What is Justice for a Rape Victim?

Phyllis Chesler 

There she was, on the front page of the American newspapers, a 20-year-old Bosnian Moslem girl, hanging from a tree, a suicide, dead by her own hand, her death a cry for help. Our silence, deafening.

Photo added

"We cannot say: "We didn't know, no one told us." We know. We've seen it on TV, read the detailed reports, seen the photos. I knew, feminists knew what was going on in Bosnia. True, we had trouble sleeping over it, and some of us sent money, gathered evidence, drafted lawsuits, petitioned the U.N., counseled and consoled the victims, quietly helped rape-refugees to leave the country, but, as a movement, we failed to mount even one Israeli-style Entebbe-raid, even one mass "pacifist" action on Bosnian soil. We wrung our hands and waited for the patriarchal governments to "do something": convene a war crimes tribunal in The Hague, bomb Sarajevo, lift the arms embargo, fight it out, man-to-man.  

"We are the Good Feminist Germans. We—and our respective governments—did even less in the matters of Rwanda, El Salvador, Guatemala, Peru, Liberia, New Guinea, East Timor, Jammu, and Kashmir, Haiti.

"In 1971, when I first heard that retreating Pakistani soldiers had begun to gang-rape Bengali women in what would become Bangladesh, I called for the rescue of "our own." I had once lived in the Moslem world, I knew what would (and did) happen to those raped and raped-and-impregnated women. "Many will kill themselves," I said, "if their brothers and fathers don't kill them first." I called for immediate feminist airlifts of the raped women." . . .