The brutal message is that even if Ukrainians won’t submit to being Russian, their unborn children will have no choice. Now Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, Lyudmyla Denisova, reports that in Bucha, 25 girls and women aged 14 to 24 were held in a basement by Russian soldiers who threatened to “rape them to the point where they wouldn’t want sexual contact with any man, to prevent them from having Ukrainian children.” Nine of them are now pregnant. In Iraq, Islamic State systematically trafficked and sexually enslaved women from the Yazidi minority as part of a campaign to destroy the community from within, knowing the children born of rape would be deemed Muslims and not Yazidi. In the rape camps set up by Serbian soldiers during the Balkan wars, victims were told they would be forced to bear Serbian babies.
But some of the stories emerging from Ukraine now have a particularly chilling dimension, one all too familiar in wars of ethnic cleansing, which is the attempt to force women to bear the invading army’s children. The aim is to intimidate, degrade and terrify civilians, and in some cultures to ensure victims are rejected by their own families. The more complex emerging challenge, however, is what to do about the horrific scale of systematic sexual violence emerging inside Ukraine itself, as the Russian retreat from occupied towns and villages frees victims to emerge and tell their stories.Īs the war correspondent Christina Lamb writes bleakly in her book Our Bodies, Their Battlefield, rape is “the cheapest weapon known to man”, one deployed every bit as strategically and deliberately as bombs and bullets. The UN has now asked the British government to ban single men from housing female refugees, advice that Michael Gove (the cabinet minister in charge of the refugee matching scheme) should act on and make policy. But it is the predictability that makes it more preventable. Wherever there is conflict, there is chaos and disruption and unguarded moments for women and children, and with depressing predictability some will always seek to exploit that.
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