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brill.com/icla
International
Criminal La
w
Review
Female Perpetrators: Ordinary or Extra-ordinary
Women?
Alette Smeulers
Universities of Groningen and Tilburg, The Netherlands
Abstract
Only a very small percentage of the perpetrators convicted by international criminal
courts and tribunals are women. This raises the question as to whether women are less
evil than men. Within the literature it is generally assumed that the genocide in
Rwanda was unprecedented in relation to the role played by women, and that it is the
rst and only period of mass violence in which many women were involved. This
explorative study however, shows that women have played a much larger role than we
have generally assumed so far and that women can be just as evil as men – although it
indeed seems true that generally far less women than men are involved in mass atroci-
ties. There is a clear gender bias in the portrayal of female perpetrators as sadists,
abnormal or lacking agency, but it can be questioned whether female perpetrators are
less ordinary than male perpetrators.
Keywords
perpetrators – international crimes – women – gender
1 Introduction
On 24 June 2011 Pauline Nyiramasuhuko was found guilty and sentenced to life
imprisonment by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda () for
her leading role in the genocide and commission of widespread rape in Butare.
She was the rst woman ever to be convicted by an international criminal
court or tribunal for genocide and sexual violence. The only other woman who
has been convicted by an international criminal tribunal was the Serbian poli-
tician Biljana Plavsic – who pleaded guilty and was convicted for persecution
as a crime against humanity by the International Criminal Tribunal for former
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Kaldor notes that the nature of warfare has changed signicantly and that most contem-
porary wars are so-called ‘new wars’ which are internal rather than international armed
Yugoslavia () on 27 February 2003. Over 280 men have been convicted by
international criminal courts and tribunals and these two women thus repre-
sent less than one per cent of all people convicted by such courts and tribunals.
This raises the question why so many male perpetrators and so few female
perpetrators have been convicted. Are women less capable of committing
mass atrocities than men as suggested by the stereotyped and gendered image
of war in which men are portrayed as perpetrators and women as victims? Or
are there other reasons that can explain why most perpetrators are male? In
order to answer these questions an explorative literature survey on the role of
women within periods of mass violence has been conducted. It has been
assessed what kind of roles women have played so far and how signicant and
extensive their involvement has been (section3). Next the relevance of gender
roles and gender norms will be discussed (section4). Specic attention will be
given to the way in which female perpetrators are portrayed within literature
and the media. Next the military will be discussed as it is an extremely gen-
dered institution. The cases of Plavsic and Nyiramasuhuko will be discussed in
more detail in section5 while in section6 the focus will be on the motives of
the lower ranking women involved in mass atrocities. The overall aim of the
article is to get an insight in the extent of the involvement of women in mass
atrocities and to get a better understanding of their roles. We will however start
in Section2 with briey presenting the very stereotyped and gendered image
of war which has been prevalent within literature for such a long time.
2 The Gendered Portrayal of War and Mass Violence
In ancient history war could be adequately qualied as an armed conict
between two armies ghting each other in a far-away trench war. But warfare
has changed over time: most wars are internal armed conicts rather than
international armed conicts and usually many diferent militarised units are
involved. There is no clear front line and battles are regularly fought in densely
populated areas in which the distinction between combatants and non-com-
batants have become blurred and civilians are exposed to violence or even
deliberately attacked. Contemporary wars have become ‘a mixture of war,
organised crime and massive violations of human rights’ resulting in many
civilian casualties. War can thus no longer be considered a ‘conict between
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conicts. See M. Kaldor, New & Old Wars – Organized Violence in a Global Era (Polity Press,
Cambridge, 2006).
C. Coulter, ‘Female Fighters in the Sierra Leone War: Challenging the Assumptions?’, Feminist
Review (2008) 55–73, at p. 55; Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern, ‘Fearless Fighters and
Submissive Wives: Negotiating Identity among Women Soldiers in the Congo ()’, 39
Armed Forces & Society (2012) 711–739. See also J.A. Tickner and L. Sjoberg, ‘Feminism’, in
T. Dunne, M. Kurki and S. Smith (eds.), International Relations Theories – Discipline and
Diversity (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007), p. 193 who conclude: ‘It is a widespread
myth that men ght wars to protect vulnerable people usually dened as women and
children’.
Coulter, ibid., p. 55.
The Srebrenica massacre is one of the best documented examples thereof.
Jean Bethke Elshtain, ‘Women and War Ten Years on’, 24 Review of International Studies (1998)
447–460, at pp. 453–454.
R. Charli Carpenter, ‘Women and Children First: Gender, Norms and Humanitarian
Evacuation in the Balkans 1991–95’, 57 International Organization (2003) 661–694.
L. Kuper, Genocide – its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press, New
Haven, 1981), p. 204.
A. Jones, Gender Inclusive – Essays on Violence, Men and Feminist International Relations
(Routledge, London, 2009), p. 153.
men’ and ever since a lot of attention has been focused on the sufering of
women during warfare. Although this might have initially been a neglected
area of interest this particular focus has gradually transformed into a very ste-
reotyped portrayal of war in which men are pictured as the aggressors and
women as the victims. Behind this vision is the assumption that women are
inherently more peaceful than men. Although it is absolutely true that many
women are victimised and sufer as a consequence of war, so do many men.
When studying war and genocide it becomes clear that violence is often gen-
der based as it is not only directed against certain national, ethnical, racial or
religious groups but also specically directed against either the men or the
women within that particular group. In general there seems to be a tendency
to consider all males - even the unarmed ones - as combatants and the women
as civilians. This classication has serious consequences as it transforms men
into legitimate targets and thus exposes them to violence. In his classic book
on genocide Kuper remarked: ‘while unarmed men seem fair game, the killing
of women and children arouses general revulsion’. In his work on gendercide
Adam Jones concludes that these difering perceptions of women and men
indeed result in diferences in casualties: ‘…the most vulnerable and consis-
tently targeted population group, throughout time and around the world
today, is non-combatant men of battle age, roughly around fteen to fty-ve
years old’.
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N. Zabeida, ‘Not Making Excuses: Functions of Rape as a Tool in Ethno-nationalist Wars’,
in R.M. Chandler, L. Wang and L.K. Fuller (eds.), Women, War and Violence – Personal
Perspectives and Global Activism (Palgrave MacMillan, New York, 2010), p. 23.
F. D’Amico, ‘The Women of Abu Ghraib’, in T. McKelvey (ed.), One of the Guys – Women as
Aggressors and Torturers (Seal Press, Emeryville, 2007), p. 45.
Ibid, p. 81.
T. Kaufman-Osborn, ‘Gender Trouble at Abu Ghraib’, in McKelvey, supra note 10, p. 158.
Coulter, supra note 2, p. 55 argues the ‘notion and discourse about war itself is gendered’.
While many men are targeted because they are considered legitimate tar-
gets, women too sufer from gender based violence albeit in a diferent way.
The most common form is sexual violence – many women in many wars over
the years have sufered from various forms of sexual violence. In the war in
former Yugoslavia and more particularly in Bosnia Herzegovina sexual vio-
lence even became a deliberate war tactic. Some scholars have argued that
rape was deliberately used as a means to utterly humiliate male warriors for
having failed to protect the ‘honor and purity’ of their women. It has to be
noted however that not only women are the victims of gender based sexual
violence. The horric pictures of the sexual abuse and violence in the Abu
Ghraib prison seem to indicate that in the War on Terror the sexual humilia-
tion and abuse of men was an explicit war tactic. Devout Muslim men were
humiliated ‘through the reversal of gender roles’. In this war American sol-
diers ‘exploited every gender and sexual taboo in the Arab world – men domi-
nated by women, men posed in homosexual acts, men treated as dogs’. The
efect on the male victims was devastating: ‘It’s okay if they beat me. Beatings
don’t hurt us, it’s just a blow. But no one would want their manhood to be shat-
tered. They wanted us to feel as though we were women, the way women feel,
and this is the worst insult, to feel like a woman’. The fact that sexual violence
was used against men rather than women was however not the only anomaly.
May be even more remarkable was the fact the perpetrators were women who
used their sexuality as a weapon. These examples show us that war and gender
are two concepts which require particular attention when studying the causes
of mass violence. They also show that men are not only perpetrators of mass
violence within periods of war but also often the victims thereof and that
women are not just victims of warfare and mass violence but can also be
the perpetrators thereof. The best documented example of the involvement
of women in mass violence is without doubt the genocide in Rwanda in
which many women played a role. These facts were highlighted by African
Rights which published a report on the involvement of women entitled ‘not so
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African Rights, Rwanda not so Innocent – When Women Become Killers (African Rights,
London, 1995).
See also Jamieson who concluded: ‘It is absolutely and consistently the case that in war
women are victims of all kinds of abuse, including sexual abuse, but the events in Rwanda
suggest that this is not the whole story’. R. Jamieson, ‘Genocide and the Social Production
of Immorality’, 3 Theoretical Criminology (1999) 131–146, at p. 142.
See K. Kompisch, Täterinnen - Frauen im Nationalsozialismus (Böhlau Verlag, 2008), p. 204;
W. Lower, Hitlers Furiën (Spectrum, Antwerp, 2013); W. Lower, ‘Male and Female Holocaust
innocent’. It is therefore time to counter this stereotyped and gendered image
of war and mass violence. In this paper I aim to do that by focusing on the role
of women within war – not as victims but rather as perpetrators. In the next
section the focus will be on the diferent roles played by women in warfare and
in relation to mass atrocities. The aim is to assess whether the involvement of
women in the Rwandan genocide was indeed so exceptional as it is generally
portrayed within literature or whether the involvement of women in mass
atrocities is so much larger than we have assumed so far.
3 Roles Played by Women in Periods of Mass Violence
The most typical role played by women during a period of mass violence is as
a silent bystander and supporter of the regime. Although such a supporting
role falls short of entailing any criminal responsibility for the crimes commit-
ted the importance of such a role should not be underestimated either. Men
like Hitler would never have gained so much power without the support of the
masses which include both men and women. Research has furthermore shown
that the role of bystanders is far more important than we tend to think.
Perpetrators carefully look at the reaction of the bystander. If the bystander
is inactive this is usually interpreted by the perpetrator as silent approval
and support. By remaining passive bystanders - at least in the eyes of the
perpetrators - seem to justify and legitimise the actions of the perpetrators and
help them to maintain the social context in which they believe themselves to
be entitled to commit their crimes. Women can also silently support genocide
and other forms and manifestations of international crimes in the private
sphere, namely as loyal wives to their husband who took up a more active role.
In Nazi Germany for instance the -men could not marry without specic
approval of the which tested whether the wives believed in the ideas as
well and were worthy of marrying a member of the elite force. Some 240.000
women married -men thus supporting the existence of this elite force and
providing legitimization for it. Many of these Nazi women were allowed to
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Perpetrators and the East German Approach to Justice’, 1949–1963, 24 Holocaust and
Genocide Studies (2013), p. 70. See also for the Rwandan context, N. Hogg, ‘Women’s
Participation in the Rwandan Genocide: Mothers or Monsters’, 92 International Review of
the Red Cross (2010) 69–102.
See Lower, supra note 16.
See C. Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland (St Martin’s Grin, 1991). See also for the Rwandan
situation, Hogg, supra note 16, p. 78.
Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Holmes & Meier, New York, 1985 -
originally published in 1961).
Christina Herkommer, ‘Women under National Socialism: Women’s Scope for Action and
the Issue of Gender’, in Olaf Jensen and Claus-Christian Szejnmann (eds.), Ordinary
live close to where their husbands worked (for instance a concentration or
death camp) and thus became fully aware of what was going on. As such they
contributed to the commission of these crimes by not criticizing their hus-
bands and providing them with emotional support. Nazi Germany was not
the only country in which loyal women and wives played an important role by
supporting the regime and their involved husbands. This is the case in many
countries in which international crimes are committed. These passive roles
were, however, not the only way women were involved in periods of collective
violence. In the following section the focus will be on the various and more
active roles played by women.
3.1 Women as Administrative and Supporting Personnel
Probably by far the largest group of women involved in mass violence are those
involved as administrative and supporting personnel. During the Holocaust in
Nazi Germany many governmental organizations were somehow involved in
progressively excluding Jews from taking part in ordinary life, in discriminat-
ing against them, rounding them up, sending them on transport, holding them
prisoner in one of the many concentration camps, and nally killing them. The
Nazi Holocaust has been qualied as a bureaucratic mass murder. Hilberg
stated:
It must be kept in mind that most of the participants of genocide did not
re ries at Jewish children or pour gas into gas chambers … most bureau-
crats composed memoranda, drew up blueprints, talked on the telephone
and participated in conferences. They could destroy a whole people by
sitting at their desks.
Amongst these bureaucrats were many women. During the Nazi period it is
estimated that 12 million women were working in organizations, which was
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People as Mass Murderers – Perpetrators in Comparative Perspectives, (Palgrave and
MacMillan, 2008), pp. 99–119; Kompisch, supra note 16, p. 11. Kompisch, supra note 16,
p. 84 notes that many women worked for the Gestapo as secretaries and administrators.
Kompisch, ibid., p. 47.
D.P. Brown, The Camp Women – the Female Auxiliaries Who Assisted the in Running the
Nazi Concentration Camp System (A Schifer Military History Book, 2002); Lower, supra
note 16 ; Kompisch, ibid., pp. 12, 88.
See Herkommer, supra note 20; Manfred Mann, ‘Were the Perpetrators of Genocide
‘Ordinary Men’ or Real Nazis’? Results from Fifteen Hundred Biographies’, Holocaust and
Genocide Studies (2000) 331–366. See also Kompisch, ibid., pp. 12, 10; Lower, supra note 16.
Kompisch, ibid., p. 137.
See Alette Smeulers and Lotte Hoex, ‘Studying the Micro-dynamics of the Rwandan
Genocide’, 50 British Journal of Criminology (2010) 435–454.
African Rights, supra note 14 , p. 45; R.V. Adler, C.E. Loyle and J. Globerman, ‘A Calamity in
the Neighborhood: Women’s Participation in the Rwandan Genocide’, 2 Genocide Studies
and Prevention (2007) 209–233, at p. 222. African Rights, supra note 14, 72 quotes one of
one third of the female population. Their involvement in these crimes as
administrative and supportive personnel can without doubt be qualied as
signicant. Within the camps women often had administrative functions,
and the infamous Einsatzgruppen for instance were accompanied by female
secretaries. Women were also involved in the so-called Euthanasia program
as administrative personnel and as nurses. Even midwives played a role by
assessing whether a pregnant woman would be suciently qualied to raise
her child according to National-Socialistic standards, and if not, then an abor-
tion was advised. Once children were born and turned out to be handicapped
then the midwives had to report this so that measures within the Euthanasia
program could be taken. Midwives received 2 German marks for every report
and could receive a ne of 150 marks if they did not report on such
occasions.
The genocide in Rwanda was an entirely diferent type of genocide as com-
pared to the Holocaust. It was not a bureaucratised process which took years.
The killings were well prepared but took place in a three-month period and
were perpetrated by so-called killer groups consisting of ten to 100 people.
These groups set up road blocks, conducted house by house searches, appre-
hended, often raped and maltreated and nally killed all the Tutsis and moder-
ate Hutus they could nd. Usually only the most fanatic members of the group
were physically involved in the actual killings – nevertheless the group as such
which included men as well as women supported the killers in a number of
ways. It is known that many women acted as a kind of cheerleaders who were
singing songs while the men raped and killed the Tutsis. Although no exact
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these cheerleaders stated: “I am accused of being there when people were being killed
and singing. I admit I did this. I was there when people were being killed. Many people.
I joined the animation just as I would join any other choir”.
Amnesty International, Sudan: Darfur: Rape as a Weapon of War – Sexual Violence and its
Consequences, Amnesty International Report, 18 July 2004, 54/076/2004. Another
example from Angola: ‘they were forced to dance, sing, respond to sexual demands and
keep the men at a high level of excitement 24 hours a day’. See Yvonne E. Keairnes,
The Voices of Girl Child Soldiers – Summary (Quaker United Nations Oce, New York,
2002), at p. 7.
In many Africa countries like Sierra Leone women were abducted by the rebels and forced
to work for them such as fetching water, doing the laundry, cooking and acting as sex
slaves. C. Coulter, Bush Wives and Girl Soldiers – Women’s Lives through War and Peace in
Sierra Leone (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, , 2009), 103. See also J. Annan,
C. Blattman, D. Mazurana and K. Carlson, ‘Civil War, Reintegration, and Gender in
Northern Uganda’, 55 Journal of Conlict Resolution (2011) 877–908 at p. 883; S. McKay and
D. Mazurana, Where Are the Girls? Girls in Fighting Forces in Northern Uganda, Sierra
Leone and Mozambique: Their Lives during and after War (Montreal: International Centre
for Human Rights and Democratic Development, Montreal, 2004), p. 17.
Coulter, ibid., p. 117.
Child Soldiers Global Report 2008 (Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, London,
2008), at 28 [See a list of government forces who use girl soldiers at p. 29).
gures are provided on how many women were involved in this way, the report
by African Rights clearly describes their participation as extensive. The Gacaca
courts tried close to two million suspects, just under ten per cent were women.
These are not the only examples, however. There are for instance also reports
from Sudan indicating that women entertained the troops or acted as cheer-
leaders during the perpetration of crimes. In many armies and especially
rebel forces in other countries around the world women and girls are often
given administrative or supporting roles as secretaries, cleaning ladies, cooks,
porters or slaves. In some cases this support was enforced, in other cases it
was provided voluntarily but whatever the amount of force used it can be con-
cluded that the contribution of these women and girls was crucial for espe-
cially rebel forces. One scholar who studied the Revolutionary Armed Front
() during the Sierra Leone conict concluded: ‘the rebels would never have
survived had it not been for the forced productive labor of women’. Many
girls were forced to support the armies and rebel forces in the abovementioned
fashion and become child soldiers (a term which refers to all members of
armed forces under the age of 18 not matter whether or not they are actively
involved in ghting). The Global Report of the Coalition against the Use of
Child Soldiers of 2008 concludes that: ‘…girl soldiers have been present in vir-
tually every non-international conict, since’. Reports suggest that there are
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See Voice of America (2009), 120.000 Girls Believed to Be Child Soldiers, <www.voanews
.com/content/a-13-2005-04-25-voa27/394897.html>, 7 June 2013.
See also Herkommer, supra note 20, p. 113.
Kompisch, supra note 16, p. 181.
African Rights, supra note 14, 81; Hogg, supra note 16, 78; Adler et al., supra note 26, p. 222.
Coulter, supra note 28, 112; Dara Cohen, ‘The Role of Female Combatants in Armed
Groups: Women and Wartime Rape in Sierra Leone (1991–2002)’, 65 World Politics (2013)
383–415.
See African Rights, supra note 14, pp. 2, 12; but also Hogg, supra 16, 70; Adler et al., supra
note 26, p. 212.
The two nuns had to stand trial together with two others, a university professor and a fac-
tory owner. They were known as the Butare Four and were the very rst Rwandese to be
convicted by a non-Rwandan court.
300.000 child soldiers of whom 40 per cent are girls and thus there are allegedly
120.000 girl soldiers worldwide. Many of them (willingly or unwillingly) sup-
port the perpetration of genocide and other international crimes.
3.2 Women as Proteers, Thieves, Traitors and Spies
During periods of mass violence many women took advantage of the position
of their husbands or the misery of the victims. In Nazi Germany for instance
the wives of concentration camp guards employed prisoners to do their house-
holds and often treated them very badly, making them work like slaves. Jews
who were interned in concentration camps had to hand over all their valuables
to the Nazis and people running the camp (both male and female) often took
advantage thereof and used these goods (clothes, jewellery, money) them-
selves. In Rwanda women searched the bodies of the people killed or
searched their hiding places or houses in order to steal valuables. Similar
incidents are reported in other countries.
Another typical role played by women during both the Nazi Holocaust and
the Rwandan genocide was as traitor. In Rwanda women in all diferent kind of
sectors betrayed Tutsis. This was not only the case for women in governmen-
tal organizations but also for teachers at schools who betrayed their pupils and
handed them over to the extremists and killer groups; doctors and nurses
handed over their patients and nuns handed over the Tutsis who had come to
seek refuge at their church or monastery. In 2001 two Rwandan nuns (Sister
Gertrude and Sister Kisito) stood trial in Belgium. During the Rwandan geno-
cide they chased all Tutsis who had sought refuge in their monastery out of the
monastery and handed them over to the extremists knowing that these groups
would immediately kill them. They even bought petrol which was used to set a
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See African Rights, supra note 14, pp. 156–191. The two nuns were convicted on 8 June 2001
to 12 and 15 years imprisonment.
Hogg, supra note 16, p. 78.
African Rights, supra note 14, p. 2; Hogg, supra note 16, p. 79.
L. Sharlach, ‘Gender and Genocide in Rwanda: Women as Agents and Objects of Genocide’,
1 Journal of Genocide Research (1999) 387–399, at p. 392.
Kompisch, supra note 16, p. 74 notes that betrayals by private persons was crucial.
Koos Groen, Als Slachtofers Daders worden – de Zaak van de Joodse Verraadster Ans van
Dijk (Ambo, Baarn, 1994).
See for an example, Coulter, supra note 28, p. 9.
garage on re in which 600 Tutsis had ed. The Belgium case attracted a lot of
media attention especially because the two accused were nuns but in Rwanda
many others like them helped and supported the killer groups by betraying the
Tutsis who tried to ee for their lives. Women who were not professionally
involved showed the killer groups where the Tutsis were living or where they
went into hiding. In some cases women did not actively betray victims but
refused to help the victims and thus contributed to their capture and death.
In some cases Tutsi women left their children under the protection of Hutu
women but some of these women turned the children in to the killer groups.
During the Nazi Holocaust many Jews all over Europe were betrayed (by
both men and women). In some countries, like for instance in the Netherlands,
people could earn money by betraying Jews. It was only a small fee, but some
traitors became good at it and thus earned quite a lot of extra money. In other
cases Jews who had been captured could save their life by starting to work for
the Germans and betraying other Jews. Although most traitors were men –
women too were involved. One of the most infamous trial cases in the
Netherlands involved a Jewish woman, Ans van Dijk. After the Nazis took con-
trol over the Netherlands, Van Dijk never ocially registered as a Jew and could
thus live a fairly ordinary life despite the German occupation. She often helped
other Jews to escape until she was betrayed and arrested by the Dutch police.
After her arrest, she was given the choice of being sent of immediately to the
death camps, or to save her own life by starting to work for the Dutch police by
searching for and betraying other Jews. Van Dijk took the ofer and unfortu-
nately turned out to be extremely good at her job. Together with a few others,
amongst whom were a number of women, she allegedly betrayed over 100
Jews. After the war, Ans van Dijk was the only woman in the Netherlands
who received the death penalty, and was publicly executed for her role in the
Second World War.
In some countries women were used as spies, because they are often not
seen as dangerous but rather as innocent victims and can thus easier manipu-
late people. They were sent to villages and towns in order to make friends
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Ibid., p.104.
Brown, supra note 22.
Daniel Patrick Brown, The Beautiful Beast – the Life and Crimes of -Aufseherin Irma Grese
(Golden West Publications, Ventura, 1996). See however also the comments in section4.1
of this article in relation to the biased portrayal of female perpetrators.
Kompisch, supra note 16, p. 186.
Ilse Koch, although not formally a camp guard but the wife of camp commander Karl
Koch, also became known for her cruelty. It was alleged that she ordered lampshades and
photo albums out of human skin and she ordered Jews with nice tattoos to be killed for
this very reason. These allegations could however – despite desperate eforts – not be
proven in two court cases and might very well be based on false rumours and lies. Ilse
Koch was nevertheless convicted to life imprisonment.
See <www.capitalpunishmentuk.org/nazigirls.html >, 15 October 2014.
and nd themselves lovers amongst the soldiers and get information about the
town. This information was then used to attack the town in question.
3.3 Women as Prison and Camp Guards
An even more active role was played by women who were prison or camp
guards. In many countries female guards are appointed to serve as guards of
the prisons and camps in which women are held. In Nazi Germany over 3500
women served as concentration camp guards and had to guard the women,
were responsible for maintaining order and discipline within the camp and
conducted selections at the ramp. Round and about six per cent of all concen-
tration camp guards were female. Most of them received their training at
Ravensbrück. Some of these women became known as extremely cruel and
sadistic guards, as for instance Irma Grese, a camp guard at Ravensbrück,
Auschwitz, and later, Bergen Belsen. She always carried around a whip in order
to beat up prisoners and seemed to derive sadistic pleasure from the sufering
of others. According to one witness at her trial she had killed about 30 prison-
ers a day.
Grese is however not the only infamous female guard known for her cruelty
and sadism. Johanna Borman was known as the woman with the dog as she set
of her dog to attack and kill exhausted prisoners. Austrian -Helferin Maria
Mandel put together a Jewish orchestra at Auschwitz which was to play music
during the selections at the ramp and the executions thereafter. Dorothea Binz
continuously hit the prisoners. Ruth Neudeck took of the clothes of some
inmates, poured cold water over them and made them stand in the cold for
hours. After the Second World War, about 60 female camp guards stood trial
under the war crimes tribunals between 1945–1949. Many of them were
described as more brutal than their male counterparts. A total of 21 of these
women were executed.
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See a.o. K.J. Greenberg and J.L. Dratel (eds.), The Torture Papers – the Road to Abu Ghraib
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005); P. Gourevitch and E. Morris, Standard
Operating Procedure (Penguin Press, New York, 2008).
M. Husejnovic, Bosnian War’s Wicked Women Get Of Lightly, balkaninsight.com: www
.balkaninsight.com/en/article/bosnian-war-s-wicked-women-get-of-lightly>, 25 May
2013.
See Bosnian Police Arrest Female Monster, <bosniagenocide.wordpress.com/2011/12/21/
bosnian-police-arrests-serbian-female-monster-monika-simonovic-ilic/ >, 25 May 2013.
A more recent example of female prison guards committing atrocities was
the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison during the American war
on terror. A number of women gured prominently in the pictures published by
the American ‘60 Minutes’ television programme in which the Iraqi prison-
ers were humiliated, harassed and sexually abused. The pictures shocked the
American public. President Bush was quick to call the perpetrators rotten apples
but it later turned out that they were acting according to the broader guidelines
as designed by the Pentagon. The American interrogators had asked the prison
guards to soften up the prisoners in order to prepare them for the interrogations.
In the night shift a group of guards amongst whom a number of women started
to systematically abuse the Iraqi prisoners. The fact that they took pictures of
the abuse seems to indicate that they were not aware of the fact that they were
committing horrendous acts in clear violation of international law.
In former Yugoslavia too there are known cases of female camp guards com-
mitting international crimes. Indira Vrbanjac Kameric was indicted for crimes
committed while being one of the commanders of a detention camp. Monika
Simonovic, the girlfriend of Goran Jelisic who was sentenced to 40 years
imprisonment by the , has beaten and maltreated many prisoners together
with Jelisic and was arrested in December 2011. A witness remembers: ‘she
wasn’t a woman, she was a monster’. Another woman, Azra Basic was ‘accused
of killing a prisoner and torturing others by forcing them to drink human blood
and gasoline and having them kneel on broken glass. Usually men and
women are not detained in the same (ward of a) prison and in principle women
only act as guards within women’s prisons. It can thus be expected that the
extent of involvement of women as prison and camp guards is much smaller
than the role of men but nevertheless probably quite extensive.
3.4 Women as Interrogators and Torturers
As already noted above many women abused their role as camp and prison
guards and many of them severely mistreated and abused the inmates. In some
cases such abuse can be qualied as torture as is the case with the medical
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See the book by R.J. Lifton, Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide
(Basic Books, New York, 1988).
See Herkommer, supra note 20, p. 112 who quotes Schwarz.
E. Saar and V. Novak, Inside the Wire – a Military Intelligence Soldier’s Eyewitness Account
of Life at Guantanamo (The Penguin Press, New York, 2005), at p. 222.
Eileen McDonald, Shoot the Women First (Forth Estate, London, 1991), p. 50.
See B. Goldblatt and S. Meintjes, ‘South African Women demand the Truth’, in M. Turshen
and C. Twagiramaria (eds.), What Women do in Wartime - Gender and Conlict in Africa
(Zed Books, New York, 1998), pp. 27–61.
M.K. Huggins, M. Haritos-Fatouras and P.G. Zimbardo, Violence Workers – Police Torturers
and Murderers Reconstruct Brazilian Atrocities (University of California Press, Berkeley,
2002).
Reuters (30-01-2013). Bahraini Princess on Trial for Torturing Detainees, <www.reuters
.com/article/2013/01/30/us-bahrain-princess-trial-idUSBRE90T0UU20130130>, 13 March
2013.
experiments conducted in the Nazi concentration camps. The inmates of these
camps were used as guinea pigs in medical experiments conducted by the Nazi
doctors. Next to many men women too were involved in these experiments.
Some as nurses others as doctors. At the Nazi Medical trial, which was con-
ducted shortly after the war, one of the 23 defendants was a woman, Herta
Oberheuser. She was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment.
A few women have acted as interrogators and torturers although there are
not many known cases. One of the few known accounts of a female interroga-
tor at work is by Erik Saar, an interpreter at Guantanamo Bay. He describes the
interrogation of a Muslim terror suspect by an American female interrogator at
which he was present. Saar describes how the female interrogator progres-
sively tried to provoke the devote Muslim by using her sexuality. It is a chilling
and saddening account of pure humiliation in which the woman ends up
smearing a red substance on the prisoner’s face while making him believe it is
menstrual blood. The pious Muslim prisoner almost became hysterical and
Saar chillingly describes how he shouted at the top of his lungs.
There are also a few reported cases of female torturers in Spain in the period
in which the was still considered a dangerous terrorist organization and
in South Africa under the Apartheid regime in which female torturers tortured
others by pumping water into another woman’s fallopian tubes and applying
electric shocks to their victims. Incidents with female torturers have also
been reported from Uruguay and Brazil.
In February last year international news agencies reported that in Bahrain a
princess was accused of torture. But as there are very few other documented
examples it seems fair to conclude that apparently only very few women so far
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See also Huggins et al., supra note 59 who came to a similar conclusion.
Kompisch, supra note 16, pp. 125–126. See also B.R. McFarland-Icke, Nurses in Nazi
Germany: Moral Choices in History (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1999).
Lower, supra note 16 mentions this at several places in her book and provides examples of
women who took a gun and shot Jews from their balcony.
Husejnovic, supra note 52 provides an example from former Yugoslavia in which a woman
who executed people because her father had been shot.
See newspaper clipping, <uk.mobile.reuters.com/article/worldNews/id83T0201
20430?irpc=979>, 23 June 2013.
See for instance African Rights, supra note 14, p. 1; Hogg, supra note 16, pp. 70, and 77, at
which she quotes a female genocide suspect who stated: ‘The diference is that men
killed, women didn’t. I hear that some women called out to be killers, but I didn’t see them
do it’.
have acted as interrogators and torturers and this is still generally a men’s job.
The only clear trend is the progressive use of women as interrogators in the war
on terror.
3.5 Women as Killers and Murderers
Women have also been involved in genocide and other periods of mass vio-
lence as killers and murderers. Many of the female camp guards in Nazi
Germany participated in the selections and thus had an active role in sending
Jews to the gas chambers. Nurses who worked in the concentration and death
camps took part in the selections too, deciding who was still t enough to work
and who was not. In some cases they personally gave the inmates lethal injec-
tions. Many women were - as nurses or doctors - also involved as killers and
murderers in the Euthanasia programme in which about 100.000 people were
deliberately killed because they were considered unt to live. Lower notes
that some of the worst perpetrators were women who did not have an ocial
function but who accompanied their husbands to execution sites or concen-
tration and death camps and took advantage of their situation and killed Jews,
some without any reason: just for the fun of it. Female camp guards in Nazi
Germany and former Yugoslavia sometimes shot prisoners or beat them to
death. On 30 April 2012 the rst woman was convicted by a Bosnian court for
killing six men during an attack in April 1993. Rasema Handanovic had been
raped herself during the war before she committed these crimes. There are
currently 40 other ongoing investigations against women who are suspected of
their involvement in Bosnia.
In Rwanda women played a huge role in the genocide but it seems that only
a few were ‘directly engaged in the killings’. This is probably due to the fact
that ‘there were few women, in the best known of the killing machines – the
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Alison des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story – Genocide in Rwanda (Human Rights
Watch, New York, 1999), p. 261.
African Rights, supra note 14, p. 81.
Ibid, p. 209.
Coulter, supra note 28, p. 18 concludes that with Sierra Leone: ‘women ghters partici-
pated in the violence with their male counterparts on a widespread scale’. See also Cohen,
supra note 35.
J. Waller, Becoming Evil – How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killings (Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 1997), p. 300, note 12.
Kesic as quoted by F. Wilmer, The Social Construction of Man, the State and War – Identity,
Conlict and Violence in the former Yugoslavia (Routledge, New York, 2002), p. 215.
Coulter, supra note 28, p. 109.
See Coulter, ibid., 137; African Rights, supra note 14, p. 7; Annan et al., supra note 28, p. 2.
army, gendarmerie and trained militia, the Interahamwe’. But some were nev-
ertheless actively involved. In a report by Human Rights Watch late genocide
scholar Alison des Forges quotes an ocer saying: ‘I had seen war
before but I had never seen a women carrying a baby on her back kill another
woman carrying a baby on her back’. It is furthermore known that after a
group of Tutsis had been killed women not only searched the bodies but also
often killed those who were still alive. Nurses and doctors in Rwandan hospi-
tals not only pointed out Tutsis to the killers but also killed Tutsi patients
themselves. In 2007 Adler et al. gured out that 3000 women representing
over three per cent of the prison population were imprisoned for their role in
the genocide. Those imprisoned can be considered to have played a larger role
and possibly be directly involved in the killings.
In many other countries women were soldiers in regular governmental
armies or irregular rebel forces and as such killed others. Sometimes in a
legitimate battle in other cases it was plain murder. Waller for instance notes
that in Cambodia ‘many Khmer Rouge women committed the same atrocities
as men’. Kesic concluded that: ‘there were women in all the militias and
national armies throughout the former Yugoslavia’, and some without doubt
committed mass atrocities. Many girl soldiers fought in armies which com-
mitted mass atrocities. Although there are few direct reports of women com-
mitting international crimes in this way it is very likely that women too were
actively involved in these crimes. In Sierra Leone for instance, there were
small girls’ units next to the infamous small boys’ units. Female ghters have
been said to be active in countries such as Peru, Liberia, Sri Lanka, Eritrea,
Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Vietnam, El Salvador, Columbia, Guatemala, Nicaragua,
Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka and Uganda. This is not a recent phenomenon: Waller
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Waller, supra note 71, p. 300 note 12.
See S. Adler, Ich sollte als Schwarze Witwe Sterben (Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2005).
M. Bloom, ‘Female Suicide Bombers – a Global Trend’, Daedalus (2007) 1–9.
Laura Sjoberg and Caron E. Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores – Women’s Violence in
Global Politics (Zed Books, London, 2007), p. 98.
Human Security Report 2005- War and Peace in the 21 Century (Oxford University Press,
New York, 2005) estimate that 30 per cent of suicides by women.
Sjoberg and Gentry, supra note 78, p. 112.
Ibid., p. 127.
provides some other historical examples, and states that in World War II more
than one million women served in the Soviet army. Furthermore, it is known
that many women fought alongside men in guerrilla and revolutionary wars.
It is also known that many female spies and female terrorists have been
involved in terrorist attacks resulting in deaths. On 29 November 1987 for
instance, a bomb exploded on Korean Airline 858, killing all 115 passengers.
Kim Hyon Hui, a female North Korean agent, had planted the bomb. In terror-
ist organizations such as the Palestinian Liberation Organization (), Rote
Armee Fraktion (), Euskadi ta Askatasuna (), Front Liberation National
(), Irish Republican Army () and Red Brigades women were involved in
many functions, including as the ones who planted bombs and killed innocent
bystanders. Especially the so-called black widows in Chechnya became infa-
mous. They were for instance, involved in the Moscow hostage-taking in
October 2002. Fifty Chechen rebels, amongst whom 20 women, held 800 visi-
tors of the theatre hostage. In the failed rescue attempt 39 terrorists and 129
hostages died.
In the last few years women have also been involved in suicide attacks. Sana
Mehaildli, a Syrian young woman, who blew herself up on 9 April 1985 killing
two Israeli soldiers, is believed to be the rst female suicide terrorist. Bloom
notes that the use of female suicide bombers is a global trend. According to
Sjoberg and Gentry, 22 out of 27 suicide attacks (and thus 81 per cent) in
Chechnya were perpetrated by women. Another group infamous for female
suicide attacks are the Tamil Tigers – allegedly 30 per cent of their suicide
attacks are committed by women. Wafra Idris was the rst female suicide
bomber in Palestine in January 2002. It is estimated that almost seven per cent
of the suicide attacks in Palestine are committed by women and in Iraq less
than one per cent. Since 2005 Al-Qaeda also uses female suicide bombers.
Women are however, still underrepresented in terrorist organizations, and it is
alleged that about ten per cent are female although this percentage is as high
as 30–40 per cent in organizations such as the revolutionary armed forces in
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B. de Graaf, Gevaarlijke Vrouwen – Tien Militante Vrouwen in het Vizier (Boom, Amsterdam,
2012) at 319.
Bloom, supra note 77, p. 4.
African Rights, supra note 14, p. 83; Hogg, supra note 16.
African Rights, ibid., p. 40.
A.M. de Brouwer and S.K. Hon Chu, The Men Who Killed Me (Douglas & McIntyre,
Vancouver, 2009).
See Cohen, supra note 35; M. Humphreys and J. M. Weinstein, What the Fighters Say: a
Survey of Ex-combatants in Sierra Leone (June-August 2003), Centre on Globalization and
sustainable development, Columbia University, <www.columbia.edu/~mh2245/Report1
_BW.pdf ,> 19 June 2013.
Colombia () and in Chechnya. The use of female suicide bombers might
however increase as they draw much more media attention than the attacks by
men: ‘the image of women defying tradition to sacrice their lives for the
Palestinian cause has drawn more attention to the despair of the Palestinian
people’.
3.6 Women as Sex-ofenders
The probably most unexpected role of female perpetrators is as sex ofenders.
Yet women have also been involved in war related sexual violence. African
Rights reports that during the Rwandan genocide women were involved in
sexual violence. A witness reports how a woman who had a hairdresser’s
shop in Kigali killed a wealthy Tutsi business woman:
Maman Aline demanded to kill the woman herself. There were some dis-
placed women from Gisozi who had pointed sticks. They tried to pene-
trate her vagina with them. They opened her legs and Maman Aline
penetrated her vagina with a stick. Then [a woman called] Pauline came
along with a big masu and hit her on the head.
In the book The Men Who Killed Me, there is a story of a thirteen year old Tutsi
boy who was held prison by a Hutu woman who sexually abused him for a
number of weeks. But these are not the only cases: other scholars studying
mass atrocities in Africa have reported that women were involved in commit-
ting sexual violence.
Dara Cohen reports that within Sierra Leone committing a gang rape was
considered a means of combat socialization and women as well as men par-
ticipated in these gang rapes. According to some estimates women were
involved in one out of four gang rapes in Sierra Leone. Within this conict
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Cohen, supra note 35.
See also examples reported by Human Rights Watch, We’ll Kill You if You Cry (Human
Rights Watch, New York, 2002); and Cohen, ibid.
L. Lawry, K. Johnson and J. Asher, ‘Evidence-based Documentation of Gender-based
Violence’, in: A.L.M. Brouwer, C. de, Ku, R. Römkens, and L. van den Herik (eds.), Sexual
Violence as an International Crime: Interdisciplinary Approaches (Intersentia, Cambridge,
2013) at p. 300.
Ibid., pp. 300–301.
Kristine A. Huskey, ‘The Sex Interrogators of Gunatanamo’, in Tara McKelvey (ed.), One of
the Guys – Women as Aggressors and Torturers (Seal Press, Emeryville, 2007), at p. 176.
M. Husejnovic, Serb Women War Criminals: Monika Simonovic, ‘She looked like a little
girl’, <bosniangenocide.wordpress.com/2011/12/20/female-serb-war-criminals-she-looked
-like-a-little-girl/>, 19 June 2013.
the was considered the group which was most responsible for sexual vio-
lence, and this was also the group which had most women in its ranks.
Women often picked the victims and held them down during the gang rape. In
other cases women used bottles and other objects to rape the victims them-
selves. A quantitative analysis by Lynn Lawry in Congo shows that in this
conict too women were actively involved in sexual violence. She concludes
that ‘17 per cent of survivors of sexual based gender violence perpetrated by
the Mai Mai name females as perpetrators’. In general, 40 per cent of the
female survivors and ten per cent of the male survivors of sexual violence
report the perpetrator to be female.
The pictures of the abuse at Abu Ghraib shows that in the War on Terror
women were purposefully used to sexually abuse and humiliate devout
Muslims: they were held naked in sexually humiliating positions in the pres-
ence of women. The policy was deliberate, structural and widespread. An
American scholar and attorney concluded:
During the last year and a half, I learned that my clients - devout Muslim
men - have been subject to sexual harassment and abuse both in and out
of interrogation. They have been forced to strip naked in front of female
guards; some have had their private parts touched and squeezed; some
have been ofered sex in exchange for cooperation; some have been
threatened with rape.
In former Yugoslavia, sexual violence was also widespread. So far little is known
about the role of women, but in some cases they were indeed involved.
One female camp commander apparently took female prisoners to the front
lines for the soldiers to rape them. We can thus conclude that most sexual
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Prosecutor v. Plavsic, 3 February 2003, , -00-39&40/1-S.
Prosecutor v. Pauline Nyiramasuhuko and Others, 24 June, , Case No. -98-42-T.
Hogg, supra note 16, p. 74.
Ibid., p. 90.
violence is probably still committed by men but that the involvement of
women in sexual violence is probably much larger than initially expected.
3.7 Women as Political Leaders and Instigators
Women can also come to play a crucial role during a period of mass atrocities
as political leaders. So far the only two women who have been convicted by
international criminal courts and tribunals were political leaders. Biljana
Plavsic was Vice-President of the Republika Srpska and thus a leading Serbian
political gure. She was indicted for persecution and pleaded guilty. The Trial
Chamber of the concluded that she
embraced and supported the objective […] and contributed to achieving
it. She did not participate with Milosevic, Karadzic, Krajisnik and others
in its conception and planning and had a lesser role in its execution than
Karadzic, Krajisnik and others.
Her role was amongst others to encourage participation and publicly justifying
the use of force.
Pauline Nyiramasuhuko was also a political leader. She was a Rwandan min-
ister and one of the members of the inner circle of power holders who pre-
pared the genocide and charged and convicted with genocide and sentenced
to life by the . Both women show that women too can instigate others
to commit mass atrocities. Their cases will be discussed in more detail in
section5.
With a few notable exceptions very few women play an important role in
politics in a period of mass violence. In Rwanda for instance women were
underrepresented: there were 3 female government ministers and 12 out of
70 members of parliament were female, there were no female bourgmestres
and only one per cent of the conseillers were women. Yet besides
Nyiramasuhuko, some other women played a leading role in the Rwandan
genocide. Agathe Kanziga, the widow of President Habyarimana also played
an important role. After her husband died she ed abroad and provided fund-
ing to Radio Milles Collines as well as to the extremist newspaper Kangura
which were both infamous for instigating people to commit genocide. Agnes
Ntamabyaliro was Minister of Justice and received a life sentence in Rwanda
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Ibid., p. 75. Another important Rwandese politician was Agathe Uwillingiyimana who had
been prime minister of Rwanda and one of the rst to be killed in the genocide.
African Rights, supra note 14, p. 15.
Ibid., p. 3.
Hogg, supra note 16, p. 90.
for her role in the genocide. Other women participated in indoctrination
meetings and as such participated in the preparation of genocide or took the
lead during the genocide. African Rights concluded that ‘some of the most
cruel local government ocials who organised the killings; especially in Kigali,
were women’. On a list published by the Rwandan government, 2202 sus-
pects including 47 women were named because of their prominent and lead-
ing roles in the genocide.
Ieng Thirith is a further prominent example. She was indicted by the Extra-
ordinary Chambers of the Cambodian Courts () for her role in the geno-
cide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot. She was Minister
of Social Afairs and the wife of one of the other accused, Ieng Sary, who died
in March 2013 before he could be tried. Thirith played an important role in the
genocide. The Chamber however ordered a stay of the prosecution because she
was unt to stand trial.
Some women can gain power by the mere fact that their husbands are head
of state. Some of these women do not interfere with their husband’s job but
some do, and are known to have played an important role by inuencing their
powerful husbands and taking up the role of ‘Madame President’. A prominent
example thereof is Mira Markovic, the wife of the late Slobodan Milosevic,
who is said to have been the driving force behind her husband. She spurred
him on to gain more and more power – no matter the cost. Another example is
Jiang Qing, the wife of Mao, who played an active role during the cultural revo-
lution and after Mao’s death. But there were others such as Eva Perron, Elena
Ceausescu and Simone Gbagbo who is now indicted by the International
Criminal Court.
3.8 A Variety of Roles
From the above enumeration it can be concluded that more men than women
are involved in international crimes, but also that many more women than so
far assumed have been involved in mass atrocities. The presented anecdotal
evidence has furthermore proven that there seems to be no role women haven’t
played in the past. Most women are indirectly involved by supporting the
regime and the criminal policies or behaviour of their husbands. Many women
have an administrative or supporting role but still quite a few are physically
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Lower, supra note 16, p. 27 estimates that one third of the female population and thus over
4 million women were actively involved with the Nazis.
A similar gender gap has been identied by criminologists studying ordinary and conven-
tional crime in relation to violent and serious crimes. See J. Miller and Christopher
Mullins, ‘Feminist Theories of Girls’ Delinquency’ at 32; Robert Agnew, ‘The Contribution
of “Mainstream” Theories to the Explanation of Female Delinquency’, both published in
M. Zahn (ed.), The Delinquent Girl (Temple University Press, 2009), at p. 7.
involved as traitors, thieves, prison and camp guards or combatants. Women
can even be involved in sexual violence – sometimes in a supporting capacity
(holding the victim) but in some cases also as the main physical perpetrator.
The role of women as hands-on perpetrators is limited compared to men but
might very well be much larger than we have assumed so far. The gathered
evidence shows that women too can commit horrendous crimes and physi-
cally or sexually abuse, maltreat or kill other people. Women in other words
can be as evil as men.
4 The Gender Efect
The above overview shows that in history women have been found to play
almost any possible role in relation to mass atrocities. Yet it is also true that
many more men than women are involved in international crimes – especially
in the physical perpetration thereof. An interesting question is obviously
how we can explain this. Within especially feminist discourses women have
been assumed to be inherently more peaceful than men but are they really?
What about the women described in the sections above who have been
involved in mass atrocities? Are they all special and extra-ordinary (read:
abnormal) women? Or are they ordinary women not very diferent from the
ordinary men capable of mass atrocities and can the fact that so many more
men than women are involved be explained by social factors alone? In the fol-
lowing subsections we will try to nd answers to these questions. In doing so
we will focus on the role of gender both in the portrayal of female perpetrators
as in organizations such as the military and amongst political leaders. This is
particularly relevant as most convicted perpetrators are either political leaders
or members of militarised units.
4.1 Portrayal of Female Perpetrators: A Clear Gender Bias
Within literature and the media there is a remarkable diference between
the portrayal of female perpetrators compared to male perpetrators. Female
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See e.g. Coulter, supra note 2, p. 63 and Lower, supra note 16, p. 287. See also Kompisch,
supra note 16, p. 236 who notes that female perpetrators in Nazi Germany were portrayed
as either being young and naïve, being seduced by men or beasts.
Sjoberg and Gentry, supra note 78, p. 13. See also the paper by Heschel entitled ‘Feminist
Theory and the Perpetrators’ as quoted by Waller, supra note 71, p. 301, note 12; Lower,
supra note 16, p. 290.
Sjoberg and Gentry, supra note 78, pp. 50–51. Similar trends can be seen within crimino-
logical studies in discussions and research on female delinquency. See Miller and Mullins,
supra note 103, p. 32.
Lower, supra note 16, p. 70.
This was the trial against Josef Kramer and 44 others better known as the Bergen Belzen
trial which took place in November 1945.
perpetrators are often described as mentally insane sadists who are more cruel
and sadistic than their male counterparts. It however, remains to be seen as to
whether they really are more cruel or merely portrayed that way because peo-
ple have trouble believing that women are capable of such extreme atrocities.
In the portrayal of female perpetrators the overriding message seems to be that
women who are involved must be either mentally disturbed, ‘unnatural and
abnormal’ or must have been forced to commit such atrocities. Sjoberg and
Gentry studied the portrayal of female perpetrators and concluded that they
are either portrayed as mothers, monsters or whores: ‘The mother narrative
describes women’s violence as a need to belong, a need to nurture, and a way
of taking care of and being loyal to men: motherhood gone awry. The monster
narrative eliminates rational behaviour, ideological motivation, and culpabil-
ity from women engaged in political violence. Instead, they describe violent
women as insane, in denial of their femininity, no longer women or human.
The whore narrative blames violence on the evils of female sexuality at its
most intense or its most vulnerable’. These narratives are all very stereo-
typed and: ‘exclude the possibility that women can choose to be violent
because violent women interrupt gender stereotypes. “Real” women are peace-
ful, conservative, virtuous and restrained; violent women ignore those bound-
aries of womanhood’.
Within the media coverage of cases of international crimes there are many
illustrations of the ‘mother, monster, whore’ thesis forwarded by Sjoberg and
Gentry. After the Second World War for instance, the press covered the trials of
female Nazis in a sensationalistic manner that was very diferent from the cov-
erage of trials in which the accused were male. The media described the female
perpetrators as ‘beasts, sadists and seductresses’. In one of the rst of these
Nazi trials, Irma Grese, a former camp guard at Ravensbrück, Auschwitz and
Bergen Belzen stood trial. Initially the press and public talked more about
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See also Herkommer, supra note 20, p. 114. The same is true for the portrayal of ordinary
female delinquents. They too are often portrayed as sexual deviant and a sexualised
image of them is presented. See Miller and Mullins, supra note 103, p. 47.
H. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem – a Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin Books, New
York, 1964); R. Hilberg Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders – the Jewish Catastrophe (Harper
Perennial, New York, 1992); Ch.R. Browning, Ordinary Men - Reserve Police Battalion 101
and the Final Solution in Poland (Aaron Asher Books, New York, 1992).
Hogg, supra note 16, p. 100. See also Sjoberg and Gentry, supra note 78, p. 2.
Coulter, supra note 28, p. 14. See also Gilani, ‘Transforming the Perpetrator into Victim: the
Efects of Gendering Violence on the Legal and Practical Responses to Women’s Political
Violence’, Australian Journal of Gender and Law (2010) 1-40 at p. 9 who notes: ‘these narra-
tives imply that violence is an inevitable consequence of a woman failing to conform to
her prescribed gender norms’.
K.J. Cunningham, ‘Female Participation in the Iraqi Insurgency: Insights into Nationalist
and Religious Warfare’, in Chandler et al., supra note 9, p. 205.
her appearance than about her crimes, but when the atrocious crimes she had
committed became known, she quickly received the nickname of the ‘beauti-
ful beast’. She was however, not the only one given a nickname: many other
women were given nicknames such as the ‘witch of Buchenwald’ and ‘bloody
Brigitte’, and most of these women were depicted as sexually perverted
women. By demonizing female perpetrators, a distance between these
“abnormal and unnatural” women and ordinary peaceful women was created.
Just after the atrocities committed at Auschwitz and many other camps people
did not want to believe that the perpetrators (whether male or female) were
ordinary people, and preferred to see them as mentally disturbed, inherently
violent and criminal human beings. Scholars such as Hilberg, Arendt and
Browning have however, convincingly showed that most perpetrators were
rather ordinary and that they can come to commit evil crimes for very banal
reasons. Thanks to their scholarship, it is now generally accepted that most
perpetrators are indeed just very ordinary people. This insight is however, lim-
ited to men: it seems that the assumption that female perpetrators cannot be
ordinary women is still prevalent today. The underlying thought and assump-
tion clearly is that ‘real women do not commit such crimes’. Women who
ght transgress the female stereotypes more than men do and are therefore
more often considered as ‘deviant and unnatural’. In most cultures men
are considered to be more aggressive and women are supposed to be more
caring– seeing a woman commit atrocities is thus often more shocking than see-
ing a man commit similar atrocities. Cunningham noted: ‘Women’s involvement
in political violence continually shock us, no matter the context, challenging
cross-cultural gendered normative assumptions about human behavior […]’.
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See also Kompisch, supra note 16, p. 181.
See for instance in relation to Nazi crimes Kompisch, ibid., p. 234. In some cases this lead
to remarkable acquittals as in the Euthanasia trial in 1965, in which 14 nurses of the
Meseritz-Obrawalde centre were acquitted. Anne-Marie de Brouwer and Etienne
Ruvebana, ‘The Legacy of the Gacaca Courts in Rwanda’, 13 International Criminal Law
Review (2013) 937–976. Gilani, supra note 112, at p. 6 states: ‘when a woman commits an act
of violence she is rarely regarded as an agent of violence, and more often considered a
victim herself’.
Kompisch, supra note 16, pp. 196, 235; Herkommer, supra note 20, p. 107; Hogg, supra note
16, p. 82.
Lower, supra note 16, p. 257 especially the inuence of their husbands was in many cases
considered detrimental.
Eriksson Baaz and Stern, supra note 2, p. 713.
It might thus be very well possible that women are portrayed as more evil with-
out actually being more evil.
Next to being portrayed as evil monsters, female perpetrators are also often
portrayed as lacking agency. The assumption yet again being that ordinary
women would not commit such atrocities so - if they are not insane - they must
have been forced. Women themselves have in some cases supported these ste-
reotyped gender images. Especially while defending themselves in front of a
court many women tried to exploit these sentiments by declaring that they
could not possibly have committed atrocious crimes out of their own accord.
In some cases this worked and some judges trying female perpetrators were
inuenced by these same gender stereotypes. Outside of the courtroom
most female soldiers do however not like to be considered as being diferent
compared to their male counterparts, nor as lacking agency. The ‘vast majority’
of female soldiers interviewed by Eriksson Baaz and Stern ‘…described them-
selves as having equal propensity for and agency in the violence committed in
comparison with their male colleagues’.
These examples and the stereotyped portrayal of female perpetrators as
either wicked and insane or as being forced by men clearly show us that within
society there are clear gender norms which dictate what can be perceived as
acceptable and unacceptable behavior for men and women respectively.
Atrocities violate legal and moral norms no matter whether they are commit-
ted by men or women but women who are involved in mass atrocities violate
gender norms in addition to that and that often becomes the central focus of
attention when reporting these atrocities. This nding raises the question as to
what gender is and how it afects the behaviour of men and women and
to what extent it plays a role in the capacity of men and women to commit
atrocities. These issues will be discussed in the next section in which we draw
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Laura Sjoberg, ‘Reconstructing Women in Post-conict Rwanda’, in Chandler et al., supra
note 9, p. 181. See also Sjoberg and Gentry, supra note 78, p. 6 who concluded that: ‘mascu-
linities and femininities are made up of behaviour expectations, stereotypes, and rules
which apply to persons because they are understood to be a member of particular sex
categories’.
Kompisch, supra note 16, pp. 216, 234.
particular attention to the efect of gender roles and norms with two institu-
tions which are particular relevant to this study as most perpetrators are mem-
bers of these two institutions: the political leadership of a country and the
military.
4.2 The Efect and Role of Gender Norms on Women in the Political
Arena and in Militarised Units
Gender roles and gender norms play an important role in each and every soci-
ety. They reect ‘socially assigned, expected roles on the basis of perceived
membership in implicitly natural sex groups’ and tend to push women and
men into these roles. Traditionally speaking men are expected to be the protec-
tors of their families who provide money, food and shelter for their families
while women are meant to look after the children and do work at home. Men
may consequently be aggressive and violent while women are required to be
sensitive and compassionate. Women are furthermore in many places still far
from equal to men, have less education, and fewer means to get certain jobs
and positions. Men are often considered natural leaders while women are sup-
posed to follow their leadership. This explains why it is generally harder for
women to make themselves a career than for men and explains why women
are underrepresented within the political leadership of a country. Although
some women defy these gender roles and became part of this leadership as we
shall see in section5, they often somehow do not seem to fully t into this
men’s world: they do not belong to ‘the old boys club’ and are often merely
tolerated rather than fully respected. Although there are some prominent
exceptions very few women have arisen to a position of real power in patriar-
chal and oppressive societies which often strongly embrace these gender
norms.
Gender roles and norms have equally stirred women away from the military.
Throughout history the vast majority of all combatants are male. Women who
served in the army were often nurses or aides who were not involved in actual
combat. There were for instance 500.000 women in the Wehrmacht (compared
to 18 million men) and 4.000 in the (compared to 900.000 men). There
were thus less than three per cent women in the Wehrmacht and less than one
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Adler et al., supra note 26, p. 223.
Human Security Report () of 2005, supra note 79, estimated that nowadays 5-15 per
cent of government armed service personnel are female at p. 111.
McKay and Mazurana, supra note 28, p. 14.
Eriksson Baaz and Stern, supra note 2, p. 712.
M. Eriksson Baaz and M. Stern, ‘Whores, Men, and Other Mists: Undoing Feminization
in the Armed Forces in the ’, African Afairs (2011), at p. 573.
M. Eriksson Baaz and M. Stern, ‘Making Sense of Violence: Voices of Soldiers in the Congo
()’, 46 Journal of Modern African Studies (2008) 57–86, at pp. 67–68, 74.
See Eriksson Baaz and Stern, supra note 2, p. 722.
Coulter, supra note 2, p. 57.
per cent women in the . In Rwanda less than ten per cent of the Interahamwe
members were women. Women thus represented only a small minority of
the members within these organizations. It is only since the last 40 years that
this is gradually changing, although many women are still not allowed to
actively engage in combat. In some conicts women do play a more promi-
nent role: in both Sierra Leone and Uganda’s Lord Resistance Army () 30
per cent of the members are female. But even though these numbers are
remarkable women are still clearly a minority group. As most hands-on perpe-
trators are members of militarised units such as the army, the police force or
specialised units the underrepresentation of women can explain why so many
more men than women are involved in mass atrocities. This however is not the
only reason. Equally important is the very patriarchal nature of the military in
which gender roles and norms are clearly enshrined.
Within the military being a good soldier is often linked to masculinity, and
many armies promote the ideal male identity as being a heroic warrior. In
these stereotyped images, males are pictured as ‘protectors of the civil popula-
tion with a duty to protect women and children’ and as having courage and
lacking fear, while women are portrayed as weak and fearful. For many men,
the army is the place to prove one’s manhood, and being called a woman is an
insult. Making it through military training is often seen as a test of man-
hood, and those who fail are called ladies or girls. Women embody female val-
ues which are rejected in the army. These stereotyped gender images afect
both men and women. Coulter for instance states: ‘Men who refuse to ght will
often be ridiculed, jailed or even killed for their cowardice, or lack of
manliness’.
Eriksson and Baaz who conducted research in the Democratic Republic of
Congo () on female combatants stated that: ‘Like in other military institu-
tions globally, many men in the military hierarchy question women’s
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Eriksson Baaz and Stern, supra note 2, p. 715.
Ibid., p. 718.
Ibid., p. 725.
Ibid., p. 730.
Charli Carpenter, supra note 6, p. 672.
D’Amico, supra note 10, p. 45.
Huggins et al., supra note 59, p. 86.
Ibid., p. 250.
Brown, supra note 22, pp. 8–9.
D’Amico, supra note 10, p. 48.
presence in the armed forces’. It is argued that ‘women’s (supposed) physical
and psychological weaknesses makes them unsuitable for combat and that
women’s presence erodes unit cohesion through fraternization and sexual dis-
tractions’. In the macho world of the military, women are looked upon with
contempt and are merely seen as objects to full men’s desire who are not suit-
able for combat, while combat is described as the function of the real (mascu-
line) army. The underlying notion is that ‘the military as a male sphere [is]
not suited for “real women”‘. As a consequence thereof women are often
excluded from ghting. Being excluded from ghting – the only “real” task of
the army makes that women in many respects are, as D’Amico concluded, ‘still
seen as “outsiders” in what many perceived as a denitely masculine institu-
tion’. Within the military, the corps d’esprit is cherished, but seems to include
just men – a band of brothers.
In their research in Brazil on ‘violence workers’ Higgins, Haritos-Fatouros
and Zimbardo also stress the important link between the military and mascu-
linity. The military represents a gender based social dominance of masculinity
and “real men”. They dene masculinism as ‘an ideology that justies and natu-
ralises male domination’. Higgins et al. do not claim that masculinity itself
caused violence but note that masculinity played an important role in the
socialization of these men: ‘… within such a secret, club-like atmosphere,
norms of highly concentrated masculinity may empower and reward violence
as the primary means of demonstrating one’s over-the top maleness to others
and to oneself’.
In many countries women are now accepted in the army, but often only in
subordinate positions. In Nazi Germany for instance, the women who joined
the were not accepted as full members but as so-called auxiliaries, and in
the camp order it was stated that a woman could never outrank an man.
Having women in superior positions to men is a sensitive issue. An American
soldier in a court-martial made this very explicit: “I don’t take orders from
women”. In some more revolutionary ideologies – women are sometimes
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2005, supra note 79, p. 111.
See Eriksson Baaz and Stern, supra note 2; K. Holmstedt, Band of Sisters – American
Women at War in Iraq (Stackpole Books, Mechanicsburg, 2007).
See for an insider story, J. Karpinsky with S. Strasser, One Woman’s Army – The Commanding
General of Abu Ghraib Tells Her Story (Miramax Books, New York, 2005).
See newspaper report, < www.voanews.com/content/senate-considers-changes-to-curb
-sexual-assault-in-military/1674866.html>, 23 June 2013.
See newspaper clipping, <www.nytimes.com/2013/06/24/us/in-debate-over-military
-sexual-assault-men-are-overlooked-victims.html?pagewanted=all>, 23 June 2013.
See also Bloom, supra note 77, p. 2 and Sjoberg who concludes that it is not accurate to
consider women more peaceful than men, see Sjoberg, supra note 119, p. 182.
placed on a more equal footing to men which might explain the relatively high
percentages of women in rebel and guerrilla forces such as the Sandinista
National Liberation Front in Nicaragua (est. 30 per cent women), the Shining
Path in Peru, the in Columbia and the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. Here
too, it might very well be possible that women have to struggle and nd their
place within the very masculine culture – the female soldiers interviewed in
general stress the fact that they are soldiers rather than the fact that they are
female soldiers.
Taking this macho culture into account it is not hard to imagine that women
who do become members of military organizations have a lot to cope with.
They are often considered and treated as inferiors. It is characteristic that in
some armies many of those who do not t the ideal role model (both men and
women) are physically or sexually abused. In a recent report of the Pentagon
for instance it is estimated that there were 26.000 cases of sexual abuse in the
army in the last year. Although the majority of the reported cases (53 per
cent) involved attacks on men, women ‘are signicantly more likely to be sexu-
ally assaulted in the military than men’. All in all we can conclude that the
military is a very patriarchal organization in which very stereotyped gender
roles and gender norms are likely to strongly afect both men and women
working within this environment. This can not only explain why so many more
men than women are members of these militarised organizations but also why
more men than women once recruited by these organizations get involved in
mass atrocities. All in all we can conclude that there seems to be little evidence
and proof that women are indeed inherently more peaceful than men but
rather that other (social) factors account for the predominance of male rather
than female perpetrators.
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5 The Cases of Biljana Plavsic and Pauline Nyiramasuhuko
As already stated earlier, so far only two women have been convicted by an
international criminal court and tribunal for their involvement in interna-
tional crimes: Biljana Plavsic and Pauline Nyiramasuhuko. Both women
were inuential political leaders: one in Bosnia Herzegovina, the other in
Rwanda – both thus deed gender inequality and made themselves a name in
the political arena which is usually dominated by men. In this section we will
focus on their cases and see what we can learn from their cases. How can we
explain that these two women were singled out for prosecution? What made
them stand out? How can we explain their rise to such powerful positions
within a violent and oppressive regime and how can we explain their involve-
ment in mass atrocities?
5.1 The Case of Biljana Plavsic
Biljana Plavsic was born on 7 July 1930 in Tuzla in Bosnia Herzegovina, which
at the time was still part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Before
entering politics, Plavsic was a Professor of Natural Sciences and the Dean of
Faculty at the University of Sarajevo, and a highly accomplished scientist who
published over 100 scholarly papers. In 1990 at the age of sixty, she co-founded
the Serbian Democratic Party and became the rst female member of the
Socialist Republic of Bosnia Herzegovina. Two years later in 1992 when the
Serbian Republic of Bosnia Herzegovina became independent under the name
of Republika Srpska and Radovan Karadzic its rst president, Plavsic became
one of the two acting Vice Presidents and his deputy. Together with Karadzic
and Momcilo Krasjnik, the other Vice President, she had de facto control and
authority of the members of the Bosnian Serb armed forces led by Radko
Mladic. Plavsic was thus at the centre of political power during the Bosnian
wars in 1992–1995. She was known for her radical statements and hate speeches.
She considered the Serbs superior to the Muslims, whom she described as
genetically deformed. Plavsic used her background in biology to justify and
rationalise the crimes: she for instance described ethnic cleansing as a form of
natural selection and a matter of biology. She was considered a radical even by
Karadzic and Milosevic, and was known as the ‘Serbian Empress’ and ‘Serbian
Iron Lady’. She became a powerful, prominent and inuential gure in politics.
She invited militias to help the army with the ethnic cleansing. In an infamous
televised broadcast she stepped over a dead body and kissed Zelkjo Raznjatovic,
better known as Arkan and the infamous and very violent and cruel leader of
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C.S. Stewart, Hunting the Tiger – the Fast Life and Violent Death of the Balkans’ Most
Dangerous Man (Thomas Dunne Books, New York, 2008).
Prosecutor v. Plavsic, 3 February 2003, , -00-39&40/1-S.
N.A. Combs, ‘International Decisions: Prosecutor v. Plavsic’, American Journal of
International Law (2003) 292–937.
Subotic noted however that ‘not everyone was impressed’ by her statement. It was cold,
supercial and lacking direct apologies. Del Ponte later reiterated in her memoirs: ‘I lis-
tened to her admission in horror, knowing she was saying nothing’, while a Srebrenica
survivor noted: ‘I feel like crying. There was nothing human in her words, not a note of
apology. She didn’t do it for me. She did it for the Serbian cause’. See J. Subotic, ‘The Cruelty
of False Remorse: Biljana Plavsic at the Hague’, 36 Southeastern Europe (2012) 39–59.
See also P. Chiet and G. Boas, ‘Sentencing Coherence in International Criminal Law: the
Cases of Biljana Plavsic and Miroslav Bralo’, 23 Criminal Law Forum (2012) 135–159, who
the Arkan Tigers whom she considered to be a hero. At the end of the war
she - unlike some of the other leaders – however, supported the Dayton
Accords, and from 1996 -1998 she served as the 2nd president of the Republika
Srpska, succeeding Karadzic who at that time was already indicted by the .
In April 2000, Plavsic was indicted by the together with Momcilo
Krasjnik and charged with several counts of genocide, crimes against humanity
and war crimes. Plavsic voluntary surrendered in January 2001 and initially
pleaded not guilty. On 16 December 2002 she however pled guilty to persecu-
tion as a crime against humanity, and in return the seven other charges includ-
ing the genocide charges were dropped. She did plead guilty to ethnic cleansing
in 37 communities in which approximately 50.000 non-Serbs were killed.
Plavsic was the rst high-ranking Bosnian Serbian politician to plead guilty,
and according to the prosecutor thus contributed to reconciliation in Bosnia.
Madeline Albright, Carl Bildt and Alex Boraine testied on her behalf. The
judges noted that Plavsic participated in ‘a crime of the utmost gravity’ but that
she was not as culpable as Karadzic and Krasjnik who exercised primary con-
trol. Plavsic, however, nevertheless supported the ethnic cleansing, and
invited Serbian paramilitaries to assist in the cleansing and was thus found
guilty. She was sentenced on 27 February 2003 to 11 years of imprisonment.
The judges regarded the fact that she surrendered voluntarily, her age, post-
conict conduct and guilty plea as mitigating circumstances. They considered
her guilty plea and remorse as genuine. The fact that she refused to implicate
others and refused to cooperate with the prosecution was not held against her.
Many people criticised this very lenient sentence: questioning whether guilty
pleas in relation to such extreme crimes should ever lead to leniency. After
all, she had been one of the leading gures; Krasjnik, who was one of her con-
federates was given a 20-year sentence. Her guilty plea helped - without
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discussed the diference in sentencing between Plavsic and Bralo, two indictees who both
plead guilty. Plavsic, one of the leading gures was sentenced to 11 years, while Bralo, a
foot soldier was sentenced to 20 years.
Subotic, supra note 148, p. 41–42. See also Gilani supra note 112, p. 12 who notes: ‘The narratives
highlight Plavisc’s feminity by portraying her as a pacist who genuinely wanted to end the
conict in the Balkans…. These narratives succeeded in constructing an image of Plavsic that
gave the impression that she was a woman who was unsuspectingly exploited by rst her male
colleagues, and later by the international criminal tribunal when she was indicted for crimes
against humanity, genocide and war crimes’. See also pp. 18, 27. Chiet and Boas, supra note 149.
Ibid.
Subotic, supra note 148, p. 40.
Ibid,, p. 40.
The Local, a Swedish newspaper, on 26 January 2009, available at: http://www.thelocal
.se/20090126/17162 (last visited 19 August 2014).
Subotic, supra note 148.
doubt - but her gender and appearance might also have played a role: ‘she
seemed out of place among a group of ruthless men’. Chiet and Boas note
that: ‘The Judgment reects a story of a well-educated, now delicate old lady,
who, caught up in events, came to see the error of her ways’. Plavsic did not
appeal the decision and was sent to Sweden to serve her sentence.
In prison, Plavsic wrote her lengthy two-volume memoires which were pub-
lished in 2005. In these memoires she retracted her admissions and ‘reiterated
a particularly hard-line, nationalist worldview that showed little, if any, reha-
bilitation and political change’. She also distanced herself from Karadzic,
whom she described as a criminal and a coward. In 2009 she gave an inter-
view in which she stated:
I have sacriced myself. I have done nothing wrong. I pleaded guilty to
crimes against humanity so I could bargain for the other charges. If
I hadn’t, the trial would have lasted three, three and a half years. Con-
sidering my age that wasn’t an option.
It thus became crystal clear that the only reason why she had pled guilty was to
get a lenient sentence – it was in other words a calculated manoeuvre. -
President Patrick Robinson nevertheless granted her request for early release
after she served two-thirds of her sentence. He reckoned that she had demon-
strated substantial evidence of rehabilitation. Plavsic was released on 27
October 2009 and granted a hero’s welcome in the Republic of Srpska.
The indictment and prosecution of Plavsic was not a surprise, as she had
been one of the leading gures in the war in Bosnia and Herzogovina and her
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S. Drakulic, They Would Never Hurt a Fly (Penguin Books, London, 2004), pp. 176–177.
The Local, supra note 154.
Plavsic in her memoires as quoted by Subotic, supra note 148, p. 53.
P. Landesman, ‘A Woman’s Work’, New York Times Magazine (15 September 2002).
virulent racism certainly helped to justify and legitimise the persecution and
killing of non-Serbs. During the war her extreme statements seem to show that
she was a fanatic, but it is also clear that Plavsic was a very ambitious woman
who probably enjoyed the power and being in the limelight. After having been
a very accomplished scholar, she started a political career at age 60 and pro-
gressed quickly to a high position. She is often described as cold and calcu-
lated. Drakulic describes her as calm, composed and dignied but also as
arrogant with an air of superiority. Her elitist attitude also showed when she
started to complain about her prison in Sweden and showed disdain for her
fellow inmates: ‘None of the other prisoners have read a single book. And yet
we are treated equally’. Her guilty plea and the retraction thereof later in her
memoires seem to indeed indicate that she is a ruthlessly calculating oppor-
tunist who tries to make the best out of the situation. She pleaded guilty to
avoid a long trial and harsh sentence, but showed no real remorse and wrote a
book to justify herself, thus probably trying to win back her popular support. In
the book she tried to rely on her gender as proving her innocence. She stated:
According to their [Momcilo Krasjnik and Radovan Karadzic] under-
standing and that is a traditional understanding, at such times just before
the war, and especially during war, there is no role for a woman.
Discussions, negotiations, that is a job for male heads […]. Is it not unfair
to recommend me for a high function and later take over all my responsi-
bilities and leave me only with accountability?
5.2 The Case of Pauline Nyiramasuhuko
Pauline Nyiramasuhuko was born in 1946 in Butare, Rwanda. Pauline N., as she
is commonly known, was born into a poor Hutu family but that did not stop
her from being very ambitious and always wanting more. An old friend testi-
ed: ‘from her childhood Pauline had political ambition. She always wanted to
achieve high. If she saw someone build a house, she wanted a bigger house. If
she saw someone do well, she wanted to do better’. She attended the same
high school as Agathe Kanziga, who was later to become the wife of President
Habyarimana. Initially she was trained and worked as a social worker. Later –
with the help of her powerful friend Agathe Habyarimana - she started to work
for the ministry and in 1968 she married a successful man and had four chil-
dren. Pauline however, wanted to forward her career even further, and in 1986
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Ibid.
Ibid.
Mark Drumbl, ‘She Makes Me Ashamed to Be a Woman: the Genocide Conviction of
Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, 2011’, Michigan Journal of International Law (2013) 559–603.
Landesman, supra note 159.
Ibid.
Gilani, supra note 112, p. 14.
Ibid, p. 14.
Ibid, p. 15.
at age 40 she began to study law at the National University of Rwanda. After
having been a local politician, in 1992 she became a minister in the Rwandan
government. The people of Butare were proud of her – as she was a woman
who had made herself a career. She was nicknamed ‘Butare’s favourite daugh-
ter’. In the years prior to and during the genocide, Pauline was within the
centre of power, and without doubt ‘one of the most powerful women in
Rwanda’s government’.
Nyiramasuhuko was named by Prime Minister Kambanda in his guilty plea
at the as ‘among the ve members of his inner sanctum ‘where the blue-
print of the genocide was rst drawn up’. She not only played an important
role in the genocide, but was also the main instigator of the mass rapes and
killings in Butare. She was present at the crime scene and gave direct orders to
erect road blocks and rape and kill Tutsis, even ordering her own son, who was
a leader of the Interahamwe, to rape women. As Minister of Family and
Women’s Afairs, she was supposed to promote the role of women and families
in Rwandan society, but did the complete opposite. It is unclear to what extent
Pauline really hated Tutsis, or whether it was a deliberate political move
which- within a polarised society - would make her rise to a more powerful
position. It has also been suggested that Pauline’s great-grandfather had in fact
been a Tutsi, and that therefore she too, was a Tutsi – in that case her extrem-
ism could have been a means to hide her true identity. Whatever the truth is,
this does not change the fact that as of the start of the genocide, Pauline had
become a very outspoken and virulent radical. In the narratives she is generally
portrayed as ‘a sexually deviant and psychologically unbalanced woman’.
She for instance, ordered that Tutsi women be raped before they would be
killed. Her violence is portrayed ‘as the work of someone who enjoyed degra-
dation and torture. By casting her as a sadist, these narratives succeed in por-
traying brutality as an artefact of psychological pathology’. It is sometimes
alleged that she had ‘personal feelings of inadequacy and unnatural proclivity
for sexual competition’ and that the violence against Tutsi women was a ‘per-
sonal vendetta’.
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Ibid, p. 19
Drumbl, supra note 162, p. 563.
C. Sperling, ‘Mother of Atrocities: Pauline Nyiramasuhuko’s Role in the Rwandan
Genocide’, Fordham Urb. L.J. (2005–2006) 637.
Drumbl, supra note 162, p. 564.
After the genocide she ed to the but was arrested on 18 July 1997 in
Nairobi, Kenya. The indicted her with 11 counts of genocide, crimes
against humanity (including rape) and war crimes. She was tried together with
5 others including her son Ntahobali in a case which was generally referred to
as the Butare case. She was mainly indicted for inciting the violence rather
than physically committing the crimes herself – although she was reported to
be seen at several crime scenes personally ordering and overseeing the perpe-
tration of the rapes and killings. She was said to have distributed condoms
amongst the soldiers in order to protect them from getting . In court
Pauline and her defense team denied all charges, and tried to rely on her gen-
der as a defense. They suggested that women are by nature peaceful, and that
she therefore could not have been involved in the violence, rapes and genocide.
Especially the fact that she was a mother was forwarded as a reason as to why
she could not have been a murderer. She claimed to be ‘a scapegoat of men’s
violence’. In an interview in 1995 she had already told the : ‘I cannot even
kill a chicken. If there is a person who says that a woman – a mother – killed,
then I’ll confront that person’. Her husband relied on similar sentiments when
interviewed by the and stated: ‘It is not culturally possible for a Rwandan
woman to make her son rape other women. It just couldn’t have taken place’.
The trial in which she was the lead defendant drew a lot of media attention.
While thousands of women had already been tried and convicted for genocide
by national courts, Pauline was the rst woman ever to be tried for genocide by
an international court and tribunal and this was picked up by the media.
Sterling noted: ‘the press seems more xated on her gender than the signi-
cance of her crimes and her prosecution’. Mark Drumbl came to a similar
conclusion: ‘her status as woman and mother to accentuate her personal cul-
pability and individual deviance i.e. she is a worse perpetrator, a greater disap-
pointment, and a more shocking ofender because she is a woman, mother and
grandmother. Another particular feature which drew the attention of the
media was the fact that one of the ve other co-defendants was her son. The
trial lasted ten years and was the longest trial ever conducted by an interna-
tional criminal court or tribunal. On 24 June 2011 the nally rendered its
judgment. Pauline was found guilty of 7 of the 11 charges. She was found guilty
of conspiracy to commit genocide and genocide; of crimes against humanity
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international criminal law review 15 (2015) 207-253
Prosecutor v. Pauline Nyiramasuhuko and Others, 24 June, , Case No. -98-42-T.
Drumbl, supra note 162, p. 580.
(extermination, rape and persecution) and of war crimes (violence to life and
outrages upon personal dignity). In relation to the crimes committed the judges
noted that: ‘the evidence … paints a clear picture of unfathomable depravity
and sadism’. Drumbl concludes that overall the ‘trial judgment carefully pur-
sues a neutral approach to the gender’. Just like her son in the very same case
Pauline N. was sentenced to life imprisonment. Both appealed the decision.
5.3 Conclusion
Biljana Plavsic and Pauline Nyiramasuhuko were rightfully singled out for
prosecution due to their leading political roles in the periods of mass violence
within their respective countries. Despite the biased media coverage, neither
of the two women can be considered abnormal or mentally disturbed. Both
were however, clearly very ambitious women who deliberately chose to embark
on a political career, and both rose to very high and powerful positions
mainly due to their calculating nature and extremist views. In both cases it is
possible- even likely - that they became such fanatics in order to advance their
political careers. The fact that they were women in a men’s world might have
caused them to become even more extreme – and show the men around them
that they were equal partners. But even if this was the case and their extrem-
ism was indeed less a matter of hatred than a calculated manoeuvre – it was a
position they took up deliberately and a choice they made consciously. In ret-
rospect they both tried to rely on their gender as proof that they could not have
been involved in such extreme crimes. Plavsic’s lenient sentence might have
been afected by her gender and appearance, but it did not make Pauline’s
judges more lenient – she received the maximum penalty. Both cases clearly
show that women - very ambitious but otherwise very ordinary women - who
rise to powerful positions are equally capable of committing and organizing
mass atrocities as their male counterparts.
In the next section we will focus on the motives of the many other women
who - often as low ranking perpetrators - have been involved in mass atrocities
and how we can compare their motives to those of men.
6 Motives of Women Involved in Mass Violence
As concluded above many more men than women are involved in mass
atrocities for the very simple reason that the organizations involved in the
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93 per cent female ghters say they were abducted compared to 85 per cent of the
men. Cohen, supra note 35.
Coulter, supra note 28, p. 99 refers to R. Brett and I. Specht, Young Soldiers – Why They
Choose to Fight (London, Boulder, , 2004), p. 85.
M. Wessels, Child Soldiers – from Violence to Protection (Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, 2006) at 88.
In Angola and Mozambique many girl soldiers are abducted as well.
Coulter, supra note 28, p. 3 and p. 9.
Ibid., p. 97.
Ibid., p. 240.
Eriksson Baaz and Stern, supra note 125, p. 720.
perpetration thereof are traditionally male dominated organizations. This
raises three questions: rst of all: why do some women nevertheless join such
organizations? Secondly how do they get involved in committing international
crimes and what motives do women have? And lastly: to what extent do the
motives of these women difer from the motives men have? These questions
are central to the following subsections.
6.1 Why Women Join Militarised Units
Women and girls can join military units in a number of diferent ways: they can
be forced, recruited or join voluntarily. In some cases, women and girls are
abducted and forced to join militarised units. The overwhelming majority of
girl soldiers in for instance many war-torn African or Asian countries are
recruited in this way – some are as young as nine years old when abducted.
The phenomenon of abduction is widespread: according to McKay and
Mazurana ‘in the period 1990–2003 armed groups abducted girl soldiers in
twenty-eight countries’. Girls can be abducted by rebels or government
forces. Rebel forces like the in Sierra Leone and the in Uganda are
infamous for using this recruitment method. Abducted girls are often physi-
cally abused, regularly raped, used as slaves and many are subjected to forced
marriage and thus become so-called Bush wives, while others are forced to
ght. One of these abductees recounts: ‘When I was captured we were put in
one room. As we were in that room any man, whether small or big, comes to
have sex with me, you can’t deny him. If you do, you will be killed’. The rea-
son why they didn’t escape was ‘fear of leaving and fear of returning home …
many were killed if they were caught escaping, and others had been forced to
kill relatives and were afraid of reprisals if they returned home’. Eriksson
Baaz and Stern note that there is a forceful stigma attached to women in the
armed forces: they are considered unt for marriage and family life. Girls
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R.L. Riley, ‘Women and War: Militarism, Bodies, and the Practice of Gender’, Sociology
Compass (2008) 1192–1208.
Coulter, supra note 2, p. 57.
Ibid., p. 63.
Ibid., p. 57. See also Coulter, supra note 28, pp. 22, 137; Cohen, supra note 35; Brown, supra
note 22, p. 9. See also Husejnovic, supra note 93.
Unfortunately, girl soldiers returning home experience such a sentiment too. They are
often not accepted back by their families (Coulter, supra note 28, p. 1) and experience
disapproval, rejection and stigmatization. Often no one wants to marry a rebel woman
and it is considered shameful to be one. The general sentiment is that ‘by staying with the
rebels for so many years had made them to become rebels too. See Coulter, supra note 28,
p. 209. programs do not focus on women and women are often not seen as real com-
batants. See Coulter, supra note 28, p. 157 and Annan et al. 2011.
See also McDonald, supra note 59, p. 366.
Kompisch, supra note 16, 163; I. Heike, “Female Concentration Camp Guards as
Perpetrators: Three Case Studies”, in O. Jensen and C.C.W. Szejnmann (eds.), Ordinary
People as Mass Murderers – Perpetrators in Comparative Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan
2008) at p. 120.
Coulter, supra note 28 p. 126.
Ibid., p. 99 refers to Brett and Specht, supra note 175, p. 85.
who join the rebels transgress gender norms and even if the reason they do is
because they were abducted, they sufer repercussions. Many girls and
women who have been forcefully abducted by rebel movements were for
instance, upon return, rejected by their own communities. It was already noted
that: ‘women who oppose female stereotypes in war will often be regarded as
deviant or unnatural. When ghting and committing atrocities women are
‘forced to violate taboos more fully than boys’. In his research, Coulter con-
cluded that in ‘Sierra Leone, and also in Liberia, Peru, and Sri Lanka, female
ghters have often been regarded by the civilian populations as monsters, bar-
barians and frequently as more cold blooded than male rebels’. When
women choose to use violence this seems to be the point of no return, more so
than for men. By taking part in violence women have to transgress stereo-
typed gender roles and their involvement is in that sense more costly which
makes them more determined but also makes it more dicult for them to
return home.
In some cases women are asked or required to join via a kind of military
service. In Israel, for instance both men and women have to serve in the
military. During the war in Sierra Leone, rebel groups as well as government
forces recruited women. Some girls and women were not abducted nor
recruited but participated voluntarily. Reasons for women to join the ranks
of militarised units can be manifold. Some women joined out of ideological
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Ibid., p. 138.
McDonald, supra note 57, p. 367.
Keairnes, supra note 27, p. 3; McKay and Mazurana, supra note 28, p. 14.
In the Nazi death camps women could earn more money than in industry, Brown, supra
note 22, p. 16.
Wessels, supra note 176, p. 90.
Eriksson Baaz and Stern, supra note 125, p. 68; Wessels, ibid.
Coulter, supra note 28, 99; Anna et al., p. 3 who refer to Alison and Mazurana.
See also Kompisch, supra note 16, p. 216; Keairnes, supra note 27, p. 3. ‘I always wanted to
join the army … I liked that, and I decided that I also wanted to become a soldier. I wanted
to become like that’.(Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2008, 69). See also Wessels, supra note 176,
p. 90.
Eriksson Baaz and Stern, supra note 136, p. 68.
Coulter, supra note 2, p. 65.
Coulter, supra note 28, p. 151.
McKay and Mazurana, supra note 28, p. 14.
Brett and Specht, supra note 175, pp. 87–90; Global Report on Child Soldiers, p. 29;
Keairnes, supra note 27, p. 3; McKay and Mazurana, supra note 28, p. 14; Wessels, supra
conviction as was the case with female rebels in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and
Eritrea. In some cases women were motivated to not only ght for political
goals, but also for gender equality, and the movement of which they are part
provides them with this opportunity. Others joined because of the opportu-
nities provided to them by doing so: they wanted a job, were in need for
money, wanted the education and training provided, wanted to make
themselves a career, wanted to gain status and become part of an elite,
wanted to exercise leadership, to be more independent, or wanted to be con-
sidered equal to boys and men. Still others joined because they were
attracted by the adventure or because they liked the uniforms. For some the
‘typical masculine ideal of a soldier became a role model’. Coulter notes that:
girls who volunteered to ght were girls who possess strength, indepen-
dence, courage persistence and character … but these are not character-
istics which are highly valued in women who have to submissive, servile,
and a willingness to endure, and accept their subordinate position.
Joining could also be a means of escape or a ‘matter of survival’ – girls or
women who had lost their family members, looked for protection or felt that
being a soldier and having a gun themselves would protect them against rape
and other forms of abuse. Some wanted to escape home and domes-
ticexploitation and abuse, a planned marriage or a life as a slave. Female
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note 176, p. 90. Criminologists have concluded that a girls early victimization can set the
stage for future criminal acts, see Miller and Mullins, supra note 103, p. 38.
McDonald, as quoted by Sjoberg and Gentry, supra note 78, p. 101.
Bloom, supra note 77, p. 9.
See also Coulter, supra note 2, p. 60.
A. Smeulers, ‘What Transforms Ordinary People into Gross Human Rights Violators?’, in
S. Carey and S. Poe (eds.), Understanding Human Rights Violations: New Systematic Studies
(Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2004), pp. 239–256.
Like their male counterparts, female leader Johanna Langefeld, who was known to be a
decent guard (Brown, supra note 22, p. 18; Heike supra note 188, p. 131) was proud that she
managed to organise the selection process in an ordinary fashion without ‘screaming and
suicide terrorists have allegedly been drawn to terrorist movements simply
because they felt that life had nothing left to ofer them. In an interview one of
the hostages of the Moscow hostage-taking in which many Chechen black wid-
ows were involved explained: ‘They told me when a Chechen woman’s hus-
band is killed, she can’t marry again … She has to put on a black mourning
dress for the rest of her life. But by dying she gets closer to her beloved. That’s
why the women were so scary. They had no reason to live’. Bloom, who
focused her research on female suicide bombers concludes: ‘it is telling that
the women who participate in suicide bombings are usually among the most
socially vulnerable: widows and rape victims’.
The reasons why men join the military are probably very similar. Choosing
to be part of the military is however, a far more obvious choice for a man than
it is for a woman. One can consequently expect that women who chose to
join the military must have thought very hard about their choice and thus are
very determined. Next to that it seems likely that more women than men
choose to be part of the military in order to ee the situation at home – hoping
that being part of the military and holding a gun in their hands would empower
them.
6.2 Why Women Commit Mass Atrocities: Socialization and Force
Joining a militarised unit is obviously not the same as committing mass atroci-
ties and the next important question is: how do women get involved in the
perpetration of mass atrocities? From research on (mainly male) perpetrators
it has become apparent that many perpetrators were socialised into violence
and that they got progressively involved and are gradually transformed from
ordinary men into perpetrators. Within a strict hierarchical organization
many people feel a strong pressure to obey all orders from their superiors and
few men or women have the guts to disregard such orders. Many of the men
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shouting’ (Herkommer, supra note 20, p. 113). She could apparently accept the ideological
aim to kill Jews (she was considered to be anti-Semitic), but could not accept unnecessary
cruelty.
E. Staub, The Roots of Evil - the Origins of Genocide and other Group Violence (Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1989).
See Lower, supra note 16, p. 131.
Brown, supra note 22, p. 17.
Kompisch, supra note 16, p. 162.
Coulter, supra note 28, p. 108.
Cohen, supra note 35.
See also Eriksson Baaz and Stern, supra note 125, p. 570; and Lower, supra note 16, p. 17 and
p. 194 in which she notes that some women when being violent dressed like males.
furthermore went through a tough and coercive training period in which they
were taught to obey and conform to all orders from their superiors. Nevertheless
research has shown that many recruits initially still have a hard time when
ordered to commit an atrocity for the rst time. But eventually most perpetra-
tors get used to the system and the violence and are brutalised. They - as Staub
noted - progressed on a continuum of destructiveness. The same appears to
be true for female perpetrators. The female camp guards in Nazi Germany
were for instance trained in Ravensbrück in which they underwent a training
which was similar to the one the male guards had at Dachau and which was
described as a ‘conditioning process that … was grueling and demanding’.
Inmates from Nazi concentration camps concluded that many inexperienced
female guards still seemed to care about the prisoners but the longer they
worked in the camps the more brutal they became. Women within milita-
rised organizations seem to experience the same pressure as their male coun-
terparts and seem to be socialised into violence in similar ways. In some cases
as for instance in Sierra Leone soldiers (men and women; boys and girls) were
forcefully injected with drugs. Up to 34–35 per cent of men and women
reported to have been given drugs while being in the . This too might be
an explanation for their brutality.
As already discussed above, many of the militarised units are male domi-
nated and within these institutions recruits are demanded to live up to the
idealised male role model. It is a men’s world and women are often stereotyped
in a condescending manner and not considered as full members. In recent
years more and more armies have accepted women in their ranks but often
they cannot take part in the ghting and thus cannot make themselves a career.
This might very well be the reason why many women have a hard time within
these organizations and many as a consequence thereof are particularly eager
to prove themselves and show what they are worth. They are eager to show
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A perpetrator of the Rwandan genocide told us in an interview: ‘The more people you
killed, the more respect you gained in the group. I killed a lot of people, four hundred and
everyone was afraid of me’, Smeulers and Hoex, supra note 25.
African Rights, supra note 14, p. 44.
Coulter, supra note 28, p. 135.
Ibid., pp. 148, 150.
Adler et al., supra note 26, p. 223.
Annan et al. supra note 28, p. 884.
Ibid., p. 9.
African Rights, supra note 14, p. 42.
that they are one of the guys and within such groups the use of violence is a
means to raise one’s status.
Within many organizations women (just like many men) were forced to com-
mit atrocities. If they didn’t obey they could be killed. Women could be forced via
direct threats, i.e. by gunpoint to commit atrocities as reported by this Rwandan
woman: ‘When they told us to kill, many people refused. I was one of those who
refused. They beat me up so badly with rie butts that the baby I was carrying on
my back, a two-month-old girl, died’. Another female ghter in Sierra Leone
recounts: ‘The commander or group leader will just tell you to kill so-and-so per-
son. If you refuse they will kill you. So you just have to do it’. The violence is
intimidating and even if there is no direct threat many recruits (male and female)
are scared. From his research on Sierra Leone Coulter concluded: ‘… the choice
between life and death was not really a choice: the will to live and the fear of
death were too strong… .It was a matter of bare survival’. In some cases the
women were forced by their husbands like this woman in Rwanda: ‘Personally I
never was on their side, but my husband once said to me ‘If you don’t take part, I
will kill you myself”. So I agreed to participate’. Allegedly as many as 12 per cent
of the abducted women in Uganda ‘were forced to beat, cut or kill family mem-
bers. This was done ‘in order to bind them to the group, to reduce their fear of
killing, and to discourage disobedience’ and to make a return home impossi-
ble. A Rwandan woman remembers:
They said I must kill my godmother. They began to insist and started
beating me up. When I felt that the beating was too much, I gave in and
hit my godmother with the machete. When I started, the others also
joined in and began hitting her with their machetes. She did not die
immediately. While this was happening, a young man jumped out of his
hiding place. The whole group attackers began to chase him. I decided to
chase him as well instead of killing my godmother. But three of the
Interahamwe brought me back to make sure that I completed the job.
They gave me a masu to nish her of and I did.
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Ibid, pp. 53–58.
Ibid., pp. 1, 41; and Hogg, supra note 16, p. 84.
Coulter supra note 28, p. 107.
Ibid., p. 110.
See Coulter, supra note 28, p. 122 who states that many ‘made it through the war as ght-
ers’ and that many of these women ‘felt empowered by having a gun’ (Coulter 2000,
p. 139). See also Bloom, supra note 77, p. 4.
Coulter, supra note 2, p. 60.
In some cases in Rwanda women were ordered to kill their Tutsi husbands or
their children and although many refused (and were killed) others obeyed the
orders and thus hoped to protect themselves.
Others were threatened and intimidated in a more indirect way. In Sierra
Leone young women who had been abducted stated that commanders were
chosen on the basis of their wickedness – the rules and regulations in the rebel
movement were uncertain and arbitrary and the commanders were unpredict-
able leaving the rebels at the mercy of these commanders. In Sierra Leone it
was best for the abducted women to be picked as a bush wife because that
meant they were protected from further abuse by other men. The bush wives
of the commanders were relatively powerful as they were in charge of the dis-
tribution of arms and ammunition and could decide who had to ght. But if
they were not chosen as a bush wife the best way to survive was probably to
join the ghters and be an extremely loyal soldier even if this involved commit-
ting mass atrocities.
It is clear that men too sufered within this coercive environment, the forced
socializations and the continuous threats. They too could be severely punished
and killed for not obeying an order or for not be considered loyal or courageous
enough. It is however very likely that women sufered more taking their gener-
ally subordinate position into account. Women within the military as well as
rebel movements sufer in other words from more structural constraints.
Coulter who studied female ghters in Sierra Leone clearly indicated that
almost all the female combatants that he spoke to had been abducted and
raped: ‘Despite their bravery and toughness, however, the conditions of female
combatants were very diferent from those of men or even boys for that matter.
If a female combatant hesitated when ordered to kill, her own group could
punish her often through rape, and if she fell into enemy hands, she would also
be most likely raped before being killed’. Many of the women were victims
and perpetrators at the same time. They sufered from regular physical and
sexual abuse: they were forced to work and please the men. Their vulnerability
was simply a result of them being a woman. Coulter concluded: ‘One needs to
make a distinction, between diferent kinds and degrees of power and agency.
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Ibid., p. 68.
Eriksson Baaz and Stern, supra note 2, p. 713.
See also B. Finlay, ‘Pawn, Scapegoat or Collaborator? Military Women and Detainee
Abuse in Iraq’, in McKelvey, supra note 92, p. 211: ‘Just as men can become torturers given
the “right” conditions, so can women. But women in the military are in a more powerless
position, more vulnerable to pressures to conform, and more likely to sufer negative con-
sequences if caught’.
Amongst others D.K. Gupta, Path to Collective Madness - a Study in Social Order
and Political Pathology (Preager, Westport, 2001); and A. Smeulers, ‘Perpetrators of
International Crimes: Towards a Typology’, in A. Smeulers and R. Haveman (eds.),
Supranational Criminology: Towards a Criminology of International Crimes (Intersentia,
Antwerp, 2008), pp. 233–266.
Adler et al. supra note 26, p. 221. See also African Rights, supra note 14, p. 27 for the
Rwandan context, and McDonald, supra note 57, for terrorists.
African Rights, supra note 14, p. 149.
Ibid., p. 70.
Ibid., p. 140.
Female guards who were believed to be sadists were Irma Grese, Dorothea Binz, Maria
Mandel, Margot Drechsel.
Because even with a gun in hand, my informants choices were circumscribed-
by convention, tradition, morality, religion, family, or fear - in ways that were
diferent from men’s’. Eriksson Baaz and Stern concluded that ‘[M]ilitary
institutions reect and reproduce gendered relations in the societies in which
they operate’. If this is indeed true, then the extent to which women sufer
from their subordinate positions within militarised units will difer per society,
but it might not be too farfetched to conclude that women within these units
are much more vulnerable than men.
6.3 Why Women Commit Mass Atrocities: Ideology and Greed
Next to the organizational pressure and group dynamics women can have per-
sonal motives to commit crimes. From research on perpetrators in general we
know that many of them - when not driven by fear - are driven by ideology or
personal motives such as for instance greed. From the literature it becomes
clear that women too can be driven by these very same motives. Adler, for
instance, concluded with respect to the Rwandan genocide: ‘While many
women attribute their involvement in the 1994 genocide to spontaneous or
poorly considered behavior, some participated deliberately and with convic-
tion’. Some women have been described as virulent extremist, vicious,
or cruel even before the genocide and some apparently derived pleasure
from hurting others and can be qualied as sadists. It is estimated that ve
per cent of the male perpetrators can be qualied as sadists – the percentage
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As far less women were involved and at least some of them participated on their own free
will it might be true that this selection process in itself shows a bias towards women who
were more prone to use violence then others which could explain that more than 5 per cent
of the women involved can be qualied as sadists. Brown, supra note 22, p. 16 for instance
noted that the women who applied for jobs in these camps were not the most sophisticated
ones. Although he also stated that women with a criminal record were rejected – ‘the vast
majority were unskilled, undereducated, and decidedly limited in job perspectives’.
Lower, supra note 16, 42.
Wessels, supra note 176, p. 91.
Bloom, supra note 77, p. 4.
African Rights, supra note 14, p. 64.
Ibid., p. 125.
Keairnes, supra note 27, p. 3. See also Kompisch, supra note 16, p. 134 notes that many
nurses involved in the Euthanasia programme were convinced that they were doing the
right thing.
Hogg, supra note 16, p. 87.
Bloom, supra note 77, p. 3.
of female perpetrators who can be qualied as such might be slightly higher
because of the self-selection bias. Choosing for a military career is less obvious
for women than it is for men and this might cause that aggressive, violent and
sadistic women are disproportionally attracted to the military and these
women use their jobs as an outlet for the cruelty or sadistic impulses. Some
were for instance already involved in criminal activities prior to a period of
mass violence. Others were driven by a personal rage: ‘When I was twelve, a
cousin raped me. I was so mad, I wanted vengeance. I wanted to hurt everyone
who had hurt me’. In some cases women get involved after having sufered a
personal tragedy. Some were already racists or fanatics before the periods
of mass violence. Others are ideologically driven or were convinced by pro-
paganda. A female perpetrator states:
the leaders told us that the Tutsis had prepared graves to put the Hutus in
and that we had to kill the Tutsis rst before they killed us. We believed
them because they were educated people … I believed them, and that is
why I killed that woman.
Periods of mass violence usually result in a restructuring of society and has
thereof often been equated with a form of social engineering. Especially if a priv-
ileged group within society is targeted, this opens up new opportunities for those
who want to gain more wealth, power or status. This is true for men and women
alike although periods of social reform might be particularly appealing to women
and many women have joined rebel movements hoping that life in general and
the position of women within society in particular, would improve. History
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See for instance Kompisch, supra note 16, pp. 42, 241; and Lower, supra note 16, p. 164.
African Rights, supra note 14, p. 27.
Adler et al., supra note 26, p. 221; African Rights, supra note 14, p. 27; and Lower, supra note
16, p. 126.
See also Ewa Kozakiewicz, Female Perpetrators of International Crimes, unpublished mas-
ter thesis in possession of the author.
Also female terrorists can strive for fame and heroism. See McDonald, supra note 57,
p. 380.
See Lower, supra note 16; but also in relation to revenge, Bloom, supra note 77, p. 2; Sjoberg
and Gentry, supra note 78, p. 100.
See also Miller and Mullins, supra note 103, p. 34; and Agnew, supra note 103, p. 7.
See also Gilani, supra note 112, p. 29 who concludes: ‘imputing their violent behavior to
culture, patriarchy, society and pathology, these reports and articles cast doubt on wom-
en’s capacity for engaging in violence voluntarily and intentionally’.
Ibid., p. 30.
has indeed shown that periods of mass violence and armed conict opens up
opportunities for women in various ways as men have to go to the army or are
killed. The opportunity to gain power, sheer greed, the aim to acquire
an equal status or pure ambition, like in the cases of Biljana Plavsic and Pauline
Nyiramasuhuko, could all be possible motives to get involved and commit
mass atrocities. Some women enjoyed the power they suddenly had, others
outplayed their sadism, while still others were motivated by revenge.
In general we can conclude that men and women can have many common
motives but that gender roles and gender inequality have a strong impact on
the life experience of girls and women and can account for some of the difer-
ences between the involvement of men and women and the roles they play.
More research needs however to be done in order to study to what extent male
and female perpetrators difer in their motives. In doing this research it is
important that it is gender sensitive but not stereotyped. We, in other words,
need to take the context and specics of the context in which women operate
into account. This context can constrain their choices (just like it does for
men) but that does not mean that they lack agency. The examples above clearly
shown that women just like men make their own choices and these choices
can lead them to commit mass atrocities. In that sense women are after all not
that diferent from men and share men’s capacity for violence.
7 Conclusion
Until the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 it was generally assumed that women
tend to play a very limited role in periods of mass violence. Shortly after this
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African Rights, supra note 14.
A. Jones, ‘Gender and Genocide in Rwanda’, 4 Journal of Genocide Research (2002) 65.
See also Kompisch, supra note 16, p. 12; and M. Krauss (ed.), Sie waren dabei. Mitläuferinnen,
Nutznieszerinnen, Täterinnen im Nationalsozialismus (Wallstein Verlag, 2008).
See also Brown, supra note 22, p. 11 who concludes ‘while there were clearly some
auxiliaries who were attractive, cruel and perverse, the vast majority were colorless,
unimaginable, plain or wretched in their physical appearance’. See also Hogg, supra note
16, p. 69 about Rwanda: ‘Many ordinary women involved in the genocide but, overall,
committed signicantly fewer acts of overt violence than men’. See Sjoberg and Gentry,
supra note 78, p. 4: ‘Woman, like men commit violence for a variety of reasons, some
rational and some irrational’. See also Adler et al., supra note 26, p. 212; and Lower, supra
note 16, p. 167.
genocide African Rights published a report on the role of women in the geno-
cide with the telling title: ‘Not so innocent – when women become killers’.
Scholars have consequently concluded that the extent of the involvement of
women in the Rwandan genocide is unprecedented. The above overview
has however, shown that although it is clear that many more men than women
have been involved in mass atrocities the role of women is much larger than
has been assumed so far, not only in Nazi Germany but also in other more
contemporary conicts in Sierra Leone, Sudan, , Uganda and Columbia to
name just a few cases.
The overview has also shown that women have been involved in mass atroc-
ities in a number of diferent ways. Most women act in a supporting capacity
but others have a more active role as leaders and instigators or as the physical
perpetrators and have been directly involved in torture, rape and murder. The
literature review conducted clearly shows that women just like men are capa-
ble of terrible atrocities. How many women are and have been involved exactly
is impossible to tell but it is clear that there are many more women involved
than we would expect. Women who are involved are often seen as either lack-
ing agency or being mentally disturbed sadists. The general perception is that
real women do not commit mass atrocities while in fact they do. Some might
have been forced and others might indeed have been disturbed sadists but the
above overview shows that so many women have been involved in mass atroci-
ties that it is simply impossible to qualify all of them as such. It is time to accept
that many female perpetrators are ordinary women and that ordinary women
just like ordinary men can become involved in mass atrocities for a number of
reasons (personal or political) and under a number of diferent circumstances
(involving extreme pressure or out of free will) and can be just as ruthless and
cruel as ordinary men.
253
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international criminal law review 15 (2015) 207-253
See also Lower, supra note 16.
An important fact that we have to take into account when studying female
perpetrators is that many societies within the world are still very patriarchal
societies dominated by males and that still many woman are as a consequence
thereof more vulnerable and much more easily exploited than many of their
male counterparts. Especially within the military many women are having a
hard time to prove that they are ‘one of the guys’. But many women try to make
the best out of it and some have become very courageous and heroic ghters,
others – especially those serving oppressive regime – have become involved in
mass atrocities. This explorative study has shown that women are in many
respects not that diferent from men, apart from the fact that indeed some-
times their choices are more constraint. Further research, in which the involve-
ment of women is gender sensitive but not explained by stereotyped gender
images (the mother, monster, whore narratives), is urgently needed to get a
better insight in the roles men and women play and the possible diference
between them. But for now we can conclude that women are not inherently
more peaceful than men, nor that those women who are involved in mass
atrocities are by denition mentally disturbed monsters or completely lacking
agency. Some are but most are just like the men, very ordinary women who
within an often constrained environment (just like many men) somehow got
involved in mass atrocities. The reason why so many more men are involved is
not because they are more evil but simply because militarised units which are
the main organizations responsible for the physical perpetration of interna-
tional crimes are still male dominated. The reason why only one per cent of all
the people convicted by international criminal courts and tribunals are female
is because these tribunals focus on those in leadership positions and the physi-
cal executioners and women are underrepresented amongst these two groups.
It can be expected, however, that the progressive emancipation of women and
the fact that more and more women are accepted in militarised units and more
and more women start to play an important role in politics, the percentage of
women involved in international crimes will go up too.
