Long perceived as an inevitable consequence of the chaos of war, rape is in reality used as a weapon in its own right and is part of virilist military doctrines. How has it been used in contemporary conflicts? How to fight against its use?
DIn the collective imagination, war inevitably leads to chaos, brutality and loss of respect for all norms. Rape, therefore, would be an inevitable consequence, a male overflow against a backdrop of disorder. This representation, deeply anchored, is nevertheless based on a specific cultural construction: that of a conquering and uncontrollable masculine sexuality where the possession of the female body becomes a reward(1). It mainly reduces sexual violence in war to an act committed by men against women, trivializes rape by legitimizing it, and depoliticizes acts which in reality relate to individual or tactical choices.
However, the idea of rape inherent to war resists neither historical analysis nor the facts. From ancient Rome, military conquest is generally accompanied by a total takeover which also involves the corps.(2). The rules of war provide that men in besieged towns be massacred, while women…and sometimes children…suffer the indignity of rape, considered the female equivalent of the death of combatants.(3). Women are seen not as individuals, but as the enemy’s property delivered to the victors as an expected and legitimate reward. In the same way, the period 1930-1945 saw the imperialist expansion of Japan accompanied by a system of military prostitution euphemized under the name of “comfort women” (ianfu)(4). This system, rigorously supervised by the military authorities and presented as aiming to prevent excesses, is in reality based on the reduction into sexual slavery of thousands of women, subject to daily medical and logistical surveillance.(5). These examples demonstrate that these practices do not arise from uncontrolled impulses, but rather are part of virilist military doctrines which promote predation and possession.(6).
From the 1990s, a double phenomenon transformed the understanding of sexual violence in times of war. On the one hand, contemporary conflicts reveal a new function assigned to rape. It is no longer just a means of military conquest, but a mechanism of targeted destruction, directed against a group as a whole, as evidenced by the conflict in Rwanda and the war in former Yugoslavia. Furthermore, these practices no longer concern exclusively regular armies: they are becoming a common practice of armed, paramilitary or terrorist groups facilitated by impunity, the breakdown of command structures and the dissemination of radical ideologies. On the other hand, this evolution is accompanied by new visibility. Driven by feminist mobilizations, gender studies, the work of NGOs, the media coverage of conflicts and the testimonies of victims, this dynamic breaks the silence and reveals the systemic extent of sexual violence. It leads to a mobilization of the international community and progressive legal recognition of these crimes. Yet despite this awareness, the United Nations continues to document the increase. By 2023, acts of sexual violence have been reported in at least 20 armed conflict contexts. This observation requires us to go beyond the legal qualification alone, to question the conditions of their use, the effects they produce and the responses that international actors are still struggling to construct in a coherent manner.
To understand this complex reality and its multiple manifestations, it is first necessary to clarify what the notion of conflict-related sexual violence covers. The United Nations defines this violence (Conflict-related sexual violenceCRSV) as “acts or modes of operation of rape, sexual slavery, forced prostitution, forced pregnancy, forced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable severity, committed against women, men, girls or boys”(7).
