“Women have gone from being considered inferior to men and viewed as property, to being considered inferior and viewed as objects.” Persephone Speaks director Ivana Ivkovic Kelley on justice for survivors of rape in war.

A few months ago I covered the Kickstarter fundraising campaign for the documentary Persephone Speaks: The Forgotten Women of Bosnia, directed by filmmaker Ivana Ivkovic Kelley. Kelley and her team followed one woman, Bakira, through Bosnia to expose the systematic rape of countless thousands of women during the war and try to bring the men who authorised, organised and perpetrated these rapes to justice. A survivor of the mass rapes herself, Bakira has become a campaigner for other victims, despite receiving death threats and being subject to harassment and intimidation by those who wish to silence her and sabotage her work.

The first campaign for Persephone Speaks: The Forgotten Women of Bosnia was successful. Filming has been completed. Kelley has now launched a second campaign, to finish post production on the film, and there are only four days left to support this. Update, on 10th Feb 2014: you did it! The campaign is succeeding, meeting and exceeding its target.

At the heart of Bakira’s work and Ivana Ivkovic Kelley’s film is a challenge to the international community to open its eyes, acknowledge and address the use of rape as a concerted strategy in war; the particular sickness, destructiveness and cruelty of rape as a type of violence; the support of rapists’ actions by a wider macho, misogynist rape culture which operates in all societies globally even in peacetime; the devastating years-long psychological, physical, cultural and social effects of rape on survivors; and the stigmatisation, punishing, abuse, denial and silencing of survivors, often by their own societies and even their own families.

As Kelley stated in the original fundraising campaign,

Females are nonstop targets during wartime, as demonstrated by the mass rapes implemented as a policy of genocide during the Bosnian war.  Because this atrocity is grossly ignored by the international community and international tribunals, this film revisits one survivor who continues to fight for justice on behalf of others all over the world.  ... The continued treatment of women around the world, especially during times of conflict, needs to be heard through as many channels as possible.  Unfortunately, war rape survivors are often seen as a problem, a by-product of war that needs to be swept under the rug.

However, the fight for justice is a hard won, waged by those who carry not just psychological and physical trauma but who have the least in terms of power, money, mobility and status. Both individually and at a mass scale, within families and within governments, within cultures and within whole societies, the trend is to punish victims and protect perpetrators, to silence victims and give perpetrators a platform, to abuse the abused and assist the abusers, to expose the victims and cover for perpetrators, to expose and question the behaviour and words of victims and condone and gloss those of the perpetrators. It is the victims who must do all the hard work, in addition to recovering personally, to gain justice – or even to be heard – while the perpetrators sit back, enjoying the victims’ torment and their own impunity. This is the case in all instances of male sexual violence, in wartime and peacetime alike.

The perpetrators and those who authorised them are fully entrenched in and enfranchised by established networks of patriarchal force. They are well-connected, well-resourced and mutually supportive. They are interested in power, not justice, and cannot be shamed morally because they are proud of what they did. If rapists did not love raping, they wouldn’t do it. If their apologists did not love rape, they would not assist and cover for rapists. Perpetrators and their apologists alike are enraged which victims of male violence speak up. However, despite their sadism and lack of shame – indeed, the shame and guilt which perpetrators should feel is transferred onto the victims – they can and must be brought publicly to justice through established international legal channels.

Persephone Speaks follows Bakira as she collects other survivors’ testimonies are seeks to have them heard in the courts in Sarajevo or the Hague. She also tracks down where some of the perpetrators live and presents this information to the courts. Commenting on the rewarding of perpetrators, Kelley wrote in the original fundraising campaign:

In many cases, the perpetrators are either awaiting trial or have been rewarded by the Serbian government for successfully running a "camp", often in the form of a promotion within the local police force.  We have witnessed incidents of this same "reward" behavior in similar conflicts around the world.  In situations such as these, many survivors have expressed anger, fear, and shock, especially when they see their attacker, years later, in high level positions or vacationing beside them on the Adriatic coast, which numerous victims have witnessed. 

The first campaign for Persephone Speaks:The Forgotten Women of Bosnia was successful. Filming has been completed. Ivana Kelly has now launched a second campaign, to finish post production on the film.

The context has obviously not changed. It beggars belief that the world community and people in general live not just in denial of this but are actively antagonistic and punitive towards survivors. One of many shocking moments during Kelley’s research has been the conversion of a rape camp into a luxury spa and hotel, whose manager dismisses survivors’ testimonies as “lies, lies, all lies.”

This is a film which must be completed and shown to the world. In the new campaign for post production funding, Kelley states,

We saw the same thing occur in Rwanda, the Congo, Liberia, Uganda, Bangladesh, Haiti, Cambodia, Cyprus, Darfur, and now in Syria... all in devastating numbers.  How survivors are treated post-conflict in one region of the world, regardless of whether it is in the heart of Europe, or the heart of Africa, and whether perpetrators continue to be brought to justice, has a huge  impact on how survivors will be treated going forward, regardless of geographical location.  The sexual violation of women erodes the fabric of a community in a way that few weapons can.  Rape's damage can be devastating because of the strong communal reaction to the violation and the pain stamped on entire families. 

The campaign for post-production seeks to raise $16,000, but ideally $22,000 and is partway there. Every time I and my colleagues cover the issue of rape in war the kickback is so interesting: in amongst the perpetrator excusal, hate mail (“You wouldn’t write about rape so much if it didn’t make your cunt tingle” is one choice line from the messages I receive) and victim-blaming there is a strong seam of positive passion and support, of other victims and survivors worldwide who are determined that this story be made loud instead of being silenced. Each film or article is a door opening onto millions of untold testimonies. Whenever I write about male violence against women and girls I uncover the immense trauma and pain of survivors, and their rage. These are a form of energy in themselves, which far outshout the bleating of apologists. We do not have the hatred, violating malice and anger of perpetrators and their friends but pain, determination, truthfulness and the desire for justice are far worthier substitutes.

To support this second and final phase of the Persephone Speaks: The Forgotten Women of Bosnia campaign, I contacted Ivana Ivkovic Kelley. She very kindly gave her time to answer my questions.

Why is it so important to make Persephone Speaks: The Forgotten Women of Bosnia?

I have been haunted by the reality women and girls seem to be increasingly facing during wartime. Women and girls have transitioned from being “the spoils” of war, to part of an operational military doctrine to ruin a community, a culture, a country: they have gone from being spoils to being used as actual weapons with which to conduct genocide in some cases. This is how we know we continue to live in an extremely unjust, unfair global society in which women have gone from being considered inferior to men and viewed as property, to being considered inferior and viewed as objects.

We really should not be measuring how much things have changed for women by the number of successful women that exist in our world today, but rather by how little has changed when there are parts of our world where it is legal to commit femicide if a woman simply looks at another man, rides a bicycle, leaves an abusive husband, gives birth to a girl child; or in wartime is used as the cheapest, most destructive weapon around. It is the most destructive because raping a woman or girl is not just an attempt to kill her spirit, it is the attempt to kill the spirit of her loved ones. In turn, multiplied, this has the ability to destroy entire communities at their core. The woman, after all, is the heart of a community.

What is your particular reason for wanting to make Persephone Speaks?

I have been haunted by the stories and testimonies I translated during the last years of the war in Bosnia. I was in college in the US at the time but  knew I had to be “in it” to help in some way, so I wrote my thesis on systematic rape used as a tool of genocide, that it was the first time in history that it’s been documented as part of a plan to wipe out a people. I travelled there while the war was still going on and connected with a group in Zagreb that was assisting the [mostly] Bosnian Muslim survivors of the rape camps, travelling to refugee camps often across enemy lines, providing them with food, clothes and medical aid as well collecting testimonies for eventual use in the Hague and local criminal courts. I knew that one day I would return to document where these women are now, and what has changed, both judicially and whether those who were vocal before have given up their fight for justice.

Has it been risky to make Persephone Speaks?

Yes. From the onset we have been receiving hateful, oftentimes degrading, comments on our Facebook page as well as individual emails through our project page on Kickstarter…sometimes an individual will send me a tweet saying they would like to interview me for a story they’re doing, only to end up shouting on the other end of the phone that I better watch myself because I don’t know what I’m talking about, that it was only Serbian women who were in the camps and that they were raped by Bosnian Muslim soldiers wearing Serb uniforms…or if I knew better, I’d keep my mouth shut or the same thing will happen to me.

It hasn’t happened as often as I would expect, but I feel that it’s pretty horrible for even one person to come forward and completely deny the reality of that war, the reality of photographs by such courageous photojournalists as Andree Kaiser and Ron Haviv, the reality of testimonies and the reality of what you feel when you look into a survivor’s eyes. There’s absolutely no denying the blanket atrocities that were done by a distinct, very clear perpetrator, especially when there is documentation and there are testimonies by individual perpetrators who have been brought to justice at the Hague that yes, this is what happened.

It is so important, I feel, for a particular government to confront its past, acknowledge and apologise to the victims, survivors, their families and communities, in order for healing to work. This is what human rights champions and survivors such as Bakira will publicly state when she holds forth, risking her life, in front of a memorial at a mass grave, as the local Serb officials in what is now an ethnically cleansed town attempt to erase the word “genocide” from said memorial.

This is a pretty big problem. As certain countries attempt to enter the EU, there needs to be outside pressure from Belgium to first recognise genocide happened and for the said government to formally acknowledge and apologise. Instead, those Serb politicians in the minority who have spoken out and have acknowledged genocide and mass rape are not only the least favourite but they are, oftentimes, placed on a death list. When we were shooting footage in the ethnically cleansed town of Visegrad (now part of Republika Srpska), we were met with our own share of passive hostility: asked to shut our camera off and leave the premises as soon as we entered the lobby of Vilina Vlas (a former rape camp now spa hotel); confronted on a tour bus led by a Serbian Orthodox priest denying the genocide; even in talking to local Serbs saying that they’ve always lived here and no, there was never any massacre of hundreds on the bridge and no, there was never any rape camp here. It all ended with me having my picture taken by a local Serbian man sitting on a bench with his friends, holding up his cell phone and menacingly telling me “now we have your picture too.”

Back in the States, I’ve received hate mail from Serbian Americans, some who are successful, running such things as a publishing company. I keep stressing that this film is about what happens to women throughout the world, during times of conflict, yet it is very hard to ignore the geopolitical reality of what happened in Bosnia. When discussing what happened to the women and girls there, there is simply no escaping the military doctrine put in place by one country to ethnically cleanse the other. There are risks that simply come with the territory and I'm certainly not the first documentary filmmaker to encounter it, nor will I be the last.

What exact work remains to be done on Persephone Speaks?


We completed production in October 2013 and are now in post-production. We are having the material transcribed, then any dialogue in Bosnian translated, then we get to the heavy duty editing. We have about 40-50 hours of footage from time spent in Bosnia in 2010 and 2011 and our first meeting with Bakira, to our time there this past summer and autumn.

We are in dire need of assistance to help us cover our costly post production costs. During the editing process, we will cover archived footage, music composition, sound and eventually the transition from a rough cut to a polished cut that we will be submitting to film festivals. Our hope is for this film to have its premiere at the Sarajevo International Film Festival this coming August, 2014, as we couldn't think of a more appropriate venue.

Is there anything like else like Persephone Speaks: Forgotten Women of Bosnia?

There are similar documentary films that have come out, such as Calling the Ghosts (1996) by Mandy Jacobson and Karmen Jelincic Ross and the brilliant documentary series Women, War & Peace (2013) produced by Abigail Disney. Part One of that, I Came To Testify, is about war rape in Bosnia.

What sets mine apart is seeing the day to day struggles that a survivor and activist encounters both on a professional and personal front. Showing a woman like Bakira not just fighting the good fight but reminding an audience that these are women who love to play with their grandchildren and find a meditative, healing solace getting their hands dirty in a garden. That regardless of ethnicity, culture, language, these women are our sisters, mothers, grandmothers, and friends. When an atrocity on such a grand scale happens to women anywhere in the world, we need to help spread their call for justice. Hopefully one day, women will not be viewed as property to be killed legally or sexually trafficked en masse, we won’t be viewed as weapons of war. Until that happens, in some ways, the work will never be done.

Contribute to the final campaign, to fund post-production on Persephone Speaks: Forgotten Women of Bosnia, here.

Further articles:

• Syrian Exodus: health, help, hypocrisy (Huffington Post)
• Women, war and peace: what we can all learn from the Zimbabwean women fighting violence as elections approach (Huffington Post)
• Busting a rape myth for Mumsnet's We Believe You campaign (Mumsnet)
• Women's rights: have things really improved for women in the last 50 years? (Daily Mail)

Disclosure: I was one of the many funders in the first campaign, donating $1000 to support it. Ivana Ivkovic Kelley is a stranger to me. She is not a friend of mine. I had never heard of her before I became aware of the campaign and I have never met or spoken with her, except to ask her via email for some comments for this feature. I have no role in the making of the film and am not invested in any way in its outcome, except as a human rights journalist who cares about the issues.

Taking action on the global health worker crisis

A couple of weeks ago I covered the importance of a well-trained, well-paid and well-respected human resources system in providing free universal healthcare globally. I analysed the challenges of doing so and examined some of the factors which can enable or inhibit good practice. Since then I’ve become aware of a new drive, flagged up by Health Poverty Action, which highlights the UK’s responsibility when it comes to global human resources in the field of health. It emphasises a developmental imbalance - with serious consequences for developing countries - created by the Western exploitation of global health worker labour.

Health Poverty Action has identified more than fifty countries, mainly in Africa and South Asia, which suffer from a “critical shortage of health personnel” while simultaneously carrying “a large part of the global burden of disease.” At the same time the increased necessity of long term care for ageing populations in European countries is creating strong demand for health workers, fuelling the migration of health workers to Europe from developing countries in today’s heavily globalised labour market.

Image of health worker in clinic in Tsumkwe in Namibia (c) Health Poverty Action

Health Poverty Action has been calling for the UK to “compensate developing countries for its role in the global health worker crisis.” There is a cached copy of the call here; I'm not sure what has happened to the plan to get supporters to write to UK MPs. The charity points to the shortage of health workers in developing countries and the UK's strong record of employing health workers who are originally from developing countries and migrate to the UK to work. HPA is not challenging people’s entitlement to move for work, to earn, to study and to create better lives, but instead seek simply to raise awareness of the consequences of the health worker shortage in developing countries. The responsibility for this must be on world governments engaged in large scale health infrastructure and planning. The shortage of health workers in developing countries results not only in poorer treatment there but in a variety of deficits which weaken the entire health system in the long term, from the under-staffing and under-maintenance of hospitals, clinics and rural health stations to poorer quality and less up to date training and education, the under-provision of medical equipment, the reduced chance of future investment when a future workforce cannot be relied upon and much more.

The charity adds,

It is estimated that 1 billion people [virtually all in developing countries] will never see a health worker, putting them at risk of dying from easily preventable diseases, from childbirth and basic health conditions.

The report Aid in Reverse challenges the UK government to play a conscientious and responsible role in ending the global health worker crisis, which Health Poverty Action labels a developing world “brain drain.” They suggest that in the UK the Departments of Health and International Development could work together on two complementary issues: first, treating the roots of the UK’s own shortage of health workers through better planning, training and education; second, giving something back to the developing countries whose health infrastructures are being weakened through lack – with severe ramifications for those nations’ own long term development – while they contribute so much to developed nations’ healthcare systems.

The challenge to developed nations who use the labour of talented health workers from developing countries to ensure their own citizens’ wellbeing is part of a pan-European initiative aiming to create a sustainable global health workforce. One of the main directives of the project is the implementation of a World Health Organisation Global Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel. The project’s tagline runs,

‘Healthworkers for all and all for health workers.’

Bidisha is a Fellow of the 2013 International Reporting Project, covering global health and development.

Monday 25th November is International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women

Trigger warning. From Karen Ingala Smith and all text (c) her:

Monday 25th November it is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. I’ll be highlighting the UK’s shocking record of women killed through male violence in 2013.

Starting at 6.00am, on the twitter account @countdeadwomen, I’ll be going through the UK’s diary of women killed by men. I’ll be starting with the 2nd January when Janelle Duncan Bailey was strangled by ex-boyfriend Jerome McDonald, moving on to 3rd January at 6.10, when Akua Agyuman died, two months after being stabbed in the chest and abdomen by her husband Minta Adiddo. Every 10 minutes, I’ll move through the year to commemorate all the women who I have found who were killed though men’s violence. So far I know of 112 women killed this year, so I’ll still be tweeting at midnight.

Thank you all for your support. We’ve reached 2,500 signatures now but I'm still the one doing the counting. As I've said all along, I'll keep doing it, until I'm convinced the government is doing enough!

Images of some of the women killed by male violence in the UK at a rate of 2 per week

The text on the campaign page lobbying the UK government to Stop Ignoring Dead Women [please click and sign in solidarity] reads as follows:

On New Year’s Day, 2012, 20-year-old Kirsty Treloar got a text from her boyfriend Myles Williams:

Okay wer all gud now and my new yrs ressy is that I aint going to hit u again and I won't hit u 4 this yr next yr the yr after that the next yr after that.

The next day he broke into her family’s home, stabbed her brother and sister as they tried to help, then he dragged Kirsty into the back of his mother's car and drove her away. She was found dead 2 miles away, dumped behind a wheelie bin. Kirsty had been stabbed 29 times.

Michael Atherton, 42, also sent a New Year text. Shortly before midnight, he sent a text to his partner, Susan McGoldrick, saying he was going out and would spend the night away because he didn’t like her sister Alison Turnbull, 44, with whom she was spending the evening. But Susan and Alison came home before he had left. Atherton, who held a gun licence despite a history of arrests for domestic violence dating back 10 years, shot Susan, Alison and Alison’s 24 year old daughter Tanya, before killing himself.

On New Year’s Day, Aaron Mann, 31 repeatedly hit Claire O’Connor, 38, with a blunt object before smothering her with a pillow. Her badly beaten body was found wrapped in her son’s sleeping bag and covered in a sheet in the boot of her car on January 2.

On 3rd of January John McGrory used a dog lead to strangle 39-year-old Marie McGrory. Garry Kane, 41, killed his 87-year-old grandmother Kathleen Milward, though 15 blunt force trauma injuries on her head and neck.

So, by the end of the third day of January 2012, seven women in the UK had been murdered by men, three were shot, one was strangled, one was stabbed, one was beaten then smothered and one was killed through fifteen blunt force trauma injuries. Perhaps because it was the beginning of the year, I just started counting, and once I’d started, I couldn’t stop. Since then, I’ve counted 199 women killed through suspected male violence. I urge you to read Karen Ingala Smith's site for more information.

At first I counted women killed through domestic violence. Then, on March 9th 2012, Ahmad Otak stabbed and killed Samantha Sykes, 18 and Kimberley Frank, 17. Otak wasn’t the boyfriend of either of them, but of Elisa Frank, Kimberley’s sister. After killing Kimberly and Samantha in from of Eliza, he abducted Eliza and drove to Dover in an attempt to escape to France. The murders of Samantha and Kimberley don’t fit the definition of domestic violence, but they’re absolutely about a man trying to exert power, control and coercion in his relationship. Their deaths made it clear to me that concentrating on what we see as domestic violence isn’t enough. It’s wider than that. The murders of Kimberley and Samantha by were no less about male violence against women that they would have been if he had been the boyfriend of one of them.

Then there’s Andrew Flood, a taxi-driver who strangled and robbed Margaret Biddolph, 78 and Annie Leyland, 88. When I learned he’d also robbed a third woman it was clear to me that there was a pattern to his actions. In fact, last year, five older women, aged between 75 and 88 were killed by much younger men, aged between 15 and 43 as they were robbed or mugged, including Irene Lawless, 68 who was raped, beaten and strangled by 26 year old Darren martin. The murders of Margaret, Annie andIrene were not any less about misogyny, than those of women killed by someone they were related to. So my list doesn’t just include women killed though domestic violence. We have to stop seeing the killings of women by men as isolated incidents. We have to put them together. We have to stop ignoring the connections and patterns.

The Home Office currently records and published data on homicide victims and the relationship of the victim to the principal suspect and sex of the victim. This does not do enough to tell us about fatal male violence against women:

1. It doesn’t tell us about the sex of the killer

2. It doesn’t connect the different forms of male violence against women

3. It dehumanises women.

The statistic ‘on average two women a week are killed through domestic violence in England and Wales’ is well known but we don't seem to feel horror in our response to this. The murders of some women barely cause a murmur; lots don’t make it into the national media. And so the connections, the horror, the patterns, the deaths continue in silence. Unnoticed. Ignored.

Ultimately, I want to see men stop killing women.

I have launched this campaign, Counting Dead Women because I want to see a fit-for-purpose record of fatal male violence against women. I want to see the connections between the different forms of fatal male violence against women. I want Domestic Homicide Review reports to be accessible from a single central source. I want to see a homicide review for every sexist murder. I want the government to fund an independently run Femicide Observatory , where relationships between victim and perpetrator and social, cultural and psychological issues are analysed. I want to believe that the government is doing everything it can to end male violence against women and girls. And I think the government should be recording and commemorating women killed through male violence – not me, a lone woman in a bedroom in east London

Let’s start counting dead women, not ignoring them. If you want us as a society, the press and the government to stop ignoring dead women, if you want us to find ways to stop women being killed, please join me, add your voice and sign this petition.

All text (c) Karen Ingala Smith

"My last attack before I got away from my abuser lasted 4 days."

From Mandy Thomas, writing for Women's Aid the day before Mother's Day:

"I have used many Women's Aid services over the years, seeking a place of safety with my children. Sadly, the last service that I used is now closed due to a lack of funding. This is why we need to support Women's Aid now, to help them campaign to protect their member services all over the country.

When it comes to using domestic violence services, I have been there, done that, got the T-shirt. I have been through the system and spoken to people who don't work in specialist domestic violence services and simply don't understand the issue or have any compassion for victims. That is why it is particularly alarming that itis the specialist services that are being hit the hardest by the economic crisis and cuts to public spending. 

The result of our experience of domestic violence, and the traumatic ongoing effects on our family, have meant that I have faced a mother's worst nightmare and buried one of my children, my eldest son Daniel, This should not have happened. He took nightmares to his grave of the things he witnessed. He could not visualise or believe in a change, be it help, or a way out. We need to make a united stand to make the changes happen to save lives.  

Victims need proper support to rebuild their lives. 

My last attack before I got away from my abuser lasted 4 days. I was tortured - beaten black and blue to the point where my children could not recognise me. Cut with knives and broken glass, punched, kicked and bitten, then dragged through the house naked by my hair, burnt with a blowtorch and raped. 

We need to make a change right now so that future generations will not be subjected to such horrific abuse. Our children look to us for protection and guidance. In a way, I was lucky. Two women every week die from domestic violence in England and Wales alone. And that's just what is reported as domestic violence. Domestic violence costs our government £178 billion every year. The cost of the aftermath is huge - hospitalisation, medical treatment, and counselling is needed to help victims deal with the impact domestic violence has on their physical and mental health. 

More specialised domestic violence services are needed, not less. These services really do save lives."

• Donate now: Women's Aid

One query from me: why is Gordon Ramsay an ambassador for Women's Aid, listed alongside Tana Ramsay, the woman he sadistically and selfishly betrayed, lied to, tricked and deceived for years, at the same time as pretending to be a family man? He has shown by his behaviour that he is not capable of treating women as human beings worth of basic respect and his presence as an ambassador to this incredibly important charity gives me pause every time I donate to it.