Women's group investigates sexual violence in Syria

Rights organisation begins landmark study A women rights’ group is using new crowd-sourcing techniques to track rape and other sexual violence across Syria in one of the first efforts to monitor assaults against women during military conflict as it happens.
So far, the group has posted more than 20 reports, including deaths, from May 6, 2011 to March 17 and is verifying others.
The effort by the Women’s Media Center aims to shed light on such assaults and provide possible evidence to prosecute future human rights violations and war crimes. The group launched its website on Wednesday and said it was working with multiple Syrian activists whom it did not identify.
Among incidents reported are undated allegations, labeled unverified, from a Palestinian news outlet that Syrian army forces raped 36 women near the villages of Kurin and Sahl Al-Rawj and from a YouTube video in which a man identified as a Syrian military volunteer says government forces kidnapped and raped 25 girls in Homs.
Crowd-sourcing allows the general public to provide information and report events very quickly. Reports can be made on the website, WomenUnderSiegeSyria.crowdmap.com, via e-mail or on Twitter using the hashtag "#RapeinSyria".
Syria faces intense international criticism over its government’s violent crackdown on a popular uprising against the government that began a year ago. More than 9,000 people have been killed, and violence continues despite peace efforts.
Violence against women has been particularly underreported, something the online project aims to change, said Lauren Wolfe, director of the advocacy group’s Women Under Siege project that launched the website.
“The stories are more atrocious than I could have imagined. We have evidence that there’s possible sexual enslavement going on, mutilation - really horrific atrocities,” Wolfe said.
“No one has ever measured sexual violence in conflict during the conflict. It’s always after the fact,” she added.
The Arabic-English website uses technology from Ushahidi, a global non-profit technology company, and allows anonymous reports.
Ushahidi, which specialises in developing free and open source computer software to collect information, began in 2008 as a website mapping reported violence in Kenya amid a post-election crisis. Its name means “testimony” in Swahili.
So far, reports to the site have come mostly through media outlets. The centre said it cannot independently verify all of those stories because the Syrian government has widely blocked access to the country.
Other reports from individuals are currently being assessed, the centre’s Wolfe said.
“That can start to give us a picture of the scale and scope of the violence and the human rights violations,” said Physicians for Human Rights Deputy Director Susannah Sirkin, who is collaborating with the center on the project and has worked on sexual violence issues in Sudan, Sierra Leone and Bosnia.
Cristina Finch at the international human rights group Amnesty International’s US branch said there are reports of men being raped in Syria as well. Her group tracks torture, harassment and deaths in Syria.
“Any tool that we can use to highlight what’s happening on the ground and document human rights abuse, atrocities and incidences of sexual violence is useful for accountability,” she said.
As Women Under Siege project gathered more reports, director Lauren Wolfe told The Washington Post that they had found something striking.
“Generally women are shunned when they are raped in war.
They sometimes are not allowed to go home, and whole families can be dishonoured,” she said. “But what’s really interesting is that we have a report that an imam called for Syrian women who were raped to be honoured, for people to embrace them. He said they’re raped and so they are heroes.”
Wolfe said that the group found other examples of support for Syrian rape victims. In one instance, Syrian men offered to marry women who were raped to help restore their honour.
In a video address, Sheikh Adnan al-Aroor, the imam that Wolfe was referring to, encourages victims of rape to accept offers of marriage:
“I am telling you, and I hope you are listening, these girls and women whose chastity was attacked should be honoured. I am giving you a religious ruling, a fatwa ... Every girl or woman who got raped, this is an honour and like a medal. People will ask to marry them, and will love them. People from the revolution and others ... I hope she is not sad ... She will have great rewards from God.”
“We often hear about deaths and detentions in Syria. But we don’t hear about rape, because women are stigmatised or killed after they are raped,” the Washington Post quoted Wolfe as saying. “It’s the most twisted reporting situation, to get any accurate information out of Syria ... A major goal is just to put this [issue] into the spotlight.”