If you haven't read Pablo K's piece on Angelina Jolie, celebrity, and the Global Summit on Ending Sexual Violence in Conflict, you should. There has been some broader discussion about the pros (see 'Hollywood can actually help solve complex global problems') and cons...
One of the traditional responsibilities of sane conservative parties is to write-out of respectability and legitimacy the scary, nut-job right-wing fringe. There can’t be a ‘no-enemies-on-the-right’...
The world has payed attention to the gang-rape of a young woman (her name has not been made widely public) in Delhi and her struggle to survive over the last few weeks. The reports of the brutal...
Adam Jones and Augusta del Zotto made this case years ago, and so have I. Glad to note the New York Times has finally taken notice by publishing Lara Stemple's excellent op-ed: AS disturbing new...
This week I served on a panel discussion for Jonathan Torgovnik's photo exhibit on the Rwandan genocide at the Woodrow Wilson School Bernstein Galley at Princeton University. The exhibit contained extraordinary photographs of female genocide survivors and their children born as a result of genocidal rape. There is also a extremely evocative video available here. I was asked to comment critically on the exhibit and the accompanying book, Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape. The review I presented was mixed. On the one hand the exhibit is very much needed. Children like these...
Over at Coming Anarchy, "Munro Ferguson" writes:This past December, UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon warned that the current geo-economic crisis would add fuel to the already raging fire that is international human trafficking. 146 years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, there exists more slaves on planet earth now than at any other given time.The UN puts the number of current slaves at some 27 million human beings, though a recent UN report offers the caveat that forced labor is much harder to track and enumerate than the most proliferate form, that of sex-slavery, and...
The Guardian reports a great triumph for women's rights at the United Nations Security Council, which has recently passed a new resolution condemning sexual violence as a war crime and a component of genocide.I'm thinking: how does this new resolution go beyond SCR 1325 of 2000, which called on governments not only to "respond to" but to actually "prevent" sexual violence? Since rape has already been recognized as a war crime since at least 1949, and since it is now also recognized, when perpetrated by an agent of the state, as torture (in the ICTY statute), as genocide (in the Akayesu...