MULT10018 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Red Army, Mass Media, Serbian Orthodox Church
19 Jun 2018
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Lecture 7: Wartime rape (1)
March 20th, 2018
Wartime history has shown that the female body in particular has been treated
in many ways as an extension of the battlefield, a place on which the victories and
the defeats of warring parties have been forced. Rape, as a military tool, is a clear
illustration of this and it is certainly proven to be very effective and very efficient.
Because, as a social constructionalist would argue, to rape the woman, as the wife
of the enemy, is to damage the property that is her husband male’s given
responsibility to defend; to attack a woman as mother is to harm the one whose role
it is to physically bear the next generation of sons who will fight and of daughters
who will care for the nation; and to assault a woman as daughter is to injure the very
symbol of the enemy’s national culture and tradition. Rape isn’t necessarily just
about the physical act, it’s about the attack on social figures that women hold. But to
fully understand these concepts, we need to look outside the narrow frame of war.
Rape in conflict is unfortunately not an elaboration. It’s not a result of the sudden
breakdown of law and order the rise of social unrest and chaos. The roots of wartime
rape instead are already well established before the first gunshot is fired.
Rape draws on commonplace meanings of gender and sexuality in peacetime
(Refer back to social construction of femininity -- commonplace ideas of women’s
gender and women’s femininity). To appreciate this and to understand the very
specific character of rape as it’s been used in particular conflicts around the world,
we need to examine the social, cultural, historical and political norms that give rise to
this form of violence in war.
“Rape in wartime is more than a symptom of war and its evidence of excess. Rape
in war is a familiar act with a familiar excuse.” – Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will:
Men, Women and Rape.
How the patterns of everyday power and domination in times of peace are
manipulated during war for the human body to become an extension of the
battlefield. So, we’ll look at things like concepts of gender, shame, sexuality and
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reproduction that are attached to the individual body in peace time and how these
become symbols for mass domination and control during times of conflict. This first
lecture will focus on basics of wartime rape, generalized over various conflicts and
particularly in our case study region of Bosnia-Herzegovina. This is the framework
for the discussion of the ‘who, what, where, when, why and how’ of the story.
Overview of how wartime rape has been considered throughout history:
-Rape and sexual violence are as old as war itself. This form of violence has
characterized every contemporary and age and conflict throughout history:
Thousands of women faced assault by knights and pilgrims on the
march to Constantinople during the first crusade.
French soldiers were responsible for the rape of English women during
the hundred years war during the 15th century.
During the first and second world wars, countless number of women
were raped in concentration camps, military brothels, and inoccupied
areas. (The rape of 130,000 German women by Soviet troops at the close
of World War II; the sexual enslavement of 200,000 ‘comfort women’
during the Asia-Pacific War from 1941-1945).
-In the latter parts of the 20th century, rape has been no less ubiquitous:
The rape of Bengali women during the 9-month conflict in Bangladesh
in 1971 (Bangladesh Liberation War) created a national crisis, when
thousands of women became pregnant and their husbands rejected their
wives.
Sexual violence also forms a very well-remembered part of the
Vietnam war due to the rapes committed by American soldiers against
civilian Vietnamese women.
Likewise, during the 1980s, conflict in New Ganda. Women once again
suffered the effects of impunity and silence due to the widespread forms of
sexual violence.
The rape of 250-500,000 Tutsi women by the Interahamwe, the Hutu
paramilitary organisation, during the Rwandan genocide in 1994
1998 conflict in Kosovo
1999 Timorese war of independence
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Patterns of rape and sexual enslavement were also rived in the conflict
of Liberia, Haiti and Iraq
Despite its existence in all conflicts, however, the urge to rape until very recently has
primarily been considered a regrettable, but an unavoidable consequence of war. It
has been overlooked in history, in law and in scholarship as the private and
opportunist practice of a few renegade soldiers, or as a reward for military service
and an unfortunate reaction to the constant threat of violence, as sort of life flag
formation in the face of death.
Up until the past two decades or so, wartime rape has largely been conceptualized in
three main ways:
(I) Rape as an expression of victory: Rape by a conquering soldier who
destroys all remaining illusions of power and property for men of the
defeated side (key example: Nanking. This refers to the mass murder and
war rape occurred over a 6-week period following the Japanese capture of
the city of Nanking in China on December 13th, 1937 during the 2nd
Japanese war. The judgment issued by the Tokyo trials at the end of this
war cited at least 20,000 cases of rape during the first month of occupation
alone. Diary entries submitted to the trial from an American missionary
who was present both during and after the invasion and the occupation
points to the rationale behind this kind of violence:
‘December 19th, 1937: It has been just over one week now since the
collapse of the Chinese army in its Nanking defence ... It is a horrible story
to try to relate; I know not where to begin nor to end. Never have I heard
or read of such brutality. Rape! Rape! Rape! We estimate at least 1,000
cases a night, and many by day. In case of resistance or anything like
disapproval, there is a bayonet stab or a bullet.’)
(II) Rape as a means of retaliation and vengeance: A fairly notorious
example here is of course the rape of German women by Soviet troops at
the end of WW2, for which the estimates range between 10 of thousands
of victims to 2 million. When power shifted in the latter stages of the
second WW and Western ally troops and the Soviet Red army entered an
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