The Book Club: how rape is being used as a weapon of war

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🗓️ 10 March 2020

⏱️ 38 minutes

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Summary

In this week’s Book Club podcast, Sam's guest is the veteran foreign correspondent Christina Lamb. Christina’s new book, Our Bodies Their Battlefield: What War Does To Women is a deeply reported survey of rape as a weapon of war, described in the Spectator's pages by Antony Beevor as the most powerful and disturbing book he has ever read. From the fates of Yazidi and Rohingya woman at the hands of IS and the Burmese military, to the German victims of the Red Army and the Disappeared of the Argentinian Junta, Christina looks at the past and present of this phenomenon and talks to me about why it’s so little reported or discussed, let alone prosecuted, how it happens, what it means — and why it’s seemingly on the increase even as wealthy western liberals congratulate themselves on the success of the #metoo movement.

The Book Club is a series of literary interviews and discussions on the latest releases in the world of publishing, from poetry through to physics. Presented by Sam Leith, The Spectator's Literary Editor. Hear past episodes here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Before you start listening to this podcast, we've got a special subscription offer. You can get 12
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0:24.1	Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast.
0:27.1	I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.
0:29.5	This week my guest is the Sunday Times' foreign correspondent Christina Lamb,
0:34.0	who was reported from wars all over the world
0:36.3	and whose new book is addressed to one of the most horrific aspects of war.
0:41.3	It's called Our Bodies, Their Battlefield, What War Does to Women?
0:45.5	And its prime subject is rape as a weapon of war.
0:50.2	Christina, welcome.
0:51.5	I mean, this is, I don't know whether we should issue a sort of trigger warning or whatever, but, you know, this is some serious stuff. How did you, you know,
1:00.1	what made you start thinking this needs to be a book? I mean, you've reported obviously a lot of
1:05.4	this material. Well, so I've been doing my job for 33 years and I've always been really interested in what happens to women in war and I always felt it was underreported that we focused much more on the sort of bang bang and the fighting which tends to be men, much less on the people trying to sort of keep life together during war,
1:29.2	which, you know, the women trying to feed, educate, protect their children. So I've always
1:34.8	been really interested in telling that story. But of course, terrible things also happen to
1:43.1	women in war. And it seemed to me in the last
1:47.5	four or five years that I was seeing more and more brutality against women, more sexual
1:55.3	violence. It began to disturb me that why was this happening so much? I mean, the stories were just so
2:03.0	horrific and I was coming across these things in place after place. And I mean, as you
2:12.0	acknowledge in the introduction of the book, you know, there is a long history, you know, there's this sort of idea that,
	...

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