women soldiers

From Salon.com; Rinita Mazumdar sends this to us:




The private war of women soldiers

Many female soldiers say they are sexually assaulted by their male comrades and can't trust the military to protect them. "The knife wasn't for the Iraqis," says one woman. "It was for the guys on my own side."

Editor's note: This story has been corrected since it was originally published.

By Helen Benedict
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March 7, 2007 | As thousands of burned-out soldiers prepare to return to Iraq to fill President Bush's unwelcome call for at least 20,000 more troops, I can't help wondering what the women among those troops will have to face. And I don't mean only the hardships of war, the killing of civilians, the bombs and mortars, the heat and sleeplessness and fear.

I mean from their own comrades -- the men.

I have talked to more than 20 female veterans of the Iraq war in the past few months, interviewing them for up to 10 hours each for a book I am writing on the topic, and every one of them said the danger of rape by other soldiers is so widely recognized in Iraq that their officers routinely told them not to go to the latrines or showers without another woman for protection.

The female soldiers who were at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, for example, where U.S. troops go to demobilize, told me they were warned not to go out at night alone.

"They call Camp Arifjan 'generator city' because it's so loud with generators that even if a woman screams she can't be heard," said Abbie Pickett, 24, a specialist with the 229th Combat Support Engineering Company who spent 15 months in Iraq from 2004-05. Yet, she points out, this is a base, where soldiers are supposed to be safe.


Spc. Mickiela Montoya, 21, who was in Iraq with the National Guard in 2005, took to carrying a knife with her at all times. "The knife wasn't for the Iraqis," she told me. "It was for the guys on my own side."

Comprehensive statistics on the sexual assault of female soldiers in Iraq have not been collected, but early numbers revealed a problem so bad that former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld ordered a task force in 2004 to investigate. As a result, the Defense Department put up a Web site in 2005 designed to clarify that sexual assault is illegal and to help women report it. It also initiated required classes on sexual assault and harassment. The military's definition of sexual assault includes "rape; nonconsensual sodomy; unwanted inappropriate sexual contact or fondling; or attempts to commit these acts."

Unfortunately, with a greater number of women serving in Iraq than ever before, these measures are not keeping women safe. When you add in the high numbers of war-wrecked soldiers being redeployed, and the fact that the military is waiving criminal and violent records for more than one in 10 new Army recruits, the picture for women looks bleak indeed.

Last year, Col. Janis Karpinski caused a stir by publicly reporting that in 2003, three female soldiers had died of dehydration in Iraq, which can get up to 126 degrees in the summer, because they refused to drink liquids late in the day. They were afraid of being raped by male soldiers if they walked to the latrines after dark. The Army has called her charges unsubstantiated, but Karpinski told me she sticks by them. (Karpinski has been a figure of controversy in the military ever since she was demoted from brigadier general for her role as commander of Abu Ghraib. As the highest-ranking official to lose her job over the torture scandal, she claims she was scapegoated, and has become an outspoken critic of the military's treatment of women. In turn, the Army has accused her of sour grapes.)

"I sat right there when the doctor briefing that information said these women had died in their cots," Karpinski told me. "I also heard the deputy commander tell him not to say anything about it because that would bring attention to the problem." The latrines were far away and unlit, she explained, and male soldiers were jumping women who went to them at night, dragging them into the Port-a-Johns, and raping or abusing them. "In that heat, if you don't hydrate for as many hours as you've been out on duty, day after day, you can die." She said the deaths were reported as non-hostile fatalities, with no further explanation.

Not everyone realizes how different the Iraq war is for women than any other American war in history. More than 160,500 American female soldiers have served in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East since the war began in 2003, which means one in seven soldiers is a woman. Women now make up 15 percent of active duty forces, four times more than in the 1991 Gulf War. At least 450 women have been wounded in Iraq, and 71 have died -- more female casualties and deaths than in the Korean, Vietnam and first Gulf Wars combined. And women are fighting in combat.


Officially, the Pentagon prohibits women from serving in ground combat units such as the infantry, citing their lack of upper-body strength and a reluctance to put girls and mothers in harm's way. But mention this ban to any female soldier in Iraq and she will scoff.

"Of course we were in combat!" said Laura Naylor, 25, who served with the Army Combat Military Police in Baghdad from 2003-04. "We were interchangeable with the infantry. They came to our police stations and helped pull security, and we helped them search houses and search people. That's how it is in Iraq."

Women are fighting in ground combat because there is no choice. This is a war with no front lines or safe zones, no hiding from in-flying mortars, car and roadside bombs, and not enough soldiers. As a result, women are coming home with missing limbs, mutilating wounds and severe trauma, just like the men.

All the women I interviewed held dangerous jobs in Iraq. They drove trucks along bomb-ridden roads, acted as gunners atop tanks and unarmored vehicles, raided houses, guarded prisoners, rescued the wounded in the midst of battle, and searched Iraqis at checkpoints. Some watched their best friends die, some were wounded, all saw the death and mutilation of Iraqi children and citizens.

Yet, despite the equal risks women are taking, they are still being treated as inferior soldiers and sex toys by many of their male colleagues. As Pickett told me, "It's like sending three women to live in a frat house."

Next page: "There are only three kinds of female the men let you be in the military: A bitch, a ho, or a dyke"

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Yale and sexual harassment

The Silent Treatment

She was a Yale senior. He was the superstar professor she’d hoped to impress?until he put his hand on her thigh. Two decades later, she’s speaking out. But her alma mater still isn’t listening. A story of sex, secrets, and Ivy League denial.

How can we make universities commit to protecting students not just avoiding lawsuits?????

See her story at : nymag.com/nymetro/news/features/n_9932. gail

Gail Turley Houston
Professor, English

witchhunts from Bhavana

A different kind of witch hunt-- a literal one, in India. BhavanaWitch huntSona's mother was murdered and dismembered; Kalo was attacked with a saw and scarred for life. Hundreds of other Indian women are killed or disfigured every year after being branded witches by their neighbours. Raekha Prasad reports Wednesday March 21, 2007The Guardian A 65-year old Indian woman bears the scars of a witch-hunting attack in eastern India. Photograph: Sanjay Jha When I first encounter Sona Bindya, this small 10-year-old girl is perching barefoot on a mound of rubbish, squinting into the sunlight by the side of a cratered road. Beckoned to the car, she sits primly on the back seat in her grubby clothes, confidently answering my questions. Her nickname is Pinky, she says. Except for a mouth full of adult teeth, she looks young for her age.Until a few months ago, Sona lived in a one-room hut in an unremarkable slum hamlet of just 12 buildings with her mother, Ramani. Ramani had been bringing Sona up alone since her husband died from an unknown illness. Every day at 6am Ramani left home for her job as a labourer (painting the factories in an industrial area in the eastern Indian state of Jharkand), returning home 12 hours later.Article continues----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------One night in January, Ramani and Sona were fast asleep when two neighbours broke down their rickety front door and dragged Ramani out of bed. As Sona fled to a neighbour's hut, she saw one of the men's hands cover her mother's mouth and another close round her throat. Next morning, no one stopped Sona from seeing the pools of blood that had darkened on her doorstep. On the railway line 100m away, Ramani's mutilated body had been dumped on the tracks. Her severed limbs pointed in opposite directions.Ramani's death was not reported by India's rolling news stations and fast-proliferating newspapers, because, sadly, there was nothing distinctively "new" about the way in which she had died. Specifically, her death was the result of being branded a witch.Police in Jharkand receive around five reports a month of women denounced as witches, but nationally the figure is believed to run to thousands. These incidents usually occur when a community faces misfortune such as disease, a child's death or failing crops, and a woman is suddenly scapegoated. Those whose lives are spared face humiliation, torture and banishment from their village: some are forcibly stripped and paraded in public; some have their mouths crammed with human excreta or their eyes gouged out. The belief is that shaming a woman weakens her evil powers. And because these crimes are sanctioned by the victim's community, experts say many of them go unreported.Ramani and her neighbours belong to one of the country's many distinct tribes, who speak their own language and hold animist beliefs, insulating them from mainstream Indian society. The country's "tribals" are among its poorest people, often living without access to doctors, schools or electricity. People in the neighbourhood are predominantly of the Ho tribe, having migrated from their ancestral forests to the fringes of this part of urban India, carrying with them superstitions and a belief in the supernatural.Although police have arrested three men in the hamlet for her murder, none of the locals condemns Ramani's killing as a crime. Sona now lives with another family in a nearby village, and as I walk with her through her old neighbourhood, other residents avert their eyes. In the aftermath of the murder, many have fled until the dust settles. Those who remain are evasive. Even the murdered woman's own cousin denies any knowledge of what happened. He says he came back to the slum at 10pm that night. "I went straight to sleep so I didn't hear anything and I don't know anything," he says.Ramani was killed because she had been deemed a malignant force, wreaking death and misfortune on the hamlet. When a child fell ill in the slum, diagnosis and solutions were sought, as usual, from the resident medicine man or ojha. The ojha is a central figure in the community, believed to have insights into evil forces affecting the health and wealth of the village. When his magical incantations fail to cure a patient, he turns to divination, gathering together water, oil, leaves, twigs, vermilion, a mirror and dung, asking the villager for the payment necessary for him to enter a trance. He then hints at, or directly names, the "culprit" behind the illness. In this case, the ojha told the father of the sick child that Ramani was to blame, says Sona, and claimed that taking her life would lift the curse.This violence is part of an India that has perhaps been obscured by stories of its software boom and nuclear prowess; a culture sometimes forgotten amid news of such successes as the steel company Tata, which recently swallowed British giant Corus.Caught between the clash of tribal India and the modern-day nation is Shubhra Dwivedy, chief executive of Seeds, a Jharkand-based development organisation that focuses on girls and women. In the decade that Dwivedy has shuttled between the villages and her urban office, she has seen no decline in witch-hunting. "It's been so deeply ingrained for generations, socially and culturally, that it can't just be undone," she says.A Seeds report explains that the "witch" label is also used against women as a weapon of control; branding a woman is a way to humiliate her if she has refused sexual advances or tried to assert herself. And the deep fear of witches can also be whipped up to grab a woman's land or settle old family scores. "It is easy for influential villagers to pay the ojha to have a woman branded to usurp her property," states the report.These are the tactics that robbed Kalo Devi of her land and home. Crouching outside her daughter's house in a village in Jharkand's rugged interior, the 65-year-old widow pulls her sari blouse from one shoulder to reveal scar tissue knotted like bark. She holds out her left hand, disfigured by wounds, and traces the dark scar that runs across her nose and cheek.She was attacked at noon, she says, just after lunch in September 2004 in the village where she had raised her daughter and lived with her husband until his death 20 years ago. As Kalo squatted in her mud home, washing up, her neighbour Jogan burst in brandishing a saw. "He attacked my shoulder; then tried to cut off my nose. Blood filled my mouth and I couldn't shout," Kalo says, her voice shaking with the memory. "I fell on the ground and he kept hitting me. I passed out so I don't know how my hand got cut."A few days before the attack, Jogan had branded Kalo a witch in front of the entire village, and accused her of causing the death of his newborn baby. His outburst was an escalation in a litany of abuse, following her repeated requests for him to stop grazing his cattle on her land. During an earlier argument he had told her: "I will graze my cows in your field and cut you into pieces if you shout to stop me."Kalo is unequivocal about why she was branded. "There were no men in my house. That's why this happened. He deliberately brought his cattle to my field because he thought that he could dominate me."Although Jogan was arrested and charged, he was granted bail and is living locally again. With no police protection, Kalo fears he may succeed in killing her. That is why she has abandoned her home and land to live with her son-in-law and daughter 20km away. "What choice do I have?" she asks.This question has occupied the lawyer Girija Shankar Jaiswal for more than a decade. As secretary of the Free Legal Aid Committee - an advocacy group that represents disadvantaged groups in Jharkand - he has instituted legislation that specifically outlaws witch-hunting in the state and its neighbour, Bihar. Although this has not succeeded in punishing the perpetrators - fewer than 1% of reported cases lead to a conviction - Jaiswal claims that it has helped instil fear into potential offenders and police. "Now an officer has a duty to prosecute, despite his personal prejudices. And if a woman can put you in jail, then she becomes a powerful woman."But for someone like Ramani, the law could not legislate against beliefs. The fear now is for the life of her daughter, the sole witness to her murder. Sona saw four men standing watch outside her hut when she fled her mother's attackers within, and they threatened to kill her if she gave their names to the police. She did so anyway. They are all still living in the hamlet.· Some names have been changed.

New Campus Witch Hunts?

These campus witch hunts by David Horowitz et all include feminist scholars too?


I've pasted two articles below, but you can go to the pages with the
following links, too. Serious.
Elaine

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Return of the Campus Witch Hunts
David Horowitz and the Thought Police
By DANA CLOUD
http://www.counterpunch.org/cloud03082007.html

Meet the New McCarthyites
Return of the Academic Witch Hunts
By DAVE LINDORFF

women regents now!

Why won't Governor Richardson put more than one token (non-student) woman on the Board of Regents at UNM?

Madre Report on women in Iraq

Elaine Baumgartel sent this: please respond:




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MADRE to Release Report on Gender-Based Violence in Iraq

On March 6, 2007, MADRE will release Promising Democracy, Imposing Theocracy: Gender-Based Violence and the US War on Iraq, a groundbreaking report on the incidence, causes, and legalization of gender-based violence in Iraq since the US-led invasion. The report documents the use of gender-based violence by Islamists seeking to establish a theocratic state, and by the US in its efforts to appease Islamists and enforce its occupation.
Please join us for the release of the report on March 6th during the Commission on the Status of Women at the United Nations. Copies of the report will be available at the event, and thereafter on MADRE's website.
Confronting Gender-Based Violence in Iraq
DATE: Tuesday March 6th, 2007
TIME: 2:00pm-3:45pm
LOCATION: United Nations Church Center, 10th floor
777 United Nations Plaza, New York, NY 10017
SPEAKERS:
Yifat Susskind, MADRE
Houzan Mahmoud, Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq
Jennie Green, Center for Constitutional Rights
Frida Berrigan, Arms Trade Resource Center (World Policy Institute)
Sponsored by MADRE, the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq, and the Arms Trade Resource Center (World Policy Institute)
Promising Democracy, Imposing Theocracy:
Gender-Based Violence and the US War on Iraq
Executive Summary
Note:
The term "Islamist" in this report refers to those who pursue a reactionary social and political vision in the name of Islam, as distinct from "Islamic" relating to the religion of Islam.
Amidst the chaos and violence of US-occupied Iraq, the significance of widespread gender-based violence has been largely overlooked. Yet, Iraqi women are enduring unprecedented levels of assault in the public sphere, "honor killings," torture in detention, and other forms of gender-based violence. Women are not only being targeted because they are members of the civilian population. Women—in particular those who are perceived to pose a challenge to the political project of their attackers—have increasingly been targeted because they are women. This report documents the use of gender-based violence by Iraqi Islamists, brought to power by the US overthrow of Iraq's secular Ba'ath regime, and highlights the role of the United States in fomenting the human rights crisis confronting Iraqi women today. Some key points include:
Imposing Theocracy through Gender-Based Violence
Under US occupation, Iraqi women have endured a wave of gender-based violence, including widespread abductions, public beatings, death threats, sexual assaults, "honor killings," domestic abuse, torture in detention, beheadings, shootings, and public hangings. Much of this violence is systematic—directed by the Islamist militias that mushroomed across Iraq after the US toppled the mostly secular Ba'ath regime.
Like religious fundamentalists in the US and elsewhere, Iraq's Islamists see the subordination of women as a top priority—both a microcosm and a precondition of the social order they wish to establish. As in Iran, Algeria, and Afghanistan, a campaign of violence against women was the first salvo in the Islamists' war to establish a theocracy in Iraq.
First They Came for the Women
Attacks on women began within weeks of the US invasion in 2003. US authorities did nothing to stop the violence, and soon the attacks spread. Within a year, Islamists were killing Iraqi artists, intellectuals, professionals, ethnic and religious minorities, lesbians and gays—indeed, anyone whom the Islamists perceived as a threat to their agenda. Women, who are seen as the carriers of group identity, have remained in the cross-hairs of Iraq's warring sectarian militias. Iraqi women's organizations report that militias "are taking revenge on each other by raping women," and targeting Christian women with rape and assassination as part of a broader attack on that community.
Iraq's War on Women: Made in the USA
Women have been systematically attacked by theocratic militias on both sides of the sectarian divide, but the most widespread violence has been committed by the Shiite militias affiliated with the US-backed government—the Badr Brigade and Mahdi Army. These groups have waged their campaign of terror against women with weapons, training, and money provided by the US under a policy called the "Salvador Option."
Gender War, Civil War
Neither the mainstream press, the alternative media, nor the anti-war movement has identified the connections between the attack on Iraqi women and the spiraling violence that has culminated in civil war. But violence against women is not incidental to Iraq's mounting civilian death toll and civil war—it is a key to understanding the wider crisis. Indeed, the twin crises plaguing Iraqi civilians—gender based violence and civil war—are deeply intertwined. For example, in the legal arena, the same provisions of the US-brokered constitution that codify gender discrimination (Articles 39 and 41) also lay the groundwork for sectarian violence: these articles establish separate laws on the basis of sex and religious affiliation.
Democracy and Women's Rights: Two Sides of the Same Coin
Although most assaults on women occur in public, violence against Iraqi women continues to be perceived mainly as a "private" or family matter, somehow outside the realm of "politics." Moreover, the characterization of violence against Iraqi women as "cultural" in nature deemphasizes the ways that such violence is used as a means toward political ends and obscures the role of the United States in fomenting gender-based violence.
Contrary to its rhetoric and its legal obligations under the Hague and Geneva Conventions, the Bush Administration has refused to protect women's human rights in Iraq. In fact, it has decisively traded women's rights for cooperation from the Islamists whom it boosted to power.
A re-telling of the Iraq War from the perspective of Iraqi women illuminates the strong links between women's human rights and democratic rights in general and the Bush Administration's clear contempt for both.
By Yifat Susskind, Communications Director

Report will be available on MADRE's website as of March 6, 2007


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