Miranda Alison, Debra Bergoffen, Pascale Bos, Louise du Toit, Regina

Mühlhäuser, Gaby Zipfel

"My plight is not unique"
Sexual violence in conflict zones: a roundtable discussion

What conceptions of gender underlie military policy towards sexual violence? Is the
specific form the violence takes determined by the type of warfare? To what extent
is sexual violence in wartime different to that in peacetime? And what does a closer
examination of homosexual violence add to our understanding? A roundtable
discussion organized by the Hamburg Institute of Social Research.

Gaby Zipfel: Empirical data from different theatres of war reveals that the
frequency and the forms of sexual violence vary. In some conflicts, sexual
violence is widespread, in others it is a fairly rare. Sexual violence can
increase, but also decline in the course of a conflict. In some cases, sexual
violence seems to represent an independent phenomenon; in others, it
constitutes one step in the development of military violence, which is usually
characterized by the triad "murder−plunder−rape". Sexual violence can be part
of a military strategy, but also the result of an escalation of violence or the
dissolution of limits to permissible conduct in a specific context. Military
leaders expect escalations of violence and the abandonment of norms that limit
accepted forms of violence. Strategic calculations can thus aim at promoting
sexual violence as a weapon in war, provided it is regarded as
combat−effective. At the same time, armed groups enforce effective sanctions
against their combatants, in order to ensure military discipline.

Does the occurrence or absence of sexual violence depend on military tactics?

Which conceptions of gender and violence underlie military policy towards
sexual violence? Is there a latent agreement that men have a natural, justifiable
access to bodies that are marked as female, regardless of the specificities of a
particular cultural−normative context?

Louise du Toit: War is a boys' game. War and the figure of the warrior are
closely entwined with hegemonic and hetero−normative masculinities. In her
book The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry makes us intensely aware of the extent
to which traditional and modern warfare take place on a symbolic plane −− the
extent to which they are imaginary constructs.1 The identity of the warrior,
soldier or freedom fighter is closely tied up with the image of the hero, who
challenges and risks, but also wields death for some supposed greater good.
The Italian feminist Adriana Cavarero sees the heroic risking of personal death
as a cornerstone of idealized masculinity in the West.

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 In material terms, of
course, armed
conflicts are often
about the expansion of
male−owned
power−bases,
including access to
land, minerals, and
other resources such as
oil. To my mind,
therefore, the very
notion of "war" needs
to be interrogated
before one looks at the
set of questions at hand. For gangs of youngsters on the Cape Flats, or gangs of
criminals in Johannesburg, one could say that, irrespective of the official status
of the country as a whole, their lives are characterized by perpetual warfare,
and indeed that is the language they themselves employ. The metaphor of war
dominates their lives and so crowds out other possibilities for them. South
Africa as a nation−state need not be at war with any other state for these young
men to inhabit, on a permanent basis, a parallel universe that constitutes a war
zone. Built into the rhetoric of war is the notion or value of survival, which
legitimizes conduct that would not be permissible otherwise. In other words,
war per definition entails an exceptional situation or period that calls for
exceptional sacrifices and exceptional conduct.

In the apartheid South African "border war" between Namibia and Angola, as
another example, the masculinized war and the exceptional sacrifices it
demanded from those young male soldiers were consistently contrasted with
the feminine world of "women, girl−friends, wives and children", who
remained "safely at home". These latter were seen as the vulnerable group, the
greater good for which exceptional deeds were needed, including all the usual
atrocities of ordinary warfare such as killing, torture, the destruction of villages
on the Angolan side of the border, and so on. In other words, the exceptions
that war allows for and creates are simultaneously deeds of self−sacrifice and
deeds of violence and cruelty; often, of course, these are complicated in real
life. War is thus seen as a situation of emergency and urgency: the means are
usually justified by the ends, whatever rhetoric is used to cloth those ends. In
my understanding, it is this exceptionality associated with the war situation
that leads to escalating levels of sexual violence. Since time immemorial,
women's sexualized bodies have been seen as part of the soldier's booty. It is
not very different today. The masculine project of war is overtly constructed
(whether rape is actively encouraged, or limited, or whatever), it usually has a
subtext about how that sacrifice entitles the hero/warrior/soldier to female
sexuality.

War even plays the role of initiating young men and boys into adulthood, and
mature masculinity is often culturally and religiously conflated with sexual
control of women. A vivid example of this is the way in which female ANC
"freedom fighters" or "comrades" were detained as sex slaves in camps around
southern Africa; this was their way of "contributing to the struggle". The
women who wanted to be part of this armed struggle had to accept men's terms
for entering "male territory", and clearly, part of this tacit agreement was
sexual availability. During the rape trial of Jacob Zuma, the current president
of the ANC, his struggle credentials were often quoted to support the idea that
he was entitled to women's bodies, and was thus in a weird sense "incapable"

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of being a rapist.

A final note on this theme: if one understands rape as I do as a means of

asserting control and of diminishing and thereby controlling women (and other
feminized categories of people), then the question as to when does sexual
violence becomes military weapon that is purposefully employed is in a sense
answered. In my understanding, sexual violence is always a means of control
and a political weapon that seeks to destroy the foundation of the victim's
sense of self and world, and, at the same time, to inflate or enhance the
perpetrator's sense of self and world. I would thus in a sense want to invert the
perspective by arguing that rape in "peace time" is an assault of the magnitude
of waging a war. Certainly in SA, rape rates have remained fairly constant
from the time of the near civil war in the 1970s and 1980s to today, fifteen
years into a democratic dispensation.

Debra Bergoffen: It
seems to me that rape
as a military strategy is
linked to the global
epidemic of violence
against women in
so−called peacetime;
and this it seems to me
needs to be understood
in terms of patriarchal
gender codes of
masculinity and
feminity. These codes
are lived in historically
and culturally specific
ways, but these specifics also share certain structural similarities −−
similarities that account for the power differentials between men and women in
societies that seem to have nothing in common. A common feature of these
gender codes is that they identify masculinity with strength and equate strength
with bodily power and the capacity for violence. Using these criteria of
strength, women are gendered as weak. Men and women are then related to
each other, coupled, through the category of protection. A man establishes his
masculinity, at least in part, through his ability to protect "his" women −−
through his ability to defend them against the violence of other men. This
coupling establishes women gendered as vulnerable to the violence of men −−
as potential victims who become real victims if there are no men to protect
them. This symbolic structure has material consequences. Civilian women's
bodies can be transformed into weapons of war, not because their bodies are
weaker than those of elderly men or young boys, but because raping them
strips "their" men of their masculinity −− their status as protectors of their
communities. Furthermore, so long as the reproductive powers of women's
bodies are controlled by the name of the father, the generative powers of
women can be stolen by enemy rapists. This was the meaning of the
Bosnian−Serb rapists taunt of Muslim women. They declared that the children
born of these rapes would be Bosnian Serbs.

In the debate about masculinity, some have argued that the violence embedded
in codes of masculinity is not that they equate masculinity with strength, but in
equating strength with violence and domination. They believe that we can end
the epidemic of violence against women if we teach boys that strong men
relate to women by honouring and respecting them, not by threatening them or

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dominating them. Others argue that recognizing rape as an illegal weapon of
war, that is as a violation of the proper use of masculine strength, will provide
the necessary sanctions. In both cases, the gendering of men as "strong" is not
seen as the problem. Rather, the problem is seen as a failure to distinguish
proper from improper understandings of masculine strength.

These two approaches to violence against women and wartime rape appeared
in two seemingly unrelated pages in the 15 June 2008 (US Father's Day) issue
of the Sunday New York Times: one a full−page ad by a group called
Founding Fathers, the other an editorial column by Nicolas D. Kristoff, entitled
"The Weapon of Rape". Both have the same objective −− to end the epidemic
of violence against women. Kristoff alerted us to a special UN Security
Council session scheduled for 19 June 2008 on sexual violence, which he
believed had the potential to move mass wartime rape "from an unmentionable
into a serious foreign policy issue". (It subsequently met and unanimously
passed a resolution doing this.)2 He holds international bodies responsible for
ending sexual violence. The Founding Fathers hold individuals responsible.
They ask us to dedicate ourselves to molding fathers of the future who will say
"no more" to sexual violence. These future fathers will not equate strength with
violence. They will respect and honour women. These two approaches to
sexual violence, one domestic, peacetime and individual, the other
international, wartime and collective, intersect in the 2001 judgment of the
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which held
individual Bosnian−Serb soldiers responsible for carrying out rape and sexual
slavery orders.3 The court assumed that individuals have the will and the moral
obligation to disobey illegal or immoral orders. The Founding Fathers assume
that the source of this will lies in the ways in which we construct masculine
identities. They argue that a concept of masculinity that entails honouring and
respecting women, and which refuses to equate strength with violence, will
stop the violence. The ICTY, moving along similar lines, argues that
honouring women entails an obligation to protect them.

I think these well−intended messages are problematic: identifying strength

with masculinity, and linking honouring women with the obligation to protect
them still genders women as weak −− as vulnerable −− as potential victims.
Honoured women will not necessarily be recognized as possessed of integrity
in their own right. Honour is a very slippery concept. It needs to be deserved.
In peacetime there are written and unwritten codes of conduct women need to
uphold (e.g. chastity in some cultures, not going out alone at night in others) in
order to be deserving of honour and worthy of having their honour protected.
In wartime, enemy women are neither recognized as deserving of honour nor
seen as candidates for protection.

GZ: The way in which war is waged is not a historical constant. Do certain
forms of warfare promote specific forms of sexual violence?

DB: Martin Shaw, in War and Genocide, distinguishes traditional wars of

previous centuries from the degenerate and genocidal wars of today.4 In
traditional wars the objective was to defeat the enemy. In genocidal wars the
objective is to destroy the enemy. This difference is crucial. In traditional wars
the enemy was the army of another state or governing body. Thus the
soldier−civilian distinction. Degenerate and genocidal wars know no such
distinction; here the enemy is the people. There are no protected innocents.
Recent data indicating that in today's wars it is safer to be a member of the
military than to be a civilian woman confirms this state of affairs. So far as I
know, sexual violence was not a weapon of war in traditional wars, and this

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may explain why wartime rape, identified as a war crime for centuries, was
rarely if ever prosecuted or taken seriously; for strictly speaking it was not a
part of war, not something that states or militaries had to take account of in
their war−waging or peace−making. Once degenerate wars become the norm,
things change. Terrorizing the enemy population becomes essential.
Furthermore, once wars become genocidal, terrorizing the enemy population is
not enough. Humiliation emerges as a tactic. Now sexual violence rises to the
status of a military and foreign policy issue; for sexual violence is an
extremely effective way of humiliating, demoralizing, and dehumanizing a
people −− of demonstrating that they are not worthy of existence. Torture and
murder terrorize a population. Rape humiliates it.

What distinguishes rape from torture and murder as a military strategy is that a
raped woman (but not a tortured man) is a humiliation to herself, her men, her
community. He is martyred. She is degraded. That a community is terrorized if
one its men is murdered or tortured, but humiliated if one of its women is
raped, has everything to do with gender identities. It reveals the ways in which
the Achilles heel of patriarchal social structures lies in its subordination of
women and its, sometimes but not always, camouflaged threat of violence
against women. The very existence of the Convention on the Elimination of all
forms of Discrimination Against Women, 1979 (CEDAW) is evidence of this.5
In wartime sexual violence, enemy men speak to each other through their
ability to violate each other's women. In traditional wars, where rape was
understood as an aberration (albeit legitimate) of the spoils of victory or as
accidental collateral damage, the critical role played by violence against
women, whether threatened or actual, was hidden. In genocidal wars, where
sexual violence cannot be called accidental or aberrant, the violence of
patriarchy cannot be veiled.

Miranda Alison: I would like to come back to the question about the strategic
implementation of sexual violence: In some situations of ethnic or
ethno−national conflict, sexual violence against the enemy sometimes seems to
be so widespread and so systematic that it is hard not to view this as a
deliberate military strategy. Indeed, there are particular cases where it does
seem clear that mass rape and other forms of sexual violence have been used
strategically −− for example in the formation of Bangladesh, the break−up of
Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda. It is not always clear, however, at
what level of military command sexual violence as a strategy originates from,
and proving it was a deliberate strategy is difficult. Sometimes, however, the
argument over whether or not the highest echelons of a particular military in a
particular war actually issued direct, deliberate orders to their subordinates to
carry out sexual violence against the enemy can be unproductive. If a climate
is created within a particular military, or in the context of a particular war, in
which sexual violence is encouraged or at least tolerated, if not actually
ordered, then the outcome remains the same for the victims.

Much work has been done demonstrating that connections between

masculinity and being a warrior have been and continue to be widely
cross−cultural, across time periods; that female aggressiveness tends to be
frowned upon; and that the training of soldiers in state militaries usually
involves misogyny and homophobia. There is an argument, then, that
militarized masculinity involves the mobilization of a particular form of
violent hegemonic masculinity which is likely to lead to sexual violence
against women. In wartime, perpetrating sexual violence −− at least against the
"enemy" −− becomes a more socially acceptable feature of (militarized)
masculinity. Lisa Price asserts that militarized nationalism, "does not simply

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allow men to be violent, but compels them so to be. In militarized societies [...]
men who resist violence are suspect. Not only is their loyalty to the state [or
nation] questioned, but also their loyalty to (heterosexual) masculinity."6

Up to a point I agree with this, but this does not explain the enormous variation
in occurrence, form, and violence of wartime sexual assault. This variation is
sometimes overlooked. Furthermore, there is perhaps an implicit presumption
here that all militaries are the same. They are not. Arguably, there is a high
degree of global similarity when it comes to the training of state militaries,
which may not be surprising when one considers how they have developed
(ex−colonial powers passing on institutional structures and training to their
newly independent ex−colonies; the global inter−connections between
different state militaries in terms of joint training exercises, weapons sales and
so forth). Nevertheless, not all state militaries exhibit exactly the same patterns
in terms of the levels and types of sexual violence they mete out.

When it comes to non−state "rebel" military groups, things are further

complicated; to speak of "the military" in universal terms becomes even more
fraught with problems. In some of these militaries, such as the Liberation
Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka, there is an explicit commitment to
women's equality and strong constraints on (and very low actual incidence of)
sexual violence. Not all military groups are exactly the same in their gender
constructs, their ideologies, their training, their treatment of female soldiers,
their relationships to "enemy" women and −− especially in cases of ethnic
conflict −− their relationships to their "own" civilian populations.

Just as militaries are not all the same, neither are all wars. I am wary of the
sometimes too−easy distinction drawn between "old wars" and "new wars" or
"traditional wars" and "contemporary wars". Nevertheless, although sexual
violence has been a feature of most wars we have records of (again, with
variations), it does seem that as wars began to be "privatized" from the second
half of the twentieth century, and hence began to affect more civilians and to
draw in more types of actors, blurring the old home front/war front boundary,
sexual violence does seem to have increased −− or at least to have taken on
new forms in terms of a greater strategic use. It also seems to be particularly
prevalent in ethnic conflicts, though it is by no means restricted to this type of
conflict, nor does it appear in every such conflict. Again, this variation needs
explaining.

GZ: Ethnic conflicts play a central role in contemporary wars. How do ethnic
and gender attributes intersect?

MA: In ethno−national conflicts, the intersection of gender with ethnicity is

particularly significant but this intersection is important in all wars. In wartime
the idea of indiscriminate sexual violence is extremely suspect (though
arguably this notion can be problematic in "peacetime" as well). In
contemporary armed conflicts, particularly though not exclusively
ethno−national, rape is intentionally committed by specific men against
specific women (and men) −− namely "enemy" women (and men) −− and
therefore cannot be seen as indiscriminate; even the Geneva Convention's
definition of "indiscriminate" attacks against civilians (those that are not
directed at a specific military objective) often no longer applies.

Admittedly sexual violence against "the enemy" is not the only type of sexual
violence to occur in wartime; there are often also cases of men raping members
of their "own" ethno−national group, their "own side" in the war. However

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these seem usually to be less frequent and much less likely to be systematic.
Sexual violence against one's "own" women seems most often to occur when
women are seen to be political traitors (refusing to go along with prevailing
ethnic chauvinism, for example), social traitors (in romantic relationships with
members of the "Other'), or are victims of the spillover violence that occurs
when a society becomes highly militarized.

One of the reasons that "enemy" women are particularly targeted for sexual
violence by militaries is because of women's −− perceived or actual −− vital
importance in constructing and maintaining the ethno−national group. Because
of women's role as biological reproducers of the collectivity, as reproducers of
the boundaries of the collectivity, as transmitters of its culture and as signifiers
of ethno−national difference, they are likely to be targeted in attempts to
destroy a collectivity or assert dominance over it. As Ruth Seifert puts it, the
female body is "a symbolic representation of the body politic" and rape of
women is "the symbolic rape of the body of [the] community".7 She has
demonstrated that wartime sexual violence functions as a form of
communication between men and a measure of victory and of masculinity,
with women's bodies the vehicle of communication, the site of battle and the
conquered territory.

Pascale Bos:
Regarding future
research, it may be
paramount to
distinguish those cases
of wartime rape and
mass rape that have a
component to them
that is informed by the
perpetrators' notions of
supposed
racial/ethnic/national
inferiority of the
(either female or male)
victim from those cases in which this does not seem to play a central role. I
thus argue that we should not consider wartime rape to be merely an extension
of "everyday rape". An explanation for wartime rape that accounts only for
male against female violence and which is ahistorical and non specific does
little to aid our understanding of what motivates and perpetuates the cycles of
wartime sexual violence.

Racial/ethnic/nationalist hatred aids in the dehumanizing of the enemy's army

and its civilian population and makes for an effective tool in warfare.
Furthermore, this hatred allows individual soldiers and military leadership to
lower their inhibitions about the use of potentially excessive or illegal force
and sexual violence, as one can find internal justification for it. For instance,
Lynda E. Boose writes on the war in Bosnia−Herzegovina: "When taken to the
extremes of collective cultural denial, the vision of the nation/self as involved
in an ongoing epic struggle to retain its heroic uniqueness −− inevitably
constructed around fantasies of racial purity −− is what allows people to reach
such euphoric heights of nationalist paranoia that it can imagine it necessary to
"ethnically cleanse" a land of its "others" when the others are, in reality,
ancestrally identical to the cleansers"8

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In general, one of the most complicated factors in an investigation of wartime
sexual violence is that dependable data is hard to come by. We have unreliable
data from the armies that are perpetrating this violence on both the level of
military leadership and of the individual military who may have engaged in
this violence (or witnessed it); there are obvious disadvantages to revealing
this information (both a fear of prosecution and the assumption that the home
front may disapprove of sexual violence, especially if it occurs as part of a
military strategy). We have the additional complication that violence of a
sexual nature tends to induce shame in its victims and/or in the victims'
families and communities, which results in a high degree of under−reporting of
this kind of crime. Many victims also fear that the crime will not be taken
seriously and prosecuted properly or at all, and in the case of a civil war may
fear retribution from the perpetrator, who may still be among the victim's
community.

Regina Mühlhäuser: Despite or rather because of this lack of sources, future

research should try to understand the varying forms of the phenomenon: the
different acts of sexual violence, the particular extent, the military calculations,
the ways in which sexual violence is treated after the end of a war, and so on.
Regarding state militaries, especially in western countries, there has been some
research lately, and we need to take a look at structural similarities, especially
if −− as Gaby suggested −− we want to evaluate the development of internal
justification. In western armies, part of the military training that prepares the
soldier for combat generally includes unleashing, as Ulrich Bröckling put it,
the "individual's potential for violence", yet at the same time requires that this
potential be kept under control.9 Consequently, the individual soldier is
targeted by a maximum of disciplinary techniques. The military as a total
institution punishes perceptible deviations more rigorously than other
institutions. In return for this required subjection, however, the army offers
compensation. As Jan Phillip Reemtsma put it, the order "You shall!" is
accompanied by the concession "You may!" Soldiers are not only disciplined
more rigorously than other people, they are also −− at least during wartime −−
free to take more liberties.10

In many wars, one of these "liberties" is the perpetration of male−to−female

sexual violence. Often, armed leaderships act on the assumption that this is a
quasi−natural consequence of male sexuality, i.e. the biologically necessary
result of male sexual urges. In addition, military commanders often asses
heterosexual satisfaction as beneficial to the war effort on several levels:
symbolically −− especially in combat situations, male virility was and still is
regarded as an expression of physical power and collective superiority.
Regarding the wellbeing of the individual −− during WWII, military doctors in
Germany as well as in Japan established that a man would be mentally and
physically strengthened by heterosexual encounters. Sexual satisfaction, thus
their line of reasoning, would help soldiers endure the hardships of the war and
contribute to an improvement of their military performance. Furthermore,
regarding war and occupation policies −− in various conflict zones, military
commanders count on the fact that an (almost) unlimited opportunity for (male
soldiers) to gain sexual satisfaction will bind the individual to the army and
strengthen the cohesion of military units.

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 While military
authorities clearly
appreciate these
"positive effects", they
also fear a number of
risks: the growing
inability to control the
individual soldier; the
spreading lack of
discipline; the erosion
of military units; the
resistance of the
enemy population; the
spread of sexually
transmitted diseases,
and so on. In general,
armed leaderships thus see a need to control sexual encounters −− sexual
violence as well as prostitution and consensual relations.

The measures armed groups implement in order to control sexual violence vary
at different stages of a war (invasion, occupation, retreat) and the tactics in
different situations and territories. Elisabeth Jean Wood has pointed out that
the implementation, interpretation and enforcement of these measures do not
represent a top−down affair, but are negotiated within and between different
levels of military hierarchy: the armed leadership, the small military units and
the individual soldier.11

The question as to when sexual violence becomes a purposefully employed

military weapon is difficult to address. For instance, we have to define
"purposeful": Does sexual violence represent a purposefully employed weapon
only when a military command orders the soldiers to rape? Or can we speak of
a purposefully employed weapon when small military units expect that certain
combat situations will involve sexual violence?

Susan Brownmiller wrote in 1975 that the German Wehrmacht and the
Schutzstaffel (SS) employed rape as a systematic weapon during the war and
the Holocaust. On the contrary, Birgit Beck and David Raub Snyder have
argued that rapes by Wehrmacht soldiers cannot be considered a military
strategy: first, because we do not know any document that ordered German
men to rape; and secondly, because the Wehrmacht laws defined sexual
violence as a crime against military discipline and "racial laws"; in some cases,
military judges did indeed sentence rapists to serve prison terms.12

However it seems premature to conclude that acts of sexual violence during the
German war of annihilation in the Soviet Union were especially scarce. If
nothing else, it would be to ignore innumerable testimonies of female and male
eyewitnesses, which indicate an immense extent of different forms of sexual
violence in every territory and at every stage of the war and the occupation.
There are, for instance, numerous cases in which members of the Wehrmacht
and the SS used coerced undressing or sexual torture during interrogations.
And while the Wehrmacht did devise measures to control and regulate
soldierly sexuality, these were only enforced in a very limited number of cases.
I would argue that exactly this lack of enforcement opened up spaces of
opportunity in which sexual violence became an accepted and normal part of
the everyday situation of war and combat. Ultimately, I would argue that
Brownmiller's descriptions of the systematic occurrence of sexual violence,

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despite the objections that might correctly be made, cannot be dismissed as
outdated.

GZ: In general, sexual violence is used as a term to describe crimes committed

by men against women. Up to now, the fact that male bodies not only have the
power to violate but are also vulnerable, and indeed regularly exposed to
sexual violence, has been a sort of a taboo. Does closer examination of sexual
violence against men change our general analysis of wartime sexual violence?

MA: Sexual violence

against men in
wartime −− as in
peacetime −− may be
more common than we
have realized or
acknowledged. This
sexual violence is also
both gendered and
ethnicized. Rather than
being perceived as a
homosexual −− and
thus less masculine −−
act, male to male rape
is often a highly
masculinized act for the perpetrator and his audience, asserting power and
masculinity, whilst the victim is feminized, reflecting the construction of
female sexuality as passive and male sexuality as active. In wartime, male to
male rape (as male to female rape) humiliates and feminizes the victim whilst
asserting the perpetrator's dominant (heterosexual, ethno−national)
masculinity. The ethno−national element means that symbolically, the victim's
national identity is also feminized and humiliated. Sexual violence is
"preferred", Inger Skjelsbaek suggests, because this type of violence "most
clearly communicates masculinization and feminization".13 Nevertheless,
indications from cases such as the former Yugoslavia suggest that although
sexual violence against men is prevalent in some cases (significantly, not in all
cases), it may more frequently take forms such as sexual mutilation, castration,
sexual humiliation, and forcing male prisoners to perform sexual acts upon
each other or upon women, often female family members −− rather than direct
male to male rape. This is something that requires much further empirical
investigation across cases and theoretical analysis. Is sexual violence against
men less likely to be part of a deliberate military strategy? Is it harder to "sell"
to soldiers? Or is it merely that the particular forms of sexual violence against
men that are encouraged will be different from those against women?

PB: Indeed, sexual violence is one more "tool" to be used in the denigration
and ultimate subjugation of one's enemy, regardless of whether that enemy is
male or female. There are, however, certain cultural factors that do contribute
to the far greater ratio of male on female than male on male rape. In some
cases it may be that the taboo against homosexual acts prevents many men
from violating other men as often as they do women. What this phenomenon
revels is the fact that while wartime rape is not primarily of a sexual nature, it
is still sexual and it is still connected to the perpetrator's "everyday" concept of
sexuality and sexual identity.

Generally, I hope than an examination of men as victims of sexual violence

will enable us to investigate more openly both perpetration and victimization

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of both sexes during wartime. By focusing exclusively on the victimization of
women, we seem to imply that women are always victims and only victims and
not participants in war. This in turn exonerates women of any responsibility,
yet it also denies them any agency they might have had.

RM: During the German war in the Soviet Union, for instance, we will find
hundreds of cases of coerced undressing of men and the inspection of their
penises in order to establish if they were circumcized (and could thus be
classified as a "Jew"). Some sources indicate that, occasionally, these acts were
accompanied by comments on the size of men's genitals. Furthermore, some
soldiers touched their victims with sticks or guns. If we do not limit our
research on sexual violence to acts of rape, but also document and analyse
these forms of violence −− violent undressing, enforced nakedness, sexual
torture or sexual blackmail −− we will understand much better the meaning of
sexual violence as part of combat as well as the gendering of war.

DB: When men sexually violate women they never risk their masculinity.
When a man sexually violates another man, however, he implicitly threatens
himself; for at some level he becomes aware of the fact that he too could be
raped, lose his masculinity, become a woman. The relative scarcity of this
crime may be due to the fact that even enemy men do not want to destabilize
each other's masculinity in this radical way.

Gender codes hide the fact that vulnerability is a shared human condition. All
violence is exploitation of our human situation −− our necessary
intersubjectivity, described by Simone de Beauvoir as our "shared
interdependence" and by Hannah Arendt as our "necessary plurality". This
intersubjectivity, interdependence and plurality, which constitutes us as
human, is lived as our bodied vulnerability. The ICTY judgment, when it
spoke of a woman's sexual integrity, opened the way for us to think of
embodied integrity as the other side of our lived vulnerability. Furthermore, in
speaking specifically of women's sexual integrity, it alerts us to the ways in
which we live our vulnerabilities differently and to the ways in which these
differences must be addressed. Gender codes matter. So long as they mystify
men as invulnerable, and burden women with the mark of vulnerability, we
will fall short of creating a world where, in recognizing our shared
vulnerability, we assume responsibility for recognizing each other's integrity.

GZ: To refuse the the attribution of the roles "violable woman" and "violating
man" also means involving the subjectivity and individuality of persons, and
enquiring after motives. How do these individuals integrate the perpetration of
sexual violence into their self−conception as gendered persons and military
actors? Does it make a difference if the act is committed by an individual
perpetrator or by a group?

PB: In terms of the psychology of the offenders, we know too little about what
causes individual men to move from generalized violence into sexual violence,
or to look at it a different way, what makes them cross the line from "normal"
consensual into "deviant" forced sexual behavior. One of the studies that I do
find useful as a springboard for such an investigation is "A Multifactorial
Model of Wartime Rape" by Henry, Ward, and Hirschberg, which analyzes the
individual, sociocultural, and situational context variables that seem to play a
role in facilitating wartime sexual violence.14

Much of what we think we know is based on inference and speculation; it is

extremely rare that researchers get to interview (former) perpetrators about

An article from www.eurozine.com 11/18

their acts. If the latter happens at all, it is usually in the context of a trial, where
it is likely that the perpetrators' explanations are laced with justification, rather
than offering useful insights into actual motivations.

RM: Testimonies of former Wehrmacht soldiers demonstrate that many men

thought they possessed discretionary power over "the women of the enemy".
They interpreted the military regulations in their interests and created scope for
themselves to pursue their sexual fantasies. Various eyewitness accounts
document that the searching of houses could be accompanied by sexual
violence against the female −− and sometimes male −− inhabitants: they were
coerced into undressing, forced to walk or bend naked in front of a group of
soldiers, they were examined voyeuristically, sometimes even photographed
and touched their sexual organs. Different military regulations did indeed
instruct the soldiers to bodysearch the inhabitants for firearms or secret
messages. However, these instructions did not include the touching of their
breasts, the squeezing of their nipples or other sexual violations. Stories like
this thus reveal that the men interpreted the regulations individually, according
to their own interests.15 In a situation in which the soldiers probably felt bored,
afraid and depressed, acts of verbal, voyeuristic and physical sexual assault
offered them a opportunity to affirm their own superiority and to ease their
emotional stress. The example shows that such acts were not only legitimized
by the institutionalized order "from above", but far more often produced in
everyday social practice.

The sudden brutality of many of these acts of sexual violence and the
escalation of group situations suggest that this could result in situations, in
which the men acted in a way that was probably unimaginable (or at least
unacknowledged) to most of the individuals before. We thus need to ask how
the individual actors treated these experiences afterwards.

In her considerations
of the intrinsic linkage
of National Socialist
crimes and sexuality,
Elisabeth D.
Heineman asked if
sexual satisfaction
eased the process of
killing during the
"Final Solution",
"either by helping
them [the perpetrators]
to dehumanize their
victims or by offering opportunities to release tension that might otherwise
have interfered with killing operations".16 From the historian's point of view, I
am not able to answer this question, but various sources do indeed raise the
question of a connection between sexual lust and a lust to kill. Heineman's
theory of the dehumanization of the victims, however, has to be differentiated.
The victims of these acts might rightly have felt dehumanized and still feel that
way until today. Indeed, it was one of the strategies of the perpetrators to
impose feelings of "unhumanness" upon their victims. Nevertheless, if we
want to understand the perpetrators and the phenomenon of sexual violence as
such, we have to confront ourselves with the fact that this form of sexual lust
−− to take possession, to conquer, to capture, to overpower and to destroy −−
is not unhuman and not out of the ordinary.

An article from www.eurozine.com 12/18

LdT: One tendency that I have picked up from my reading on gangster
violence, for instance, is that there was a clear desire on the side of the
perpetrators to "perform" their masculinity in front of "an audience". In such a
scenario, where the affirmation and enactment of an idealized masculinity was
the whole point of the rape, the body of the victim became a prop and the place
became a theatre for which the purpose was to demonstrate the enormous
power of the particular penis. The suffering and humiliation of the victim was
magnified because it presumably testified to the controlling power of the penis.

Many rapists also testify to feeling exhilarated, energized and affirmed

afterwards. Within this logic, presumably, the rapist grows stronger, bigger and
more masculine the more he succeeds in reducing a live woman or girl to a
passive, infantile, pleading being and sexual spectacle. Rape has often been
cited as a specific form of initiation of the young, new gang member. By
reducing female sexuality to spectacle that can be controlled through violence
and fear, the young boy finally and decisively breaks with his initial
dependence on his mother and symbolically erases his origin within her body.
From now on, through his risking of death and through his performative
destruction of female sexuality, he will be counted as a man. In this case, and it
would be interesting to see how often also within the context of war, rape plays
the role of shifting the young man's relation to female sexuality from one of
fear, awe and dependence, to one of control and appropriation.

MA: This is an area which I believe requires much greater investigation than it
has so far received. Part of the problem here may be the difficulties entailed in
real inter−disciplinary approaches to research, as well as problems accessing
perpetrators of wartime sexual violence. In my discipline, politics, the focus is
more likely to be on sexual violence as a weapon of war or a military strategy,
rather than on what makes individuals prepared to commit sexual violence in a
context of war. Probably there is research in psychology that we tend not to
have engaged with that does examine the motives of perpetrators; however the
problem, it seems to me, is that too narrow a focus on perpetrators may curtail
a deeper understanding of the structures within which perpetrators are
operating −− which does not mean I am proposing a stark structure−agency
dichotomy, of course. When we look at the scale of wartime sexual violence in
terms of numbers of perpetrators (as opposed to numbers of victims) there are
some cases where this is so widespread (Rwanda, former Yugoslavia, DRC,
Darfur etc.) that it is quite obvious that this cannot be explained with reference
to "deviant individuals" or to simplistic notions of war loosening moral
restraints. However even within the most widespread and virulent
manifestations of wartime sexual violence, and where there seems to be a
military strategy of sexual violence or at least no sanctions against it, there are
always cases to be found of men who refuse to commit sexual violence, even
under threat of severe physical sanction. How do we account for this in a way
that also explains why so many do not refuse?

Furthermore, it is no coincidence that so many acts of wartime sexual violence

are committed by groups of perpetrators −− gang rapes and so on −− rather
than lone individuals. It has been shown that gang rape performs a bonding
function for groups of men, cementing a sense of loyalty; those who might not
rape individually do rape collectively, in a group assertion of masculinity.
Joshua Goldstein suggests that raping as part of a group "may serve to relieve
individual men of responsibility".17 However I would also propose that part of
the reason gang−rape promotes group cohesion may be that it bonds men
together in complicity, in a shared awareness of responsibility, which makes
loyalty to the group vital. This does not seem to be restricted to military/war

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contexts −− the same applies to university fraternities and also to gangs, as
Louise has already pointed out.

It seems clear that

many men who have
committed acts of
wartime sexual
violence were aware
of the moral
unacceptability of their
actions. There is
evidence that at least
some of the
soldier−rapists in the
wars in the former
Yugoslavia possessed
a sense of guilt. Testimonies of internees and rape victim−survivors state that
some Serbian soldiers in the rape camps took sedatives or stimulants to enable
themselves, at least in the early days, to commit rape. Lisa S. Price reports that
many others sought resolve or escape in alcohol.18 Similarly, in Rwanda the
provision of alcohol to some of those committing the genocide was
necessary.19 Tragically for their victims, self−doubt and uncertainty about their
actions −− even, Price suggests, about their very identity −− produced distress
which may in turn have led to the men being even more violent in an effort to
reassert their hetero−masculinity, their nationalism, their loyalty.

GZ: A wartime society or an army in battely submits to different rules and

norms of behaviour as those that apply in peacetime. In keeping with this
perception, sexual violence is frequently seen as rampant in warfare while
generally condemned in peacetime. However, it remains to be asked to what
extent sexual violence in war and sexual violence in peacetime constitute
different phenomena −− in what ways do they affect each other? How can we
describe the processes that evolve under the conditions that prevail before the
outbreak of a war, during combat, and after the end of a war (with respect to
power, violence, and identity)?

LdT: I feel this is one of the crucial areas of investigation for the theme at
hand. It is important to note in the African context that the liberation struggles
were generally couched in nationalist and masculinist terms. Not only is this
very clear in the liberation rhetoric, but also in places such as African
philosophical texts (dating back to the 1940s) and in African literature, which
displayed a very strong masculinist bias right throughout the twentieth century.
This is not surprising, against the backdrop of colonial systems which
enhanced indigenous tendencies towards patriarchy (and repressed counter
forces such as female chiefs, queens, female deities and the like) and
articulated these with Victorian and other nineteenth century
Christian−European patriarchal worldviews. This historical situation led to a
masculinist−nationalist liberation discourse in which women were often
conflated with timeless (static) tradition, the home, sexuality, and thus with a
sphere outside of politics.

In South Africa in particular, women were either left out of the struggle
completely (maintaining the soldiers' homes), or they had to "become men" if
they wanted to participate. For many women, this latter option meant that they
had to make their sexual bodies available to the soldiers, literally serve the
liberation struggle sexually. History, liberation, war and politics (motion,

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mobility, action) were defined in monosexual, masculinist terms. If one views
the colonial state as one of semi−permanent occupation, then most African
states have been experiencing exceptional circumstances for the past 300−500
years, and although one cannot say that they were at war for so long, clearly
the stress placed on the indigenous communities translated into hyper−strained
gender relations. So much has become clear when African women became
educated and started to find their own voice, both politically and intellectually,
only during the past 20 to 30 years. This strain has also shown in the pervasive
presence of sexual violence and rape generally in the African conflicts. Not
only "enemy" women are raped −− often sexual violence against the "friendly"
women is tolerated on a large scale under the rationalizations: women's
"contribution" to the liberation effort; greater entitlements of freedom fighters;
the "punishment" of women who are too independent or who simply assert
their sexual autonomy; and (revolutionary) cultural claims to the effect that
true African men do not allow their sexuality to be controlled −− not by
women, not by Christian morality, and not by western law.

Not even our much−celebrated TRC process and our very progressive new
constitution, together with an official ANC policy of gender equality and
quotas for women in parliament, could make a dent in the war−levels of sexual
violence in our new democracy. One must also not lose from view the
horrendous statistic that currently about 40 per cent of rape victims are under
the age of 12, in other words young children. On 30 June 2008, the Minister of
Safety and Security of SA announced that child murders have gone up with 22
per cent during the past year −− now, a South African child is murdered every
6 hours, and these murders are usually accompanied by sexual violence. I don't
know how to make sense of this phenomenon. What is war? What is peace?

RM: In her autobiography Seed of Sarah, the Hungarian Jew Judith Magyar
Isaacson described that she constantly feared sexual violence. One day, a
commandant of the camp Lichtenau asked her to follow him: "The
Kommandant strode ahead in his stiff breeches and pounding boots.
Instinctively, I followed, my head cast down, my eyes on the graveled road. I
had a flash of recognition, as if I had followed a past master in such dumb
obedience. Do women inherit memories of rape? I recalled the myth of the
Sabine women and the tale of Hunor and Magor and their abducted mates, the
legendary ancestors of Huns and Magyars. 'My plight is not unique', I told
myself, 'I am caught in an ancient rite of sex and war.'"20

Isaacsons knowledge of the antic myth of the Sabine women and the
Hungarian tale of Hugor und Manor reflects the normalcy and pervasiveness of
sexual violence in wartime. In general, women were and often still are
socialized with the notion to await and endure acts of sexual violence.

Narratives of German soldiers also inform us about expectations of sexual

excesses even before the war had started. Autobiographies of German soldiers,
especially by those who were drafted as 15 or 16 year olds at the end of the
war, openly reflect their expectation that the war would be accompanied by
sexual experiences and adventures.

Such dominant (female and male) ideas and expectations about wartime
sexuality structure the experiences and narratives during the war. Furthermore,
these expectations, as well as the actual wartime experiences, shape postwar
societies.

An article from www.eurozine.com 15/18

MA: Anthropologists tend to claim that war is a part of every human society,
and therefore that it is not an exception or a break from "normal" life. They
may have a point, but my concern with this approach is that it can potentially
lead to a fatalistic attitude towards attempts to try and end wars (or to resolve
socio−political conflicts before they lead to wars). Although much of the
violence and other impacts or events of wars are in many ways intensified
continuations of violence and events that occur in non−war contexts, at the
same time wars do involve many people participating in acts they would not in
"peacetime". They also involve some people going to heroic lengths to avoid
or refuse participating in such acts. I accept the point of conflict resolution
theorists who argue that conflicts between people (and, by extension, between
groups of people) are inevitable and are a normal part of human society.
However this is not the same thing as saying armed, violent conflict (war) is
equally inevitable or "normal".

When it comes specifically to sexual violence in war, there is further

disagreement: is this an intensification of sexual violence that occurs in
"peacetime' or is it a separate phenomenon? My answer would be that it is not
quite either of these things. There are connections, but at the same time there
are some manifestations, patterns and rationales for wartime sexual violence
which do not apply to non−war contexts. It has been claimed that, "In wars
men only continue to do what they did before but in a more mindless and
indiscriminate way"21 and that "rape [...] happens during war for the same
reasons it happens during peace. It is a phenomenon rooted in inequality,
discrimination, male domination and aggression, misogyny and the entrenched
socialization of sexual myths."22 Brownmiller goes further, maintaining that,
"rape in war is a familiar act with a familiar excuse. [...] War provides men
with the perfect psychological backdrop to give vent to their contempt for
women."23 Brownmiller's early work on rape was highly significant in
demonstrating that we cannot seriously explain sexual violence in terms of
individual isolated acts by deviants, but must address, in Segal's words, "the
wider social context of the power of men".24 However, Brownmiller's (and
similar) arguments do not explain why particular men rape while others do not,
beyond the general idea that the power of all men over all women is secured by
the actions of the few. There are also, of course, the problems we discussed
earlier of specific categories of women being targeted, men being subject to
sexual violence, and women as perpetrators. Such generalizations are also
insupportable given that the extent of rape in different societies and at different
times varies significantly, as it does in different wars.

Although it is generally accepted that rape is influenced by socio−cultural

conditions, meaning that patterns of rape vary, within anthropological
literature there is a high degree of controversy over whether or not any
societies can truly be described as "rape−free' (generally smaller tribal and
pre−industrial societies), though there is more consensus that some societies
are "rape−prone' (including all modern western societies). While it is hard to
disagree that male−female power imbalances and gender structures are
fundamental to the incidence of rape and other sexual violence, and that there
are similarities between wartime and "peacetime" sexual violence,
explanations for the widespread, often systematic, orchestrated and targeted
occurrences of wartime sexual violence need to go beyond this.

LdT: This kind of phenomenon, where the symptoms of war as it were

continue into the transitional or post−war phase of the country, tends to blur
and question the supposedly clear−cut distinction between war and peace. As a
feminist, I would argue that women's reality differs from men's, and that "war'

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and "peace' are usually defined in a masculine world and through men's lenses.
Women's lived reality, of something like sexual violation, for example, may
trace a very different historical trajectory from this official masculine one.

Based on papers presented at the workshop "The pervasiveness of sexual

violence in wars", organized by the Arbeitskreis Krieg und Geschlecht
(Working group war and gender) at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research
on 11−13 July 2008, led by Birthe Kundrus, Regina Mühlhäuser and Gaby
Zipfel.

1 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain. The Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford 1985.
2 UN Resolution 1820, passed on 19.06.2008,
http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2008/sc9364.doc.htm.
3 Prosecutor v. Dragoljub Kunarac et al., Judgment, Case No. IT−96−23−T und
T−96−23/I−T, 22. Februar 2001, http://www.un.org/icty/foca/trialc2/judgement/index.htm.
4 Martin Shaw, War and Genocide, Cambridge 2003.
5 http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/cedaw/
6 Lisa S. Price, "Finding the Man in the Soldier−Rapist. Some Reflections on Comprehension
and Accountability", in: Women's Studies International Forum, 24 (2001), 2, S. 222.
7 Ruth Seifert, "Krieg und Vergewaltigung. Ansätze zu einer Analyse", in: Alexandra
Stiglmayer (Hrsg.), Massenvergewaltigung. Krieg gegen die Frauen, Frankfurt am Main
1993, 87−113, 101.
8 Lynda E. Boose, "Crossing the River Drina: Bosnian Rape Camps, Turkish Impalement and
Serb Cultural Memory", in: Signs. Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (2002) 1,
76.
9 Ulrich Bröckling, Disziplin. Soziologie und Geschichte militärischer Gehorsamsproduktion,
München 1997.
10 Jan Phillip Reemtsma, "Die Wiederkehr der Hobbesschen Frage. Dialektik der
Zivilisation", in: Mittelweg 36 3 (1995), 6, 47−56.
11 Elisabeth Jean Wood, "Sexuelle Gewalt im Krieg. Zum Verständnis unterschiedlicher
Formen", in: Insa Eschebach und Regina Mühlhäuser (eds.), Krieg und Geschlecht.
Sexuelle Gewalt im Krieg und Sex−Zwangsarbeit in NS−Konzentrationslagern, Berlin
2008, 75−102.
12 Birgit Beck, Wehrmacht und sexuelle Gewalt. Sexualverbrechen vor deutschen
Militärgerichten 1939−1945, Paderborn 2004, 72, 335. David Raub Snyder, Sex Crimes
under the Wehrmacht, Lincoln 2007, xi f.; 135 ff.
13 Inger Skjelsbaek, "Sexual Violence and War: Mapping Out a Complex Relationship", in:
European Journal of International Relations 7 (2001), 2, 227.
14 Nicola Henry, Tony Ward und Matt Hirshberg, "A multifactorial Model of Wartime Rape",
in: Aggression and Violent Behavior 9 (2004), 5; 535−562.
15 Alf Lüdtke, Eigen−Sinn. Fabrikalltag, Arbeitererfahrungen und Politik vom Kaiserreich
bis in den Faschismus, Hamburg 1993.
16 Elizabeth D. Heineman, "Sexuality and Nazism: The Doubly Unspeakable?", in: Journal of
the History of Sexuality 11 (2002), 1/2, 22−66, 55.
17 Joshua Goldstein, War and Gender. How Gender Shapes the War systems and Vice Versa,
Cambdrige 2001, 357−360.
18 Lisa S. Price, op. cit.
19 Adam Jones, "Gender and Genocide in Rwanda", in: Journal of Genocide Research, 4
(2002), 1.
20 Judith Magyar Isaacson, Seed of Sarah. Memoirs of a Survivor, Urbana und Chicago 1990,
90.
21 Vesna Nikolic−Ristanovic, "War and Violence against Women", in: J. Turpin and L. A.
Lorentzen (Hrsg.), The Gendered New World Order: Militarism, Development, and the
Environment, New York 1996, 196.
22 Tamara L. Tompkins, "Prosecuting Rape as a War Crime: Speaking the Unspeakable", in:
Notre Dame Law Review 70 (1995), 4, 850f.
23 Susan Brownmiller, Gegen unseren Willen. Vergewaltigung und Männerherrschaft,
Frankfurt am Main 1980, 38.

An article from www.eurozine.com 17/18

24 Lynne Segal, Slow Motion. Changing Masculinities, Changing Men, London 1990, 237.

Published 2009−09−02
Original in German
Contribution by Mittelweg 36
First published in Mittelweg 36 1/2009
© Miranda Alison, Debra Bergoffen, Pascale Bos, Regina Mühlhäuser, Louise du Toit,
Gaby Zipfel
© Mittelweg 36
© Eurozine

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