Rape as a Tool of War

In our presentation on Thursday, much of our conversation turned to the topic of the use of systematic rape as a tool of war. This was a topic that my small group had been focussing on in our previous discussion and I believe it is one that must be talked about. In conflicts where ethnicity is involved, rape is used as a way to destroy what makes a community a certain ethnicity. In the Balkans, Serbs raped Bosnians to cleanse the land of Bosnians and make sure that their Serbian blood line permeated the region to assert their superiority. But what happens after the Serbians leave. Many women are left with children they would rather forget about than raise and others with husbands who would disown them if they even mentioned being raped. And worse in a society as patriarchal as that of the Balkans, the women have absolutely no one to talk to. Despite the fact that many of the women in their community might have been raped as well, they cannot find comfort in each other for fear of what would happen to them if they found out. One woman went so far as to say that all of her daughters were good girls and only served the soldiers tea, there was no way that her daughters would have been so bad to have been raped by the soldiers. She acts as if they ever had a choice, which goes against the whole definition of being raped. In a society such as this how do people even begin to heal and others even begin to help. For many of this women it will be a torment that they will harbor their whole lives with the feeling of blame for allowing this to happen. For many women it would be better to committ suicide than be raped. This makes you question what kind of world do we live in that a women would choose death over the possibility of life and what kind of societies allow women to believe that their rape is in any way their fault?