Abstract
The study of sexual violence in war and conflict around the world has soared since the mid-1990s. The degree to which rape was used in wars in the former Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda, the attention it received from the world media, the evidence pouring out of these conflict zones, and the following prosecutions of perpetrators at International Criminal Tribunals have firmly put rape in war on the international agenda. Rape has long been a topic of feminist enquiry and activism. However, international peace building, transitional justice, and international criminal prosecution discourse and practice have only recently begun to focus on the issue, and despite increased attention in policy, legal, and academic spheres, rape in war nor gender-based violence in peace has mitigated or reduced in any significant way. This suggests there is still much we do not understand and do not know how to deal with.
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Notes
See: Erin Baines, “Gender, Justice and the Grey Zone,” Journal of Human Rights 10 (2011): 477–93;
Chris Coulter, Bush Wives and Girl Soldiers: Women’s Lives through War and Peace in Sierra Leone (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009);
Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern, “Why do Soldiers Rape? Masculinity, Violence and Sexuality in the Armed Forces in the Congo,” International Studies Quarterly 53 (2009): 495–518.
Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Ballantine Books, 1975), 4.
On variation in the use of rape in war, see: Elizabeth J.Wood, “Variation in Sexual Violence during War,” Politics & Society 34 (2006): 307–341;
Elizabeth J. Wood, “Sexual Violence during War: Variation and Accountability,” in Women and War , ed. Chantal de Jonge Oudraat, Kathleen Kuehnast, and Helga Hernes (Washington, DC: USIP, 2011).
In her history of rape and development of frameworks to understand rape, Bourke concludes that societal (including social, legal, and individual) definitions and meanings of rape shift over time, context, and geography: Joanna Bourke, Rape: Sex, Violence, History. (Emeryville: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007).
Inger Skjelsbæk , The Elephant in the Room. An Over view of How Sexual Violence came to be Seen as a Weapon of War (Oslo: Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), 2010).
Skjelsbæk, The Elephant in the Room, 27, and see also: Inger Skjelsbæk, The Political Psychology of War Rape: Studies from Bosnia-Herzegovina (London: Routledge, 2012), 61.
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Leiby, Digging in the Archives , 82; and, Maria Jennie Dador Tozzini, El otro Lado de la Historia: Violencia sexual contra Hombres: Peru 1980–2000, (Lima: Consejería en Proyectos (PCS), Ediciones Nova Print S.A.C., 2007).
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The distinction between rape and harassment of women in detention and arbitrary rape in the emergency zones was also observed by Robin Kirk in her early investigation into violence against women in the Peruvian conflict: Robin Kirk, Untold Terror: Violence against Women in Peru’s Armed Conflict (Human Rights Watch, 1992).
Edilberto Jiménez, Chungui: Violencia y trazos on de memoria, (Lima: Comision de Derechos Humanos (COMISEDH), 2005).
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Enloe, C. H., Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990),
Cynthia Cockburn, The Space between Us: Negotiating Gender and National Identities in Conflict (London: Zed Books, 1998),
Meredeth Turshen, “The Political Economy of Rape: An Analysis of Systematic Rape and Sexual Abuse of Women During Armed Conflict in Africa,” in Victims, Perpetrators or Actors?: Gender, Armed Conflict and Political Violence , ed. Caroline O. N. Moser and Fiona C. Clark (London: Zed Books, 2001).
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Former Senderista and soldier Lurgio Gavilán Sánchez speaks in his autobiography of prostitutes who regularly visited military basesand were referred to as charlis. Gavilán Sánchez, Memorias de un soldado desconocido. Autobiografía y antropología de la violence (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2012).
See also Ricardo Uceda, Muerte en el pentagonito: Cementerios secretos del Ejército Peruano (Bogota, Colombia: Planeta, 2004), 146.
Henríquez and Mantilla, Contra viento y marea; Henriquez, Cuestiones de género ; Uceda, Muerte en el pentagonito. See also the various testimonies by Manta and Vilca, Huancavelica, in Archive TRC Manta y Vilca, (2003), “Individual Investigations: Violación sexual en Huancavelica: Las bases de Manta y Vilca.” at Annex 52, discussed in more detail in: Jelke Boesten, “Marrying your Rapist: Domesticating War Crimes in Ayacucho, Peru,” in Gendered Peace: Women’s Struggles for Post-War Justice and Reconciliation , ed. Donna Pankhurst (New York: Routledge, 2007). Prostitution is here understood as providing sex in exchange for money, goods, or even physical safety. The line between coercion and consent is more than dubious, of course.
Chris Coulter, Bush Wives and Girl Soldiers: Women’s Lives through War and Peace in Sierra Leone (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Paperbacks, 2009).
On the character and construction of military masculinities, see Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Carol Cohn, “Missions, Men and Masculinities,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 2, no. 3 (1999);
and Paul Higate ed., Military Masculinities: Identity and the State (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003).
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Vesna Kesic, “A Response to Catherine MacKinnon’s Article: ‘Turning Rape into Pornography: Postmodern Genocide,” Hastings Women’s Law Journal 5 (1994): 267–280.
Lindsey Feitz and Joane Nagel, “The Militarization of Gender and Sexuality in the Iraq War” in Women in the Military and in Armed Conflict , ed. Helena Carreiras and Gerhards Kummel (Weisbaden: VS Verlag, 2008).
Joanna Bourke, “Torture as Pornography,” The Guardian , May 7, 2004; Jean Baudrillard, “Pornography of War,” Cultural Politics 1, no. 1 (2005): 23–26;
Nicholas Mirzoeff, “Invisible Empire: Visual Culture, Embodied Spectacle, and Abu Ghraib,” Radical History Review 95 (2006): 21–44.
Theidon, “Gender in Transition”; Theidon, “How We Learned to Kill Our Brother”; Theidon, Kimberly “Justice in Transition: The Micropolitics of Reconciliation in Postwar Peru,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 50, no. 3 (2006): 433–457. See also Wendy Coxshall, “Rebuilding Disrupted Relations: Widowhood, Narrative, and Silence in a Contemporary Community in Ayacucho, Peru” (PhD diss., University of Manchester, 2004); Caroline Yezer, “Anxious Citizenship: Insecurity, Apocalypse and War Memories in Peru’s Andes” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2007).
Carolyn Nordstrom, Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004); Turshen, “The Political Economy of Rape”; TRC Report.
Henríquez and Mantilla, Contra viento y marea ; Henríquez, Cuestiones de género ; Merecedes Cristósomo, “Tan buena era mi mama… ,” in Para no olvidar: Testimonios sobre la violencia en el Perú ed. Jorge Bracamonte, Beatriz Duda, and Gonzalo Portocarrero (Lima: Red para el Desarrollo de las Ciencias Sociales en Perú, 2003).
Jelke Boesten, “Pushing Back the Boundaries: Social Policy, Domestic Violence and Women’s Organisations in Peru,” Journal of Latin American Studies 38, no. 2 (2006): 355–378.
Kimberly Theidon, Intimate Enemies. Violence and Reconciliation in Peru (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 124.
John Lonsdale, “Agency in Tight Corners: Narrative and Initiative in African History,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 13, no. 1 (2000): 5–16.
Carisa Showden shows how the choices women make from within severe structural constraints can have adverse effects. She also shows that these choices have to be respected as agency, and that more attention is needed for how women’s choices come to bear: Carisa R. Showden, Choices Women Make. Agency in Domestic Violence, Assisted Reproduction and Sex Work (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
Anonymous , A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in a Conquered City (London: Virago, 2005).
Irina Anderson and Kathy Doherty, Accounting for Rape: Psychology, Feminism and Discourse Analysis in the Study of Sexual Violence (New York: Routledge, 2008).
Eduardo Toche Medrano, Guerra y democracia. Los militares Peruanos y la construccion nacional (Lima: DESCA, CLACSO, 2008)
Eduardo Gonzalez Cueva, “Conscription and Violence in Peru,” Latin American Perspectives 3 (2000): 88–102.
See also: Joanna Bourke, Rape: Sex, Violence, History (Emeryville: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007).
See R. W. Connell, The Men and The Boys (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000) for a further elaboration on collective and institutionalized masculinities.
Carol Cohn and Cynthia Enloe, “A Conversation with Cynthia Enloe: Feminists Look at Masculinity and the Men Who Wage War,” Signs 28, no. 4 (2003): 1187–1207;
Cynthia Enloe, The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993);
Gina Marie Weaver, Ideologies of Forgetting: Rape in the Vietnam War (Albany: State of New York University (SUNY) Press, 2010).
Carol Cohn, “Women and Wars: Towards a Conceptual Framework”, in Women and Wars , ed. Carol Cohn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013): 1–35, 27.
This is not unique for Peru, the same happened during the systematic rapes in Foca, former-Yugoslavia. See: Nicola Henry, “Witness to Rape: The Limits and Potential of International War Crimes Trials for Victims of Wartime Sexual Violence,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 3 (2009): 114–134.
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Boesten, J. (2014). Sexual Violence in War. In: Sexual Violence during War and Peace. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137383457_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137383457_2
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