Women's Bodies as Battlefield

Women's Bodies as Battlefields makes a strong argument for the fact that the so-called 'War on Women' is not a metaphor. Violence against women is a global war on women, where their bodies literally become the battlefields. The reality of women's bodies as battlefields connects violence against women with war itself. There are social, cultural and religious supports a society needs to employ in order that more than a third of women in that society can be treated violently, or threatened with violence, without mass outcry and rebellion. These social, cultural and religious supports overlap with many of those that are necessary for societies to be willing to send the young, healthy bodies of its citizens into war where many of them will be maimed or killed, also without mass outcry or rebellion. The three most crucial of these supports in common between the war on women and war itself are the desire for power, hierarchical authority structures, and contempt for the body. Moreover, it will be shown in this argument that war and violence against women not only have some of the same social, cultural and religious roots, these roots are also mutually reinforcing.
Paradigms designed to limit or prevent war, Pacifism, Just War and Just Peace, are critiqued from the perspective of violence against women, and a practical proposal for positive changes to more deeply engage in the prevention of both the war on women and war is made to the Just Peace paradigm.