From: dan@cubmol.bio.columbia.edu (Daniel Zabetakis)
Subject: Re: Rape and War
Organization: Columbia University, Dept. of Biological Sciences.
Date: Sat, 23 Jan 1993 19:02:20 GMT

In article <1993Jan23.031117.7505@cs.ucla.edu> pierce@lanai.cs.ucla.edu (Brad Pierce) writes:
>
>RAPE IN WAR -- ENFORCING POWER
>
>In recent months, reports of the systematic rape of Bosnian women 
>in detention camps have seized the attention of peace and women's 
>groups around the world. Nothing can lessen the horror of this 
>situation; but they are far from an isolated case.

> Rape has always been
> an institutionalized part of war; rape in wartime is always to a large 
>extent systematic and deliberate. The raping of women is, symbolically, 
>one of the essential means of gaining control of a given territory and its
> population.

   This is overstating the case. The danger is of course, that by overstating
you loose sympathy and credibility among the general populace. I doubt you
could find much evidence that rape is always systematic in war. There have
been times when some nation has specifically encouraged rape as a means to
spur it's troops. We need to recognize this, and not overstate the frequency,
and help our civilization come to terms with  the truth so that we will
appropriately and negatively. It won't help if a small group is strongly
against war-rape, and the larger group doesn't or refuses to know that it
does happen.
   A training officer will tell you that a well trained and disciplined
army should have a very low rate or criminal activity. It is armies that
are undisciplined that have problems with rape (and murder and desertion).
   Still:

      As the Red Army approached the borders of Germany the propaganda
      was intensified and as an act of policy the troops were told that
      personal property and German women were thiers by right and that
      they were not accountable by law for civil crime committed in
      Germany.
                              (Albert Seaton, e-mail for reference)

 And this quote from Soviet propaganda:

      Kill! There is nothing that is innocent in the German. Neither in
      the living nor in the unborn. Follow the directive of Comrade Stalin
      and trample into the groud forever the Fascist beast in his cave.
      Break by force the racial haughtiness of German women! Take them as
      your lawful prey! Kill, you brave advancing Red soldiers!

   We can see why the soviets used this sort of inducment, and why it was
effective if we look at the nature of the German occupatin of Eastern
Europe. It is the cycle of violence that we need to break. Guy Sajer: "War
always reaches the depths of horror because of idiots who perpetuate
terror from generation to generation under the pretext of vengance".

>
>Women working on violence hot-lines in former-Yugoslavia stress 
>that rape is used in several ways to wage war -- both as an act of war 
>in itself, and as a standard feature of nationalist propaganda.

   I can't see how rape can be a form of propaganda.

> They 
>stress that rapes have been committed against women of all 
>nationalities, and by men from all military and paramilitary groups, 
>as well as the civilian population. Though we can be fairly certain that
> Muslim women are disproportionately among the victims, and Serbian
> paramilitaries and militias disproportionately among the rapists, the 
>women of the SOS Telephone in Belgrade remind us that rape is "first 
>and foremost a crime against women. Rape is a form of controlling 
>women which men knew before they started fighting each other."
>
>Women from the SOS Telephone have isolated certain characteristics 
>they see as particular to rape in wartime. First, it is a public event. 
>Frequently, the women are raped in front of their families and 
>neighbours. "This becomes an act against her husband/father/nation, 
>not against her body," writes Stasa Zajovic. "Through humiliation and
> destruction of the enemy's property, the power of the warrior is 
>enforced."
>
>Second, war rapes are usually mass rapes -- "boys do it together 
>and in mutual solidarity."
>
  I think this is overstating things again. Although there are mass
rapes, I would be suprised to find that most rapes were mss rapes.

>Third, the rape frequently ends with the murder of the woman. 
>Sometimes it is hard to know if the rape or the murder was the first 
>motive; the two are so tangled together. Yayori Matsui of the Asian 
>Women's Network notes that when the Iranian army took captives 
>during the war with Iraq, the women were routinely raped before 
>they were killed because "if they died as virgins they might go to 
>heaven."
>
>Finally, women who become pregnant after war-rapes often have 
>even less access to abortion than other unwillingly pregnant women, 
>and may be forced to bear the child of the rape. This is connected, 
>of course, to the clear tendency for women to be deprived 
>reproductive rights during wartime, when access to birth control 
>and abortion are commonly restricted.
>
   This is a pretty strange paragraph. It seems that the author is
confusing the western (particularly US) debate on abortion with the horrors
of war. It's as if only by bringing up the issue of abortion here that
middle class citizens (safe in thier homes) can feel a part of the suffering
of other people. Debates on birth control and abortion seem out of place.

>The institutionalization of rape as part of war is not by any means 
>separate from the invariable increase of prostitution in wartime, 
>or indeed around military bases at any time.

   All sex is rape?

> War *requires* 
>prostitution for the constant reinforcement of the 'masculinity' of 
>the soldiers.

   Does this apply to female soldiers as well? Or did you conveniently
forget about the contributions made by women in national emergancies.
Don't degenerate into anti-male slavering and forget about women.


> Women may be drafted into military prostitution by 
>sheer force, like the Korean "comfort women" or the Karen women 
>porters in Burma. Or women who have lost their families, husbands, 
>lands or livelihoods in war may be forced into prostitution as their 
>only means of survival; like the large number of women who have 
>fled Burma and become prostitutes in Thailand.
>
  Or women may just be being prostitutes because that is what they want
to do. Two French official prostitutes were recommended for the Croix
de Guerre in Indo-China. From Acts of War: "Brothels catered to the needs
of French soldiers in two World Wars, and far-flung garrisons were sustained
by [brothels] with the specific aim of cutting down on rape, desertion, and
disease".

>It is significant that this increase in prostitution has been found to
> accompany not only 'conventional' armies, but United Nations 
>peacekeeping troops -- something mentioned, at the War Resisters'
> International Women's Conference in November, by women from 
>as far apart as Cambodia and ex-Yugoslavia. Men with guns, it seems, 
>are pretty much like other men with guns.

   If you can find a group of men that don't like sex, send them to the
front. Until then, stop whining about prostitutes and armies.

> And, as Stasa Zajovic 
>writes, "in any moment, the warrior must never forget which gender 
>he belongs to, which is the gender of the gun."

     And for female soldiers?  Oh, well, forget about them again?

DanZ

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