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

1. Rape in the American Revolution: Process, Reaction, and Public Re-Creation

Chapter 1 Rape in the American Revolution: Process, Reaction, and Public Re-Creation Sharon Block Rapes occur in wartime and in peacetime. They occur in military conflict zones, in what we might call the social/cultural/political conflict zones of colonial encounters, and in zones without any overt macroconflicts at all— in “peacetime.” To what degree can, or should, we distinguish rapes that occur in military conflict zones from those that occur in mainstream society ? Are all sexual assaults somehow tied together, as some feminist scholars of rape have suggested? How different are conflict zone rapes from sexual attacks committed in other settings? In other words, what can a study of sexual violence in a military conflict zone reveal, not just about the particulars of the sexual violence committed during a specific military episode, but also about the historic meaning and understanding of rape itself?1 As a scholar who has studied heterosexual sexual coercion in early North America from 1700 to 1820, I have devoted significant ink to discussing how early Americans enacted, interpreted, and punished acts of sexual violence. Here I focus specifically on the enactment, prosecution, and representation of rape during the American Revolution. Isolating sexual violence in wartime allows me to test the argument, made by me and other feminist scholars, that sexual power is contingent upon other forms of power. While early American men regularly used the power of their social location as masters , fathers, or powerful authority figures to coerce sex, military personnel relied on their status as warriors to coerce sex. Such different means for sexual coercion should translate into Revolutionary War sexual assaults that were more overt and more violent than other early American sexual assaults. The first two sections of this chapter detail the commission of sexual attacks during the American Revolution. The many first-person sources that describe these assaults substantiate my claim that rape perpetrated by British soldiers during the Revolution was indeed more violent and more 26 Sharon Block public than peacetime sexual attacks. Unlike sexual attackers in peacetime, military personnel rarely attempted to replicate consensual sexual norms in their assaults on American women. In part because of this more overt nature, assaulted women tended to respond differently to rape in conflict zones: women raped by enemy soldiers often reported their grievances more quickly and with less assistance from intercessors. Ironically, these public and speedily reported attacks more closely matched the archetypal image of rape in early America than did many peacetime rapes. This, in turn, contributed to more successful prosecution and harsher punishment of sexual attackers in wartime than in peacetime. In the chapter’s third section I compare such wartime assaults with discussions of sexual violence in wartime propaganda. Americans virulently condemned the British soldiers (and their Hessian mercenaries) for sexual attacks on Patriot women. As I have discussed elsewhere, such propaganda focused on those sexual attacks that could be constructed to threaten America’s Patriot (and patriarchal) politics.2 Here I expand on that analysis to show how these propagandistic sexual attacks compared to the conflict zone rapes about which we have eyewitness accounts. Ultimately, early Americans highlighted those sexual attacks that best fit their image of an undeniable and uncivilized rape, creating a public image of wartime sexual violence that used rape for political ends. In the final pages of my chapter I introduce two instances of sexual violence against marginalized members of early American society to complicate the relationship between the commission and representation of sexual violence. While the overt brutality of conflict zone rapes could transcend the bounds of wartime, the public attention that made them into matters of public interest did not necessarily follow. Because wartime rapists neatly fit the image of enemy attackers, the sexual violence they perpetrated became public proof of their illegitimacy. In contrast, rapes against marginalized members of colonial society did not so easily engender a metanarrative of good and evil. These final examples suggest that the public construction of rape, as much as the level of violence or purposeful torture used in the commission of sexual attacks, made an individual attack into a matter for public concern. Sexual Assaults in Conflict Zones A variety of historical sources record incidents of sexual assaults in conflict zones. These include military court-martial records, criminal court Rape in the American Revolution 27 records of soldiers’ trials, personal letters and diaries, and political propaganda . Of more than nine...