— it’s time that changed
Our chief foreign correspondent has reported for decades on frontline sexual violence. What does the first leading museum to tackle the subject reveal —
and hide?
Christina Lamb, Chief Foreign Correspondent
Sunday May 18 2025, The Sunday Times
Pass the massive naval guns in front of the Imperial War Museum (IWM) and enter its spectacular atrium and you will be confronted by a Soviet tank and German V2 rocket while a Harrier jump jet and a Spitfire from the Battle of Britain dangle from the ceiling — the ultimate boys with toys fantasy.
No surprise perhaps for a country that has fought more wars (about 120 in the last 300 years) than almost any other. But something is happening — upstairs a colourful North Korean propaganda poster advertises a new exhibition, Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict.
Yes, it’s tucked away behind the lifts on the third floor and comes with a trigger warning, but it’s the first time any big western museum has tackled this subject, the dark side of what happens to (mostly) women in war.
Representations of rape in war have been in many of our leading galleries and museums for years, but are not described as such. As a foreign correspondent who has been reporting on this for years — often feeling like I’m whistling in the wind as it keeps on happening — I find it incredible to finally see it the focus of an exhibition.
“We wanted to do it because it’s a side of war we don’t talk about or see represented enough,” says the curator Helen Upcraft. The exhibition has been seven years in the making, partly because of delays caused by Covid, but that has made it more timely. In the meantime we’ve had Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the October 7 attacks in Israel and subsequent escalation of conflict with Palestine — all of which have produced widespread allegations of sexual violence, not to mention horrific reports from the Sudanese civil war with even 12-month-old babies being raped.
Giving the museum’s annual lecture last month, Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynaecologist and the founder of Panzi Hospital, which has treated 87,000 rape victims, asked: “Where is the outrage? People should be out on the streets.”
As Upcraft says, sexual violence does not happen in a vacuum, and the exhibition offers a sobering look at underlying factors — from gender stereotypes to the objectification of women exemplified by “nose art” such as a naked reclining blonde on an RAF jet in the Gulf War proclaiming “Hello Kuwait”.
Rape in war is of course nothing new. The exhibition’s first example is the German invasion of Belgium in 1914 and testimony from Belgian civilians, collected in the so-called Bryce report by the British Parliamentary Committee on German Outrages.
The next is of state-sanctioned sexual violence and sexual slavery — tens of thousands of young women and girls snatched across southeast Asia in the Second World War to be so-called “comfort women”, repeatedly raped by Japanese soldiers. A collaboration with the Museum of War and Women’s Human Rights in South Korea has provided items such as a soldier’s comfort station pass and the brave testimony of Kim Bok-dong, in 1991 the first to tell her story publicly. Photos and placards from the Wednesday demos outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul remind us that the women are still waiting for an apology from the Japanese government.
Then we see how rape can be used as a tool of genocide, hearing from two Yazidi women among thousands abducted by Islamic State fighters who swept through their villages in northern Iraq in 2014 and took them as sex slaves. More than a decade later, thousands are still in miserable conditions in displacement camps and many are still missing.
How to illustrate such an exhibition is, as Upcraft says, “a real challenge — people want to see 3D objects in glass cases”. Instead they have testimonies, documents, photos and talking heads (I am one of them).
It might have been an opportunity to exhibit the Scottish artist Peter Howson’s Croatian and Muslim, a confrontational painting of a woman with her legs spread apart by one man as another pushes her head into a lavatory. This was painted for the IWM, for whom Howson was the official war artist in the Bosnian War, but their male-dominated Acquisitions Committee refused to buy it, arguing, somewhat strangely, that he could not have witnessed the scene. David Bowie ended up buying it.
Instead they have opted for one of Albert Adams’ 2004 paintings of abuse of male Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib as a reminder that this doesn’t only happen to women (although overwhelmingly it does). Upcraft says they looked at exhibiting the Howson, but at 2.13m x 1.52m it was “too big and we wouldn’t be able to put anything else in the room as people would have to step back”. Although the Adams is not small at 1.5m x 1.5m.
Surely an exhibition on such a shocking subject needs to shock people? “It’s difficult graphic content and we don’t want to overwhelm people,” she says. “It’s a balance. If we went down the road of shock and horror people would turn off and what we want is for them to engage.
“We know it’s just a fraction of all the sexual violence happening round the world,” she adds. “What I hope is it’s a start on treating this complex subject and being better at incorporating it within our collections.”
And this is me quibbling because Unsilenced is truly groundbreaking and, one hopes, will be a wake-up call. The Justice and Reconciliation room, which importantly looks at who gets to have their day in court and who gets believed, reminds us that neither Tokyo nor the Nuremberg Tribunals prosecuted anyone for sexual violence despite horrendous evidence. Accountability continues to be the exception, not the rule.
Such is the exhibition’s power, there is a quiet room at the end. I hope people will reflect on what kind of society we live in where it’s the victim who bears the life sentence, not the perpetrator.
The updated edition of Christina Lamb's
Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women by is out now in paperback
Imperial War Museums to open UK’s first major exhibition on sexual violence in conflict.
By Mark Westall, FAD Magazine, 8 March 2025
