Theorizing Wartime Rape

Theorizing Wartime Rape

Feminist theory “does not accept existing premises and established ‘truths’ but problematizes them by asking alternative questions and offering different conceptions” (Mardorossian 2002, 745). Feminist theories on wartime rape have followed this tradition through seeking to critically challenge dominant discourses, gender binaries, fixed victim subjectivities, and paradigmatic, one-dimensional narratives that are constructed around the universal rather than diversity of lived victim experiences. Below I draw attention to three key theoretical critiques found in this body of literature (see also Henry 2014). I seek to demonstrate that although scholars make important attempts to deconstruct the victim-subject, the issue of perpetrators and the underlying structural causes or conditions of violence (including the links between pre-conflict, conflict, and post-conflict contexts) ⁵ remain at the periphery of such analyses.

First, increasingly feminist scholars in the field have drawn attention to the problematic gender binaries that position women exclusively as victims and men as perpetrators of wartime sexual violence. Some scholars, for instance, argue that male and child victims of such violence are effectively ignored or sidelined in both the theory of wartime rape as well as the practical legal, social, medical, and legal interventions on the ground (Carpenter 2006).

Second, feminist scholars argue that other gender-based harms, such as reproductive violations and socioeconomic deprivations, are given far less attention in comparison to sexually based harms against women (Ni Aoláin 2006). It is claimed that the priority given to some forms of wartime sexual violence has the effect of constructing a victim hierarchy. Indeed, during the early 1990s, after the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, feminist scholars and activists discussed at great lengths the desirability of prosecuting rape as a crime of genocide (see Engle 2005, 785-94). Some feminist scholars were reluctant to distinguish between genocidal rape (as the “worst” form of rape) and other “less extraordinary” forms of wartime rape (Copelon 1994). Buss (2009), for example, argued that the rapes of Rwandan Hutu women or the rapes of Tutsi or Hutu men during the Rwandan genocide did not capture the same level of attention at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, since Rwandan Tutsi women are generally portrayed as the exclusive victims of genocidal rape. International criminal courts thus prosecute rape only when there is a connection to the crimes listed in the statute of the court (e.g., war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide). Relatedly, as some claim, these “extraordinary” forms of rape are problematically constructed as the “worst” of crimes, rendering them not only unknowable, but also unthinkable and unspeakable (Halley 2008).

Finally, a third strand of feminist critique concerns the focus on women as exclusively passive victims of wartime sexual violence. Scholars argue that this representation conceals the role that women play either as perpetrators of violence, or as agentic, autonomous, and resilient civilians or combatants. Engle (2005), for example, claims that presenting women solely as victims of rape has unintended consequences, including obscuring or ignoring other narratives, such as when women have consensual sexual relations during wartime, when men do not engage in the abuse of women, or when women perpetrate or support sexual or nonsexual violence during armed conflict. Other feminist critiques focus on problematizing the subjugation of victims through universal, homogenous representations of suffering that serve to deny agency and autonomy. In relation to war crimes trials, for instance, legal procedures do not allow witnesses to tell their stories in their own ways or words. Instead, the criminal trial is inherently limited by its focus on the prosecution of the accused, not the “truth-telling” of victims (Henry 2009; Mertus 2004).

Similarly, scholars note that representations of victims in activist and scholarly circles tend to fixate on a paradigmatic narrative of sexual violence that universalizes women’s experiences. Halley (2008) asserts that in these existing dominant discourses, women are represented as perpetually and inevitably powerless, vulnerable, and in need of protection. Kapur (2002, 18) claims that the “authentic victim subject” is an “ideal victim,” “a truncated Third World woman who is sexually constrained, tradition-bound, incarcerated in the home, illiterate and poor.” The victim-subject is thus monolithic, one-dimensional, and ahistorical, denied any opportunity for self-representation, fixed to her identity as a victim and cast as needing protection by the law and the state (Brown 1995). Victim-survivors who do not conform to the paradigmatic image of victim are thus potentially excluded from not only representations of suffering but also redress measures in practice (Soh 2008).

In summary, although not uncontroversial (see Soh 2008), these feminist critiques have contributed richly to the theorization of wartime rape, posing critical challenges to fixed subjectivities, accepted truths, and dominant discourses. These analyses have more specifically contributed to theories about victim subjectivity (e.g., whether victims are discursively represented as agentic or passive) and victim hierarchies (e.g., whether the attention given to women as victims of wartime sexual violence results in a failure to respond to other forms of gender-based violence). However, what is missing from these accounts is both the individual perpetrator and the structural determinants underlying sexual aggression in conflict. To date, this has largely remained at the periphery of feminist theories of wartime rape.

In the next section, I briefly review the theoretical literature on the causes (both individual and structural) of wartime rape and consider some avenues for further theoretical investigation in this field. I seek to demonstrate that a conceptualization of the intersections of disadvantage, discrimination, and oppression (Crenshaw 1991) contributes to a deeper understanding not only of diverse and complex victimization but also of the relationship between pre-conflict structural forces, individual perpetrator characteristics, and the role that these forces play in determining the nature, prevalence, and scope of wartime sexual violence.

An Etiology of Wartime Rape

In thinking about the espoused causes of rape more generally, McPhail (2015) argues that it is helpful to understand how rape has been theorized historically. She states that twentieth-century psychoanalytic theories conceived of rape as primarily a sexual act rather than one of violence. Psychological theories of rape “tended to focus on clinical explanations including blaming poor parenting, castration anxiety and repressed homosexual inclinations, lack of social skills, and being sexually starved or sexually insatiable” (McPhail 2015). In addition to focusing on the deviant sexual predator, other twentieth-century discourses effectively blamed victims for precipitating rape, particularly in contexts where rape was perceived as sexually motivated. Over the past few decades, evolutionary psychology or sociobiological theories have controversially positioned rape as a form of evolved sexuality or a reproductive strategy that functions as part of a natural evolutionary process (Thornhill and Palmer 2000). Critics, however, argue that biological theories of rape rigidly lock men and women into genetically or biologically determined roles. Such theories focus almost exclusively on sexual motives and as such not only ignore the heterogeneity of offenders and the gender diversity of victims, but also fail to address the role that power and culture play in perpetuating sexual aggression.

More recent feminist contributions to understanding sexual violence have moved away from dominant clinical or controversial sociobiological explanations of rape and have instead sought to identify social and structural causes or so-called risk factors for sexual violence perpetration. Although empirical evidence remains limited, in her review of existing studies on rape perpetration, Jewkes (2012, 3) suggests that the following factors are important: adverse childhood experiences; attachment and personality disorders; social learning and delinquency; gender inequitable masculinities; and substance abuse and firearms. Although she identifies individual factors, she notes that “the predominant underlying factors for rape perpetration are environmental, and central among them are gender attitudes and childhood experiences of violence.”

Jewkes draws on Bandura’s (1986) social cognitive theory as a useful starting point for understanding how cognitive self-regulatory mechanisms are deactivated through external situational stimuli and internal thought processes of individuals, ⁶ as well as on Connell’s (1987) work on gender, power, and masculinity. Like other scholars in the field, Jewkes claims that it is crucial to understand rape perpetration within the social and structural context of patriarchy and gender order or hierarchy—a “historically constructed pattern of power relations between men and women and definitions of femininity and masculinity” (Connell 1987, 98-99). In other words, although rape and other forms of sexual violence may be perpetrated by individuals, the expression or performance of normative hegemonic masculinity is culturally constituted, encoded, and endorsed. As Butler (1988) claims, the heterosexual matrix is a socially constructed binary of gender and sexuality, where heterosexuality is the norm, and both gender and sexuality are “rehearsed” within the “confines of already existing directions”—namely, social conventions, and norms. Patriarchy, hegemonic masculinity, and negative attitudes and beliefs about sex, sexuality, and gender are therefore “important environmental influence[s] on men’s likelihood of being sexually violent” (Jewkes 2012, 34). But, moreover, these structural factors also help to explain men’s violence against other men, as well as female-perpetrated forms of violence.

Although the causes of rape in domestic contexts have been the subject of some attention, particularly in more recent times, there has been a comparable neglect of the etiology of wartime rape in the scholarly literature. Despite some investigations into the psychology of wartime sexual violence (e.g., Baaz and Stern 2009; Henry, Ward, and Hirshberg 2004), overall, theory on the causes—both structural and individual—has been the subject of very few studies to date. One early exception in this field is Seifert’s (1996) study of “cultural models” of wartime rape. Seifert claims that (1) rapes are part of the “rules of war”; (2) the abuse of women is an element of male communication in conflict; (3) rapes result from the elevation of masculinity that accompanies war; (4) wartime rape aims to destroy the enemy’s culture; and (5) wartime rape is the expression of a culturally rooted contempt for women, lived out in times of crisis. However, she focuses predominantly on situational and structural factors, and the individual perpetrator is all but invisible in her model (see also Gottschall 2004).

More recent studies examining the causes of wartime sexual violence have been grounded in empirical research, comparing indicators such as type of conflict, patterns of sexual violence, and preexisting levels of gender inequality in various data sets (e.g., Cohen 2013; Farr 2009; Wood 2006). As Davies and True (2015) point out, there are two major explanations for wartime sexual violence emerging from these studies. The first is that sexual violence is caused by the existence of conflict; that is, sexual violence is an opportunistic crime engaged in by individuals and facilitated by a lack of command structure or norms against sexual violence within the armed group. Wood (2006), for example, found little support for the hypothesis that sexual violence is caused by existing gender inequalities since not all military groups where gender inequality is pronounced perpetrate sexual violence. The second, alternative explanation characterizes sexual violence as an instrumental strategy, as a weapon of war or “a deliberate collective strategy deployed against civilians for the purpose of war gain or plunder” (Davies and True 2015, 163; Farr 2009).

Davies and True, however, problematize both theories of wartime rape because they fail to account for the “relationship between structural gender inequality and political violence” (see also Gerecke 2010). They argue that while such studies see gender inequality as existent and even pervasive across all armed conflicts, structural conditions are not seen as the cause of violence, presumably because the causes are more squarely located within the individual who is opportunistic or uses sexual violence to achieve ulterior political aims. Davies and True suggest that these studies see gender inequality as part of the backdrop or structural context to sexual violence, rather than as the problem itself. As such, they contend that structural explanations remain “poorly operationalized” in the theorization of wartime rape (Davies and True 2015, 176).

One approach to address this deficit is to draw on intersectionality as a framework for understanding both individual and structural causes of wartime sexual offending, as well as the complex and diverse experiences of victimization. Intersectionality is the study of the cross-cutting hierarchies of power or “intersections” (interconnections/relationships) between disadvantage, discrimination, and oppression on the basis of race, class, and sex (Crenshaw 1991). An intersectional model of wartime rape can thus capture the complexity of people’s lives and their relationships. First, such a model can contribute to a better understanding of the complex and diverse experiences of victims of wartime sexual violence, who have been targeted (whether intentionally or incidentally) in part because of their sex, race, ethnicity, age, and socioeconomic status. Structural forces such as capitalism, imperialism, and patriarchy, and their intersections, thus become essential to understanding victimization. We can also begin to move away from universalizing, essentializing discourses or generalizations. Second, intersectionality contributes to an understanding of perpetration. As discussed earlier, it is crucial that perpetration be analyzed not solely as an isolated individualized phenomenon but also as part of a collective mentality around masculine entitlement and perceived superiority on the basis of interlocking forces of classism, racism, and sexism. An intersectional model thus treats wartime sexual violence as fundamentally about complex webs of power. Meger (2014, 3), for instance, emphasizes the importance of both gender inequality and structural disadvantage in explaining wartime sexual violence, arguing that

gender is . . . a social structure that is productive of and reproduced through processes of the political economy. It is within this constitutive relationship that conflict-related sexual violence operates in three distinct ways: first, as a form of interpersonal violence, driven by individual motivations that serves to reconstitute masculine identity. Second, it operates as a form of political violence, motivated through structural inequalities, and the desire to subvert or contest intercommunal hierarchies. Third it operates as a cog in the global political economy, wherein violence provides the necessary conditions for . . . “accumulation by dispossession.”

These emerging feminist theories of gender-based violence in armed conflict, where political economy is integral to understanding the origins, factors, and causes of violence, are indicative of a significant and more recent shift within this particular field. The tension between the individual and the social and political context is critical to these analyses. Indeed, as many have argued, practical (and often overly individualized) interventions often fail to adequately account for or address the structural causes of gender-based violence. But practical, primary prevention interventions, or legal responses need to focus on changing deeply embedded beliefs and values that are both socially constituted and individually (but not uniformly) absorbed.

Attention to the structural causes of wartime sexual violence thus can help to situate the inherent connections between “everyday” forms of violence in prewar and postwar contexts and “extraordinary” forms of violence during periods of armed conflict. This is not to deny the role that individual agency and culpability play in the perpetration of such crimes, nor to exclusively blame “rape culture” or structural gender inequality for the prevalence of rape. Rather, it is to place the perpetrator in a social and political context that is typically chaotic and unstable under conflict conditions, and yet not divorced from the preconflict context where norms, beliefs, and attitudes about gender, sexuality, and violence prevail.

Some key issues for future theoretical development in this field concern how to conceptualize causes across different cultural contexts and how to translate theories about gender and power from nonconflict settings to conflict settings (and vice versa). Finally, attention needs to be paid to how theory can translate into more effective strategies and solutions in practice to not only prevent the occurrence of wartime sexual violence in the first place but to also provide better social justice outcomes to victims and their communities in the aftermath of politicized violence.

Conclusion

The theorization of wartime rape ultimately should entail the critical examination of dominant discourses or representations of both victims and perpetrators, as well as the underlying (but potentially diverse) structural conditions that lead to, or contribute to, violence, and which in turn contribute to problematic representations in judicial, political, and social contexts. In other words, a theory of wartime rape should critically examine the intersections between gender, sexuality, and violence and the social contexts in which they are a part, and deconstruct paradigmatic ways of thinking about victims and perpetrators. Enriching theoretical insights into wartime rape not only can help to inform practical primary prevention and transitional justice interventions, but conceptually to situate wartime sexual violence in historical epochs, different spaces and times, and to bring us to a deeper understanding of wartime rape and how it might be responded to and prevented in the future.