Introduction: Jacqueline Bhabha, University Committee on Human Rights
Studies, Harvard University
"Gendered fallout is part and parcel of the business of war," Bhabha
says. "The rape of the Sabine women at the founding of Rome captures an image of sexual
violence - the same image that we have heard about in Rwanda, in Kosovo, and in Darfur."
Setting the stage for the other panelists, Bhabha lists other archetypal images: the white
southern women who took over the running of plantations and management of slaves during the
Civil War; the European women who transformed themselves from wives and mothers into
proletarian laborers during the World Wars; the Korean comfort women conscripted into sexual
slavery in Japan during World War II; the German women in Berlin systematically raped by the
victorious Red Army retreating to Russia; the Bosnian women raped, impregnated, and held in
ethnic cleansing camps until they had given birth; the Muslim women whose fetuses and
breasts were barbarically excised in Gujarat, India; and the Sierra Leonian women sexually
brutalized during a recent conflict.
She then introduces the panelists.
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