THE RAPE OF IRAQ AND OTHER SEXUAL MATTERS

By Suki Falconberg Ph.D.

I just e-mailed the following paragraph to Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Refugees International, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, Iraq Veterans Against the War, and two women journalists at CBS news, Katie Couric and Lara Logan (foreign correspondent in Iraq):

I would like to know more about the sexual assault on women in Iraq: rapes by American and coalition forces; rapes by the Iraqi police and military; rapes by Iraqi civilian men; rapes of women and girls detained in prisons; gang rapes; women forced into starvation prostitution—either for the occupying forces or for Iraqis; the increase of brothels in Baghdad and Basra as a result of the occupation; the trafficking of women and girls into prostitution by criminal gangs, either within Iraq or in surrounding countries; the way families are forced to sell daughters for survival; any ´survival sex´ women and girls are engaged in due to desperation; ´survival sex´ forced upon the refugee population (2 million in Iraq--2 million in surrounding countries); the trafficking, by U.S. military contractors, of Filipina and Chinese girls into brothels in the Green Zone; the role of the U.S. Military Police in the pimping of Iraqi women and girls; the physical and psychological state of the prostituted Iraqi girls trafficked into the Green Zone for paid rape; the rape of female military personnel by their own men—and anything else you may have seen going on in Iraq.

For Couric and Logan, I appended: "This aspect of Iraq has been overlooked by CBS news." For Amnesty International, I added, "I would also like to know about the trafficking of girls into Guantanamo Bay to service the U.S. military there. Your organization is involved in the rights of detainees there but has overlooked this other class of tortured beings."

This is the year I would like to see the sexual exploitation of women in the wars America indulges in finally covered rather than ignored—in reparation for not having done so from the Revolution forward—the Civil War (with its wandering bands of syphilitic camp followers, mostly women widowed by the war); the Spanish American War and the two Great Wars and Korea and Vietnam and Desert Storm and Panama and Afghanistan and now Iraq—not a whisper from the whore in the dirty alley, offering it up for a few dollars due to hunger, or the hunger of her children. It is time. Katie Couric and Lara Logan (the latter journalist has been ´embedded´ with the troops over there), it is time you report on all the women and girls, in Iraq, and all the Iraqi refugee women and girls in surrounding countries forced into survival sex. It is time you profiled the 14-year-old Iraqi refugee girl sold by her family in order to feed her younger brothers and sisters.

American Chronicle