Protectors turn into perpetrators when the victims are women. The participants believed that those who were supposed to protect women were often guilty of further perpetuating violence against women instead. This is particularly obvious in peaceful demonstrations when the security services and police officers - who are almost all men- treat women with as much disproportionate use of force as men, even in cases where women are peacefully protesting and are clearly no match for armed men. One participant said, “Generally each woman is arrested by two or three policemen”. 204 Participants pointed to separate cases such as Daw Naw Ohn Hla, Daw Tin May Thaw and Daw Nilar Thein, all of whom faced disproportionate violence at the hands of the police, including being held down, hit with sticks, and pushed about while peacefully protesting in February 2015 outside Yangon City Hall, outnumbered by multiple male security service officers: “I want to know how men were allowed to do this and why the police allowed such unjust and unequal behaviour towards women.” 205 In other cases such as labour disputes, plainclothes police or paramilitaries have surrounded women protesters calling “arrest these bitches!”206 The participants were equally concerned about what they believed to be the purposeful detention of individual women by male police officers, with the women being taken alone to police stations without any information being provided to them or others on the reason for their detention. One participant reported a case they were working on where “policemen take young women activists individually knowing that they are young, unmarried and feel both fearful and embarrassed to be detained alone by men. According to our culture, men shouldn’t do this. The police know this very well and purposefully scare women using both mental and physical tactics intended to make them worry about being raped.”207 Another participant pointed to the case of a heavily pregnant woman who lost her baby after three male police officers grabbed her with excessive force.208 One participant who has been in and out of Insein Prison since 2010 said that, once behind bars, women face significant psychological violence from prison guards who abuse them, joke and laugh at them, and constantly use abusive language. The participant added that the prison guards know that such women have no access to support mechanisms, are often unaware of the crime they are supposed to have committed, and are constantly caught “in a cycle” of police detention and release when they are living on the street. Another participant said that the military often perpetuate gender-based violence. She believed that soldiers are given permission – or at least never sanctioned – to threaten women: “When I criticised the sexist attitudes of soldiers guarding the military compound within which my family live, the soldiers threatened me saying that I was a member of [a political party] and next time I spoke out they would take me directly to prison. They said ‘You women don’t understand what military administration is’.”209 Institutions ignore gender-based violence, leading to impunity. The notoriously unpunished statement of an army commander to his soldiers is illustrative of the way in which institutions ignore gender-based violence such as rape “in the front line, everything in the village is yours - women, domestic animals. You are free to do anything you want even if you have a wife at home in your village.”210 Access to justice, whether in armed conflict areas or elsewhere is also difficult for women. One participant, a sexual rights defender, said, “There is no fair judicial process [for women] … when we complained to the Quarter Administrator [about an assault by 30 men ARTICLE 19 - Censored gender: Women’s right to freedom of expression and information in Myanmar - Page 78