rape as a mechanisms of mass oppression

[justabit]

I have been following the various threads on rape and find they live on in your brain long after you leave the computer. I wanted to post something about what recently happened in Congo but didn't feel that any of the threads were the right place. I'm not expecting a discussion about Congo just wanted to share the information with such a bunch of aware women. As you will know women in Congo (and Liberia and many other places) contend with this abuse of power daily and it happens at such a level that it has become normalised. We don't even hear about it any more. I will post next an extract about recent attacks in Congo which only make news when the scale of atrocity is so high.

sorry not immunity from rape, immunity from being prosecuted

BUt SGM I disagree on principle that "educated" men are less likely to rape.
There is no typical face of a rapist.
Vietnam, for example

I know it is a joke, the Japan thing. I honestly believe they've still got an inferiority complex over the war. BUt it's more complicated; they're tied into some tricky trade relations they can't break out of

Good point about men with rape tendencies to gravitate towards war zones. I often think that.
But while I'm sure men who have been raised a particular way, or had certain experiences, might be more likely to rape, I think the overriding factor is men together in groups. I think that's the big issue. The pecking order, the hierarchy, the testosterone warp their minds. And the power. I think it goes to their heads. If mass rape in war had happened now and again I'd agree with you, but it has happened in every. single. war.

THe ability to say no... but isn't that connected to self-esteem rather than education. I mean your ability to say no depends more on whether you had controlling parents.

I still think the war atmosphere goes to their head. I read that in vietnam a new batch of troops arrived to a village that the preceding troops were just about to massacre.
The new batch hadn't yet been desensistized and htey stopped the massacre and saved a lot of lives, but if they'd already been there a few weeks/months, perhaps they wouldn't have

Slightly off topic but I was listening to an interview with a man who wrote an account of what went wrong with 1st Platoon who murdered a family in Iraq for fun and raped their 14 year old daughter (article here

He really highlighted in the interview (less so in the article) how the US army's recruitment of people who are disturbed or are otherwise not really fit for duty is in large part responsible for some of the atrocities they carry out.

Very frightening.

I'm that the UN classes baby girls and women in the same bracket

WOmen and baby boys were raped.

FFS

Ladybiscuit, I wonder if that's an oversight or whether it's part of the terror tactic, . I mean they shouldn't have been there in hte first place, they got there by lying, so who knows how low they'd stoop

Sorry Sakura - don't understand what you mean by an oversight?

I remember in the Kuwait war how so many US troops had joined the army to pay for their education and they never expected to go to war. Now I think people are a bit more wary and so it comes back to the cannon fodder point someone made earlier. There are people out there who don't have the capacity to act as peace keeping forces - it's a very sensitive and complex role.

I mean, do you think they sent the loonies to Iraq knowing they were loonies

I don't think they bothered to check Sakura and that's the point. From that article I linked to, it wouldn't have taken much digging to find out that Steven Green was entirely unsuitable to be in the army. And the fact that he wrote that killing Iraqis was his only interest and that didn't raise concerns beggars belief really.

SGM - that's very interesting (and chilling). I did a lot of work at university (many moons ago!) about how women's voices are ignored in most standard historical teaching.

That was a fascinating post SGM. I am woefully ignorant about history generally (never been one of my "things") and all of what you just wrote is news to me. News, but sadly not surprising news.

I have exactly five minutes online (bank holiday weekend)and so very much that I want to say and so many contexts that I would like to reference. One of the reasons that I wanted to post about the Congo (which stands for me for all the other contexts where this is happening now and in the past)was reading what I felt were shocking and confused posts the other night about what constitutes rape in this culture, what constitutes abuse of power, what has become preceived as male entitlement, and what this says about us as a society. How can we hope to stop such abuse of power in lawless societies if in our own (regulated) society women themselves have such disunity on the matter of consent? In Congo, in Liberia, in Darfur, and elsewhere, sexual violence has been normalised in every aspect except that of the shame that the women are expected to feel and the consequences likely to be experienced by the women. Reading the other thread the other night I felt that it was the same here in the UK.

A very depressing parallel justa. Didn't want your post to go unanswered - but I don't really know what to say.

I do think that there is an element that when people read about rape in war zones and the situation with rape in places like South Africa, everyone gets very upset and agrees that it's terrible. But when people try to talk about rape in the UK, and how prevalent it is, and how basically it is a crime that men can easily get away with, and an awful lot of people just flatly deny that it is a problem. Deny that the stats are correct, deny that it happens as much as it does. Like some kind of blind spot.