A woman covers her face as she describes her rape by soldiers to a health worker in 2006 in the Democratic Republic of Congo.Can We End Rape As Tool Of War? -- Gloria Steinem and Lauren Wolfe, CNN
(CNN) -- We first thought about starting this piece with the story of Saleha Begum, a survivor of Bangladesh's 1971 war in which, some reports say, as many as 400,000 women were raped. Begum had been tied to a banana tree and repeatedly gang raped and burned with cigarettes for months until she was shot and left for dead in a pile of women. She didn't die, though, and was able to return home, ravaged and five months pregnant. When she got home she was branded a "slut."
We also thought of starting with the story of Ester Abeja, a woman in Uganda who was forcibly held as a "bush wife" by the Lord's Resistance Army. Repeated rape with objects destroyed her insides. Her captors also made her kill her 1-year-old daughter by smashing the baby's head into a tree.
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My Comment: The answer is unfortunately no. The best that we can do is make political and military leaders accountable for the actions of their soldiers, and to punish them accordingly.