Our Bodies, Their Battlefields: War Through the Lives of Women

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. [em](Sept.) [/em]