Some scholars argue that the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide should state that mass rape is a genocidal crime.[17] Other scholars argue that genocidal rape is already included in the definition under article two[Note 1] of the convention.[15][18]Catharine MacKinnon argues that the victims of genocidal rape are used as a substitute for the entire ethnic group, that rape is used as a tool, with the target being the destruction of the entire ethnic group.[19]
Siobhan Fisher has argued that forced impregnation and not the rape itself constitutes genocide. She says, "Repeated rape alone is still 'just' rape, but rape with the intent to impregnate is something more."[9][20] Lisa Sharlach argues that this definition is too narrow because these mass rapes should not be defined as genocide based solely on those raped having been forcibly impregnated.[9]
Per the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1820 (declared on 2008) rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity or a constitutive act with respect to genocide.[21]
According to Amnesty International, the use of rape during times of war is not a by-product of conflicts but rather a pre-planned and deliberate military strategy.[22] In the last quarter of a century, the majority of conflicts have shifted from wars between nation states to communal and intrastate civil wars. During these conflicts the use of rape as a weapon against the civilian population by state and non-state actors has become more frequent. Journalists and human rights organizations have documented campaigns of genocidal rape during conflicts in former Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Liberia, Sudan, Uganda, and during the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.[23]
The strategic aims of these mass rapes are twofold. The first is to instill terror in the civilian population, with the intent to forcibly dislocate them from their land.[Note 2][24] Targeted rape has also been used to force those who might resist genocide into submission.[25] The second is to degrade the chance of possible return and reconstitution by having inflicted humiliation and shame on the targeted population and to decrease social cohesion of a targeted group. These effects are strategically important for non-state actors, as it is necessary for them to remove the targeted population from the land. Rape as genocide is well suited for campaigns which involve ethnic cleansing and genocide, as the objective is to destroy, or forcefully remove the target population, and ensure they do not return.[23]
One objective of genocidal rape is forced pregnancy, so that the aggressing actor not only invades the targeted population's land, but their bloodlines and families as well. However, those unable to bear children are also subject to sexual assault. Victims' ages can range from children to women in their eighties.[26][27]
Armin Wegner's description: "the Armenian women and girls are generally very beautiful. Looking at you is the dark [and] beautiful face of Babesheea who was robbed by Kurds, raped, and freed only after ten days; like a wild beast the Turkish soldiers, officers, soldiers, and gendarmes swept down on this welcome prey. All the crimes that had ever been committed against women, were committed here. They cut off their breasts, mutilated their limbs, and their corpses lay naked, defiled, or blackened by the heat on the fields."
Rape was widespread during the Armenian Genocide, which was committed by the Ottoman Turks. During the death marches of Armenian civilians through Anatolia in 1915, Turkish soldiers frequently raped and killed Armenian women and children. In many cases, Turkish and Kurdish civilians also participated in these crimes.[29] Turks took Armenian women and girls into sexual slavery or forced them into marriage. Those women forced into marriage also had to convert to Islam.[30] Some perpetrators believed that women and girls could be successfully assimilated into Muslim Turkish culture, unlike men and boys.[31] After the genocide ended, women and girls who had been forced into marriage often could not return to their former lives. They had no family left, no source of income, or otherwise feared the stigma of having married a Turk.[32] Additionally, Turks publicly raped the wives, daughters, and other female relatives of important Armenian men. In addition to dehumanizing the victims, these targeted rapes intimidated the Armenian leadership into submission and dissuaded them from resisting.[25] Some Armenian women and girls were sold as sex slaves. The Turkish soldiers stripped them naked and displayed them at auction. Their nudity in a conservative society served to further dehumanize them and strip them of agency. Many were forced into marriage or prostitution.[33]
During the Greek genocide, another of the late Ottoman genocides, Turkish troops and civilians abducted Greek village women and raped them for hours or days. Turkish villagers raped one woman for eight days in a row; she died soon after. One man, who protested the violation of his wife, was sodomized.[34] In the Pontos region, bands of brigands led by Topal Osman went from village to village, plundering, raping women, and killing at will.[3] As in the Armenian genocide, it was common for Turkish troops to kill the men and rape the women; the women often died later during the long marches to Syria. Massacres were especially prevalent along the Black Sea coast while the Russians invaded and the Turkish troops fell back. In one Pontic village, dozens of women and girls leapt into a river to avoid rape. Turkish troops rounded up women at Vazelon Monastery, a Greek Orthodox monastery, and raped them before killing them..[35] Many women and girls were also raped during the death marches to Syria.[4]
During Sayfo, or the Assyrian genocide, Turkish soldiers followed the same pattern: they massacred the young men and deported the women, children, and elderly. Many women were raped during deportation or sold to Muslim civilians as sex slaves.[36] Women were abducted and forced to convert to Islam.[37] In Urmia, which had a large Assyrian population before the genocide, both Turkish and Kurdish civilians raped or abducted Assyrian girls.[38] In one village, perpetrators subjected girls as young as eight to rape;[39] in another, girls as young as six or seven who had been hiding on a rooftop were raped.[7] Many rape victims later died. Turkish irregulars raped some women as they were dying.[40]
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) it is estimated that in 2011 alone there were 400,000 rapes.[41] In the DRC, genocidal rape is focused on the destruction of family and communities. An interview with a survivor gave an account of gang rape, forced cannibalism of a fetus taken from an eviscerated woman, and child murder.[42]
During the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, members of the Pakistani military and supporting Bihari and Razaker militias raped between 200,000 [43] and 400,000[44] Bangladeshi women in a systematic campaign of genocidal rape. Some women may have been raped as many as eighty times in a night.[45]
In the ongoing Darfur genocide the Janjaweed militias have carried out actions described as genocidal rape, with not just women, but children also being raped, as well as babies being bludgeoned to death and the sexual mutilation of victims being commonplace.[46]
A large portion of these rapes were systematized in a process where soldiers would search door-to-door for young girls, with many women taken captive and gang raped.[49] The women were often killed immediately after being raped, often through explicit mutilation[50] or by stabbing a bayonet, long stick of bamboo, or other objects into the vagina. Young children were not exempt from these atrocities, and were cut open to allow Japanese soldiers to rape them.[51]
On 19 December 1937, the Reverend James M. McCallum wrote in his diary:[52]
I know not where to end. Never I have heard or read such brutality. Rape! Rape! Rape! We estimate at least 1,000 cases a night, and many by day. In case of resistance or anything that seems like disapproval, there is a bayonet stab or a bullet... People are hysterical... Women are being carried off every morning, afternoon and evening. The whole Japanese army seems to be free to go and come as it pleases, and to do whatever it pleases.
During the Rwandan genocide the violence took a gender specific form, with women and girls being targeted in a systematic campaign of sexual assault. It is estimated that between 250,000 and 500,000 were victims of rape.[53][41] Those who survived the genocidal rape found themselves stigmatised, and many also discovered that they were infected with HIV. This has resulted in these women being denied their rights to property and inheritance as well as their employment chances being restricted.[54] The first woman charged and convicted for genocidal rape was Pauline Nyiramasuhuko.[55]
In 1996 Beverly Allen wrote Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia in which the term genocidal rape was first introduced, she used the term to describe the actions of the Serbian armed forces who had a policy of rape with the intention of genocide.[56] In her book she compares genocidal rape to biological warfare.[57] During the conflict in Bosnia Allen gave a definition of genocidal rape as "a military policy of rape for the purpose of genocide currently practiced in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia by the Yugoslav army the Bosnian Serb forces and the irregular Serb forces known as Chetniks".[58]
Coverage of the mass rapes during the ethnic cleansing carried out by the Serbian forces in the 1990s began the analysis over the use of rape as a part of genocide. Catharine MacKinnon argues that the mass rapes during the conflict "were a simultaneous expression of misogyny and genocide", and argues that rape can be used as a form of extermination.[Note 3][9][59]
The acts of violence which were committed against women during the Partition of India have also been cited as examples of genocidal rape. Dyan Mazurana et al argued that the "patterns of rape and sexual violence carried out [in the Tigray War] by the ENDF, the EDF and Amhara regional militia and special forces against Tigrayan civilians are consistent with acts of genocide, potentially conducted with the intent of destroying the Tigrayan people."[60]
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2"
↑ "In the context of genocide [...] violence against women may be aimed at the destruction of the integrity of the group through its women, who embody its genetic and cultural continuity."
↑ "It is also rape unto death, rape as massacre, rape to kill and to make the victims wish they were dead. It is rape as an instrument of forced exile, rape to make you leave your home and never want to go back. It is rape to be seen and heard and watched and told to others: rape as spectacle. It is rape to drive a wedge through a community, to shatter a society, to destroy a people. It is rape as genocide"
Related Research Articles
Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part.
Crimes against humanity are certain serious crimes committed as part of a large-scale attack against civilians. Unlike war crimes, crimes against humanity can be committed during both peace and war and against a state's own nationals as well as foreign nationals. Together with war crimes, genocide, and the crime of aggression, crimes against humanity are one of the core crimes of international criminal law, and like other crimes against international law have no temporal or jurisdictional limitations on prosecution.
The Armenian genocide was the systematic destruction of the Armenian people and identity in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Spearheaded by the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), it was implemented primarily through the mass murder of around one million Armenians during death marches to the Syrian Desert and the forced Islamization of others, primarily women and children.
Sexual violence is any harmful or unwanted sexual act or attempt to obtain a sexual act by violence or coercion, act to traffic a person, regardless of the relationship to the victim. This includes forced engagement in sexual acts, attempted or completed acts and occurs without the consent of the victim. It occurs in times of peace and armed conflict situations, is widespread, and is considered to be one of the most traumatic, pervasive, and most common human rights violations.
The Sayfo, also known as the Seyfo or the Assyrian genocide, was the mass slaughter and deportation of Assyrian/Syriac Christians in southeastern Anatolia and Persia's Azerbaijan province by Ottoman forces and some Kurdish tribes during World War I.
The Greek genocide, which included the Pontic genocide, was the systematic killing of the Christian Ottoman Greek population of Anatolia which was carried out mainly during World War I and its aftermath (1914–1922) on the basis of their religion and ethnicity. It was perpetrated by the government of the Ottoman Empire led by the Three Pashas and by the Government of the Grand National Assembly led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, against the indigenous Greek population of the Empire. The genocide included massacres, forced deportations involving death marches through the Syrian Desert, expulsions, summary executions, and the destruction of Eastern Orthodox cultural, historical, and religious monuments. Several hundred thousand Ottoman Greeks died during this period. Most of the refugees and survivors fled to Greece. Some, especially those in Eastern provinces, took refuge in the neighbouring Russian Empire.
Razakar Urdu: رضا کار, literally "volunteer"; Bengali: রাজাকার) was an East Pakistani paramilitary force organised by General Tikka Khan in then East Pakistan, now called Bangladesh, during the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971. The force committed war crimes during the war including massacring civilians, looting, and rape.
Androcide is a term for the hate crime of systematically killing men, boys, or males in general because of their gender. Not all murders of men are androcides in the same way that not all murders of women are femicides. Androcides often happen during war or genocide. Men and boys are not solely targeted because of abstract or ideological hatred. Rather, male civilians are often targeted during warfare as a way to remove those considered to be potential combatants, and during genocide as a way to destroy the entire community.
Hacı Topal Osman Ağa also known as Osman the Lame, was a Turkish officer, a militia leader of the National Forces, a volunteer regiment commander of the Turkish army during the Turkish War of Independence who eventually rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel, and was a perpetrator of the Armenian and Pontic genocides.
Rape during the Bosnian War was a policy of mass systemic violence targeted against women. While men from all ethnic groups committed rape, the vast majority of rapes were perpetrated by Bosnian Serb forces of the Army of the Republika Srpska (VRS) and Serb paramilitary units, who used rape as an instrument of terror and key tactics as part of their programme of ethnic cleansing. Estimates of the number of women raped during the war range between 10,000 and 50,000. Accurate numbers are difficult to establish and it is believed that the number of unreported cases is much higher than reported ones.
Wartime sexual violence is rape or other forms of sexual violence committed by combatants during an armed conflict, war, or military occupation often as spoils of war, but sometimes, particularly in ethnic conflict, the phenomenon has broader sociological motives. Wartime sexual violence may also include gang rape and rape with objects. It is distinguished from sexual harassment, sexual assaults and rape committed amongst troops in military service.
Armenian genocide survivors were Armenians in the Ottoman Empire who survived the genocide of 1915. After the end of World War I, many tried to return home to the Ottoman rump state, which later became Turkey. The Turkish nationalist movement saw the return of Armenian survivors as a mortal threat to its nationalist ambitions and the interests of its supporters. The return of survivors was therefore impossible in most of Anatolia and thousands of Armenians who tried were murdered. Nearly 100,000 Armenians were massacred in Transcaucasia during the Turkish invasion of Armenia and another 100,000 fled from Cilicia during the French withdrawal. By 1923, about 295,000 Armenians ended up in the Soviet Union, mainly Soviet Armenia; an estimated 200,000 settled in the Middle East, forming a new wave of the Armenian diaspora; and about 100,000 Armenians lived in Constantinople and another 200,000 lived in the Turkish provinces, largely women and children who had been forcibly converted. Though Armenians in Constantinople faced discrimination, they were allowed to maintain their cultural identity, unlike those elsewhere in Turkey who continued to face forced Islamization and kidnapping of girls after 1923. Between 1922 and 1929, the Turkish authorities eliminated surviving Armenians from southern Turkey, expelling thousands to French-mandate Syria.
During the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, members of the Pakistani military and Razakar paramilitary force raped between 200,000 and 400,000 Bengali women and girls in a systematic campaign of genocidal rape. Most of the rape victims of the Pakistani Army and its allies were Hindu women. Some of these women died in captivity or committed suicide, while others moved from Bangladesh to India. Imams and Muslim religious leaders declared the women "war booty”. The activists and leaders of Islamic parties are also accused to be involved in the rapes and abduction of women.
Forced pregnancy is the practice of forcefully impregnating a woman or girl without her consent. This act is often as part of a forced marriage, as part of a programme of breeding slaves, or as part of a programme of genocide. Forced pregnancy is a form of reproductive coercion.
The term international framework of sexual violence refers to the collection of international legal instruments – such as treaties, conventions, protocols, case law, declarations, resolutions and recommendations – developed in the 20th and 21st century to address the problem of sexual violence. The framework seeks to establish and recognise the right all human beings to not experience sexual violence, to prevent sexual violence from being committed wherever possible, to punish perpetrators of sexual violence, and to provide care for victims of sexual violence. The standards set by this framework are intended to be adopted and implemented by governments around the world in order to protect their citizens against sexual violence.
During the Rwandan genocide of 1994, over the course of 100 days, up to half a million women and children were raped, sexually mutilated, or murdered. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) handed down the first conviction for the use of rape as a weapon of war during the civil conflict, and, because the intent of the mass violence against Rwandan women and children was to destroy, in whole or in part, a particular ethnic group, it was the first time that mass rape during wartime was found to be an act of genocidal rape.
During the Armenian genocide, which occurred in the Ottoman Empire under the leadership of the CUP, Armenian women in the Ottoman Empire were targets of a systematic campaign of genocidal rape, and other acts of violence against women described by scholars as "instruments of genocide" including kidnapping, forced prostitution, sexual mutilation and forced marriage into the perpetrator group.
During the first and second conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), all armed parties to the conflict carried out a policy of genocidal rape, with the primary purpose being the total destruction of communities and families. Such was the violence directed at and carried out towards women that Human Rights Watch (HRW) described it as "a war within a war". HRW has reported that as of March 2013, civil conflict had reignited when the militia, March 23 Movement (M23), resumed hostilities following a ceasefire.
During the Sierra Leone Civil War gender specific violence was widespread. Rape, sexual slavery and forced marriages were commonplace during the conflict. It has been estimated by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) that up to 257,000 women were victims of gender related violence during the war. The majority of assaults were carried out by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). The Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), The Civil Defence Forces (CDF), and the Sierra Leone Army (SLA) have also been implicated in sexual violence.
The late Ottoman genocides is a historiographical theory which sees the concurrent Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian genocides that occurred during the 1910s–1920s as parts of a single event rather than separate events, which were initiated by the Young Turks. Although some sources, including The Thirty-Year Genocide (2019) written by the historians Benny Morris and Dror Ze'evi, characterize this event as a genocide of Christians, others such as those written by the historians Dominik J. Schaller and Jürgen Zimmerer contend that such an approach "ignores the Young Turks' massive violence against non-Christians", in particular against Muslim Kurds.
1 2 Shirinian, George (2017). "Background to the Late Ottoman Genocides". Genocide in the Ottoman Empire: Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks, 1913-1923. Berghahn Books. p.55. ISBN9781785334337. ...deadly bands of çetes (organized brigands), especially those led by Topal Osman, had been engaged in continuous shooting, plundering, and raping of the defenseless Greek villagers in the Pontus region. With Kemal's support, they stepped up their campaign with the objective of clearing the Greeks from the region by massacring the Greek population in cities such as Trebizond, Amasya, Pafra, Merzifon, and many others.
↑ Ihrig, Stefan (2016). Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismark to Hitler. Harvard University Press. pp.200–201. ISBN978-0-674-50479-0.
↑ "A Debt of Blood: An Eyewitness Account of the Barbarous Acts of the Japanese Invaders in Nanjing," 7 February 1938, Dagong Daily, Wuhan edition Museums.cnd.org
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![Armin Wegner's description: "the Armenian women and girls are generally very beautiful. Looking at you is the dark [and] beautiful face of Babesheea who was robbed by Kurds, raped, and freed only after ten days; like a wild beast the Turkish soldiers, officers, soldiers, and gendarmes swept down on this welcome prey. All the crimes that had ever been committed against women, were committed here. They cut off their breasts, mutilated their limbs, and their corpses lay naked, defiled, or blackened by the heat on the fields." Babesheea.png](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/e/eb/Babesheea.png/220px-Babesheea.png)
