Sexual Violence and Armed Conflict

Janie L. Leatherman

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745658353
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Pace e sviluppo globale

Every year, hundreds of thousands of women become victims of sexual violence in conflict zones around the world; in the Democratic Republic of Congo alone, approximately 1, 100 rapes are reported each month. This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the causes, consequences and responses to sexual violence in contemporary armed conflict. It explores the function and effect of wartime sexual violence and examines the conditions that make women and girls most vulnerable to these acts both before, during and after conflict. To understand the motivations of the men (and occasionally women) who perpetrate this violence, the book analyzes the role played by systemic and situational factors such as patriarchy and militarized masculinity. Difficult questions of accountability are tackled; in particular, the case of child soldiers, who often suffer a double victimization when forced to commit sexual atrocities. The book concludes by looking at strategies of prevention and protection as well as new programs being set up on the ground to support the rehabilitation of survivors and their communities. Sexual violence in war has long been a taboo subject but, as this book shows, new and courageous steps are at last being taken Ð at both local and international level - to end what has been called the "greatest silence in history".

CHAPTER ONE

Ending the Silence

“One day when my husband went into the forest to gather rubber, the sentry Ikelonda came, finding me in my hut where I stayed, and asked me to give myself to him. I rejected his proposition. Furious, Ikelonda fired a gun shot at me, which gave me the wound whose trace you can still see. I fell on my back; Ikelonda thought I was dead, and to get hold of the brass bracelet that I wore at the base of my right leg, he cut off my right foot.” (Boali of Ekolongo, 1905)¹

Boali is one of 13 women who had the courage to testify before the King’s Commission investigating atrocities in the Congo Free State in the early 1900s at a time when King Leopold II himself was organizing the conquest, slave labor system, and plunder of his personal colony for the collection of rubber that brought him enormous wealth. Her testimony stands as one of the great exceptions among survivors, not the rule. Mostly, the historical record is silent when it comes to the voices of victims, especially from sexual violence. Nonetheless, sexual violence in armed conflict has been part of the spoils of war from time immemorial. It has carved a path of humiliation and destruction, turning the lives of women and girls into the currency of chattel and slaves, and the feminization and emasculation of men and boys. References to rape are found in the earliest documents of recorded history and in early religious texts, such as in Homer’s Iliad and the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. The founding of Rome, the Crusades, colonialism, slavery, and the spread of settlers across Native American lands all encompass a history of rape.

Sexual violence in warfare is among the darkest legacies of the twentieth century, and it continues to ravage societies in the new millennium. Instances of widespread use of sexual violence include: the 1915 Armenian genocide by Ottoman Turkey; the Japanese assault on the Chinese in Nanking during World War II, and in the Chinese civil war; the partition of India and creation of Pakistan; and Bangladesh’s 1971 war of liberation. Sexual violence has been prevalent in many other conflicts during the Cold War and after, including the Korean War, Vietnam War, and Cambodia; in the wars and conflicts in Central and Latin America, and in Haiti; and in many African conflicts, such as Angola, Djibouti, Liberia, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and Sudan. In Asia, war rapes are found in East Timor, Sri Lanka, Burma, Kashmir (India), Papua New Guinea; and in wars and conflicts in Central Europe and Eurasia, including Afghanistan, Turkey, Kuwait, Georgia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. No part of the world has been unaffected by wartime sexual violence.

The estimates of numbers of raped women in post-Cold War conflicts are staggering: as many as 500,000 women were raped in the Rwandan genocide; 60,000 in the wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia; and 64,000 internally displaced women were victims of sexual violence in Sierra Leone during the decade of civil war from 1991–2001.² The wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo (hereafter DRC) since the mid-1990s encompassed widespread and horrific forms of sexual violence, particularly in Eastern Congo.³ United Nations (UN) Emergency Relief Coordinator John Holmes tells of “sexual violence so brutal it staggers the imagination.” More than 32,000 cases of rape and sexual violence have been registered in South Kivu Province alone since 2005 – a fraction of the total number of women subjected to such extreme suffering.⁴

Historically speaking, investigating sexual violence in armed conflict has been taboo. One of the reasons for silence on sexual violence in war is the seemingly impossible task of understanding it. Incomprehension is a typical response to egregious violence. Normal people (by definition) cannot understand cruel acts. Such assumptions have their own perils, however. Dismissing cruel perpetrators as mad, crazy or demonic alienates the observer from the perpetrator, rendering the perpetrator a “monster, inhuman, unlike me.”⁵ The impulse to dissociate serves many functions. Most significantly, dissociation from sexual violence in war is a means of silencing that suppresses awareness and accountability. Until recently, this produced a great gap in international law, among scholars in disciplines across the academy, and in national and international policy-making circles and practice. This silence has been an integral part of the institutions that make sexual violence in war possible, and permissible. To borrow from Hilary Charlesworth, the silence is a critical element of the stability of the institution in question, not a weakness in its structure.⁶

The silence on sexual violence has undergirded the economic, social, cultural and political power structures of patriarchy. Patriarchy is a hierarchical social order centered on dominant or hegemonic forms of masculinity. It requires an investment of time, social organization, and resources to sustain such disciplinary practices as honor killings; bride dowry that values men over women; cultural codes on adultery (that fail to differentiate it from rape); practices to ensure the purity of the girl child, whether through surveillance or cutting (such as female genital mutilation); forced marriage or child marriage.

Sexual violence in conflict does not develop in isolation from the society’s preexisting socioeconomic and culturally shaped gender relationships. The extent of gender-based violence (GBV) in society is a predisposing condition for sexual violence in war and is a principal reason why women and girls in countries with high levels of gender-based discrimination and inequality are at a much greater risk of victimization and revictimization of sexual violence from the onset to the aftermath of violent conflict. GBV involves many forms of human rights violations, such as rape, domestic violence, sexual assault and harassment, sex trafficking, and harmful traditional practices ranging from female genital mutilation, early marriage and bride inheritance to honor killings. Men, women and children can be targets of GBV, and this affects all the social institutions in society, including family and community structures and relationships. GBV often intensifies and becomes more extreme in a crisis, even escalating into a tool of war. In some armed conflicts, the brutality and systematic use of sexual violence rises to the level of a crime against humanity, a war crime and an aspect of genocide.⁷ To understand what drives men (and infrequently, women) to commit sexual violence in armed conflict, this book draws especially on theories of constructivism to explore systemic factors like hegemonic masculinity and how it links up with situational factors in conflict to produce other masculinities that are subordinate, violence laden and catastrophic.

Contemporary war amplifies gender injustice in a context of globalized militarism and weak states. Where gender injustice is highest in the world, so too are indices of poverty, hunger, state fragility, and war. The region where these factors coalesce most intensively is called an “arc of instability” that runs from the west coast of Africa, including the important oil-producing state of Nigeria across the African continent through the Persian Gulf region and into Central Asia and beyond, reaching Afghanistan, nuclear-armed Pakistan, and Nepal. This arc of instability has a heavy concentration of the 20 failed or weakest states in the world that represent a population of 880 million people. Sub-Saharan Africa has an especially high concentration of states in crisis or war, or in a post-conflict period.⁸

Historically, claims to state sovereignty have protected governments from external scrutiny (regarding human rights, for example), which is the international analogy to the domestic divide between the public and private. This separation reverberates across many divisions in society and internationally, including between state and community, state and market, the market and the family, and so on, with different impacts depending on race, class, (dis)ability, sexual identity, nationality, or location (global North versus global South), for example. It also is intrinsic to globalizing capitalist processes that separate capitalist production and human reproduction in gendered terms. By the late twentieth century, globalization has defined these processes by the accelerating pace and the global reach and penetration of flows of capital, information, culture, production, and people across boundaries. While globalization itself is presented as gender neutral, the designation of the productive economy as the formal, monetarized economy, and reproduction as the domain of informal, noncompensated pay, reveals the hidden gendered nature of economic relations of domination and subjugation, as well as class, race/ethnicity, geography, and history (such as the legacies of colonialism and postcolonialism).⁹ Women have been traditionally subordinated in both the productive and reproductive spheres of the global economy under the institutions of hegemonic masculinity.

Global capitalism takes a position of nonresponsibility regarding the economies of reproduction that involve the private sphere of family economies. This is where life is generated, children nursed and reared, family members’ needs cared for, the roots of community life and socialization laid, and intergenerational relations sustained.¹⁰ The position of nonresponsibility for the reproductive economy has been sustained globally through the dominance of European and American capital via colonization, empire, and more recently globalization. This capitalist ideological organization of labor contrasts starkly with the reality that women in most parts of the world have been involved in the productive, as well as the reproductive, economy and continue to contribute to the formal economy by growing crops, making goods to buy and sell at the market, and so on.¹¹

The rules of the ordinary capitalist workplace are also embedded in assumptions about the division of the productive and reproductive economy, so that such activities as child rearing, breast-feeding, caring for elderly parents or feeding the family are excluded from its arena of responsibility. These claims to nonresponsibility normalize unpaid labor for women and extend into other realms, such as nonresponsibility for exploitation of laborers who are not directly under the employment of multinational corporations (as sweatshop workers, for example), or the negative impacts of capitalism on the environment and its sustainability. As this study will demonstrate, corporations also take a position of nonresponsibility for marginalized people in war zones whose exploitation is a function of global networks of profit making in diamonds, gold, tin, coltan (short for ColumboTantalite), and other valuable commodities. This system connects corporate headquarters with plundering militaries on the ground that use extreme forms of violence against the reproductive economy in general, and more specifically through sexual violence against women as a profit-making strategy to gain access to and control of natural resources. Through such developments, the global political economy has become militarized and violence-laden.

The divide between public and private is also marked by the development of male-oriented human rights protections in the public sphere as the domain for men (where they work and engage in politics) and the absence of legal protections in the private sphere as the domain for women (where they are responsible for family and home).¹² Liberal human rights serve to protect masculine modes of thinking and rights, as seen in the United States (US) Bill of Rights, for example. Forms of oppression that women face in “marriage, procreation, labor, property ownership, sexual repression, and other manifestations of unequal citizenship that are routinely viewed as private, nongovernmental, and reflective of cultural differences” have not historically been part of liberal activism on rights.¹³ This has left women vulnerable to inequalities, despite their involvement both in and outside the home, and to domestic violence and other forms of discrimination and marginalization in public.¹⁴ It has also left them vulnerable to sexual violence in war.

Nothing about sustaining a patriarchal system is inherently “easy.” Patriarchy is not natural; it requires great effort to reproduce and sustain it every day.¹⁵ Patriarchal institutions depend on hegemonic leadership, enforcement and reenactment, in which many women and men in society actively participate.¹⁶ For example, women who circumcise girls are participants in patriarchal institutions, though they may do so to earn a living or as a source of power and leadership in secret societies. Patriarchy is also facilitated by its incorporation into or “colonization” of other forms of social organization, such as ethnic cleavages, race and class relations, economic development, militarization, and militarized masculinity. In war zones, access to and control of local resources like diamonds, coltan, gold, tin, timber, illicit drugs and underground trade in weapons and other commodities enrich local commanders and political backers, while guaranteeing profits to multinational corporations who negotiate lucrative contracts and concessionary rights with failed states and rebel groups that skirt accountability or transparency. Social disintegration and chaos facilitate economic exploitation, while sexual violence is one of the key tools in the arsenal of the global political economy of war. War strategies are always political strategies about who remains in control and what assets are theirs. In that sense, sexual violence is part of the political economy of war – one of its most efficient tools.

Few other strategies can so fundamentally unravel the fabric of society. This is because sexual violence encapsulates the violation of multiple taboos, including but not limited to those involving rape. Other forms of sexual violence encompass exploitation and abuse through sexual slavery, forced pregnancy, forced marriage, mutilation, cannibalism, violation of breast-feeding or pregnant and elderly women, the forcing of children to commit rape of others, or family members to commit incest. In armed conflict, rape is often part of a systematic campaign of terror, resulting in mass or collective rape. Gang rape is especially horrific. It involves multiple perpetrators sexually assaulting a particular victim and results in devastating physical and psychological consequences. Sexual assaults also leave victims at risk of HIV/AIDS (Human immunodeficiency virus/Acquired immune deficiency syndrome) and sexually transmitted diseases. Dealing with the health and psychosocial consequences of sexual violence is an urgent need, but most countries lack the specialized surgical resources.

Literature on sexual violence and war generally refers to those who have lived through the experience as survivors, and reserves the term victims for those who died or as a legal term of reference.¹⁷ This book follows these conventions. Nevertheless, like men, women have many identities in war, not only that of victim. They navigate its treacherous waters as mothers, daughters, wives, farmers, traders, smugglers, caretakers, internally displaced persons (IDPs), and refugees, among many other roles and identities, including as combatants. This underscores the complexity of gendered power relations in war where rape is much more prevalent than in peacetime.¹⁸

Conceptualizing sexual violence

Sexual violence in armed conflict happens in a place, and involves violent acts, perpetrators, victims, survivors and impacts ranging from health to a broad array of social consequences. Sexual violence is also a tool or strategy of war that encompasses the pre-conflict, conflict escalation and post-conflict phases. It breaks taboos, thereby violating rules and crossing thresholds that society sets on acceptab...