OUR BODIES, THEIR BATTLEFIELD by Christina Lamb

 I think this woman, Christina Lamb, is incredible. She has her own Wikipedia page! And an OBE! She is one of a rare breed - a female war correspondent who somehow seems to combine the telling of the horrors and truly awful stuff of war with intense compassion and humanity for the people she writes about. She tells it all with a remarkable sense of urgency, which make her stories compelling, almost taking your breath away. And leaving you drained if you read too much in one go! I have read a number of her books, each one is better than the previous. I was living in India at the time of President Benazir Bhutto's assassination - to me her return to Paksitan seemed like a death wish; lo and behold such a short time later she was dead. I later found out that Christina Lamb was with President Bhutto when she was killed, and reading her account of this awful day made the whole catastrophe so much more powerful. 

In this book, with its brutal title and beautiful cover, she has tackled the ghastly business of rape as weapon of war. Not only to brutalise the victims - both male and female, although she focuses almost entirely on females - but to also defeat, destroy complete populations and communities with the damage done to women and girls. I am sure I read somewhere in this book that in no time previous has rape been used as an instrument of war so extensively as it has in the 20th and 21st centuries. This is very sobering and at times painful reading, but also compelling, knowledgable, and as Christina Lamb does so well, involving herself in the communities/camps/war zones/villages/hospitals she is privileged enough to enter. 

Yet again we are horrified by the awful awful things human beings do to one another. No age or stage of life is immune from being raped in some way by men. Her geographical reach is diverse, extensive and yet the female population is the same the world over, as are the avenues of power that men have. Argentina, Bosnia, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Congo, Burma, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Spain, Syria, Yazidi. You already know by these countries the types of conflicts taking place, and the terrible subjugation of the local populations. 

She records the stories of survivors, visits the sites of the atrocities, speaks to organisations and individuals involved in helping, her support of campaigns to even get the initial and vital step of rape recognised as a war crime, the success and otherwise of the war crime prosecutions. She says this is a battle that she will never stop writing about or investigating. Even recent decisions in some US states to overturn women being able to access abortions has made her fear for the health and rights of women in supposedly the most advanced economy/society in the world. 

We know, as women, that females will always be used as a pawn, as a weapon, as a second class citizen with minimal rights in many many societies. We may be enlightened in our safe Western world, but millions and millions of women and girls are not. They won't have heard of #MeToo.  It is unlikely we can do anything really to change the situation, but at the very least, by reading a book such as this,  we are informed.