Sian Powell; 5/7/08
The girl in Sierra Leone’s Freetown spends all her time caring for her baby, a child born of violent rape. The adolescent in southern Afghanistan has finally begun to learn to read, but she is terrified because her school has been bombed. The young woman from Darfur, in Sudan, sexually assaulted by four men, disdained by her father and left to weep in a tent, is psychologically scarred beyond imagining. The girl living in a tent camp near East Timor’s Dili airport mourns her child, born in the hills and dead of untended medical complications. Like more than 200 million others, all these girls and young women live in war zones or troubled post-war zones. All have been traumatised beyond the ordinary vicissitudes of conflict simply because they were female. Apart from the standard stream of war stories, little publicity has been given to their plight, which not only entails common horrors of war, such as the physical danger, the hunger, the fear, but also those disasters peculiar to females: rape as a war crime, early marriages of convenience, giving birth without access to child care. If girls and women endure discrimination during times of peace, it is doubled in times of war.
See: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23969299-32682,00.html
