No Matter Which Side Wins, Women Always Pay the Price
By Joanna Gentle, staff writer
Ever since the time humans could make tools they began to use those tools against one another. Thousands of wars have been fought over thousands of years of human history. From wars over wealth, family issues, power, monarchy, and religion, there has always been conflict. These conflicts have been short and long, bloody and seemingly peaceful yet all share one common factor: Women always pay the price. Men may have always been the one’s fighting but no matter who wins or loses women are always abused and used at the end of these “great wars”. Men consistently use war as an excuse to do the unspeakable and hurt women on either side of a war. War may mean death for men, but it always means pain and suffering for women.
The first ever recorded war was fought 13,000 years ago in Mesopotamia in 2,700 B.C. between the forces of Sumer and Elam. This war was fought for centuries between the Sumerians and the Elamites over territory claims. This story of the first war is in constant dispute, but one constant is that war results in the destruction of homes and other people’s lands. The modern wars have not changed this factor. Almost 13,00 years later we are still fighting each other over land, cultural, and racial differences. Homes and land are still being destroyed. Innocents pay the price of war in blood and always have since the beginning of time. Innocents often include women and children, and although both pay the price of war in blood, women also pay another price.
During the second world war, once Japan got involved and started their invasion of Guam, Wake Island, and Hong Kong, they began doing what all conquerors do: looting, burning, and raping cities. However it wasn't just the Japanese doing this. Both sides of the “bad” and the “good” did this to people. Their stories were silenced for many years but once these accounts came out, the world gasped and then seemed to completely erase their stories from memory. Under the Japanese Imperial Army’s occupation of Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, China, and other countries, the women were enslaved and deemed as “comfort women”. These women are still alive and continue to tell their stories, such as Jan Ruff-O’Herne of the Dutch Colony who states “ I have forgiven the Japanese for what they did to me, but I can never forget. The war never ended for the ‘Comfort Women’.” These women were silenced by not only the Japanese, but also by their own people and governments.
In an article published by the United Nations titled “Sexual Violence: a Tool of War,” they describe the Rwandan Genocide in 1994. This article condemns the sexual violence in not just the Rwanda Civil War, but in wars overall. Sexual Violence against women during war has during history mostly been excused as collateral damage. However excusing this type of behavior from both sides of the war excuses sexual violence against women in everyday life. As said by Ms. Zainab Hawa Bangura, “sexual violence in conflict needs to be treated as the war crime that it is; it can no longer be treated as an unfortunate collateral damage of war.” As a society, we need to all agree and listen to what the victims of war have told us for thousands of years.
In conclusion, the only way to start working against the normalization sexual violence against women during times of war is to stop normalizing it. This price should never be excused and seen as a side effect of war. These women are living and breathing humans who deserve to be treated with respect and dignity. Sexual violence should not be weaponized and excused as collateral damage. After we agree that this price of war exists, we must listen to survivors and what they have to say. Only by learning from the past and listening to the victims can we learn from it and truly strive to be better. Forgetting these atrocities only allows room for them to happen again. In order to move forward, we must acknowledge the pain and suffering of war so that future generations are aware of the true cost of war.
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