Vulnerable Women: A Critical Reflection on Human Rights Discourse and Sexual Violence (original) (raw)
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Rethinking ‘Rape as a Weapon of War
Feminist Legal Studies, 2009
One of the most significant shifts in current thinking on war and gender is the recognition that rape in wartime is not a simple by-product of war, but often a planned and targeted policy. For many feminists ‘rape as a weapon of war’ provides a way to articulate the systematic, pervasive, and orchestrated nature of wartime sexual violence that marks it as integral rather than incidental to war. This recognition of rape as a weapon of war has taken on legal significance at the Rwandan and Yugoslav Tribunals where rape has been prosecuted as a crime against humanity and genocide. In this paper, I examine how the Rwanda Tribunal’s record of judgments conceives of rape enacted as an instrument of the genocide. I consider in particular how the Tribunal’s conception of ‘rape as a weapon of war’ shapes what can be known about sexual violence and gender in the Rwandan genocide and what cannot, the categories of victims legally recognised and those that are not, and the questions pursued, and those foreclosed, about the patterns of violence before and during the genocide.
2017
The following work shall critique the bodies of the laws of armed conflict and international criminal law for their inadequacy in addressing sexual assault during wartime through inappropriate measures to define, incorporate, and progressively interpret international statute to encompass sexual assault as a global crime. In order to illustrate this point one provides a socio-historic examination of the international legal development of sexual assault and an analysis of what makes it a ‘gendered’ crime. The second section shall then critically assess attempts to prohibit sexual assault in the Geneva Conventions, and how its recognition and prosecution under ‘grave breaches’ can be problematic. The third section then examines the decisions made at the ICTY and ICTR to define rape under “greater” crimes such as genocide and crimes against humanity. The overall evaluation of the above shall provide a socio-legal account of the woman’s subordinate and decentralized status in internatio...
Human Rights Policy Paper: Rape as a Tactic of War
2010
This paper reports on rape used as a tactic of war, outlining the scope of the problem and introducing policy options to address the issue on a global scale. Policy options targeted at relief services include increasing direct aid through funding fistula surgeries, building rural hospitals, and providing skills training for women awaiting surgery. Additional policy options addressing the problem at its root include legislative changes to stop impunity at the International Criminal Court, revising the Convention on Genocide to include sex and gender, utilization of devices such as the Rape aXe, and changing the culture of misogyny through educational rights campaigns.
Feminist Perspectives on the International Prosecution of Conflict-related Gender-based Crimes
Journal of International Criminal Justice, 2022
Feminist legal scholars played a prominent role in surfacing gender-based crimes and developing the international criminal justice system in the last three decades, from as early as the first horrific reports of the systematic mass rape of mainly Bosnian Muslim women throughout the Yugoslav dissolution war of 1992–1995. Due to the failure of the international criminal tribunals and courts to adequately prosecute wartime rape and other forms of sexual violence in the past three decades, gender-based crimes were inflicted on a massive scale as an integral part of ethnic and civil armed conflicts, by both enemies and supporters, in Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Sierra Leone, and other countries recently torn by sectarianism and civil war, particularly Libya and Syria. As a result of the rampant mass rape that prevailed in conflicts over the past three decades, international criminal law has witnessed unprecedented developments, including the emergence of several ad hoc international criminal courts (ICCs) and tribunals, as well as the establishment of the ICC. These prosecuted wartime rape and other forms of sexual violence, for the first time, as crimes of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Simultaneously, this period has witnessed the publication of substantial legal scholarship underlining these developments, including the books under review. The significance of these carefully selected books lies in their study of the above crimes from several doctrinal and methodological angles, which together constitute an in-depth analysis that answers many complex questions about what these crimes are, why they are committed, how to resist them, how to bring perpetrators to justice, as well as the obstacles to accountability that have helped perpetrators enjoy impunity.
The fixation on wartime rape: feminist critique and international criminal law
Since the early 1990s, wartime rape has been successfully prosecuted as a war crime, a crime against humanity and a crime of genocide. Feminist scholars, however, warn that the unprecedented attention to wartime sexual violence within international criminal law has had wide-ranging and unintended consequences. The aim of this article is to examine the heightened consciousness around wartime sexual violence and its ascendancy as a crime against ‘humanity’. The article draws attention to two discourses. The first is the feminist political project, which sought to delineate wartime rape as a crime of grave magnitude that warranted explicit treatment under international criminal law; the second is the postmodernist feminist discourse, which questions the desirability of fixating on sexual violence against women in conflict. The point of this article is not to situate myself in either camp but rather to examine the power of international criminal law to pronounce meaning, demarcate the gravity of crimes and silence alternative stories. I will argue that due to the impassioned political controversy over rape within populist, scholarly and legal realms, not only are the substantive problems associated with rape prosecutions often left obscured but problematic rape hierarchies are reified and victim experiences further marginalised.
Rape as a Tactic of War: Human Rights Policy Proposals
This paper reports on rape used as a tactic of war, outlining the scope of the problem and introducing policy options to address the issue on a global scale. Policy options targeted at relief services include increasing direct aid through funding fistula surgeries, building rural hospitals, and providing skills training for women awaiting surgery. Additional policy options addressing the problem at its root include legislative changes to stop impunity at the International Criminal Court, revising the Convention on Genocide to include sex and gender, utilization of devices such as the Rape aXe, and changing the culture of misogyny through educational rights campaigns.