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24 February 1959—

Helping Women Reclaim Their Lives

Too frequently, sexual violence against women in wartime is reported by the media as simple criminal assault. Monka Hauser, founder of Medica Mondiale, a women’s advocacy organization, believes this is wrong-minded. Sexualized violence, says Hauser, is always a destructive “exertion of power over the immediate victim.” But in wartime, sexual assaults take on an entirely new vehemence. “They always have strategic significance, regardless of whether they were explicitly planned, tacitly encouraged, or merely tolerated,” because they “boost the morale of one’s own fighters and terrorize the enemy.” And it’s for this reason that sexual violence in wartime should be considered a weapon of terrorism and users of that weapon indicted for war crimes.

Hauser, an Italian gynecologist who studied in Innsbruck and lives in Cologne, first became familiar with rape as a strategy of war when she traveled to Bosnia in 1993 to treat sexual assault victims of that region’s conflict. Her experiences led her to found Medica Mondiale, which has worked with over one hundred thousand victimized women in such war-torn nations around the world as Afghanistan, the Congo, Israel, Liberia, Albania, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Medica Mondiale’s mission is to create local support structures and counseling centers for women who have been sexually violated in wartime, to advocate for women’s rights, and to lobby for the official recognition of sexual violence in wartime as a war crime and not simply a civil one.

Hauser is especially concerned with eliminating the social stigma that wartime sexual assault victims often have to endure at the hands of their fellow countrymen. By ostracizing rape victims, notes Hauser, “society at home almost always continues the work of the rapists. Communities ostracize raped women and girls as blemishes on masculine/national honor or force them to remain silent if they want to survive socially.” This “non-recognition of rape as a form of torture and grave human rights violation” constitutes an indifference to it that Hauser sees as nothing short of shameful.

Throughout the history of warfare, but especially in the conflicts of the last century, women and children have been the primary casualties of armed conflict. The poverty, famine, and diseases exacerbated by war are typically seen as the chief causes of their victimization. But Hauser and Medica Mondiale are helping the world to see that sexual assault is another powerful way in which women become wartime casualties who must live with the scars of their experiences for years afterwards. She has devoted her career to accompanying “tens of thousands of traumatized women on their path towards reclaiming their lives.”