The difference is that in all four cases, sexual degradation and intimidation, often in public, were used as a strategy of ethnic or religious conflict itself. This use of rape as a premeditated act of warfare has challenged efforts by nations of the world to organize effectively to prevent and punish crimes against humanity. It has also prompted the creation of the world's first international criminal court. Largely because of the use of sexual assault in ethnic wars in the Balkans and Rwanda, the court has ranked rape as an internationally recognized war crime for the first time in history, alongside the violence against non-combatants, mistreatment of prisoners, torture and other unusual punishments. Now, a New York-based organization that aids women in poor nations and immigrant women in the US, said rape is now widespread because it is so effective in ethnic wars.
Rape is a psychological grenade thrown into the middle of daily life to provoke maximum terror.
Rather, the Serbs have made war a form of rape. Their intention from the beginning was not military but simply terroristic. The Serbian intention has been to rape whole cultures, to rape women and men, to rape social relationships going back five hundred years, to rape religion and art. Such incidents appear in each of the four US State Department reports on human rights violations in the former Yugoslavia. Over the last decade there has been some change among those who are most vulnerable.