ANN JONES | War Is Not Over When It's Over

Women Speak Out From The Ruins Of War

 From the renowned authority on domestic violence, a startlingly original inquiry into the aftermath of wars and their impact on the least visible victims: women. In 2007, the International Rescue Committee, which brings emergency relief to countries in the wake of war, sought to understand what women in post-conflict zones really needed, wanted, and feared. Answers came through the point and click of a digital camera. On behalf of the IRC, Ann Jones spent a year traveling through Africa, East Asia, and the Middle East, giving cameras to women who had no other means of telling the world what war had done to their lives. The photography project—which moved from Liberia to the Congo to Burmese refugee camps in Thailand and points in between—quickly became a lens on the true nature of modern warfare and its consequences for the most vulnerable. As Jones hears from Iraqi wives, Karenni widows, and West African teenage girls, the definitive moments of military victory often bring little relief to civilians. Women and children remain blighted by injury, loss, and displacement. They are the most affected by the destruction of communities and social institutions. And along with peace often comes worsening violence against women, both domestic and sexual, inflicted by roving militias, brought home by men returning from the front, and taken up by civilians. Dramatic and compelling, animated by the voices of unimaginably brave and resourceful women, War Is Not Over When It’s Over shines a powerful light on the lives of people too long cast in shadow.

http://www.annjonesonline.com/NotOverDetails.html

ANN JONES is a journalist, photographer, and the author of ten books of nonfiction. She has written extensively about violence against women. Since 2001, she has worked intermittently as a humanitarian volunteer in conflict and post-conflict countries in the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and central and south Asia. From Afghanistan and the Middle East, she has reported on the impact of war upon civilians; and she has embedded with American forces in Afghanistan to report on war’s impact on soldiers. Her articles on these and other matters appear most often in The Nation and online at www.TomDispatch.com. Her work has received generous support from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, where she held the Mildred Londa Weisman Fellowship in 2010-11, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2011-12), and the Fulbright Foundation (2012). She lives in Oslo, Norway, with two conversational cats.

Stephanie Doty
Women’s Issues Matter
August 11, 2014
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0