The 18-year-old had been an FSA soldier for less than a month when he was picked up. Crying uncontrollably as he recounted his torture while in detention to a psychiatrist named Yassar Kanawati, he said he suffers from a spinal injury inflicted by his captors. The other men detained with him were all raped, he told the doctor. When Kanawati asked if he, too, was raped, he went silent.

Although most coverage of the Syrian civil war tends to focus on the fighting between the two sides, this war, like most, has a more insidious dimension: rape has been reportedly used widely as a tool of control, intimidation, and humiliation throughout the conflict. And its effects, while not always fatal, are creating a nation of traumatized survivors — everyone from the direct victims of the attacks to their children, who may have witnessed or been otherwise affected by what has been perpetrated on their relatives.

In September 2012, I was at the United Nations when Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide shook up a fluorescent-lit room of bored-looking bureaucrats by saying that what happened during the Bosnian war is “repeating itself right now in Syria.” He was referring to the rape of tens of thousands of women in that country in the 1990s.

“With every war and major conflict, as an international community we say ‘never again’ to mass rape,” said Nobel Laureate Jody Williams, who is co-chair of the International Campaign to Stop Rape & Gender Violence in Conflict. [Full disclosure: I'm on the advisory committee of the campaign.] “Yet, in Syria, as countless women are again finding the war waged on their bodies–we are again standing by and wringing our hands.”

To read this rest of this story, please click over to The Atlantic.

It has taken an attack that lies nearly outside of comprehension to prompt demonstrations, but the outcry has begun.

Over the weekend, women rose up in Nepal, protesting outside the prime minister’s house against gender-based violence.

Egyptian women have faced ceaseless sexualized violence since the start of that country’s revolution, but are now protesting to stop the ever-present sexual harassment and assault.

According to Eve Ensler, the head of V-Day and One Billion Rising, a movement calling for women to rise up on February 14, 2013, and demand an end to violence, women in Somalia are planning what may be their first-ever major demonstrations against rape and violence.

This groundswell — what Ensler calls “a catalytic moment” — is the perfect chance for us to consider how we think about subjugation, rape, and degradation of women globally.

Gloria Steinem and I have written about how a cult of masculinity is behind the constant violation of women around the world — that some men brutalize women against their own self-interest because of an addiction to control or domination. To put it plainly: Rape is not about sex.

“Rape is about violence,” Steinem says, “proving ‘masculine’ superiority; often inserting guns and other objects into women’s bodies; playing out hostility to other men by invading the bodies of ‘their’ females, including old women and babies; occupying wombs with sperm of a conquering group; owning female bodies as the means of reproduction; and raping men and boys to make them as inferior as females.”

To read the rest of this op-ed, please click over to CNN.com.

We don’t know what really happened, whether her death was intentional or a byproduct of war. We don’t know who the perpetrators were for sure. But we do know that this baby is one of the many that has died in Syria’s ongoing conflict. And we know that no matter how many bodies we count, or don’t, that she is a civilian, one of many documented to have been killed in more than 20 months of fighting.

Nearly a year ago, the United Nations gave up on keeping track of Syria’s dead. Over the summer, the International Committee of the Red Cross declared the conflict a civil war. That means intentional attacks on civilians are now officially considered war crimes under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The question then becomes: How will we know what to prosecute when the fighting dies down if we don’t keep track of crimes against civilians, which are, in most cases, women and children?

To read the rest of this story, please click over to The Atlantic.

In the year since we launched Women Under Siege, a project at the Women’s Media Center, I’ve struggled with how to illustrate our many stories about sexualized violence in conflict. We are a documentation project that believes in the power of the image—that it can call up emotion, invite empathy, make plain suffering that needs to be seen to be brought to an end. That women are forced to hide is why we exist. Stigma on top of rape is a crime upon a crime, and it is why we show and show and show in words and whatever images we can the horrors that will remain hidden if we don’t, with effort, put them into the light.

I’ve had photojournalists offer for publication photos and videos of rape survivors with their faces uncovered, seated on hospital beds in countries like Afghanistan, where there are multiple language and cultural barriers between a foreign journalist and local women.“Did this woman give you permission to take her image?” I always ask.

“Yes,” the journalist always says.

“But did she understand that this image might be going on the Internet on a New York-based website that has international reach? That the world will potentially see her face and understand that she has been raped?”

“No, no she didn’t,” is always the reply. How could she?

For the rest of this story, please click over to WITNESS.

In a taxi recently en route to Heathrow Airport, I was told another startling story. The driver turned to me and said, “I am Syrian. And I have a story to tell you that I keep wishing is not true.”

His eyes welled up as he relayed what his neighbor said happened to a friend. The neighbor described being stopped in his car at a Syrian checkpoint on the road from Zabadani to Damascus. He said army officers told him to leave his daughter with them. My driver said he knew no other details than this, that the man had been given a horrific choice to make: leave his daughter behind, or his wife and other children would be killed in front of his eyes.

Please click over to CNN.com to read the rest of this op-ed.

“This is my message to the world,” she says. “Let all the world hear what is happening to us. And I might not be the first one nor the last who was treated in this way.”

The still-unidentified woman posted the video to YouTube on February 11, 2012. It is one of the earliest reports on our live, crowd-sourced map of sexualized violence in Syria. The Women’s Media Center project Women Under Siege has been collecting reports out of Syria for three months, during which time we’ve seen many stories similar to this, in which multiple attackers, usually government forces, are said to gang rape a woman in her home. We have also mapped stories at the extreme edge of nightmares; of teenage girls given shots that immobilize them while their genitals were burned or filled with mice. Government forces and others appear to be carrying out appalling sexualized attacks against women, men, and children in Syria as the conflict there continues. Although we are unable to independently confirm these stories — Syria is simply too dangerous, and our research staff too small — they are consistent both internally and within the news and NGO reports telling similar stories from the Syrian conflict.

To step back from the red dots on our map and try to understand the sexualized violence of Syria’s war, our team of doctors, activists, and journalists has taken the 81 stories we’ve gathered so far, from the onset of the conflict in March 2011 through June 2012, and broken them down into 117 separate pieces of data on everything from rape to the consequences of sexualized violence, such as depression, HIV, and pregnancy. Many more victims are included in these reports, but the vagueness of much of the information does not allow us to give an estimate of the total number. For example, one report tells of an incident in which the Syrian army allegedly raped 36 women while another speaks of a doctor who is treating some of the “2,000 girls and women raped throughout Syria.” Our data, though largely anecdotal, gives us a sense of the scope and impact of sexualized violence in Syria. It appears to be widespread, not limited to any particular city, and often involves rape.

“The data we have so far suggest sexualized violence is being used as a tool of war, although possibly haphazardly and not necessarily as an organized strategy,” said Dr. Karestan Koenen, associate professor of epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and the lead epidemiologist on the mapping project. “These reports indicate that post-conflict intervention will need to address the consequences of sexualized violence for victims.”

For the rest of this article, please click over to The Atlantic.

With the sound of a horn — Dr. Denis Mukwege at the home’s gate — the gunmen and the family’s security guard, Joseph Bizimana, collided in a desperate moment of chaos, in which shots were fired. Bizimana fell to his death. Shots flew at Mukwege, who ducked, according to my sources and The New York Times. Here is where the story takes on subtle variations: The gunmen tried to wrestle Mukwege into his own car, tearing the keys from his hand; they ran out of ammunition and fled in Mukwege’s car; they fired at the doctor and missed, fleeing as neighbors who heard the shots arrived. The men soon abandoned the car, according to Physicians for Human Rights.

No money or property was taken and the car was left behind, calling into question robbery as a motive. Whether this was a kidnapping or assassination attempt, no one is quite sure, but what we do know is that the attack occurred within a couple blocks of the headquarters of MONUSCO, the United Nations Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo — the largest current peacekeeping force in the world, with more than 20,000 troops. We know that DRC is at the mercy of multiple armed groups, including the notorious M23, FDLR, and Mai Mai militias, which are known for their inhuman mutilations of women’s bodies.

We also know that Mukwege is the world’s best-known doctor treating women who have been raped in that country’s 16 years of conflict. He has treated more than 40,000 women as medical director and founder of the Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, eastern DRC, he told me recently. He has operated on more than 15,000 women whose bodies have been ripped apart by sexualized violence, he said. Mukwege is “the epicenter of resistance,” said Stephen Lewis, founder of the Stephen Lewis Foundation, which works to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa, and a supporter of Panzi Hospital.

“He is the person who stands as the anchor for survival,” Lewis said. “You lose him and you lose yet another dimension of the struggle.”

For the rest of this article, please click over to The Atlantic.

The Northern Cheyenne people have a saying: “A nation is not defeated until the hearts of its women are on the ground. Then it’s finished. No matter how brave its warriors, or how strong its weapons.” Well, we are pretty sure that for much of the Native American community, the nation is near defeat.

What else can we say when one out of every three Native American women report they have been raped, or that an attempt has been made to sexually brutalise them? That is more than 2.5 times the national average. And if you think those numbers are staggering, consider who is carrying out these attacks: at least 86% of sexual assaults are reportedly being perpetrated by non-Native men, according to the US department of justice.

We don’t think about such massive sexual assault rates happening in industrialised places like the US. We think about them as war crimes happening in downtrodden, developing countries. But here we have rates of sexualised violence that rival anything the Women’s Media Center project Women Under Siege has documented in Sudan or the Democratic Republic of Congo, where, according to a study published in the American Journal of Public Health, 12% of women say they’ve been raped in their lifetime.

A culture of remarkably high impunity is also thriving. The justice department reports that it makes arrests in merely 13% of the sexual assaults reported by Native women. That comparees with 32% for white women, according to the New York Times. Native women are also not reporting crimes, because they trust that nothing will be done in the terrible knot that is the tribal lands’ jurisdictional confusion (between tribal courts and the federal government), and a combination of racism, a lack of victim services, and not enough police. Whatever’s going on, justice is not taking root.

“When you make that first phone call and there is one officer for the entire tribal community and he can’t respond or take evidence, and then a woman experiences racism at the hospital,” said Cristina Finch, the policy and advocacy director of women’s human rights at Amnesty International USA, that’s when a woman gives up, goes home, and tries to live the rest of her life battered and broken, struggling to survive after rape. According to Finch, racism is “a very large factor” in what is happening to Native American women.

(For the rest of this op-ed, please click over to The Guardian.)

Smith reported the attack on her blog today, describing how a horde of men descended on her Sunday night, pulling her limbs and throwing her around as she tried to protect her camera. She said she soon lost her camera, her backpack, and began to pray: “make it stop.”

“They were scratching and clenching my breasts and forcing their fingers inside me in every possible way,” Smith wrote. “So many men. All I could see was leering faces, more and more faces sneering and jeering as I was tossed around like fresh meat among starving lions.”

In Cairo to film an independent documentary on women’s rights and abuses against women in Egypt since the revolution, according to her website, Smith shared an account of her attack that is eerily parallel to Logan’s. Smith did not immediately reply to an email request for an interview. Atul Singh, editor-in-chief at Fair Observer, confirmed that Smith is an associate editor for the website. He said that “the attack occurred” but declined to elaborate.

Here’s what I mean by eerily parallel. This February, Logan described what happened to her for Women Under Siege, a project I direct at the Women’s Media Center on sexualized violence in conflict:

“I kept appealing for mercy, begging them to stop in the midst of the violence and the chaos, as they tore my clothes from my body and raped me with their hands,” Logan wrote. “Hundreds of them.”

When I spoke to Logan today, she told me that Smith’s account was hard for her to read, that she felt the same terror again “the way the mob came after her; the way the men looked—so close to you—and the faces of the people who looked away.”

At one point, Smith wrote, women surrounded her and “frantically tried to cover” her naked body. “I fell to the ground and apparently temporarily lost consciousness.” When she awoke, she said, the women told her the attack had been prompted by “rumors spread by troublemaking thugs that I was a foreign spy, following a national advertising campaign warning of the dangers of foreigners.”

To read the rest of this article, please click over to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Someone crudely “hacked” my site yesterday. It was a day in which I was experiencing high levels of vitriol because of an op-ed I wrote with Gloria Steinem (the founder of my project at the Women’s Media Center, Women Under Siege) that was published in The Guardian UK. The piece was about how a false image of manhood is contributing to the high levels of rape around the world, especially in war zones or street gangs. The idea is that, while the majority of men are not rapists by any stretch of the imagination, some men become addicted to control, which is part of what we’re calling the “cult of masculinity.” This addiction can make men act violently and risk their lives against their own self-interest as human beings. I.e. it’s a bad thing; it’s a cult.

But that’s not how many men seem to have read it. Many men, it seems, took our concept as a personal attack—as if talking about an extreme end of masculinity meant we were deriding them as an entire gender. We weren’t. I’ll repeat: Not all men are rapists or control-addicted.

The Guardian’s editor asked me to engage with readers in the comments section. I tried that. No matter what I seemed to write, I was attacked. My language was called sloppy when I said that there was good news in that “all men have the ability to be role models in the fight against rape.” (“We are role models!” They yelled. Yes, yes, some of you are, of course I know that.)

Many of the comments were out-and-out sexist, as I’m sure you can imagine. Here’s a particularly good one. The pull quote the writer cites at the top is from another commenter who appears to support our premise. (Note that 31 people recommended this comment to their fellow readers):

By evening, I was dismayed enough by the overall response to the op-ed to wonder whether it is possible to have a non-heated or personalized discussion about the causes of rape at all. I wondered why it is that the media can spill millions of pages of ink each year on femininity and deriding women but I can’t even consider how men are contributing to violence against women in a public space. I can’t, it seems, ask what it is that causes men to sexually assault 1 in 5 women in the U.S. and more than 400,000 women a year in the Democratic of Congo. My bad.

Anyway, so back to why my site looks different today. I needed to do some rejiggering for security after someone last night felt the need to hack this onto it:

I’ll leave the rest of this commentary to you—the women and men who know how to articulate cogent thoughts, rather than shove demeaning images and words in my face. It comforts me to know you’re out there.

*Addendum, 7:51 p.m. Since this all happened, I’ve been in conversation with Gloria about it. She just sent me some thoughts to share here:

“In fact, we went out of our way to defend men against statistics that can be misleading. If you just say how many women have been sexually assaulted, it seems that the same number of men are rapists, when, in fact, there are fewer men who rape multiple times.

“But it’s also true that in any situation of unequal power, it’s threatening for the more powerful to feel criticized. Think about it: It’s okay for women to ‘sing the blues,’ but not okay to equalize reasons for blues-singing. It’s okay to talk about the feminization of poverty, but not okay to talk about about the masculinization of wealth. It’s okay to talk about poor black people, but not so okay to talk about white racism and rich white people—and so on.

“Also we’re so accustomed to hierarchy that it’s hard to imagine equality. I think some men imagine reversal—women are going to do to them what they’ve have done to women—but that’s just guilt talking. Probably our first job is to imagine equality. After all, hope is a form of planning!”