an no one to soothe Khalida when she has flashbacks that make her relive the day when assailants dressed in police uniforms arrived at the Oil Ministry where she worked and said they were taking her in for questioning.
She did not tell her husband that she had been raped but he figured it out. Now, Khalida does not blame him for going away, or for leaving her so vulnerable to men who wish to prey on her.
“I have his phone number,” she says, sobbing quietly. “I dial it sometimes for the kids to talk to their father. Sometimes, because I love him, I like to hear his voice. But when I say ‘hello’ he hangs up.”
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Another American import along with McDonald, Exxon, Freedom™ and…
Jina,
Of course it’s America’s doing that Iraqi men rape Iraqi women and that Jordanian men rape a woman just because it is known she’s defensless.
It is also our doing that ME society condemns the victim for the crime perpetrated upon her.
It is also our fault that an arab man would leave his wife out of shame, instead of comforting and protecting her…..
Of course.
I am glad you agree
[...] blogger Wameeth links to an article on Mideast Youth on how rape victims in the Iraq war continue to remain without treatment and counseling. Posted [...]
Of course I agree Jina, why should you or anyone else accept any personal responsibility when another abstract entity can be blamed.
I suspect each and everyone of your own personal problems, issues and needs can be placed at the foot of another.
That must make life very…..what word am I searching for Jina?
Jina,
You are a daughter of your society.
Don’t you realize that your comments are much the same as the men in your society…”she was raped because she was outside alone and not dressed modestly enough” so it isn’t the rapists fault it’s hers. It’s not an individual crime but a societal issue beyond the criminal.
Rapes existed in Iraq prior too, during, and will exist after all US personnel are gone.
Blaming it on an outside entity relieves the rapists just as in the comment above…”politics had something to do with it?”
I know you will continue to grind your axe but please think thru your process as you sound very familiar…not the cutting edge ‘new ME guy/gal you’d like to be’.
I am a guy you retarded ignoramus and I am not an Arab.
And the fact that you didn’t get the sarcasm in what I wrote is even more sad.
I think there should be a government-side solution for the rape problem in Iraq.
NGO’s work is just a relief. But no NGO can bring punishment to the perpetrators… That is, is those NGOs are not militia…
-Andy
http://myarabicstories.blogspot.com
The breakdown in law and order thanks to the criminal American invasion Iraq is what led to this. Of course patb and other cretinous yanks will never owe up to the crimes of their government. I’m sure that 14 year Iraqi girl 4 yank terrorists gang raped and murdered along with her whole family were asking for it as well. The bastards will be eligible for payroll within 10 years. Bravo!
first of all……LOL for patb calling jina the daughter of society….and its not patb’s fault..lol
secondly, i feel so bad for khalida being raped and all other iraqi women who have been raped from the war….and what kind of sick bastard leaves his wife and 2 kids after finding out his wife was raped….and in a way its also the womens fault,,for being away and alone from her family…
and no offense but jina is a girls name…lol….im so sorry man…lol
anyways…is there anything i can do to help these women who have been raped in iraq/jordan?
i feel sorry for the children and women…and all the innocent ones of the war
“I’m sure that 14 year Iraqi girl 4 yank terrorists gang raped”
what do u mean?..does this realy happen?
Rape is being used as a tactic by all sides. It’s not hard to round up and weed out the most disgusting and sadomasochistic people and give them a paycheck.
Governments are breeding this mentality in their backyards.
Care to provide a citation to back the allegation that coalition forces (one of the sides) is perpetrating rape as a tactic?
Tor
I am actually a psychosocial worker who has been doing work with Iraqi women in Syria and Egypt for over a year now. Rape has occurred extensively–by Iraqi militias, the Iraqi police forces, Coalition forces and lay people. It is important to recognize that rape is an act of aggression, shame and domination as much as it is sexual. It is a tactic that has been used in war since time immemorial, and it is sadly very very common, especially as the social order breaks down and there is no regular and reliable recourse for the action. If people can get away with it unpunished, it becomes more frequent, and the more frequent it becomes, the more it is seen as “normal”. And I would like to note that, although it more commonly happens to women, it does happen to men as well, particularly in torture situations.
I think that the take-home message from this article though is that there are not enough psychosocial resources available to support the survivors. Until an asylum-seeker has been officially recognized as a “refugee” by UNHCR, they are not eligible for any services or protection. This is extremely problematic, especially with the added fear of deportation by the local government, which hinders those seeking help. The problem is systemic and needs to be addressed in terms of international policy concerning service provision for asylum seekers and national laws providing safety for all those seeking refuge within their borders. For those who really want to help, educate yourselves and others about the situation of the 30million+ refugees currently displaced in the world, and volunteer with your local IRC or another NGO, or lobby the UN (who recently cut their budget and suspended psychosocial services for Iraqis in Jordan) for asylum-seeker’s rights. It can take up to a year to be recognized as a refugee after entering a country of refuge–what are people supposed to do in the meantime without the legal ability to work or send their children to school, and without any official or legal support?