Sexual Abuse as a Crime against Humanity and the Right To Privacy

Abstract

Over the last three decades, rape and sexual abuse of women as repressive practices during war and dictatorial regimes are gradually being recognized as specific forms of human rights violations. Increasingly they come to be considered as crimes against humanity within the international regime of human rights law. In Argentina, although the existence of such crimes has been known since the nineteen eighties, only now is testimony in trials against repressors being taken as evidence for specific rape-based convictions. Under these circumstances, the women involved face a personal and political dilemma, between the urge to talk and the right to intimacy and silence. The political and moral character of rape emerges jointly under these circumstances, posing a paradoxical situation.

Notes

1 As far as this image is concerned, what stands out for me is the hermaphroditism of the “Fatherland” (patria).

2 This section is based on various international documents, and especially on the collection and analysis by Viseur-Sellers, 2009.

3 The most often-quoted cases are those by Raquel Martí de Mejía vs. Peru and Penal Miguel Castro vs. Peru.

4 Of the 17,000 testimonies, the number of reported rape cases was relatively low: only 538. Eighty-three per cent of the violations were perpetrated by the Armed Forces.

5 This integration of women's experience is more evident in in-depth ethnographic studies rather than in hearings of commissions and trials. Theidon shows cases in which acts of rape implied an attempt by the women involved to protect their relatives (Theidon 2007).

6 “If the concentration camp experience is an extreme case of all human experience, testimonials are no less so.… The requirement to talk about humiliating memories and the difficulty to do so can easily create a feeling of obligation to testify, but also of having to justify oneself in relation to the evoked facts and, as a result, to feel oneself not a witness but accused” (Pollak 1990: 186).

7 Faced with the Commission of Truth in Peru that insisted that “talking is good”, many Andean women felt that talking was dangerous and that words can often function as weapons. Silence was powerful and protected them (Theidon 2007).