Exploring the Intersection: Women’s Bodies, Warfare, and International Law

Introduction

Sexual violence against women in times of war is a grave violation of human rights and a global concern. The weaponisation of women’s bodies throughout history has been a disturbing phenomenon wherein women are exploited, objectified, and used as tools to advance various political, social, and military agendas. Sexual violence is used in war, occupation, and conflict zones worldwide.¹ Sexual violence is political violence that maims people and intimidates populations.² Violence against women is defined as any gender-based violence that causes bodily, sexual, or psychological harm.³ Sexual assault has been shown to affect mental, physical, and behavioural health, family functioning, and economic and social well-being.⁴ According to the International Protocol on the Documentation and Investigation of Sexual Violence in Conflict, ethnic, religious, original residents, and civilians are the main targets of sexual violence.⁵ The twentieth century saw a rise in the “rape as a weapon of war” paradigm, most notably with the events in Rwanda, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which will be discussed later in the article. According to this narrative, the military frequently uses rape as a tactic to inflict agony and suffering on the opposing side.⁶ Others say that rape is a tool and has a far larger agenda when used systematically,⁷ while others claim that rape occurs because accountability and oversight structures deteriorate during combat.⁸ This article critically examines the multifaceted issue of sexual violence perpetrated against women during armed conflicts and delves into international law’s role in preventing and addressing this heinous crime.

Understanding the relationship between war and rape

Marx utilised the conflict theory to illustrate power struggles inside power hierarchies. Conflict theory helps explain how sexual violence can be weaponised when men control authority, institutions, and resources, making women targets of rape, sexual violence, and forced female genital mutilation. Wartime rape is sensitive and gendered. According to Brownmiller, a soldier who rapes an enemy woman symbolises his power and dominance over the defeated soldiers.⁹ Raped women’s bodies become a “ceremonial battlefield”. She also claims that sexual abuse breaks the enemy mentally and physically. Rape, a symbol of cruelty, shows who wins and loses. Thus, victorious troops can utilise women as rewards. Over two hundred thousand Rwandan women were raped and sexually tortured, while approximately sixty thousand Bosnian women and girls were impregnated and imprisoned in rape camps until they could not have abortions.¹⁰ MacKinnon calls rape “systematic and group-based”; he claims State-armed actors intentionally rape.¹¹ Rape occurs collectively, he adds. Commanders accept it to attain political goals.¹² Rape has a political purpose. Rape showed a group’s power, domination, and ethnic supremacy. Rape was central to ethnic cleansing in Bosnia.¹³ Varrasso claims that belligerent forces rape of women has medical and societal implications.¹⁴ A prime example is the DRC. Armed forces that rape enemy civilians want to infect them with HIV/AIDS to demoralise and terrorise them. Thus, warriors may infect foetuses by spreading these viruses. Culture views these half-blooded babies as unrepresentative of their community. The winning side shows their superiority by raping the victims, pushing them out of their social circle. Varrasso’s point applies to the DRC again. In her investigation, she cites Congolese military terms. The soldier says war means raping women to fight the enemy. As mentioned above, rape was considered a key factor in both wars. Finally, State armed forces rape affects performance. The violence of the fight makes rape important to discuss. Sexual violence helps certain ethnic groupings and actors gain wartime superiority.

Contemporary cases

Israel-Palestine conflict

Israeli prisons and jails hold 4500 Palestinians.¹⁵ Since 1948, Israel has weaponised sexual assault against Palestinian women.¹⁶ The Palestine Central Bureau of Statistics (2019) reports that 5 million Palestinians are under military occupation.¹⁷ Supporters of Israel utilised sexual violence in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.¹⁸ The 1948 Nakba (translated as “the catastrophe”) evicted 7,00,000 Palestinians from their homes and land via force, fear, and flight.¹⁹ The Israeli soldiers propagated rumours of rape or participated in gang and individual rapes of Arabs to instil fear and flight.²⁰ On 9-12-1948, two Israeli troops raided Haji Suleiman Daoud’s house and abducted his 18-year-old daughter, according to the Red Cross. The daughter disappeared for 17 days. Scholar Shalhoub-Kevorkian found that Palestinian women she interviewed often recounted rape and sexual violence when discussing their 1948 exodus.²¹ Al Arabiya stated that Israeli historian Benny Morris was “surprised” by the many reported rapes after seeing some of the closed archive documents.²² Seniora claims that Israel uses sex and honour to silence Palestinian women’s political engagement.²³ In contrast, Al Talaa’s study on Israeli jailed women’s coping strategies found that public life and belonging improved women’s well-being and resilience, and their patriotism was linked to resilience.²⁴

Russia-Ukraine conflict

The UN Human Rights Watch, and La Strada Ukraine are documenting sexual abuse in Ukraine. So have the Ukrainian officials. “The cases we documented amount to unspeakable, deliberate cruelty and violence against Ukrainian civilians”, Human Rights Watch Europe and Central Asia Director Hugh Williamson wrote last month.²⁵ “Rape, murder, and other violent acts against people in the Russian forces custody should be investigated as war crimes.” “One of them is reports of gang rape, which is actually very common in wartime”, she says. “In fact, gang rape in particular is by far the most widely reported form of rape during periods of conflict. And that is in stark contrast to peacetime, where gang rape is relatively rare, even in places where we know rape to be quite common.” Lack of concealment of such crimes is another worrying tendency she has found. She said offenders may kill victims or witnesses to bury evidence in such situations. While information is scarce, Cohen says Russian soldiers brazenness shows leaders are “aware of what is happening”. “It does not suggest … individual soldiers going off to engage in opportunistic sexual violence. It suggests something that is at the very least being tolerated by the command, if not ordered”, says. She cites Bucha violence. For the BBC, Ukrainian Human Rights Ombudswoman Denisova said, “About 25 girls and women aged 14 to 24 were systematically raped during the occupation in the basement of one house in Bucha. Nine of them are pregnant. Russian soldiers told them they would rape them to the point where they would not want sexual contact with any man, to prevent them from having Ukrainian children.”²⁶ Cohen says this reminds her of the 1990s Balkan Wars in Bosnia, when women were raped and impregnated.²⁷ Bucha’s atrocities constitute “genocide wrapped in gender-based sexual violence”, noted UC Irvine history Professor Sharon Block. “The soldiers could have killed the women and girls to prevent reproduction. But they chose to inflict sexual harm as a sign of their power.” Russian officials say their military campaign in Ukraine is being misconstrued and that Ukrainian forces “staged” massacres for western media.²⁸

International Human Rights instruments and tribunals

The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights estimates 20,000 women were sexually abused in Yugoslavia between 1992 and 1994.²⁹ Women were imprisoned, questioned, gang-raped, disfigured, and forced into pregnancies to change the region’s ethnicity. These crimes prompted UN Security Council Resolution 827 (Chapter VII of the UN Charter) to create the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 1993. The UN Security Council specifically said that it was “appalled by allegations of widespread, coordinated and systematic incarceration and rape of women”, a major change from Nuremberg.³⁰ Article 5 of the ICTY statute makes rape a crime against humanity.³¹ In the Kunarac trial, the ICTY ruled that it is not required to prove that crime-based activities like rape were common or systematic.³² The ICTY approach has changed how gender crimes are conceptualised in international criminal law, allowing the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SLSC) to recognise forced marriage and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court to include comprehensive sexual violence provisions.³³ The Kunarac ruling also allowed the SLSC to prosecute sexual slavery under its statute.³⁴

After decades of racial tensions between Hutu and Tutsi populations, the Rwandan genocide began in April 1994. About 5,00,000 women were raped during the 100-day massacre, mostly by the Hutu militia Interahamwe.³⁵ Since Nuremberg, establishing a permanent international court for grave crimes has been considered.³⁶ Since 1951, the International Law Commission has been working on developing an international criminal code. These led to the 1998 Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2002. The Rome Statute formalised ICTY, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and SLSC advances in prosecuting sexual and gender-based violence. It went further than earlier courts, calling coerced prostitution and female trafficking sexual slavery and concluding that gender discrimination can lead to persecution. Article 68(1) of the Rome Statute mandates the ICC to safeguard victims and witnesses of sexual assault. Through these and other indictments, the ICC hopes to help the global effort to end impunity for sexual and gender-based violence by being proactive and sensitive to victims’ concerns and international criminal law.

Way ahead

Despite the existence of international legal mechanisms, prosecuting perpetrators of sexual violence remains challenging. This article provides a foundation for understanding how wartime rape affects civil-military relations. Several feminist thinkers offer a different perspective on civil-military interactions. The major goal is to correct the perception that rape is a wartime collateral injury. Sexual violence can influence minds as a weapon, practice, and strategy. It can be used to show the power and supremacy of a State or ethnic group, as a political tool, and to unite people towards personal goals. According to research, States can engage in sexual assault through military/paramilitary formations. Rape is a delicate matter regardless of gender, yet literature rarely addresses male victims. Rape and its weaponisation stem from viewing women and children as helpless things that must be safeguarded. There is a lot of literature on female victims, but more research may focus on male victims to provide a masculine perspective. Scholars might draw implications from the two narratives to develop a wartime rape discourse. Scholars discuss the challenges of documenting rape instances. Data inaccessibility limits the statistical study of rape because there is no clear measurement. Overall, this work is productive in examining the logic of rape as a weapon of war and civil-military relations. In conclusion, this article emphasises the urgent need for a comprehensive legal approach to eradicate the weaponisation of women’s bodies. By strengthening international human rights instruments, enhancing domestic legislation, and promoting awareness and education, societies can challenge the deep-rooted norms perpetuating these practices. Legal reforms, coupled with social change, can empower women, uphold their rights, and create a future where the weaponisation of women’s bodies becomes a dark chapter of history, rather than a present reality.