International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict

A crime against humanity
in continuity with patriarchal logic against women, but not only

“Sexual violence in war is a crime against humanity and at the same time an instrument of offence and humiliation specific to the male sex against the female sex”.  (Source: https://www.micromega.net)

This is how journalist Monica Lanfranco comments on the extreme horror of the rapes perpetrated in the current Russia-Ukraine conflict, reporting on the chilling telephone exchange, bounced around the world’s media, between a Russian soldier and his wife last April:

“Go and rape Ukrainian women. But don’t tell me anything afterwards, I don’t want to know anything, understand?”

In the audio the soldier asks his young wife: ‘So you give me your permission? Yes – she answers.”

Never would we have thought that, in ultra-modern Europe, more than 70 years after the Fourth Geneva Convention, which explicitly prohibited rape and forced prostitution in wartime, we would have witnessed live the incitement of wartime rape with the complicity of women against women.

Photo: https://www.onuitalia.com

Today, this rampant brutality represents for us the ultimate tipping point in men’s path to freedom from violence. It is as if all historical milestones on the ‘law of war’ have been annulled; it was even Cicero, in the first century B.C., who urged soldiers to respect the rules of war, since obeying such rules separates ‘men’ from ‘brutes’!

Photo: https://biografieonline.it

SAD TIMES OURS, SAD TIMES FOR HUMANITY
NOW NOT ONLY BECAUSE OF PATRIARCHAL LOGIC…
BUT SIMPLY BECAUSE IT IS AT THE MERCY OF AN ANNIHILATING CHAOS.

There is an urgent need to rediscover or recover the spark of humanity that our Foundress Saint Mary Euphrasia ‘ensures’ exists in each of us through prayer that also involves God.