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Topic: RSS FeedA Rape in Iraq: Rape, Brothel Rape and Prostitution in Wartime
Off Our Backs , 2006 by Falconberg, Suki
Another difference between Takita's era and 'Abir's might lie in the fact that in the early 1990's, the Korean Comfort Women finally told their stories. This was unprecedented. Woman actually admitting they had been raped/prostituted. (In brief, for those of you who do not know the story, roughly 200,000 women were sexually enslaved by the Japanese military before and during World War II, held in rape camps, and violated 30 to 50 times a day. Those who survived were permanently crippled and broken, both physically and psychologically.)
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Widespread violation of girls also took place in Vietnam. According to the Oxford Companion to American Military History, in Vietnam, from 1970 to 1973, thirteen marines and one navy serviceman were convicted of rape. The book goes on to say that this in no way reflects the actual number of rapes. According to some reports, and Vietnam vets themselves, the numbers probably ran in the hundreds, even thousands, per day. And, in Vietnam, the rape sometimes led to murder as well-a soldier would simply "blow away" a girl when he was finished using her.2
The Iraqi rape broadens out into other concerns-the entire picture of sex and war. Should/does the U.S. military traffic in girls from Eastern Europe, Thailand, and the Philippines for the troops? It happened during Desert Storm-prostituted bodies were shipped in for our guys who lined up to use them.3 Will journalists in Iraq ever tackle the question of whether girls and women (Iraqi or of other nationalities) are being prostituted for our men in that country?
Particularly horrifying to me is the part our soldiers have played in the collective history of brothel rape. Along these same lines, I keep waiting for someone to suggest that there aren't enough brothels in Iraq where our men can let off steam-that's why they're raping. The same idea as in Okinawa when several American soldiers raped a 13-year-old girl and the politicians said, "They should have used a prostitute." Or when Occupation Comfort Girls were forced into brothels to service GI's in Tokyo after World War II so the men would not attack "decent" Japanese girls. Despite cheap bodies available in the brothels, American soldiers raped on the streets of Tokyo anyway, for fun and "sport."4
Perhaps the crime of raping the brothelized goes unnoticed because of the sheer numbers involved. During World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, access to cheap sex with starving girls was simply there-a fact of going to war. To survive, women will sell themselves. One reason women will sell themselves during war is to feed their children. Men destroy towns and villages, crops and animals, and then the girls left alive are forced into survival sex with the conquerors. Having worked as a prostitute myself, near a military base, I can attest to the aspect of destitution: one incentive that pushed me into prostitution was that I was hungry, and I was afraid of being homeless.
Historian John Dower estimates that almost 100% of the American soldiers stationed in Tokyo after World War II used Japanese prostituted bodies. It was considered such an everyday activity by the military that they refused to recognize it as rape. (It has always puzzled me enormously-how the use of sexually exploited bodies all over the world by my soldiers protects my freedom as an American woman here at home?)
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