Understanding Sexual Violence in Conflict, Program March 12th

Memorial to the ComfortWomen
in Chiba Prefecture, Japan
erected 1973

Understanding Sexual Violence in Conflict:
Regional Views of the Comfort Women Legacy

Featuring

Shu-Hua Kang
Taipei Women’s Rescue Foundation

Mina Watanabe
Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace

Thursday, March 12, 2015
10:00AM – NOON
Rome Auditorium
1619 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20036

RSVP HERE

Event webcast HERE

Please join the U.S.-Korea Institute at SAIS and Asia Policy Point in commemorating International Women’s Day this month with a discussion by two spokeswomen for the survivors of sexual slavery. Ms. Mina Watanabe and Ms. Shu-Hua Kang have devoted their careers to the care of and advocacy for victims of sexual violence and trafficking in Asia, and will be in Washington after presenting at the 59th session of the Commission on the Status of Women at the United Nations in New York.

Shu-Hua KANG is Executive Director of the Taipei Women’s Rescue Foundation (TWRF). TWRF was established in 1987 by a group of lawyers, scholars, and social workers to fight on the behalf of girls illegally forced into prostitution. In her 9 years at TWRF, she has devoted herself to promoting awareness about institutionalized sexual slavery by the Japanese military during WWII (“comfort women”), as well as to the prevention of gender violence in Taiwan. She is the executive producer of Song of the Reed, a documentary depicting the stories of Taiwanese "comfort women" survivors, as well as the chief editor of the book The Reason to be Strong, which shares the recovery processes of these survivors. She is currently leading a team in preparing for a women’s rights museum in the memory of Taiwanese “comfort women.”

Mina WATANABE is Secretary General of the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace (WAM) based in Tokyo, which focuses on violence against women in conflict situations including military sexual slavery during the Second World War (the “comfort women”). Founded in 2005, WAM was a recipient of the Catholic Pax Christi’s International Peace Award in 2007. She has worked in women’s NGOs and parliamentarians’ offices with a focus on women’s rights, and was actively involved in The Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal for the Trial of Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery held in Tokyo in 2000.

Copies of YOSHIMI Yoshiaki’s seminal book Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War II will be available for purchase.