Variation in sexual violence during war

Politics and Society

Volumn 34, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 307-341

  Wood, Elisabeth Jean ^a,b  

^a YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b SANTA FE INSTITUTE   (United States)

Author keywords

Human rights; Political violence; Rape; Sexual violence; War

Indexed keywords

EID: 33746605531     PISSN: 00323292     EISSN: 15527514     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0032329206290426     Document Type: Article

References (143)

1. This paper joins other recent works that analyze variation in wartime sexual violence but focuses on a wider range of variation. See Lisa Boswell Sharlach, "Sexual Violence as Political Terror" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Davis, 2001);
2. J. Robert Lilly and Pam Marshall, "Rape in Wartime," in The Encyclopedia of Criminology and Deviant Behavior, ed. Clifton D. Bryant (London: Brunner-Routledge, 2000), 318-22;
3. and Mia Bloom, "War and the Politics of Rape: Ethnic Versus Non-ethnic Conflicts," unpublished manuscript.
4. See UNESCO, Contemporary Forms of Slavery: Systematic Rape, Sexual Slavery and Slavery-like Practices during Armed Conflict, E/CN.4/Sub.2/1998/13 (New York: United Nations, 1998);
5. and Human Rights Watch, "We'll Kill You if You Cry": Sexual Violence in the Sierra Leone Conflict (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2003).
6. Sexual violence differs from the broader category of gender violence in that the latter category includes violence that occurs because of the victim's gender without the kinds of sexual contact included in sexual violence.
7. Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany. A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949 (Boston: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), 69-140.
8. Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany. A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949, Ibid., 72
9. Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany. A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949, see also 74.
10. Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany. A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949, Ibid., 106-7.
11. Lilly and Marshall, "Rape in Wartime."
12. Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2002), 300, 326, 413.
13. Naimark, The Russians in Germany, 88-90.
14. The records of women requesting abortions confirm a high prevalence of rape in Berlin. While abortion was technically illegal, authorities suspended the law in the case of rape by foreigners; permission was granted to nearly all cases in the district whose records were analyzed by Atina Grossman. See Atina Grossman, "A Question of Silence: The Rape of German Women by Occupation Soldiers," in West Germany under Construction: Politics, Society, and Culture in the Adenauer Era, ed. Robert G. Moeller (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), 33-51.
15. Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945, 410.
16. The incidence of rape (incidents/population) would be much higher than the prevalence (victims/population) given the pattern of gang rapes and multiple incidents suffered by the same person.
17. Quoted in Naimark, The Russians in Germany, 72.
18. Naimark, The Russians in Germany, Ibid., 71.
19. Jeffrey Burds, personal communication, December 3, 2006.
20. Wendy Jo Gertjejanssen, "Victims, Heroes, Survivors: Sexual Violence on the Eastern Front during World War II" (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 2004).
21. Jonathan C. Friedman, Speaking the Unspeakable: Essays on Sexuality, Gender, and Holocaust Survivor Memory (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2002), ch. 2. The German military treated rape of civilians by German soldiers on the eastern front much more leniently than on the western front, where military courts imposed significantly more severe punishment.
22. See Birgit Beck, "Rape: The Military Trials of Sexual Crimes Committed by Soldiers in the Wehrmach, 1939-1944," in Home/Front: The Military, War and Gender in 20th Century Germany, ed. Karen Hagerman and Stefanie Schuler-Springorum (New York: Berg, 2002), 255-73.
23. Gertjejanssen, Victims, Heroes, Survivors, 220.
24. Based on Gertjejanssen's description of the camp brothels, I estimate the number of women in camp brothels to have been between 1,000 and 10,000.
25. Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Penguin, 1997). Chang draws on a wide range of documents, including the diaries and reports of international observers who remained in Nanjing throughout the violence, as well as some interviews. It is not clear how Chang arrives at this estimate.
26. Joshua A. Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 367. The system was begun in 1932 but expanded extensively in the aftermath of the violence in Nanjing.
27. Japanese Cabinet Councillors' Office on External Affairs, "On the Issue of Wartime 'Comfort Women,'" cited in UNESCO, Contemporary Forms of Slavery, appendix, 9(a). The precise number of women forced to serve as military sexual slaves is not well documented, as the Japanese destroyed much of the documentation in 1945.
28. Cited in Chung Hyun-Kyung, '"Your Comfort versus My Death': Korean Comfort Women," in War's Dirty Secret: Rape, Prostitution, and Other Crimes against Women, ed. Anne Llewellyn Barstow (Cleveland, Ohio: Pilgrim Press, 2000), 17-19.
29. Cited in Goldstein, War and Gender, 363;
30. and Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 140. Twenty thousand girls and women comprise 2.1 percent of female Muslims in pre-war Bosnia-Herzegovina of all ages. The UN Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights initially made a lower estimate of 11,900 rapes, based on 119 pregnancies resulting from rape that were aborted in six major medical centers (the rapporteur assumed a rate of pregnancy after rape of about 1 percent);
31. cited in Todd Salzman, "Rape Camps, Forced Impregnation, and Ethnic Cleansing," in Barstow, ed., War's Dirty Secret, 76. However, as Salzman points out, on the one hand many women were raped more than once and others had no access to medical facilities and induced abortion themselves, abandoned the child, or kept the child. On the other hand, many pregnant women who sought abortions did not indicate that pregnancy originated in rape. On balance, Salzman argues that the number of pregnancies was likely significantly higher than 119, and he concurs with the 20,000 estimate
32. (Salzman, "Rape Camps," 76-77, 63).
33. United Nations Security Council (UNSC), "Rape and Sexual Assault," in Final Report of the United Nations Commission of Experts Established Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 780 (1992), S/1994/674/Add.2, vol. V (New York: United Nations, 1994), annex IX.I.C.
34. This history of Foça draws on UNSC, "Rape and Sexual Assault";
35. and Joanne Barkan, "As Old as War Itself: Rape in Foça," Dissent (Winter 2002): 60-66.
36. UNSC, "Rape and Sexual Assault," annex IX.2.A.20.
37. Eight men from Foça were indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) on sixty-two counts of sexual assault and rape as crimes against humanity and grave breaches and violations of the laws and customs of war (see Barkan, "As Old as War Itself," 65). The three who were tried received sentences of twenty-eight, twenty, and twelve years.
38. UNSC, "Rape and Sexual Assault," esp. annex IX.
39. Rape and Sexual Assault, Ibid., annex IX.I.A.
40. Rape and Sexual Assault, Ibid., annex IX.A.
41. Rape and Sexual Assault, Ibid., annex IX.I.C.
42. Rape and Sexual Assault, Ibid., annex IX.A III.A.2.
43. Ibid., annex IX, "Conclusions."
44. Of course, one reason the ethnic violence in the former Yugoslavia seemed troubling to many observers was the fact of significant intermarriage before the war: from 1981 to 1991, 18.6 percent of new marriages in Bosnia-Herzegovina were inter-ethnic (1991 census figures cited in Enloe, Maneuvers, 142).
45. See Amnesty International, "Sri Lanka: Torture in Custody," 1999, http://www.amnestyusa.org/countries/sri_lanka/reports.do;
46. and United Nations Development Fund for Women, "Gender Profile of the Conflict in Sri Lanka," rev. October 31, 2005, http://www. womenwarpeace.org/sri_lanka/sri_lanka.htm.
47. Amnesty International documented sexual violence by government forces against eleven women between 1999 and 2001. See Amnesty International, "Sri Lanka: Rape in Custody," 2002, http://www.amnestyusa.org/countries/ sri_lanka/reports.do.
48. Miranda Alison, "Cogs in a Wheel? Women in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam," Civil Wars 6, no. 4 (2003): 34-54.
49. Human Rights Watch, Living in Fear: Child Soldiers and the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, vol. 16, no. 13 (C) (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2004);
50. and United Nations Development Fund for Women, "Gender Profile."
51. Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
52. In the testimonies compiled by Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights, victims reported perpetrators wanting sex with a virgin, wanting a new wife, wanting to send a message to the government, and so on, but do not report perpetrators stating a wish to have sex with or to punish a person of particular ethnicity or religion. See Human Rights Watch, We'll Kill You if You Cry;
53. and Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), War-Related Sexual Violence in Sierra Leone (Boston: PHR, 2002).
54. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Sierra Leone, Final Report, 2005, http://trcsierraleone.org/drwebsite/publish/index.shtml, ch. 3b, para. 282.
55. Human Rights Watch, We'll Kill You if You Cry.
56. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Sierra Leone, Final Report, paras. 292-96;
57. and Human Rights Watch, We'll Kill You if You Cry, 35-42.
58. Lynn L. Amowitz, Chen Reis, Kristina Hare Lyons, Beth Vann, Binta Mansaray, Adyinka M. Akinsulure-Smith, Louise Taylor, and Vincent Iacopino, "Prevalence of War-Related Sexual Violence and Other Human Rights Abuses among Internally Displaced Persons in Sierra Leone," Journal of the American Medical Association 287, no. 4 (2002): 513-21. The survey design combined systematic random sampling and cluster sampling in four locales representing 91 percent of the internally displaced population. The estimated prevalence rate appears to be several times higher than the peacetime rate (the estimated lifetime prevalence of non-war-related sexual violence is 9.0 percent;
59. Amowitz et al., "Prevalence of War-Related Sexual Violence," 518).
60. Rape and Sexual Assault, Ibid., table 3.
61. Rape and Sexual Assault, Ibid., table 2.
62. Human Rights Watch, We'll Kill You if You Cry.
63. See Physicians for Human Rights, War-Related Sexual Violence in Sierra Leone, ch. 4;
64. and Human Rights Watch, We'll Kill You if You Cry, ch. V.
65. According to Physicians for Human Rights, girls and women who undergo female genital cutting are at increased risk for genital trauma and related complications after rape (War-Related Sexual Violence, 49).
66. Human Rights Watch reports that 90 percent of females in Sierra Leone undergo female genital cutting (We'll Kill You if You Cry, 24).
67. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Sierra Leone, Final Report, ch. 3b, 299-311.
68. Amowitz et al., "Prevalence of War-Related Sexual Violence," table 3.
69. Forced marriages in the sense of marriages of girls without their consent, often at a very young age, was common in Sierra Leone before the war but required permission of the girl's family (Human Rights Watch, We'll Kill You if You Cry, 17, 23-24).
70. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Sierra Leone, Final Report, para. 298.
71. This summary of events at My Lai draws on Michael Bilton, Four Hours in My Lai (New York: Penguin, 1992);
72. Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will (New York: Bantam, 1975);
73. Seymour M. Hersh, My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath (New York: Random House, 1970);
74. Herbert C. Kelman and V. Lee Hamilton, Crimes of Obedience (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989);
75. William R. Peers, The My Lai Inquiry (New York: Norton, 1979);
76. and James Olson, My Lai: A Brief History with Documents (New York: Bedford, 1998).
77. Mitch Weiss, "Rogue GIs Unleashed Wave of Terror in Central Highlands," Toledo (Ohio) Blade, October 22, 2003.
78. Mark Danner, The Massacre at El Mozote (New York: Vintage, 1994).
79. Truth Commission for El Salvador, "From Madness to Hope: The 12 Year War in El Salvador. Report of the Truth Commission for El Salvador," reprinted in The United Nations and El Salvador, 1990-1995, United Nations Blue Books Series, vol. IV (New York: United Nations, 1993).
80. Truth Commission for El Salvador, "From Madness to Hope," unpublished annex (Tomo II: 8-10, 15).
81. Elisabeth Jean Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), ch. 4.
82. See the various maps and graphs compiled in Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Peru, Final Report (2003), http://www.cverdad.org.pe/ingles/ifinal/ index.php, Statistical Annex.
83. In her analysis of testimonies to the commission, Michele Leiby found that Sendero Luminoso was responsible for nearly 20 percent of reported cases of sexual violence. Her finding is based on a wider definition of sexual violence and her coding of reported instances of homicides, torture, or other human rights violations as also sexual violence if they included sexual violence. See Michele L. Leiby, "Sexual Violence as a Strategic Weapon of War: Latin America," unpublished manuscript.
84. Ethel Tobach and Rachel Reed, "Understanding Rape," in Evolution Gender and Rape, ed. Cheryl Brown Travis (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), tables 5.1 and 5.2.
85. Patricia D. Rozee, "Forbidden or Forgiven? Rape in Cross-Cultural Perspective," Psychology of Women Quarterly 17 (1993): 499-514. For example, in some societies, sexual access to women is granted to guests, brothers, or other associates of the husband (and the women are beaten or killed if they refuse). And in some societies, female transgression of social norms (such as women seeing ceremonial artifacts strictly reserved for males) is punished by rape, sometimes group rape in a public place.
86. Even if all females who were pregnant as a result of rape reported the incident to health authorities and were in fact pregnant as a result of rape, that would not be enough to infer the incidence of rape given the fact that multiple rapes appear to be frequent in wartime settings.
87. World Health Organization, "Sexual Violence," in World Report on Violence and Health (Geneva: World Health Organization, 2002), table 6.1, 151. For developing countries, the data is compiled from face-to-face surveys in the capital city; there is apparently no correction for possible rural-urban differences other than for variation in household size. Given the challenges to compiling comparable sexual violence data, I average across the lowest and highest three cities.
88. J. N. van Kesteren, P. Mayhew, and P. Nieuwbeerta, Criminal Victimization in Seventeen Industrialised Countries: Key Findings from the 2000 International Crime Victims Survey (The Hague: Ministry of Justice, Research and Documentation Center [WODC], 2000), app. 4, table 6, 188-89. For industrialized countries, the surveys are national samples and done by phone (with the exception of Malta). The high reported rates in Sweden and Finland probably reflect high rates of binge alcoholism, with attendant violence, or higher rates of reporting sexual assault, and a more inclusive definition of "assault."
89. See Rozee, "Forbidden or Forgiven?" 504.
90. Peggy Sanday, "Socio-cultural Context of Rape: Cross Cultural Study," Journal of Social Issues 37, no. 4 (1981): 27.
91. Rozee, "Forbidden or Forgiven?"
92. Rozee, "Forbidden or Forgiven?"., Ibid., table 1.
93. Rozee, "Forbidden or Forgiven?", Ibid., table 1.
94. Neil Mitchell and Tali Gluch, "The Principals and Agents of Political Violence and the Strategic and Private Benefits of Rape" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, September 2004).
95. The United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute's (INICRI) crime victimization data for most developing countries goes back only to 1996 or 1997 (and in a few cases to 1992), and only a few countries with recent civil wars are included. Of the cases discussed above, El Salvador, Sri Lanka, Israel, and Sierra Leone are not included; while a survey was carried out in Yugoslavia in 1996, it is difficult to see its relevance for Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992.
96. Madeline Morris, "By Force of Arms: Rape, War, and Military Culture," Duke Law Journal 45, no. 4 (1996): 651-781.
97. Madeline Morris, "By Force of Arms: Rape, War, and Military Culture," Duke Law Journal 45, no. 4 (1996): 651-781, Ibid.
98. Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer, The Natural History of Rape: Biological Basis of Social Coercion (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002).
99. See the essays in Brown Travis, Evolution Gender and Rape.
100. Richard Borshay Lee, The Kung San: Men, Women and Work in a Foraging Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
101. Mary P. Koss, "Evolutionary Models of Why Men Rape: Acknowledging the Complexities," in Brown Travis, Evolution Gender and Rape, 191-205.
102. Jerry A. Coyne, "Of Vice and Men: A Case Study in Evolutionary Psychology," in Brown Travis, Evolution Gender and Rape, 171-89.
103. However, see Jonathan A. Gottschall and Tiffani A. Gottschall, "Are Per-Incident Rape-Pregnancy Rates Higher than Per-Incident Consensual Pregnancy Rates?" Human Nature 14, no. 1 (2003): 1-20, for a discussion of the possibility that a conditional rape strategy that accounts for such targeting objections could have evolved.
104. For example, Mitchell and Gluch, in "Principals and Agents," argue that the principal-agent problem confronting armies is the tendency of combatants to seek to engage in more sexual violence than the leadership deems optimal.
105. Inger Skjelsbaek, "Sexual Violence and War: Mapping out a Complex Relationship," European Journal of International Relations 7, no. 2 (2001): 218.
106. Allan Mazur and Alan Booth, "Testosterone and Dominance in Men," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (1998): 353-97.
107. John Archer, Nicola Graham-Kevan, and Michelle Davies, "Testosterone and Aggression: A Reanalysis of Book, Starzyk, and Quinsey's 2001 Study," Aggression and Violent Behavior 10 (2005): 241-61.
108. Mazur and Booth, "Testosterone and Dominance."
109. Richard E. Nisbett and Dov Cohen, Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996).
110. Mazur and Booth, "Testosterone and Dominance."
111. Theodore D. Kemper, Social Structure and Testosterone (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990);
112. and Theodore D. Kemper, "Fantasy, Females, Sexuality and Testosterone," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (1998): 378-79;
113. and Jeremy Freese, Jui-Chung Allen Li, and Lisa D. Wade, "The Potential Relevances of Biology to Social Inquiry," Annual Review of Sociology 29 (2003): 233-56.
114. Lea H. Studer, A. Scott Aylwin, and John R. Reddon, "Testosterone, Sexual Offense Recidivism and Treatment Effect among Adult Male Sex Offenders," Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment 17, no. 2 (2005): 171-81.
115. Versions of the argument can be found in many feminist works; the classic work is Brownmiller, Against Our Will.
116. Cynthia Enloe, Does Khaki Become You? The Militarization of Women's Lives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
117. Goldstein, War and Gender, 253-300.
118. Goldstein, War and Gender, Ibid., 356-60.
119. Morris, "By Force of Arms," 692.
120. Morris, "By Force of Arms,", Ibid., 707, 701-6. There appears to be significant consensus among researchers about the factors at the individual level that are associated with increased likelihood to suffer sexual violence or to perpetrate sexual violence in peacetime. In addition to Morris's summary,
121. see World Health Organization, "Sexual Violence," ch. 6.
122. Lisa Sharlach, "Gender and Genocide in Rwanda: Women as Agents and Objects of Genocide," Journal of Genocide Research 1, no. 3 (1999): 387-99.
123. Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
124. Lisa Sharlach, "Rape as Genocide: Bangladesh, the former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda," New Political Science 22, no. 1 (2000): 89-102;
125. and Bloom, "War and the Politics of Rape."
126. Enloe, Maneuvers, 134.
127. Enloe, Maneuvers, Ibid., 124.
128. Stathis Kalyvas, "The Ontology of 'Political Violence': Action and Identity in Civil Wars," Perspectives on Politics 1, no. 3 (2003): 475-94.
129. Jeremy Weinstein, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
130. Human Rights Watch, You'll Learn Not to Cry: Child Combatants in Colombia (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2003), 10.
131. Kalvyas, "The Ontology of 'Political Violence.'"
132. Wood, Insurgent Collective Action.
133. See Amelia Hoover, "Disaggregating Violence during Armed Conflict: Why and How," unpublished manuscript, for an analysis of how different repertoires of violence can be understood via principal agent models in which elites (the principals) have distinct preferences than do combatants (the agents) for different types of violence.
134. Jennifer L. Green, "Uncovering Collective Rape: A Comparative Study of Political Sexual Violence," International Journal of Sociology 34, no. 1 (2004): 97-116.
135. Green, in "Uncovering Collective Rape," takes a distinct approach, identifying cases of collective rape via online searches of the New York Times archive. The strength of this approach is that she has tentative findings about the correlates of collective rape; the weakness is the reliance on a single source and the difficulty in coding relative prevalence of rape based on that source.
136. Elisabeth Jean Wood, "The Ethical Challenges of Field Research in Conflict Zones," Qualitative Sociology 29, no. 3 (2006).
137. Francisco Gutiérrez Sanín, personal communication, July 2005.
138. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence.
139. Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, forthcoming).
140. Weinstein, Inside Rebellion.
141. Wood, Insurgent Collective Action.
142. Macartan Humphreys and Jeremy Weinstein intend to carry out such a disaggregated analysis of patterns of violence in the Sierra Leone conflict, drawing on a survey they carried out with ex-combatants to document (among other things) patterns of command-and-control and discipline among particular units. However, as yet they do not have adequately disaggregated data on human rights violations. If such data becomes available, they will be able to test how well unit discipline predicts sexual and other violence. See Macartan Humphreys and Jeremy Weinstein, "Handling and Manhandling Civilians in Civil War: Determinants of the Strategies of Armed Factions," unpublished paper, 2004.
143. Straus, The Order of Genocide.