Download or read book Rape in Wartime written by R. Branche and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-10-26 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection offers a new reflection on rape in war time through 15 case studies, ranging from Greece to Nigeria. It questions the specificity of rape as a universal transgression, its place in memories of war, its legacies, including children born from rape, and the challenge of writing about intimate violence as both a scientist and a human.

Download or read book The Lonely Soldier written by Helen Benedict and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Lonely Soldier--the inspiration for the documentary The Invisible War--vividly tells the stories of five women who fought in Iraq between 2003 and 2006--and of the challenges they faced while fighting a war painfully alone. More American women have fought and died in Iraq than in any war since World War Two, yet as soldiers they are still painfully alone. In Iraq, only one in ten troops is a woman, and she often serves in a unit with few other women or none at all. This isolation, along with the military's deep-seated hostility toward women, causes problems that many female soldiers find as hard to cope with as war itself: degradation, sexual persecution by their comrades, and loneliness, instead of the camaraderie that every soldier depends on for comfort and survival. As one female soldier said, "I ended up waging my own war against an enemy dressed in the same uniform as mine." In The Lonely Soldier, Benedict tells the stories of five women who fought in Iraq between 2003 and 2006. She follows them from their childhoods to their enlistments, then takes them through their training, to war and home again, all the while setting the war's events in context. We meet Jen, white and from a working-class town in the heartland, who still shakes from her wartime traumas; Abbie, who rebelled against a household of liberal Democrats by enlisting in the National Guard; Mickiela, a Mexican American who grew up with a family entangled in L.A. gangs; Terris, an African American mother from D.C. whose childhood was torn by violence; and Eli PaintedCrow, who joined the military to follow Native American tradition and to escape a life of Faulknerian hardship. Between these stories, Benedict weaves those of the forty other Iraq War veterans she interviewed, illuminating the complex issues of war and misogyny, class, race, homophobia, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Each of these stories is unique, yet collectively they add up to a heartbreaking picture of the sacrifices women soldiers are making for this country. Benedict ends by showing how these women came to face the truth of war and by offering suggestions for how the military can improve conditions for female soldiers-including distributing women more evenly throughout units and rejecting male recruits with records of violence against women. Humanizing, urgent, and powerful, The Lonely Soldier is a clarion call for change.

Download or read book Crimes Unspoken written by Miriam Gebhardt and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-12-20 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The soldiers who occupied Germany after the Second World War were not only liberators: they also brought with them a new threat, as women throughout the country became victims of sexual violence. In this disturbing and carefully researched book, the historian Miriam Gebhardt reveals for the first time the scale of this human tragedy, which continued long after the hostilities had ended. Discussion in recent years of the rape of German women committed at the end of the war has focused almost exclusively on the crimes committed by Soviet soldiers, but Gebhardt shows that this picture is misleading. Crimes were committed as much by the Western Allies – American, French and British – as by the members of the Red Army. Nor was the suffering limited to the immediate aftermath of the war. Gebhardt powerfully recounts how raped women continued to be the victims of doctors, who arbitrarily granted or refused abortions, welfare workers, who put pregnant women in homes, and wider society, which even today prefers to ignore these crimes. Crimes Unspoken is the first historical account to expose the true extent of sexual violence in Germany at the end of the war, offering valuable new insight into a key period of 20th century history.

Download or read book Bush Wives and Girl Soldiers written by Chris Coulter and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the war in Sierra Leone (1991–2002), members of various rebel movements kidnapped thousands of girls and women, some of whom came to take an active part in the armed conflict alongside the rebels. In a stunning look at the life of women in wartime, Chris Coulter draws on interviews with more than a hundred women to bring us inside the rebel camps in Sierra Leone.When these girls and women returned to their home villages after the cessation of hostilities, their families and peers viewed them with skepticism and fear, while humanitarian organizations saw them primarily as victims. Neither view was particularly helpful in helping them resume normal lives after the war. Offering lessons for policymakers, practitioners, and activists, Coulter shows how prevailing notions of gender, both in home communities and among NGO workers, led, for instance, to women who had taken part in armed conflict being bypassed in the demilitarization and demobilization processes carried out by the international community in the wake of the war. Many of these women found it extremely difficult to return to their families, and, without institutional support, some were forced to turn to prostitution to eke out a living.Coulter weaves several themes through the work, including the nature of gender roles in war, livelihood options in war and peace, and how war and postwar experiences affect social and kinship relations.

Download or read book Our Bodies Their Battlefields written by Christina Lamb and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Christina Lamb, the coauthor of the bestselling I Am Malala and an award-winning journalist—an essential, groundbreaking examination of how women experience war. In Our Bodies, Their Battlefields, longtime intrepid war correspondent Christina Lamb makes us witness to the lives of women in wartime. An award-winning war correspondent for twenty-five years (she’s never had a female editor) Lamb reports two wars—the “bang-bang” war and the story of how the people behind the lines live and survive. At the same time, since men usually act as the fighters, women are rarely interviewed about their experience of wartime, other than as grieving widows and mothers, though their experience is markedly different from that of the men involved in battle. Lamb chronicles extraordinary tragedy and challenges in the lives of women in wartime. And none is more devastating than the increase of the use of rape as a weapon of war. Visiting warzones including the Congo, Rwanda, Nigeria, Bosnia, and Iraq, and spending time with the Rohingya fleeing Myanmar, she records the harrowing stories of survivors, from Yazidi girls kept as sex slaves by ISIS fighters and the beekeeper risking his life to rescue them; to the thousands of schoolgirls abducted across northern Nigeria by Boko Haram, to the Congolese gynecologist who stitches up more rape victims than anyone on earth. Told as a journey, and structured by country, Our Bodies, Their Battlefields gives these women voice. We have made significant progress in international women’s rights, but across the world women are victimized by wartime atrocities that are rarely recorded, much less punished. The first ever prosecution for war rape was in 1997 and there have been remarkably few convictions since, as if rape doesn’t matter in the reckoning of war, only killing. Some courageous women in countries around the world are taking things in their own hands, hunting down the war criminals themselves, trying to trap them through Facebook. In this profoundly important book, Christina Lamb shines a light on some of the darkest parts of the human experience—so that we might find a new way forward. Our Bodies, Their Battlefields is as inspiring and empowering is as it is urgent, a clarion call for necessary change.

Download or read book Comfort Women written by Yoshiaki Yoshimi and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Available for the first time in English, this is the definitive account of the practice of sexual slavery the Japanese military perpetrated during World War II by the researcher principally responsible for exposing the Japanese government's responsibility for these atrocities. The large scale imprisonment and rape of thousands of women, who were euphemistically called "comfort women" by the Japanese military, first seized public attention in 1991 when three Korean women filed suit in a Toyko District Court stating that they had been forced into sexual servitude and demanding compensation. Since then the comfort stations and their significance have been the subject of ongoing debate and intense activism in Japan, much if it inspired by Yoshimi's investigations. How large a role did the military, and by extension the government, play in setting up and administering these camps? What type of compensation, if any, are the victimized women due? These issues figure prominently in the current Japanese focus on public memory and arguments about the teaching and writing of history and are central to efforts to transform Japanese ways of remembering the war. Yoshimi Yoshiaki provides a wealth of documentation and testimony to prove the existence of some 2,000 centers where as many as 200,000 Korean, Filipina, Taiwanese, Indonesian, Burmese, Dutch, Australian, and some Japanese women were restrained for months and forced to engage in sexual activity with Japanese military personnel. Many of the women were teenagers, some as young as fourteen. To date, the Japanese government has neither admitted responsibility for creating the comfort station system nor given compensation directly to former comfort women. This English edition updates the Japanese edition originally published in 1995 and includes introductions by both the author and the translator placing the story in context for American readers.

Download or read book What Soldiers Do written by Mary Louise Roberts and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-05-17 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do you convince men to charge across heavily mined beaches into deadly machine-gun fire? Do you appeal to their bonds with their fellow soldiers, their patriotism, their desire to end tyranny and mass murder? Certainly—but if you’re the US Army in 1944, you also try another tack: you dangle the lure of beautiful French women, waiting just on the other side of the wire, ready to reward their liberators in oh so many ways. That’s not the picture of the Greatest Generation that we’ve been given, but it’s the one Mary Louise Roberts paints to devastating effect in What Soldiers Do. Drawing on an incredible range of sources, including news reports, propaganda and training materials, official planning documents, wartime diaries, and memoirs, Roberts tells the fascinating and troubling story of how the US military command systematically spread—and then exploited—the myth of French women as sexually experienced and available. The resulting chaos—ranging from flagrant public sex with prostitutes to outright rape and rampant venereal disease—horrified the war-weary and demoralized French population. The sexual predation, and the blithe response of the American military leadership, also caused serious friction between the two nations just as they were attempting to settle questions of long-term control over the liberated territories and the restoration of French sovereignty. While never denying the achievement of D-Day, or the bravery of the soldiers who took part, What Soldiers Do reminds us that history is always more useful—and more interesting—when it is most honest, and when it goes beyond the burnished beauty of nostalgia to grapple with the real lives and real mistakes of the people who lived it.

Download or read book I Had Rather Die written by Kim Murphy and published by Kim Murphy. This book was released on 2023-09-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American Civil War is often regarded as a "low-rape" war, due to gentlemanly "restraint." Nearly thirty Union soldiers were executed for the crime. As a result, rape is perceived to have been dealt with harshly. On the surface, the numbers reflect the view that rape was indeed far from widespread. In reality, few soldiers received harsh punishment for a crime considered a capital offense in the nineteenth century. I Had Rather Die is the first book dedicated to the topic of rape during the war. Through newspapers, Official Records, diaries, letters, and court-martial documents, Kim Murphy exposes the misrepresentations about the topic of rape during the war. Not only were women raped during times of battle, but those who bravely stepped forward to name their attackers were interrogated in the justice system, often by their assailants. Courts-martial revolved around a woman's consent and her degree of resistance against a man's force. Poor and black women frequently had their reputations called into question. For far too long, women's claims have been dismissed as hearsay and propaganda. Behind the brother-against-brother war lurks the hidden war of brother against sister.

Download or read book Taken by Force written by J. Robert Lilly and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2007-07-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sociologist and criminologist Professor Bob Lilly makes unprecedented use of military records and trial transcripts to throw light on one of the overlooked consequences of the US Army's presence in Western Europe between 1942 and 1945: the rape of an estimated 14,000 civilian women in the United Kingdom, France and Germany. By focusing on a group of men - the 'greatest generation' - more commonly idolized in the Western historical imagination, the study makes an important and original contribution to our understanding of sexual violence in armed conflict. Taken by Force speaks as often as possible through the protagonists themselves and examines the differing social contexts prevailing in each country where the crimes were committed. Attention is also given to the racial dimension of this issue: the disproportionate number of black GIs prosecuted and the relative harshness of their sentences when convicted.

Download or read book Ideologies of Forgetting written by Gina Marie Weaver and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First book to study rape and sexual abuse of Vietnamese women by U.S. soldiers during the Vietnam War.

Download or read book Black Hearts written by Jim Frederick and published by Crown. This book was released on 2010-02-09 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Riveting. . . a testament to a misconceived war, and to the ease with which ordinary men, under certain conditions, can transform into monsters.”—New York Times Book Review This is the story of a small group of soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division’s fabled 502nd Infantry Regiment—a unit known as “the Black Heart Brigade.” Deployed in late 2005 to Iraq’s so-called Triangle of Death, a veritable meat grinder just south of Baghdad, the Black Hearts found themselves in arguably the country’s most dangerous location at its most dangerous time. Hit by near-daily mortars, gunfire, and roadside bomb attacks, suffering from a particularly heavy death toll, and enduring a chronic breakdown in leadership, members of one Black Heart platoon—1st Platoon, Bravo Company, 1st Battalion—descended, over their year-long tour of duty, into a tailspin of poor discipline, substance abuse, and brutality. Four 1st Platoon soldiers would perpetrate one of the most heinous war crimes U.S. forces have committed during the Iraq War—the rape of a fourteen-year-old Iraqi girl and the cold-blooded execution of her and her family. Three other 1st Platoon soldiers would be overrun at a remote outpost—one killed immediately and two taken from the scene, their mutilated corpses found days later booby-trapped with explosives. Black Hearts is an unflinching account of the epic, tragic deployment of 1st Platoon. Drawing on hundreds of hours of in-depth interviews with Black Heart soldiers and first-hand reporting from the Triangle of Death, Black Hearts is a timeless story about men in combat and the fragility of character in the savage crucible of warfare. But it is also a timely warning of new dangers emerging in the way American soldiers are led on the battlefields of the twenty-first century.

Download or read book I Am a Soldier Too written by Rick Bragg and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2003-11-11 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author lends his remarkable narrative skills to the story of the most famous POW this country has known. In I Am a Soldier, Too, Bragg lets Jessica Lynch tell the story of her capture in the Iraq War in her own words--not the sensationalized ones of the media's initial reports. Here we see how a humble rural upbringing leads to a stint in the military, one of the most exciting job options for a young person in Palestine, West Virginia. We see the real story behind the ambush in the Iraqi Desert that led to Lynch's capture. And we gain new perspective on her rescue from an Iraqi hospital where she had been receiving care. Here Lynch’s true heroism and above all, modesty, is allowed to emerge, as we're shown how she managed her physical recovery from her debilitating wounds and contended with the misinformation--both deliberate and unintended--surrounding her highly publicized rescue. In the end, what we see is a uniquely American story of courage and true heroism.

Download or read book Band of Sisters written by Kirsten Holmstedt and published by Stackpole Books. This book was released on 2008-08-25 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now available in paperback. Winner of the 2007 American Authors Association Golden Quill Award. Winner of the 2007 Military Writers Society of America Founder's Award.

Download or read book A Woman in Berlin written by and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2006-07-11 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For eight weeks in 1945, as Berlin fell to the Russian army, a young woman kept a daily record of life in her apartment building and among its residents. She tells of the shameful indignities to which women in a conquered city are always subject.

Download or read book Women in the Military written by Connie Goldsmith and published by Twenty-First Century Books ™. This book was released on 2019-01-01 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In December 2015, the Pentagon changed a rule to allow American women to serve for the first time ever in front-line ground combat troops. Women have fulfilled many military roles throughout history, including nursing; driving ambulances; handling administrative duties; working as mechanics; and serving in the WASPs, WACs, WAVES, and SPARS. More recently women are flying jets, conducting surveillance, commanding naval ships, and now fighting on the front lines. Yet no matter their official title, they have faced devastating discrimination—from lack of advancement, economic inequity, and inadequate veteran support, to sexual harassment and rape. Meet the women who have served their country courageously and who are standing up for fairness in the US military.

Download or read book This Woman s Army written by Marie DeYoung and published by PSI Research. This book was released on 1999 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenge to rethink enlistment, training and disciplinary policies and eliminate double standards for performance and discipline that contribute to the breakdown of military readiness and the disintegration of American families associated with the military. [back cover].

Download or read book The General s Daughter written by Nelson DeMille and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2001-04-01 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Thegripping murder mystery about an upstanding military officer - the base commander's daughter - who's been leading an unsavory double life. When a professional military woman with a pristine reputation is found raped and murdered, a preliminary search turns up certain paraphernalia, and sex toys that point to a scandal of major proportions, The chief investigator is reluctant to take the case when he learns that his partner will be a woman with whom he had a tempestuous affair and an unpleasant parting. But duty calls and intrigue begins when they learn that several top-level people may have been involved with the "golden girl" - and many have wanted her dead. "DeMille is a master at keeping the reader hanging on to see what happens next." - Associated Press