Rape and Sexual Violence Flashcards
Long history of sexual violence as a war crime?
SHANKER
- 1471, Peter von Hagenbach convicted for the subduance of Breisach, Austria
- American Civil War, rape a capital crime in the Union Army from 1863
How did the Hague convention 1909 protect against sexual violence? When was it used
SHANKER
Article 46 of the Hague Conventions bound subscribers to protect ‘family honour and rights’
- Invoked by the Tokyo tribunal for the pandemic rape of Nanking, China
What did Article 47 of the Geneva Conventions, 1949, say?
SHANKER
- ‘women shall be protected against any attack on their honour, in particular, against rape, enforced prostitution, or any form of indecent assault’.
Sexual violence against men?
SHANKER
- Dusko Tadic, convicted of making Omarska inmate bite off another inmate’s testicle
- Celebici case: prosecution pursued ‘cruel treatment’ charges, but judge said that rape charges would have been accepted.
- Ante Furundzija, a Bosnian Croat, commanded a colleage to rape a detainee, and was convicted of rape-as-torture. First case where UN refered to ‘victim’, not ‘male/female’
Case study: the trial of Jean Paul Akayesu
SHANKER
- ‘the most groundbreaking decision on gender-related crimes’
- rape considered to be a crime against humanity and a tool of the Rwandan Genocice
- Also convicted of inhumane acts for forced nudity
- found rape was ‘systematic and was perpetrated against all Tutsi women and solely against them.’
- ‘rape and sexual violence constitute genocide in the same way as any other act’ if ‘done with intent to destroy the protected group in whole or part’
How can rape be prosecuted?
SHANKER
- Article 147 of the 4th Geneva Convention
- Common Article III (c) of the Geneva Convention: treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria….(no) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment;
- Violation of the laws and customs of war
The statute for the establishment of a permanent International Criminal Court, July 17th 1998
SHANKER
- grants jurisdiction to prosecute rape, enforced prostitution, sexual slavery, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization
How broadly did the Rwanda and Yugoslavia tribunals define sexual violence?
SHANKER
‘forced marriage, forced abortion, forced nudity, sexual mutilation, sexual humiliation’ - all included, so broad definition
Case Study: Foca, Bosnia
RODRIGUE
First sexual slavery prosecution in any international criminal proceeding
- June 1996, ICTY issues indictment against 8 Bosnian Serbs for enslavement and rape of Muslim women in Foca, eastern Bosnia.
- Girls tortured and raped over several months
- At least 72 held in school, sports house, make shift brother
How far can we extrapolate general terms from case studies of sexual enslavement in Bosnia?
RODRIGUE
‘victims statements indicate overwhelmingly that what happened to this particular girl in Foca was anything but unique. Multiple witnesses, interviewed seperately, described “rape camps” throughout Bosnian Serb-controlled territory, as well as a far smaller number of camps run by Croatian and Bosnian government forces.
Precursors to Bosnian ‘rape camps’ ?
RODRIGUE
- Japanese ‘comfort women’ in brothels
- Netherlands tribunal convicted japanese of ‘enforced prostitution’ of 35 Dutch women.
In what circumstances does sexual slavery constitute a crime against humanity?
RODRIGUE
can be considered enslavement - a crime against humanity - if part of a ‘widespread and systematic attack against a civilian population’
So: comfort women held for easy sexual access by troops, but in Bosnia, a targeted campaign of sexual violence to ‘terrorise and demonise the enemy’
on the legal basis of slavery prosecutions
RODRIGUE
- ‘The legal basis for prosecuting those responsible for rape, enslavement, enforced prosecution and sexual slavery has long existed, even if prosecutions have not always been robust’
What is systematic rape?
STIGLMAYER
no specific crime under international law, but, in reality, the phrase ‘systematic rape’ describes crimes committed against women in Bosnia-Herzgovina
to prove rape as a crime against humanity, must prove not that the rape was widespread/systematic, but that the attack was, and that rape was a means of attack. Systematic may establish intent, which may establish GENOCIDE
Why are women raped?
STIGLMAYER
- ‘Women in conflict zones are frequently raped to humiliate and degrade as part of a pogrom
- to terrorize
- to drive away the unwanted ethnic “other”
- to demoralise men associated with raped women
How can rape constitute genocide
STIGLMAYER
International Criminal Tribunal of Rwanda:
- rape and sexual violence constitute genocide in the same way as any other act’ if ‘done with intent to destroy the protected group in whole or part’
- Rape “was a step in the process of the destruction of the Tutsi group - destruction of the spirit, of the will to live, and of life itself.’
–> Akayesu convicted Sep 2nd 1998
SHARLACK’s thesis
Rape certainly may cause serious physical and/or mental injury to the survivor, and also may destroy the morale of her family and ethnic community.
However, this Convention does not explicitly state that sexual violence is a crime of genocide.
The Convention should be expanded to include mass rape, regardless of whether the victims are raped on the basis of racial/ethnic, national, or religious identity.
Why does SHARLACK suggest that rape should be added to the convention on genocide?
The Genocide Convention should be expanded to include mass rape, regardless of whether the victims are raped on the basis of racial/ethnic, national, or religious identity.
INTENT TO DESTROY SHOUD, ON MY ANALYSIS, MERIT THE SAME STATUS under international law as the intent to destroy people on the basis of ethnicity, nation, and religion.
Sharlack on the stigma of sexual violence
rape as genocide appears to occur to ethnic groups that strongly stigmatize rape survivors rather than rapists. In such communities, women in their roles as mothers of the nation and as transmitters of culture symbolize the honor of the ethnic group. When a woman’s honor is tarnished through rape, the ethnic group is also dishonored.
Post-rape trauma is compounded by “the second rape” of becoming a pariah
What are some of the traumatic consequences for rape survivors?
UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, Radhika Coomaraswamy
UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, Radhika Coomaraswamy
trauma; sexual apathy or promiscuity; substance abuse; depression; psychosomatic ailments; anger; loss of sense of womanhood; and confusion about one’s identity.
Genocide against the female sex?
SHARLACK
encompass social groups might permit international criminal courts to deem mass rape to be genocide, intended to harm or destroy the female sex in whole or in part, regardless of whether the sexual violence had an ethnically or racially based motivation.
How are the effects of genocide gender specific?
Girls and women are far more likely than are men to be the targets of sexual violence used as a component of genocide, but it is rare that analysts perceive rape to be a component of genocide.
Catherine McKinnon on rape as a tool of Serbian Ethnic Cleansing
It is also rape unto death, rape as massacre, rape to kill and to make the victims wish they were dead. It is rape as an instrument of forced exile, rape to make you leave your home and never want to go back. It is rape to be seen and heard and watched and told to others: rape as spectacle. It is rape to drive a wedge through a community, to shatter a society, to destroy a people. It is rape as genocide.
Siobhan Fisher on rape vs forced impregnation
Siobhan Fisher, writing of the Serbs’ rape-until-pregnant campaign against Muslim and ethnically Croatian females in Bosnia–Herzegovina, argues that forced impregnation, not rape per se, constitutes genocide.
victims cannot carry the babies of men of their own ethnic group while their wombs are so “occupied.” - preventing births
Sharlach on gendered discrimination in the UNGC
SHARLACH
Genocide is the attempt to destroy a people, and at present women are not included under the rubric of people unless attempts are made to destroy men at the same time as women.
Genocide and rape of bengalis in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh)
During the 1971 nine-month war between East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and West Pakistan (now Pakistan), approximately 3 million people died.
The genocide against East Pakistani Bengalis (an ethnic group comprised of both Hindus and Muslims) during the war of 1971 was fuelled by West Pakistani perceptions of Bengalis as racially inferior.
After raping the women, soldiers often murdered them by forcing a bayonet between their legs. The pre- pubescent girls who were cut and gang-raped often died thereafter from the injuries. There are many reports of women and girls who survived the assaults and later killed themselves.
How many women were sexually assaulted in Yugoslavia?
Estimates of the number of women sexually assaulted during the conflict in the early 1990s vary from 10,000 to 60,000.3
How were women raped in yugoslavia?
Soldiers assaulted some women in the streets, others in their homes. Still others they took to concentration camps, a few of which were known as “rape camps.”
Second rape in Yugoslavia
Muslim religious leaders in Bosnia–Herzegovina urged bachelors to marry the single women and girls who had suffered rape, but few did.
Kosovars tend to see rape as a humiliation of the entire family, and they do not perceive the raped women and girls to be innocent victims. The death of the family member deled by rape may seem the only way to restore the family’s honor.
How was rape in Bosnia Herzegovina different to in Pakistan or Rwanda?
- not merely to drive away and to harm non-Serb women, but to rape them repeatedly to ensure that they became pregnant.
- In many cases the soldiers intentionally detained women until abortion was no longer possible.
Evidence that rape in Bosnia-Herzogovina was systematic
(1) that rapes in non-contiguous parts of Bosnia–Herzegovina had similar characteristics, including raping edu- cated or upper-class women rst and forcing family members conned in the same camp to perform incest;
(2) that the rapes happened in different sections of Bosnia–Herzegovina simultaneously and accompanied the ghting;
(3) that many rapes took place within official detention centers with identical layouts
Rape in Rwanda
Rape of Tutsi girls and women took place in every part of Rwanda between April 6 and July 12, 1994
The UN’s Special Rapporteur on Rwanda estimates that in this tiny country there were between 250,000 and 500,000 rapes
Rape in the Rwandan genocide usually preceded murder, or was intended to cause fatal injuries.
the deliberate transmission of HIV was a unique component of rape as genocide in Rwanda - for a Hutu man known to be HIV-positive to rape a Tutsi woman is in essence protracted genocide
‘Second rape’ in Rwanda
Rwandan women are often unwilling to admit they have been raped because of the terrible social stigma that accompanies rape. President of a Rwandan widows’ association, Felicite ́ Umutanguha Layika, explains that their family and neighbors may perceive rape survivors to have been willing participants and even complicit with the Interahamwe in the genocide.
Karekezi on genocide in Rwanda vs Genocide in Yugoslavia
in Yugoslavia, for example it was used as—sexual violence was used as ethnic cleansing, too. The Serbian was trying to have children from Muslim women. Here, it wasn’t used like that. Pregnancy was a consequence, but not aimed to have children through them. But the goal of the men … was to weaken, to destroy, in this case the Tutsi, in Rwanda.
How has the Rwandan Parliament responded to the accusations of Rape in the Rwandan genocide?
Rwanda’s Parliament took several years to agree upon the genocide law, which divides genocide crimes into four levels.71
The first level carries a mandatory death penalty. This category is reserved for the planners of the genocide, those implicated who held public or military office, and those who were especially ruthless and prolic killers.
The second level of the genocide law is for those who were not leaders, but who participated in the killings.
The third level is for assault (not murder), and the fourth is for crimes against property
How has the Rwandan Parliament responded to the accusations of Rape in the Rwandan genocide?
Rwanda’s Parliament took several years to agree upon the genocide law, which divides genocide crimes into four levels.71
The first level carries a mandatory death penalty. This category is reserved for the planners of the genocide, those implicated who held public or military office, and those who were especially ruthless and prolic killers.
The second level of the genocide law is for those who were not leaders, but who participated in the killings.
The third level is for assault (not murder), and the fourth is for crimes against property
BUT
With respect to Rwanda, for example, it is not possible to jail or to execute three-quarters of the adult population of Rwanda and many of its minors as well.
Inadequacy of the Rwandan justice system? Evidence:
Sharlach
However, not one man has yet been found guilty within the Rwandan courts of perpetrating rape during the genocide.
(as of 2000), BUT now have been progressive prosecutions (eg Jean Paul Akayesu).
Helene Sinnreich (2008), dehumanisation and rape
the notion that dehumanising Nazi propaganda would create a barrier to rape contradicts numerous theorists who argue that rather than deter rape, the rendering of a victim as sub-human enables a perpetrator.
Catherine Derderian - rape and Turks
Helene Sinnreich (2008)
rape helped the Turks dehumanise the Armenians.
Conversely, the dehumanisation of the Armenians made it easier for the Turks to rape them.
Copelon - war and violence
Helene Sinnreich (2008)
War tends to intensify the brutality, repetitiveness, public spectacle, and likelihood of rape. War diminishes sensitivity to human suffering and intensifies men’s sense of entitlement, superiority, avidity, and social license to rape.
Reasons why historians have failed to explore rape of Jewish women
Helene Sinnreich (2008)
gender bias in Holocaust scholarship
significant work on the particulars of women’s experience during the Holocaust did not appear until the mid and late 1990s
mistaken belief in the idea that Germans implemented their genocidal policies with unwavering ideological purity has caused many to turn a blind eye to numerous sources, German and Jewish, which testify to the realities of Jewish experiences during the war.
Helene Sinnreich (2008), Ana C’s testimony
the Germans took Jewish women from the Lodz Ghetto for forced prostitution
she herself was selected for this duty
Helene Sinnreich (2008), other testimonies suggesting systematic sexual exploitation of Jewish women
in her memoir I was There, Frances Penney claims that such a list of women was created in the Vilna Ghetto.
Another survivor from Lithuania testified that very attractive women were rounded up and selected for ‘labour’ in the Kaunas ghetto.
Emil G. reported that while he was in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Germans arranged a ‘show’ where they took 20 Jewish women prisoners and raped them in front of one of the labour groups. Emil reported that the male prisoners were supposed to stand and applaud.
Helene Sinnreich (2008), necrophilia and power
numerous testimonies from a variety of camps which discuss women being sexually violated after death. As a way of expressing power over a corpse, this act of necrophilia further desecrated and dehumanised both the deceased and living witnesses
Helene Sinnreich (2008), Lya C’s testimony of Haidari concentration camp, Greece
every morning the commandant would select the seven most attractive female prisoners - the same seven women. One day, one of the women was sick and he approached Lya. Lya was 14 - she thought the girls were cleaning the rooms; instead she was raped by a young German
Weitsman (2008), the unique plight of babies born as a result of govt-orchestrated mass rape
The cloud of shame that nearly always follows these children throughout their lives undermines their human rights in critical ways.
Weitsman (2008), rape’s functions as a tactic in genocide
- intimidates
- degrades
- humiliates
- tortures
Weitsman (2008), under what circumstances is rape a ‘particularly potent form of torture’?
in patriarchal societies in which a woman’s standing derives from her relationship to the men in her family: her brothers, father, husband, and sons
In many cases, if a woman is unmarried, her worth derives from her status as a virgin. Once raped, society no longer deems her marriageable or socially viable
Weitsman (2008), Nazi ideology and prohibition of rape
The Nazis viewed racial purity as the absence of any non-Aryan blood, whether maternally or paternally derived. Sexual intercourse between “racially impure” individuals and Aryans was prohibited because it would “taint” the offspring
Weitsman (2008), Serbian militias and rape
Serbian militias, in contrast, sought to impregnate Bosnian Muslim women so that they would bear “Serbian” children. In this case, identity was viewed as exclusively paternally derived.
serves to ‘occupy the womb’ of the women in question
Weitsman (2008), where rape does represents ethnic cleansing
Policies of mass rape designed to humiliate and degrade a population to such an extent that people leave en masse, thereby advancing the goal of ethnic cleans ing
Weitsman (2008), children born of
purely as “the other,” despite their birth mothers’ identities …inextricably linked to their rapist fathers.
TWO CASES
Bosnia - they are called “a generation of children of hate.”
Rwanda - known as “children of bad memories,” “children of hate,” and “unwanted children.”
Primary Source: Foca testimony
Oosterman, a member of the prosecution investigation team, testified against Serbian leader Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic in July 1996. “The soldiers told often that they were forced to do it. They did not say who forced them to do it, but they were ordered do it.” Her testimony continued, “They wanted to make Serb or Chetnik babies. The pattern was, yes, all over the same.”
Weitsman (2008), Rwandan genocide and gendered policy
Much of the propaganda leading up to the killing was directed at Tutsi women, especially in regards to their supposed promiscuity and their feelings of superiority toward Hutu men, who were considered unattractive and lower class.
As a consequence, much of the violence was directed at women
Weitsman (2008), One Tutsi woman, who was taken by the Interahamwe (Hutu militias) to observe the mass slaughter and be the lone survivor to tell the tale to God of the Tutsis’ demise…
witnessed:
- the spearing of a baby as it emerged from its mother’s body
- a multitude of rapes with foreign objects, such as machetes and spears, and the burning of women’s pubic hair afterwards
- Pregnant women were sliced open and the fetuses removed from their bodies
Weitsman, the purpose of systematic rape in Rwanda
systematic rape that took place during the widespread killing in Rwanda was undertaken with the express purpose of degrading, humiliating, punishing, and torturing Tutsi women
Weitsman: the ideological foundations of rape in Rwanda
- the view of Tutsi women as sexual objects requiring subjugation
- the patriarchal structure of society
Weitsman (2008), Rwandan govt - rape as a tool. HIV
Nearly 70 percent of the women raped contracted HIV. Rwandan President Paul Kagame said, “We knew that the government was bringing AIDS patients out of the hospitals specifically to form battalions of rapists.”
Sharlach (2000) on whether rape and rape cum genocide are the same thing.
Rape harms a woman whether or not it takes place in the midst of genocide. Copelon fears that when courts treat rape during genocide specially, they are in effect indicating that rape that does not take place during genocide is not a crime of equal magnitude.
Bos (2006), feminist interpretations of wartime rape
analysis of rape as primarily motivated by power
and control (sex is merely the chosen vehicle through which to inflict
harm on a woman rather than the motive for the act)
Brownmiller, Against Our Will
Bos (2006)
She suggests further that rape is
integral to legitimizing patriarchy
when given the opportunity, for instance during war or military occupation,
men should indeed be expected to rape.
and has been much more prevalent
throughout history than has been previously acknowledged
Bos (2006) critique of Brownmiller
Brownmiller’s tendency to view rape and the
politics of rape as both common and universal throughout history, as in
essence ahistorical or transhistorical and transcultural, can lead to a decontextualization of specific incidences of rape and a near demonizing of
all men.
Thus:
it remains to a great extent unexamined if and how sexual
violence during wartime belongs to the same continuum of patriarchal
violence against women or whether it is indeed an altogether different
phenomenon from everyday, peacetime rape
Bos: Two approaches to understanding gender and genocide
sexism approach - women as the collective target
and object of rape are emphasized
genocide approach, in which the ethnicity or race of the women is the focus and women are seen as
collectively violated as a particular ethnic or racial group rather than, or
in addition to, as women.
both of these ways of viewing the conflict—along
gender or ethnic/racial lines—played a role in the ideology that fueled
the wars and in the violence itself: it was both sexual and ethnic/racial.
Bos (2006), significance of sexist vs genocidal approaches to rape
Most local Yugoslav feminists and
a number of American feminist rape advocates argued that intervention
should take place on behalf of all women who were facing rape in this conflict: Bosnian women, certainly, but Croatian and Serb women as well.
Other scholars argued instead that since the Serb attack on the Bosnian
women seemed to be planned and systemic and since Serbs were the main
aggressors in this war, attempts at intervention should focus on helping
Bosnian women and on condemning Serb men specifically.
Underlying this disagreement was a debate over whether the rapes
should be seen in essence as sexist in nature or as genocidal
Bos (2006), feminist law scholar Rhonda Copelon
the women were raped not primarily because of their ethnicity but because of their sex
Bos (2006), harm and agency
Because the focus of analysis is exclusively on the harm caused by rape, the victimization of women is at the center,
fail to acknowledge that forms of harm other than rape may have been as damaging or more so and should have required intervention as well.
This assumption was in fact contested by many of the rape victims themselves.
MacKinnon
in the Bosnian context, rape was ‘a tool, a tactic, a policy, a plan, a strategy, as well as a practice’:
rape as genocide, rape directed toward women because they are Muslim or Croatian. But when rape is a genocidal act, as it is here, it is an act to destroy a people. What is done to women defines that destruction. … This is not rape out of control. It is rape under control.
MacKinnon on the varying forms/uses of rape
It is also rape unto death, rape as massacre, rape to kill and to make the victims wish they were dead. It is rape as an instrument of forced exile, rape to make you leave your home and never want to go back. It is rape to be seen and heard and watched and told to others: rape as spectacle
Copelon critique of MacKinnon
The elision of genocide and rape in the focus on ‘genocidal rape’ … [is] dangerous. Rape and genocide are separate atrocities. Genocide – the effort to destroy a people – based on its identity as a people evokes the deepest horror and warrants the severest condemnation.
Rape is sexualized violence that seeks to humiliate, terrorize, and destroy a woman based on her iden- tity as a woman
Taylor, Sacrifice as Terror: The Rwandan Genocide of 1994 (1994)
the genocide ‘was about power relations between men and women perhaps as much as it was about power relations between groups of men.
Among other things, ‘to many Rwandans gender relations in the 1980s and 1990s were falling into a state of decadence as more women attained positions of prominence in economic and public life.’ Genocide was an extremist back- lash ‘to reclaim both patriarchy and the Hutu revolution’.
African Rights, 1995, Rwanda: Not So Innocent - Women As Killers
Rwanda: Not So Innocent – Women As Killers, argued that an emphasis on women as victims of the geno- cide had tended to ‘obscur[e] the role of women as aggressors’. ‘When it came to mass murder’, wrote the authors, ‘there were a lot of women who needed no encouragement.’
women participated in the persecution, murder, and sexual enslavement of Tutsi women,
Lentin’s argument
called for ‘the definition of genocide [to] be gendered’, since ‘catastrophes, genocidal or otherwise … target women in very specific ways due to their social, ethnic and national construction.’
El-Bushra’s argument
- rejected an understanding of gendered power relations based on ‘a simplistic divide between power/men on the one hand and powerlessness/ women on the other’.
women may well be active in peace-work in many contexts, they are also often in the forefront of demands for aggression in defence of their and their group’s interests.’
Jones, vulnerability of ‘battle-age’ civilian males
evacuation from Srebrenica -women, children and old evacuated. But Serbian requirement that no males with combat potential be carried out overland was respected
Srebrenica as massacre of men and boys (!!!!)
Fein, gender arguments
two types of gendered genocide?
distinguished between gender- neutral and gender-specific genocide: that is, ‘genocides which seek to destroy everyone regardless of gender … and those which destroy only males (there is no record of a perpetrator of genocide destroying only females).’ She argued that ‘gender-neutral’ genocide was on the rise, in part because the decline of slavery had reduced incentives for conquerors to preserve women and children alive.
Jones, Gendercide and Genocide
the most vulnerable and consistently targeted population group, throughout time and around the world today, is noncombatant men of ‘battle age’, roughly fifteen to fifty-five years old.
commentary… has tended to actively suppress the male experience [to] increase the sympathy and policy attention extended to female
One of the best indicators of the special vulnerability of men and boys is the
frequency with which relatives and friends sought to disguise them in women’s
clothing.
Carpenter arguments about male gender
While able-bodied men, as adults, are among the least vulnerable group physically, they become far more vulner- able than women, children, and the elderly to certain forms of attack in certain situations because of socially constructed assumptions about male gender roles.
Holter, Theory of Gendercide
a very masculinized image of the enemy becomes entrenched. Any male is
potentially dangerous
In the modern view, gender seems more relevant when women are more involved than men
if Anne Frank had taken this gendered and anti-male aspect of Nazi tactics to be
their main strategy, and emerged from hiding, she would not have survived. Whatever the gender situation, she would have been killed as a Jew, due to the
racist (or regressive-political) character of Nazi aggression, which overrode the
gender aspect. Analyzing gender and con icts therefore usually means to
understand how gender and other forces interact
Holter, 9-step theory of gendercide
- anti-democratic core political purpose
- Early and/or background gender dynamics
- A victimization connection and, gradually , a system.
- Creation of an aggressive ideology (often disguising 1–
- “Mythic core” formation:The basic mythic core consists of motherland and soldier, as an alternative to worker and democratic citizen.
(6) the rise to power of authoritarian leaders
and the breakdown of democracy;
(7) the build-up, including a reorganization of
gender;
(8) conflict; and
(9) genocide and gendercide.
UN Special Rapporteur on Rwanda, Rene´ Degni-Se´gui
, noted that in
atrocities against Tutsi women, “rape was the rule and its absence the exception”;
he offered the staggering estimate of 250,000 to 500,000 rapes committed
during the 12 weeks of the genocide.
Jones, female perpetrators
Rose Karushara, a councilor in Kigali, who “took an extremely active role in
the genocide, wearing military uniform throughout. A tall and physically
strong woman, she used to beat up the refugees herself before handing them
over to her interahamwe
Women (especially, it seems, prostitutes)
were also prominent as spies, denouncing Tutsis and moderate Hutus in hiding
to the interahamwe;
Fein (1999), Genocide and gender: The uses of women and group destiny
In genderspecific
genocides (as in Bosnia) the genocider’s tactic appears to be to spoil the
reproduction of the victims rather than to appropriate their babies,
In gender-specific
genocides, men are more likely to be killed directly than women
Male trauma?
Fein
Although women are more likely to suffer sexual abuse than men during
genocide, we must recognize from observations in Bosnia that men also suffer
direct and indirect trauma from sexual victimization and torture.
‘Rape as a Weapon of Genocide’, Genocide Studies and Prevention, 3:3 (2008) - Alison Ruby Reid-Cunningham 2008
PTSD in rape survivors
Sexual violence is perpetrated against women during ethnic conflict because women
‘‘keep the civilian population functioning’’ through their roles as mothers, wives, and
caretakers.78 The suffering inflicted may cause permanent psychological symptoms
or have social consequences that affect women’s ability to relate, work, or care for their
children.
Women and Genocide: Notes on an Unwritten History - Roger W. Smith 1994
How is genocide different for women?
Genocide has affected women differently from men in at least three ways:
women have seldom participated directly in genocide, though this has begun to
change in the twentieth century (e.g., in Nazi Germany and Cambodia);
women have
been victimized in ways different from men to a large extent (rape and enslavement);3
and the consequences of genocide (incorporation into the perpetrators’ society; or
ostracism of victims of rape, as in Bangladesh) have often been different as well
Beverly Allen
Forms of genocidal rape?
First, prior to the arrival of the official Serbian
military (Yugoslav Army or Bosnian Serb forces), Serb militias, civilians, or
Chetniks would enter a village and terrorize the inhabitants
The second form of genocidal rape occurred in Serb concentration
camps where Bosnian-Herzegovinan and Croatian women (and sometimes
men)73 were randomly chosen to be raped. The victim was often murdered
after the sexual assault.74
The third form of genocidal rape occurred in “rape/death camps.”
LINDSEY CRITIQUE OF JONES
From atrocity to data: historiographies of rape in Former Yugoslavia and the gendering of genocide - R. Lindsey 10/2002
Although Jones’s argument is tenable (and there are a number of feminists
that concur that the genocidal killing of men should be studied on its own
‘merits’), it is also extremely problematic because of his insistence in placing
his argument in opposition to the rape debate.
Rape as Genocide: two positions
BROWN
One side argued in effect that rape as an act of genocide should not
receive special treatment and that it should not be specially denominated.
The
other side contended that genocidal rape is different from rape that occurs
outside of a genocide and that the international community should acknowledge
a woman’s gender identity along with her identity as a member of a particular
national, ethnic, racial or religious group
