The year of vengeance: How neighbours turned on each other and anarchy erupted in the aftermath of WWII

Simone Segouin, the 18 year old French RГ©sistance fighter,В French female collaborator punished by having her head shaved to publicly mark her, 1944. ()ДЄ sculpture in Mujibnagar, Dhaka depicts the tens of thousands of rapes of Bengali women by the Pakistani Military in 1971. A common punishment for criminals was being placed in a box like this in public possibly until starvation. Starving Mongolian Woman: This was published in National Geographic in 1913 by Stefan Passe. Original вЂ“ A woman condemned to death in Mongolia is seen from the porthole of a crate inside which she is encumbered and left to die of starvation. On arrival these women had their own clothes taken away and replaced by the smock uniform worn in the Nazi concentration camps.В В© 2011 Yad Vashem The Holocaust MartyrsвЂ™ and HeroesвЂ™ Remembrance Authority. Women prisoners selected for work at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland, 1944. Investigation: A young Chinese woman who was in one of the Imperial Japanese ArmyвЂ™s вЂcomfort battalionsвЂ™ is interviewed by an Allied officer ( en.)ДЄ British merchant being carried by a Sikkimese lady on her back. (.uk)Дisgraceful: Four вЂComfort GirlsвЂ™ captured in the hills of Luzon, play mahjong during recess period in womanвЂ™s detention home on outskirts of Manila.The girls were part of a group which rotated among various Japanese Battalions.

Japanese officials visited a New Jersey town in April 2012 to ask for a memorial to the thousands of Korean women and girls who were enslaved to be removed. The Japanese government admitted deception, coercion and official involvement in the recruitment of comfort women in August 1993, but critics said they needed to go much further.ДЄfter JapanвЂ™s surrender it is reported that it set up a similar system there for American GIs, with tacit approval from U.S. The issue began to emerge in Korea only in the late 1980s. Several Japanese military officers were convicted for having forced the 35 Dutch women involved in the case into comfort stations.ДЇile photo shows women who were forced to serve as sex slaves for Japanese troops being transported to a Japanese military camp. When the war ended, the only military tribunal concerning the sexual abuse of comfort women took place in Batavia (now Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia) in 1948. They were also concerned with the health of the troops, which prompted close supervision of the hygienic conditions in the comfort stations to help keep STDs under control. The authorities believed the comfort system would enhance the morale of the military and help prevent soldiers from committing sexual violence toward women of occupied territories, which became a real concern after the infamous Nanjing Massacre in 1937. Japanese women and women of other occupied territories (such as Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Burma and the Pacific islands) were also used as comfort women, according to a report by San Francisco State University. Some of the girls forced into sexual slavery were as young as 12 years old, according to Chinese legal groups.ДЄn вЂinexcusable actвЂ: Historians estimate that the Japanese military forced up to 200,000 women to act as prostitutes during World War II There is no way to determine precisely how many women were forced to serve as comfort women, but estimates range from 80,000 to 200,000, of whom about 80 per cent of whom are thought to have been Korean. Military brothels existed across the Asia Pacific region in areas occupied by the Japanese forces. вЂComfort womanвЂ™ is a translation of the Japanese euphemism, jugun ianfu, (military comfort women), referring to women of various ethnic and national backgrounds and social circumstances who became sex slaves for the Japanese troops before and during World War Two.

Marked woman