Children Born of Wartime Rape: Rights and Representations

Abstract

The ongoing conflict in Darfur has once again served to highlight the threat of sexual violence that women face during times of war. Yet, although sexual violence in wartime has existed probably for as long as war itself, it is only in more recent times that its recognition as a crime under international humanitarian law has taken place. Moreover, although it is recognized that women may conceive as a result of such wartime rape, largely missing from the international rights framework, and from the discourse that surrounds it, is a consideration of the children – or ‘war babies’ – who are born as a result. This article places the focus upon ‘war babies’ by considering the reasons for their current marginalization as a category in international discourse. In addition to examining such marginalization within existing theoretical analyses, this article also analyses the potential for their incorporation within the wider rights framework: first, in terms of international legal practice and; second, in terms of the actions of civil society. The final section concludes.

Keywords:

• children
• feminism
• rape
• war
• women

Acknowledgement

An earlier version of this article was presented at a workshop entitled ‘“War Babies”: Theorizing Children Born of Wartime Rape and Sexual Exploitation’, held at the University of Pittsburgh in November 2004. The author would like to thank the participants at that workshop for their comments made at that time. The author would also like to thank Charli Carpenter for further subsequent comments, as well as Siobhan McEvoy-Levy, Oliver Richmond and Chandra Sriram for their input at various stages of the writing process. The author would also like to thank the editorial team and two anonymous referees for their very useful reports. All errors remain the author's own.

Notes

1. See http://www.un.org/ictr/english/singledocs/jpa_summary.html. Having made its factual findings, the Chamber analysed the legal definitions proposed by the Prosecutor. Rape was defined as a form of aggression whose central elements cannot be encapsulated just by describing objects and body parts. It also noted the cultural issues that surround the crime of rape.

2. See, for example, the extensive work carried out by Charli Carpenter in this area.

3. Indeed, describing children as a category is of course, in itself, problematic. As Holloway and Valentine have noted children's sense of identity is affected by their class, race and gender roles, in the same way class, race and gender are cross-cut by adult identities (Holloway and Valentine 2002).

4. See Marianne Hirsch's discussion of Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex, (Hirsch 1997: 355).

5. The phrase ‘women-and-children’ was probably first used within the feminist literature by Cynthia Enloe (see Enloe 1990, 1991).

6. Though this is not of course to say that the mothers of such children did not face similar stigma for ‘consorting with the enemy’.

7. Resolution 1593, for example, fulfils the recommendation of the UN Commission of Inquiry established by the Security Council in resolution 1564 that the situation in Darfur should be referred to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), representing the first step in ending impunity for the crimes committed in Darfur and elsewhere in Sudan.

8. See the following weblinks for further information on these organizations: Human Rights Watch (www.hrw.org); Amnesty International (www.amnesty.org); International Labour Organization (www.ilo.org); Save the Children (www.savethechildren.org); War Child (www.warchild.org); Euronet (www.europeanchildrensnetwork.org); Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers (www.child-soldiers.org).

9. See www.msf.org

10. See www.savethechildren.org/emergencies/emergency_child_exploitation.asp. Save the Children here says much about gender-based violence but little on the babies resulting from rape and forced pregnancy.