Panelists, including Kings College professor Jelke Boesten, second from right, discuss the implications of wartime sexual violence on gender and power dynamics. Boesten urged the international community to pay more attention to the cultural context in which sexual violence occurs. (Madeline Fox/MNS)
By Madeline Fox
WASHINGTON – Sexual violence in war-torn regions is a known problem, but less attention is paid to the severe issue of the lingering peacetime gender inequality that it reinforces, said London professor Jelke Boesten.
In a panel at the U.S. Institute of Peace, Boesten, a Kings College, professor who specializes in emerging economies and international development, stressed that sexual violence in conflict does not exist in a vacuum. It is the result of existing social structures of race, class and gender — inequalities that are made worse in war and persist after the fighting ends.
Boesten argued that international concern about rape and abuse during war often misses this larger culture of gender inequality, which allows tolerance for sexual violence to be reinforced and continued even after the conflict and resulting international attention subside.
She advocated for organizations like the United Nations and the International Criminal Court to pay more attention to the cultural context in which sexual violence occurs and to its aftereffects, rather than just the immediate problem of violence in periods of conflict.
“Very little attention is paid to women’s other stories of violence,” Boesten said. “It’s as if women who are victims of sexual violence are denied any agency.” Kathleen Kuehnast, director of the Center for Gender and Peacebuilding at the peace institute, a congressionally established national security institution focused on nonviolent solutions, echoed her concern. And she argued against the common conception that sexual violence persists because women do not speak up.
“Women speak. Women speak a whole lot,” Kuehnast said.
Boesten spent years researching the effects of sexual violence in Peru during the 1980s and 1990s, when conflict between the leftist insurgent group Shining Path and the national army plunged the country into violence.
Both state forces and the Shining Path used rape, forced nudity, sexual torture and other forms of sexual violence to subjugate the population, though the insurgents did so less systematically, according to Boesten.
“There hasn’t been during those years (following the Peruvian conflict) a cultural or societal change in how people judge sexual violence against women,” said Boesten.
Armed conflict such as that in Peru causes socioeconomic insecurity, loss of breadwinners, and unwanted pregnancies and HIV infections, said Boesten.
The international community has been paying more attention to sexual violence in times of conflict, particularly since the international outcry in response to the murderous 1994 Rwandan crisis, when hundreds of thousands of women were raped during the three months of attacks against ethnic Tutsi people. Far less attention was paid to its aftereffects. The office of the U.N. Secretary General for Sexual Violence in Conflict, established in 2009, does not mention post-conflict concerns among its priorities, nor has the International Criminal Court prosecuted cases of solely sexual violence.
“Rape tends to be seen as a lesser crime in comparison to other crimes against humanity,” Boesten said. Since wartime rape produces existing inequality, “it is important that domestic and international courts do prosecute wartime sexual violence as a crime against humanity.”
