THE POLICY OF RAPE
By Sarah Fallavollita, Department of Political Studies, Queen’s University
Originally Published: 2 June 2018
Sexual violence is an abhorrent psychological and physical element of warfare that targets a population’s most vulnerable members. Though rape is certainly not reserved for conflicts rendered as genocide, this sort of violence is categorically at its most vicious under such circumstances. Rape as an act of genocide is perhaps the most grotesque occurrence of this abusive crime as it is conducted at an organized and systemic level. Genocidal rape is distinctly horrendous as it is rape as a policy of war, a strategic ploy to rape with the intent to kill, rape with the intent of causing ostracization, rape as a demoralizing spectacle made to degrade and humiliate and rape as a means to destroy a people.
The culture of violence and conflict for most women is one dominated by androcentric values; its patriarchal tenets continue to oppress women systemically as women are seen as a commodity and a tool for inflicting terror. The abuses that women face as a result of this cultural inferiority are grotesque and breach their human rights to security, dignity, and equality. In times of armed conflict, sexual abuse of women runs rampant and is used as a weapon of warfare. Sexual assault of women in combat zones and occupied territories occurs throughout the history of warfare, most widespread in cases of genocide or ethnic cleansing. Many wars produce rape, as the conflict becomes a fulcrum for masculinity through which men assert their dominance through violence. Rape has become a deliberate strategy of civil war and genocide in many regions and conflicts, used systemically as a means of political and economic violence, rather than just social and interpersonal.
In the context of the Rwandan genocide, sexual violence was seen on a massive scale. It was initially estimated that during the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi people by the Hutu in Rwanda, 250,000 women were raped and it was later divulged by Human Rights Watch that the number was closer to 500,000. The Rwandan genocide was an attempt by the Hutu people to ethnically cleanse Rwanda of the Tutsi. To further this goal, rape and sexual violence were used as supplementary tools aimed at destroying whole populations. Rape served as a way of stripping women of their economic and political assets. Women’s economic value resides first in their productive and reproductive labour force, and second in their possessions and access to valuables. By depriving women of these assets, they effectively eliminate the flow of resources to the enemy. With men at war, they depend on women’s productive forces to fuel the war effort and their reproductive forces to repopulate. Rape survivors are therefore stripped of their worth, as quoted by Turshen in Victors, Perpetrators, or Actors: Gender, Armed Conflict, and Political Violence, one victim stated that “I felt I wanted to die because I felt I wasn’t worth anything anymore”. In some African societies, women who have experienced rape are seen as dishonoured and are ostracised from society; often the only way of restoring honour is in killing the raped woman. Falling victim to rape can therefore make a woman unacceptable to society, thereby forcing her to fend for herself, and increasing the overall death toll of the genocide. Another desirable outcome of rape in genocide is to impregnate the victims, therefore again forcing them to be secluded from society and to bear children of ‘enemy’ ethnicity.
The widespread health concern of HIV/AIDS in Africa provides another tool of genocide to liquidate whole populations in Rwanda. Militias used HIV/AIDS as a way to terminate the Tutsi population through raping women. By spreading the HIV/AIDS virus the Hutu men were condemning Tutsi women to an eventual death. As quoted by Christopher Mullins in his article “ “He would kill me with his penis”: Genocidal Rape in Rwanda as a State Crime”, one victim recounted being told that, “we are not killing you. We are giving you something worse. You will die a slow death”. Another victim described an account with a Hutu soldier where “he said he wasn’t going to waste a bullet… he said he was going to kill me with his penis”.
Sexual violence against women in times of armed conflict is above all a method of generating terror and preying on vulnerable populations. No woman was spared, from women as young as four years old to elderly women, all ages were subjected to sexual violence. The violence that occurred was as psychologically traumatizing as it was physical. Women were tortured in the most perverse methods. Some women were raped by up to ten men, others were forced to watch friends and family raped under the threat of death, one instance recorded a sixteen-year-old boy being forced to rape his own mother. Another common practice was referred to as fistula, which denotes the forcing of a foreign object like a firearm or tree branch into the vaginal canal after being raped. This practice caused considerable damage to female genitals, often rendering them sterile or causing long-term physical issues. Some soldiers would insert hot plastic into women’s vaginas ensuring that their genitals sealed over altogether.
In 1991 during the Bosnian crisis, the now infamous “Brana Plan” was implemented. Though it does not explicitly use the word “rape”, multiple humanitarian organizations have corroborated that a policy of rape was implemented which encouraged the intentional perpetration of sexual abuse as a tactic of war. It is estimated that, over the course of the Bosnian conflict, 50,000 women were victims of sexual violence. Many of these women were subjected to such horrors as gang rape, torture and sexual enslavement. The Serbian government and military troops organized rape camps as a systemic method of creating an ethnically pure nation.
The abuse of women during armed conflict and the utilization of rape as a conduit for genocide are not unique to the Rwandan or Bosnian context, and other regions have experienced similar accounts of this horror with the numbers of victims staggeringly high. The subordination of women in times of conflict is seen as an extension of power relations between the sexes in general and it reflects the patriarchal structures of wartime society in which the female body is property controlled by men. In order to combat this issue I believe that nations should continue to promote the increasing presence of women amongst their military ranks, and perpetrators of these acts should be more consistently tried for their crimes against humanity.
