Why in news?

Nobel Peace Prizes for the year 2018 were announced.

Who are the Nobel Peace Prize Winners 2018?

• Nadia Murad and Denis Mukwege have been awarded the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize.
• They were awarded for their work in trying to end sexual violence during war and armed conflict.
• Women’s bodies have become battle sites and sexual violence a weapon of war.

What is the background of the winners?

Nadia Murad

• Nadia Murad is an Iraqi citizen.
• She is a Yazidi survivor of rape and captivity by ISIS.
• Due to her minority status she was targeted by the Islamic State.
• She was abducted, sold as a sex slave and brutally abused by members of IS.
• Murad eventually escaped and has spoken extensively about her experience, despite the immense shame her culture associates with rape.
• Nobel Peace Committee has stated that she had shown uncommon courage in recounting her own sufferings and speaking up on behalf of victims.

Dr. Denis Mukwege

• Dr. Denis Mukwege is a Congolese gynecologist.
• Mukwege has treated victims of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
• He practices medicine in eastern Congo, which has been called the "rape capital of the world" by U.N. officials.
• He founded the Panzi Hospital, which supports survivors of sexual assault.
• Mukwege developed a model of treatment that emphasizes both physical care and justice.
• The Panzi model's five pillars are

1. medical treatment
2. psychosocial therapy
3. socioeconomic support and training
4. community reintegration
5. legal assistance

• It is a healing process that allows survivors to process physical, emotional and spiritual trauma.

What significance does this announcement mean?

• The Peace Prize gives an unprecedented platform for the issue of sexual violence as a weapon of war.
• It further gives recipients the recognition and sometimes the necessary protection to continue their good work and mobilize others.
• The protection and mobilization are indeed necessary to end the use of sexual violence in conflict.

What are some instances where sexual violence was used as a weapon of war?

• Systematic rape is often used as a weapon of war in 'ethnic cleansing'.
• According to UNICEF, rape has been documented in many armed conflicts including those in Bangladesh, Congo, Sudan, Cambodia, Cyprus, Haiti, Liberia, Somalia and Uganda.
• More than 20,000 Muslim girls and women have been raped in Bosnia since fighting began in April 1992, according to a European Community fact-finding team.’
• Teenage girls have been a particular target in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, according to The State of the World's Children 1996 report.
• The report also says that impregnated girls have been forced to bear 'the enemy's' child.
• In some raids in Rwanda, virtually every adolescent girl who survived an attack by the militia was subsequently raped.

How bad the victims are affected?

• Women and girls are physically tortured and psychologically traumatized.

• Many of rape victims who became pregnant were ostracized by their families and communities.
• Some of them abandon their babies and others commit suicide.

• In addition to rape, girls and women are also subject to forced prostitution and trafficking during times of war.
• During World War II, women were abducted, imprisoned and forced to satisfy the sexual needs of occupying forces, and many Asian women were also involved in prostitution during the Viet Nam war.
• In these context, the high risk of infection with sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), including HIV/AIDS, accompanies all sexual violence against women and girls.

Why sexual violence is used as a weapon of war?

• Rape and sexual violence are used to extract confessions and information from victims.

• Sexual violation of women erodes the fabric of a community in a way that few weapons can.
• Rape's damage can be devastating because of the strong communal reaction to the violation and pain stamped on entire families.
• The harm inflicted on a woman by a rapist is an attack on her family and culture because in many societies women are viewed as repositories of a community's cultural and spiritual values.

Source: Business Standard, UNICEF