The Human Security Report 2005
Liu Centre for Global Issues, Vancouver, Canada
Introduction
They went after my daughter, and I knew they would rape her. But she resisted and said she would rather die than have relations with them. They cut off her left breast and put it in her hand. They said, 'are you still resisting us?' She said she would rather die than be with them. They cut off her genital labia and showed them to her. She said, 'please kill me.' They took a knife and put it to her neck and made a long vertical incision down her chest and split her body open. She was crying but she finally died. She died with her breast in her hand.
-Testimony to Human Rights Watch, The War Within the War: Sexual Violence against Women and Girls in Eastern Congo , pp.55
Since the end of the Cold War, the character of warfare has changed dramatically—from conflicts waged by superpower proxies to multi-ethnic struggles involving multiple armies and non-state militias. Accountable to no one and largely drawn from a population of semi-literate, unemployed and impoverished young men and boys, today's armies more closely resemble ill-organized gangs of armed thugs than professional military forces.
It is against a backdrop of anarchic and politically sanctioned impunity that violence against civilians is quite literally engendered. Today's conflicts are notable for numbers of civilian casualties—throughout the 1990s an estimated 90 per cent of war-related deaths. And although more men die as a direct consequence of conflict, women tend to be targeted and killed with calculated viciousness—often experiencing gender-based torture and mutilation or being deliberately infected with HIV/AIDS. Moreover, despite a lack of hard data, anecdotal evidence suggests that the strategic use of gender specific violence —to terrorize, to maim and as an instrument of genocide—appears to be on the rise.1 Indeed, the use of systematized, gender-based violence has become the hallmark of war in the 21st century.
Military and political leaders have historically diminished rape and other forms of sexual violence as the unfortunate consequence of armed conflict—usually confined to assaults by private individuals or the actions of renegade fighters. Rape has also been viewed as part of the ‘spoils of war’—the rightful prerogative of victorious fighters that has too often obscured the suffering of survivors. During the Second World War, Russian soldiers raped and gang raped hundreds of thousands of German women in their drive towards Berlin, while in Asia, Japanese soldiers abducted an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 Korean women —so-called ‘comfort women’—to serve as sex slaves at the front.2 The occupation of Nanking was likewise notorious for the brutality of Japanese military forces. In one month, historians estimate as many as 80,000 women and girls were sexually assaulted and tortured. Many were mutilated and murdered soon after. So widespread were the attacks that only the grossest atrocities were ever recorded or prosecuted. While sexual violence remains very much a feature of contemporary warfare, it is difficult to determine whether incidence or prevalence is actually increasing or decreasing. In the past, stigmatization, coupled with the belief that rape in conflict was both inevitable and therefore tacitly acceptable, undoubtedly resulted in under-reporting and the apparent readiness of authorities to look the other way. Indeed, it was only following revelations of ‘rape camps’ in Bosnia, that public outrage compelled the international community to finally recognize gender-specific violence as a war crime and a crime against humanity. Much of the outcry had to do with the apparently methodical use of sexual violence as an instrument of genocide—a strategy that has been repeated subsequently in other conflicts throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium.
During the war in Bosnia Serb forces sexually assaulted and tortured an estimated 25,000 women in an orgy of ethnically and politically motivated violence. In Rwanda Hutu extremists raped an estimated 250,000 to 500,000 women during the 1994 genocide3 while in Burma a government-backed reign of terror continues to encourage the wholesale violation of thousands of women from the Karen, Karenni, Mon and Tavoyan ethnic minorities.4 In The Democratic Republic of Congo, human rights workers have described the collective assault on the nation's women as ‘the war within a war’5 while in nearby Zimbabwe, recent reports indicate that the government is using strategic sexual violence targeting women and small children to intimidate and silence dissenters.6
In many conflicts, rape is employed with the calculated aim of terrorizing and humiliating a particular community or ethnic group to achieve a specific political end. In traditional ‘honour and shame’ societies, the integrity of the family is bound up in the virtue of its womenfolk: the rape of one woman results in humiliation for her entire family and highlights the inability of—and therefore impotence—of male family members to protect her. Because women in traditional societies are often perceived and treated as little more than chattel, rape is also used as a de-facto assault on property and an act of broader social degradation.7
In the Bosnia, The Democratic Republic of Congo, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan and in Rwanda during the genocide, hostilities provided a cover for all manner of gender-based violence—regardless of the ethnicity or political leanings of the women targeted. Author and historian Gerard Prunier described the violence in Rwanda thus:
In Kigali, the Interhamwe and Impuzamugambi (those who have a common purpose) had tended to recruit mostly among the poor. As soon as they went into action, they drew around them a cloud of even poorer people, a lumpen proletariat of street boys, rag-pickers, car-washers and homeless unemployed. For these people, the genocide was the best thing that could have happened to them. They had the blessings of a form of authority to take revenge on socially powerful people as long as they were on the wrong side of the political fence. They could steal, they could kill with minimum justification, they could rape ... This was wonderful. The political aims pursued by the masters of this dark carnival was quite beyond their scope.
Hate media and gender Prior to the Rwanda genocide, and in Kosovo, extremist propaganda explicitly targeted Tutsi and Albanian Muslim women as a means of attacking the ethnic minorities from which they came. In the case of Tutsi women, hate propaganda focused on the seductiveness and beauty of minority women, with claims they used their sexuality to infiltrate the majority Hutu population on behalf of the Tutsi led Rwandan Patriotic Front. At the same time, Tutsi women were also targeted because of the perception that they considered Hutu men ugly and inferior.8 For the legions of under-employed, poorly educated young men and boys who made up the Interhamwe, the genocide provided an opportunity to collectively punish Tutsi women for their arrogance.9 Kosavar Muslims, on the other hand, were portrayed as being “open-legged, stupid, uneducated women ready to have sex.”10 Because rape victims are stigmatized in many traditional cultures—including in Kosovo—investigators believe women and girls were specifically targeted to ensure that they could neither marry nor produce offspring.11
Sexual violence in conflict also takes other forms; the abduction and enslavement of ‘enemy’ women and girls as ‘camp wives,’ as child soldiers, or for the purposes of forced prostitution. In Foca, Bosnia, the now infamous ‘rape camps’ doubled as both an instrument of genocide and as a transit camp for human trafficking12 while in much of conflict-racked Africa, women and girls are abducted to serve as porters, cooks and sex slaves. Many are trafficked out of their countries altogether.
Sexual torture A certain percentage of sadistic or sociopathic individuals exist in every culture. In wartime, generalized lawlessness, lack of accountability and impunity encourage certain individuals to act out their most destructive inclinations without fear of community or judicial censure.
During the 1991–2001 conflict between government forces and RUF rebel groups in Sierra Leone, young girls and virgins were specifically singled out for rape, gang rape and rape with firewood, pestles, guns and umbrellas. Many, particularly the very young, did not survive. Adult women were also assaulted so violently that they often bled to death or suffered vaginal and anal tearing. More gruesome still, are accounts of pregnant women who had babies torn out of their uterus by rebels who waged bets on the sex of the unborn child.13
Case histories gathered by Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) provide insight into the extent of the brutalities inflicted on the women and girls. In an interview with PHR, 13-year-old Katamara B. spoke of how she was abducted and then forced to watch as RUF rebels perpetrated outrages on other women. Released only in the latter stages of pregnancy, Katamara, herself only a child, is now mother to a baby girl.
...We were then taken to a mosque in Kissy. They killed everyone in there ... They were snatching babies and infants from their mother's arms and tossing them in the air. The babies would free fall to their deaths. At other times they would also chop them from the back of their heads to kill them, you know, like you do when you slaughter chickens...One girl with us tried to escape. They made her take off her slippers and give them to me and then killed her...one time we came across two pregnant women. They tied the women down with their legs eagle-spread and took a sharpened stick and jabbed them inside their wombs until the babies came out on the stick.14
In Bosnia, and Kosovo, Human Rights Watch and other NGOs have reported unusual acts of cruelty—ranging from the perforation of sexual organs with umbrellas, sticks, knives and bullets, the hacking off of breasts and widespread biting.15 Needless to say, those who survived were often left incontinent, severely disabled and/or maimed for life. Victim as perpetrator: psychological and social consequences For the survivors, the shame such assaults engender within the immediate family and larger community requires that they either conceal their injuries or risk being stigmatized and rejected by the very people they would normally look to for support. Following rape, it is not uncommon for family members (if they survive) and the community at large to reject and ostracise the victim—frequently forcing survivors out of the home and into the streets where they must fend for themselves and often, their unwanted offspring.
Deprived of home and support, survivors, many of whom are unskilled and illiterate, are frequently forced by poverty to engage in ‘survival’ sex or travel to other cities to work as prostitutes where they are exposed to further exploitation, violence and infection with STDs. In some Islamic societies, rape survivors are beaten or even killed owing to the perceived disgrace of being victim to a sexual crime.16Moreover, many conflict and post-conflict societies lack either the will or capacity to properly investigate and prosecute allegations of rape. Long-standing cultural stigma and shame often means that the victim is cast as the offender while the perpetrator is either dealt with leniently or excused altogether.
Those that conceal their trauma and forgo medical care in order to avoid identification as a rape survivor, may suffer isolation and long-term medical and psychological complications—including depression. psychotic episodes and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).17 One young abductee, interviewed by Physicians for Human Rights in Sierra Leone, described the effects of multiple gang rapes on her mental health:
I don’t like to talk because of the memories. When I made it back, my mother couldn't believe it. Since I got back I have been so sick ... I never used to get sick like this ... I would like to go back to school, but I can't concentrate anymore. I can't do anything.”18
Humanitarian organizations and medical personnel have also reported high rates of suicide among rape victims. For many of Rwanda's genocide survivors, the sight of tormentors—many of whom were well known as neighbors and colleagues—going about their daily business with neither guilt nor fears of reprisal, remains too much to bear.
Since the war has ended, I have not had my monthly period. My stomach swells up and is painful. I think about what happened to me all the time and I cannot sleep. I even see some of the Interhamwe who did these things to me and others around here. When I see them I think of committing suicide.19
Medical complications Violent sexual assault can result in a broad spectrum of medical consequences, including unwanted pregnancy and gynecological complications such as vaginal and anal tearing, prolapsed uterus, perforated bladder, genital irritation, decreased sexual desire, pain during intercourse, chronic pelvic pain, pelvic inflammatory disease and urinary tract infections.20
The transmission of sexually transmitted diseases and infections are also a common feature of sexual violence—the most deadly being HIV/AIDS. Other STDs—chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis, and venereal warts—are not only showing troubling levels of antibiotic resistance,21 but are often asymptomatic in women. This means infections often go untreated which in turn leads to more serious health consequences later on—the most common being pelvic inflammatory disease and infertility. High levels of cervical cancer in post-conflict populations has been linked to transmission of the cancer-causing human papilloma virus (HPV) during rape.22
The disease burden associated with widespread sexual violence can strain already seriously over-stretched health services in conflict and post-conflict settings. During one six month period in 1999, Brazzaville hospitals treated 1,600 cases of rape while Physicians for Human Rights estimates that more than 50 per cent of women surveyed in Sierra Leone experienced sexual violence during the conflict. Fully one third were victims of gang rape.23 Unwanted children represent another hurdle for rape survivors and their families. According to studies, a single act of unprotected intercourse can result in pregnancy between one to four per cent of the time. Women who are impregnated risk their health by going to back alley practitioners in order to secure an abortion. Those unable to access health services, face the stigmatization and further trauma for bearing ‘enemy’ offspring—otherwise known as “children of hate” in Rwanda. Flight into fear: displacement during and following conflict In 2002, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported the numbers of externally displaced people at 19.8 million. An additional 20–25 million are known as internally displaced persons (IDPs)—those who are displaced, usually during civil war, but have stayed in their homeland rather than seeking asylum abroad.24 According to the UNHCR, women and children make up as much as 80 per cent of both groups and are particularly vulnerable to exploitation and ill treatment.
The breakdown of community and family norms means women and girls are without protection. In order to obtain basic necessities, many engage in survival sex, or submit to coerced unions in order to feed themselves and their families. Reports of exploitation from humanitarian workers and peacekeepers are well documented leaving many women with no other choice but to exchange their bodies for what should be rightfully theirs. Hungry, humiliated and unprotected, these women and girls are in no position to negotiate condom use—increasing the likelihood of infection with HIV/AIDS and other STDs. The separation of labour in many traditional cultures also means women and girls must leave the relative safety of the refugee camp in order to forage for firewood or collect water. This heightens the risk of attack from men both inside and outside the camp. Latrines located on the perimeter, poor security and bad lighting likewise increase opportunities for sexual predation, abduction and murder.
As well as carrying the burden of caring for children, the ill and disabled, competition for scarce food and resources put women and their children at another disadvantage: too often, food and other commodities are distributed to the presumed head of the household—in traditional societies, usually men. As well, studies show that where food is scarce, it is women and girl children who invariably wind up going without. The distribution of food directly to women would go a long way in preventing goods from being siphoned off and diverted elsewhere.25 Seeking female input during the camp planning phase, hiring more female NGO and peacekeeping personnel, as well as providing more equitable food distribution would help solve many of these problems. Despite these and other challenges, conflict can enable women to oppose and even redefine traditional gender roles. For many women, war can represent a unique opportunity to fight for what they believe in; to work outside the home; to become the main decision makers and heads of the household. As well, women may, for the very first time, organize and agitate for political change and an end to discriminatory attitudes.
Aftermath Along with the intensification of gender-specific violence during war, increased militarization and the long-term effects of civil unrest increase the vulnerability of women before and following hostilities. Unfair inheritance laws, lack of political rights, unequal access to aid, coupled with caretaking responsibilities for both young and old, limit mobility and opportunities for economic advancement or redress (where it exists) for crimes suffered. As well, prolonged exposure to violence often leads to habituation both in the community and at home. Domestic abuse, criminal activity and post conflict predation of various rogue elements all conspire to increase female vulnerability.
Although there has been some progress, peace building and reconstruction efforts don't go far enough to address the needs of women during and following conflict. Only recently have reconstruction and development efforts focused on gender issues, while inheritance laws in many developing countries leave many widowed women disinherited from their land and/or the family business. Thus they are left with the dual burden of being impoverished, yet responsible for the care, not only of their own children, but of the infirm and the elderly as well as children of murdered or ‘disappeared’ relatives. In Rwanda, where women now make up fully 70 per cent of the population, government policies and international aid programs continue to disappoint. Disinherited under customary law, many survivors have been left with the futile task of trying to access the bank accounts, pensions or property of disappeared, jailed or murdered spouses. “Someone once told me that it is better to live through a war than after a war” one woman bitterly told Human Rights Watch. “I understand that now.”26
To sleep with anger: domestic violence in post-conflict settings Recent research indicates that conflict fuels domestic abuse. Often, the celebration of hyper-masculinity that goes with militarization, coupled with the exposure to, and perpetration of, violence, makes it difficult to make the transition from violent to non-violent behavior at home. Enforced idleness, high unemployment rates, alcohol and drug abuse are also contributing factors. As stated earlier, conflict can also provide women with opportunities and freedoms not afforded them in peacetime. This can spawn resentment, which in turn can lead to spousal violence.
In one study undertaken in Cambodia, fully 75 per cent of women surveyed reported intimate partner abuse. A number reported being threatened by men brandishing small arms used during the war.27 In other post-conflict settings, investigators have reported even higher numbers. In Burundi, all married women surveyed reported suffering spousal abuse during their time as refugees.28 Making the peace Even at the best of times, achieving equality between men and women is fraught with difficulties. Gains that women may have made during hostilities have been rarely sustained in peacetime. Two steps forward can mean one step back—as evidenced in post-war Rwanda, Afghanistan and now, in Iraq. Even in societies where the women now comprise the majority, as in Afghanistan and post-genocide Rwanda, entrenched gender roles, the glorification of warrior culture, discriminatory inheritance rights and lack of redress too often means a return to a status quo of impoverishment, exploitation and despair.
A long-term commitment to gender equality in all aspects of peace-building—from the appointment of female peacekeeping personnel and high-ranking decision makers, to changing legal statutes that relegate women and girls to little more than chattel, is the only solution to longstanding marginalization that fuels gender-based violence and discrimination of all stripes. Moreover, although concentrating efforts on programs that aid women and girls are laudable and necessary, real change is impossible without bringing to justice the perpetrators of gender-based violence or focusing on the individuals, societal and political attitudes that encourage and reward attacks on women and girls.
Current human rights legislation more often than not defines sexual assault as a crime against 'honour;' thus diminishing the seriousness of such offences and denying survivors both justice and redress. Sexual violence is a crime against the individual. And too often it is the individual who is penalized—through official neglect; through outmoded attitudes that relegate survivors to the status of offender and through a justice system that continues to trivialize crimes perpetrated against women and girls.
"Many women begged to be killed during the genocide," says Esther Mujawayo, spokeswoman for the Rwandan Association for Widows of the April Genocide. "They were refused and told 'you will die of sadness'. We want to challenge them [the rapists/killers] and live. We don't want to remain the living dead."29
References
1. HRW: The war within the war. They went after my daughter 2.Ibid. 3. Women, War and Peace: The Independent Experts Assessment: Elisabeth Rehn and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, UNIFEM, 2002 p.11 4.No Safe Place: Burma's army and the rape of ethnic women: Betsy Apple and Veronika Martin, Refugees International, April 2003. p.7 5. The War within the war: Sexual violence against women and girls in Eastern Congo , Human Rights Watch, 2002, www.hrw.org/reports/2002/drc/ 6. Zimbabwe's torturers on the run , Alistair Leithead, BBC, April 17, 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/2956099.stm 7. Gender and conflict early warning: A framework for action, Susan Schmeidl with Eugenia Piza-Lopez, International Alert and the Swiss Peace Foundation, 2002. pp. 12 8. Shattered lives: Sexual violence during the Rwandan Genocide and its Aftermath , Human Rights Watch, 1996, pp. 10, www.hrw.org/reports/1996/Rwanda.htm 9. ibid pp2 10. Federal Republic of Yugoslavia: Kosovo - Gender-based violence against Kosovar Albanian women, HRW, 2000. pp. 3, www.hrw.org/reports/2000/fry/Kosov003-02.htm#TopOfPage 11. Ibid. pp. 4 12. Bosnia: Landmark Verdicts for Rape, Torture, and Sexual Enslavement, Human Rights Watch press release, Feb 22, 2001, www.hrw.org/press/2001/02/serbia0222.htm 13. We'll kill you if you cry: Sexual violence in the Sierra Leone conflict , Human Rights Watch, 2003. pp. 3, http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/sierraleone/ 14. War-related Sexual Violence in Sierra Leone: a population-based assessment , Physicians for Human Rights, 2002, pp. 5, www.phrusa.org/research/sierra_leone 15. Federal Republic of Yugoslavia: Kosovo - Gender-based violence against Kosovar Albanian women , HRW, 2000. pp. 4, www.hrw.org/reports/2000/fry/Kosov003-02.htm 16. Climate of fear: Sexual violence and abduction of women and girls in Baghdad, Human Rights Watch, July 2003. http://hrw.org/reports/2003/iraq0703 / 17. World Report on Violence and Health, The World Health Organization, 2002, pp 163, 18. "War-related Sexual Violence in Sierra Leone: a population-based assessment , Physicians for Human Rights, 2002, pp. 7, www.phrusa.org/research/sierra_leone 19. Shattered lives: sexual violence during the Rwandan Genocide and its Aftermath HRW/Africa, September 1996, pp. 23 20. Ibid 21. Overcoming Antimicrobial Resistance: year 2000 WHO infectious diseases report, Pat Leidl, The World Health Organization, ppxx 22. Civil Wars Kill and Maim People - Long After the Shooting Stops, Hazem Adam Ghobarah, Paul Huth, Bruce Russett, American Political Science Review, Vol 97, No 2, May 2003, pp. 199 23. UNIFEM citing "War-related Sexual Violence in Sierra Leone: a population-based assessment, Physicians for Human Rights, 2002, www.phrusa.org/research/sierra_leone 24. Helping refugees 2002: An introduction to the UNHCR , United Nations Commissioner for Refugees, pp. 9 25. Women, Peace and Security , United Nations, October 2002, pp. 28 26. Shattered lives: sexual violence during the Rwandan Genocide and its Aftermath HRW/Africa, September 1996, pp. 35 27. UNIFEM citing "Household survey on domestic violence" Project Against Domestic Violence (PADV), Phnom Penh, 1996 28. Women, Peace and Security , United Nations, pp. 27 citing World Report 1999 , Human Rights Watch 29. Interview with author, April, 2004