What About Reparations for Women?

Is It Time We Acknowledge the Hardships Women Have Suffered?

Content Warning: This story discusses rape, sexual assault, and violence, and might be a trigger for some readers. Proceed if that’s okay with you.

It was sometime in mid-June of 1945, in Berlin Germany, where the second world war had just begun to wrap up in the European theater. The German military that was left in the city, about 200,000 soldiers, remained to fight to the last man and woman, defending some 2,000,000 civilians. What ensued was utter carnage. It was a bloodbath. But this bloodbath overshadowed a darker, covert, yet, terrifyingly sinister series of events that would unfold as the Soviet war machine pummeled the German capital: the mass rape of German women. Soldiers in the Red Army were given what amounts to essentially a free license to do as they pleased with the survivors. If you ever wondered what happened in the immediate aftermath of the second world war, at least in Europe, the answer is rape and lots of it. The thought of it makes me cringe, honestly…

It’s a story as old as time and war itself. Women becoming the proverbial and literal booty of lost conflicts since time immemorial, and it goes much deeper than that. With the long-overdue question of reparations for African Americans being raised, one can’t help…