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Changing the equation: Prosecution as prevention of war rape
Improved techniques in bringing perpetrators to account are needed to
stop rape from being considered inevitable in warzones
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Guardian Professional, Monday 10 June 2013 10.19 EDT
"He was Palestinian, she was Syrian. The regime soldiers who broke
into their home asked why a Syrian man wasn't good enough for her.
They tied him up, then stripped her and raped her in front of him,"
says Dr Issam Mohammed.
An NHS consultant psychiatrist of Syrian descent based in the
Midlands, Mohammed has just returned from an undercover trip home to
treat people suffering post traumatic shock disorder (PSTD).
The woman was unable to speak about her experience, recalls the
doctor; he was only able to treat her husband, who had developed PTSD
following the attack. "He could do nothing for her to help. He was
extremely distressed with vivid flashbacks."
The disempowerment and fury felt by family members forced to watch as
the women and children they love are raped and sometimes then killed
in front of them is a powerful element fueling the conflict, Mohammed
believes. "Some men join the FSA (Free Syrian Army) because they want
to take revenge."
The Syrian civil war is just the latest conflict in which sexualised
violence is used by fighters to brutalise and subdue the other side.
The numbers raped during other recent wars are staggering but also
approximate and, it's accepted, under-reported: 20,000 to 60,000 in
Bosnia; between a quarter and half a million in Rwanda; unknowable
thousands in Sudan.
Army commanders know that rape is a cheap, readily available and
effective tactic, says Zainab Bangura, UN Special Representative on
Sexual Violence in Conflict.
"When you shoot someone, that person is buried and their family
mourns," she says. "When you rape someone they have to live with the
physical, mental, legal, economic and social repercussions of that
crime every day."
The effects on women and children, she argues, are particular, and
catastrophic for communities attempting to rebuild.
"When women are sexually assaulted it is an attack on the people who
produce the food, the people who run the informal economy, who teach
the children, tend to the family and really are the fabric of society.
When you commit this crime against children you ensure that the
community will live with effects of conflict long after the guns have
ceased firing."
Until very recently however, rape has been thought of as "an
inevitable, almost subterranean feature of war – part of the 'boys
will be boys' thinking many had about war and how soldiers conduct
it," observes Kim Thuy Seelinger, director of the sexual violence
programme at the Human Rights Center, University of California,
Berkeley.
"The idea that targeting civilians through sexual violence could also
be a strategic or intentional means of attack - and that these were
international crimes for which perpetrators should be punished and
survivors should be redressed - was not part of the dialogue or
documentation."
By contrast, Seelinger notes that the past decade has seen a greatly
increased UN Security Council focus on sexualised violence in war: UK
foreign secretary William Hague's communiqué, adopted last month by
the G8, outlined measures to help remove the impunity that those who
order, encourage or commit acts of sexual violence in conflict have
typically enjoyed.
Improved documentation, it's hoped, will be critical in holding
perpetrators to account. An initiative by the Women Under Siege
project to live-track sexualised violence in Syria, is, says director
Lauren Wolfe, "the first time anyone has tried to measure such
atrocities in real time in an ongoing conflict" and may one day be
used as evidence in war crimes trials.
But is it realistic that the threat of prosecution will make military
commanders think again in the savage chaos of war?
Bangura believes that it could.
"We have to change [the] equation to make rape in war very expensive
for the perpetrator, meaning they will be prosecuted and imprisoned,
they will never be integrated into state security forces or allowed to
work for the state, and they will be named and shamed in the
community," she says. "Prosecution is prevention, and it has been
shown that when you end impunity for a crime the instances of that
crime go down."
However, at aid agency CARE International, Senior Policy Advisor
Howard Mollett warns that challenging the impunity of those in power
is never a simple matter: it too can kill.
"When, in North Sudan, the International Criminal Court (ICC) indicted
the president for war crimes including rape, the first thing he did
was kick out the humanitarian agencies who were providing life-saving
assistance, with really serious consequences," he says.
That's not the only problem. There is, says Mollett, bitter cynicism
in parts of Africa that only governments from their continent have to
date been indicted by the ICC for war crimes including those of sexual
violence.
It's a complaint addressed directly by ICC chief prosecutor Fatou
Bensouda, who said last year: "The greatest affront to victims of
these brutal and unimaginable crimes … women and young girls raped,
families brutalised, robbed of everything, entire communities
terrorised and shattered … is to see those powerful individuals
responsible for their sufferings trying to portray themselves as the
victims of a pro-western, anti-African court."
There are some small steps forward. In 2012, Mali became the fifth
African state to refer itself to the ICC for investigation,
challenging the perception of bias that Mollett describes. And
Seelinger refers to research by colleagues at Yale and Harvard that
seeks to identify the characteristics of military groups that don't
commit sexual assault.
"Understanding how and why they conduct themselves that way could be a
key to learning how to appeal to armed actors' self-interest and
convince them not to rape," she says.
It's knowledge that can't come too soon. Back in Birmingham, a world
away from the anguish being suffered by his fellow Syrians, Mohammed
says that he'll soon be going back. As someone with the skills to
help, he feels he doesn't have a choice. "With sexual violence, the
trauma will not go unless you tackle it. It will always affect
people's lives."
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