Wars may have evolved to be men’s games, but the women are always on the losing end.
She sweeps up the shards of her broken living room window. Some bite her bare toes; she doesn’t register. Her lips mumble the familiar tune “Shche ne vmerla Ukrainy” (Ukraine has not yet perished). It echoes through the walls her papa’s papa built. The powder blue wallpaper they chose when her second daughter turned one hangs in shards.
“A broken window today, what else tomorrow?”, she thinks as she straightens a picture frame. She won’t cry; she never did except when her husband professed his love on a November winter. Once more when her baby squeezed her fingers right after the labor. But the thought of leaving her home, broken as it was, left tears trailing down her cheeks.
With wars, every hard-fought right of women disappears like it never existed. In a country like Ukraine where females, on average, have higher education levels than men and yet earn only 70% of the gender counterpart, the situation is bound to worsen. This is extremely unfortunate as it comes on the heels of Ukraine’s partnership with ILO to achieve Gender equality in 2020.
Nearly 3 million people have fled Ukraine in the biggest refugee crisis in Europe since WWII. Reports observe that mostly women and children are walking to Poland, waiting at times in 24-hour-long queues. Some children clung to their families who dropped them off to return to their homeland. Photographs of shuttered underground labors have surfaced with newborns sleeping in make-shift ventilators. Health facilities are already stretched thin as around 80,000 women expecting babies in the next three months.
A 2019 UNFPA report released unsettling findings that 75 percent of women in the country reported experiencing some form of violence since age 15, and one in three reported experiencing physical or sexual violence. The numbers are bound to shoot up with refugees fleeing along distressed roads.
We cannot help but recall wounds, and explicit details of women-specific struggles brought about by war. Here are quotes from The New York Times that covered the Syrian refugee crisis.
“I have been lucky”, says one Ms. Horani , “I’ve only been beaten and robbed.” She is a makeup artist, who dressed up as a boy and stopped washing to ward men off. Others haven’t been this ‘lucky’.
Another 30-year-old Syrian mother of four fled with her family. When her husband ran out of money to pay their smuggler in Bulgaria, he offered his wife as payment instead. For three months, she was raped almost daily to earn her family’s onward journey.
Horani sleeps with the cupboard against the door as there is no lock or key. That is the best she can do.
The Taliban in Afghanistan strikes a different chord of fear– about losing freedom. It is a country, where an entire generation of young Afghan women has grown up with liberal values.
BBC reports receiving the following texts from young women in 2021-
“…we have already seen news reports that many girls have been sent back from university. A lot of them have been asked to get married at age 15, or 12.”
In 2022, the reality is much worse than universities closing. A staggering 95% of the population is severely starving, and 13,700 babies have died.
Different war, different place, same trauma. It is women who suffer the most.
As another war rides into the land, uneasiness creeps into our souls. We realize war is not just fought on battlefields but also behind every door, where a woman hides to save herself. It echoes with every scream of a shattered survivor. The crisis creates an urgency to revisit our definitions of gender and protection.
