"Key Excerpts from the Taguba Report" (May 03, 2004) documents that female prisoners have been indeed sexually tortured in the same or worse way as male prisoners have: among the abuses listed in the report are "b. Videotaping and photographing naked male and female detainees" and "k. A male MP guard having sex with a female detainee." And yet, the English-language media have been oddly silent about Iraqi female prisoners, as if they did not exist. Long before CBS and The New Yorker reported on the torture at the Abu Ghraib prison, however, the Arabic-language media like Quds Press were running articles like this: "It is to be noted that a number of Iraqi female prisoners there issued a statement asking the Iraqi resistance men to pound the prison and destroy it over their heads because some of them were raped by the occupation forces" ("'Occupation' Soldiers Reportedly 'Rape' Female Inmates in Iraqi Jail," February 13, 2004). Still, there is no sign that the English-language media have or will pick up such reports.
What explains the invisibility of Iraqi female prisoners, in contrast to the visibility of American female prison guards who torture and Iraqi male prisoners who are tortured? Is it that the English-language media regard the story of American men sexually torturing Iraqi women as "normal" and therefore "not newsworthy," in comparison to a newsworthy story of American women sexually torturing Iraqi men? Or are they afraid of the Arab and American publics' reactions?
Even without photographic evidence, however, we, like Riverbend, can very well imagine "what must be happening to the female prisoners" in Iraq, based on the treatment of female (and male) prisoners in the United States itself, whose sufferings are nearly as invisible as Iraqi female prisoners' in the mainstream US discourse:
A recent study of prisons in four Midwestern states found that approximately one in five male inmates reported a pressured or forced sex incident while incarcerated. About one in ten male inmates reported that that they had been raped. . . .
The rest of my posting is available at <http://montages.blogspot.com/2004_05_01_montages_archive.html#108363247184336264>. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>