The BBC News is reporting that Ingrid Betancourt’s health is fine, in spite of six years of brutal captivity. Again, as before, the article seems to hint around at the possibility of sexual violence. When asked about the possibility that the Colombian government may have paid a ransom to free the captors, Betancourt’s responded,

If it were true, so much the better. Why not?” she said. “I suffered terribly.”

She described one of her captors, who she called Enrique, as being a man “of special cruelty”.

Although the article doesn’t specifically say, “she was raped,” the fact that all the articles I read about Betancourt keep hinting at some dark repressive form of abuse (as if being held in the jungle against your will for six years isn’t bad enough) is disturbing to me.

Whether or not a woman was raped while held in captivity always seems to be the unasked question in these situations. Remember Jessica Lynch?

The authorized biography, I Am A Soldier Too: The Jessica Lynch Story, by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Rick Bragg states that Lynch had been raped during her captivity, based on medical records and her pattern of injuries.

However, Lynch has since stated that she does not recall any sexual assault and was “adamantly opposed to including the rape claim in the book”, but that Bragg wore her down and told her that “people need to know that this was what can happen to women soldiers.”

Can rape not happen to male soldiers as well? I think that there is something deeper going on here. Some reason why rape seems to be the first thing that people are concerned about when it comes to women caught up in political battles between largly male governments/organizations. I think that it’s critically important to bring rape out into the open and demand it be stopped. But it also really bothers me that rape is not something that is discussed in the media with any amount of consistency at all.

Many times, rape in the media is actually portrayed in violent and horrible ways that wind up revictimizing the survivor. So in the case of women being held captive, why is it so essential to bring her story to the public?