Our Bodies, Their Battlefields
War Through the Lives of Women
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- ¥2,200
発行者による作品情報
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.
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Journalist Lamb (Farewell, Kabul) delivers a heart-wrenching study of rape as a weapon of war. Interweaving the harrowing testimonies of contemporary women in war-torn regions such as the Democratic Republic of Congo (where a 2010 UN report concluded that 1,000 women were being raped per day) with the history of the practice, Lamb documents the experiences of Korean and Japanese "comfort women" during WWII, sexual assaults committed by Red Army soldiers against German women, gang rapes during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, rape camps in the Bosnian War, and the 2014 kidnapping of hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls by the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram. Only in rare occasions, such as an international tribunal on the Rwandan genocide, has rape been recognized as a war crime. Most countries, she writes, bury these parts of their histories, but "for there to be an end to rapists' impunity there must be an end to silence." In one particularly moving interview, a Congolese woman who was raped so severely that she is in permanent pain and unable to bear children asks Lamb to "please be our voice." This harrowing account bears powerful witness to a worldwide tragedy.
