Can we end rape as tool of war? By Gloria Steinem and Lauren Wolfe / CNN

By lwolfe, February 8, 2012

We first thought about starting this piece with the story of Saleha Begum, a survivor of Bangladesh’s 1971 war in which, some reports say, as many as 400,000 women were raped. Begum had been tied to a banana tree and repeatedly gang raped and burned with cigarettes for months until she was shot and left for dead in a pile of women. She didn’t die, though, and was able to return home, ravaged and five months pregnant. When she got home she was branded a “slut.”

We also thought of starting with the story of Ester Abeja, a woman in Uganda who was forcibly held as a “bush wife” by the Lord’s Resistance Army. Repeated rape with objects destroyed her insides. Her captors also made her kill her 1-year-old daughter by smashing the baby’s head into a tree.

We ran through a dozen other stories of women like Begum and Abeja, and finally realized that it would be too difficult to find the right one — the tale that would express exactly how and in what ways sexualized violence is being used as a weapon of war to devastate women and tear apart communities around the world, conflict by conflict, from Libya to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

(Read the rest of this op-ed on CNN.com.)