The Patriarchal Roots of Evil: Mass Rape and its Implications :: Free Essays Online

The Patriarchal Roots of Evil: Mass Rape and its Implications Imagine this scene. A woman is being brought through the forest. Someone had, very tactically, tied her to a cross in a vertical manner, and by the painful look on her face, the worst is yet to come. The woman is being carried by what is soon to become her audience. It consists mostly of other women by looks very similar to their friend on the cross: malnourished, zombie-like, bodies painted with blood of the bruises that never were given a chance to heal. Most of their clothes are ripped, and this is but one indication of the things that happen in a repeated motion night, after night, after night. When they arrive at the clearing area, the audience is ordered to sit down and watch, by very well armed, male guards who were following them the entire way. Only now do we see that the woman on the cross is pregnant. In any other case it would possibly be less noticeable, but that woman, at that exact moment, was cut open with a knife. In her belly, a baby could be seen moving. The audien ce does not move, nor protest. They know better. The only difference between them, and the woman on the cross, is that they, if stayed quiet, still have a chance of survival. The guards react differently. In trance-like excitement they clap, screaming, "Die, Muslim Whore! Die before you pollute the world with your bastard! If you gave birth to a Chetnik you?d be let go." Fifteen minutes later, both, the baby and its mother were dead. The above example is an interpretation of a roughly similar scene told to Catherine MacKinnon by one of the survivors in the audience. This event specifically occurred in the aggression over Bosnia and Herzegovina, in the 1992 to 1995 war, but it is not very different from the crimes inflicted onto women during other political conflicts, out of which mass rape used as a weapon of war is the most often occurring scenario. Since the beginning of recorded history, when the conflict arises women are raped, and some are then killed, regardless if conflict be on a local, national or an international level. (In this essay, war will be the example of conflict.) While Bosnia offers an example most known to today's generations this type of violence is not a new phenomena: a slight change of a year and tragedies of women of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Germany, India, Kenya, Peru, Rwanda, Somalia (and many, many more) do not seem as foreign.