Violence against women in war: We need a feminist foreign policy

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Woman in a building in Kyiv that was destroyed by fire: Women also use their bodies voluntarily or involuntarily for local politics

Photo: Future Publishing/Getty Images

The New York Times has compiled reports of rapes and sexual violence against Ukrainian women since the beginning of the war.

Ukrainian officials and MP Maria Mezentseva say they are increasing.

The newspaper quotes Ukrainian lawyer Kateryna Busol: "I have been told of incidents of gang rape, child rape and sexual violence following the killing of family members."

The statements are still unproven, but based on experiences from previous wars, the worst fears are justified.

This is precisely why a feminist perspective is needed in foreign policy.

A perspective that considers, recognizes and recognizes gender differences in the impact of conflict and that negotiates the consequences that war has on all genders.

Women are affected differently by war than men.

Men are forced to fight - some even go out voluntarily - and have to risk their lives in a conflict area politically.

Referring to democratic mass meetings, Judith Butler wrote: "For politics to take place, the body must appear." War is the perversion of this idea, as it uses the body politically as a resource, ammunition, or wall of protection.

Men are more likely to be killed, wounded, or disappear.

But women's bodies are also politically abused in conflicts, even if not directly militarily.

Unstable situations exacerbate existing patterns of discrimination against women and girls, putting them at increased risk of violence, including arbitrary killing, torture or sexual abuse.

In a cynical logic of war, women also embody the enemy country and when they are raped, this violence also aims to weaken the opposing war party.

The abuse of women here is also strategic military terror.

However, women's bodies are also highly endangered by war in other ways: lack of access to health care, including reproductive health for women and girls, creates a higher risk of unplanned pregnancies and maternal mortality - especially in Ukraine, where there is an above-average number of surrogate mothers .

Likewise, trans women are particularly affected by the war, when they are denied their womanhood at the Ukrainian border, are not allowed to flee and are physically degraded in the process.

They are also at greater risk of sexual violence in other conflicts and wars, especially in captivity and detention.

In desperation, the Ukrainian trans singer Zi Faámelu fled to Germany by swimming across the Danube via Romania.

Some women use their bodies voluntarily or involuntarily for local politics, they defend their houses for fear of being occupied, they document events as civilians and chroniclers, or they go to war armed to resist.

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War reporter Julia Leeb and journalist Cosima Gill accompany such women in various conflicts in the podcast »Woman in War«.

In Ukraine, too, they record how women fight, flee, calm children, distil water - like Olena Biletska, for example, who founded the »Ukrainian Women's Guard«.

Ukrainian women's magazines provide information on how to hold a gun, search for a missing child or organize menstruation or childbirth in a bomb cellar.

These are all aspects that foreign policy should take into account if it wants to be policy for all people.

It's not about making men's suffering in war and conflicts invisible, considering it natural or relativizing it - quite the opposite: it's about making visible that all genders suffer from the consequences.

Last Wednesday, the plans of the traffic light parties for the special assets of the Bundeswehr were discussed in the general debate in the Bundestag.

The professional provocateur Friedrich Merz attracted attention with a few typical Merz statements.

It was about the 100 billion euros promised by Olaf Scholz and the not unimportant question of what exactly the money should be spent on.

Merz condescendingly murmured to Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock that the spending was an investment in the Bundeswehr – and for nothing else.

He announced that Baerbock could make feminist foreign policy and also feminist development aid policy.

But not with this budget for the Bundeswehr.

Baerbock referred to this in her speech and explained: "To single out the Bundeswehr here and then to say in the same sentence: 'Okay, Bundeswehr and no more this feminist foreign policy' - it breaks my heart."

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At this point, Merz melodramatically clutches his chest and makes a mockingly pitying face;

a condescending gesture to poke fun at the sentence or the moral hurt it entails.

Whereupon Baerbock reacted visibly hit:

'And do you know why?

Because I was with the mothers of Srebrenica a week ago and they described to me how the traces of this war are in them and said: Ms. Baerbock, back then, in the early 1990s, nothing was done when they, as theirs Daughters when their friends were raped, rape was not recognized as a weapon of war, was not prosecuted by the International Criminal Court.

That is why a feminist perspective is also part of a security policy for the 21st century.

This is no fuss!

It's not gibberish, it's up to date."

She was probably quoting Gerhard Schröder, who in 1998 described the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth as the "Ministry for the family and all the fuss".

Baerbock is right: It is more than necessary to think about gender equality with such a high sum for the Bundeswehr.

And it is up to date: in 2020, Mexico was the first Latin American country to proclaim the intention of a feminist foreign policy.

And even if there is still work to be done on gender equality domestically, Sweden and France also claim to represent an all-gender foreign policy, just like Joe Biden's cabinet.

In 2017, Canada launched a "feminist international aid policy" aimed at supporting women, children and youth worldwide - which includes pledged CA$1.4 billion annually to foreign governments and organizations to improve access to nutrition, health and education to improve.

About $700 million of that is earmarked for eliminating gender-based violence.

Globally, research on gender and security shows that more equal countries are less likely to be affected by civil wars.

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How women are treated affects all areas of society and is an indicator of a country's stability and security.

Gender equality is related to good governance.

Countries where women are exploited are more unstable.

And it is not the peacefulness, which is still attributed to women today, that causes this.

The supposedly feminine supposedly stands in contrast to the military concerns of a state, since a gender-typical caring nature is often assumed, which seeks harmony in order to protect children and families.

However, this is a patriarchal cliché.

Women work for peace because they experience the effects of war far beyond the war zones and far beyond the war's end.

A pacifism decried as feminine is in fact pure pragmatism.

He is willing to survive and rational in his efforts to prevent.

It was women who had been warning of the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan for more than five years and were not heard.

How long it took to rate the use of sexual violence in conflicts as a crime against humanity shows us how large and persistent this gap in our political perception is - and why a feminist perspective is a perspective that thinks about

affected, i.e.: one humanistic.