Our Bodies, Their Battlefields

Starred review from May 15, 2020
The chief foreign affairs correspondent for the London Sunday Times shows the horrific effects of the mass rape of women and girls in conflict zones around the world. Lamb's editors have put "Disturbing Content" warnings atop some of the stories she's filed about hot spots from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. "Disturbing" is too mild a word for this superb expos� of the use of mass rape as a "systematic weapon of war." Crisscrossing the globe to interview survivors, the author makes it abundantly clear that the devastating effects of rape transcend borders. She chronicles her discussions with Nigerian women kidnapped as schoolgirls by Boko Haram and forced to serve as the terrorists' "bush wives." She met Yazidis abducted by the Islamic State group and used as sex slaves or sold through online forums that "advertised women along with PlayStation consoles and second-hand cars." She spoke to female survivors of the Rohingya genocide and of a "rape camp" where Bosnian Serbs raped Muslim women "all night every night to the point of madness." Legal justice mostly eludes these and other victims. The International Criminal Court has made only one conviction for rape as a war crime, overturned on appeal, and such cases have had a similar fate elsewhere, often because male judges or prosecutors "do not see sexual violence as a high priority compared to mass killings." Some victims have been ignored until championed by celebrities like Angelina Jolie or Denis Mukwege, the Congolese physician and co-winner of the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize whose hospital the author visited despite the risks of Ebola and dangerous militias in the area. To tell some of these stories, Lamb clearly has put herself in peril, and it's difficult to overpraise her courage or a book that--for the breadth and moral force of its arguments--is perhaps the most important work of nonfiction about rape since Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will (1975). A searing, absolutely necessary expos� of the uses of rape in recent wars and of global injustices to the survivors.

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August 10, 2020
Journalist Lamb (Farewell, Kabul) delivers a heart-wrenching study of rape as a weapon of war. Interweaving the harrowing testimonies of contemporary women in war-torn regions such as the Democratic Republic of Congo (where a 2010 UN report concluded that 1,000 women were being raped per day) with the history of the practice, Lamb documents the experiences of Korean and Japanese “comfort women” during WWII, sexual assaults committed by Red Army soldiers against German women, gang rapes during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, rape camps in the Bosnian War, and the 2014 kidnapping of hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls by the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram. Only in rare occasions, such as an international tribunal on the Rwandan genocide, has rape been recognized as a war crime. Most countries, she writes, bury these parts of their histories, but “for there to be an end to rapists’ impunity there must be an end to silence.” In one particularly moving interview, a Congolese woman who was raped so severely that she is in permanent pain and unable to bear children asks Lamb to “please be our voice.” This harrowing account bears powerful witness to a worldwide tragedy.

Starred review from October 1, 2020

Foreign correspondent Lamb's (Farewell Kabul) latest book describes interviews with victims of war-time rape conducted throughout the 2000s and across the globe. Sixteen short chapters weave personal stories with historical background: the rise of IS in the Middle East and Boko Haram in Nigeria along with the Rohigya genocide in Myanmar, the Bangladesh Liberation War, the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda, the Bosnian War, Argentina's "Dirty War," the Congo Wars, and World War II. Offering a crash-course in recent history and telling the stories of women as young as four and as old as 89, the book also argues that rape is "the world's most neglected war crime." Lamb draws on the work of lawyers and scholars as well as her own reporting to argue that rape, often described by victims as worse than death, is used as a deliberate military strategy but is rarely tried in court due to the false belief that it is ancillary to the goals of terror and ethnic cleansing. VERDICT Dizzying for its historical breadth and emotional strain, this book is nevertheless essential reading. Readers interested in human rights will stick through the highly readable but earth-rattling chapters for the sake of their larger purpose; namely, to give voice to people who have felt erased.--Jennifer Flaherty, Univ. of California, Berkeley

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 23, 2020
Long-time British war correspondent Lamb, the coauthor, with Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, of I Am Malala (2013), considers the impact of war on women in a powerful, wrenching account that travels around the globe giving voice to those who have experienced almost unimaginable horrors. Lamb argues persuasively that rape, to which most of the women she interviews have been subjected, often many times, is not a by-product of war but rather a "deliberate strategy," and "as much a weapon of war as the machete, club, or Kalashnikov." She interviews Yezidi women enslaved by ISIS fighters, Tutsis who were raped by Hutus in Rwanda, and some of the remaining Filipino "comfort women" forced into sexual service by the Japanese in WWII, among many others. Though much of the book is understandably grim, a few rays of hope lighten it, as in the story of Nobel Peace Prize-winning Dr. Denis Mukwege, whose hospital in the Democratic Republic of Congo has treated some 55,000 victims of rape. Casting her subjects as survivors rather than victims, Lamb gives life to individual stories without neglecting the larger picture. Far from an easy book to read, it casts vital light on a subject that has been long, and shamefully, ignored.

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