committee, the United Nations special envoy and actress told how
desperate families were risking their lives to flee sexual violence in
Syria and Iraq.
She said she had met a distraught doctor in Malta whose wife and two
children had drowned on a boat from Libya. He told her how his family
had fled the region because the “biggest threat” was sexual assault and
rape.
Jolie Pitt said: “This terror group that we are dealing with in Syria
and Iraq are absolutely dictating rape as policy, beyond something
we’ve seen before, this is actually policy. They’re saying ‘You should
do this, this is the right way to build a society, we’re asking you to
rape’.
“So we really have to have a very, very, very strong response to this particular group on this issue.”
She was backed by former British foreign secretary William Hague who
said preventing sexual violence was now a “very important strand” of UK
efforts to tackle ISIS.
“Rape and sexual violence is their actual policy, as Angelina has
said,” he told the committee. “I hope the UK, the United States, and
other leading countries in that global coalition will give increased
importance to combatting sexual violence and crimes being committed in
Iraq and Syria.”
BuzzFeed News reported last month how ISIS fighters use their faith to justify
taking women and girls – some as young as 12 – as sex slaves. According
to human rights groups, ISIS has captured thousands of Yazidi women and
children as slaves since they swept through the group’s ancestral home
in the Sinjar mountains last year.
tackling sexual violence, led by Hague as foreign secretary, had
encouraged victims to start coming “out of the shadows”, adding: “To me,
that means everything.”
She said rape was “not sexual” but a “powerful abusive weapon”. She
told peers: “I think what would happen if I was raped, or my daughters
were raped. You would want to know that it was wrong, that the world
thought it was wrong, and that the person that did this to you doesn’t
just walk free.”
Her appearance in front of the Lords committee on sexual violence in
conflict drew far more attention than other hearings along the same
parliamentary corridor. Chancellor George Osborne, who was addressing
the Treasury committee, told journalists waiting for Jolie Pitt: “I know
my place. I’m in the committee next door but I don’t expect to see you
there.”
Source: Buzzfeed
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