What war does to womens’ and girls’ lives

Yesterday, a truly amazing piece of reporting by the WaPo‘s Ariana Eunjung Cha told the story of a 23-year-old mother of two in Baghdad, widowed by last year’s war, who has turned to prostitution in an attempt to buy necessities for her kids, her brothers, and the rest of her family.
The piece is so well-written, and so painful. Bill the spouse immediately questioned why the paper only ran it in the “Style” section, which seems totally to trivialize it. I agree.
One of my main reactions, after “wow” at the reporting and a great gaping sadness at the content of the story, was to be really, really glad that there is a strong enough presence of women in the “corps” of foreign correspondents that a piece like this gets done. (As opposed to men foreign correspondents, a goodly number of whom in the bad old days when I was out there as a hack would actually frequent women working in that sector as a matter of course; and who certainly would seldom have either wanted to do a great story like Cha’s, or been in a position of the right kind of intimacy to be able to do it.)
Cha credits Shereen Jerjes, presumably a female Iraqi stringer, with contributing to the work on the report. And a female photojournalist called Andrea Bruce Woodall has an incredible series of photos there on the young woman’s life, as well– including one, of her just at the start of a sexually intimate encounter with a man, that Woodall apparently took from inside a closet in the woman’s bedroom.
I want to come back to this question of the new role that empowered women journalists can make in the way we all understand the costs that war imposes on women and families, and on journalism in general, later.
But while I’m here in the realm of reporting (by women) on post-war prostituion tragedies, I can’t avoid linking to this truly outrageous story from a refugee camp in the DRC, where Kate Holt reports on the lives of young-teenage Congolese girls forced into prostitution by the war there, and who their johns there are:

Here is how Holt’s story starts:

Faela is 13 and her son Joseph is just under six months old.
Sitting on the dusty ground in Bunia’s largest camp for Internationally Displaced People (IDPs), with Joseph in her arms, she talks about how she ensures that she and her son are fed.
“If I go and see the soldiers at night and sleep with them then they sometimes give me food, maybe a banana or a cake,” she explains.
“I have to do it with them because there is nobody to care, nobody else to protect Joseph except me. He is all I have and I must look after him.”
It is a story that might not sound out of place in any part of the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of Congo but for one thing, the soldiers Faela is talking about are not the rebel groups who devastated Ituri Province, in north-eastern DR Congo, during the last four-and-a-half years of conflict.
They are part of the UN peacekeeping force, Monuc, and are stationed next to the IDP camp in Bunia on UN orders…
“I came to this camp nearly six months ago when the fighting got bad in our village,” Faela explains.
“Every night the [Congolese militia] soldiers would come to our hut and make my sisters and I do it with them. We had no choice. If we said ‘No’ then they would hurt us.
“Sometimes they put their guns against my chest and sometimes between my legs. I was really scared.”
Scared indeed, scared enough to leave the village where she had been born and begin the long walk through the jungle to the IDP camp, knowing she was pregnant by one of the fighters who raped her.
“I had Joseph in the forest,” Faela says. “My father cannot help me any more – he is ashamed of me because I had this baby when I am not married.”
Faela expected to be safe in the IDP camp, instead she discovered that the shame her father felt had followed her, and in the camp she was shunned and refused food.

Oh God, it’s all just horrible. I don’t have the stomach to continue with my little rant about how the presence of women in the journalism corps has helped to reveal the truth about such stories– stories that just about always undregird all the nonsense people talk about the “glories” of war. Trust me, I encountered stories like those in Lebanon; but to my regret nowadays I did not persist in going after them.
By the way, Kate Holt tells us that the UN troops in question come from Morocco and Urugay. This would certainly not be the first time that UN troops have gotten involved in supporting prostitution among members of the exact same population they they have been sent in to protect.
And yes, there is this short portion in Ariana Cha’s story from Baghdad about one of the other young prostitutes she encounters:

Nada says one day she and her sister were driven to an office building near the Baghdad airport and were introduced to two American soldiers. She was afraid, she says, but they were gentle and nice and made jokes and slipped them an extra $100 each. She was so giddy from the encounter that she hardly cared that the pimp’s profit, Nada says, was $700.

God help all these young women and girls. God help all of us if we let situations like these persist, and recur.
War is always, inevitably, bad for women and families.