Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones: From the Ancient World to the Era of Human Rights (review)

While conflicts affect men, women, and children, women and girls face a set of distinct issues, including, of course, pervasive sexual violence, forced impregnation, reproductive violence, sexually transmitted diseases, and forced abortion. In Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones: From the Ancient World to the Era of Human Rights, over the course of fourteen chapters, the authors provide an impressive historical perspective on the pervasiveness of sexual violence during wars. Written almost exclusively by historians, the essays survey an outstanding array of sites, ranging from ancient Greece to medieval England, from the American Revolution and pre-colonial warfare in Tanzania to the Bangladeshi war, from ancient warfare to World War II. A final essay, by the late Rhonda Copelon, addresses how far legal approaches to sexual violence have come—and how much farther they need to go (a wonderful memorial of her and her work).

The essays are all rooted in a minute accounting of the site-specific historical record, frequently presenting rarely accessed sources and demonstrating methodological sensitivity to uncovering the presence and absence of women from the records and narratives of conflict. In a number of essays (e.g. Susan Barber and Charles Ritter, Kathy Gaca, and Anne Curry) the authors analyze the contextual, political, and social factors making the type of sexual violence experienced in conflict zones more or less likely. Almost without exception, the essays illuminate the persistence of trauma for women and the devastation wrought on their social and familial status. The book's primary contribution is to reveal in a comparative and detailed manner, the specificity and historical pedigree of violence against women in war. As a number of authors rightly note, while there has been increased contemporary attention to the violence experienced by women in wartime, attention to the historical record of gender-based violence has generally been limited. In connecting to the historical experiences of women in war, primarily as victims, we gain a deeper understanding of the patterns and variances in sexual violence, understanding its deep hold on the presumptions of normality for combatants, and grapple with the difficulties of undoing the masculinities that give rise to the behavioral norms in the first place. By exploring the historical and jurisdiction-specific nuance, contemporary writers, including ourselves, gain a better understanding of the commonality of victims' experiences, perpetrator motivations, and the relationship between wartime and peacetime sexual violence. Taken together, the chapters support and explain the contemporary feminist human rights moment.

The book grew out of a conference held in April 2006 at the University of Iowa Center for Human Rights, titled, "The History of Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones," and co-organized by Elizabeth Heineman, the editor of this collection of essays. It is organized topically, rather than chronologically or regionally. The first section on Sexual Violence in Peace and in Conflict begins by addressing rape perpetrated by British soldiers during the American Revolution, as well as the attendant propaganda that accompanied it; this is followed by an analysis of the experiences of Amerindian women in the Spanish conquest of Alta California. The section concludes with a close study of the post-Bolshevik revolutionary period in Uzbekistan and the targeting of Muslim women there who choose to unveil. The next section, on the economy of sexual violence during conflict, includes two chapters, one on capture and subjugation of women and girls in the Mediterranean from the Bronze Age to Antiquity, and the second addressing the complex interface between pre-colonial and colonial gendered violence in Tanzania.

A third section turns to stories, recounting first the political and social utilization of sexual atrocity stories in framing Anglo-American responses to war and the subsequent discrediting of the extremity narrative. The Section continues with perspectives on the paramilitary and civil war campaigns targeting "political women" that took place in Eastern...