The Four Types Of Genocidal Rape

As a response to the systemic, widespread and massive rape campaign carried out against Bosnian Muslims and Croat women and girls during the 1992 to 1995 Bosnian War, the 1993 United Nations Security Council Resolution 827 (UN Security Council, 1993), as a preamble to the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), contains the first ever documented UN reference to rape committed during armed conflict or rape as a violation of international humanitarian law (Schott, 2011, p. 5).

The United Nations has identified four types of war rape. These four types include opportunistic rape, which is random; political rape, which defines the woman as property and frequently incorporates public rapes as a means

The overall goal of genocidal rape is to inflict punishment on the male enemy by creating psychological and physical harm for women and girls (Sharlach 2000 as cited in Matusitz, 2017, p. 836). Consequently, war rape as genocidal rape redefines the sexually assaulted woman’s body as a “site of ethnic clashes” (Kirk & Taylor, 2006, p. 139) and reframes the targeted population as sub-human. In turn, the ethnic cleansing strategy represents “an enactment of ethnic superiority” (Mullins, 2009, p. 732).

The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical analysis of genocidal rape. The following will be discussed: how genocidal rape manifests, including prevalence rates, consequences of genocidal rape, socio-cultural, political, and economic factors that affect women’s vulnerability to genocidal rape and the interventions that might be effective in addressing the issue.

How Genocidal Rape

720). Underpinning mass war rape or rape as political policy (Rittner & Roth, 2012) are “patriarchal gender relations” (Messerschmidt, 2006, p. 708), “hegemonic masculinity” (Mullins, 2009, 730), sexual violence (Burn, 2011; Rittner & Roth, 2012), and competing nationalisms (Messerschmidt, 2006) particularly in country-specific or regional specific armed conflicts in which ethnicity, nationalism, and beliefs in ethnic superiority combined with racism take precedence. In turn, the three-way relationship between nationalism, militarism, and patriarchal masculinity becomes the ideal breeding grounds for genocidal rape (Albanese, 200, p. 1007 as cited in Messerschmidt, 2006, p. 709), leading to the construction of a hierarchy of masculinities (Hunnicutt, 2009). This socially constructed hierarchy of masculinities then serves to justify masculine domination and ethnic superiority over the “Other women, Other men, and the Other nation” (Messerschmidt, 2006, p. 710); thereby, justifying the goal of humiliating and metaphorically castrating or emasculating male members of the targeted population (Mullins,