To mark the launch of Listening to the Silences: Women and War (Brill Publishers), co-edited by Helen Durham of the International Committee of the Red Cross Regional Delegation for the Pacific and Tracey Gurd of the Open Society Justice Initiative, OSI presented a discussion with Ambassador Swanee Hunt.
Listening to the Silences: Women and War is a collection of women s voices, each exploring a unique aspect of women s experiences and changing needs during armed conflict, and the adequacy of legal and other responses to those needs. Drawing together highly personal stories including those of a survivor of sexual slavery during World War II and a soldier recently returned from service in Iraq with tight academic analyses, this book highlights the ways in which the international community at large has historically failed to listen to women. It reveals that responses to women s requirements during times of war will continue to be inadequate so long as we persist in silencing these differing perspectives and fail to take account of women s dynamic and changing needs.
The event was hosted by James A. Goldston, executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative, with an introduction by Tracey Gurd, junior legal officer of the International Justice Program, Open Society Justice Initiative.
Special guest speaker Ambassador Swanee Hunt is chair of Women Waging Peace and director of the Women and Public Policy Program, Harvard University.