Defending women’s freedom isn’t pretty. It takes an army

written for The Telegraph, 17 June, 2014

In 415BC, the Athenian army raped and slaughtered its way across the island Melos, the most notorious by-casualty of Athens’ 27-year war with Sparta. The brutal treatment of the island’s women remains infamous, not least because it inspired Euripides’ great anti-war play, The Trojan Women, with which he confronted his fellow citizens in performance that year at the city’s festival to Dionysus. The Trojan Women is a spectacular indictment of willful blindness to women’s suffering in war: “enslavement”, which the Athenians practiced wholesale in Melos, is exposed for what it is: rape, pure and simple. In the aftermath of the sack of Troy, Cassandra is finally maddened for good after being raped by the brutal fighter Ajax in Athena’s temple; Hector’s widow, Andromache, shudders as she waits to be “collected” by her husband’s killer, only learning at the last that her rapist has also ordered the death of her infant son.

But when it comes to euphemisms for the rape of women in war, Islamism takes the biscuit. Remember the Taliban practice of issuing blank marriage certificates to their fighters, permitting them to “to take wives by right of conquest, as you find them?” Or look back to Boko Haram leader Abubaker Shekau, reveling in the drama of telling the West, “In Islam, it is allowed to take infidel women as slaves…I will marry off a woman at the age of 12. I will marry off a girl at the age of nine.” It’s been two months since anyone has seen the girls of Chibok, Nigeria, one month since Michelle Obama, lacrimosa, posed with a placard: #BringBackOurGirls. A week later, her husband announced the withdrawal of the last American troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2016.

I suspect one action will have more affect on the lives of women than the other. Afghanistan hasn’t always been a haven for the abuse of women, despite the ahistorical relativism of the US President, sighing at the podium that “Afghanistan will not be a perfect place and it is not the US’ responsibility to make it so”. State-sanctioned rape of women isn’t “cultural”, Mr President – in Kabul, it isn’t even traditional.

So, as ISIS rampages across Iraq this week, women, again, will bear the brunt. No wonder that Syrian refugee women in Amman have flocked to take part in their own production of The Trojan Women, giving voice in performance to their own experiences of suffering and bereavement. They share experiences in performance of exile, not of rape – this isn’t a gathering of rape survivors, and were it described so, I expect few would show their faces on stage – but in their stories of loss and isolation, the invidious patterns of gender violence surface repeatedly.

Georgie Paget, the play’s indefatigable producer, is still haunted by a woman who arrived in Jordan, with four daughters from an anti-fundamentalist family, suddenly facing starvation. A charming local, financially secure, offered to take one of her daughters in marriage. A supposed liberal, he promised her daughter every modern freedom, and although the family barely knew him, a guarantee that she’d have food on her plate was more than they could refuse. Now he keeps her veiled, and refused to let her leave the house to see her family. Her job is to bear his children. Aid workers across the region tell of landlords in refugee slums suddenly demanding sex to cover “unexpected rent increases”. These aren’t just stories of “abuse” – these are the rapes that will never appear in the statistics. Just as “acquaintance-rape”, doesn’t nearly conform to our vision of “stranger-rape”, ever since the Vikings first pillaged their way onto the silver-screen, we children of Hollywood have mistakenly assumed that “rape in war” means aesthetically-thrilling rape on the battlefield.

So this is the context in which Adam Boulton this week attacked a summit on rape in war as “trivial”. Apparently he’s been misunderstood – he didn’t mean that rape is “trivial”, only that the Foreign Secretary holding a summit on it was a trivial use of his time, given the real horrors on the ground in Iraq this week. But what exactly are those horrors on the ground, if not the violent spread of a macho cult which defines itself by the urge to dominate women? We’ve spent a week talking about British values (again, faced by the rise of Islamism) – what are those values, in opposition to the world view of ISIS and Trojan Horse, if they don’t include first and foremost a respect for 51% of the population’s autonomy, bodily and intellectual? That’s why our most effective recent move against rape was Theresa May’s criminalization of forced marriage, which came into effect yesterday. These are our values, here we stand.

But to be fair to Boulton, he’s right about the most important thing: there is no point holding a summit on violence against women if we roll over in the face of ISIS in the same week. Last week, we celebrated the last great defence of the West’s freedom, D-Day. It wasn’t just a moral stand: it was the most sophisticated logistical operation in military history. If British feminists really want to confront global violence against women, we need to agitate for a military that can still has some capability to engage with the world. We can’t bomb every Islamist in the Middle East – and standing “shoulder to shoulder” with Iran against ISIS in Iraq is fraught with problems – but we need to get real about what it costs to confront the world’s greatest misogynistic cult. That means swotting up on the nitty-gritty of defence spending – for example, how many campaigners at the Fawcett Society can explain the effect the toxic “Pay As You Dine” policy has had on morale in the barracks, let alone nutrition? Defending women’s freedom isn’t pretty. It’s expensive. But it is British.