Rape in War: What It Does to Women

A blockbuster exhibition, told by men

The blockbuster exhibition of the autumn in London is the Bayeux Tapestry – the first time it has ever been displayed outside of France – the must do on everyone’s list. For those of us who remember Tutankhamun 1972, it has the same kind of buzz and queues, only this time online.

I was lucky enough to see it just before it opened on September 10 and the superlatives are justified. This 70-metre-long work of embroidery is a stirring depiction of battle like no other. As you walk its length you realise it is literally, a medieval comic strip giving a blow-by-blow account of William the Conqueror and his invading forces defeating Harold II, England’s last Anglo-Saxon king in 1066.

Seeing it in real life and beautifully displayed, it’s hard to believe it's almost a thousand years old. The colours and scenes are so vivid you can almost hear the thundering of the horses’ hooves and barking hunting dogs as well as the lip-smacking of the feasting Normans. I was lucky enough to have space to zero in on details like the intricately sewn chainmail, squirming eels in the shallows, and Harold and his men lifting up their tunics as they wade into the sea, as well as the famous comet.

But when I look at it, I see something else. It’s also incredibly male.

Throughout almost 40 years as a war correspondent I have often complained of how war reporting and military history focuses on what I call the bang-bang - men fighting men rather than what happens to women.

The nuns’ hidden message in the margins

The Bayeux Tapestry is no exception. Women are almost entirely absent. Just three of the 627 figures depicted in the 58 scenes in its main body are women. In fact, there are far more penises – 93 [many of them on horses] - than women.

Yet this was woven by women, thought to have been nuns in Kent. And they have used it to tell another story, what war does to women.

One of the few images of a woman in the tapestry.

Look carefully and in the borders, or marginalia, you can see they have stitched in a cowering woman shielding her modesty from a naked sexually aroused man – we can only imagine what is about to happen. There are two other similar scenes. One of the earliest visual depictions of sexual violence in conflict.

This message left to us from the nuns’ needles almost 1000 years ago, is something that sadly continues to this day.

Bearing witness on the mountain

As a reporter, mostly covering war – and at a time of more conflicts than any time since the Second World War - I cannot think of a single conflict where it is not happening.

The first time my eyes were truly opened to the horrors of war rape was meeting Yazidis, a small peaceful minority living on a mountain in Iraq by the Syrian border which was taken over by Islamic State fighters in 2014, abducting many of the young women to become their sabiyas or sex slaves. I had never heard such horrific stories.

And when a 16-year-old Yazidi girl later sent me a WhatsApp asking “We told our stories but what difference did it make?” and I couldn’t answer; it set me on a worldwide journey researching this.

In my 38 years covering war and conflict I have always focused on what happened to women in war – a story that too often goes untold. I saw them as heroes, trying to keep life together, to feed and protect the children and elderly, as all around them fell apart.

But there is also a dark side: The use of sexual violence and brutality against women and girls.

Christina Lamb reporting from Aleppo in 2016.

A weapon as old as war itself

There has of course always been rape in war. The first written western history by Herodotus starts with a series of abductions of women by the Phoenicians then the Greeks and eventually the Trojans snatching Helen. Homer’s Iliad begins with Achilles and Agamemnon arguing over who would get Briseis, abducted from Troy.

From the ancient Greeks, Persians and Romans, to the ‘comfort women’ of the Imperial Japanese Army and the rapes of German women by the Soviet Army in World War Two, women have long been seen as spoils of war.

In recent years, however, ethnic and sectarian groups have used rape as a weapon - not just to humiliate and terrorise communities but to wipe out what they see as rival ethnicities or non-believers or, as in the case of the DRC, to capture territory with lucrative minerals – things we use in our laptops or mobile phones. “Rape,” said one Congolese militia member, “is cheaper than a Kalashnikov bullet.”

Bosnia, Rwanda, and an epidemic that wouldn’t end

For many of us the first time we heard about rape as a weapon of war was not in some far-off village but Bosnia in central Europe, just a couple of hours flight from London.

Brave women there spoke up about the terrible ordeals they had gone through in the Bosnian war in the 1990s - the rape camps, watching daughters raped in front of them, giving birth to children who were reminders of the worst night of their life. So did women in Rwanda during the genocide 30 years ago, where, to add to the injustice, HIV drugs were given to perpetrators who had been rounded up and not to victims.

Travelling around the world from Argentina to South Sudan to research my book Our Bodies Their Battlefields, it was hard to find a war where rape hasn’t happened. It soon became clear to me that we are seeing an epidemic of war rape – literally hundreds of thousands of women finding their bodies used as a battlefield.

When the book came out in 2020, I noted at the end; “I don’t think I will ever finish this journey – it seems to be happening more and more.” I had no idea then that within three years we would have two major wars – in Europe and the Middle East – both of which would see rape used as a weapon. I have already updated the book twice.

ICRC worker helping woman leave war zone in eastern Ukraine.

ICRC

Voices from Bucha to Raqqa

The war in Ukraine has seen Bucha and Irpin, small towns just north of Kyiv, become synonymous with the evils of Russian occupation. In April 2022, as the Russians were driven out, I visited these areas and heard story after story to make you weep – the sisters kept in captivity by soldiers, the elder forced to watch them rape the younger, begging them to take her instead, until her sibling eventually died; the haunted blue eyes of Vika who told me how a Russian officer had come to her house and said “my men have had vodka, now they want entertainment.’

She was raped by a soldier the age of her son.

Nor will I forget Hadiya, 27, with her hair pulled back into a ponytail and sad smile as she welcomed me into her tent in a camp in northern Iraq last summer. She told me how she and her two younger sisters were blindfolded and taken by ISIS fighters, eventually ending up in Raqqa, traded between different fighters for four and a half years. At one point she managed to get a piece of glass and cut her wrists. Her last captor was one of their leaders who she said tied her hands to a chair and beat her.

“Every time he beat me he said ‘you deserve this, you are Yazidi. If you don’t let me rape you I will beat you every day.”

Women fleeing violence, including rape, in El Fasher in Sudan in 2025.

ICRC photo

Shame, silence, and the numbers that don’t add up

Researching my book I met grandmothers in the Philippines who took 50 years to come forward about being held as ‘comfort women’ by Japanese soldiers, and had never told their families from shame. When I gave book talks in Germany and Poland, people told me “this happened to my grandmother/aunt and no one ever spoke about it”. Indeed, in Germany at the end of the Second World War some committed suicide rather than live with how Red Army soldiers had brutalised them.

Even in Ukraine where for the first time there was widespread reporting of the issue, women told me they wouldn’t report because they feared being judged and don’t believe it will make a difference. Just look at the shameful rate of conviction in this country where last year 200 women a day reported rape of whom less than four will see a charge.

Justice denied

War rape is the world’s most neglected war crime wherever it happens and accountability remains the exception not the rule.

The first prosecution of rape as a war crime did not occur until 1998, not in Bosnia as many assume, but in the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda. Even after that landmark ruling, brought about by the brave testimony of five Rwandan women and the intervention of a female judge, it can still take decades for perpetrators to be brought to justice. In most cases they never are.

The International Criminal Court has only convicted two people for sexual crimes in 22 years of existence. And in Bosnia where world leaders vowed ‘Never Again’, the International Tribunal only convicted 36 men for sexual crimes. Women there tell me they see their perpetrators in coffee shops or even still in the police.

No one has been prosecuted for the rape of thousands of Rohingya women by Burmese soldiers or for what Boko Haram did to the Chibok Girls and thousands of other girls and women across northeast Nigeria.

When I asked Iraq’s chief justice in Nineveh prosecuting ISIS fighters why none of them were being charged with rape and abduction of Yazidi women, he literally laughed.

“Would it be the same if hundreds of thousands of men were being sexually assaulted by women?” asks Dr Denis Mukwege, the incredible gynaecologist whose hospital in eastern Congo has treated 75,000 rape victims. One wonders.

A rare path to accountability, and what’s left undone

Germany is now leading the way by using universal jurisdiction which means any war crime can be prosecuted in any country, not necessarily where it took place. In 2021, the Higher Court in Frankfurt saw the first trial anywhere in the world against an ISIS member for crimes against the Yazidis as well as for aiding and abetting genocide.

Since then, German courts have prosecuted seven other cases against ISIS members, all but one women.

But to women like Hadiya, alone in her bleak tent in northern Iraq, justice seems far off. A UN project to investigate ISIS war crimes against Yazidis wound up two years ago even though many mass graves remain excavated and thousands, like her brothers and parents, remain missing. On top of everything, Iraqi authorities are threatening to close the camps, even though their homes in Sinjar are in ruins and the area divided by militias. “The world has moved on and passed us by,” she shrugs.

Winner of 19 major awards, Christina Lamb is the author of "Our Bodies Their Battlefields; What War does to Women" (William Collins). First reporting from Afghanistan in the late 1980s, she is the chief foreign correspondent of The Sunday Times.