We know that in armed conflicts, it’s women who pay the highest price. Women do not ask for war. Women do not make war. Yet women are the principal victims of war: women and their children, women and their spouses, women and their siblings. With every death, it’s the parents, sibling, child or husband of a woman. So women are at the heart of the matter.

http://www.unwomen.org/2013/05/girls-receive-a-visit-from-a-different-man-every-night-a-new-husband-saran-keita-diakite/

Now I see some people being cold holocaust-denier bue just saying that “Yes there was 6 million Jewish deaths but there where not the only ones being killed by Nazis”.

No, the operative part that the deniers are saying is “The Holocaust did not target Jews, it hurted everyone!” and other such nonsense, including and not limited to “Da Atheists did it..” or “Da Gayz did it…” or “Hitler was an Atheist Eskimo Midget Gay Pedophile Illegal Immigrant!”

That said, I do agree that Daran was off the mark here by redefining “viable” in an extreme manner and using it to pose a loaded double barreled question to a hypothetical strawman.

“If by “viable” you mean sufficient to satisfy every wingnut, birther, holocaust-denier, truther, flat-earther, or crank on the internet, then no.”

Many of this thing just to mean somthing,like for example holocaust-denier.But now ,people use it as a salencing tactic.If you don’t fall in lain you are this and that evil thing. Holocaust-denier just to be someone who that holocaust was the lie.Now I see some people being cold holocaust-denier bue just saying that “Yes there was 6 million Jewish deaths but there where not the only ones being killed by Nazis”.

Birther and truth? I don’t know who these people are.

Daran, as we well know, that is setting the standard of comparison pretty low. I think you find in men’s spaces there is not much tolerance of sexist dismissals of women’s harms, just pushback against letting them be used to erase harms to men. That looks radical and misogynist only because of the way the culture shapes expectations.

I haven’t been defending the 20,000 figure or any other figure, and I don’t know why you keep harping on about it. (Actually I do.)

Actually you don’t know why. It’s called missing the point, Daran. Not the greatest offense and I’ll be glad to explain. My original statement which started this, that you disagreed with, is as follows:

There was never any viable evidence for the “rape camps” that were being reported in the media.

You said there was ample evidence for rape camps, etc. etc., in response to the comment where I said that. Seems like you were responding to me as if I was denying that widespread rapes had occurred, whereas I had never said that. I said that there is scant evidence as to the actual extent of the rapes. My comment was about the way witness accounts had been sensationalized by the media and turned into propaganda by the governments involved. The 20,000-50,000 rape figure is extremely relevant to that and had been part of what my original comment was referring to. I had made the comment, it was mine to begin with, and you were responding to me and what I said, not the other way around 🙂 Everything that I presented you with, including the academic paper by Phillip Hammond, was along the lines of my original statement.

I’m not sure what exactly it was that you were responding to, then, but it seems that you may have misread me and we ended up talking past one another. I think that perhaps if you did take a greater interest in propaganda, sensationalism, and psy ops, then you would have a better perspective of how gender and the exploitation of women play into it (disclaimer: I worked closely with psy ops during the Iraq war and I lived in an Eastern Block country where my parents were political activists. When you said you weren’t interested in watching that Communist video, I kind of took offense because this is the kind of propaganda may be stupid, but a lot of people risked their lives fighting against it. I’m not above learning as much as I can about it myself).

What really is curious, though, is that the UN investigators actually spent a substantial portion of their report documenting rape and sexual assault against men. Yet, when the UN and the media went on to describe female rape camps, they were completely silent about the men. I actually went out on a limb and tried to search for how many men are estimated to have been raped and I found nothing. But for women we get a figure of 20,000 pulled out of who knows where. It’s almost as if the evidence of men being raped had been used to bolster the idea that women had been. So women-only camps get labeled as “rape camps” but male-only camps where fathers are forced to have sex with their sons and men’s penises get cut off by Serbian women are just “camps.”

I entirely agree with this description of how male victimisation (and also female perpetration) documented at the incident-level gets erased in secondary and tertiary treatments, while, the female component gets larged up. I’ve blogged about this on numerous occasions. (For example, here and here).

The appropriate response to the erasure of male victimisation isn’t to erase female victimisation. It’s to try and paint an accurate picture which includes both.

Daran, dungone and Valkina, thank you very much for developing this lobe of the discussion. It is very much to the point.

Thank you. It’s worth observing that if a gender-reversed version of the “lobe” – where I was rebutting denials of male-victimisation – were to take place on a feminist website, then it is quite likely to be shut down as a “what about the menz”.

And that’s it. From this, they extrapolated that there had been female 20,000 victims and made sweeping generalizations about wide ranging abuses.

I haven’t been defending the 20,000 figure or any other figure, and I don’t know why you keep harping on about it. (Actually I do.) The only point at issue is your claim that ‘There was never any viable evidence for the “rape camps”’. If by “viable” you mean sufficient to satisfy a judge, or a committee of investigators, then yes, there was viable evidence. If by “viable” you mean sufficient to satisfy every wingnut, birther, holocaust-denier, truther, flat-earther, or crank on the internet, then no. No evidence of anything is that viable.

I’m done with this discussion. Feel free to have the last word.

This involves a total number of 55 persons who were either the victims of or witnesses to rape or sexual assault.

And that’s it. From this, they extrapolated that there had been female 20,000 victims and made sweeping generalizations about wide ranging abuses. In the passage that Daran quotes, they make generalize about broad strategies based on anecdotal evidence from a handful of witnesses and pepper it with strong words to make it sound convincing when in reality, some of the claims they made were quite spectacular and would warrant a high degree of corroboration. At one point they vaguely try to bolster their argument by saying that they independently verified that another camp really did exist:

The witness was told that the women had to do this because the women in another camp (which the witness named and which has been documented by other information gatherers) were exhausted.

Overall, it only serves to drive home what Phillip Hammond wrote about it, and goes along well with what he said about other reports of “rape camps” in Bosnia.

What really is curious, though, is that the UN investigators actually spent a substantial portion of their report documenting rape and sexual assault against men. Yet, when the UN and the media went on to describe female rape camps, they were completely silent about the men. I actually went out on a limb and tried to search for how many men are estimated to have been raped and I found nothing. But for women we get a figure of 20,000 pulled out of who knows where. It’s almost as if the evidence of men being raped had been used to bolster the idea that women had been. So women-only camps get labeled as “rape camps” but male-only camps where fathers are forced to have sex with their sons and men’s penises get cut off by Serbian women are just “camps.”

A judicial finding means that evidence has been presented to the court and found to be reliable.

But without the actual evidence, it’s only hearsay and an appeal to authority. The only evidence mentioned in the finding were 16 victims – that’s all we can say of what was presented. We have absolutely no clue where the rest of the claims came from. Anyway, if we’re going to go based authority, then I implore you to look at all the scholarly citations that Phillip Hammond’s paper received. Probably more than most you’ll be able to find on the Bosnian rape camps.