Teaching Workshop
In May 2007, the University of Iowa Center for Human Rights sponsored a workshop to enable faculty, graduate students teaching their own courses, and secondary school teachers to integrate instruction on sexual violence in conflict zones into their regular course offerings.
Revelations of sexual abuse of prisoners by personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and reports of rape in the ongoing conflict in Sudan have drawn renewed attention to an issue as old as warfare: sexual violence in conflict zones. According to the United Nations, the term sexual violence refers to many different crimes including rape, sexual mutilation, sexual humiliation, forced prostitution, and forced pregnancy. Awareness of sexual violence in conflict zones as a violation of human rights and a war crime evolved in the decades after World War II. Only in the last five years have wartime sexual offenders and their commanding officers been convicted in international courts of law.
The all-day workshop, on May 5, 2007, focused on discussion of pre-circulated readings from human rights organizations, eyewitnesses, and academic disciplines such as law, history, literature, and journalism. Prior research or teaching on sexual violence in conflict zones was not required.
Below are the readings for the workshop:
Common Readings
"Rwanda: Women Speak," in War's Dirty Secret: Rape, prostitution, and other crimes against women. Anne Llewellyn Barstow, editor (Cleveland, Ohio: Pilgrim Press, 2000): 93-95.
"Former Yugoslavia: Women Speak," in War's Dirty Secret: Rape, prostitution, and other crimes against women. Anne Llewellyn Barstow, editor (Cleveland, Ohio: Pilgrim Press, 2000): 57-62.
Elisabeth Wood, "Variation in Sexual Violence During War," in Politics and Society 34:3 (Sept. 2006): 307-341.
Individual Readings
Human Rights Watch, "Shattered Lives: Sexual Violence During the Rwandan Genocide and Its Aftermath" (1996).
Susan Brownmiller, "Making Female Bodies the Battlefield: Alas for woman, there is nothing unprecedented about mass rape in war," Newsweek (January 4, 1993): 37.
Tom Post and Alexandra Stiglmayer, "A Pattern of Rape: A torrent of wrenching first-person testimonies tells of a new Serb atrocity: systematic sexual abuse," Newsweek (January 4, 1993): 32-36.
Rhonda Copelon, "Surfacing Gender: Reconceptualizing Crimes Against Women in Time of War," in Mass Rape: The War Against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Alexandra Stiglmayer, editor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994): 1-34.
Hannah Rosen, "'Not That Sort of Women': Race, Gender, and Sexual Violence during the Memphis Riot of 1866," in Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History, edited by Martha Hodes (New York: New York University Press, 1999): 267-293.
Anne Curry, "The Theory and Practice of Female Immunity in the Medieval West," SVCZ Conference paper, February 2006.
Madeline Morris, "In War and Peace: Rape, War, and Military Culture," in War's Dirty Secret: Rape, prostitution, and other crimes against women. Anne Llwellyn Barstow, editor (Cleveland, Ohio: Pilgrim Press, 2000): 167-203.
Sponsors
Funding for the Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones conference was provided by Arts & Humanities Initiative of Iowa, UI International Programs' Major Project Fund, UI Center for Human Rights, and The Perry A. and Helen Judy Bond Fund.
The 2006 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.