Book Review of Abu Ghraib Torture Stories
One of the Guys: Women as Aggressors and Torturers
- Edited by Tara McKelvey
- Foreward by Barbara Ehrenreich
- Afterword by Cynthia Enloe
- Contributors: Eve Ensler, Angela Y. Davis, Ada Calhoun, Karen J. Greenberg, Francine D’Amico, Lucinda Marshall, Ilene Feinman, Jumana Musa, Steven H. Miles, Erin Solaro, Elizabeth L. Hillman, Aziz Huq, Laura Frost, Timothy Kaufman-Osborn, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Katharine Viner, Kristine A. Huskey, Riva Khoshaba, LaNitra Walker, Barbara Finlay, Janis Karpinksy and Lila Rajiva
The atrocious torture that happened at the Abu Ghraib prison will remain in our collective consciousness for decades. The photos published are stomach turning and the humiliation appalling, even in today's world of violence in the mass media.
How could women have been a part of this scandal? That is the question Tara McKelvey’s book, One of the Guys: Women as Aggressors and Torturers, tackles head on. Distinguished writers and activists take the forefront in their essays about the experience of women committing horrendous acts that only men have historically been charged with. It makes the crimes seem even more awful.
What unfolds is a complex look at, not only the scandal, but also women’s role in it. The public was intensely shaken by the fact that females played a large part in the torture, the photos exposing their involvement. Private First Class Lynndie England, Specialist Megan Ambuhl and Specialist Sabrina Harman were all charged with 4 other men in the abuse at Abu Ghraib.
The pictures showed them smiling, smirking and giving the camera a thumbs up beside prisoners covered with excrement, tied up, on a leash and in degrading positions.
Each essay deals with power, violence and the uncommon connection with the female sex. What equality has brought us, including the right to vote, own businesses and land, and participation in the military, also brings the equality of the darkest parts of human beings.
A lot of the public reaction centered around the fact that people couldn’t comprehend the involvement of women in such brutality. Violence by women against men is such a rare thing compared to violence against women by men, that the shock of a role reversal to such an extreme was alarming.
This collection as a whole does not focus on the torture or the photos, but the powerful issues that lie beneath them. As Barbara Ehrenreich puts so perfectly in the foreword, “it is not enough to assimilate. We need to create a world worth assimilating into.”
