From: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu (Rich Winkel)
Subject: Rape in war: enforcing power
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: PACH
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 09:15:10 GMT

The ACTivist Volume 9 #1, January 1993.

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/** gen.newsletter: 129.7 **/
** Written 11:44 pm  Jan  9, 1993 by web:act in cdp:gen.newsletter **
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.

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. 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."

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.

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

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. 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."
** End of text from cdp:gen.newsletter **

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