6/29/2023 0 Comments Strategic war rape![]() ![]() ![]() In very few conflicts did rebels alone commit the crime. Thus, in conflicts in which rape occurred, both sides were often guilty. Rather, state collapse and weak law enforcement appeared to allow fighters to rape with impunity. Other notions about wartime rape - that it is more prevalent in ethnic conflicts and genocide, or in areas with greater gender inequality - were not borne out by the evidence. Cohen’s argument contradicts the common view that wartime rape stems from combatants’ “biological or latent desire to rape” or serves some purposeful military strategy. That would explain the extraordinary brutality and public nature of so many wartime rapes, and the frequency with which the rapists loudly bragged about their crimes. They joined in gang-rapes, Cohen believes, as a way to prove their loyalty and toughness to the group. The combatants, many of whom were physically or sexually assaulted when they were abducted, found themselves fighting alongside their attackers and other people they had no reason to like or trust, and who probably felt the same way about them. Groups that acquired new fighters through force - using press-ganging or kidnapping, both surprisingly common - were much more likely to rape. The single greatest indicator for rape in civil war was how the perpetrators had been recruited. But 15 of the wars had no reported rapes at all. Gang-rape is “much more common in war than in peacetime,” and culprits “are far less likely to have previously committed sexual offenses than are lone perpetrators.”Īfter studying all 86 major civil wars fought between 19, Cohen found that 53 involved reports of widespread rape in at least one year of conflict. While rape is commonplace in some conflicts, it is virtually absent in others, she writes in the American Political Science Review. A new study finds that assumption to be largely false.ĭara Kay Cohen, an assistant professor of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, encountered puzzling facts in the literature on sexual violence during war. Conventional wisdom has long held that rape is an inevitable evil of war, the unfortunate consequence of men taking advantage of chaos to satisfy their lusts. ![]()
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