Niall Firth, technology editor
(Image: Ricardo Garcia Vilanova/AFP/Getty Images)
Earlier this month, an unnamed woman in the village of Sahl Al-Rawj, Syria, left the safety of her hiding place to plead for the lives of her husband and son as government forces advanced. She was captured and five soldiers took turns raping her as she was forced to watch her husband die.
Her shocking story - officially unverified - is just one of many reports of sexual violence against women that has come out of Syria as fighting continues between government forces and rebels. Now a crowd-mapping website, launched this week, will attempt to detail every such rape and incident of sexual violence against women throughout the conflict.
The map is the creation of the Women under Siege initiative, and uses the same crowdsourcing technology developed by Washington DC-based Ushaidi, which is also being used to calculate the death toll in the recent fighting.
Anyone who experiences or witnesses an incident is asked to report what happened via email, SMS, Twitter - using #RapeinSyria as the hashtag - or directly on the site. Reports that appear in traditional news outlets are also collated. A map of the region then shows where each attack has taken place, as well as more details about each incident when you click on the link. The stories are categorised by degrees of violence and who the perpetrators were.
Women Under Siege is also working both with refugee groups on the ground in neighbouring Lebanon and Turkey, as well Syrian activists who live abroad, to help collate the stories from their friends and relatives and bring them to the wider public.
Women under Siege director Laren Wolfe told Mashable: "The emphasis is not so much the number, but that this is a crisis. Entire communities are torn apart by sexual violence and conflict ... My hope is to get the international community to realize that [the crisis in Syria] is also a public health crisis."
(Image: Ricardo Garcia Vilanova/AFP/Getty Images)
Earlier this month, an unnamed woman in the village of Sahl Al-Rawj, Syria, left the safety of her hiding place to plead for the lives of her husband and son as government forces advanced. She was captured and five soldiers took turns raping her as she was forced to watch her husband die.
Her shocking story - officially unverified - is just one of many reports of sexual violence against women that has come out of Syria as fighting continues between government forces and rebels. Now a crowd-mapping website, launched this week, will attempt to detail every such rape and incident of sexual violence against women throughout the conflict.
The map is the creation of the Women under Siege initiative, and uses the same crowdsourcing technology developed by Washington DC-based Ushaidi, which is also being used to calculate the death toll in the recent fighting.
Anyone who experiences or witnesses an incident is asked to report what happened via email, SMS, Twitter - using #RapeinSyria as the hashtag - or directly on the site. Reports that appear in traditional news outlets are also collated. A map of the region then shows where each attack has taken place, as well as more details about each incident when you click on the link. The stories are categorised by degrees of violence and who the perpetrators were.
Women Under Siege is also working both with refugee groups on the ground in neighbouring Lebanon and Turkey, as well Syrian activists who live abroad, to help collate the stories from their friends and relatives and bring them to the wider public.
Women under Siege director Laren Wolfe told Mashable: "The emphasis is not so much the number, but that this is a crisis. Entire communities are torn apart by sexual violence and conflict ... My hope is to get the international community to realize that [the crisis in Syria] is also a public health crisis."
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