UN acknowledges sexual violence in Hamas attack (and four other stories)

Five reads on gender (in)equality and the backlash against sexism to start your week.

It’s late on a Sunday. I’m finally sitting down to write this newsletter after a small, quiet weekend, but the good kind. Here’s wishing you all a great start to your week. This edition is a sombre affair, with a lot on gender-based violence, and links with some trigger warnings.

Here are the reads…

1) UN acknowledges accounts of gender-based violence on 7/10

Evidence that sexual violence was perpetrated by Hamas when the group attacked southern Israel on 7th October was there from the beginning. As readers of this newsletter may remember, in October Israeli women’s groups signed an open letter urging UN Women to break its silence on the targeting of women and children that day. This week, both the UN and UN Women made statements regarding gender-based violence. On 29th November, four days after the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres tweeted/Xed:

There are numerous accounts of sexual violence during the abhorrent acts of terror by Hamas on 7 October that must be vigorously investigated and prosecuted. Gender-based violence must be condemned. Anytime. Anywhere.

On 1st December, as the Israel-Hamas truce broke down and fighting renewed in Gaza, UN Women released its own statement:

We deeply regret that military operations have resumed in Gaza, and we reiterate that all women, Israeli women, Palestinian women, as all others, are entitled to a life lived in safety and free from violence.

We unequivocally condemn the brutal attacks by Hamas on Israel on 7 October. We are alarmed by the numerous accounts of gender-based atrocities and sexual violence during those attacks. This is why we have called for all accounts of gender-based violence to be duly investigated and prosecuted, with the rights of the victim at the core.

This week, there has been some significant coverage of these accounts (trigger warnings for all of these links), with in-depth reporting in the Sunday Times (a splash by chief foreign correspondent Christina Lamb) and Haaretz (see this piece by Hilo Glazer). Physicians for Human Rights, an Israeli NGO, also published a position paper collating reports made public so far, including testimonies from survivors who witnessed sexual violence.

P.s. This is not a report, but this piece by Gaby Hinsliff on the trivialising of the rapes that occurred that day is very good, as is this by Maya Lecker on the problem with the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s social media campaign highlighting the sexual violence (complete with terrible hashtags).

2) The consequences of not listening to women

Two recent pieces highlight the cost of dismissing national security warnings from women simply because they are women. Both relate to hints of potential terrorist attacks about to happen, but some 22 years apart. In Haaretz, Yaniv Kubovich has an infuriating report about low ranking women soldiers in the Israeli army — “spotters” whose role involves watching surveillance cameras for suspicious activity, a role only performed nowadays by women — whose warnings that Hamas in Gaza were acting unusually and preparing for some sort of attack long before 7th October were ignored. Fifteen spotters were killed on 7th October at the Nahal Oz military base near Gaza, and a further seven were taken to Gaza. Of these, one was rescued by the Israeli security forces and another was killed in captivity. According to the piece, in the lead-up to 7th October:

The spotters believe Hamas was actually being rather negligent: it didn’t try to hide anything and its actions were out in the open. But throughout this period, they say senior officers in the IDF’s Gaza Division and Southern Command refused to listen to their warnings. They believe this stemmed partly from arrogance but also from male chauvinism.

The spotters are exclusively “young women and young women commanders,” explains one of them. “There’s no doubt that if men had been sitting at those screens, things would look different.”

The second piece by Liza Mundy in The Atlantic is about the women CIA analysts whose warnings about 9/11 coming were not taken seriously. She concludes:

Whatever else it is, the CIA is a workplace, one with institutional biases, turf wars, bureaucracy, and, yes, sexism. When the stakes are so high, those dynamics can have history-making consequences.

3) Feminist activism for survivors of the Balkan War

This piece, out just ahead of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women on 25th November, discusses a cross-border initiative to support survivors of rape and sexual violence from the wars in the Western Balkans. In the Bosnian War, sexual violence was widespread and systematic. It was used as a tool of ethnic cleansing. It is estimated that between 20,000 and 50,000 women were raped. Anamarija Divkovic, Sabina Kaqinari and Sanja Pavlovic, who are involved in the programme, write:

The wars in the former Yugoslavia were fuelled by hatred and their violent impact is still being felt in the dominant nationalistic and patriarchal narratives that persist in the region. That is why change needs to be fuelled by love, respect and trust, particularly towards those whose experiences were neglected and downplayed.

This is where regional feminist organisation has its place. Traditional processes of transitional justice often overlook women’s experiences. Through feminist cooperation, the voices of women, especially survivors, are at the centre of all activities, policies and demands.

4) Italian student’s death triggers reckoning with violence against women

Giulia Cecchettin, a 22-year-old engineering student, disappeared on 11th November in northern Italy after meeting up with her boyfriend Filippo Turetta. Her body was found a week later, dumped near a lake in the foothills of the Alps. She reportedly had 26 stab wounds. Turetta was arrested in Germany on suspicion of her murder after going on the run. The murder has sparked a national outcry in Italy over gender-based violence. As per AP’s report:

Premier Giorgia Melon i expressed outrage at Italy’s long history of violence against women by their partners or ex-partners, saying it has appeared to be getting worse recently. She cited data from the Interior Ministry saying of the 102 women killed in Italy this year up to Nov. 12, 53 died at the hands of their partners or former partners.

“Every single woman killed because she is ‘guilty’ of being free is an aberration that cannot be tolerated and that drives me to continue on the path taken to stop this barbarity,” she said in a statement on social media.

A government-backed bill that has already passed the lower Chamber of Deputies and is coming to the Senate later this month would boost preventative measures to protect victims of gender-based violence.

In Politico, Hannah Roberts has more detail on the debate on this within Italy (and on how the populist right-winger Meloni divides feminists).

5) In the US, legal abortions increase after the end of Roe v Wade

According to a new report, the slashing of access to abortion in 17 US states has had the unintended effect of slightly increasing the level of legal abortions. As per Andrea González-Ramírez in The Cut:

The research project, led by the Society of Family Planning, offers the most robust look yet at how abortion access has changed since Dobbs. Researchers analyzed the average monthly number of abortions between April 2022 — establishing a baseline prior to the fall of Roe — and June 2023 based on data reported by 83 percent of the nation’s abortion providers. (The project does not track self-managed abortions, so the figures undercount how many pregnancies have been terminated over the past year.) The report found states that outlawed the procedure after June 2022 performed 114,590 fewer abortions than they would have if the Court had preserved the constitutional right to abortion. In 33 states and D.C., where abortion remains legal, there were 116,790 more abortions than expected. That makes for 2,200 more cumulative abortions nationwide.

Thank you so much for reading. See you next week.