Investigations
Gender-based Violence in Armed Conflict
During war, women are often more economically dependant and physically vulnerable than men--at the same time they bear primary responsibility for the day-to day care of children and elders. Domestic laws can fail them, but international law defines one common form of gender-based violence as a war crime: rape as a weapon of war. Despite this legal protection, in dozens of recent conflicts, armies have used rape as a tactic of war, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. PHR advocates treating rape in war as a war crime punishable under international law and has studied the physical, psychological, economic, and social impact of violence against women and girls in times of conflict.
In The Taliban's War on Women - A Health and Human Rights Crisis in Afghanistan, PHR helped bring the plight of that country's women to the world's attention. PHR documented how the regime's restrictions on women's access to medical care, education, and employment created a dire health and human rights crisis. In a subsequent report, Women's Health and Human Rights in Afghanistan: A Population-Based Assessment (2001), PHR revealed attitudes on women's rights to education and work opportunities, freedom of expression, participation in government and legal protection for their human rights.
PHR's groundbreaking study War-Related Sexual Violence in Sierra Leone: A Population-based Assessment (2002) is one of the first to scientifically document the extent of sexual violence as a result of war. Sierra Leone's decade-long conflict has been one of the deadliest in recent history and has been marked by an extraordinary level of brutal human rights abuses, including abductions, beatings, sexual assault of women and men, being "captured" for less than 24 hours, torture, forced labor, gunshot wounds, serious injuries and amputations. An alarming 94% of 991 households of internally displaced persons randomly surveyed by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) and the United Nations Assistance Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) reported among its members at least one of these serious abuses during the past ten years of conflict.
The psychological toll of rape includes anxiety, depression, nightmares, social phobias, physical complaints, and post traumatic stress disorder. In Rape as a War Crime in Kashmir, PHR documented how Indian security forces and militant forces in Kashmir used rape to punish, intimidate, coerce, humiliate, and degrade their female victims.
Rape's consequences are also social: PHR's report Darfur: Assault on Survival, examined how rape victims in a conservative Muslim society suffer stigma and shame. Husbands disown wives; unmarried victims are condemned as "spoiled."
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