In an article on the 23rd September BBC correspondent Yolande Knell reported on a disturbing rise in violence against women and girls in the Gaza Strip, including rape and sexual assault, forced and child marriage, domestic abuse and sexual exploitation.
But in an article about violence against women, one group receives remarkably little scrutiny: the perpetrators.
Instead, the BBC’s report, based largely on recent research by the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), constructs gender-based violence primarily through the living conditions of displaced Gazan women.
Readers learn about overcrowded tents, poverty, food shortages, inadequate sanitation, lack of privacy and poorly lit communal toilets. They are told that the destruction and displacement of the war have “broken down social structures”, while aid agencies argue that some dangers could be reduced by better shelters, sanitation and lighting.
These conditions undoubtedly matter. A woman forced to use an unlit communal toilet at night is more vulnerable to an attacker than a woman with secure sanitation inside her home. Overcrowding can deprive women of privacy and make escaping an abusive family member more difficult. Poverty can make victims more dependent upon those abusing them. But these are conditions which facilitate violence. They do not perpetrate it.
That distinction becomes difficult to ignore when the BBC’s own reporting contains repeated examples of individual human agency:
“One displaced woman in a school-turned-shelter in Gaza highlights how rape victims are often married to their rapists to avoid shame and scandal. “When rape cases are discovered in schools, you find weddings and celebrations at the school the next day,” she says.
Another woman tells how last year, at the time of famine, “a man married off his 14-year-old daughter in exchange for two bags of flour so he and his [other] children could eat”. Six women in different displacement camps shared stories of such exchanges”
“One woman in a Gaza City camp interviewed for the report says she attended the wedding of two girls from her family, aged just 14 and 15.
“Their uncles married them off very young. Do you know why? Because their father and mother were martyred, and their uncles wanted to get rid of the responsibility and expenses,” the woman said.”
“One widow was looking for a tent, and a [camp] representative told her, “I’ll give you a tent, we’ll put you in our camp, and you can come stay with me tonight,” recalls a woman in Gaza City”
These are not acts committed by poverty, displacement or inadequate lighting. They involve Gazan men making decisions about women and girls.
Knell herself provides one of the clearest indications that material conditions alone cannot explain what is happening. Discussing the effects of the war on children, the BBC notes that boys face pressure to find informal work to support their families. Girls, meanwhile, face heightened concerns about their safety. The children inhabit the same devastated economy. They experience the same displacement and shortages. Yet the responses described by the BBC are profoundly gendered: boys are sent to work; girls may be sent into marriage.
Why?
The BBC’s only hint at the reasons for this is the offensive euphemism that Gaza has:
“a socially conservative society”
Marriage is described as preserving female modesty. Rape can produce “shame and scandal” for the victim severe enough that marriage to her alleged rapist is presented as a solution. Male relatives make decisions about whether teenage girls should marry. Marriage itself is understood by some families as a means of protecting girls. These are beliefs about gender, family authority, female sexuality and marriage. Beliefs which were not created by Israel or the war, and beliefs which are more than “socially conservative”.
Child marriage, for example, was a significant phenomenon in Gaza before the current war. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics in 2023, 19%, very nearly 1 in 5, registered marriages in the Gaza Strip involved girls under 18. The intensification of an existing practice cannot simply be laid at the door of the IDF or the Israeli government.
The BBC reports:
“distressing cases of girls who have been married and suffered abuse, often becoming pregnant. They say that those in their early teens are much more likely to have miscarriages and underweight babies than adult women.
“We see adolescent pregnancies going through the roof because of child marriage,” says Owomuhangi. “A child who is at an age when the body is not fully developed to sustain another body, who is hungry, in unhygienic circumstances, who doesn’t know how to take care of the infant, who doesn’t even know how to take care of herself, the consequences of that pregnancy are always really, really bad.”
The decision to abuse and impregnate a child is one made by individual men, informed by beliefs about entitlement to women’s bodies, not by airstrikes or tents. Better lighting can reduce opportunities for sexual assault. Secure toilets can make women safer. Better shelters can provide privacy and reduce exposure to harassment and abuse. None of this is controversial. But the rapist must exist for the rape to occur.
That distinction becomes particularly important in the BBC’s article because Israeli agency is considerably easier to identify than the agency of those abusing Palestinian women.
Israeli air strikes, Israeli restrictions on materials, displacement and destruction are repeatedly identified. Towards the end of the article:
“There are calls for Israel to allow higher quality shelters into the territory as well as equipment to upgrade latrines and sanitation as well as lighting. Israel restricts items it classes as having a potential dual use for military purposes.”
Is Israel ultimately responsible for how men in Gaza treat the women around them? Where is the examination of their responsibility in this? Or is the BBC’s argument that Palestinian male violence exists like a weather system, and if there’s a hole in the tent it will inevitably get in? There is something deeply uncomfortable about an account of violence against Palestinian women which renders the perpetrators as environmental and unable to help themselves.
Palestinians are not acted upon by circumstances without possessing moral agency of their own. Poverty can constrain choices without eliminating choice. Culture can influence behaviour without making behaviour inevitable. Social norms are not immutable characteristics of an ethnic group, they are beliefs and practices which people can reproduce, resist and change.
Indeed, some of the strongest evidence against the “they don’t know better” formulation suggested by Knell’s article comes from Palestinian women themselves. They recognise the decisions being made around them. They identify fathers, uncles, rapists and other men abusing positions of power. Their testimony should not be transformed into a story in which those perpetrators become secondary to the physical environment in which they operate.
The humanitarian situation in Gaza may have made women and girls more vulnerable to violence. It may have increased opportunities for perpetrators and intensified economic pressures on families. But vulnerability is not a perpetrator. Darkness does not sexually assault a woman walking to a toilet. Hunger does not force a child into marriage. Overcrowding does not rape.
Men do.
A serious examination of violence against Palestinian women should be capable of examining both the circumstances which make women vulnerable and the agency, choices and beliefs of those who exploit that vulnerability. The BBC’s report overwhelmingly examines the former, Palestinian women deserve journalism willing to examine the latter too.