The Quest for Post-Conflict Gender Justice

There is no scarcity of evidence of gender-related crimes committed on an astronomical scale in current or past conflicts around the world, despite the reluctance of victims to report the crimes and the disinclination of a majority of investigators and reporters to search for evidence of sexual violence. Sex crimes are exceedingly commonplace during periods of international and internal armed conflict, with the crimes committed both opportunistically and purposefully, randomly and calculatedly, and by persons in control or those out of control. Such crimes are committed regardless of whether there are orders or encouragement to commit rape or whether such assaults are expressly forbidden by superiors. Sexual violence is committed by military personnel and civilians alike on all sides of armed conflict, whether to achieve political and military objectives or simply for personal motivations or gratifications. Once considered a by-product of war, it is now recognized that women and girls are regularly and intentionally targeted for abuse, particularly sexual abuse. Evidence is incontrovertible that in conflicts as diverse as those in Sierra Leone, East Timor, Colombia, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Peru, Mozambique, Bangladesh, Congo, Nicaragua, Sudan, Bosnia, Haiti, Rwanda, Chechnya, Somalia, Guatemala, Angola, Argentina, Ethiopia, Iraq, and Cambodia, among a myriad of others, sexual violence is committed in strikingly comparable contexts.

Various forms of sexual violence, particularly rape and sexual slavery, are used methodically and strategically as weapons of war and instruments of terror. On the one hand, such violence is used as a tactic for deliberately destroying lives and terrorizing members of opposing sides, and on the other hand, it serves as fuel for soldiers as part of the war machinery. Sexual slavery, particularly in the form of forced marriage or enforced prostitution, is treated as a means of providing relatively safe, cheap, and convenient sexual services to the fighters. Sometimes women and girls are raped purportedly ‘to give the soldiers energy.' Hence, women are used and abused for multiple purposes during war and periods of mass violence, with two parallel objectives: to use sexual violence as a means to demoralize and destroy the opposition as an instrument of war; and to use sexual access as a means to entertain or reward the fighters as an engine of war, fuel that energizes and galvanizes the troops.

Women are regularly murdered after they are raped or otherwise sexually abused, and sometimes their death is an inadvertent, albeit seemingly irrelevant, consequence of the violence inflicted on their bodies and imprinted on their psyche. When victims of an opposing side are intentionally left alive, it is typically either because the perpetrators consider rape to be a fate worse than death or because the perpetrators intend to infect women with HIV/AIDS so that they will die a slow death, and in the interim spread the deadly virus to members of their own community. Reproductive crimes—ranging from sexual mutilation and forced sterilization to forcible pregnancy or abortion—are also remarkably pervasive during wartime, when women's bodies and their reproductive capacities serve as a battleground for injuring or eliminating outright an opposition group. When women and girls are murdered during armed conflict, their deaths often have a sexualized component, such as having their breasts cut off, fetuses ripped from their wombs, weapons thrust up their vaginas, or their sexual organs impaled. Sexual violence, and fear or threat thereof, inflicts widespread psychological harm on victims and others associated, however remotely, with the victim. Indeed, wartime violence has deliberately become sexualized as a means of inflicting physical or mental harm on members of the opposition group.

Impunity for the lengthy catalogue of sexual horrors committed exclusively or disproportionately against women and girls during armed conflict undermines humanitarian law, incites additional violence and violations, and endangers whole communities or groups. Rarely are perpetrators, facilitators, or complicit superiors of sexual violence held accountable for their crimes. Moreover, seldom are gender-related crimes included in reports of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (“TRC”) investigating gross violations of human rights and scarcely ever do victims of gender crimes receive any other form of judicial or quasi-judicial remedial measures, such as protective services or compensation.