Handbook on Sexual Violence (13 page)

Sexual violence and modern warfare

Britain escaped invasion during the two World Wars and so was spared the epidemic outbreaks of rape perpetrated by victorious troops, including British and Allied forces, against defeated civilian populations across Europe and the Far East. Nevertheless there was an increase in sexual crime in Britain during the war, by both the military and civilian men. Some children were placed in sexual danger when they were evacuated (Bourke 2007: 363).

Sexual violence in warfare is frequently a technique aimed at increasing the pain and humiliation of defeat. The rape and murder of women is also an insult directed at the masculinities of the vanquished, manifestly unable to defend their homes, families and society. Despite the fact that rape was a serious contravention of most modern Western military codes, it has been very frequently condoned by military authorities. Since until very recently combatant military forces have been composed almost entirely of men, the gender dimensions of wartime rape have been stark. Rape provided a key sexual component to military masculinities and emphasised the feminised vulnerabilities of the defeated. Very often the victims of sexual violence were then murdered and there are many examples of associated mutilation and torture. (Herzog 2009; Harris 1993; Horne and Kramer 2001; Lilly 2007; Seifert

1994, 1996).

During the Second World War American GIs in Europe raped around 14,000 civilian women, in England, France and Germany. There were around 3,500 rapes by American servicemen in France between June 1944 and the end of the war. Robert Lilly’s analysis explores the diversity of contexts of these rapes. In some situations rape was a cultural weapon or a matter of strategy. In others, it was part of masculine militarism or revenge against the enemy. Practices such as gang rape acted as recreation and social bonding among combatants, or were treated as a necessary libidinous release following combat. Between 110,000 and 900,000 women were raped by Russian soldiers in and around Berlin in 1945. The violence was indiscriminate. As well as Nazi supporters the victims included Jewish women and forced labourers. French soldiers committed rape on a large scale in Southern Baden Wittenberg. Moroccan mercenaries fighting with the remnants of the Free French Army in Italy were explicitly given licence to rape and plunder and British soldiers also raped women in France and Italy (Askin 1997: 59; Seifert 1996: 64; Bourke 2007: 360–1, 368–9; Lilly 2007).

Coerced sex was also part of a more general appropriation of female bodies which included forced prostitution and domestic labour. Many women chose prostitution rather than starvation or death, though many were killed anyway and others preferred suicide to the humiliation of rape (Askin 1997: 72, n. 238). Nazi attempts at genocide included forced sterilisations (of both women and men), abortions and other medicalised violence in the concentration camps. Following conflict, mixed-race children and their mothers have often faced hostility and discrimination since women’s sexual and reproductive capacities were seen as national resources. Some births arose out of consensual sexual relations, but others were the result of rape. Other women had had very constrained choices. The children in Europe fathered by black American

soldiers were especially visible. An estimated 5 per cent of all children born in Berlin between winter 1945 and summer 1946 had a Russian father (Ericsson and Simonsen 2005: 232–3). Although societies differed in the way that they addressed the issue, the original damage done by sexual violence was extended by the subsequent social stigma of miscegenation. The most recent large-scale example on European territory was the use of rape as a weapon of systematic genocide by Serbian forces in Bosnia–Herzegovina in 1992-3 (Stiglemayer 1994).

Following conflict the war crimes of the defeated attract punishment more readily than those of the victors, though some Allied troops were punished for sexual violence, including the execution of 70 American soldiers (Bourke 2007: 361). In 1945 tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo investigated major war crimes committed by the Axis Powers. However, unlike in Tokyo, Nuremberg paid little attention to crimes of sexual violence (including forced sterilisation and prostitution) (Askin 1997: 73, 88; Brouwer 2005: 6–7). It was a further half century before international law on sexual violence in warfare was substantially readdressed in a European tribunal. Meanwhile, prevailing international law had not prevented the genocide and sexual violence in Rwanda in 1994 (Melvern 2004: 251–4). The International Crime Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia argued for the explicit inclusion of wartime rape as a form of torture as well as a crime against humanity, and prosecuted rape in several trials (Hansen 2001). The Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998, applied from 2002) has expanded the specification of crimes against humanity to include a range of sexual offences, including sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilisation or other grave sexual violence (Brouwer 2005: 85). As with all changes in black-letter law, however, the direct effect on the violences in war and conflict cannot be expected to be great. In fact, on a global scale, if anything, in recent conflicts the distinction between combatants and non-combatants seems to have collapsed ever further, increasing people’s vulnerabilities to all the violences of conflict.

Modern sexual identities and sexual violence

Alongside the medicalisation of sexual deviancy, sex itself was retheorised. Early in the twentieth century, sexology was an innovative, secular, scientific explanation which acknowledged the importance of sexual pleasure for both women and men. However, because it privileged and naturalised a model of sexual practice based on sharp gender dichotomies it provided a new rationale for the well-established premise that masculinity was the active, aggressive principle and femininity involved submission. Plenty of men, now charged with the responsibility of delivering female sexual fulfilment, found new levels of anxiety about their sexual performance (Hall 1991). If women could be blamed for ‘frigidity’ men could also be held accountable for causing it (Bourke 2007: 307ff). At the same time many women found sexology’s insistence on female sexual pleasure liberating. However, the interwar popularisation of (Freudian) psychological models of human subjectivity and

the idea of female masochism meshed with sexology to naturalise violent intercourse. Psychologist Helene Deutsch argued that women desired and fantasised rape (Garvey 2005: 19–20, 22). As Havelock Ellis argued, ‘Rooted in the sexual instinct . . . we find a delight in roughness, violence, pain and danger’ (Ellis 1948: 95). Ordinary heterosexual practice seems to have concealed what would now be thought of as sexual violence or coercion, although at the time sexual violence was identified by its pathological nature, most clearly where it focused on an inappropriate sexual choice, especially children, or where it was accompanied by extreme physical violence. By the 1970s theories of victim precipitation elaborated a psychological framework for victim blaming (Garvey 2005: 29).

Feminism and changing analyses of sexual violence

In her 1913 pamphlet
The Great Scourge
Christabel Pankhurst advocated ‘Votes for Women and Chastity for Men’. The slogan sums up the position of first wave feminists; sexuality was a site of women’s oppression but this could be remedied by giving women the vote. The Victorian women’s movement had campaigned on prostitution and domestic violence and recognised the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) as a form of sexual violence (Mort 2000: Part 3). Into the interwar period feminists recognised the injustices in the way women and child victims of sexual abuse were treated by police and criminal justice. They took up first voluntary and later professional work as advocates and statement takers and became part of emergent penal welfare approaches. Between the wars, some feminists campaigned for birth control or to change the law to allow abortion (Hall 2000; chs 6, 7; Hall 2005), but overall feminist attention to sexuality decreased. The predominance of sexology and scientific legitimation of patriarchal models of sex constrained feminist analyses until the 1970s saw a ‘sea change’ (Garvey 2005: 17) in attitudes to sexual violence, prompted in no small measure by new wave feminism and encouraged by a climate of post-war liberalisation of culture and in a number of areas of law, though as we have seen it took decades before there was meaningful revision of sexual violence law.

Out of this post-war generation for whom better access to paid work, education, public institutions and contraception increased both their exposure to sexual violence and their articulateness about it, emerged the breakthroughs in gender theory which prioritised the violent potential in dominant heterosex. Kate Millet introduced the then startling idea that sexuality and intimacy had a politics and were infused by power (Millet 1970). Susan Brownmiller made the radical feminist argument that:

From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation in which
all
men keep
all
women in a state of fear.

(Brownmiller 1975: 14–15, emphasis in the original)

Brownmiller’s polemic was deliberately ahistoric. Her insistence that
all
men

were rapists meant that date, acquaintance and marital rape, and sexual harassment became more visible. However,
Against Our Will
located sexual violence as an issue for white women, ignoring how race doubled with gender in constituting sexual vulnerabilities. It veiled both the (far smaller amount of) sexual violence committed by women and victimisation of men as well as the inequalities in the punishment of sexual offenders. Nevertheless, this and other key second wave feminist texts mobilised a body of work which by the 1990s was to become a full and systematic engagement with gender oppression in dominant modes of sexuality in fields as diverse as pornography, media representation, criminal justice and the law. It is to no small extent due to feminist theorising and activism that the reactionary climate of 1970s and 1980s criminal justice has been eroded to the extent of changing the statute law, though, as the following
chapters of this volume make clear, those who experience sexual violence (women, men and children) are still not necessarily assured of justice.

Conclusion

In the Early Modern era the use of force was a prerogative of social status, and although both rape and sodomy were decried as serious crimes, in practice sexual violence and coercion was often hidden or unreadable, not least because dominant models of sexuality read submission as consent even when obtained by force. The medieval legal legacy conceptualised rape or
raptus
at least in part as a crime against the property men held in women’s bodies and reproductive capacity. The transition to modernity was marked by changes from the later eighteenth century which gave greater value to masculinities that were aggressively heterosexual, although the potential for violence in these sexual cultures was glossed by romance and narratives of seduction. Although changes in sexual practices cannot necessarily be directly substantiated from cultural change, if valorised masculinities aimed to distance themselves from those whose same-sex practices branded them as ‘sodomites’ the outcome was to provide an increasingly sexualised rationale for male sexual predation. By the middle of the nineteenth century, dominant masculinities were committed to the chivalrous protection of female chastity but this also had the effect of containing and policing female sexuality in the name of family, respectability and social order. The nineteenth-century law and criminal justice system pursued social order through a civilising offensive against visible (male) violence. Its treatment of sexual violence was more contradictory. Because female sexuality was thought to be inherently unstable, dangerous and often threatening to respectable masculinities, women and girls complaining of sexual violence were frequently disbelieved and treated harshly. However, the project to police ‘uncivilised’ men meant there could also be chivalric gestures to ‘protect’ demonstrably chaste female victims. The location of the injury caused by sexual violence had shifted over time, from the social reputation of the Early Modern victim to the violence done to the victim’s moral status by the late nineteenth century; moral status was heavily predicated on sexual chastity and the victim was gendered feminine.

As well as the law, other professions developed in the nineteenth century. In particular medicine, psychiatry and subsequently psychology claimed authority to speak out (not least as expert witnesses in court) on criminality, on sexuality and the signs of both sexual violence and sexual deviance on bodies and minds. One fairly early outcome was that by the 1880s homosexuality was established as a deviant social identity (rather than a sexual practice) and further criminalised, making sexual violence against men even more opaque before the law. By the interwar period homosexuality had been bundled into a wide range of sexually violent offences which were held to be in some measure amenable to medical or psychiatric interventions. At the same time, sexology was finding new, scientific ways to normalise violence in heterosex while victims of same-sex violence were manifestly culpable through their own deviance.

There were, of course, broader effects of the development of modern subjectivities which valued individuality and the centrality of the psyche. This view of subjectivity idealised constructions of sexuality associated with intimacy, equality and trust, hence sexual violence could be understood to inflict psychological damage and violate key aspects of the self irrespective of physical injury or social reputation. As Joanna Bourke argues, ‘sexual practices have changed dramatically – boundaries between normal sex and abuse have also shifted’ (Bourke 2007: 413). Part of this process has involved the (belated) recognition of sexual violence against men and the few women perpetrators. Modern subjectivities were also the prerequisite for second wave feminist theory on sexual violence. The concept of a continuum of sexual violence in its fullest sense is therefore most strongly applicable to modern society. Politically this concept challenged the prevailing assumptions of criminal justice, the police and sections of public opinion. These remained shaped by the nineteenth-century idea of moral violence which in the later twentieth century still dealt in outdated notions of sexual chastity as a measure of personal and social worth. In their most reductive forms such ideas continue to inform the popular myths which neutralise violence in sexual relations, and which some juries, police, criminal justice and medical professionals still believe.