Sexual Violence and Armed Conflict Annotated Bibliography 2012 The Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights created this Annotated Bibliography to provide a guide to the landscape of academic research in sexual violence and armed conflict. Our goal is to provide the policy, activist and scholarly communities with access to the findings of academic research; therefore, the extensive and valuable resources produced by policy agencies, NGOs, and international organizations are generally not included here. Of course, we assume that readers will use this Annotated Bibliography only as a guide to help find useful readings, and that anyone wishing to cite these sources in their own work will go back to the original sources. © 2012 Consortium on Gender, Security, and Human Rights The Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights created this Annotated Bibliography to provide a guide to the landscape of academic research on sexual violence and armed conflicts. This bibliography is by no means an exhaustive listing. We have focused on the academic literature, so most of the numerous publications originating from within the policy and NGO communities have not been included here. This bibliography is also limited to articles published in English. Insofar as possible, entries includes citations, published abstracts, quotations of key sentences (indicated in quotation marks, and followed by page number) and additional annotations by the interns who worked on this bibliography, and URLs for articles that are available on line. Books usually are only briefly summarized, often with the table of contents included. This annotated bibliography is meant to introduce readers to the landscape of academic research and debate in this field, and to help support the reader in her or his own research. Despite the inclusion of quotations and page numbers in the annotations, we strongly advise the reader not to quote directly from this document, but rather to use it to direct you to the literature that will be of use to you. If you are familiar with resources that you think should be included in this annotated bibliography, please send the citation, or, better yet, an annotation, and we will add it to the bibliography, with your name as reviewer. Resources can be submitted through our website at: genderandsecurity.org/projects-resources/annotated-bibliographies. 2 Aafjes, Astrid. Gender Violence: The Hidden War Crime. Washington D.C.: Kumarian Press, 1998. Print. Abstract: Sexual violence has been practiced against women during armed conflicts since the beginning of warfare, but until recently the international community perceived and accepted such gender-based abuse as an inevitable byproduct of war. Rape and other forms of sexual abuse have been explicitly or implicitly prohibited by most international and regional human rights and humanitarian laws for decades. Almost every country in the world has ratified and signed one or more of these instruments and, therefore, has obligations under multiple treaties to protect women against sexual violence during armed conflict. Yet rape remains the least condemned war crime. (Abstract from Amazon) Agger, Inger. “Sexual Torture of Political Prisoners: An Overview.” Journal of Traumatic Stress 2.3 (1989): 305-318. Abstract: Not much is known about the repressive use of sexuality against political prisoners. It is important to gain a better understanding of the trauma involved in sexual torture for treatment purposes. On the basis of clinical experience with refugees from the Middle East, North Africa, and Latin America, and the collection of mainly unpublished material on the subject, a theory of the psychodynamics of sexual torture is proposed. It is claimed that this method of torture is especially traumatic, as it is characterized by a confusing and complex ambiguity containing both libidinal and aggressive components, against which the victim has difficulty maintaining a psychological defense. Hence, his or her core identity processes are threatened. Aspects of transcultural treatment are discussed, and it is stressed that there must be a reframing of the trauma story so as not to repeat the psychological pain of the torture and aggravate symptoms. The Testimony-Method is introduced as an important tool for reframing. If the refugee presents sexual symptoms, sexological treatment interventions are recommended. (Abstract from Wiley Online Library) Alison, Miranda. “Wartime Sexual Violence: Women’s Human Rights and Questions of Masculinity.” Review of International Studies 33 (2007): 75-90. Abstract: This article examines wartime sexual violence, one of the most recurring wartime human rights abuses. It asserts that our theorizations need further development, particularly in regard to the way that masculinities and the intersections with constructions of ethnicity feature in wartime sexual violence. The article also argues that although women and girls are the predominant victims of sexual violence and men and boys the predominant agents, we must also be able to account for the presence of male victims and female agents. This, however, engenders a problem; much of the women’s human rights 3 discourse and existing international mechanisms for addressing wartime sexual violence tend to reify the male-perpetrator/female-victim paradigm. This is a problem which feminist human rights theorists and activists need to address. (Abstract from Academic Search Premier) Additional Notes and/or Quotations: “Lynne Segal stresses, however, that we could reverse the assumed causal link between masculinity and violence: ‘[t]he idea that what is at stake here is state violence in the hands of men (rather than, as many feminists believe, male violence in the hands of the state) is supported by reports of women’s use of force and violence when they are placed in jobs [or other positions of power] analogous to men’s.’” (Alison,76) “The homosocial nature of militaries may be necessary for cohesion but its attendant danger of homosexual behaviour does not sit well with the hetero-normativity of hegemonic masculinity. Rape (even, as discussed later, rape of men) serves to reassert heteromasculinity.” (77) “Finally, it has been noted that gang-rape performs a bonding function for groups of men and that it accounts for a high proportion of wartime sexual violence. Gang-rape cements a sense of loyalty between men and those who might not rape individually do rape collectively in a group assertion of masculinity. Goldstein suggests that raping as part of a group ‘may serve to relieve individual men of responsibility’. I suggest, however, that part of the reason gang-rape promotes group cohesion may be that it bonds men together in a complicity (in fact a shared awareness of responsibility) that makes loyalty to the group vital.” (77) “‘[I]n wars men only continue to do what they did before but in a more mindless and indiscriminate way’, and that ‘[r]ape . happens during war for the same reasons it happens during peace. It is a phenomenon rooted in inequality, discrimination, male domination and aggression, misogyny and the entrenched socialisation of sexual myths.’” (78) “In contemporary armed conflicts, particularly though not exclusively ethnonational, rape is intentionally committed by specific men against specific women (and men) – namely ‘enemy’ women (and men) – and therefore it cannot be regarded as indiscriminate.” (79) “During times of conflict multiple binary constructions are formed; not only is ‘masculine’ contrasted to ‘feminine’ within a group and ‘us’ contrasted to ‘them’ between groups, but ‘our women’ are contrasted to ‘their women’ and ‘our men’ to ‘their men’. ‘Our women’ are chaste, honourable, and to be protected by ‘our men’; ‘their women’ are unchaste and depraved. Wartime propaganda presents the (male) enemy as those who would rape and murder ‘our’ women and the war effort is directed at saving ‘our’ women.” (80) “In wartime, then, male to male rape (as male to female rape) humiliates and feminises the victim whilst asserting the perpetrator’s dominant (heterosexual, ethno-national) 4 masculinity. The ethnonational element means that symbolically the victim’s national identity is also feminised and humiliated. Sexual violence is ‘preferred’, Inger Skjelsbæk suggests, because ‘this is the form of violence which most clearly communicates masculinisation and feminisation’.” (81) “Women are not only victims of war, they are also agents of violence; men are also victims of sexual violence; the idea of male protection is inherently problematic and can lead in itself to abuses of women; women are not all located the same and one’s positioning impacts on one’s experiences of war. This leads us to a further overriding problem: how to both acknowledge and respond to the reality of male victims and female agents of sexual violence whilst still recognising and acting with the simultaneous reality that women and girls remain the majority of victims and men and boys the majority perpetrators – but, further, that both women’s and men’s ethnic and social positioning contributes enormously to differential experiences.” (84) “I have argued that a more complex analysis of empirical cases of wartime sexual violence that examines the interplay between masculinity, femininity, ethnicity and sexuality, is required and serves to bring into relief the problems with accepting this binary at face value and wholeheartedly. The example of wartime sexual violence as a problem for women’s human rights, then, illuminates a broader