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IRCT’s research from the Bosnian war (Arcel et al.1995, 1998) shows that war-rape
is an expression of many elements. Motives are: expulsion of the civilian population,
trans-generational revenge and punishment for atrocities committed in earlier
conflicts between the two groups, misogyny, genocide mentality (wishes to
extinguish the enemy from the face of the earth) and feelings of nationalistic
superiority.
The undermining of the enemy’s familial, social and national bonds by humiliating
females, by creating life-time scars in women’s bodies and minds and by socially
stigmatizing the enemy, comprises psychological warfare. In a patriarchal society
each rape symbolizes defeat and the impotence of enemy men in protecting their
women. Rape of the enemy’s women symbolizes rape of his territory and his total
defeat. The term rape is also used to denote the occupation of a territory or a town.
(e.g. the rape of Nanjing).
Feministic explanations of sexual torture stress that men abusing power in sexual
ways enjoy a position of sexual dominance and feel their masculine identity
reinforced by humiliating and subjugating the woman. In feministic assumptions,
men show their inner desires in war-raping, stripped of civilizational inhibitions. The
subjugation supports the maintenance of the patriarchal society. (Brown Miller 1975,
Hague 1997).
This view is supported by the fact that the vast majority of rapists in war are not
mentally disturbed. They are ‘normal’ men, drafted or volunteers.
I do not believe that men raping in war show their inner desires or that man is a
sexual animal that cannot control himself when in absolute power. It is true that
male sexuality is potentially more aggressive than female sexuality, also in times of
peace. The great bulk of sexual crime – rape, incest, pedophilia – is at all times and
in all countries committed by men. This aggressiveness is cultivated to the extreme
through institutional misogyny in the military establishment and exploited in
racist military wars. Under such circumstances, many more men rape, even those
who would never consider raping a woman during ‘normal’ times. However, the main
responsibility for war-rapes lies with those identified leaders and their followers who
conceive a rape-strategy and give soldiers or other officials the ‘license to rape’.
My own explanation for mass rapes of war is that it happens because it is allowed,
without any or mild sanctions for the perpetrators.
permission can be by commission: open allowance as has been the case with the
torturers in Latin American dictatorships and the Greek dictatorship in the early
70ies, in armed conflicts where war-rape is a strategy, or by omission by turning a
blind eye to the crime and ensuring impunity for the offenders.
In a patriarchal, hierarchical and undemocratic system, as the military often is, those
at higher levels of power send the signal to lower levels that sexual torture is allowed,
not punishable and not preventable. According to this way of thinking women are
expendable and barely human beings:
According to surviving Japanese veterans many of the soldiers felt remarkably little
guilt about the raping of Chinese women. One of them says: “Perhaps when we
were raping her we looked at her as a woman. But when we killed her, we just
thought of her as a pig” (Chang 1997 p.50) The dehumanization of the woman (the
belief that she is a not a human being) makes gross abuse possible.
In short, preventing sexual abuse of women is a matter of political will and the
general perception of women in a given society. If gender-based violence is both
widespread and ethically tolerated in male consciousness, then it is of little help that
sexual torture is a crime and prohibited by national and international law. The ethical
tolerance creates a gap between law and practice. The barriers for building bridges
between law and practice may be purely technical given that political will exists,
but are in most societies ideological.
Posted on 2002-11-11
remarks:3 |
