Women: Developing Countries

Baroness Hamwee Excerpts

Thursday 27th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, I am somewhat out of my comfort zone in speaking on this subject, but I should not complain, considering how important it is. I put my name down partly because at that point, apart from my noble friend on the Front Bench, only men had put their names down to speak, but also out of a sense of responsibility, guilt and appreciation of the privilege that I have had throughout my life, and as a tribute to my noble friend Lord Loomba, who has made such a wide-ranging and riveting speech, which will certainly bear re-reading.

As for privilege, I had a secondary education which never suggested to me or my classmates that there was anything at all that we could not do. I was one of seven women on a course of 200 people at Cambridge. I do not know what the statistics are which lead to two of the seven speaking today. I am doubly fortunate in that I am not where my grandparents were born—in Aleppo.

The messages from me have been slightly mixed because my family’s religion, Orthodox Judaism, firmly placed women in a subservient position. I have never entirely understood that. We are necessary both for reproduction and for chicken soup. Things have moved on, but not everywhere. Even where they have moved on, traces of those attitudes inevitably linger a little. In some places, of course, there has been no change.

I hope it will not offend sensitivities if, in thinking about my own experience, I wonder aloud about the impact of religions and strands of religions which place women in second place—if as high as that—around the world. Perhaps because of that, I particularly want to mention the role of men. We are all aware of rape as a weapon of war and the considerable difficulties in prosecuting rape, despite its recognition as a war crime and a crime against humanity. I must say here that I acknowledge that men are raped too.

In Bosnia there have been around 30 convictions for what are thought to be something of the order of 50,000 rapes. The difficulties include getting evidence and supporting the victims so that they can be witnesses. We know that it is has happened in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in Rwanda and of course it is going on in Syria. Rape within the refugee camps is particularly corrosive because it means that women are vulnerable to those running the camps.

Women who are raped suffer terrible stigma. So too do their children. They are outcasts and they are denied very necessary treatment. The very deeply held attitudes, which are incomprehensible to me, mean that abuse is piled on abuse. I have heard it said, “Destroy one woman and you destroy the next generation”. They become less than second-class citizens. I heard today that the Save the Children Fund is talking of a lost generation in Syria because of the deaths. The rapes too contribute to that.

There is a responsibility on men who are part of this culture. It has to be men who educate and persuade other men—members of their own community and their own religion—not just that rape is wrong, but crucially that women who are victims of rape are just that. They are victims. They are not to be shunned. They are not in any way different as human beings, except that they are survivors. Documenting the accounts of atrocities with a view to prosecution and redress is essential. I wonder whether noble Lords are familiar with the website Women Under Siege. It has digital media recording of reports of rape in real time. It is sobering to look at the crowd map of sexualised violence and to read individual reports. I will share a few points from one of the reports that I have read on that website. This is from Syria where women are,

“terrified to talk about the brutality forced upon them … doubted, ignored, and made invisible through shame … they only speak about their ‘neighbour’ or ‘friend’ who was raped”.

One rape survivor told a woman doctor working in Amman:

“I’m sure if my husband knows he will divorce me the same day, the same hour”.

Her experience was having been raped in her own home in front of her children. Of course, she felt responsible; responsible for her own rape. The writer of the report stated:

“In a society, as in Syria, that places their purity in their physical bodies, when women are no longer thought to be virgins, they are discarded like dirty tissues”.

The writer continued:

“Beyond divorce, I’ve heard multiple stories that detail honor killings after women have been raped in Syria—a survivor is shot by her own brother/husband/whoever in the family. Social workers and doctors who have interviewed rape survivors from Syria have told me that women believe that speaking about their rapes will end their lives … The concept of purity, and honor, kills women”.

I applaud the Government’s preventing sexual violence initiative and the work particularly of the Foreign Secretary. He said very recently in a speech at a meeting of the UN Security Council that he paid tribute to,

“the organisations and individuals who have worked for years so that the world knows and understands the scale of rape and sexual violence in conflict, and have helped persuade Governments to take it seriously as many of us are now doing”.

He referred to grassroots organisations. They are often led by women who do so much to respond to sexual violence. We should remember that very small amounts of funding produce often disproportionately very significant results when spent by such organisations.

UN Security Council Resolution 2106, which has just been adopted, emphasises the,

“important role that can be played by women, civil society, including women’s organisations … in exerting influence over parties to armed conflict with respect to addressing sexual violence”.

Secondly, it mandates envoys and peace mediators to engage with women’s organisations and survivors of sexual violence, and crucially to include their concerns in all peace provisions. Thirdly, it highlights the roles of local level women’s rights organisations in providing community-level protection against sexual violence. I urge the Government to continue what I would describe as recognising that peacebuilding goes on outside conference halls and that women are essential to peacebuilding.

I asked some Questions about this a few months ago. They were printed in Hansard under the same headings as questions from my noble friend Lady Tonge. The Questions were about the proportion of aid spent on peacebuilding. The Answers were that the format uses codes which allow DfID to report how much funding goes to gender issues, but does not allow funding for peacebuilding to be disaggregated. There are always more data that one might hope to see. Those data are important.

I return to the men. For the cultural change that is needed, both to tackle the prevalence of rape as a weapon of war and to treat its victims humanely, men have a pivotal role. As my noble friend Lord Loomba said, no culture is set in stone. The challenges to which he referred in the title to his debate are challenges for men too.