Embodiment, Authority and the International Criminalization of Sexual Violence against Women1

Abstract: This article analyzes interviews with African American women about their work prosecuting sexual and gender based violence at international tribunals. The analysis distinguishes abolitionist and early feminist themes from psychologized human rights discourse on trauma. Thus, these feminists avoid pathologizing victims, unlike much policy discourse on trauma and crisis intervention. In 1999 Women and Therapy published interviews with women involved in international criminal prosecution of rape in a special issue devoted to atrocities against women in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. This article analyzes the texts of two of these interviews with African American women. The first is with Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia between 1997 and 1999 and an original drafter of its rules. McDonald also oversaw genocide cases before the Rwanda Tribunal. The second is with Patricia Viseur-Sellers, a Legal Adviser on Gender Related Crimes and Senior Acting Trial Attorney for the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. I am interested in two premises running through these interviews that articulate both old and new political discourses of bodily autonomy which different generations of feminists have appropriated in order to publicly assert female sexual freedom: firstly, the themes of embodiment as a source of political knowledge and of bodily violation as a question of freedom; secondly, the conflation of ideals about psychological health with ideals of individual freedom, bodily integrity and democratic politics. Both women speak of slavery, mass war crimes, rape, torture and genocide as similar kinds of traumatic political processes, which not only cause individual psychological problems but also give rise to further social violence. My analysis distinguishes the classically abolitionist themes, which inspired women's organizations to take up the question of sexual autonomy from late twentieth century psychologized human rights discourse while also showing the historical continuities within feminist theorizing on the politics of sexual violence. Female embodiment and political authority on the government of women's issues McDonald and Viseur-Sellers speak of their bodily empathy for victims of atrocity, particularly sexual atrocity during foreign conflict, as a source of authoritative knowledge that informed their legal thinking. When asked about how they found listening to evidence of sexual violence during the Yugoslav and Rwanda tribunals, both women emphasize their bodily empathy with female victims of rape specifically, if obliquely, in terms of having a vagina and not a penis. They speak of female embodiment as a source of knowledge that makes them more likely to notice sexual violence. McDonald puts it this way: As a woman, I can feel the act of rape. I can empathize with it. Men look at it differently, if they are sensitive. It is almost as though they see themselves in the shoes of the perpetrator, and they see more the damage that can be wrought, because they could be a perpetrator themselves. I feel, as a potential recipient, that I can feel the pain more. I don't want to be too graphic, but I can feel it in my body more than they can. (Sharratt & McDonald, 1999, pp. 32-33) McDonald (1999) tells of how a male prosecutor failed to prosecute rape in indictments he wrote based on evidence before the Yugoslav Tribunal. When queried, he claimed there was no support for such charges in the evidence. McDonald went through the materials herself finding "numerous statements referring to rape" by witnesses who said they would testify before the Tribunal if called. When she showed the prosecutor her findings he apologized; however, she had seen no movement on the issue since then, even though the man in question voiced a commitment to prosecuting sexual crimes (Sharratt & McDonald, 1999, p. …