“Once a woman is raped, she loses her name.” When Rose Cunningham, an Indigenous women’s human rights defender from Nicaragua spoke those words, she paused for a moment. “People just call her ‘la violada’: the raped one.”
This is the stark, dehumanizing power of sexual violence, wherein a person’s identity is erased, pushing her outside the safety and solidarity of community bonds. When these community ties are frayed, the dangers multiply, both to the survivor who is deprived of the caring she deserves and to the community as a whole.
This is also what gives rape as a weapon of war its destructive power. Perpetrators know that it can traumatize, and even destroy a person, and that the impacts do not stop there. The trauma of rape reverberates through families and communities. When people ostracize, reject or, as is all-too-common, kill survivors because of the stigma attached to rape, it tears apart the ties that bind families and communities. Resilience resides in these bonds of support vital to people’s ability to sustain each other through armed conflict. Armed groups in war will eagerly use a weapon that attacks those bonds, rendering a community even more vulnerable to domination and control.
