Who's human? Developing sociological understandings of the rights of women raped in conflict

Abstract

International approaches to human rights have, until recently, largely overlooked the experiences of women in conflict, displacement and crisis. Although women's human rights are progressing on paper, rape and sexual violence continues at mass levels in conflict and civil unrest with few consequences for perpetrators and very little emphasis on preventions. Sociology has itself been slow to engage in discourses around human rights, and even slower progress has been made in developing sociological understandings of gender and human rights. This contribution argues that overlooking gendered inequalities leaves the violation of women at the bottom of a priority list regarding international humanitarian law, and that sociological approaches highlighting and challenging women's subordination may support prevention and conviction at localised and international levels.

Keywords:

• sexual violence
• rape
• conflict
• sociology
• human rights
• women's rights

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Helen Churchill, Ian Cook and Kay Standing for their continued support, and many thanks to Joe Sim, Angela Tobin and Andrew Douglas for their help and support in my work and this contribution.

Notes

This study focuses on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda's definition of rape and sexual violence as ‘a physical invasion of a sexual nature committed under circumstances which are coercive’ but acknowledges that the reality is far more complex, and that sexual violence includes many forms of cultural, social and individual violence. See ICTR, Prosecutor v. John-Paul Akayesu, 1998, 138. Mass rape in this context indicates vast numbers of women raped during conflict and unrest, such as in Rwanda; the rapes of groups of women, as was reported in rape-death camps in Bosnia Herzegovina and systematic rapes of women in particular areas, as has been evident in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The term ‘micro levels’ refers to the individual perpetrators of rape, whether or not in a group, and the individual women who are raped in conflict. The complex consequences that rape has on the relationship between the individual woman and local and global society will be discussed further on.

Joanna Bourke, Rape: A History from 1869–Present (London: Virago, 2007).

Ingrid Palmary, ‘Positioning Feminist Research Politically: A Reflection on Tensions and Standpoints in African Feminist Research’, POWS Review 9, no. 1 (2007): 23–33; Liz Kelly, ‘Wars Against Women: Sexual Violence, Sexual Politics and the Militarised State’, in States of Conflict: Gender, Violence and Resistance, ed. S. Jacobs, R. Jacobson and J. Marchbank (New York: St. Martin's Press inc., 2000), 45–65.

Major General Patrick Cammaert, quoted in The Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, Justice Denied, December 2009, http://justice-denied.torturecare.org.uk/Justice_Denied.pdf (accessed 10 December 2009).

Conflict throughout this contribution includes official wars and any conflict, as well as civil unrest. Each of these are significant as all can include systematic violence, and incorporates violence perpetuated by militia, armies, police, and civilians themselves. Sexual violence can be perpetuated by all of the above, as well as peacekeeping troops. For discussions on definitions of genocide see Martin Shaw, War and Genocide (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003); and Daniela De Vito, Aisha Gill and Damien Short, ‘Rape Characterised as Genocide’, SUR: International Journal on Human Rights 6, no. 10 (2009): 29–50; Michael Goodhart, ‘Introduction: Human Rights in Politics and Practice’, in Michael Goodhart (ed) Human Rights: Politics and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009): 1–8.

Bryan Turner, ‘Outline of a Theory of Human Rights’, Sociology 27, no. 3 (1993): 489–512; Damien Short, ‘Sociological and Anthropological Approaches’, in Human Rights: Politics and Practice, ed. Michael Goodhart (Oxford, Oxford University Press: 2009), 96–111.

Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975).

Goodhart, Introduction, 4. This definition, an echo of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, will be used to outline the ideological discourses of rights throughout this contribution.

Rhonda Copelon, ‘Surfacing Gender: Reengraving Crimes Against Women in Humanitarian Law’, in Women and War in the Twentieth Century, ed. Nicole Ann Dombrowski (New York: Routledge, 2004), 332–359.

The author's PhD research focuses on the significance of sexual violence in war and conflict situations in women's claims for asylum, specifically in the Merseyside area of north-west England. It is qualitative by nature and encompasses ethnographic and activist research methodologies.

Michael Peel, Rape as a Method of Torture (London: Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, 2004); Medical Foundation, Justice Denied.

Palmary, ‘Positioning Feminist Research’; Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face to Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare (London: Granta Books, 1999).

This may include private violence committed by partners or acquaintances, but also includes violence in private and domestic spheres committed by strangers in the absence of male ‘protectors’ who have fled in the wake of conflict and/or genocide. This is particularly common in displacement camps and asylum refuges.

Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War Two (New York: Basic Books, 1997).

Relevant section: ‘Women shall be especially protected against any attack on their honour, in particular against rape, enforced prostitution, or any form of indecent assault’, available at http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/WebART/380-600032?OpenDocument (accessed February 5, 2010).

Kelly, ‘Wars Against Women’.

Due to evidence of significant levels of sexual violence by UN peacekeeping troops, in 2005, former UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, was led to develop, ‘A comprehensive strategy to eliminate future sexual exploitation and abuse in United Nations peacekeeping operations’. This highlights the extent to which women are rendered vulnerable during unrest, even by those employed to protect them. Available at http://www.peacewomen.org/un/pkwatch/discipline/ZeidReport24March05.doc (accessed 6 April 2009).

Resolution 1325, available at http://www.un.org/womenwatch/osagi/wps/; Resolution 1820, available at http://www.stoprapenow.org/pdf/Security%20Council%20Resolution%201820.pdf (accessed 14 January 2010).

For an in depth discussion on this, see De Vito, Gill and Short, ‘Rape Characterised as Genocide’. Furthermore, Mackinnon provides significant feminist and legal criticisms of rape laws in the context of honour. See Catherine A. Mackinnon, ‘Defining Rape Internationally: A Comment on Akayesu’, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law 44 (2006): 940–58.

The complex consequences that rape has on the relationship between the individual woman and local and global society will be discussed further on.

This contribution explores the specifically gendered nature of rape in conflict as an act of violence largely perpetrated by men against women, and does not have enough scope to engage in discussion about sexual violence as perpetrated against boys and men.

Feminists often highlight that women's experience of peace can be different to men's, as violence against women continues to occur outside of conflict. Cynthia Enloe, ‘Feminist Thinking About War, Militarism and Peace’, in Analysing Gender: A Handbook of Social Science Research, ed. B. Hess (Newbury Park: Sage, 1987), 526–549.

Bourke, Rape, 359.

Definitions of torture within legislation and by organisations such the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT), have not always fully recognised the significance of rape. Gradually, however, this is coming into fuller consideration in programmes such as ‘Violence against Women’, however it is something that continues to need mainstreaming in approaching conflict issues. See OMCT, Violence Against Women Programme, http://www.omct.org/index.php?id=EQL&lang=eng&PHPSESSID=e0591c3cd4411080e735f0548fef4001 (accessed 18 January 2010).

Such as was evident during the deliberate impregnation of Bosnian women during the Bosnia–Herzegovina War who were deliberately imprisoned to be systematically raped and tortured. See Roy Gutman, A Witness to Genocide (Shaftesbury: Element Books Ltd, 1993); and Alexander Stiglmayer, ed., Mass Rape: The War Against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1994).

Peel, Rape as a Method of Torture; Medical Foundation, Justice Denied; Refugee Council Vulnerable Women's Project, Refugee and Asylum Seeking Women Affected by Rape or Sexual Violence: A Literature Review, February 2009, http://justice-denied.torturecare.org.uk/Justice_Denied.pdf (accessed 10 March 2009).

Forced pregnancy in rape camps was an element of mass rape during the Bosnian War. Stiglmayer, Mass Rape.

Ruth Seifert, ‘War and Rape: A Preliminary Analysis’, in Stiglmayer, Mass Rape, 55.

Medical Foundation, Justice Denied; Refugee Council, Refugee and Asylum Seeking Women.

Sexual Violence Research Initiative, available at http://www.svri.org/ (accessed 18 January 2010).

For an in-depth discussion on the problems that arise from the binary elements of defining violations of women as a group and violations of an individual, see De Vito, Gill and Short, ‘Rape Characterised as Genocide’.

Copelon, Surfacing Gender, 332.

Helen Jones and Kate Cook, Rape Crisis: Responding to Sexual Violence (London: Russell House Publishing, 2008).

Adapted by Peel, Rape as a Method of Torture, from M. Richters, ‘Sexual Violence in Wartime’, in Rethinking the Trauma of War, ed. P.J. Bracken and C.K.Petty (London: Free Association Books, 1998).

Catherine Mackinnon, ‘Rape, Genocide and Women's Human Rights’, in Stiglmayer, ed., Mass Rape, 183–96.

Shaw, War and Genocide, 179.

Consider that approximately 500,000 women were raped during the Rwandan genocide, 20,000 during the Bosnian War, 64,000 in Sierra Leone, 4500 in Democratic Republic of Congo in six months, and hundreds of women per day in Darfur, Stop Rape now, UN Action Against Sexual violence in Conflict, http://www.stoprapenow.org. This is before even considering the prevalence of rape outside of conflict (accessed 18 January 2010).

Shaw, War and Genocide, 21.

Sociology is not the only discipline that can overlook sexual violence, sexual violence in conflict or the human rights of women, but is the main focus throughout this contribution.

Turner, ‘Outline’.

Short, ‘Sociological and Anthropological Approaches’; Goodhart, ‘Introduction’.

Sara Delamont, Feminist Sociology (London: Sage, 2003), 114.

Andrea Cornwall and Maxine Molyneux, eds, The Politics of Rights: Dilemmas of Feminist Praxis (London: Routledge, 2008).

See Sonia Corrêa, Rosalind Petchesky and Richard Parker, Sexuality, Health and Human Rights, Part 3 (London: Routledge, 2008).

See Daniela De Vito, ‘Rape as Genocide: The Group/Individual Schism’, Human Right's Review 9 (2008): 361–78; Lisa Sharlach, ‘Rape as Genocide: Bangladesh, the Former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda’, New Political Science 22, no. 1 (2000): 89–102; Shaw, War and Genocide; Alex Alvarez, Genocidal Crimes (New York: Routledge, 2010).

Another complex subject worth mentioning is the structures of discipline and techniques for desensitisation within the army and other military environments. See Bourke, Rape.

For example, see Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1971); Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989).

Helen Jones, ‘One Hand on the Keyboard: Sexual Violence in Hyperspace’ (paper presented at Crime and Social Justice seminar, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK, 1 February 2010).

Robert W. Connell, Gender and Power (Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press, 1987).

See Jones and Cook, Rape Crisis, for an in-depth discussion on second wave contributions to social understandings of rape in the UK and US.

For examples, see Amnesty International, Sudan: Darfur: Rape as a Weapon of War: Sexual Violence and its Consequences, 2004, http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AFR54/076/2004 (accessed 12 October 2008); Human Rights Watch, Shattered Lives: Sexual Violence during the Rwandan Genocide and its Aftermath, 1996, http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2004/09/29/rwanda-rape-survivors-find-no-justice (accessed 28 September 2008).

Brownmiller, Against Our Will; Kelly, ‘Wars Against Women’; Bourke, Rape.

Peel, Rape as a Method of Torture; Medical Foundation, Justice Denied; Refugee Council, Refugee and Asylum Seeking Women.

Soothill and Walby highlighted the UK media's inaccurate labelling of rapists as deviants and psychopaths, yet it continues to be evident in reports on sexual violence. This vastly undermines the perpetrator's social autonomy, or the structures and gender dichotomies produced and reiterated in society that harbour violence against women. See, Keith Soothill and Sylvia Walby, Sex Crime in the News (London: Routledge, 1991).

Gutman, A Witness to Genocide.

D. Scully and J. Marolla ‘Riding the Bull at Gilley's: Convicted Rapists Describe the Rewards of Rape’, in Violence Against Women: The Bloody Footprints, ed. P.B. Bart and E.G. Moran (London: Sage, 1993), 28.

Medical Foundation, Justice Denied.

Again, contexts of rape in conflict differ, and therefore different sociological approaches will inevitably be more relevant to different conflicts and even individual or group acts of one rape.

This is not in itself without complexities, as human rights are not universal, and the rights of women more generally are neither fixed globally nor adhered to within either private or public domains.

James Messerschmidt, Crime as Structured Action: Gender, Race, Class and Crime in the Making (London: Sage, 1997).

Paul J. Magnarella, ‘How Could it Happen? The Background and Causes of the Genocide in Rwanda’, Journal of International Criminal Justice 3 (2005): 801–22.

Ibid.; Jean Hatzfeld, A Time for Machetes (London: Profile Books ltd, 2005).

Ibid.

Hatzfeld, A Time for Machetes.

Quote from Fulgence, a Hutu killer as quoted in Hatzfeld, A Time for Machetes, 9.

D.R. Mosher and M. Sirkin, ‘Measuring A Macho Personality Constellation’, The Journal of Research and Personality 18 (1984): 150–63.

Medical Foundation, Justice Denied.

Brownmiller, Against Our Will.

Bourke, Rape, 376.

Connell, Gender and Power; John Remy, ‘Patriarchy and Fratriarchy as Forms of Androcracy’, in Men, Masculinities and Social Theory, ed. Jeff Hearn and David Morgan (London: Unwin Hyman Ltd, 1990), 43–54.

R. Mulhauser, ‘Coerced Undressing, Sexual Torture and Sexual Enslavement – Different Forms of Sexual Violence During the German Occupation of the Soviet Union’ (paper presented at ‘Rape in Wartime’, University of Paris 1, Paris, France, 11–12 May 2009).

Stiglmayer, Mass Rape.

Gutman, A Witness to Genocide.

Remy, ‘Patriarchy’, 45.

Brownmiller elaborates on this, ‘for once he is handed a rifle and told to kill, the soldier becomes an adrenaline-rushed young man with permission to kick in the door, to grab, to steal, to give vent to his submerged rage against all women who belong to other men’, in Stiglmayer, Mass Rape, 181.

Remy, ‘Patriarchy’, 45.

Since sexual violence is perpetrated by civilians, military, police, peacekeepers and government forces, each group may not be defined as ‘military’ but, during conflict and unrest, demonstrate militaristic attributes.

Bourke, Rape, 362.

Note that in all these strategies, if the value of woman or her femininity did not lie in being ‘pure’, sexually inactive or virginal, and if her dignity were not determined by these traits, then this tactic would be significantly less effective.

Bourke, Rape; Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War Two (New York: Basic Books Ltd, 1997).

Cited in Bourke, Rape, 381.

Brownmiller, Against Our Will.

Ibid.

The irony, of course, lies in the significance that must be placed on the domination of women's sexual autonomy, otherwise sexual violence would not be perpetrated on the mass scale that it is.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (London: Penguin, 1959, 1990). Feminists can, however, be critical of Goffman's ignorance of women in sociology. See Delamont, Feminist Sociology, 117.

Joanna Bourke provides a valid criticism of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as an excuse developed to provide impunity for American soldiers during this time. See Bourke, Rape, 384.

Including men who campaign for women's rights.

See http://www.icc-cpi.int/Menus/ICC/Structure+of+the+Court/Office+of+the+Prosecutor/Prosecutions/ (accessed 18 January 2010).

See Ashley Dallman, Prosecuting Conflict Related Sexual Violence at the International Criminal Court, May 2009, SIPRI, http://books.sipri.org/files/insight/SIPRIInsight0901.pdf (accessed 26 January 2010).

Although this contribution is too limited in scope to examine all forms of justice, it is worth noting that the controversial Gacaca courts in Rwanda have been both praised and criticised for their method of transitional justice and focus on civilian perpetrations of genocidal crimes, including rape and sexual violence.

Women are significantly more likely to experience sexual violence by a stranger when displaced or seeking asylum, Refugee Council, Refugee and Asylum Seeking Women.

For examples, see National Sexual Violence Resource Centre, Global Perspectives on Sexual Violence: Findings from the World Report on Violence and Health, 2004, http://www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/Publications_NSVRC_Booklets_Global-perspectives-on-sexual-violence.pdf (accessed 2 February 2010); Medecins Sans Frontieres, The Crushing Burden of Rape: Sexual Violence in Darfur, 2005, http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/publications/reports/2005/sudan03.pdf (accessed 10 December 2009); and Medical Foundation, Justice Denied.

See the South Africa Medical Research Council, Stepping Stones, http://www.mrc.ac.za/gender/stepping.htm (accessed 2 February 2010), as an example of a preventative educational programme.