Focus shifts to jail abuse of women

(Please let me know if this is a dupe, I didn't see it anywhere.)

Focus shifts to jail abuse of women

Luke Harding in Baghdad
Wednesday May 12, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1214698,00.html

For Huda Shaker, the humiliation began at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Baghdad. The American soldiers demanded to search her handbag. When she refused one of the soldiers pointed his gun towards her chest.
"He pointed the laser sight directly in the middle of my chest," said Professor Shaker, a political scientist at Baghdad University. "Then he pointed to his penis. He told me, 'Come here, bitch, I'm going to fuck you.'"

The incident is one of a number in which US soldiers are alleged to have abused, intimidated or sexually humiliated Iraqi women.

According to Prof Shaker, several women held in Abu Ghraib jail were sexually abused, including one who was raped by an American military policeman and became pregnant. She has now disappeared.

Most of the coverage of the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib has focused on Iraqi men. But there is compelling evidence that several female prisoners, who are in a minority at the jail, were abused as well.

"A female colleague of mine was arrested and taken there. When I asked her after she was released what happened at Abu Ghraib she started crying," Prof Shaker said.

"Ladies here are afraid and shy of talking about such subjects. They say everything is OK. Even in a very advanced society in the west it is very difficult to talk about rape. But I think it happened."

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