But numbers can also be a smokescreen preventing us from seeing the pain happening around us every day. Numbers are crucial to quantifying any problem. Beneath the numbers, I’ve written just a few specific reasons why we shouldn’t trust them-why all numbers counting a problem based in trauma and fear are certainly higher than estimated. Here then are some of the numbers painstakingly gathered by researchers. Much of the work to count them has been done forensically, however, through costly research efforts. Women have no reason to come forward.īut over time, some have. There’s too much in the way: the murder of victims after rape (aka the destruction of evidence), deep stigma that prevents reporting, fear of retribution by either the perpetrators or the survivor’s family. The problem is that it is nearly impossible to know exact-or often even ballpark-numbers of women raped in conflict. They say that women who are escaping abduction from ISIS are returning severely traumatized and sit languishing in temporary centers with zero psychological treatment.) (And there is next to no money being spent on these issues in the Syria context, according to my sources in the region who treat survivors of torture and rape. Which means that every dollar not spent to help these survivors, many of whom appear to have made it out of the war zone, is another survivor left suffering without psychological, medical, or other supportive care. There have been too many reports, many credible and confirmed, to say it is not. In years of documenting sexualized violence in the Syria conflict, I’ve long maintained that we can’t know in a hot war exactly how many women and men are being violated-but we know it is happening. If we don’t know the numbers, they ask, how can we help properly? How can we mount prosecutions? Offer reparations? Put in place proper advocacy? So the thinking goes.
#By the numbers infographic how to
That’s what governments, scholars, and others argue when trying to figure out how to allot funds toward this problem of sexualized violence in conflict. We know there’s a problem but we don’t know how big it is. Violence against women Infographic: Rape in war, by the numbers
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