ABSTRACT
The use of dirty war tactics as a common strategy in modern conflict has placed women and their dependants at the epicentre of war’s violence. The injuries and abuse sustained by women are only now beginning to gain international attention. Derek Summerfield reports that research has found higher levels of anxiety and depression in women than men following war in developing countries, with women who have been widowed, lost a child or been raped being particularly vulnerable to depression and posttraumatic stress disorders (Summerfield 1991, p. 165). However, as Carolyn Nordstrom (1991, p.3) highlights, women are not just hapless victims of political violence. In reality, when their lives are at stake, women fight, whether or not they are part of a recognised fighting force. The assumptions that women don’t fight; that they stand somehow removed from the waging and immediacy of ‘real war’, and that unless they are soldiers in fighting forces, they are not considered as constituting a part of war miss the reality of today’s battlefields.
