Iraqi Women Silenced
Rapes, bombings, death sentences, and a discriminatory legal system; it is one of the unspoken facts of militarism that women often become the spoils of war. The Iraq war has been a disaster in many ways, but none so extreme as what it’s done to Iraqi women.
Women not only suffer what everyone in Iraqi society suffers - the absence of security, collapse of the country’s infrastructure, a health care system in tatters, and high levels of poverty and unemployment. They also suffer gender-based violence and increased social conservatism. The constant violence - looting, assault, kidnapping, rape or death at the hands of suicide bombers, militias, foreign troops, Iraqi police, and local thugs - has trapped women and children in their homes. Many women who’d formerly worked outside the home or attended school now stay indoors.