Home > Iraqi Women and Torture, Part III Violence and Virtual Violence

Iraqi Women and Torture, Part III Violence and Virtual Violence

by Open-Publishing - Thursday 5 August 2004

Edito Women - Feminism Wars and conflicts International Prison

Despite a well-documented picture of under-reported sexualized violence, the
major media has not shown any interest in pursuing cases of rape or abuse of
Iraqi women by the US military. Instead, two stories about hoaxes or more accurately
apparent hoaxes made the rounds earlier this year. They’re worth looking at to
better understand what’s behind the seemingly artless way in which hoaxes and
allegations of hoaxes creep into the factual history of abuse in Iraq.

On May 4, 2004, just when evidence of the rape of Iraqi women at Abu Ghraib threatened
to become public, a BBC report by Paul Wood described a set of graphic photographs
circulating on Arabic-language web sites that showed two Iraqi women in black
burqas being raped at gunpoint by men wearing US Army uniforms. Probably aware
of other torture pictures published in the Daily Mirror which the British government
had charged were fraudulent, (1) Wood claimed that the rape
photos looked inauthentic but offered no conclusive proof (2),
only suggesting that the uniforms of the American soldiers depicted in them did
not look genuine.

World Net Daily, a conservative American site, claims it discovered proof of
the hoax when it was allegedly led to the porn sites, “Sex in War” and “Iraq
Babes,” from which the fake photos originated by two anti-war Iraqi sources,
but by then the Boston Globe had already published the pictures, as had a pro-Islamic
site, Jihad Unspun, from where they ended up on many Arab news sites including
Al Basrah. Both Al Basrah and the Globe eventually removed the photos after they
were alerted, but Jihad Unspun insisted that they portrayed actual rapes in Iraq
taken by pornographic filmmakers with the intention, all along, of posting them
on American sites. To complicate the matter, other genuinely Islamist groups
as well as the director of a group that monitors terror-related sites believe
that Jihad Unspun may be a CIA creation intended to find out who visits or orders
Bin Laden videos. (3)

If the “fake rape” photos did not worm their way out of the porn site accidentally,
we have several interesting possibilities on our hands: someone who was aware
of the abuse that was going on but, either unable to find proof or unwilling
to compromise victims by using real photos, used pre-existing porn to bolster
their case (4); antiwar forces planted the story to add to
the scandal, although this is less likely since they would be especially cautious
about losing credibility by posting fake photos, and after all, they helped uncover
the hoax; the photos were planted by American intelligence to cast doubts on
the genuine rape stories that were beginning to come out; or finally, the photos
were made at home by soldiers or contractors perhaps in Iraq or Eastern Europe
where there is widespread trafficking and prostitution of women.

There also remains the troubling possibility that the pictures aren’t faked at
all and did not originate as commercial porn but were photos of actual rape or
prostitution that ended up on the porn sites by accident or as the deliberate
act of a commercial pornography ring.

This is quite within the realm of things. DynCorp, the private corporation that
now holds the contract to train Iraqi police, was sued successfully by its own
employees for its involvement in a prostitution ring in Kosovo where it was hired
to provide security services to the U.N. and American forces. (5) The
ring involved sex-slavery, pornography, and drugs and victimized Bosnian women
who had previously been raped or imprisoned by Serb forces, including girls as
young as 14. One DynCorp employee pled guilty to photographing himself raping
a 14-year-old girl.

Whatever the truth behind it, the Globe hoax story makes it amply clear that
it’s no longer possible to judge the status of a representation, that is, its
level of authenticity, by its appearance or even by its venue. Wartime rape can
surface on porn sites and apparently commercial or homemade porn can be made
on the battleground. When “Sex in War,” for instance, advertises itself as having “exclusive
rape hard-core content” drawn from the war in Iraq, can we be entirely certain
that its contents are staged?

Caution about fraudulent pictures and claims may be one explanation why journalists
haven’t been asking questions about Iraqi women at Abu Ghraib, but it seems an
unsatisfactory one given that they’ve been avidly covering the abuse of male
prisoners. Unsatisfactory, that is, unless for some reason the abuse of women
has a significance that the abuse of male prisoners does not.

The second hoax raises a different set of questions but it too involves the Boston
Globe, which by the way, is owned by the New York Times. In January 2004, around
the time when “Noor” smuggled her story out of Abu Ghraib, the Globe was again
talking about a rape hoax. An article called the “The Rape of Iraq” written at
the time of the invasion by sex expert and commentator Dr. Susan Block was deliberately
or unintentionally misread as a literal account of mass rape by U.S. soldiers
of Iraqi women. (6) Based on this, a Turkish Islamist journal
claimed falsely in October that a wave of 4,000 rapes had taken place and in
a second article in December charged that scores of Iraqis killed in November
were shot while rioting over the kidnapping and rape of 30 young girls by American
soldiers. The supposed 4,000 rapes seem also to have motivated suicide-bomber
attacks in Turkey.

In her article for a left-wing website, Dr. Susan Block, a sex-therapist, described
the invasion of Iraq as the “Rape of Iraq” in a graphically elaborated metaphor
that was deliberately or accidentally misconstrued several months later in the
Turkish journal Yeni Safak. The reactions from the Americans and the Turks were
instructively different:

According to the US embassy, Dr Block’s professional activities disqualified
her as a legitimate source of news:

The US Embassy in Ankara, the Turkish capital, has strongly denounced the reports,
calling them “outrageous allegations . . . based on a US ‘source’ best known
for her pornographic websites and erotic television program. We believe it is
irresponsible for a serious newspaper to present such false claims from a clearly
unreliable source.”

Here, pornography is so clearly differentiated from the world of “serious” news
reporting that anything that appears on a porn site is on its face unreliable,
a theory with interesting uses if one wanted to set in motion a campaign of disinformation
to discredit “serious” information. For the Americans, the pornography automatically
discredits the rape charge.

But for the
journal, Yeni Safak, it’s precisely the vividity of the description of the “Rape
of Iraq,” almost pornographic in effect although not in intent, that makes it
credible. The fact that the author is also the owner of a pornographic website
only confirms for them that the detention of Iraqi women, for months the subject
of swirling rumors on the “Arab street,” amounts to rape. For the Turks, the
pornography automatically seals the rape charge.

Dr. Block herself naturally enough condemns the misuse of her “rape” metaphor
as completely unjustified, but her philosophy doctorate from Yale apparently
hasn’t disabused her of the naïve assumption that authorial intent can be “fixed” by
what the author has in mind at the moment of writing. It’s precisely the fluidity
of authorial intent that is the reason for the Iraqi cultural perception that
the photographing of female detainees while stripped or even partially undressed
is not simply a violation of their privacy but tantamount to rape, and depending
on the uses made of the photography, even worse than rape.

Without representation, there’s only sex or rape. It’s the visual, textual, or
audio recording of a sexual act or rape that makes it pornography. By literally
representing the accomplished act, pornography can powerfully change how it’s
perceived not only by outsiders but by the participants. Even more importantly,
it can change how the participants in the act are seen, again, not only by outsiders,
but by themselves. For instance, an ordinary Iraqi woman caught undressed on
camera can be represented as loose or even a prostitute both to her community
and, most insidiously, to herself. The intent and will of the photographer becomes
ineluctably printed on top of her own absence of intent or will in an act of
force that is nothing short of a rape of her identity. Whereas a physical rape
ends at the end of the act, however, this virtual rape can continue permanently
for the life of the image which, of course, can far exceed several human lives.

Since tens of thousands of Iraqis have passed through the detention system during
a year of occupation, we can assume that thousands of Iraqis have been privy
to the photographing of male and female detainees. Even if the actual number
of those photographed was lower - and at this point we have no way of knowing
if that is so or not - even the knowledge that such photographs existed would
have been enough of a threat for most Iraqi women to keep silent about their
abuse. As I have suggested, there is testimony that the photographs were used
to blackmail detainees into silence with the fear of public exposure or commercial
use. Add to this the threat of reprisals in an honor culture and we may have
another reason why women have not been forthcoming about these incidents.

If, the notion of “intent” can be so easily manipulated, so can the notion of “consent.” Although
initially Dr. Suzy (as she is known in her multimedia empire) admitted to some
dismay at the similarity between some of the abuses described at Abu Ghraib and
the sexual practices cheerily promoted on her website, she ultimately insisted
that there was a firewall between her representations of sexuality and the pornographic
violence of Abu Ghraib — her clientele consented to participate; the Abu Ghraib
victims did not.

This of course is a staple of some feminist defenses of pornography.

But is there in fact such a firewall?

Dr. Block herself is an engaging personality — Little Bo-Peep on leave from
a French bordello according to no less than the Weekly Standard (who knew their
reading habits?). (7) And she presents the practices on her
site including sadomasochism, bondage and dominance, mother, father, and child
fantasies, intruder and rape fantasies, consensual gang-bangs, vampirism, cannibalism,
and, yes, genital torture — as part of a sexual “nature” that must be rescued
from the unhealthy repression of societal constraint. They are quirky variants
in the normal landscape of adult human sexuality, we’re told, which in the interests
of unrepressed good health must be let out in the open.

But Dr. Block’s assumptions about nature are as naïve as her assumptions about
authorial intent. For one thing, since a part of her site is devoted to her therapeutic
practice, we have to assume that at least some part of her clientele engages
in these practices not from any kind of choice at all but from compulsion. For
another, sexual practices and responses — whether mainstream or marginal —
are themselves a part and a product of elaborate social constructions that develop
out of the structure of society and can exist only in dialogue with it.

The textual, visual, and audio representations of sexual practices remove them
even further from the “natural” world of peaceful polymorphous perversity she
wants us to believe is the alternative to the violent struggle for power and
show that what we are talking about is not really Rousseauian nature at all.
Instead we have a set of socially constructed practices, driven by desire (not
always to be equated with choice) and even compulsion, that circulates simultaneously
through networks of commercial exchange and representation (print, internet,
film, T.V., video/CD/DVD) in which they are replicated and transformed. This
guarantees that at any given moment after an image has been inserted into circulation,
the link between the representation and the intent or consent involved originally
will be tenuous or even contradicted. It also guarantees that at no point is
the manufacture and dissemination of pornography free of the market forces behind
any other commercial enterprise - demand and supply,

Including the smaller homosexual and child porn markets, the overwhelming proportion
of demand for pornography is male. Excluding those markets, the overwhelming
proportion of the supply of pornographic performers is female. But contrary to
some anti-porn feminist rhetoric, the porn business is not so much an exploitation
of men by women as it is an exploitation of the natures of both men and women
by commerce. The international skin trade feeds both on sexual and economic needs
that it also molds, much as the fast-food industry alters and shapes taste-buds
in ways that are not necessarily either healthy or ecologically sound. It’s a
global business worth a staggering $57 billion dollars, the U.S. share being
about $12 billion, and it’s been made even more lucrative by the advent of the
internet. A digital camera and a click of the mouse and mere consumers of pornography
are now producers and suppliers. In this kind of a market, big players can afford
to play safe and say no to violence, minors, or “extreme” practices, but even
they’ve come a long way. “Ma Bell” is the prime distributor of pornography through
pay-per-view channels on its cable services, and one in five of its broadband
cable customers pay to see “real, live all-American sex — not simulated by actors.” (8) For
corporate America, at least, if not for the U.S. military or for some feminists,
there seems to be no firewall between the real and the simulated.

In the face of such big-time competition, little guys who want a foothold in
porn have every incentive to push the envelope if they want to sell, and violence
and degradation sell. Where do they find violence and degradation ready-made?
In war zones. No surprise then that more and more American and European porn
producers are relocating to Eastern Europe where women driven to desperation
by economies shattered by the U.S./NATO intervention and neo-liberal policies
are willing to do a great deal more for much less. Budapest, where the bogus
Globe rape photos apparently originated, is the new porn capital of Europe and
the main transit and destination for the trafficking of women from the Ukraine,
Moldova, Russia, and Yugoslavia. Sex Farm, a site in Denmark, has images with
titles like “needle torture,” “pregnant bondage” and “drunk from the toilet” that
recall details in the accounts by Iraqi detainees, and the women in them display
visible wounds and bleeding. Rape and torture are not new but their pornographic
representation has until now been limited, hard to come by, and socially censored.
But now such images make up an ever increasing proportion of marketed pornography,
are far more easily accessed, reach many more people than was ever remotely possible,
and are available in interactive formats whose graphic effect on the neural network
of the viewer is likely to be significantly more powerful and long-lasting than
older representations. (9)

While we can’t definitively prove that viewing violent pornography incites real
acts of rape or torture (although many suspect it does), we can prove that real
acts of rape and torture do indeed increase the supply of violent pornography.
And real acts of rape, abduction, and torture without doubt follow in the wake
of war and economic devastation. Studies have repeatedly shown that sex crimes
surge in wartime and around military bases to which prostitutes are trafficked. (10) Other
studies have shown that neo-liberal policies of “structural adjustments” that
accompany globalization create economic conditions where prostitution, rape,
and sex trafficking flourishes. (11)

These studies make it obvious why talking about consent and choice in the sex
trade or in porn is misleading. If it’s morally problematic to create images
of real rape and torture from wartime atrocities either to blackmail or coerce
or for some one’s pleasurable viewing, it’s surely also at least somewhat problematic
to create images of simulated rape and torture from the coerced or so-called “consensual” labor
of impoverished and desperate women, or for that matter children or men. Even
in peaceful or prosperous societies, the fact that most performers in the porn
trade come from physically or sexually abusive backgrounds or are substance abusers
should raise a moral question about the supply side of the business, even if
we have nothing to say about the demand.

But in fact we don’t raise questions about either. And that’s yet another reason
for our unease about the torture at Abu Ghraib. Our dismay is a product of our
instinctive, if unacknowledged, recognition not that the degradation and torture
were “only porn,” but that at least some of what is passed off as “only porn” or
even an empowerment of women is really a form of degradation and torture, whether
the participants consented to it or not and whether they, or we, find it enjoyable
or not. The pervasive presence of violent and even some non-violent pornography
that intends to degrade has so numbed us to the way in which it dehumanizes that
only encountering their images unexpectedly on the front pages of a newspaper
shocks us into awareness.

The thin or at times non-existent line between genuine and simulated degradation
and violence that commercial smut encourages us to ignore not only makes the
sexualized torture of Abu Ghraib more possible, it also makes it more permissible.
Having encountered these images where they lawfully constitute “mere” humiliation
as entertainment, we are more inclined to pass them off in the way Rush Limbaugh
and some others did as a “brilliant” psychological tactic. The implication of
this, that the psychological must inherently be non-torturous, is a claim that
follows from our muddled notion of representation, as I’ve earlier argued.

This prejudice against mental forms of torture (and Abu Ghraib of course clearly
included plenty of physical forms of torture) means that crimes in which the
psychological component is high tend to be regarded as less serious, even when
physical violence and injuries are involved. This is even more true during war-time.
Iraqi hospitals and police as well as the U.S. military police and occupation
authorities have for a year displayed their indifference to the crisis of rape. (12) Reporters,
rather than questioning this, appear to have gone along with the attitude that
when people are dying in the thousands, sex crimes are of less importance. That
certainly could factor into the silence about such crimes.

But if so, why did the rape of Iraqi men provoke more of an outcry than the bombing,
shootings, and snipings that have occurred daily since the end of the war? Why
have many Iraqis themselves felt that they would rather have been killed than
put through the sexualized torment of Abu Ghraib? On our side, why did the possible
rape (I say possible because there are contradictory statements and evidence
about this) of Jessica Lynch create more rage than the death and wounding of
hundreds of American soldiers? Any account of the media silence about the crimes
against Iraqi women must take into account such ambiguities and contradictions.

(To Be Continued)

Lila Rajiva is a freelance writer in Baltimore currently working
on a book about the press. She has taught music at the Peabody Preparatory, and
English and Politics at the University of Maryland and Towson University. Copyright
(c) 2004 by Lila Rajiva.

NOTES

(1) On May 1, the Daily Mirror carried pictures showing a hooded man being urinated
on and assaulted with a rifle butt. The Mirror claimed it was given the photos
by two anonymous soldiers. The following day, The Sunday Telegraph newspaper
said six soldiers from the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment were going to be arrested
in connection with the apparent abuse. The Mirror, one of only two papers that
opposed the war, had good reason to trust the photos given the testimony of a
number of soldiers, reports of abuse in the Independent, as well as earlier reports
by Amnesty International and the International Red Cross. The Queen’s Lancashire
Regiment was also facing a charge of having murdered an Iraqi detainee. However,
within a few days, there were charges that the pictures were hoaxed and a 25-member
government investigation began. Rushing to judgment to preempt the charges against
the QLR, the government found the pictures a hoax. Pressure from Mirror’s owners,
Trinity Mirror, and several prominent US corporations with shares in Trinity
who had opposed the Mirror’s antiwar stance long before the photos were published
led to the sacking of Piers Morgan, the Mirror’s editor, on May 14. The paper
published an apology although it stood by its editorial decisions. The government
never produced documentation to support its findings.

(2) “Arab
anger at Iraq torture photos,” Paul Wood, BBC, May 4, 2004.

(3) “The
Web as al-Qaida’s safety net,” Scott Shane, Baltimore Sun, April 2, 2003.

(4) A well-known Iraqi-born Egyptian novelist, Buthaina Al-Nasiri, who refused
to publish the photos believing them to be inauthentic and inflammatory nevertheless
affirms that they represent what really did take place at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere: “Fake
Rape Photos Infuriate Arab World,” Sherrie Gossett, May 9, 2004.

(5) “New
DynCorps Contract Draws Scrutiny,” Kelly O’Meara, Insight 2003.

(6) “Rumors
of rape fan anti-American flames,” Charles Radin, January 1, 2004, Boston
Globe.

(7) Press
Quotes, Dr. Susan Block’s Journal.

(8) “Wall
Street Meets Pornography,” Timothy Egan, October 23, 2000. See also, “Dirty
Business: Porn Profits Attract Blue-Chip Corporations,” ABC News, March 25,
2002. General Motors’ adult video trade is a bigger business than Hustler’s
Larry Flynt, and EchoStar, backed largely by Rupert Murdoch, makes more money
than the whole Playboy business.

(9) “The Use of New Communication and Information Technologies for the Sexual
Exploitation of Women and Children,” Donna Hughes, Rhode Island University Professor
and an expert in the study of global trafficking of women Hastings Women’s Law
Journal, 2002: www.uri.edu/artsci/wms/hughes/demand.htm

(10) Studies by Moon, 1997 and Sturdevant and Stoltzfus, 1992, cited in Hughes,
2002.

(11) Studies by Daguno, 1998 and Bishop and Robinson, 1998. Cited in Hughes,
2002.

(12) “Iraqi
women shut out by fear,” Radio Netherlands, July 2003.

To rebel is right, to disobey is a duty, to act is necessary !

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Iraqi Women and Torture, Part III Violence and Virtual Violence