Rape as a weapon of war

Photographic Slideshow: Rape in the DRC

Rape in war is as old as war itself. After the sack of Rome 16 centuries ago Saint Augustine called rape in wartime an “ancient and customary evil”. For soldiers, it has long been considered one of the spoils of war. Antony Beevor, a historian who has written about rape during the Soviet conquest of Germany in 1945, says that rape has occurred in war since ancient times, often perpetrated by indisciplined soldiers. But he argues that there are also examples in history of rape being used strategically, to humiliate and to terrorise, such as the Moroccan regulares in Spain’s civil war.


For combatants who know little about each other, complicity in rape can serve as a bond. The Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone, most of whose members say they were kidnapped into its ranks and then raped thousands during the civil war, is a case in point. Ms Cohen argues that armed groups that are not socially cohesive, particularly those whose fighters have been forcibly recruited, are more likely to commit rape, especially gang rape, so as to build internal ties.

For the victims and their families, rape does the opposite. The shame and degradation of rape rip apart social bonds. In societies where a family’s honour rests on the sexual purity of its women, the blame for the loss of that honour often falls not upon the rapist, but the raped. In Bangladesh, where most of the victims were Muslim, the use of rape was not only humiliating for them as individuals but for their families and communities. The then prime minister, Mujibur Rahman, tried to counter this by calling them heroines who needed protection and reintegration. Some men agreed but most did not; they demanded sweeteners in the form of extra dowry payments from the authorities.

In 2008 the UN Security Council officially acknowledged that rape has been used as a tool of war.The laws and customs of war are clear. But in many parts of the world, in the Hobbesian anarchy of irregular war, with ill-disciplined private armies or militias, these norms carry little weight.

But rape in war is not inevitable. In El Salvador’s civil war, it was rare. When it did occur it was almost always carried out by state forces. The left-wing militias fighting against the government for years relied on civilians for information. You can rape to terrorise people or force them to leave an area, says Elisabeth Wood, a professor at Yale University and the Santa Fe Institute, but rape is not effective when you want long-term, reliable intelligence from them or to rule them in the future.


Some groups commit all kinds of other atrocities, but abhor rape. The absence of sexual violence in the Tamil Tigers’ forced displacement of tens of thousands of Muslims from the Jaffna peninsula in 1990 is a case in point. Rape is often part of ethnic cleansing but it was strikingly absent here. Tamil mores prohibit sex between people who are not married and sex across castes (though they are less bothered about marital rape). What is more, Ms Wood explains, the organisation’s strict internal discipline meant commanders could enforce these judgments.


(Economist: Violence Against Women)