The actress and UN envoy told the House of Lords that refugees were drowning to escape rape at home.
In heartbreaking evidence to a House of Lords committee, the United Nations special envoy and actress told how desperate families were risking their lives to flee sexual violence in Syria and Iraq.
She said she had met a distraught doctor in Malta whose wife and two children had tragically drowned on a boat from Libya. He told her how his family had fled the region because the biggest threat was sexual assault and rape.
Jolie Pitt said: This terror group that we are dealing with in Syria and Iraq are absolutely dictating rape as policy, beyond something weve seen before, this is actually policy. They’re saying You should do this, this is the right way to build a society, were asking you to rape.
So we really have to have a very, very, very strong response to this particular group on this issue.
She was backed by former British foreign secretary William Hague who said preventing sexual violence was now a very important strand of UK efforts to tackle ISIS.
Rape and sexual violence is their actual policy, as Angelina has said, he told the committee. I hope the UK, the United States and other leading countries in that global coalition will give increased importance to combating sexual violence and crimes being committed in Iraq and Syria.
BuzzFeed News told last month how ISIS fighters use their faith to justify taking women and girls some as young as 12 as sex slaves. According to human rights groups, ISIS has captured thousands of Yazidi women and children as slaves since they swept through the groups ancestral home in the Sinjar mountains last year.
Jolie Pitt said an increasing global focus on tackling sexual violence, led by Hague as foreign secretary, had encouraged victims to start coming out of the shadows, adding: To me, that means everything.
She said rape was not sexual but a powerful abusive weapon. She told peers: I think what would happen if I was raped, or my daughters were raped. You would want to know that it was wrong, that the world thought it was wrong, and that the person that did this to you does’nt just walk free.
Her appearance in front of the Lords committee on sexual violence in conflict drew far more attention than other hearings along the same parliamentary corridor.
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