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Overview
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 relief to countries in the wake of war, wanted to understand what really happened to women in war zones. Answers came through the point and click of a digital camera. On behalf of the IRC, Ann Jones spent two years 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 Syria and points in between—quickly broadened to encompass the full consequences of modern warfare for the most vulnerable. Even after the definitive moments of military victory, women and children remain blighted by injury and displacement and 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.
Dramatic and compelling, animated by the voices of brave and resourceful women, War Is Not Over When It's Over shines a powerful light on a phenomenon that has long been cast in shadow.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly
While hoping to document postwar violence against women in war-torn regions like Afghanistan, parts of Africa, and the Middle East, the International Relief Committee project unexpectedly provoked a loaded question about the injustice of their lives: "Why can't a man bathe a child?" With this question, and armed with IRC cameras, a group of African women started the dialogue in the hope of ending their abuse by and harsh subservience to men. A shy young girl in Sierra Leone elicits cheers from her schoolmates when she tells elders that teachers "should stop impregnating schoolgirls." Jones (Kabul in Winter) recounts her observations of the Global Crescendo Project in this concise travelogue praising women's fortitude in the direst of circumstances while decrying the continuing "post-conflict zone" of violence against women, including in the American-bombed ruins of Iraq, which cracks her sense of detachment. Underfunded and doubted in First and Third World countries, the project reveals the link between misplaced rage by depressed former soldiers and the women who suffer culturally sanctioned violence, while the U.N.'s antirape resolutions are ignored. In spite of the graphically grim material, Jones provides glimpses of hard-won triumphs, including separate bathing areas in Burmese refugee camps and the promise of peace for women by a thoughtful local chief. 33 b&w photos. (Sept.)From the Publisher
“Harrowing and important... What Jones brings to the fore here is sadly often overlooked in discussions of the world politic.”
—Star Tribune
“Gripping... This searing exposé on war’s remnants convincingly makes the case that gender inequality may be one of the greatest threats to peace.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Kirkus Reviews
A gripping, ground-floor look at the lingering ravages of conflict in some of the deadliest contemporary war zones.
Photographer and activist Jones (Kabul in Winter, 2007, etc.), an award-winning authority on domestic violence, turns her journalistic sights on women in areas where war and its grim aftermath have significantly altered their lives. The author recounts her experiences from 2007 to 2009 while volunteering with the International Rescue Committee in Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Congo, as well as in Burmese refugee camps in Thailand and with Iraqi refugees scattered throughout Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. The IRC's basic project was to enable women in these troubled areas to "examine their problems and present suggestions to improve their lives," and they provided digital cameras to small groups of women, asking them to photograph some things they found pleasing, others they found problematic, and then gathered the women and other locals to exhibit and discuss the photos. It is difficult to choose the more powerful result: Jones's intimate portrayal of disturbingly similar atrocities exposed in each region, or the self-awakening and solidarity the graphic recording of their living conditions occasioned in the photographers. For example, in the Congo, a renowned gynecologist reported surgically treating more than 10,000 rape victims from 2004 to 2008—"the oldest patient was eighty-three, the youngest nine months"; at the IRC women's photo exhibition, one of the photographers explained why they had cloaked their subject in a sheet: "We covered her face because we did not want to show her identity—and she could be any one of us." After describing the conundrum faced by Burmese refugees in Thai camps—"they can't return to their own country, and they can't enter this new one"—Jones wryly observes: "A photo is not always worth a thousand words. Sometimes you need the words to grasp the photo; without them, you would never know that the graceful lady with the rosy umbrella passing over the pretty river has no place to go."
This searing exposé on war's remnants convincingly makes the case that gender inequality may be one of the greatest threats to peace.