Rape on the Rise in Iraq

Via TalkLeft, this story from the NY Times:

In her loose black dress, gold hairband and purple flip-flops, Sanariya hops from seat to seat in her living room like any lively 9-year-old. She likes to read. She wants to be a teacher when she grows up, and she says Michael, her white teddy bear, will be her assistant.

But at night, the memory of being raped by a stranger seven weeks ago pulls her into its undertow. She grows feverish and has nightmares, her 28-year-old sister, Fatin, said. She cries, “Let me go!”

“I am afraid of the gangsters,” Sanariya whispered in the twilight of her hallway. “I feel like they are killing me in my nightmares. Every day, I have these nightmares.”

Since the end of the war and the outbreak of anarchy on the capital’s streets, women here have grown increasingly afraid of being abducted and raped. Rumors swirl, especially in a country where rape is so rarely reported.

The breakdown of the Iraqi government after the war makes any crime hard to quantify.

But the incidence of rape and abduction in particular seems to have increased, according to discussions with physicians, law-enforcement officials and families involved.

I really am conflicted about this story. First, I do not want to downplay the devestation, fear, and wreckage that rape creates in any society, but I also think that some perspective is necessary. Certainly, in a security vacuum created by the fall of a totalitarian dictatorship, we would expect crime to increase temporarily (particularly since Hussein emptied the prisons of all the violent felons prior to and during the war). What is not available, however, is any way to measure the actual incidence of rape now as compared to before the war. Are there reliable pre-war statistiucs. Perhaps people are feeling more comfortable reporting the rapes now as opposed to before. Perhaps now the rapists are not only Ba’ath party officials, and people can confront the problem. Also, we know that crime statistics are always higher in free societies- after all, we document the crimes, prosecute them, and deal with them in the open, rather than merely walking people behind the ‘police station’, putting a .38 to the back of the accused’s head, and burying them in an unmarked grave.

In short, there is more to this story than the headline would suggest.