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On Ending Sexual Violence, or Civilising War.
Jelke Boesten
King’s International Development Institute, King’s College London
Abstract
This paper uses the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict, held in
London in June 2014, as a window into the current wave of calls for action
against wartime rape. The recent political attention to address sexual violence in
conflict builds on decades of scholarly research, feminist activism, and more
recently, the adoption of feminist goals in UN gender and security work. This
paper asks if the feminist work done to unpack and unsettle gender binaries that
foment sexual violence in war and in peace is not undone by the singular focus
on rape-in-war. With the knowledge that rape in war tends to reproduce and
naturalise the inequalities that fed into conflict in the first place, how should we
understand a focus on eradicating sexual violence in war spearheaded by
countries that regularly engage in postcolonial wars? What does this say about
the framing of contemporary war, and attitudes towards sexual violence? More
specifically, to what extent can one usefully make war ’more civilised’ (US
Secretary of State John Kerry’s words) by addressing one specific aspect? The
paper builds on case study research in Peru which looks at how the state deals
with rape in war and peace, as well as the broader literature in the field of
gender, peace and security.
3
On Ending Sexual Violence, or Civilising War
Never has conflict-related sexual violence received so much international
concern and public attention as in the last couple of years. Recently, high profile
celebrities have joined forces with governments to 'end' such violence in a moral
mission to make war less horrible. In June 2014 this attention culminated in a
London-based Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict organised by
actress, filmmaker and Special Envoy for the United Nations High Commission
for Refugees, Angelina Jolie, and then United Kingdom Foreign Secretary William
Hague. Jolie’s famous husband Brad Pitt turned up for the closing ceremony, as
did United States Secretary of State John Kerry and other media-savvy
celebrities, politicians and UN representatives. The three-day event aimed to
raise public awareness through a series of open ‘fringe’ events, but also, to work
in closed sessions with politicians, policymakers, military representatives and
experts from around the world to design action points that could help the cause.
This high-profile event certainly drew attention to the problem of wartime
sexual violence for a broad and perhaps otherwise unconcerned audience.
For the informed public, the conference and its associated global activities
should raise alarm bells: How should we understand a focus on eradicating
sexual violence in war spearheaded by countries that sustain massive military
industrial complexes and who regularly engage in postcolonial wars? What does
this say about the framing of contemporary war, and attitudes towards sexual
violence? More specifically, to what extent can one usefully make war ’more
civilised’ (US Secretary of State John Kerry’s words) by addressing one specific
aspect? These questions point to the ways in which attempts to address sexual
violence in war need to be examined critically and in the context of the broader
foreign policy objectives of countries such as the US and the UK. But it also points
to the need to put forward new ways of thinking about sexual violence in war, as
well as in peace. In this essay I will discuss these questions using the Global
Summit as a window into the current geopolitics that frame ‘ending sexual
violence in conflict’.
The Global Summit was a collaborative effort between Jolie and Hague that
started in 2012, when the Foreign and Commonwealth Office set up a Prevention
of Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative. The initiative follows fifteen years of
relatively successful engagement of feminist activists with global peace and
security discourse. This was spearheaded by the work of the Women’s
International League for Peace and Security, which led to Security Council
Resolution 1325 aimed to unsettle the gendered assumptions embedded in
security discourse. SCR 1325 is an important achievement that recognises
women as part of an otherwise overly militarised perspective on global peace
and security, providing a gender perspective, making visible women’s
organisations’ peace work, and providing benchmarks for women’s participation
in peacebuilding. But, as Gina Heathcote and Dianne Otto observe in their critical
evaluation of contemporary peacekeeping and security (2014), the persistent
institutional and discursive frameworks that reproduce gendered stereotypes
overshadow this initial success. Indeed, through the increasing emphasis on
sexual violence in war, emphasis on women’s victimhood replaces a focus on
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women’s agency.
1
This has rightfully raised alarm among feminists concerned
with disrupting gender binaries and the military emphasis in security and peace
discourse and practice. Ending sexual violence cannot replace, or be substitute
to, gender analysis of war and peace.
The focus on sexual violence within gender, peace and security draws on more
than twenty years of renewed scholarly, professional, legal, and policy interest in
the issue; an interest that emerged from the ashes of the wars in the former-
Yugoslavia and the Rwandan genocide. While rape in war was not new in itself,
changing attitudes towards sexual violence globally and increased media interest
highlighted the scale of such violence during armed conflicts and the harm it did
to the fabric of societies. Since the mid 1990s feminist lawyers have made sure
that sexual violence is now seen as an international crime and they have worked
hard to get cases of wartime sexual violence prosecuted either in national or
international courts and tribunals. Increasingly, and in tandem with the turn to
calls for accountability and international justice in human rights work,
campaigns against sexual violence in war focus on impunity (Engle 2014).
2
In
addition, while largely ignored by the Global Summit in London, scholars are
working hard to further our understanding of such violence, as well as the
dynamics of the efforts to eradicate such violence.
3
The research that is available with regard to wartime sexual violence shows that,
first, sexual violence, and violence against women more broadly, is not only
widespread during war, but also omnipresent during peacetime. This means that
gendered social structures -independent of warfare- partly dictate what
violences are effective during war. It also suggests that it might not be wise to
separate war and peace as political contexts if the aim is eradicating sexual
violence.
4
1
Gina Heathcote, and Diane Otto, eds. (2014) Rethinking Peacekeeping, Gender Equality and
Collective Security. Palgrave Macmillian.
2
Karen Engle, ‘The Grip of Sexual Violence: Reading UN Security Council Resolutions on Human
Security’. In: Heathcote and Otto, eds. Rethinking Peacekeeping, pp 23-47.
3
There is a growing body of scholarly literature, too long to cite here, in health, law, politics, and
sociology that aims to provide empirical evidence to a complex problem. Unfortunately, as
several observers have pointed out, this was largely ignored by the organisers of the Global
Summit. See: Paul Kirby, ‘Acting Time; or, Ending Sexual Violence in Conflict’, The Disorder of
Things, 17 June 2014: http://thedisorderofthings.com/2014/06/17/acting-time-or-ending-
sexual-violence-in-conflict/ ; Amelia Hoover Green , ‘Ignoring the Evidence at the End Sexual
Violence in conflict Summit’, Women Under Siege, 17 June 2014:
http://www.womenundersiegeproject.org/author/profile/amelia-hoover-green. Kim Thuy
Seelinger, ‘An Open Letter to UK Foreign Secretary William Hague and UNHCR Special Envoy
Angelina Jolie’ Huff Post, 17 June2014: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kim-thuy-seelinger-
jd/sexual-violence-initiative_b_5490235.html
There is also an increasingly critical feminist scholarship unpacking the relation between
international institutions and the goal of gender equality, of which the volume by Heathcote and
Otto is its most recent manifestation.
4
Brownmiller, in her pathbreaking work Against Our Will (1975), analyses both wartime and
peacetime sexual violence as grounded in the same gendered structures. Today, scholars are
returning to such an analysis in order to counter the overemphasis on wartime sexual violence as
essentially different and separate from peacetime sexual violence. See: Boesten 2014.
5
Secondly, and following from the first point, sexual violence, as an exacerbation
of peacetime gendered strategies of domination and persistent inequality, is
more prevalent in some wars, and among some armed forces, than others.
5
Considering that war-related sexual violence is used both strategically as well as
opportunistically, it is relevant to look at the context of those wars, and the
militaries found to be prone to such violence. Hence, if the aim is to eradicate
sexual violence in war, it is necessary to unpack the political, economic, as well as
gendered underpinnings of those wars in the first place. This is, of course, what
feminist peace activists and scholars have argued for decades.
6
Thirdly, international peacekeeping troops as well as NATO allies are accused of
committing sexual violence, but such crimes are not targeted through
international campaigns as the Global Summit. Rather, they are treated
separately, and not very effectively for that matter.
7
The lack of political will to
look at, evaluate and question its own policies to address conflict related sexual
violence –i.e., in Western militaries, in asylum policies, in its own courts- suggest
that the campaign is selective in its gaze. This means that the aim to ‘eradicate
sexual violence in conflict’ has geopolitical aims tied to powerful military
complexes. Arguably, selectively identifying perpetrators and victims, while
ignoring the high levels of peacetime gendered violence as well as the sexual
abuse perpetrated in and by armed forces supported, funded and/or protected
by the US and the UK, reinforces the global inequalities that are as much
gendered and raced as those that underpin contextualised patterns of sexual
violence. Hence, it is necessary to make an explicit link between global wars and
local crimes.
To what extent is rape as a weapon of war eradicable?
William Hague’s Prevention of Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative, which
hosted the Global Summit in June, managed to gather and showcase enormous
political interest at the highest level, and from many corners of the world. Not
only those already invested in gender, peace, and security such as
representatives of relevant UN agencies, but Ministers of Foreign Affairs,
Development, or Women of both conflict and postconflict, and developed and
developing countries, contributed to the event. The aim of the Summit was to
5
Elisabeth Wood, Elisabeth Wood, ‘Variation in Sexual Violence During War.’ Politics & Society 34,
2006, pp307–341.
6
Perhaps most persistently, Cynthia Enloe throughout her ouvre, but specifically in Bananas,
Beaches and Bases first published in 1989 by the University of California Press, and Maneuvers:
The International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives (Berkeley and London, University of
California Press, 2000), and Globalization and Militarism. Feminists Make the Link, (Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007), as well as Nimo's War, Emma's War: Making Feminist Sense of
the Iraq War, (Berkeley and London, University of California Press,, 2010). In the UK, see the
work of Cynthia Cockburn, among others: From Where We Stand: War, Women’s Activism and
Feminist Analysis. (London and New York: Zed Boks. 2007), The Postwar Moment: Miltaries,
Masculinites and International Peacekeping. (Co-edited with Dubravka Zarkov.) (London:
Lawrence and Wishart, 2002).
7
Róisin Burke, Shaming the State: Sexual Offences by UN Military Peacekeepers and the Rhetoric
of Zero Tolerance. In: Heathcote and Otto, eds. (2014) Rethinking Peacekeeping
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kick-off a campaign to ‘end’ sexual violence in conflict.
8
As John Kerry said in his
closing remarks: “The history of wartime is littered with unspeakable horrors
and atrocities. But the history of peacetime has always been marked by advances
in civility and codes of conduct that address the worst acts of war.”
9
The US
Secretary of State recalled the international community’s success in eradicating
particular forms of violence as part of the Geneva Conventions, such as the
Geneva Protocol (1925), which prohibits the use of chemical weapons and has
allowed international intervention in specific conflicts, recently in Syria. He also
referred to control over nuclear weapons, a process started after Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.
10
This, Kerry argued, meant that with determination and international
political will, rape as a weapon of war can also be banned from the repertoires of
violence deployed by armed groups. In similar vein, William Hague made
parallels to the abolishment of slavery and landmines. Following such a line of
argument, the international community advocating to end sexual violence in
conflict proposes to ‘remove’ rape from the arsenal of potential weapons of war
in a quest for more civilised warfare. There is no need to stop war, or sexual
violence in peacetime; focussing on the particular problem of rape as a weapon
of war will be enough. Independent of how the campaign proposes to do that, or
what the motivations for doing so might be, which I will discuss further below,
the first question should be if rape is comparable to other weapons such as
chemical weapons, landmines or nuclear arms, i.e., is this understanding of rape
in war as a weapon not too simplified in its reading of the problem?
Rape as a weapon of war
While rape is formally forbidden to be used as part of warfare in international
law since the mid-19th century
11
, it was not taken seriously as a war crime until
the 1990s. Rather, sexual violence was often seen as an inevitable by-product of
war: men rape because they can. Such an analysis builds on the idea that men
need sex, and will do anything to get it, i.e., men are biologically wired to rape if
they do not see other options (for example, when there is no access to more
legitimate forms of sex), and women, especially enemy women, are legitimate
targets for such encounters. In militaries where rape was not seen as legitimate,
but where soldier’s sexual needs were recognised, prostitution was often
actively facilitated by militaries, with or without the support of local
communities.
12
But the belief that biology determined sexual behaviour was
largely abandoned in the 1970s. Feminists started to emphasise the social
8
This was not the first such a campaign though. The UN Action against Sexual Violence, initiated
in 2007, not only works for better Resolutions, but campaigns to raise awareness, with the help
of celebrities: http://www.stoprapenow.org/ Karen Engle wrote a critical analysis: Engle, ‘The
Grip of Sexual Violence: Reading UN Security Council Resolutions on Human Security’. In:
Heathcote and Otto, eds. Rethinking Peacekeeping, pp 23-47.
9
John Kerry at the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict, 13 June, London.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2N4nadOjI78 min.7.16
10
Susan Watkins, the Non Protestation
11
https://www.icrc.org/applic/ihl/ihl.nsf/Article.xsp?action=openDocument&documentId=B1C
E1E21A4237EE6C12563CD00514C6C Thanks to Paul Kirby forpointing this out:
http://thedisorderofthings.com/2014/06/17/acting-time-or-ending-sexual-violence-in-
conflict/#more-8744
12
Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000.
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dynamics of gender and sex: while men rape because they can, they do so
because of the gendered power dynamics that govern our social relations,
including war.
13
Hence, gender inequality, not biology, became the focus of
studies of sexual violence.
In this line of thinking, men do not need sex. Rather, such needs are the result of
specific contextual dynamics that draw on perceptions of masculinity and
femininity within a context of domination and subordination. Research on
military masculinities since the 1980s show the centrality of heterosexism to the
training of soldiers: a good soldier needs to be strong and dominant, in control of
the feminine (in himself as well as in others), thereby cultivating the legitimate
‘need’ for sex.
14
But not all soldiers or all militaries rape, confirming that sexual
behaviour in this respect is largely socially constructed. This, in turn, means that
such behaviour can be controlled.
The idea that rape is used strategically as a weapon of war, rather than a mere
collateral effect of war, became mainstream in the mid-1990s. The conflicts in
the Former Yugoslavia showed that rape was used explicitly (visibly),
systematically (on a large scale and in targeted ways), and strategically (with
military purpose). By raping enemy women, combatants humiliated and
fragmented communities. In a patriarchal society, conquering the women of the
enemy means paralysing that enemy, and fomenting long-term humiliation and
defeat. Rape was used as a form of ethnic cleansing. By raping Bosnian women,
Serbian soldiers and paramilitaries interrupted the reproduction of the Bosnian
community in favour of Serbia. In Rwanda, rape was used to further genocide, to
eliminate the Tutsi community. As in the Bosnian case, the association between
women’s sexuality and the social and biological reproduction of the (ethnic)
group, made rape a particularly effective weapon of war.
15
This is the
interpretation that is now widely used in the rhetoric on eradicating sexual
violence in conflict.
Similar cases as the above can be found throughout history.
16
The Rwandan and
Bosnian cases were not unique, but these two cases changed the understanding
of sexual violence in war in part because of the International Tribunals
established to prosecute crimes committed during those conflicts. The
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda, ICTY
and ICTR respectively, were instrumental in further defining international
13
Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. New York: Ballantine Books,
1975.
14
Cynthia Enloe. The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1993. Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System
and Vice Versa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. The military psychiatrist Theodore
Nadelson, makes the argument about fighting the feminine within in: Trained to Kill: Soldiers at War.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.
15
Inger. Skjelsbæk, ‘The Elephant in the Room: An Overview of How Sexual Violence Came to Be
Seen as a Weapon of War.’ Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO): 2010.
16
Nira Yuval-Davis’ 1997 book Gender and Nation is a founding text for understanding how gender,
sexuality, nationalism, and militarism may lead to sexual violence. See also a recent volume that
collects historical case studies: Elizabeth Heineman, Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones. From the
Acient World to the Era of Human Rights. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.
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human rights law and practice in relation to conflict-related sexual violence. As a
result, rape in war is now recognised as a crime that can be prosecuted under the
International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction.
17
Understanding rape as a weapon of
war allows for the prosecution of responsible military commanders, without
necessarily the need to identify individual perpetrators. These might seem
important advances, but few actual cases have been prosecuted –none by the
ICC-, and there is no evidence that the threat of prosecution works as deterrent.
The latter is important to note: although lack of solid data might not allow us to
know with certainty if rape used as a weapon of war has increased or decreased
in contemporary conflicts as compared to earlier conflicts, we do know that the
visibility of such crimes has increased –see current and very recent conflicts and
reports of widespread sexual violence in Syria, Sudan and South Sudan, Central
African Republic, Libya, Egypt, and calls to rape Palestinian women by ultra-
rightwing Israelis in the war against Gaza in July 2014.
18
This visibility, fomented
by the media and global campaigns such as discussed here, might raise
awareness and outrage among the comfortable in Western countries; it has not
proved to bring anything to mitigate or reduce the occurrence of sexual violence,
or much to support victim-survivors.
But there are also many conflicts in which rape is not used as a weapon of war.
This, in principle, supports the idea that rape is not inevitable and thus, can be
eradicated. Elisabeth Wood and others used statistical analysis to show what
conditions and circumstances facilitate the use of rape as a weapon of war.
19
This
body of work contributes to discussions about what conditions need to be
created within armies to support or avoid the use of rape as a weapon of war.
However, despite the better knowledge and understanding of how and why rape
is used strategically in conflicts, we have less clarity on the tools needed to stop
such violence. One of the main problems is the deep-rooted gender inequality
and the widespread sexist understandings of male and female sexuality that
makes sexual violence such an effective tool of domination in the first place.
Sexual violence is not an effective tool of war because of the physical and
17
For a critical analysis of the development of the international justice system, see Tor Krever,
Judging the ICC, in NLR, No 85, 2014. Krever shows how politicised the ICC, and its predecessors
the ICTY and ICTR, are, and how they serve powerful military complexes by investigating only a
very selective number of cases. The very limited and selective prosecuting of wartime rape (only
really in the ICTY, the ICC has notprosecuted any SV cases) supports such an analysis.
18
United Nations General Assembly. Report of the Secretary General on Sexual Violence in
Conflict. A/67/792–S/2013/149. http://www.un.org/sexualviolenceinconflict/key-
documents/reports/ Media has picked up on many of the stories regarding rape in ongoing
conflicts. On Gaza specifically, see: Alex Sham, ‘Israeli discourse of sexualized violence rises amid
Gaza assault’ Ma’An news Agency: 7 August 2014.
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=717908; Elena Maryles Sztokman, ‘Gaza:
It’s a Men’s War. How sexism contributes to the cycle of violence between Israelis and
Palestinians.’ The Atlantic, 7 August
2014.http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/08/gaza-a-mans-war-israel-
gender/375689/
19
Elisabeth Wood, ‘Variation in Sexual Violence During War.’ Politics & Society 34, 2006, pp307–
341; Amelia Hoover Green, Dara Kay Cohen and Elisabeth Wood, ‘Wartime Sexual Violence:
Misconceptions, Implications, and Ways Forward.’ Special Report of the United States Institute of
Peace, Washington, DC, 2013. Online at http://www.usip.org/publications/wartime-sexual-
violence-misconceptions-implications-and-ways.
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emotional harm done to individual women, but because of the meaning that such
violation has in both the affected communities, as well among the men who
perpetrate it. The dominant analysis of rape as a weapon of war and the belief
that the international community can eradicate the use of such a weapon within
the rules of war, as John Kerry would have it, overlooks what such violence
actually means, and what its social roots are.
However, the idea that rape is used as weapon of war because of the social
meaning attached to sexual violence and women’s bodies is undermined by the
overwhelming data showing the ubiquity of sexual violence and abuse
perpetrated for more opportunistic reasons. Research in the DRC shows that
wartime ‘strategy’ is often far less a motivation for soldiers to perpetrate rape
than opportunity and entertainment based on feelings of entitlement. Notions of
women as inferior and available, moreover, are essential to such behaviour.
20
Of
course, the opportunity is not only created by the breakdown of institutions, but
by the cultivation of violent and hyper-masculinised soldiers within armed
groups. So if the aim is to end sexual violence in conflict as a single issue within
the rules of war, as John Kerry proposes, the way soldiers are trained and
perceived and the expectations upon them would have to change drastically –not
only in the DRC, but among peacekeepers and any national army. And there are
other complexities: on the one hand, women are not the only ones who are
sexually abused and tortured and the perpetrators are not all male. Broadening
the perspective from rape as strategic weapon of war to include opportunistic
motivations and contexts forces us to look at the normative frameworks that
allow men -and some women- to rape.
In practice, sexual violence perpetrated by militaries around the world are still
largely treated as collateral damage. For example, was the forced prostitution of
about 200,000 (mainly) Korean women by the Japanese during WWII a war
crime collateral damage, or even just prostitution? Japan is still actively refusing
any restitution or satisfactory apology to the surviving women and their families,
suggesting that forced prostitution is not the same as rape in war, and thus, not a
war crime.
21
Militarised prostitution and trafficking is known to be widespread
in contemporary military operations as well. There is even a policy-speak for it:
Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (SEA), referring to the forced prostitution of
young women from poor backgrounds in countries with weak institutional
control. The “management” (or lack thereof) of rape and abuse perpetrated by
peacekeepers in postconflict and post disaster areas further highlights the
tensions within the international community over what forms of sexual violence
to target, how to define it, what perpetrators to prosecute and which victims to
20
Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern. ‘Why Do Soldiers Rape? Masculinity, Violence, and
Sexuality in the Armed Forces in the DRC.’ International Studies Quarterly 53, 2009, pp495–518.
21
This despite the fact that according to the UN that ‘the term “sexual violence” refers to rape,
sexual slavery, forced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization and any other form
of sexual violence of comparable gravity perpetrated against women, men or children with a
direct or indirect (temporal, geographical or causal) link to a conflict.’ (see UNSG report
A/67/792–S/2013/149), and can be prosecuted as per international criminal law as crime
against humanity, war crime, or acts of genocide. See Rome Statute: http://www.icc-
cpi.int/nr/rdonlyres/ea9aeff7-5752-4f84-be94-0a655eb30e16/0/rome_statute_english.pdf
10
recognise.
22
The fact is that if there is not a clear indication that rape is used
strategically as a weapon of war, ‘civilised society’ tends not to see such violence
as violence. Apparently, men do still need sex and deserve it.
And then we are not even touching the issue of sexual violence within
contemporary militaries such as the US armed forces, where an estimated one
third of women are sexually assaulted while in service, of which 86 per cent
apparently goes unreported.
23
Few cases are met with appropriate judicial
response. There are clearly different standards when it concerns ‘civilised
armies’ as compared to the ‘barbarous’ practices of men in uncivil wars. As John
Kerry insisted in his speech, ‘the civilised world will not accept such
transgressions’.
24
But one has to wonder why some acts of sexual violence are
unacceptable (rape used as a weapon of war in uncivil wars), while others are
not (opportunistic rape and sexual abuse perpetrated by civilised soldiers).
So sexual violence perpetrated by armed forces can only be realistically
addressed if there is an acknowledgement of a problem far bigger and more
complex than rape- as-weapon-of-war perpetrated by a selective number of
armed groups. Instead, a range of sexual violences (e.g. forced prostitution, or
sexual abuse and exploitation), motivations, perpetrators and victims would
have to be included in the global campaigns initiated by international
institutions and Western powers. But this would entail looking at and acting on
the gendered behaviour of those powers and institutions. And yet, this is not
what is proposed or even the link that is made in the current proposals to end
sexual violence in conflict, on the contrary. How can we address sexual violence
in war if we do not address the type of masculinity that is fomented in militaries
and, importantly, through the militarisation of security, of peace, and even
humanitarian action? A lone voice at the Global Summit last June, Lt General
David Morrison, Australian Chief of Army, argued that military training and
practice needed to change, values need to be shifted, and the inclusion of women
and ethnic minorities promoted and improved. Morrison also urged militaries
around the world to start within their own organisations if they were committed
to change elsewhere. While his comments clearly challenged mainstream
thinking espoused at the Global Summit, they did not question military
intervention in the first place.
Is wartime sexual violence extraordinary?
Wartime sexual violence is often extraordinary in scale and cruelty; such
violence is deployed alongside other forms of violence over periods of time, in
prisons, or militarised camps. The rape and abuse of individuals in front of their
22
See Marsha Henry, ‘Gender, Security and Development.’ Conflict, Security and Development 7
(1) 2007, pp61–84. Burke, Shaming the State: Sexual Offences by UN Military Peacekeepers and
the Rhetoric of Zero Tolerance. In: Heathcote and Otto, eds. (2014) Rethinking Peacekeeping
23
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/13/senate-sex-assault-military-hearing
24
John Kerry at the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict, 13 June, London.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2N4nadOjI78 min10.16. Kerry’s speech moves from an moral
imperialist discourse of civilised war to a more balanced account of addressing ‘gender-based violence
everywhere’ (min19.23), which seems to be written by a different speech writer; the one who read the
aims and objectives of the UN declaration to End Sexual violence in Conflict
11
family and/or community is another specific tactic of terror. In addition, reports
show that gang rape and rape using firearms and sticks, often leading to
extremely painful deaths, is widespread in wars where rape is used
systematically. And, while women and girls tend to be the main victims of such
violence, men and boys, have also reportedly been targeted.
25
All these facts
suggest that wartime sexual violence is extra-ordinary, specific to war time,
different from anything else.
Or is it? As mentioned earlier, opportunistic sexual violence and abuse in conflict
is much more widespread than most people realise. Recently, Holly Porter found
that more than 50% of women raped during the conflict in Northern Uganda,
were raped by husbands or boyfriends, not soldiers.
26
As mentioned above,
research shows that a large proportion of wartime sexual violence is perpetrated
because of opportunism and entitlement rather than for strategic purposes of
terror, and not only by combatants.
27
That means that conflict situations may
provide the context and opportunity to rape, but that there are broader
normative frameworks that make such violence imaginable to the men and
women involved. This is reflected in the high levels of so-called peacetime sexual
and physical violence against women: the latest WHO report on the matter
estimates that globally, 35% of women experience physical and/or sexual
violence during their lifetime. And while sexual violence is particularly high in
post conflict countries such as Peru or Uganda, as well as in other countries
suffering from chronic violence such as Pakistan, Mexico or Brazil, it is certainly
not unique to these countries. Currently, a series of institutions are under
specific scrutiny because of widespread sexual violence against women and girls
(US Colleges, UK entertainment industry), and against men and boys (the
Catholic Church globally, private schools in the UK). These are alarming facts that
should put the extremities of conflict-related sexual violence elsewhere in
perspective: while wartime violence may be extra-ordinarily cruel, such violence
clearly builds on a much wider culture largely shared across the globe in which
sexual violence is a reflection of the abuse of power, and an established tool to
impose dominance from one person over another, and one group over another
group.
Victim-survivors of wartime sexual violence who testified to the Peruvian Truth
and Reconciliation Commission that investigated the abuses committed during
the war between the Shining Path and the armed forces between 1980 and 2000,
spoke of military commanders who would capture them during incursions on
villages. Many different experiences were recorded as well as a wide variety of
25
Michele Leiby, ‘Digging in the Archives: The Promise and Perils of Primary Documents.’ Politics
& Society 37, 2009, pp75–99; Chris Dolan, Director of the Refugee Law Project at Kampala
University, Uganda, in this article by Will Storr, ‘The rape of men,’ 16 Jul, 2011, The Guardian:
The Observer Magazine online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/jul/17/the-rape-of-
men?INTCMP=SRCH
26
Porter, Holly, E. forthcoming. After rape: Comparing civilian and combatant perpetrated crime
in northern Uganda. Women’s Studies International Forum.
27
Amelia Hoover Green, Dara Kay Cohen and Elisabeth Wood, ‘Wartime Sexual Violence:
Misconceptions, Implications, and Ways Forward.’ Special Report of the United States Institute of
Peace, Washington, DC, 2013. Online at http://www.usip.org/publications/wartime-sexual-
violence-misconceptions-implications-and-ways;
12
atrocities and crimes against humanity, including sexual torture, in relation to
women. One of the striking features of that violence was how women recalled
that soldiers would ‘abuse [me] as if [I] was his wife’.
28
Women were not only
‘used’ for sexual purposes, but were forced to carry out domestic duties such as
cooking and cleaning. In Liberia, girl soldiers were often forced to marry rebels,
having to supply sex and other domestic duties.
29
These cases indicate how
easily sexual violence –even extremely cruel wartime sexual violence- is
normalised, drawn into the existing structures of a society that sees women as
the property of men. If seen from such a perspective, sexual violence in war may
be extreme in scale and cruelty, but ultimately, reproduces and further
naturalises existing patterns of gendered inequality.
Indeed, as the cases of Bosnia and Rwanda showed so clearly, sexual violence not
only reflects and entrenches existing gender inequality, but also reflects other
vectors of inequality and identity such as race, ethnicity, class or religion. Again,
this is not unique to these two conflicts: in most cases of rape, in peacetime or
wartime, we see how racism is reflected in how such violence is justified by
perpetrators, and victim-profiles often do not only reflect gendered divisions,
but very often other societal divisions. In the Peruvian conflict, the victim profile
was largely young, poor and indigenous. While this was a reflection of who was
seen as the enemy, and hence matches the overall victim-profile of the conflict, it
is the racial slurs that accompanied sexual violence that help understand the role
of race in perpetrating sexual violence, as well as the role of sexual violence in
re-producing racism.
30
The intimacy of such violence, and the potential
reproductive outcomes, makes rape particularly suited to make hierarchies
based on race, ethnicity, class or religion, seem natural, biological, and thus,
helps justify domination in the minds of perpetrators, victims, and witnesses.
In a different context, the sexual abuse by male and female US soldiers in the Abu
Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003-04, revealed through the circulation of celebratory
pictures of such abuse made by the perpetrators themselves, reflected existing
prejudices and stereotypes of the enemy. While this abuse seemed different from
other forms of rape-in-war, as most victims were male and some perpetrators
were female, the actions, and the way they were staged to convey dominance and
control over ‘the enemy’, reflected known scripts of imperial power, racial
superiority, and misogyny.
31
These examples help us see how sexual violence is
28
Testimonies, Archives of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Defensoría del Pueblo, Lima,
Peru. File: “Investigaciones individuales: Violación sexual en las bases de Manta y Vilca; see also:
Salazar, Milagros. “DDHH-Peru: Las ultimas de la fila en la justicia.” 2011.
http://ipsnoticias.net/nota.asp?idnews=97187.
29
Chris Coulter, Bush Wives and Girl Soldiers: Women's lives through war and peace in Sierra Leone,
Ithica: Cornell University Press 2009;
30
Jelke Boesten, Sexual Violence during War and Peace. Gender, Power and Postconflict justice in
Peru. New York: Palgrave,2014.
31
My analysis of the Abu Ghraib pictures, is largely based on the folloiwng texts: Nicholas
Mirzoeff, ‘Invisible Empire: Visual Culture, Embodied Spectacle, and Abu Ghraib,’ Radical History
Review 95, 2006, pp21-44; Lindsey Feitz and Joane Nagel, ‘The Militarization of Gender and
Sexuality in the Iraq War” in Women in the Military and in Armed Conflict, (eds.) Helena Carreiras
and Gerhards Kummel, Weisbaden: VS Verlag 2008; Joanna Bourke, ‘Torture as Pornography,'
Guardian, 7 May 2004; and Jean Braudillard, 'Pornography of War,' Cultural Politics 1(1) 2005, pp
23-26.
13
not only used to humiliate or destroy the enemy, but to act out, entrench, and
naturalise existing inequalities. Sexual violence is thus not only destructive of the
enemy group, but it is productive of the dominant group.
In sum, while each of the above-mentioned cases are different according to
context, perpetrators and victim profile, and political, social, and religious
dynamics, and hence may have different meanings and purposes within that
context, they also have much in common. For a start, rape in war tends to
reproduce and naturalise the inequalities that fed into conflict in the first place.
This makes it so effective, but it also makes clear the profundity of the crime –its
grounding in normative understandings of social divisions, and the legitimacy of
sex and violence as a means to impose dominance. Secondly, patterns of
peacetime sexual violence tend to follow similar divisions in society. Peacetime
sexual violence is widespread in most contexts, but much less visible than
wartime rape, as it is perceived as somehow ‘normal’ and ‘ordinary’. This
normalcy of ‘ordinary’ sexual violence allows much wartime sexual violence to
go unnoticed as well. Instances of opportunistic, non-strategic wartime sexual
violence do not fall in the category of ‘wartime rape’, cannot be prosecuted as
crimes against humanity, war crimes, or genocide in international courts and
tribunals, and do not qualify for post conflict reparation and restitution
programmes. This means that the category ‘wartime rape’ imposes a script of
what is extra-ordinary, and what is just ‘ordinary’.
The Global Summit and ending sexual violence in war
The above considerably complicates the goal of ending sexual violence in conflict
as a policy objective. While William Hague and Angelina Jolie were able to
mobilise an important number of senior politicians from around the world, and
helped raise further awareness of the issue of wartime sexual violence, we do
need to ask what ending sexual violence in conflict means according to the UK
Foreign Office. How does it propose to achieve such a goal?
First, the Statement of Action of the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in
Conflict emphasises that an important step towards eradicating sexual violence
in conflict is reversing the shame from victim-survivor to perpetrator.
32
Such a
position is supported by UN Security Council Resolution 1960, which proposes a
naming and shaming policy for perpetrators of sexual violence in conflict.
33
Interestingly, at the Summit, we learned much about the victim-survivors and
many made important contributions. Valuing the voluntary contributions of
victim-survivors is perhaps essential; however, we did not hear anything about
the perpetrators. How can we reverse the shame, if the victim-survivors have a
face, but not the perpetrators? How can perpetrators be shamed if that is only
possible after difficult and lengthy prosecution processes and guilty verdicts? In
32
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/statement-of-action-global-summit-to-end-
sexual-violence-in-conflict
33
Gina Heathcote wrote a criticalanalysis of this policy: Heathcote, (2012) 'Naming and Shaming:
Human Rights Accountability in Security Council Resolution 1960 (2010) on Women, Peace and
Security.' Journal of Human Rights Practice .4 (1)pp 82-105.
14
her keynote remarks, the Liberian Minister for Gender and Development, Julia
Duncan-Cassell, told of a Liberian MP who is widely known for his involvement
in conflict-related rape in her country. However, she would not name him –
shame him- as he was not (yet?) found guilty of his crimes. However correct it is
according to the rule of law, this does indicate how perpetrators are protected by
law, while victim-survivors are rarely so –considering the very low conviction
rates for both war and peacetime cases of rape. Likewise, it is questionable to
what extent the current attention from international media, celebrities and
policy makers for the stories and faces of victim-survivors of rape, reverses the
shame, or rather, provides a charitable goal and a categorising image of poor and
powerless women.
34
The impunity with which sexual violence in conflict is met was the second aim of
the initiative. Impunity feeds into violence and opportunism, and accountability
might ultimately lead to prevention. At the Global Summit an International
Protocol on the Documentation and Investigation of Sexual Violence in Conflict
was presented, which provides a detailed and accessible resource for doctors,
lawyers, prosecutors and judges around the world. This could be very useful,
especially in contexts where legal training is limited, and opportunities for
enhancing legal practice even more so. For accountability for sexual crimes to
succeed, institutions and their representatives at local, national and
international levels need to take such crimes seriously, and take action. The
political will demonstrated in London suggested that this is increasingly the case.
But institutions do not change their normative cultures that quickly. And even if
they did, with what resources are they going to do this? As lawyer Kim Thuy
Seelinger argued in her presentation at the Summit on internationally-funded
programmes to help law enforcers in Liberia, Kenya and Uganda to process cases
of sexual violence, it is unclear if these trained people will be able to continue
their work if and when the foreign donors withdraw, and on what scale.
35
These
are the typical dilemmas faced by aid programmes that are unlikely to be
sustainable. While judicial accountability is important, it might be an impossible
demand considering the scale of the problem. Interestingly, Sue Berelowitz,
England’s Deputy Children’s Commissioner, who recently revealed the high
prevalence of child sexual abuse and exploitation in Rotherham, blamed an
institutional culture of denial as one of the main problems in tackling the
problem. While front-line personnel needs to be better trained to deal with
sexual exploitation, Berelowitz stated, ‘we cannot arrest our way out of this
problem’ either.
36
Impunity is an important issue, but legal accountability is not
so easily met, be that in Liberia or in England.
34
Karen Engle argues that the focus on rape imposes suffering caused by it. Victim-survivors
become defined by the experience of rape, not because of the actual experience, but because of
the assumption around the stigma, the shame, and the emotionaland physical suffering. See:
Engle, ‘The Grip of Sexual Violence: Reading UN Security Council Resolutions on Human Security’.
In: Heathcote and Otto, eds. Rethinking Peacekeeping, pp 23-47. See also: Engle, Karen.
“Feminism and Its (Dis)Contents: Criminalizing Wartime Rape in Bosnia and Herzegovina.” The
American Journal of International Law 99 (2005): 778–816.
35
Kim Thuy Seelinger, ‘Closing the Impunity Gap’, at the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in
Conflict, 11 June, London.
36
Randeep Ramesh, ‘Willfully blind’ authorities put children at risk’, The Guardian, 28 August,
2014, p 9.
15
The third aim of the Summit (apart from reversing the shame and tackling
impunity) was to develop practical steps towards protecting women from
warzone violence. Of course, the idea that soldiers around the world, including
peacekeepers, should not only be trained not to rape, but to protect, as the
website of the summit claims, should attract a solid feminist discussion around
the idea of men protecting women in wars. As long as women need protection
from men –in or outside of warzones-, the gendered structures of society are not
only unequal, but will keep feeding into the legitimization of the violence of men.
The gender binary that assumes that men fight wars and women are its victims
ultimately serves to reproduce and legitimise war.
The fourth aim concerns more and better support for victim-survivors of sexual
violence. While the need for good medical and mental health support as well as
other practical support is obvious and necessary, it raises the question of the
relation between legal accountability and recognised victimhood. To what extent
are legal decisions needed to determine who is a victim, and hence, gets access?
Considering the difficulty with criminal accountability, discussed above, a
separation of legal pursuits and institutional recognition for the purpose of
service delivery might be advisable. However, as practice shows, the question of
recognition of harm done by sexual violence also has profound social
consequences, both for victim-survivors as for communities. Society at large
might not be convinced of the legitimacy of the claim to victimhood, and hence,
support services. In addition, providing large-scale support to rape victims
requires another institutional shift in attitudes towards sexual violence more
generally.
And hence, the fifth and last aim of the Summit was to change attitudes towards
conflict-related sexual violence.
37
What is needed is a worldwide cultural change,
a debunking of myths around conflict-related sexual violence to make clear to all
that such violence is not inevitable, a natural by-product of war, or a lesser war
crime than other such crimes. This is again an objective that in itself is difficult to
argue with. However, considering the complexities of sexual violence in conflict
here discussed, then this objective becomes far less realistic. To end sexual
violence in conflict, global campaigns would need to take into account that sexual
violence in conflict is more than a strategic weapon of war. Instead, campaigners,
politicians and policymakers would need to accept that such violences are crimes
embedded in the social structures of any given society, including, or perhaps
especially, in armed forces, and are reproductive of existing inequalities, building
on existing gendered and racial stereotypes. Such an analysis of the problem
does not only make the whole project unrealistic, it also highlights the dis-
ingenuity of it in the first place: there is no real attempt at understanding the
problem, or changing the structures that feed into its occurrence.
37
https://www.gov.uk/government/topical-events/sexual-violence-in-conflict/about
16
Civilising war
So the Global Summit, and the overall initiative, has not presented a convincing
action plan, but it has drawn further attention to a problem by using the tried
and tested political strategies of summits, keynotes, and celebrities. Arguably,
‘sexual violence in conflict’ is a cause providing a platform for celebrities and
politicians to show their engagement with the suffering in the world. Is this a
campaign to gather political capital, rather than a way to address a profoundly
difficult problem? Ill-informed and self-serving celebrity activism has done harm
before, and tends to serve a broad range of interests that often reinforce existing
inequalities, rather than undermine them.
38
On the other hand, celebrity status
also lends visibility and legitimacy to the issue and reaches a much wider
audience that would otherwise not be willing to engage. So perhaps the
motivation of and gains for the main characters of this particular initiative is
irrelevant, that is, assuming that the initiative is worthwhile rather than
counterproductive.
But it is valid to ask if the current attention to sexual violence in conflict
reinforces, rather than breaks down, the inequalities in which this violence is
grounded. Considering what we know about both the complexity and ubiquity of
sexual violence in both war and peace throughout the world, does the current
attention not simplify the problem to the extent that it becomes
counterproductive? The way the problem is portrayed points at specific conflicts,
specific peoples, specific perpetrators and victims. It overlooks how the problem
is much bigger than these identified instances, and hence, purposefully ignores
the role of sexual violence in reproducing inequalities everywhere. Selectively
identifying perpetrators and victims, while ignoring the high levels of peacetime
gendered violence as well as the sexual abuse perpetrated in and by armed
forces supported, funded and/or protected by the US and the UK, reinforces the
global inequalities that are as much gendered and raced as those that underpin
contextualised patterns of sexual violence. At the ‘fringe summit’ that ran
parallel to the ‘expert summit’, open to the public and specifically aimed at
British young people, the exhibitions, plays, talks, and stalls selling handicrafts
pointing at the unfortunate lives of women in poor countries, the ‘problem’ of
sexual violence was clearly located in certain foreign places. Such a portrayal of
what conflict-related sexual violence is categorises large groups of people as
populations in need of protection, and their invisible counterparts –the
perpetrators- as barbarous.
Such selective action against sexual violence suggest a neo-colonial
understanding of warfare, whereby good, civilised war is pitched against
barbarian war in other places; after all this is a discourse that mainly refers to
certain conflicts (especially African conflicts), certain perpetrators (not those in
service of Western or UN armed forces), and specific victims (not the
empowered women of Western societies). The idea that we can and should
address wartime sexual violence independent of militarism itself and
independent of the broader problem of sexism and violence, suggest that there
17
are just and unjust wars, civilised violence and uncivil violence. A hierarchy of
violence and war is imposed, whereby barbarous weapons of war used by unruly
armies far away pertain to war crimes and should be prosecuted. In contrast, this
discourse legitimises civilised warfare and the violence used, such as drones to
bomb targets removed from military bases, allowing individuals to be
unaccountable for their actions. Such portrayals naturalise the hierarchy
between the civil and uncivil, between legitimate violence and illegitimate
violence. Sexual violence is a powerful tool in this naturalisation for the same
reason that it is an effective weapon of war: the intimacy of the destruction
suggests that the perpetrators of such violence are more immoral than those
who bomb from afar. As perpetrating sexual violence provides physical and
emotional dominance over victims and their communities, so does opposing
such violence emphasise the corporeality of the evil committed, and hence,
imposes a naturalised hierarchy between those who aim to protect and those
who perpetrate. Highlighting the cruel nature of sexual violence in conflicts by
emphasising the idea of rape as a weapon that should be eradicated not only
obscures the scale of sexual violence perpetrated by peacekeepers or ‘civilised
armies’, and indeed, distracts from the everyday violence in homes and
institutions, but it obscures and distracts from the war crimes committed
through industrial warfare. The focus on sexual violence in war affirms the
possibility of civilised war and helps legitimise US and UK military activity –as
these protect civilised people, and women. In this way, progressive, feminist
politics are mobilised to justify military intervention, actively undermining the
feminist peace movement by incorporating some of its goals
39
Thus, this simplified portrayal of sexual violence in conflict, overlooking multiple
perpetrators and victims both in war and in peace, labels specific groups, lets
others off the hook, and hence, reproduces the gendered and raced inequalities
that shape our global world. As feminist International Relations scholars have
argued for years, war, and violence, are profoundly gendered and raced.
40
War
and the way it is waged builds on gendered and raced stereotypes, so
reproducing those stereotypes and inequalities contributes to the possibility of
war. These same inequalities contribute to the possibility and effectiveness of
sexual violence in war, and, let’s not forget, in peace. Ultimately, media, legal and
policy attention to sexual violence in conflict has, to date, not brought much
benefit to the survivors or future victims of such crimes, thereby leaving only the
39
As Judith Butler has argued, progressive sexual and feminist politics have served as a rationale for
wars before, particularly in Muslim countries. Judith Butler, Frames of War. When is Life Grievable?,
London & New York, Verso, 2009, p26. The way a feminist rhetoric of women’s liberation was used
to help justify the wars in Afghanistan has received particular scrutiny, see: Elisabeth Klaus and
Sussane Kassel, 'The Veil as a Means of Legitimization. An Analysis of the Interconnectedness of
Gender, Media and War.' Journalism. Theory, Practice and Criticism. 6 (3) 2005, pp335-355. Carole
A. Stabile and Deepa Kumar, ‘Unveiling imperialism: war on Afghanistan’, Media, Culture and
Society, 27 (5), 2005, pp 765-782. Diane Otto critically discusses the implications of the incorporation
of feminist goals in the UN Security Council: Otto, Beyond Stories of Victory and Danger: Resisting
Feminism’s Amenability to Serving Security Council Politics. In: Heathcote and Otto, Rethinking
Peacekeeping, pp 157-172.
40
Cynthia Enloe, The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993; Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the
War System and Vice Versa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001; Carol Cohn,Women
and Wars. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013.
18
image of the violated woman intact. This is a useful image that helps justify
military and legal (via the ICC
41
) intervention in places proved to be barbarian –
in need of a civilising mission, the eradication of the abuse of women, ending the
savage use of rape as a weapon of war. The moral mission to make war more
civilised is in the hands of the dominant political and economic powers, the
intention is not to end war, nor to end sexual violence. Rather, ending sexual
violence in conflict has become an emblem that allows Western powers to
dictate how war is fought, and gain public approval for its military missions.
Ultimately, while sexual violence helps produce and perpetuate inequalities in
the communities where it is perpetrated, the international community’s efforts
to eradicate such violence, in its current form, reproduce global inequalities.
41
Krever in NLR No 85
