A Horror as Old as Warfare
Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones
By Elizabeth Heineman
In the spring of 2004, two very different stories of sexual violence in war grabbed newspaper headlines. The first was the massive rape of women by Janjaweed forces in the Darfur region of Sudan. The second was American forces’ sexual torture and humiliation of mostly male Iraqis imprisoned in Abu Ghraib. So much differed in the two settings: the aims of the wars, the manner in which they were being fought, the attention paid them by the international community. Yet sexual violence found a place in both conflicts.
This was a familiar problem to me. Having studied sexual violence in the European theater of World War II, I had thought a great deal about the very different forms it could take and functions it could serve. The German military established brothels in occupied Europe, where women worked in slave-like conditions. The aim of the brothel system was to improve compliance among occupied populations and slow the spread of sexually transmitted diseases – two goals that were threatened by occupation soldiers’ frequent rapes of local women. Concentration camp authorities established brothels inside camps to provide incentives for male inmates to work well and to comply politically. At the end of the war, mass rapes of German women by Soviet soldiers signaled pent-up fury and a collapse of military discipline. In the American zone of occupation, the porous boundaries between dating relationships, exploitation of women turning to prostitution to fend off starvation, and rape sometimes resembled the porous boundaries between consensual sex, sex under duress and non-consensual sex in civilian life.
Kidnapped, by Kim Soon-deuk of the Korean Solidarity Committee, The House of Sharing
Sexual violence is anything but an incidental problem in war. We do not have precise data, but estimates point to very large numbers: up to 50,000 rapes in Bosnia in the early 1990s, between 100,000 and a million German women raped by Soviet soldiers at the end of World War II, as many as 64,000 sexual assaults in the wars in Sierra Leone in the 1990s; and perhaps 200,000 women conscripted to work as “comfort women” for the Japanese armies in World War II.
Yet for millennia, rape was considered an inevitable by-product of warfare and not worth much special attention. Feminists began to challenge this attitude in the 1970s, arguing that perpetrators must be held accountable and rape must be confronted equally in conflict and in civilian settings. Years of organizing bore fruit when rape during the wars in the former Yugoslavia and in the genocide in Rwanda received widespread media coverage, reflecting changed attitudes toward such systematic gendered violence.
In the 1990s, international organizations, from courts to the UN, recognized sexual violence as a violation of human rights and a crime of war. Furthermore, our understanding of what constitutes sexual violence has broadened. According to a 1998 UN report, “sexual violence” can refer to many different crimes including rape, sexual mutilation, sexual humiliation, forced prostitution and forced pregnancy. Victims can be female or male, of any age.
Recognizing and prosecuting sexual violence in conflict zones is one thing; understanding its causes and consequences is another. Yet only by understanding the causes of sexual violence in conflict zones can we hope to make it less likely. Only by understanding its consequences can transitions to civil society bring lasting peace to traumatized societies.
In the spring of 2004, I shared my thoughts with the late Ken Cmiel, my colleague in the UI History Department and then soon-to-be director of the UI Center for Human Rights. We agreed that history – with its unfortunate wealth of examples of sexual violence in conflict zones – would be a good place to look for answers. With their deep knowledge of specific settings, historians are sensitive to the complex cultural, social, economic and political currents that shape behavior in particular conflicts. This might help us to correct generalizations, based on a few recent cases, about why such violence occurs. And with their ability to trace war’s aftermath for decades after the conclusion of a conflict, historians can explain long-term consequences that are unknowable when we look only at very recent wars.
With this in mind, we planned a conference on the History of Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones, to be hosted by the UI Center for Human Rights from April 27-29, 2006. Following Cmiel’s death, just a few weeks before the conference, the staff and interns of the UICHR worked hard to insure that his hopes for the conference would be realized. Organizing the conference taught us a great deal about the state of the field. Although we traced dozens of leads, we were not able to find anyone working historically on Latin America, and until history colleague Jim Giblin saved us at the last minute, we feared our program would lack any contributions on Sub-Saharan Africa, although we did receive numerous proposals for papers on contemporary conflicts in both locations. Interestingly, the only proposals we received on U.S. history were those we personally solicited.
But we were thrilled to receive many inquiries from scholars working historically on the Middle East and Asia, and we learned that the subject was attracting much attention by students of medieval and early modern Europe. This was important in understanding not only Europe’s history, but also warfare in other non-industrialized settings, environments torn by religious conflict, and so on. In the end, our program covered the ancient world to the late 20th century and most major areas of the globe. Participants represented the disciplines of law, women’s studies, French, classics, and history. (The program is available at www.uichr.org.)
A good example of meaningful trans-historic dialogue came in a session on “Memories of Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones and Post-Conflict Politics.” Here we learned how domestic politics of the 1920s emphasizing male wartime sacrifices led the British to downplay World War I atrocity stories regarding German rapes of Belgian women – although such stories had been important in motivating Britons to fight in the first place. In post-World War II Germany, women talked openly about their rapes by Soviet soldiers, but such stories were soon instrumentalized in popular, often semi-pornographic, fiction colored by the Cold War. In Bangladesh, women raped in the 1971 war of independence from Pakistan remained silent in part because the rapists were not all Pakistanis: many were fellow Bangladeshis or even neighbors, with whom the women had to create a post-conflict society. Thirty years later, both victims and perpetrators spoke of humanity lost and, they hoped, to be regained by speaking of their experiences in oral histories.
The possibility of achieving peace with wartime rapists was also a theme in several papers on wars in under populated areas, ranging from ancient Greece to East Africa in the early 20th century. In such wars, the capture of populations for labor and reproduction is often a central aim. For women and girls, capture typically meant forced marriage, and thus forced sex and forced impregnation. Yet the captives' subsequent integration into the victorious society put the initial rape into a very different context than in wars where the rapist remained an enemy "other."
A highlight of the conference was the keynote address by Rhonda Copelon, director of CUNY's International Women's Human Rights Law Clinic. Copelon’s pioneering work has played a major role in bringing gender into the jurisprudence of the International Criminal Tribunals and other institutions of international human rights. As we learned from conference papers, efforts to bring the law to bear on wartime sexual violators stretch at least back to Europe’s Middle Ages, and the violation of “comfort women” was a theme in the Tokyo Tribunals regarding Japan’s role in the Second World War. Yet only in the last five years have wartime rapists, and the commanding officers who either promoted or tolerated such action, been convicted in international courts of law.
Cmiel’s work on human rights deeply informed the conference. Despite feminists’ attention to sexual violence in conflict zones, he noted, “general” frameworks of conflict either ignore sexual violence entirely or, at best, consider it a consequence of the general breakdown of order. Cmiel worked from the premise that sexual violence does not simply follow from or accompany public violence. Rather, it is a defining feature of public violence, even if its specific forms, aims and scale (like the specific forms, aims, and scale of non-sexual violence) differ from conflict to conflict. One aim of the conference volume will be to theorize public violence in a way that fully incorporates sexual violence – a fitting tribute, we hope, to a great scholar and passionate advocate of human rights.
Elizabeth Heineman
Sue Heineman
Elizabeth Heineman.
Elizabeth Heineman is an associate professor of history in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences with a secondary appointment in UI International Programs. She teaches courses in Germany, Europe, gender and sexuality. She has written on gender, war and memory; welfare states in comparative perspective (Fascist, Communist, and Democratic); the significance of marital status for women; and sexuality and consumption. She is currently writing a book on sexual consumer culture in West Germany, home of the world's largest erotica firm, before the legalization of pornography.
She is also editing a collection of essays inspired by the conference on sexual violence in conflict zones. A Major Projects Award from International Programs helped to support this project. The conference received additional funding was provided by Arts & Humanities Initiative of Iowa, the UI Center for Human Rights, and The Perry A. and Helen Judy Bond Fund. The conference was co-sponsored by the UI Departments of History and Women's Studies, Sexuality Studies Program, Institute for Cinema and Culture, and Women's Resource and Action Council, with an additional contribution from the College of Law.