The idea for working collaboratively on Conflict-Related Sexual Violence evolved from our success with a special issue of Wagadu, Journal of Transnational Women's and Gender Studies entitled
“Sexual Violence and Armed Conflict: Gender, Society, and the State” (Volume
10, Spring 2012, available online. As we worked together, the
intimate intersections between anthropology and the law with respect to
conflict-related sexual violence became evermore apparent. We were not the
first to discover this connection between anthropology and the law, as our
application of theory follows in the path pioneered by anthropologist Sally
Engle Merry. Tonia’s experience as a legal practitioner and lobbyist during the
US rape law reform movement in the 1990’s and Susan’s experience in the field
in the former Yugoslavia in 2006 gives the text an applied emphasis and seeks
to provide concrete recommendations for addressing the systemic nature of
conflict-related sexual violence.
We
edited the book with the understanding that many readers might find it
overwhelming and difficult understanding conflict-related sexual violence’s
globally pervasive and enduring nature. As
an editor, anthropologist Susan Dewey ensured the articles selected were
infused with cultural analysis to help readers grasp the force of war rape
narratives as well as the particularities of individuals’ lived experiences. Chapters
cover a wide variety of countries where war and sexual violence have converged,
including Sierra Leone, Liberia, Haiti, Afghanistan, South Africa, and Colombia.
It is through survivors’ stories in these case studies that we uncover some of
the many reasons for the globally pervasive and enduring nature of conflict-related
sexual violence.
In
thinking about reasons for conflict-related sexual violence’s pervasive nature,
we were forced to ask ourselves why this is the case? Women’s universally
marginalized status is one of the common threads running through examples
provided in the book. Throughout the world (including the United States), women
are much less likely than men to play active decision-making roles in
governance and policy-making, and still earn less (or have less stable jobs)
than their male counterparts. In situations of conflict-related instability,
this situation only worsens, rendering women particularly vulnerable to
violence as non-combatants. This is compounded by the reality that women’s and
girls’ sexualities constitute a point of tension throughout the world; in fact,
one of the arguments against women filling active combat roles in the US
military is that they face a higher likelihood of being raped by enemy forces
as a means to humiliate their male co-combatants. Indeed, in almost every
instance documented in our book, conflict-related sexual violence has a unique
power to destroy social institutions, families, and communities, through shame
and stigma. Because of the punishing violence involved, responses to wartime
sexual violence reveal much about the dynamics of gender-based violence during
peacetime. Since most nations participate in worldwide organizations tasked
with managing violations of international humanitarian law, local responses to
these crimes also expose gender inequality in the recourses available to, and
community support of, survivors of conflict-related sexual violence.
Our
volume focuses on three key areas of analysis with respect to conflict-related
sexual violence: the rhetoric and discourses used to describe it, international
criminal justice reactions, and the post-conflict reprecussions. We wanted to capture the complexity and depth
of this topic without giving way to sensationalism. As much as we appreciate
increased newspaper coverage of conflict-related sexual violence, photographs
of sexual and gender-based violence survivors from combat zones throughout the
world have now become standard fodder in North American and Western European
news media. In fact, our book opens with descriptions of such images of women
shielding their faces in pain, or in expressions of shame. We know that sexual
violence is- as one of our volume’s contributors observes- nothing new, and yet
such sensationalized images and language does a real disservice to the issue.
When, for example, elements of the news media refer to the DRC as “the rape
capital of the world,” there is an element of Other-ing that diminishes the
complex ways in which survivors make sense of their trauma and begin to forge
new lives for themselves and their families. We chose these three themes as a
way to understand the totality of experiences that surrounds international
responses to conflict-related sexual violence, which is necessarily a very
local and personal experience. Hence the early chapters, by Bronwyn Winter and
Laura Sparling, examine the language used by the international community to
describe conflict-related sexual violence; doing so provides insight into these
underlying ideologies. Later chapters by
Avory Faucette, Kiran Grewal, Peace Medie, and Benedetta Faedi Duramy,
triangulate survivors’ experiences with local and international criminal
justice systems to examine the disconnects that can occur between intention and
effect. The final chapters, by Carol Mann, Evalina van Wijk, Jose Miguel Nieto
Olivar and Carlos Ivan Pacheco Sanchez, document the post-conflict paths taken
by survivors and their families.
The
introduction of the book provides an overview of international law as it
applies to conflict-related sexual violence, which had its nascence in the
post-WWII Geneva Conventions (1949) and Nuremburg Trials, and more recently the
criminal tribunals of the former Yugoslavian war (1991-95) and Rwandan Genocide
(1994) that led to the Rome Statue (1998) and the creation of the International
Criminal Court (ICC). Part two of the text examines how far the international
community has come in responding to conflict-related sexual violence. Here the
theme is not the creation of laws to prosecute war rape instead Faucette,
Grewal, Medie, and Faedi Duramy analyze how effective the advancements in legal
advocacy and health services have come to aid survivors and their families.
Despite progress made in responding to conflict-related sexual violence, these
chapters demonstrate that the international community still has a considerable
way to go in combating this global issue. The law is only as good as those who
enforce it, including both legal professionals and members of the local
communities where survivors live.
The authors in this text share insights into the key areas in
which the international community could better respond to sexual violence in
conflict and post-conflict zones and involve analysis of legal, medical, and
mental health systems. In terms of international humanitarian law, the Akayesu
case in Rwanda (The Prosecutor v. Jean
Paul Akayesu, 1998, ICTR-96-4-T), the Foča rape camp trials from the
former Yugoslavia (Kunarac et al., 2001, IT-96-23 & 23/1) and the Rome
Statute that establishes the crimes and procedure for the ICC are the watershed
events impacting legal responses. Here
we see many of the same themes that were developed during the rape law reform
movement in the US that began in the 1970s coming to forefront of international
criminal practice around wartime rape. The goals converge into: (1) a
pro-prosecution approach that encouraged survivors to report rape and to
co-operate with criminal justice officials in prosecuting offenders; (2) legal treatment
of rape as a crime like any other, specifically by shifting the focus from the
behavior or reputation of the survivor to the unlawful acts of the offender. On
the international level this was accomplished by redefining rape and consent,
by making rape (and other forms of sexual violence) an individual crime, and
explicitly defining rape as both a war crime and a crime against humanity.
Accordingly, the ICC incorporates a number
of mechanisms to support the rights of victims of sexual violence. The ICC has
the authority to determine the extent of the victims’ damages as well as the
power to give reparations directly to the victims. The ability to make
reparations to victims is critical because it provides victims (often members
of marginalized groups) equal rights relative to other citizens and seeks to
facilitate their trust in the court and state institutions. Additionally, the ICC provides a Victim and
Witnesses Unit staffed by professionals with expertise in trauma, especially trauma
related to sexual violence and a Gender and Child Unit which assists the
prosecutor in dealing with issues surrounding victims and witnesses of sexual
crime. Finally, ICC Statute provides that the court will take appropriate measures
to protect the safety and physical well being of the victims and considers
their views and concerns at different stages of the proceedings. In short, the ICC
has realized that mechanisms to protect survivors’ rights are crucial to
establishing the truth about these serious crimes. It wis hoped that ultimately
these reforms will lead to an increase in the number of rape cases which are
reported and would make arrest, prosecution, and conviction for more likely.
However, our volume indicates that such reforms have been less than ideal in
their results.
Consequently,
our volume presents an interesting, albeit cautionary, argument about the
incorporation of legal and policy-related “best practices,” developed in the
context of the North American and Western European feminist and rape law reform
movements. The authors use different approaches to ask a similar question: what
are some of the potential problems with importing these “best practices” as
global solutions to local problems? Work presented in the volume examines best
practices from the legal, medical, and mental health fields, while intertwining
threads of the current vigorous debate on how best to aid survivors of
conflict-related sexual violence.
Our
volume builds upon feminist scholarship, jurisprudence, and activism that made
significant contributions to contemporary international legal discourse and
practice. Yet feminist scholars continue to debate the nature of the North
American and Western European rape law reform movement’s influence of on the
Rome Statute. Our book problematizes the relatively recent emergence of
concretized “best practices,” which we define as a method or technique believed
to produce superior results. This policy, despite its good intentions, recommends
global solutions for what are inevitably local problems frequently couched in
human rights discourses presumed universally relevant, these concepts are
almost exclusively originated and disseminated by individuals in a privileged
position vis-à-vis the intended beneficiaries. Such broad overviews obscure the
local realities of girls’ and women’s experiences in conflict zones by
proposing universal solutions that ignore the particularities of culture and
place.
Such
unsuccessful attempts at formulating best practices have considerable precedent
in the United States, where feminist legal scholarship
has begun to challenge the pro-prosecution approach by pointing to the failure
of these reforms. Nonetheless, this prosecution-oriented approach remains popular among the populace, prosecutors, and
jurists involved. The efficacy of these reforms continues to hold sway and
younger generations of lawyers receive little alternative to the hegemonic “end
the impunity” model presented by criminal prosecution and recreate it with
little room to question or challenge. Therefore,
chapters in our volume highlight how the purported benefits of criminalization
are even more destructive in the international criminal prosecution arena because
cultural beliefs about gender, sexuality, and violence are as varied as the
countries where conflicts originate, this is due to the reality that such
approaches may be inappropriate in conflict zones, where sexual violence is
often not interpersonal but systemic and widespread among the civilian
population. Exporting flawed solutions from the U.S. criminal justice system raises
serious ethical and human rights concerns regarding colonialism and
conflict-related sexual violence, a great deal of which takes place in
communities outside the North American ideological purview. We address this
issue further in our forthcoming article in “Between Global Fears and Local
Bodies: Toward a Transnational Feminist Analysis of Conflict-Related Sexual
Violence,” which will appear in volume 13, number 3 of the Journal of International Women’s Studies.
There
are numerous references to transnational feminism throughout the book that help
the reader to understand conflict-related sexual violence in novel ways. Transnationalism
is a social phenomenon and scholarly research agenda that emerged from the
heightened interconnectivity between people and the receding economic and
social significance of boundaries among nation states. Proponents of
transnationalism seek to facilitate the flow of people, ideas, and goods among
regions. It is different from internationalism, which advocates a greater
economic and political cooperation among nations for the theoretical benefit of
all, such as the United Nations. Economic transnationalism, commonly known as globalization,
was impelled by the development of the internet and wireless communication
causing corporations to organize their operations in the most efficient means
possible irrespective of political boundaries, contending that it does not make
sense to link specific nation-state boundaries with migratory workforces, globalized
corporations, global money flow, global information flow, and global scientific
cooperation. Transnational Feminism is generally a critique that is attentive
to intersections among nationhood, race, gender, sexuality, and economic
exploitation on a world scale in the context of emergent global capitalism and
imperialism; their connections to colonialism and nationalism; and the role of
gender, the state, race, class, and sexuality in the organization of resistance
to hegemonies in the making and unmaking of nation and nation-state. It seeks
to lay the groundwork for more productive and equitable social relations among
women and men across borders and cultural contexts.
There
are some rather bleak findings presented in some of the chapters. Authors
describe UN peacekeepers abusing women, note discriminatory tendencies in
international law, and the systematic use of rape as a tool of terror and
genocide such that some readers might conclude that international humanitarian
law has failed survivors of conflict related sexual violence. Readers who are seeking to draw a “black or
white” conclusion will be disappointed in this text. Clearly we would not have
written the book if it were not for the groundbreaking work of feminist
jurists, practitioners, scholars, and activists involved in the criminal
tribunals in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Their work defined rape as a war
crime for the first time in history and this is an achievement in international
humanitarian law equivalent to that which Roe
v. Wade made in US law. However as scholars, we separate our understanding
of the sacrifices these women made to produce these reforms from a rational
analysis of how efficacious they have been in practice. On the former there is much to celebrate in
terms of advancement, on the latter much work needs to be done. The articles in
the text work to identify what is failing and point to ways to improve legal,
medical, and mental health responses to those afflicted by conflicted related
sexual violence.
Several
chapter authors make mention of the reality that rape happens in peacetime as
well. The chapters on Haiti and South Africa, countries that have experienced
considerable levels of sociopolitical upheaval, illustrate this particularly
well. We included these to illustrate why it is useful to distinguish
conflict-related sexual violence from rape that occurs in societies that are
not at war. The issue of gender justice for wartime sexual violence under law has
developed within the larger theoretical feminist framework about gender
inequity in other institutions like economics, religion, education, and the
like. As a result, some contemporary
feminist theorists argue that pre-existing conditions of gender socialization,
inequality, body objectification, and eroticism of violence evoke sexualized
violence during peace and help explain the rise of rape as a tool during war.
The articles in this text generally make this connection. The role of media, academic, and political
context in giving the relatively unspoken rape stories of women in both peace
and wartime more exposure has had a powerful impact connecting the two.
Although rape occurs in almost every society in peacetime, rape that occurs in
the context of a war has distinct features, consequences, and implications for
interventions. This raises one of the fundamental questions of the text: how
can laws designed to prosecute the rape of one woman, usually by one man in the
in socioeconomic context of North America be effective models for justice in
conflict zones where rape is widespread, systematic, even normalized?
In
sum, Conflict-Related Sexual Violence examines systems of law, medicine, and mental health to explore
how “best practices” have become the conduit for exporting ideas about gender
justice for wartime sexual violence. It exposes various sights of tension
between ICC prosecutors and scholars of feminist jurisprudence, between the UN
and NGOs seeking to help survivors, between the survivors and their
communities, and beyond. The discussion
of such conflicts reveals the cracks and fissures where new ideas can take
shape and inclusive solutions can be created. As such, the chapters in the book
collectively advocate for the incorporation of transnational feminist practices
into international humanitarian law and provide some guideposts for how this
might look in practice. Conclusions presented acknowledge the limitations of a
binary, prosecution-intensive approach to ending conflict-related sexual
violence by juxtaposing these against a focus on respecting local meanings of
justice. They examine how women are often a doubly oppressed population- that
is, disadvantaged by both their local cultural norms and the international
legal framework in its current form, and how this reality makes it difficult to
create community-based models of accountability in which perpetrators will be
brought to justice, whatever that means in a particular cultural context. We
believe that feminist scholarship is in a place to move international human
rights policy and international criminal law in a new direction both
methodologically and substantively. However, the first step involves a clear
acknowledgment that we have a very long way to go toward actively including
women in processes of restorative justice.
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