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COMMENTARY By
Clarissa Rojas, Margo Okazawa-Rey and Marisol Arriola The screams were similar; the gasps for final breaths in life remained suspended in the air above their bodies in quite the same way. Shortly after a U.S. bombing spree, the bodies of women lay dead in Kabul, Afghanistan. Shortly after soldiers returned home from serving in Afghanistan, the bodies of four women lay dead in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Teresa Nieves, Andrea Floyd, Jennifer Wright and Marilyn Griffin were killed by their military partners within weeks of each other this past summer. Before invading Afghanistan, “there had been no deaths attributable to domestic abuse by Fort Bragg personnel in two years,” reported the New York Times. Wright’s mother said of her son-in-law, “Until he came back from Afghanistan, I didn’t worry about violence.” Why the sudden and significant change? Is it purely a striking coincidence that these women died brutally at the hands of men who had just returned from war in Afghanistan? No, say domestic violence activists who are using October’s Domestic Violence Awareness Month as an opportunity to make the connection between military and domestic violence. While the Bureau of Justice estimates that 2,000 women are killed yearly by their partners, the Miles Foundation, an advocacy group for military victims of domestic violence, reports that rates of abuse are two to five times higher in military homes. Author Cynthia Enloe argues that war and military institutions lay the foundation for violence against women, partly by encouraging men to be physically aggressive, while placing women in subservient roles. The language of “hunting down” the “enemy” also leads to extensions of military violence, where the practices of war become the practices of relationships. The violence of war will not be limited to the battlefields drawn in the Pentagon but will extend to the battlefields drawn in the bedroom. As
President Bush relentlessly pursues war on Iraq and permanent war, the
bodies of these four women at Fort Bragg lie battered and buried. Their
deaths are as much a casualty of war as the deaths of innocent Afghans
and other victims of war. The authors are members of Women Raise Our Voices, a San Francisco Bay Area working group of scholars and activists examining the impact of war on women. |
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