Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict – Introducing a series of blogs

Sexual violence in conflict situations is as much a terrifying crime as a brutal one, wherever it takes place; it has direct and indirect effects on human lives, leaving deep, indelible scars on the victims as well as society itself.

As part of the Preventing the Sexual Violence Initiative that the Foreign Secretary has launched, we will be hosting, in the next few days, a series of blogs that describe the experiences of people who have witnessed the horror of war and have shared their experiences with us through their writing and photographs.

Our first guest blogger is Stephania Mizara and below is her story, through the eyes of a photojournalist.

As a photojournalist I have covered only two active war zones in Gaza and Burma. The feeling that prevails under conditions of high risk has more to do with fear and adrenaline. Anything could happen when the risk cannot be calculated. The human body and mind is made to operate so as to survive. It forgets the pain the fears, it sees only as much as it can bear.

I have done more reporting on the issues after the war or disaster, eg Iraqi refugees in Syria, Eritrea. For me, the hardest is what comes after; when the adrenaline goes and you have to live with your injuries.

I am interested especially in women in all these matters, not so much because of pure feminism, but because I have better tools to understand them, even if we don’t speak the same language. I don’t know if I can assess whether women suffer more in a war. I am not in a position to judge that. What I have seen is that in a war, a man feels more afraid for his life if the face of the enemy, while a woman is afraid more for her physical integrity, as if the threat on a sexual level is a weapon of intimidation and evidence of the power of the one who dominates.

The Arab Spring made a big impression on me in relation to the role of women. It started with women having an active role. The predominantly urban societies of Tunisia and Egypt demanded a change in the social and political level. Men and women were protesting in the streets. Women also took initiatives, informing the world during the demonstration through the internet. The amazing thing is that, barely a year later, Tunisia and Egypt are talking about the possibility of application of religious ‘sharia’ law; there is a proliferation of assaults and sexual harassment in the street and issues we could not have imagined are arising daily.

Sexual harassment, of course, can in no way be compared with rape, with daily violence of this kind. In Syria, women’s activist organizations have identified cases of underage marriages of short duration between Syrian women and Arab men from other countries, creating thus a new type of prostitution network that is being justified socially…