CW: sexual assault\/abuse<\/p>\n
One book that I have been reading this summer is titled <\/span>Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora?<\/span><\/i>, and it is about a pair of villages in the region of Kashmir where the women of these villages were mass-raped by the Indian army in February 1991. Although I won\u2019t be able to do it justice in a few sentences, the Kashmir conflict is centered on the obstacles and abuses the Kashmiri people have faced in asserting self-determination. Both India and Pakistan claim Kashmir and occupy different parts of it; the two countries have also gone to war over the territory around three times I think. There has been continued concern over the human rights abuses in Indian-occupied Kashmir, especially since an insurgency (with both pro-independence and pro-Pakistan groups) began in the late 1980s. The mass-rape of the women from Kunan and Posphora came during the height of the insurgency and military crackdowns that followed. The description of the book states, \u201cOn a cold February night in 1991, a group of soldiers and officers of the Indian Army pushed their way into two villages in Kashmir, seeking out militants assumed to be hiding there. They pulled the men out of their homes and subjected many to torture, and the women to rape. According to village accounts, as many as 31 women were raped.\u201d The book goes in depth about the background of the authors (all of whom are Kashmiri women themselves) and why they chose to bring light to this issue, witness accounts of the events that occurred, and the history of how the case has been handled by government authorities and Indian media.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The book is a great look into this incident and how it fits into the broader conflict as a whole. The rape of these women was a deliberate tactic to weaken supposed militants and penalize the villagers for no reason. However, abusing women as military tactics isn\u2019t new, especially not in a South Asian context. During the Partition of India and Pakistan, women were raped and abused as they went back and forth across the new borders. In 1971, the Pakistani army systematically mass-raped countless numbers of Bengali women during the Liberation War. It is enraging and frustrating to see how women have continuously been exploited as tools of war. What is even more frustrating is that most often, these women don\u2019t get justice or even recognition of their plight by state authorities. So often their stories are brushed under the rug or discounted totally. <\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n On a personal level, I am interested in studying incidents such as these because I want to know more about how South Asian women have faced misogyny and what resistance movements they have created to fight back. The women of Kunan Posphora are inspiring because they have chosen to continuously raise their voices and seek justice even in the face of an occupying power, and this has done much to inform my ideas of South Asian feminism, especially when it comes to Muslim women. Reading this book also increased my interest in the relationship between military occupation and women\u2019s health, and I would love to be able to study this issue one day as a public health researcher\/doctor in places like Kashmir or Palestine. I think it is important to bring light on not just the immediate harm of abuse by military personnel, but also on the long term impacts, such as the psychological and physical consequences women face. <\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Below are some clips which describe the Kunan Poshpora incident. One features one of the authors of the book, Ifrah Butt, and you can turn on the captions to understand the part where she\u2019s speaking Urdu\/Hindi. The other features direct accounts from survivors. <\/span><\/p>\n [su_youtube url=”https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=UVDhjT6Jpm0″]<\/p>\n [su_youtube url=”https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=JwGXYw5vf3w&t=6s”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" CW: sexual assault\/abuse One book that I have been reading this summer is titled Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora?, and it is about a pair of villages in the region of Kashmir where the women of these villages were mass-raped by the Indian army in February 1991. Although I won\u2019t be able to do it… Continue reading Learning about the Abuse of Women in Kashmir<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1611,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading","category-amira","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/wagsfp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/wagsfp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/wagsfp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/wagsfp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1611"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/wagsfp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1979"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/wagsfp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1979\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3043,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/wagsfp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1979\/revisions\/3043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/wagsfp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/wagsfp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/wagsfp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}