Research on genocide and sexual violence
On 2 September 1998, Jean-Paul Akayesu, Mayor of the Taba commune in Rwanda where at least 2000 Tutsis were killed between April and the end of June 1994, was found guilty of criminal responsibility for the genocidal crimes of targeted and systematic sexual violence against Tutsi women by the Interahamwe (the armed local militia). This judgement set a legal precedent: the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) had recognized rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, sexual mutilation, forced pregnancy, forced sterilization and other serious forms of sexual violence as war-crimes in international and domestic armed conflict, as well as crimes against humanity.
Despite the lack of case law, the Statute of the Tribunal also stated that rape and other forms of sexual violence, even when not resulting in death, can constitute acts of genocide whose prosecution require a fair representation of female judges and legal expertise (whether male or female) on gender crime. Sexual violence was defined for the first time as ‘any act of a sexual nature which is committed on a person under circumstances which are coercive’. Furthermore, sexual violence is defined as genocidal when it is both an attack on an individual and a calculated means by which an ethnic group is wholly or partially destroyed 1.

Since the sexual reproduction of a group ensures its survival, the sexual degradation of women and the pollution, appropriation or destruction of their reproductivity can be a central element of a given genocidal assault. Rape is often tolerated or encouraged by the aggressor, but it can also be instrumentalized as a military and civilian strategy designed to terrorize, humiliate, and isolate not only individual women but also to fragment or destroy the historical and future line of the victim group as a whole. Those women who are not raped to death or otherwise killed can be left unmarriageable or ‘spoiled’ and subject to ‘social death’. Although sexual violence has been part of the process of genocidal conquest since the beginnings of recorded history2 , it is now recognised that rape is not ‘merely’ the private ‘off-duty’ crime of soldiers relieving their sexual frustration (as was assumed during the Nuremberg trials and until the late twentieth-century

mass rape of Muslim women in former Yugoslavia and Tutsi women in Rwanda).
However, as Helen Fein has noted, we should be wary of generalizing about the role of sexual violence in genocide3. Women are predominantly, but not exclusively, the victims of genocidal sexual violence: Bosnian Muslim men were subject to sexual mutilation by Dusko Tadic and others in the Omarska camp, northern Bosnia. Here, men were forced to commit incest with their children or sisters, and to witness the sexual torture of wives and daughters, some of them children 4. So too, women have taken active roles themselves in the twentieth-century genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda and were at least complicit with aspects of genocide in the Holocaust. It should also be remembered that German men, under the 1935 Nuremberg laws concerning racial pollution, sought to increase Aryan women’s reproductivity but did not commit sanctioned sexual violence against Jewish women, though they tacitly permitted sexual violence against them by collaborators in some of their occupied territories (as in the Kovno ghetto, Lithuania, 1941). Or again, although rape was very widespread during the Armenian genocide of 1915, it does not appear to have been planned and organized as an instrument of genocide as gang rape was to be in Rwanda or as forcible impregnation was to be in Bosnia.

Questions raised by the role of sexual violence in genocide
A postmodern unease with totalising narratives and polarities has seen many feminist theorists relinquish the term ‘patriarchy’, or at least relativize it by using it in the plural to theorize a number of different social, historical, economic and ethnic hierarchies. Nonetheless, this paper suggests that, carefully nuanced, the noun and its adjective, patriarchal, help us to question whether genocide is only a bid for ethnocracy or whether it belongs to a more basic patriarchal (dis)ordering of the world in which the primary violation is the appropriation, accumulation and consumption of bodily and natural territory and resources (usually cast as female) by male elites in the consolidation and expansion of their own power.

Recommendations
It is no longer necessary to demonstrate in international law that sexual violence can constitute a genocidal crime. While sexual violence is not the only genocidal crime, it is no longer regarded as a peripheral crime, and it is necessary to support and develop understanding of the ICTR ruling through education.

The following recommendations are not intended to suggest a direct causal relation between patriarchal religions and cultures and genocidal sexual violence. Rather, these recommendations are intended to raise questions about the subordination of women in the world’s religious cultures that should inform and contextualize genocide education in a wider sexual-political discussion about the proper distinction between patriarchal ‘custom’ and crimes against our common humanity. By using gender as a category of analysis, genocide can be understood not so much as an historical aberration but as continuous with other forms of patriarchal domination and, more specifically, with its appropriation of female sexuality and reproductivity.

This option paper recommends that:
1. If Christian Scherrer is right that the most successful prevention of mass violence is anticipative justice, that is, the ‘institutionalisation of constructive relationships between different groups’5, then that must also include the definitively anticipative institutionalisation of just relationships, mutual responsibility, and power-sharing between men and women that can be progressively effected by education in equal opportunities from primary to advanced levels.

2. Genocide education should be gender-inflected: women’s bodies are very often themselves the sites of social and religious conflict and their sexual violation may be intended to humiliate men as much or more than the women whose ‘property’ they might be considered to be. Educators should challenge the connections between the religiously sanctioned marital and paternal ownership of female sexuality and the sub-religious investment of kinsmen’s masculine honour in a woman’s sexual integrity, since it is upon this assumption that the emasculating purpose of much sexual violence in genocide is premised. Educators should further note that women may be doubly erased by the genocidal assault: a raped but surviving woman may not only feel that her own future has been destroyed, but may bring such dishonour upon her family as to be considered dead and the offspring of the rape socially disowned.

3. Religious educators should acknowledge that religion may both protect and limit women’s rights; that religion is both liberative and oppressive. Scripture, theology, and religious rituals may not only discriminate against women but can also sanction contempt for and violence against them. Ascetic (body-denying) theologies and religio-domestic ideologies of femininity variously found in all world religions may permit or even justify or blame women for their violation. Characterstically feminine spiritualities of self-sacrifice, submission and silence, the theological glorification of pain, the divine ordination of women as property, and the misogynistic and gynophobic devaluation or repudiation of female sexuality as a locus and occasion of cultic and moral impurity or chaos are all ways in which religions sacralize both supererogatory virtue and violence against women.

4. Given the role of religious difference in genocide, the possible religious sanction of genocide, and the spiritual damage inflicted by genocidal sexual violence, genocide education must also be from the perspective of all ethical and religious subjects, not only the (male) political subject. Feminist literature, historiography and ethics demonstrate that the abused are victims but they may also be agents of their own spiritual resistance 13. Religious and social education should, therefore, provide a means by which sexually violated women are heard as speaking subjects. This, despite those cultural and religious taboos that both dictate a woman’s modest (shamed) silence as a means of limiting dishonour to the family and effectively obstruct the due processes of justice.

5. Theoretical connections should be made between genocidal sexual coercion as a crime against humanity and the gynocidal control of women’s sexuality through the coerced genital mutilation experienced by an estimated two million girls a year. Connections should also be made between genocide and gynocide through sex selection practices and female infanticide in parts of India and China and with the preferential care of boys in developing or under-developed countries leading to a higher mortality rate for girls.

6. Western education in the politics of sexual abjection should be ethically reflexive. Our own culture’s quasipornographic representations of women and (increasingly) men disconnect the viewing subject from the viewed object. The cultural erosion of emotional reciprocity and mutuality can, under certain political conditions, permit sexual atrocity.

1 The classification of sexual violence as the means of committing genocide was subsequently confirmed in the ICTR judgement in the Prosecutor v. Musema,
ICTR-96-13 I judgement, 27 January 2000 (see http://www.shanland.org.HR/Publication/LtoR/sexual_violence_as--_a_constituent.htm).
2 Examples of the use of sexual violence in acts of partial genocide include the Israelite practice of abduction and rape of women from other tribes during warfare
(condoned in Numbers 31:17-18, 32-35), the mass rape of indigenous women in the early modern European colonial conquest and expansion in the
Americas, and the systematic rape of the Highland clanswomen in the eighteenth century by English troops after the battle of Culloden.
3 ‘Genocide and Gender: the Uses of Women and Group Destiny’, Journal of Genocide Research 1 (1999), pp. 49-53.
4 See further “Omarska Detention Camp”, War Crimes in Bosnia-Herzegovina, vol. II (Helsinki Watch, 1993).
5 ”Towards a Theory of Modern Genocide. Comparative Genocide Research: Definitions, Criteria, Typologies, Cases, Key Elements, Patterns and Voids.”
Journal of Genocide Research 1 (1999), p. 14.

References
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Beuken,Wim and Karl-Joseph Kuschel, Religion as a Source of Violence ( SCM, 1997).
Fein, Helen. ‘Genocide and Gender: the Uses of Women and Group Destiny’, Journal of Genocide Research 1 (1999) 43-63.
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Stiglmayer, Alexandra, ed. Mass Rape: The War Against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina (University of Nebraska Press, 1994).
The Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice: http://iccwomen.org
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