COLD COMFORT

Women have been enslaved for sexual services seemingly forever and nearly every so-called religion in the world openly frowns on this practice while giving tacit approval sub-rosa. It still remains part of the "spoils of war" and in many cases is government sponsored.

Of course children are victims also and some countries in Asia, for example, depend on the tourist revenue to finance their governments. Here in the land of the vanishing Constitution, it rears its ugly head for a moment when human smuggling rings are busted then is quickly swept under the rug again.

Regulation of women in this country was supposed to have ended but now it seems our human rights are flowing backwards with the latest decision from the Supremes to subject women's bodies to state control. We've come the wrong way, baby.

World news also tends to remind us how women were and are still treated as a commodity to be regulated rather than as human beings:

WASHINGTON (CNN) - Korean, 78, speaks out against Japan's enforced slavery of women in World War II. An estimated 200,000 were forced into sex slavery more than 60 years ago. She's 78 years old, but for Lee Young-soo, life as she knew it ended at age 15 -- when the Japanese government forced her to become a sex slave for its military members during World War II. "I was abducted at age 15 by the Japanese Imperial Army," she said. "I was put on a Japanese naval ship. There were 300 military men there and five girls, including myself."

Japan's leader Shinzo Abe visiting Washington expressed "deep" sympathy to "comfort women" and President Bush calls sex slavery a "regrettable chapter in history of world"

The words of Bush and Abe are cold comfort, for the Comfort Women of WW2, from men who know it is still going on in Iraq. How quiet and unconcerned the media is on the subject.

"This system [Comfort Women] resulted in the largest, most methodical and most deadly mass rape of women in recorded history. Japan's Kem pei tai political police and their collaborators tricked or abducted females as young as eleven years old and imprisoned them in military rape camps known as 'comfort stations,' situated throughout Asia. These 'comfort women' were forced to service as many as fifty Japanese soldiers a day. They were often beaten, starved, and made to endure abortions or injections with sterilizing drugs. Only a few of the women survived, and those that did suffered permanent physical and emotional damage." http://www.religioustolerance.org/sla_japa.htm

"Records show tens of thousands of Japanese women were forced to provide sex to U.S. troops until the spring of 1946, when Gen. Douglas MacArthur shut the brothels down. About 350,000 U.S. troops were occupying Japan by the end of 1945, and a Japanese government-funded association employed 70,000 prostitutes to serve them, according to a memoir by Seiichi Kaburagi, the chief of public relations for association. The records indicate that by then the Americans had full knowledge of Japan's reported torture of women in countries it invaded across Asia during the war, the records show." http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/25/comfort.women.ap/index.html

Under government sanctions (including ours), women were kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery. One can only shudder at the pain inflicted as one is pummeled incessantly in every orifice as often as 50 times a day, every day. Children as young as 11 were used and then discarded when they became too sick to service male soldiers.

How safe to you feel under your government's most recent sanction now stamped O.K. by the Supreme Court?.

gapperserve-at-peoplepc.com
http://gendergappers.blogspot.com

2007-019

Copyright 2007 Renee T. Louise and Ruth M. Sprague, Ph.D. These articles may be republished for noncommercial use only, provided that they are copied intact, and that this copyright notice is attached. Address all queries to: gapperserve@peoplepc.com.

G e n d e r G a p p e r s   ^{T M}