Rape during Civil War

Dara Kay Cohen

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781501705274
• eBook ISBN: 9781501706530
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Rape is common during wartime, but even within the context of the same war, some armed groups perpetrate rape on a massive scale while others never do. In Rape during Civil War Dara Kay Cohen examines variation in the severity and perpetrators of rape using an original dataset of reported rape during all major civil wars from 1980 to 2012. Cohen also conducted extensive fieldwork, including interviews with perpetrators of wartime rape, in three postconflict counties, finding that rape was widespread in the civil wars of the Sierra Leone and Timor-Leste but was far less common during El Salvador's civil war.Cohen argues that armed groups that recruit their fighters through the random abduction of strangers use rape—and especially gang rape—to create bonds of loyalty and trust between soldiers. The statistical evidence confirms that armed groups that recruit using abduction are more likely to perpetrate rape than are groups that use voluntary methods, even controlling for other confounding factors. Important findings from the fieldwork—across cases—include that rape, even when it occurs on a massive scale, rarely seems to be directly ordered. Instead, former fighters describe participating in rape as a violent socialization practice that served to cut ties with fighters' past lives and to signal their commitment to their new groups. Results from the book lay the groundwork for the systematic analysis of an understudied form of civilian abuse. The book will also be useful to policymakers and organizations seeking to understand and to mitigate the horrors of wartime rape.

1

THE LOGIC OF WARTIME RAPE

[What types of activities would the members of your group typically do together?] The group rape of women. Afterward, we would feel good and talk about it a lot, discuss it among ourselves, and laugh about it.

—RUF ex-combatant, Sierra Leone, March 29, 2008

What explains variation in the use of rape during civil conflicts? Despite the lack of clear evidence about basic patterns of wartime rape, ideas proliferate about its causes. One scholar counted more than a dozen different theories in the various literature, with explanations ranging from biology (men are evolutionarily prone to rape) to the type of war (ethnic wars create the conditions necessary for mass rape) (Wood 2009). Few of these theories are satisfying, and as I argue throughout the book, many fail to account for the remarkable variation in the forms of rape, the patterns of how rape is committed across time and space, and the identity of its perpetrators and victims.

In the first part of this chapter, I introduce an explanation of wartime rape that I call combatant socialization. Starting from the well-documented fact that the majority of reported wartime rape—when rape is widespread—is gang rape,¹ I argue that wartime rape may be the result of a violent socialization process that takes place among the rank and file of combatant groups, especially groups with low levels of internal social cohesion. I maintain that factions with particularly low levels of internal cohesion are those that use extreme forms of forced recruitment to garner fighters—whether abduction (by insurgents) or its equivalent, press-ganging (by states). Drawing on literature from a variety of disciplines—particularly sociology, psychology, and criminology—and across a number of related contexts, I argue that gang rape is a form of group violence that increases social cohesion and performs various functions that are essential from the perspective of the armed group. Gang rape—unlike, for example, marital rape—is arguably universally taboo; as a stigmatizing form of violence, it can help to sever ties to fighters’ pasts. Gang rape is also a form of public, sexualized violence, which serves to communicate norms of masculinity, virility, and strength between fighters of both sexes. All of these are qualities of immense importance to fighters in armed groups, especially to those who have recently suffered the violence and humiliation of abduction. Finally, because gang rape carries risks—sometimes grave or debilitating risks, including sexually transmitted infections (STIs)—for the perpetrator, it can help to forge ties of trust among strangers.²

In the second part of the chapter, I present a series of competing, existing arguments about wartime rape. I consider the most common and influential explanations and separate them into three broad sets of arguments—opportunism/greed, ethnic hatred, and gender inequality—from which I derive a set of hypotheses and observable implications that I test in subsequent chapters. The explanations for wartime rape that I include have been put forth by scholars as well as by policy-makers, practitioners, and human rights advocates.³

Every explanation examined here can likely account for at least one case of wartime rape; indeed, detailed case studies of particular events and incidents often inform the development of more general explanations. The purpose of this chapter, however, is not to provide an exhaustive list of every possible cause of wartime rape but rather to distill those that are most prominent in both theory and policy. Of course, wartime rape may have any number of conceivable causes, and none of the arguments presented here, including combatant socialization, can fully explain every instance. In subsequent chapters, I use a number of methods—including statistical analysis and three fieldwork-based case studies—to determine which explanations find the most support across the universe of recent civil wars. In other words, which explanations for wartime rape are generalizable across contexts? Which explanations are best able to account for the central puzzles described in the introduction? The answers to these questions are essential both for scholars who analyze wartime violence and for those in the policy world working to mitigate the severity and consequences of wartime rape.

In this chapter, I first present the combatant socialization argument, along with its main assumptions and its basis in numerous fields of research. In particular—relying on the literature from psychology, sociology (especially military sociology), and political science—I address questions of how and why cohesion forms through a process of socialization. I explore puzzles about the power of social groups in perpetrating violence, including large-scale violence like genocide. I also raise two theoretical questions: First, why does violence serve to create cohesion among fighters in armed groups? Second, why is sexual violence selected by some groups, and what other alternatives exist for building unit cohesion? I then discuss a number of related arguments about rape and other forms of civilian abuse and explain how these arguments are distinct from combatant socialization. In the second part of the chapter, I examine the three broad sets of competing arguments that I consider throughout the remainder of the book. Table 1.2, which summarizes the main arguments and the hypotheses tested throughout the book, is presented at the conclusion of this chapter.

Combatant Socialization

The central argument of this book is that wartime rape is best understood as a form of group violence.⁴ Through this lens, it is possible to draw on a number of related fields of study that have focused on similar types of group violence in order to address some of the more puzzling aspects of wartime rape. As outlined in the introduction, one of the most persistent puzzles of wartime rape is why gang rape is far more frequent during wartime than in peacetime. Estimates of peacetime gang rape as a proportion of all peacetime rape vary but nearly always comprise a minority of reports; one set of scholars estimates that peacetime gang rape comprises between 2 and 27 percent of all cases (Horvath and Woodhams 2013, 2). In contrast, studies of wartime rape have found that 75 percent or more of reported cases of rape are gang rape. Although many scholars have argued that wartime rape is a continuation of peacetime gender violence (e.g., Boesten and Fisher 2012), I argue instead that wartime rape is distinct from rape during peacetime in several fundamental ways. First, the increased prevalence of multiple-perpetrator rape in wartime suggests that wartime rape has a different purpose than peacetime violence. Second, evidence shows that members of armed groups who perpetrate wartime rape are different from the types of people who rape during peacetime. Third, the victims of wartime rape differ from those who are raped during peacetime, particularly in terms of their relationships to perpetrators.⁵ Finally, wartime rape is frequently more brutal than peacetime rape. All of these differences mean that, although gendered forms of violence exist in both peacetime and wartime, wartime rape requires a different type of explanation than peacetime gender violence.

The need for a different explanation suggests that the focus in much of the previous literature on combatants’ opportunities to commit violence—and related principal-agent explanations for rape—is incomplete. Mere opportunity cannot account for the manner in which rape is actually perpetrated—often as part of a group, and under intense social pressure to participate. Principal-agent explanations, in which leaders direct their subordinates to commit violence, are also problematic—and occasionally contradictory. Some scholars understand agents to be “overworking” when they commit sexual violations (Mitchell 2004), while others argue that principals order or encourage rape as part of a military strategy to undermine the morale of the opposition (e.g., Leiby 2009).

That mass rape is a part of military strategy (or a “tool of war”) is now a widely held belief. For example, the former foreign secretary of Britain William Hague wrote in an editorial in 2012 that “more often than not [rape] is carried out not by invading armies but by one group against another: deliberately to destroy, degrade, humiliate and scar political opponents or entire ethnic and religious groups” (Times, October 15, 2012). Similarly, physician-turned-activist Dr. Denis Mukwege said the following during an interview about rape in the DRC:

The most important reason [that rape is so prevalent in the DRC], among others, is that rape is used as a war strategy. When a woman is publicly raped, and so violently, not only is she traumatized, but the whole community is traumatized—her husband, her children, and the whole village. The result is often that a population will leave the village and will leave it to the armed bands who can then use the cattle and the fields. And so that’s just as good a result as using weapons. (Mukwege and Ensler 2009)

Overall, however, the explanation of rape as a military strategy suffers from a lack of supporting evidence. As previously argued, rape is rarely directed by commanders—although there are notable exceptions, both in recent conflicts and in the historical record.⁶ In addition, in much of the current debate, the consequences of rape are frequently conflated with its goals (Aranburu 2010; Wood 2012; Cohen, Hoover Green, and Wood 2013, 9–10; Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2013). It is indisputable that rape may have the effect of displacing a population or weakening the opposition. However, this does not necessarily imply that these outcomes were the result of an explicit strategy. Returning to the example of the DRC, in the most comprehensive studies that have been conducted with combatants, they did not specifically mention a strategy of using rape to take land and animals (Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2013). To determine the motivations for rape—and whether it is being used strategically—researchers must study the perpetrators themselves, a task I take up in the three case study chapters.

Abductors’ Central Dilemma

Combatant groups that forcibly recruit new members—whether by abduction into an insurgency or by press-ganging into a state military—face a central dilemma: how to create a coherent group out of strangers who do not know each other and feel no loyalty toward the group of which they are now members. The process of being abducted or press-ganged is violent; it often involves beating, forced labor, and, for women, rape and other forms of sexual violence.⁷ Many of those interviewed for this book reported feeling frightened and isolated when they were first abducted. The perpetration of costly, risky group violence is a means of overcoming these problems and of building trust and loyalty in such groups.

Scholars have noted that battlefield experiences, and group perpetration of atrocities such as mass killing, can forge strong ties between strangers. Gang rape, as a public, sexualized form of violence, is another such means for increasing group cohesion (e.g., Goldstein 2001). Despite its prevalence, not all rape in wartime is gang rape, and bonding among perpetrators can also occur in the aftermath of single rape—that is, in perpetrating a rape alone, and then recounting it to peers afterward. Scholars have noted that perpetrators may brag about the rapes in which they participated, in order to “revel in a sense of enhanced masculinity” (Sanday 2007, 83).

I argue that combatant groups with the lowest levels of social cohesion are those that recruit their members both randomly and through extreme force.⁸ Forcibly and randomly recruited combatants, whose members initially know very little about one another, may be more likely to commit wartime gang rape than those recruits who voluntarily join a fighting force. While social cohesion has not been found to be necessary for the battlefield effectiveness of an armed group, it is nonetheless essential for the group’s longevity.⁹ Social cohesion may decrease the chances that abducted fighters will try to escape or turn violent against the leadership. In addition, the collective responsibility for group atrocities like gang rape can serve to further increase ties of loyalty to the group. Overall, social cohesion is especially important in combatant groups comprised of kidnapped strangers—to enable the survival of the group—and rape is a powerful means of creating this cohesion.

Though the term “socialization” has various meanings, I understand socialization to be a process through which individual actors become committed to an armed group, including learning the norms and rules of the fighting force—and especially the norms and rules regarding rape and sexualized violence. As Checkel (2015, 11) argues, the endpoint of a process of socialization is either a learned role (where the individual may not agree with the action but still performs it) or the full internalization and acceptance of the norms and rules as the “right thing to do.” As applied to the use of rape by armed groups, socialization is complete when rape regularly occurs in the absence of overt orders, coercion, or threats.¹⁰ Scholars have argued that socialization can be achieved through the mutual hatred of an enemy group, as a result of a guiding ideology shared by all members of the group, or, most relevant for this study, from a set of benefits that derives from a group activity (O’Neill 2001, 104). Gang rape illustrates this last method of socialization: benefits for the group (greater cohesion) are created through acts of group violence (gang rape).

Creating cohesion through gang rape need not be a conscious decision by the combatants or their commanders. It is unlikely that combatants themselves identify gang rape with the explicit purpose of forming social bonds, although the quotation from the RUF ex-combatant at the start of this chapter suggests that some do. Rather, combatants may perceive that regular participation in rape develops out of the dynamics of the combatant group. Wood (2016) argues that this type of violence comprises a third category of political violence, which is neither strategic nor opportunistic. She defines a “practice” as “violence which is neither ordered nor authorized but is tolerated by commanders” (1).¹¹ Individual combatants do not necessarily want to be integrated into the group that has just forcibly kidnapped them, but leaving the group is often not a viable option. Becoming more socially cohesive with one’s peers is a means of survival for abducted fighters and a way of gaining acceptance in a violent and confusing situation. If trapped in a group of hostile strangers, individuals will often choose participation in costly group behavior over continued estrangement from their peers. The fact that rape can also carry personal risks for the perpetrators, including danger to physical health, may reinforce its utility as a costly signal of loyalty and commitment, as a particularly useful intragroup organizing device, and finally as a tool of cohesion. In sum, gang rape is a particularly efficient method of both creating and perpetuating cohesion—not just as an initial hazing mechanism but also as a sustained socialization practice once the norms and beliefs about its use are internalized.¹² The cohesive benefits of rape may be one of the central reasons that leaders of the combatant units may not be able to prevent it from occurring—or may not sincerely attempt to do so. As Wood (2016, 16) argues, commanders may view actively prohibiting violence as a practice “too costly in the short term,” in terms of discipline, resources, or lessening respect for the command, often in part because they are “little troubled by the suffering of women and others targeted with rape.”

In one of the few existing studies of how this process works inside armed group units—albeit in a very different, non–civil war context—Donna Winslow (1999, 429) examines the practices of “non-conventional methods for promoting unit cohesion” within the Canadian Airborne Regiment (CAR). She argues that the need for unit cohesion was especially strong in the CAR because the men had to rely on each other when jumping out of airplanes, a particularly difficult and emotionally demanding task. This extreme and unique reliance on one another may be akin to the emotional upheaval and need for survival experienced by abducted combatants. Winslow documents how the CAR engaged in a variety of degrading and sometimes sexualized rituals whose ultimate purpose, she maintains, was the creation of bonds of loyalty and friendship within the group. Winslow cites research showing that the more severe these violent rituals, the stronger the bond to the unit. Bonding within armed groups, she concludes, can sometimes take the form of inappropriate or harmful practices. Similarly, I would argue that the “need” for bonding is greater in groups that have forcibly and randomly recruited their fighters; individuals in these g...

Table of contents

• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Puzzle of Rape in Civil War
• 1. The Logic of Wartime Rape
• 2. Research Strategy, Cross-National Evidence (1980–2009), and Statistical Tests
• 3. Mass Rape by Rebel Actors: Sierra Leone (1991–2002)
• 4. Mass Rape by State Actors: Timor-Leste (1975–1999)
• 5. Less Frequent Rape in Wartime: El Salvador (1980–1992)
• Conclusion: Understanding and Preventing Rape during Civil War
• Appendix
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index