Teaching Modules

Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones: Teaching Resources

In the early years of the twenty-first century, revelations of sexual abuse of prisoners by personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and reports of mass rape in the conflict of Sudan drew renewed attention to an issue as old as warfare: sexual violence in conflict zones.

Our best information regarding the scale of sexual violence in conflict zones is imprecise, but estimates point to very large numbers: up to fifty thousand rapes in Bosnia in the early 1990s, between one hundred thousand and a million German women raped by Soviet soldiers at the end of the Second World War, as many as sixty-four thousand sexual assaults in the wars of Sierra Leone in the 1990s, and perhaps two hundred thousand women conscripted to work as "comfort women" for the Japanese armies in the Second World War.

Following World War II, Japanese defendants were tried for crimes including mass rape, but sexual violence in conflict zones attracted little notice in subsequent decades. In the 1990s, however, mass rapes in the war of Yugoslav disintegration and during the Rwandan genocide received widespread media attention. International organizations, from courts to the UN, recognized sexual violence as a human rights violation and a crime of war, and the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the Former Yugoslavia have handed down "guilty" verdicts.

On this web site, you will find materials to help you integrate instruction on sexual violence in conflict zones into your course offerings. Please feel free to glean the materials here for ideas. If you adopt a course unit, or a significant part of one, we would appreciate your crediting the author and the UICHR.

We welcome you to submit materials for inclusion on this page. In addition to your syllabus or other course materials, please include:

An introductory paragraph explaining the course and the place of sexual violence in conflict zones within the course
Your contact information, and whether you are willing to have this information appear on the web site
A statement indicating your agreement to publish your materials on this web site, and to have visitors to the web site use your materials

The more submissions we get, the more useful this page will be. Please send materials or questions to: uichr@uiowa.edu.

About the Teaching Workshop

The University of Iowa Center for Human Rights sponsored a workshop on May 5, 2007, to enable faculty, graduate students, and secondary school teachers to integrate instruction on sexual violence in conflict zones into their regular course offerings. The all-day workshop, led by UI Professor of History Elizabeth Heineman, focused on discussion of pre-circulated readings from human rights organizations, eyewitnesses, and academic disciplines such as law, history, literature, and journalism. Each of the participants then developed instructional materials such as syllabi, reading lists, and course modules. Through the UICHR, the participants have made their materials available to the general public to implement or adapt to their own needs. The Teaching Workshop followed a Research Workshop on the history of sexual violence in conflict zones.

Terms of Use Statement

You may copy, distribute, display and use the work contained in this SVCZ Curriculum Resource Center for educational endeavors that are non-commercial in nature. You may excerpt, combine or otherwise alter the content of the various syllabi and curriculum modules as needed for your use. Should you make substantial changes to the materials, or combine or otherwise utilize the materials in new and innovative ways, the UI Center for Human Rights encourages you to submit the revised curricular materials for dissemination on this web site.
Additionally, the UI Center for Human Rights requests that you acknowledge your use of materials from the SVCZ Curriculum Resource Center in your own printed materials. None of the content of the SVCZ Curriculum Resource Center may be used for commercial purposes without prior written consent from the UI Center for Human Rights. Requests for commercial use should be addressed to uichr@uiowa.edu.

Curriculum Modules

Encountering the comfort women through fiction: Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman

Katharina R. Mendoza, Ph.D. Candidate in Women's Studies, University of Iowa
"I find that fiction works very well as a gateway to learning about the comfort women. At present, I teach Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman as part of my General Education Literature courses (2nd and 3rd year university students). I maintain a balance between exploring military sexual slavery and the various controversies surrounding the comfort women on the one hand, discussing the narrative devices Keller uses to tell Akiki's and Beccah's story on the other. I've structured this unit loosely so that it can be easily adapted to fit into any course, literary or otherwise, that covers sexual violence in conflict zones."

Sexual Violence in Contemporary Conflict Zones: Syllabus and Assignments for Exploring the Social Conversation

Allison McGuffie, Ph.D. Candidate in Film Studies, University of Iowa
"UI Rhetoric courses are structured around the concept of broader social conversations, or "controversies," with attention given to analyzing specific rhetorical strategies used in various individual texts, mapping the relationships between texts within a broader social conversation, and ultimately teaching students to advocate their own positions with rhetorical strength and informed responsibility. With these general skills in mind, this course module includes several assignments that address basic rhetorical skills by analyzing texts and the broader conversations about Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones. While the basic materials and structure are provided, this course is designed to encourage student involvement to fuel daily classroom activities and discussion. The assignments can also be used with flexibility, allowing instructors to tailor them to individual class needs and course requirements."

Health Consequences of War

Maureen McCue, Global Health Studies, University of Iowa; Coordinator, Iowa Physicians for Social Responsibility
"I teach several courses on women, health, and militarism. Each of these courses has included attention to the health consequences of militarism and a variety of related gender impacts. While none focus specifically on sexual violence, each includes required papers, book reports, and/or "special presentations" by interested students which at times would focus on sexual violence. I try to convey the complexity and multi-layered impacts on the health and well being of the world's women from pervasive, daily grinding structural violence in so-called peace time, manifested by patriarchy, disproportionate levels of poverty, social inequity, and sexual violence. Militarism and sexual violence as a specific manifestation of conflict add to and exacerbate the everyday risks of being born female for women in much of the world."

Sexual Ethics: Syllabus, Class Activities, and What People Say

Anette Ejsing, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Theology and Ethics, Augustana College (Rock Island, IL)
"I recreated my course, 'Sexual Ethics,' which I had previously taught at both introductory and advanced levels, but more narrowly from the perspective of theological ethics. Adding an application of theological ethical theory to the experiences of rape victims in conflict zones is an important improvement in the course. It adds a significant sense of urgency to the academic task of applying theory to practice."

Rape Victims and the Culture of Dissemblance

Jennifer Harbour, Department of History, University of Iowa and Iowa State University
"The course that I imagine is a 'Women and War' course. In the courses that I have done on women and war (Vietnam and World War II), I have tried to show the spectrum of women's involvement: from combat role to mother to assault victim to intelligence officer. In this assignment, students have read several different types of accounts of rape, and I want them to begin to discern how the experience is varied in terms of its trauma, its duration, its aftershocks, and its ability to victimize. As a historian, part of what I want to show students is how to ask good questions about the topic being explored, which is why I've got so many questions here. By the time we get to this point in the semester, they know that with any given primary source (a lot of autobiography, for instance) there are unending questions about how to characterize these experiences for individual women, for groups of women, and so on. As a historian, it is my job to give a voice to people who do not have one anymore."

Gender and Violence: Syllabus and Class Assignments for Rhetoric I, II, or III (speech assignment, discussion questions)

Alina Haliliuc, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Communication Studies, University of Iowa
"This Rhetoric I class, organized around the theme of gender, instructs students in writing and speaking while also developing their skills in analyzing and mapping arguments. The daily schedule illustrates a trajectory of thinking gender in terms of the violent power of normativity in times of both peace and war. The students' critical skills are cultivated through readings and assignments that encourage them to interrogate the norms of gender for men and women. Students see how conforming to those norms sometimes encourages performing or suffering violence, and how breaking those norms is always accompanied by different degrees of violence."

Sociologically Exploring Sexual Violence in Conflict and in Peace: Introduction, Discussion, Application (syllabus)

Susan L. Wortmann, Ph.D., Department of Sociology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
"Overall, this course is a sociological exploration of selected issues facing women in contemporary society. As such, topics explored include culture, gender socialization, violence against women, and women and social institutions (economy, religion, family, etc.). Following a unit on sexual violence against women, two weeks of this course will be dedicated to exploring this gendered nature of sexual violence in conflict and peace, and extending this discussion to the students' own community. My objects are fourfold: to introduce and problematize sexual violence in war conflict; to explore the gendered dimension of sexual violence in war conflict zones and to contrast this with gendered sexual violence in peacetime; to critically examine theories and to be aware of their implications; and to discuss potential solutions to gendered sexual violence in war and in peace both globally and locally."

Bibliography: Teaching Resources on Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones

The first part of this bibliography ("Workshop Readings") constituted the reading list for the teaching workshop at the University of Iowa Center for Human Rights in May, 2007. The entire group read the article by Elizabeth Wood. Each participant read and reported on additional readings, which were selected according to the disciplinary and topical specialties of the participants.

The remainder of the bibliography focuses on scholarly articles, films, and NGO reports on sexual violence in conflict zones. It includes a small number of literary works and memoirs. Rather than being comprehensive (and perhaps overwhelmingly long), it aims to offer a selection of readings that will help visitors to this web site locate materials that might be most useful to them.

We welcome suggestions for additions to this bibliography, which we will periodically update. Please send suggestions to: uichr@uiowa.edu.