Violence

This subsection explores how war violence is written about and witnessed across various life-writing media. It considers the extent to which stories centered on new voices – specifically the victims of rape – offer a more holistic view of the lasting traumas that result from conflict.

Gender hierarchies in war writing remain difficult to subvert, even if they are beginning to be identified and challenged. For all the efforts to use digital platforms to elevate new voices, the existing infrastructure and datafication of life and war pushes against this. Rupert Smith has described the profound paradigm shift from “interstate industrial war” to “war amongst the people,” which he presents as both a “graphic description of modern war-like situations, and also a conceptual framework” that challenges Western notions of a “secluded battlefield upon which armies engage.”¹ Taking a step back from individual stories and the raising up of new voices to provide holistic perspectives on how violence is manifest and alleviated, Caroline Criado Perez, in her chapter “It’s Not the Disaster That Kills You” from Invisible Women (2019) addresses the dangers of data biases in war writing that render certain people invisible and traces its lasting social effects.

She points out that, as has long been known in modern conflicts, civilians are more likely to be killed than active combatants. Simply focusing on war stories – in their many media incarnations, off- and online – that elevate combat narratives above all other testimonials paints an extremely incomplete picture of the social ramifications of modern conflicts for the reading public. Given how war narratives are used to frame any number of fundamental cultural debates and assumptions – about but not limited to sacrifice as linked to moral authority, divisions of power, allocations of public resources, and what citizenship means – this has had, and continues to have, profound implications. With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) as a means for understanding “dirty” or biased data, researchers like Meredith Whittaker and Kate Crawford of New York University’s AI Now Institute have argued that biased conclusions may become more, not less, of a problem,² leading policy makers to overlook core narratives of the human experience of war trauma.

Criado Perez argues that reports on broader trauma contain an implicit gender bias: “The data on the impact of conflict (mortality, morbidity, forcible displacement) on women is extremely limited and sex-disaggregated data is even rarer. But the data we have suggests that women are disproportionately affected by armed conflict...And while men and women suffer from the same trauma, forcible displacement, injury and death, women also suffer from female specific injuries.”³ These include but are not limited to: increases in domestic violence; rape, which is also significantly underreported around the world; maternal deaths; and death from infectious diseases and pandemics that often follow in the wake of war.⁴ Examples of this stretch from the influenza outbreak that followed the First World War and is now estimated to have infected over 500 million people around the world,⁵ to the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, which disproportionately affected women and, in turn, decimated the largely female health-care force.⁶

Some offline revisionist memoirs of twentieth-century war experience have attempted to address the data gap. Writing of the Russian occupation of Berlin in 1945, an anonymous woman wrote in her war diary: ‘‘‘They’re gone! They’re all gone!’ We can hardly believe it. Out of some involuntary reflex we look up the street, as if trucks had to be arriving any minute with new troops.”⁷ Their vacating of the city leaves “silence – an eerie silence. No horses, no neighing, no roosters. Nothing left but horse manure.” This corporeal detail provides a bridge to discussion of a particular expression of war violence that permeates this civilian account of the Second World War. A young girl is sweeping the horse manure out of the hallway. She has been raped by a Russian soldier, and yet she “has the same dumb, self-satisfied look she always had.” The writer, herself a victim of rape, tries to sympathize with the girl, whose only sexual experience has occurred through the prism of rape and war, which allows for a suspension of normal rules and “the whole peacetime whoopla” that would have surrounded her experience in the past. However, now rape has become a “collective experience, something foreseen and feared many times in advance, that happened to women right and left, all somehow part of the bargain.” Only by “airing their pain and allowing others to air theirs and spit out what they’ve suffered” could the women achieve a collective “overcoming.” However, the woman notes, that this was too simple a corrective to account for individual trauma: “Which, of course, doesn’t mean that creatures more delicate than this cheeky Berlin girl won’t fall apart or suffer for the rest of their lives.”⁸

The programmer and war blogger Riverbend wrote about the vacuum and “lawlessness” created by the US-led occupation of Iraq in 2003, and how this created space for fundamentalists to threaten sexual violence against Muslim women who had, before the war, enjoyed relatively equal access to education and employment: “Females can no longer leave their homes alone. Each time I go out, E and either a father, uncle, or cousin has to accompany me. It feels like we've gone back 50 years since the beginning of the occupation. A woman, or girl, out alone, is at risk. An outing has to be arranged at least an hour beforehand.”⁹ Riverbend also wrote about the images depicting abuse of prisoners by their American guards at Abu Ghraib.

The grimy, semi-pornographic images of imaginative torture struck a chord with many across the world. She draws a parallel between reactions to the images, shared by the guards amongst themselves seemingly as badges of honor, and reactions to a Newsweek article that ran in May 2005 depicting the desecration of the Qur’an: “What did surprise me was the collective shock that seems to have struck the Islamic world like a slap in the face. After what happened in Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons, how is this astonishing?”¹⁰

Riverbend’s observations about the nature of occupations have their antecedents. The historian Heather Jones, in her comparative assessment of the treatment of prisoners of war in Britain, France, and Germany during the First World War, identifies a “spectrum of radicalisation.”¹¹ Denigration of individuals and groups creates spaces in which acts that would normally be deemed unacceptable by a society and its members start to seem plausible and even justified. She shows how the institutional rejection, toleration, acceptance, and/or promotion of violence – beginning with rhetorical attacks and moving on from there – against the enemy had profound implications for the military cultures and for the waging of future wars across the twentieth century.

For Riverbend, the images emerging from the prisons represented the full realization of a period of denigration and othering of Iraqis and Islam more broadly. Her blog of the Iraqi war and occupation, which ran from 2003 to 2007 (Riverbend posted once more, writing reflectively on the ongoing, now ten-year-old war in April 2013¹²), used irony to draw her readers’ attention to the dehumanizing of the civilian population by (primarily) US forces and the Western media. As W. K. Abdul Jabbar has written about Baghdad Burning, Riverbend’s “conceptualisation of resistance...disrupts the certainty of colonial authority to legitimize knowledge” about the war; her blog explicitly plays on the ways in which a variety of mediations of the war built up layer upon layer of stereotypical representations of Iraqis.¹³ As the blog itself gained technological functionality with respect to live comments, her posts also directly challenged furious readers who questioned not only her authenticity as a writer but her right to offer her particular critical perspective at all. As a piece of war writing it exhibits some of the interactional aspects core to later social media, even as Riverbend retains authorial and editorial authority.

Much has been written about pornography and the internet, and social media’s promotion – and potentially normalization, in some online communities – of extreme sexual violence perpetrated against female and male victims. Some initially tried to dismiss the images of Abu Ghraib as aberrations, not curated instances of broader, systemic problems of moral leadership; a similar discussion emerged in the wake of the My Lai massacre, another example of an atrocity replete with performative, sexualized violence.¹⁴ In the Abu Ghraib example the subsequent investigations and evidence bore out these suspicions. In March 2015 a US district judge ruled that the US government must release additional images – “perhaps hundreds or thousands” – that showed instance of abuse taking place within at least seven sites across Afghanistan and Iraq.¹⁵

Even taking into account this particular episode detailing violence and abuse in times of war, many writers and readers seemed to grasp that they provided evidence of something darker and more culturally widespread. The intense denigration of Muslims in the wake of the September 11th attacks that took place off- and online in the Western media created a permission structure that in part contextualized, if not explained or justified, the guards’ actions. Additional sites with disturbingly large followings – nowthatsfuckedup.com for example, which Andrew Brown wrote about in The Guardian in 2005 ¹⁶ – further attest to the appetite for deeply exploitative digital trophies depicting extreme, often pornographic violence in wartime.

Weaponized sexual violence expressed itself in domestic contexts as well and has become an important strand of online war writing. In recent years the issue of rape in the military has, increasingly, become a topic for reporting and personal testimonial. In 2014 the magazine GQ published a long-form article under the following banner: “Sexual assault is alarmingly common in the US military, and more than half of the victims are men. According to the Pentagon, thirty-eight military men are sexually assaulted every single day.” They went on emphasize the value of the testimonials: “These are stories you never hear, because the culprits almost always go free, the survivors rarely speak, and no one in the military or Congress has done enough to stop it.” The article is structured around a set of themes, populated by quotes from various interviewees about their particular experiences – the rapes themselves, hierarchies and reporting, lingering fear and trauma, treatment (or lack thereof), and blame. These sections include contextual introductions. Interspersed within these sections featuring short quotations are three concise, complete narratives, offered in the first person; a fourth case, described in the third person, frames the overall article. Black and white photographs by Platon of survivors – with their children, draped in the American flag – put a face to the written quotations and testimonials. The article is also broken up, interrupted on all sides by flickering digital advertisements – a particular feature of online war writing that interferes with the reading of the narratives even as it speaks to the commercial infrastructure that sits at the core of online communication.¹⁷

Another personal narrative of rape and recovery is offered by retired lieutenant Meredith Mathis on the dedicated military site Task & Purpose. She describes being raped by her commander, blaming herself, and then later finding out that he was a repeat offender who had been offered a commuted sentence with no prison time for his guilty plea. Her husband had encouraged her to report her story, which she did, in solidarity with the other survivor.¹⁸

Stories are placed at the center of these articles, which are also, as their framing headlines and banners make clear, meant to draw readers’ attention to rape and sexual assault as a broader cultural problem. The blunt opening to a paper reviewing literature on the topic of prevention programs in the US military states the following: “Sexual assault (SA) in the US military is a significant public health concern with wide ranging consequences. The prevalence rate of SA during military service range from 4 to 7% among women and 1 to 2% among men, exceeding the prevalence rate among same-age civilian populations.” The authors go on to qualify this statement: “These data are concerning, as the number of reported incidents of SA far under-represent the number of assaults that actually occur.” They go on to say that, “Despite core values emphasizing mutual respect and protection, military environments foster unique pressures that facilitate sexual violence.”¹⁹ Based on 2014 surveys of over 180,000 military personnel across the US services, the RAND Corporation prepared a searchable data set and associate report ranking the places where assault levels were highest: in September 2018 Military Times published a summary of the report and its data with requisite links to the study under the headline: “Sexual assault: Here are the bases where troops are most at risk.”²⁰

In policy and in training, military institutions are attempting to identify the problem of sexual violence in war as more life-writing material emerges about it. In this space, social media is seen as a potentially contributing factor, providing yet another digital layer of harassment and abuse. This might be enacted by individual actors; it is also amplified by crowds who encourage off- and online degradation and, in some cases, actual violence. Prevention requires holistic approaches that address not only individual actions but broader cultures of abuse, including in social media spaces: an upbeat online two-minute training video produced by the US Army about military personnel who make “hateful, mean or judgemental comments, or who act aggressively” toward fellow soldiers, can now be disciplined under “bullying and hazing” guidelines, because “every one of us deserves to be treated with the respect we’ve earned for putting on this uniform.” However well-intentioned, such a video glosses over issues of race, gender, and sexuality, and it stays far away from sexual assault and rape in the military.

Given the scale of the problem, online platforms, while useful in raising up stories, networking survivors, and circulating information and stories about the problem, are insufficient. At their best they force readers to confront the violence born of exploitative and unequal power structures, to see these stories as part of a heritage of war writing, and to consider how abuse and trauma transgresses military and civilian spheres. At their worst they create a false sense of agency and resolution when deep, structural, cultural, and legal transformation is required. One survivor who contributed to the GQ story about male rape writes about the online afterlife of his assault, “I know the identity of the ringleader, and two of the others came back to me a year ago. I searched online, and there was no trace. There’s millions of people that have those last names.”²¹ Yet for Meredith Mathis something was gained in the act of storytelling – first to a group of women combat veterans and later, online on Task & Purpose – which becomes transformative in that it alters the power dynamic between survivors and their assailants: “Something truly miraculous happens when we allow others the honor of hearing our stories, even the parts we don’t quite understand. Our shame cannot survive being talked about – it dies the moment we share it. And our authenticity frees others to own their stories, too. And that’s where the healing happens.”²²

There is some evidence that, when individual stories are compiled and passed on to organizations with the power to shape international and local networks, some restitution and support are secured. The former may be long in coming: writing in Al Jazeera, Sara Derehshori, former prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, writes of how the 1995 investigation originally focused on genocide. Radio technology enabled a precursor of crowdsourcing: as women heard about the testimony offered by a single survivor of her rape at the hands of Taba’s former mayor, many more came forward to offer their accounts of assaults. Charges were later expanded after Human Rights Watch passed on their testimonials. The women and their stories led to the establishment of rape as a war crime prosecutable – provided national jurisdictions cooperate – by the International Criminal Court at The Hague.²³ The 2017 documentary film The Uncondemned helped to further disseminate the stories of the survivors: at the time of writing the trailer has been viewed over 45,000 times online.²⁴

In an age where mobile media make the extended recording of audio as well as visual narratives of possible, and subsequently accessible to audiences, narratives that explore different forms of war violence are emerging. The New York Times podcast Caliphate (2018), the first documentary audio series that was released by the news organization in 2018, interweaves a number of war stories together, one of which provides an interesting example of how small stories, sexual violence, and social media can combine to advance broader war narratives. There is the reporter and narrator Rukmini Callimachi, who tells of online threats of torture, rape, and murder issued by would-be jihadis in relation to her reporting on the Islamic State (IS), and an occasion where she thought these digital warriors had breached the screen and were actually attempting to break into her home in New York (they were not). There is the Canadian IS fighter whose story the narrator and her team are attempting to verify or discount. And finally there are the stories of Yazidi women who were kidnapped, enslaved, and raped for years by IS captors and were ultimately liberated from the caliphate and returned to their families. Initially they are so traumatized that their stories are retold by their rescuers and relatives, who often can hardly speak through their audible tears. They relay the women’s stories to Callimachi, explaining how they had been so isolated – without television or internet – that they believed the caliphate extended across the region and, possibly, the world.

In its narrative arc the podcast subverts expectations about war stories and offers numerous examples of digital and social media advancing and enabling the storyline. It begins as a kind of aural journalist’s blog about how to go about reporting on mobilized jihadis in a globalized, digital world, and as a portrayal of one man’s radicalization and partial loss of faith in the cause. Ultimately, it becomes a story about the victims and survivors of war and their particular physical and cultural dislocation, trauma, and exhaustion. Testimonial becomes a form of witness and a detailed articulation of the forms of violence wars and occupations encourage. Digital material serves as evidence to illustrate small and large stories – important, as Leigh Gilmore has shown, given the politics that devalue and dismiss women’s accounts²⁵ – and social media platforms enable wider dissemination: both also provide inflection points for narratives.

In Caliphate the family of one sixteen-year-old young woman – Souhayla – who was thirteen when she was abducted – is adamant that they want the story of her captivity and treatment to come out: she initially whispers responses to her uncle, who acts as interpreter. Her uncle breaks through the immediate scene – which Callimachi describes as “tender” – by showing photographs of the Souhayla and her younger sister Shayma, on his mobile phone from the time of their abduction. Souhayla speaks of her attempted suicide; Callimachi steps in as journalist and narrator to provide context, confirming that she has heard the same story from many imprisoned women. Souhayla tells of surviving airstrikes in Mosul, of being dressed like a boy so that she and her abductors might escape as refugees, of how her captor was killed, and she was able to make her way to Iraqi forces, who helped her to find her family in the refugee camps. Serving as a narrative mediator Callimachi shows Souhayla images of the liberation of Sinjar Mountain, the spiritual home of the Yazidis, by Kurdish forces on her phone. She and her uncle take the phone and flip through the images, as he narrates recent historical events and battles: this is the moment that Souhayla’s mood changes, as she starts to be convinced of the defeat of the IS-controlled caliphate. However, after years of exposure to war propaganda, the digital evidence is not enough: she wants to see it for herself.

There is another element of social media–enabled audience engagement in the form of crowdfunding that provides an emotional coda to this episode and to the podcast more generally; listeners, moved by Souhayla’s story, founded a Facebook group and funded a return trip to the Sinjar Mountain with her family. The money raised by the group helped to locate her younger sister Shayma. Callimachi describes clicking on a link and watching digital video – listeners hear clips of the audio while she is speaking – of the reunion of the sisters, family, and community. Callimachi is careful not to allow this moment to be of sentimental comfort to the listener, as she goes on to report on the tenuous existence of the Yazidi people, now and in the future, and then to pick up the story of the returned IS fighter who remains broadly loyal to the ideals of the caliphate.²⁶ Yet the resounding figures of the series – as much as the parallel stories about terrorist networks, digital indoctrination, and war provide a sense of unresolved dread – are these resilient young women.

The mobile infrastructure supporting the podcast form allows the listener to literally carry the war story articulated in Caliphate with them: to listen to the voices of the writers, victims, and perpetrators. This complicates their understanding of softwares of the self with respect to citizen journalists, victims and witnesses, and of conflict narratives more broadly, providing a new layer of experience replete with strange traumatic and quotidian juxtapositions. It is necessary to note here that Souhayla’s story is one of so many others, plucked out of obscurity and given an enhanced platform by the New York Times. There are increasing numbers of independent accounts offering new perspectives on war available online. Whether or not they are picked up by international media and inflect set expectations and ideas of conflict in Western cultures, or remain the preserve of specialist academics, remains an open question.

At the same time the relative accessibility of these new narratives also raises ethical questions. Do such accounts really make warfare more proximate for Westerners for whom the experience of war has, for the most part, become entirely alien? As I go about my everyday life, riding trains and buses, cooking, drinking coffee, all the while listening to such a graphic story of violence and suffering, what is happening to my understanding of war? Am I implicitly contributing to processes where such encounters become commonplace and normalized, where I can opt in and out of war stories, while a forty-year-old Syrian, Somali, or Iraqi woman is forced to live and then relive them, day after day? Do such wars – inflicted by societies in which I exist in relative peace and security – move further away, or closer and more personal – or do both things happen at the same time?

Carry on to Lenses, Screens, and Datafication, the next subsection of Life and War Writing, Off- and Online.