Introduction: Life Blossoms in the Killing Fields

Abstract

This book contains stories from what has come to be known as “the killing fields”: an unprecedented pandemic of gender-based violence (GBV) during war and conflict. According the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the term “gender-based violence” is used to distinguish violence that targets individuals or groups of individuals on the basis of their gender from other forms of violence. GBV includes violent acts such as rape, torture, mutilation, sexual slavery, forced impregnation, and murder. When involving women, it is violence that is directed against a woman or girl because she is female, or that affects women disproportionately. The authors address both the troubling and triumphant personal experiences of girls and women in war-related conditions and the activists, both men and women, who are shedding humanitarian floodlights on the epidemic of violence against women in many forms worldwide. According to the World Health Organization, gender-based violence accounts for more death and disability among women between the ages of 15 and 44 than the combined effects of cancer, malaria, traffic injuries, and war.

The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation because in the degradation of woman the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source.

—Lucretia Mott