Post World War II: Sexual Violence and Genocide

922 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Rape as a war tactic

Parallel to the post World War II developments of IHL, rape incrementally gained recognition as an international crime, including as a crime against humanity. Rape was accepted as an express form of crimes against humanity via the incorporation of international crimes into national military codes and national legislation. More recently, the recognition of rape as an international crime was anchored by its listing in the statutes of international courts and tribunals and their modern judicial interpretation.
The declarations, resolutions, reports, commissions, preparatory meetings and other precursors of the specially mandated international criminal courts and tribunals created in the 1990s and early years of the twenty-first century, foresaw that the jurisdiction invoked by these international bodies would certainly include crimes of sexual violence, as central violations to IHL and international criminal law, including crimes against humanity. The constitutive instruments of these international judicial bodies, in varying degrees, bore out that prediction. The governing statutes of the International Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Court for Rwanda the Special Panels for Serious Crime and the International Criminal Court (ICC) list the crime of rape, together with other expressly named sex crimes such as trafficking and slavery, that are, on their face not of a sexual nature, but crimes whose actus reus could certainly include acts of sexual violence.
Provisions of these constitutive instruments that established the subject-matter jurisdiction of these international bodies mandated that the following crimes involving sexual assault could be the basis for criminal charges:

a) The...

... middle of paper ...

...
The definitions in the Statutes in respect of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes do not spell out all the general legal elements of each category or the legal elements in relation to each of the underlying crimes such as rape and sexual slavery. However the tribunals have developed case law in this respect.

ii. Violent and serious nature of relevant crimes

Crimes of a sexual nature – i.e. gender-based, sex-based or sexual crimes – amounting to genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes are almost always physically violent and/or gravely denigrating. By nature crimes involving sexual violence are serious – otherwise they would not constitute or amount to atrocity crimes. For the purposes of this paper, atrocity crimes of a sexual nature, sex-based atrocity crimes and gender-based atrocity crimes are generally referred to as “sexual violence”.

Show More
Related

  • Examining of Estrich´s and Pineau´s Discussion on Rape

    1473 Words  | 3 Pages

    As Estrich demonstrates, the law on rape has major flaws. The law exposes traditions and attitudes that surround women and sex. It condones the idea that sex contains male aggression and female passivity. The law uses three different criteria to label an act of sex as rape: mens rea, force, and consent. Estrich feels that these features demonstrate sexist attitudes within the law. Our legal system abandon’s mens rea which is Latin for “guilty state of the mind.” It is the perpetrator’s ability to understand force and non-consent. A woman must demonstrate resistance. The man can escape by stating he did not realize the woman was not consenting. So, the court turns to the woman to see if she provided proper evidence that she did not consent to the sex.

    Read More

  • The Social Construction of Rape

    1580 Words  | 4 Pages

    In “Sex and Violence: A Perspective,” MacKinnon turns her focus to the common definition of rape as a form of violence. The categorizations of rape, sexual harassment, and pornography as forms of violence are problematic in themselves because they do not capture the reality of sex. In fact, much of intercourse is about violence (MacKinnon p. 268), in the way that power and dominance are extremely eroticized, thus to say “rape is violence” is a misnomer. MacKinnon brings one’s attention to the construction of rape, which separates rape from intercourse based on the amount of force applied (p. 268). This definition is especially legitimate in the legal system, which derives solely from a male point of view: it is called rape when there is penetratio...

    Read More

  • Comparison Of Genocides: The Holocaust Vs. The Rape Of Nanking

    1208 Words  | 3 Pages

    Imagine every friend, every neighbor, every single person in one city being raped, killed, tortured. In the genocide known as the Rape of Nanking, the city of Nanjing was brutally taken captive by the Japanese. On the other hand, all of Germany attacked the Jews. But both of the genocides involved killing, raping, and dehumanizing. The Holocaust exterminated a whole lot more people than the Rape of Nanking. Germany also paid for their crimes, while Japan hardly acknowledged it. Both genocides also happened during the same time period, too. The Rape of Nanking was a smaller genocide than the Holocaust, but they still have their similarities and differences.

    Read More

  • Rape as a War Tactic in the Rwandan Genocide

    2041 Words  | 5 Pages

    “The sweetly sickening odor of decomposing bodies hung over many parts of Rwanda in July 1994: . . . at Nyarubuye in eastern Rwanda, where the cadaver of a little girl, otherwise intact, had been flattened by passing vehicles to the thinness of cardboard in front of the church steps,” (Deforges 6). The normalcy of horrible images like this one had cast a depressing gloom over Rwanda during the genocide, a time when an extreme divide caused mass killings of Tutsi by the Hutu. Many tactics such as physical assault or hate propaganda are well known and often used during times of war. Sexual assault and rape, however, during times of war is an unspoken secret – it is well known that rape occurs within combat zones and occupied territories, but people tend to ignore, or even worse, not speak of the act. There have been recorded cases of rape and sexual assault in almost every war in human history. Genocidal rape was used as a gendered war tactic in the Rwandan genocide in order to accomplish the Hutu goal of elimination of the Tutsi people in whole, or part.

    Read More

  • Domestic Violence Counseling Program Specializing in Spousal Rape

    1577 Words  | 4 Pages

    Eileraas, Karina. "Rape, Legal Definitions of." Encyclopedia of Women in Today's World. Ed. Mary Zeiss Stange, Carol K. Oyster, and Jane E. Sloan. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2011. 1205-09. SAGE Reference Online. Web. 4 Apr. 2012.

    Read More

  • Rape - The Plague of the Modern World

    2187 Words  | 5 Pages

    “Before the rape I felt good. My life was in order. I was getting ready to get married. Afterward everything changed. I kind of lost who I was as a person…

    Read More

  • Sociological Analysis of Sexual Assault

    1560 Words  | 4 Pages

    This essay will examine the social and cultural conditions, within the macro-diachronic and micro-synchronic theoretical models , that intensify or perpetuate sexual assault. I have chosen only one concept from each model because these are the only concepts that I feel that I can use to most accurately and comprehensively depict causes and reasons for why sexual assault is deeply entrenched in our social structure. I will thus explore, from these ideological viewpoints, some of the motivations and circumstances which lead offenders to sexual assault. I will also fuse some of the historical attitudes from which today's concepts have evolved to our contemporary understanding of this social phenomena. However, it’s important that we look beyond both offenders' motivations and history, and to the greater sociological view, if we are to correctly reconstruct acts of violence such as sexual assault.

    Read More

  • Men as Victims

    922 Words  | 2 Pages

    According to RAINN, (2009) approximately 10 per cent of all victims of sexual assault and abuse are adult and juvenile males. In terms of the nature of assault, real figures include a compendium of reported incidents ranging from unwanted sexual touching to forced penetration. To qualify this statement, it must be understood that the percentage does not reflect a vast number of crimes that go unreported due to issues that will be discussed in the present paper.

    Read More

  • Slobodan Milosevic and Genocide in the Former Yugoslavia

    2158 Words  | 5 Pages

    Greenfield, Daniel M. "Crime of Complicity in Genocide: How the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia Got It Wrong, and Why It Matters." The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 98.3 (2008): 921-24. HeinOnline. Web. 18 Apr. 2011.

    Read More

  • Exploration of Accusations of Selective Justice Regarding the ICC Made by the African Union

    3149 Words  | 7 Pages

    The International Criminal Court (ICC) is an established court of law meant prosecute individuals accused of significant crimes, where national courts are unable or unwilling to (ICC, 2011). The ICC asserts itself as a court of last resort meant to supplement and strengthen national judiciaries. Being an international orga...

    Read More

  • Redefining Rape: A Discussion on Male Sexual Assault

    1270 Words  | 3 Pages

    Sexual assault of men in history is recognized as a means of humiliating opponents by conquering soldiers especially the Romans. It was used as a feature of sexual torture or aggression. Rape, in this case, is motivated by a wish to dominate and degrade the victim. Man on man rape is usually discussed when the incarceration is the topic due to social media and movies. Although nearly two-thirds of the male jail inmates who had been victimized, said the staff perpetrator was female nevertheless that one-third of rape is still a cause for concern as anal trauma that occurs in male rap...

    Read More

  • Criminal Acts in Sport

    9585 Words  | 20 Pages

    During the evaluation of the events in each topic area there are some legal terms that may need to be defined. These terms may also be defined differently depending on the state that the event occurs in. At the end of this paper there is a list of definitions that describe what a certain legal action could mean. All forms of government view these definitions similarly, however, each state may have differing consequences for each of the crimes.

    Read More

  • Victims of Forcible Rape

    2209 Words  | 5 Pages

    Like many crimes, rape has had a variety of legal definitions over the years. The word rape comes from the Latin word rapere means “to take by force.” An early English common law definition described rape as the unlawful carnal knowledge of a woman (Karmen, 2010). Another common definition, and the one used by the FBI for the Uniform Crime Report, is that rape is the carnal knowledge of a woman by force and without consent (M...

    Read More

  • Human Trafficking Violates Human Rights

    1834 Words  | 4 Pages

    In the international effort to prosecute human trafficking, several guidelines and definitions of human trafficking have been provided:

    Read More

  • War Crime Essay

    1125 Words  | 3 Pages

    A war crime is an unjust act of violence in which a military personnel violates the laws and acceptable behaviors of a war. Despite all the violence in a war, a soldier shooting another is not considered a war crime because it is not a violation to the laws and practices of a war, and it is considered just. A war crime is defined as a “violations [violation] of the laws and customs of war” (“War Crimes”), and are attacks “against civilian populations, prisoners of war, or in some cases enemy soldiers in the field” (Friedman). War crimes are typically committed with weapons or by uncommon, cruel, devastating military methods and are “…Committed primarily by military personnel” (Friedman). There are many different types of war crimes one can commit, including “murder, ill treatment…murder or ill treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages or devastation not justified by military necessity” (Friedman). Originally constructed as international law by the London Charter on August 8th, 1945 and further developed by the Hague Conventions of 1899, 1907 and the Nuremberg trials, war crimes are aggressive, unacceptable and unjust actions performed by military workforce that occur during a war.

    Read More

More about Post World War II: Sexual Violence and Genocide

Open Document