Dirty Secret

War's Dirty Secret

War's Dirty Secret: Rape, Prostitution, and Other Crimes Against Women

Anne Llewellyn Barstow, Editor
Pilgrim Press, $20. ($14 from Amazon.com)

A review by the Rev. Barbara Battin, Centerville, Ohio
[11-7-01]

Reading War's Dirty Secret: Rape. Prostitution, and Other Crimes Against Women requires a willingness to go slowly into the silent secret of misogyny's cruel oppression of women's lives during war. It must be read slowly because the misogyny reported is so massive that it is a heavy weight on the soul. It is hard simply to read about the experiences of women who were abused to alleviate men's wartime discomfort, to appease their boredom, who were objectified and used as tactical "weapons" in the waging of genocide. These women whose stories are told remained silent so long because to speak the horror of this misogyny often made it more real to the victims. And even more often their stories were rejected as unreal by those who would not acknowledge that such dehumanizing acts could happen. Their stories remained secret because to uncover these crimes, to unveil the horrendous treatment of women described by the authors in these essays, is to lay open for view the heinous possibilities of our humanness and the sinful exploitation of God's sacred gift of both body and soul.

In gathering the material in this book, Anne Llewellyn Barstow forces us to face the realities of what happened to the "comfort women" who were sexual slaves to the Japanese military in World War II. She sets before us the facts: about the Rape of Nanking in that war, about the rape camps of the war in the Balkans, about rape and killing that has left what Laura Flanders calls "living casualties" in Rwanda, and about the sexual violence perpetrated against women in Kenya, Haiti, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. She also includes reports on how military culture is established so that rape and prostitution become an acceptable addendum to what we have come to call "conventional warfare."

In this collection of accounts of what has happened to women in wartime, Barstow demonstrates the importance of women finding the courage to talk about the terror and to speak of the unspeakable. Pauline Muchina says that "(v)iolence against women is a silent war that spreads to the whole society." As long as it remains silent, as long as no one speaks, the war goes on; the war spreads. Laura Flanders says of listening to Haitian women who were telling their stories: "The tragedy of the tale was one thing; more moving even than the stories was the women's courage to talk." It is as women begin to talk about what has happened that healing becomes possible for both the victim and the violator, and those who have been bystanders.

As I read story after story, as I witnessed the courage it takes to speak up, I thought again and again of the story of Jesus and "the woman with the hemorrhage." When she was healed, she had to speak up, not to confirm her own healing, but rather to extend her own healing to the society. By speaking up, the comfort women of World War II, the women of the Balkans and Rwanda and Haiti and Guatemala, all the women whose stories Barstow brings into the open, assist us all in our need to acknowledge these horrors so that we may work for a world in which they are not repeated.

In her conclusion, Barstow describes a conference in Northern Ireland focusing on "Men, Women and War." At that conference, some of the comfort women were asked, "If anyone would have listened to you in 1945, would you have told your stories then?" Barstow reports that "(b)oth were silent for a moment, weighing the consequences. Then both said, 'Yes.'" The questioner responded to them saying: "If you could have spoken in 1945 -- and been heard -- the world might have begun to respond. And the Serbs might not have dared to build rape camps in 1993."

As one who has stood at the edge of a mass grave in Croatia and heard first hand some of the stories of war in the Balkans, I am grateful for Anne Llewellyn Barstow's work in collecting and sharing the many stories of women and war. She fulfills her intent to "to change the way (we) think about war." She gives us the information we need in order to give voice to the sexual violence that war perpetrates against women. She inspires us to reveal its horrors to the world so that there may be an outcry against it. The comfort women and other war-wounded women have spoken. Barstow's work impels us to speak out as well.