XPost: 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

It is time the 500 journalists ´embedded´ with the troops focus, everyday, on this aspect of the war.

This is the Year of the Whore. And her woes in war. And her misery in ´peace´ since she can never leave the battlefield. It is the year of her trafficked, ripped-apart vagina, and her shredded pulped womb, due to overuse. It is the year of the girl child prostitute whose anus is hanging out of her body due to too much anal rape upon a fragile being not even ready for a gentle act of intercourse. (I am not sure if there is a ´right amount´ of anal rape—even one act forced upon an unwilling body is an abomination against the goddesses of mercy and tenderness. The thousands of rapes the prostituted body endures should make the planets drop out of their orbits and the stars go supernova.)

About the Rape of Iraq, information scattered across the internet is sparse, but it is there. Of 50,000 or so mainstream news articles on Iraq, only a handful even intimate that anything might be sexually amiss in the latest war rape zone, the one called Iraq, but the non-mainstream media give us a different view. In many ways, it too is sparse, but at least there is minimal coverage. Code Pink (Women for Peace), for example, at least make some mention (however slight) of the rape and sexual humiliation of Iraqi women by U.S. personnel in detainment centers and the way the girls are subjected to honor killings after release. And they report the kidnapping and trafficking of girls by criminal gangs who sell them into brothels in neighboring countries and the way "coalition forces and U.S. military contractors have committed horrific crimes of sexual abuse, torture, and physical assault." There are, according to Code Pink "copious accounts of rapes and gang rapes." All of this is quite hidden away on their site—as if this aspect of war were not really that important. And, unfortunately, Code Pink overlooks the starvation prostitution many Iraqi women and girls have been forced into. But, then, this does not surprise me. If you have read any of my other articles, you know that I am an ex-prostitute and that even women helping other women ignore my kind. We prostitutes are marginalized as disposable by the ´respectable´ women of the world who regard the one-time rape of a ´good´ girl as terrible and the thousands of rapes upon the whore body as not even an act of rape.

Iraq Veterans Against the War say that prostitution is now ´common´ in Iraq, but they do not give details. This subject is not covered on their website—at least I cannot find it anywhere.