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Iraq:
Insecurity Driving Women Indoors
Human Rights Watch, 16 July 2003
The insecurity plaguing Baghdad and other Iraqi cities has a distinct
and debilitating impact on the daily lives of women and girls, preventing
them from participating in public life at a crucial time in their
country’s history, Human Rights Watch said in a report released
today.
The 17-page report, "Climate of Fear: Sexual Violence and Abduction
of Women and Girls in Baghdad," concludes that the failure of
Iraqi and U.S.-led occupation authorities to provide public security
in Iraq’s capital lies at the root of a widespread fear of rape
and abduction among women and their families.
"Women and girls today in Baghdad are scared, and many are not
going to schools or jobs or looking for work," said Hanny Megally,
executive director of the Middle East and North Africa division of
Human Rights Watch. "If Iraqi women are to participate in postwar
society, their physical security needs to be an urgent priority."
Human Rights Watch interviewed rape and abduction victims and witnesses,
Iraqi police and health professionals, and U.S. military police and
civil affairs officers, and learned of twenty-five credible allegations
of rape or abduction. The Human Rights Watch report found that police
officers gave low priority to allegations of sexual violence and abduction,
that the police were under-resourced, and that victims of sexual violence
confronted indifference and sexism from Iraqi law enforcement personnel.
The report also found that U.S. military police were not filling the
gap when Iraqi police were unwilling or unable to conduct serious
investigations of sexual violence and abduction. Human Rights Watch
said this inadequate attention to the needs of women and girls has
led to an inability, and in some cases an unwillingness, by police
to conduct serious investigations. In some cases, reports of sexual
violence and abduction to police were lost.
Megally urged that Iraqi and occupation authorities urgently undertake
legal reforms, law enforcement training, and health and support services
for women. The U.S. should deploy a special investigative unit to
investigate sex-based and trafficking crimes against women and girls,
until such time as the Iraqi police can take up the responsibility
for it
.
Cases documented in the report include:
• Saba A. (not her real name), a nine-year-old girl, was brutally
raped by a man who grabbed her from the stairs of the residence hotel
where she lives, in the middle of the afternoon on May 22. A hospital
refused to treat her, and the forensic institute refused to give her
an exam because she did not have an official referral.
• Muna B.(not her real name), a fifteen-year-old-girl, escaped
from a house outside Baghdad on June 8, where she had been held for
a month with her two sisters and seven other children. She wasn’t
raped, but her sister was, and she thought that her captors intended
to sell her and the other children to traffickers. Her case was reported
to U.S. military police, but Iraqi police didn’t even take a
statement from her.
• Dalal S. (not her real name), a 23-year-old-woman, was snatched
while walking down the street with her mother and other family members
on May 15; she was taken to a house outside Baghdad, held overnight
and raped. Her father reported her abduction to the police, but they
never pursued the allegations.
"Iraqi and U.S. military police continue to receive reports of
abductions of women but mechanisms are wholly inadequate for processing
these cases," Megally said.
For example, on June 17, two young women reported to the U.S. military
and Iraqi police that their friend had just been kidnapped. U.S. military
police went to the scene of the abduction, but the perpetrators had
long-since fled. Iraqi police failed to take a statement from the
witnesses and thus no investigation was opened into the abduction
of that young woman.
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