THE ROLE OF CONFLICT IN EXPLAINING RAPE

    A stronger world built on peace, security, and a healthy respect for the rule of law are the standards of criminal justice.  Yet, the character of conflict is such that no one is safe.  Perpetrators do no consider any act off limits, and this is apparent in the many attacks committed against women.  Crimes are becoming more brazen and horrific in the character of their commission.  It is almost as if the attackers were boldly defying and challenging the standards set by criminal justice and most of mankind.  Attackers dare anyone to take action against them, even as they escalate their own actions inhumanely.  If outside forces intervene in any way or begin to record the crimes committed, it seems that escalation increases.  This paper is about the role of conflict in explaining crimes against women, primarily rape.

Literature Review

    Why do men rape women or for that fact women rape men?  This question has many political, psychological, sociological answers, but not that many historical ones.  The study of women, men, and sexual crime in rural and other countries, it expands the terms of current debates about sexuality and sexual violence.  Most females find their information by relying on criminal case files, mainly revealing largely untapped source for social historians to recall or retell stories of group or individual sexual danger crimes such as rape, abortion, seduction, murder, and infanticide, but the information supports many feminist analyses of sexual violence.

  Crimes are expressions of power, that courts are prejudiced by the victim’s background, and that most assaults occur within victim’s homes and communities.  Mass rape is an increasingly sophisticated weapon of war, as it is being used in the world today.  Survivors of conflicts speak of rape on the frontline and third party rape; these rapes are carried out publicly by soldiers to demoralize family members and opposition forces are compelled to witness them.

Many stories refer to village towns or communities that have been rounded up in camps, perhaps a school where a space is cleared in the middle.  It is in this place that public raping takes place.  If it is reported as repeated, violent, and procedural, then it is claimed that many of the victims and witnesses know the rapists.

Destruction and violation at women is one way of attacking male opponents who regard or reply to women as their property, and whose male identity is therefore bound to protection of their property.  The United Methodist Church affirms sacredness of all people and their right to safety, nurture, and care.  Together with the international community, it is challenged to respond to the aspect women in conflict, when people call upon the United Methodist Church.  It is to condemn all forms of rape as incompatible with the church’s understanding of the sacredness of life; and to affirm the right of all persons to safety, nurture, and care; to urge the United Methodist Church Office for the UN to work toward including the condemnation of rape as a war crime in international instruments such as the Geneva Conventions; to urge the General Board of Global Ministries to develop an anthology of theological and biblical perspectives of rape in times of war, written by survivors  and other women who have observed and reflected on this grave concern.  To urge both the General Board of Global Ministries and the General Board of Church and Society to act as resources for churches who wish to press for legal and political decisions to protect victims of rape in times of war.  And finally to urge UMCOR to continue developing assistance and support for women victims of war and their families, to meet their physical and emotional needs.  This may mean supporting, as war time refugees, women who cannot return to their homes because of fear of rape, violence, and condemnation.

Research Plan

In this section I will tell you some of the ways in which I found this information.

• There has been a great deal of furor around the rape statistics which are used to indicate the scale of the crisis in America. There are a number of "versions" of the statistics being used, and these are sometimes being used rather loosely - I heard part of a debate in parliament last week, for instance, in which one parliamentarian claimed that there had been 1,6 million REPORTED rapes in 1998 (there were 49 280).
•  Table - Comparison of sexual assault data collection methods

2. Official Criminal Justice Statistics

• Methodology
• Data
• Table - Offenses known to police in cities over 100,000 people in Arizona
• Critical Assessment

3. Victimization Surveys

• Methodology
• Data
• Table - Selected NCVS Statistics
• Critical Assessment

4. Perpetrator Surveys

• Methodology
• Data
• Table - Selected findings of perpetrator self-report surveys
• Critical Assessment

5. Surveys of Service Providers

• Methodology
• Data
• Table - 1994-95 Violent and Abusive Behavior Data for Arizona
• Critical Assessment

Summary and Conclusions

    In conclusion I have talked about all different types of rapes concerning conflict and rape.  Women are raped in all forms of armed conflict, international and internal, whether the conflict is fought primarily on religious, ethnic, political or nationalist grounds, or a combination of all these. Men from all sides - both enemy and `friendly'
forces, rape them. Women are not free from interference even from those who are in the territory with an international mandate to restore international peace and security. International media attention has been directed towards the widespread rapes, torture and forced pregnancy. Nevertheless, the international response in itself carries the risk that violent offences against women will be perceived as something exceptional, peculiar to this particular conflict. The reality is that rape and violent sexual abuse of women in armed conflict has a long history. 
    Numerous incidents of women raped in other international and internal armed conflicts can be cited to illustrate this point. During the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait it is estimated that Iraqi soldiers raped at least 5,000 Kuwaiti women. After the liberation large numbers of foreign domestic working women in Kuwait were attacked and subjected to sexual violence from subsequently returning Kuwaitis; women in Rwanda who are caught up in the vicious civil war in that country; women in Kashmir who have suffered rape and death under the administration of the Indian army. The following has been reported concerning a civil conflict in South America. Women have been threatened, raped and murdered by government security forces; and women have been threatened, raped and murdered.  Women have been repeatedly raped in the ethnic violence of that country's civil war and women from East Timor have been raped as well as killed since the occupation by Indonesia commenced in 1975.
    Another example which occurred longer ago, but which has only recently received serious attention, was the continued sustained rapes of the so-called `comfort women' by the Japanese military during the Second World War. Numerous other examples could have been cited but this selection illustrates that men of all colours, religions, nationalities and ideologies attack women in conflicts across the globe. 
    Rape in war is not merely a matter of chance, of women victims being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nor is it a question of sex. It is rather a question of power and control, which is `structured by male soldiers' notions of their masculine privilege, by the strength of the military's lines of command and by class and ethnic inequalities among
women'.  Violence against women may be directed towards the social group of which she is a member because `to rape a woman is to humiliate her community. Complex combined emotions of hatred, superiority, and vengeance for real or imagined past wrongs and national pride are engendered and deliberately manipulated in armed conflict. They are given expression through rape of the other side's women. For the men of the community rape encapsulates the totality of their defeat; they have failed to protect `their' women. Second, studies have indicated the connection between militarization of the nation State and violence against women.  License to rape has been included as a term of employment for mercenary soldiers. In determining why such a condition is repugnant, Walzer discounts the utilitarian argument that it acts as a spur to military courage. Instead he goes to the heart of the matter: Rape is a crime, in war as in peace, because it violates the rights of the woman who is attacked. To offer her as bait to a mercenary soldier is to treat her as if she were not a person at all but a mere object, a prize, a trophy of war. It is the recognition of her personality that shapes our judgment. Rape has also been directed as an instrument of war. In the former Yugoslavia rape has been `massive, organized and systematic.  As you can see there many different types of rape.

[Comments: You should change the title later.  You starting point here may or may not take you far enough to do a research term paper.  All you've got so far is an idea, and you'll need to do some extensive research to find support for it.]
[Comments: I added your Part 2 and 3, and I'm not quite sure where you're going with this paper. Perhaps if you tied in it in more closely with some of the topics in this course.]
[Comments: I added your Part 4.  Word count may not be long enough, and there's some topical concerns that make me wonder if it's a paper for a police course.  You might want to think about doing a final revision before the last deadline.]

Last updated: 12/02/02