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Women under siege (Warning: graphic content)

***Trigger warning: Graphic content. Rape, murder, torture.***

As discussed here, the global endemic of gender and sexualised violence follows systematic patterns across the board.

Alongside violent male opportunism, government militaries and rebels alike use rape for horrifyingly strategic benefits – to exercise “ethnic cleansing” and to break the moral and will of individuals and communities.

With no functioning judiciary and not enough humanitarian aid, thousands of women and children face horrors every day in war-torn nations.

Women Under Siege have published testimonies from survivors to show the world what the truth behind political conflict looks like. We’ve listed a few here.

Perhaps now, the truth will appear starker to you. Perhaps.

Witness - DRC

An Oxfam/Harvard report tells of one ordeal in which family members were forced not only to watch each other be attacked, but to attack their own kin—or be killed:



Witness - 
Bosnia

Mirsada, aged 17, spoke to a women’s group of her extreme abuse in a rape camp. Her story was printed in a 1993 Los Angeles Times article:



Witness

CNN interviewed a survivor named Jasmina in 2008. She was 19 when the war broke out, and was raped and tortured in her own home alongside family members:



Witness-Sierra Leone

In a study by Denov and Maclure, girls who had survived the war report the pain they endured. One interviewee describes the physical consequences of being raped at a young age:



The above excerpts are from the NGO Women Under Siege's website.

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