Read the January 2021 Issue of eShe Magazine

The latest issue of eShe is here! You can read it online on Issuu or Magzter, or download it to your device:

EDITOR’S NOTE: THE PEACE ISSUE

In Christina Lamb’s book Our Bodies Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women (2020), she describes her conversations with women victims and sex slaves in terrorism-ravaged areas of the world. “[Rape in war] is the cheapest weapon known to man… And it is almost always ignored in the history books,” she writes.

Describing case studies of women sold from one man to another, of mothers protecting their young ones and struggling to survive in treacherous circumstances, she chronicles the wars of the past century through their female victims and survivors. The stories expose damning truths: that there is no ‘honour’ in war; that men see women as property of men; and that whoever wins or loses a war, the women always lose.

Women in positions of relative power around the world – those of us with agency and a voice earned for us by waves of feminism before us – are uniquely positioned at this moment in time to speak up for a cause greater than ourselves: that of an end to conflict and to the establishment of peace. We must step up so that women coming later may never have to be the ‘spoils’ of any war.

Let us begin with our neighbourhood, the Indo-Pak conflict, and tackle it as only women can: with collaboration, dialogue, constructive action and relationship-building. Next, the world.