Although we still hear that violence is as old as war itself and that women's...

Although we still hear that violence is as old as war itself and that women's bodies have been a battlefield for centuries throughout the world, the experience in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Rwanda served to scuttle the cynical acceptance of sexual violence as a natural phenomenon in armed conflicts, and of rape as a weapon of war of devastating power. The atrocities documented at the time and the survivors' testimonies of massive violations — rapes in camps, mutilations, sexual slavery and forced pregnancies — moved humankind's ethical consciousness, while sexual violence in armed conflicts seized being an invisible crime or an immutable tradition. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the Special Court for Sierra Leone decisively made progress in classifying sexual violence, in particular rape in conflict situations, as torture, a war crime and a crime against humanity. With complete clarity, the International Criminal Court Statute would subsequently establish that acts of rape, sexual slavery, prostitution, forced pregnancy or sterilization or any other form of sexual violence of comparable severity constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity.