Institutionalized Rape

The following story is from the UK Guardian newspaper:

"For Huda Shaker, the humiliation began at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Baghdad. The American soldiers demanded to search her handbag. When she refused one of the soldiers pointed his gun towards her chest.

"He pointed the laser sight directly in the middle of my chest," said Professor Shaker, a political scientist at Baghdad University. "Then he pointed to his penis. He told me, 'Come here, bitch, I'm going to fuck you.'"

According to Prof Shaker, several women held in Abu Ghraib jail were sexually abused, including one who was raped by an American military policeman and became pregnant. She has now disappeared...

Few women released from US detention have come forward to talk about their experiences in a Muslim society where rape is sometimes equated with shame and victims can be killed to salvage family honour.

According to the New Yorker magazine the photos and videos so far unreleased by the Pentagon show American soldiers "having sex with a female Iraqi prisoner", and a secret report by General Antonio Taguba into the scandal confirms that US guards videotaped and photographed naked female prisoners and that "a male MP [military police] guard" is shown "having sex with a female detainee".

Human rights campaigners say the US military frequently arrests wives and daughters during raids if the male suspect is not at home.

US officials have acknowledged detaining women in the hope of convincing male relatives to provide information: a strategy that is in violation of international law. "