Sexual violence is used as a weapon to humilate and degrade in conflict situations. Chibuzo Odigwe takes a look at this crime against humanity

"I was leaving for boarding school in Gisenyi. Just before reaching the town... we were ambushed by the abacengezi [insurgents]... The taxi rolled over, and, as the passengers fled the vehicle, the abacengezi chopped them with machetes. I managed to hide under the corpses but heard the rebels saying they would get fuel to burn the bodies. I cried out, and they stabbed me... and carried me into the forest... There were other women and girls there too, from different parts of the country, who had been kidnapped under similar circumstances. Members of the militia came each night to rape me, until one night a militia member announced that I was his, that he was my "husband." I only thought of escaping to my family..."¹

This is the story of Angèle, from Kigali, Rwanda, who was repeatedly raped during the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Sexual violence was one of the many crimes committed in the attempt to exterminate the Tutsi minority ethnic group. During this conflict, women were repeatedly sexually assaulted and subjected to degrading forms of treatment. Tutsi women were made to feel humiliated by being forced to parade nude in front of soldiers and the public. Although Angèle survived the genocide, she was infected with HIV.

Weapon of hate

Sexual violence is a powerful weapon against individuals, families, and communities, motivated by the desire to dominate and degrade. Although men can be victims of sexual violence, most of the victims in conflict situations are women. Sexual violence is used as physical and emotional torture for its victims, mostly women and in some cases children, leaving scars that take a long while to heal--if they heal at all.²

Another atrocity committed in conflict is sexual slavery. This occurs when an individual is forced to submit to the sexual will of another person for a prolonged period of time. Having unlimited sexual access to "enemy" women is often seen as one of the spoils of war. Testimonies suggest that women and young girls have been captured and made to serve as sex slaves for whole battalions. In the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia in 1992, rape was used as one method of ethnic cleansing. One woman interviewed in a refugee camp by Human Rights Watch said that the group of men who raped her and 13 other women with whom she was imprisoned "were a kind of military police [that] did nothing but rape. It was all organised; they had a group for raping and a group for killing."

CHRISTINE NESBITT/AP

Members of the revolutionary United Front in
sierra Leone on trial for brutalising civilians and raping women

In Bosnia, it is estimated that up to 60 000 women may have been raped. So widespread was the violence and killings, that some women began to see themselves as lucky if they were raped--they could have been killed. "When they take you away, they may kill you. So if you are raped, you feel lucky. At least you're alive," one woman said in her testimony.³

In Sierra Leone, about 94% of households involved in a random survey conducted by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), reported sexual abuse among its members. Bola, a Sierra Leonean teenager said, "They forced us to be tied and we were taken to the bush where the sexual act was forced on us... Nine men raped me..." The form of abuse ranged from rape to the forceful insertion of foreign objects into the genitals. Some women died as a result of the abuse and many others were permanently scarred. Pregnant women were not spared. One young girl said, "One time we came across two pregnant women. They tied the women down with their legs eagle spread and took a sharpened stick and jabbed inside their wombs until the babies came out on the stick."⁴

Abuse of power

In conflict situations, a combination of factors makes women vulnerable to sexual abuse. One of these is the lack of security people have to live with. The hallmark of conflict is general anarchy and instability, and in situations like this people with criminal intent find it easy to commit crimes. Women may be forced to exchange sex for the right to obtain favours like being allowed to cross a checkpoint. They may also feel they have to put up with makeshift relationships on the condition that they will be protected. This arrangement sees them living in virtual slavery with men who they think will offer them protection. Most of the time these men are soldiers or warlords, and some of them have little regard for the basic tenets of human sexual rights.^{1 2 3 4}

The problem is worse for women who live in societies where women's rights are not accorded their proper place. In such places, some men feel they have a right to treat women as possessions, exposing them to sexual assault in many cases.⁵

Consequences

Few people, if any, ever experience sexual violence without emotional, psychological, or physical scars. Victims may become pregnant--a burden made more painful by the fact that they will have to learn to love and care for a child whose father they do not know, may never know, and have never loved. The children themselves are brought up living with social discrimination. In Rwanda, children born after rape are referred to as "children of bad memory," even by their mothers and have few if any social rights. One woman says, "Where I come from, everybody, my husband, my daughter, the whole town, everybody would think of the kid as filth."²

Another major consequence of sexual violence is HIV infection. Marie is a Rwandan woman who contracted HIV from one of the many sex masters she served during the genocide. She is now in the terminal stage of her illness, after passing through years of indescribable sorrow and pain. Looking back on her ordeal, she wishes that she had not survived the genocide.⁶ Some other women develop gynaecological complications as a result of the assault, and run the risk of ruining their entire reproductive lives.¹ There are also emotional implications of sexual assault with most victims suffering from depression, and suicidal ideation.⁷

BEN CUTRIS/AP

Kula, victim of sexual assault,
visits a centre for women traumatised by war

The way forward

Most of the current interventions aimed against sexual violence are from human rights organisations and non-governmental voluntary groups with the cooperation of international bodies like the World Health Organization and the United Nations. Physicians for Human Rights say that more intervention effort is needed because support services are sometimes virtually non-existent in trouble spots leaving the victims with no alternative other than death or mental breakdown.⁴ Establishment of international criminal tribunals to prosecute sexual crimes committed during conflict and the inclusion of sexual crimes into the list of crimes against humanity is one way to tackle this.² According to the Coalition on Women's Rights in Conflict Situations, history was made when, on October 2 1998, Jean Akayesu, a Rwandan mayoral official, was sentenced by the International Court on Rwanda for his role in the sexual violence that occurred during this period. Akayesu aided and abetted sexual crimes in the region under his control and was quoted in one instance as telling the rapist Hutu militia, "Don't complain to me now that you don't know what a Tutsi woman tastes like."⁸

Another area that needs attention is the health needs of victims. Human Rights Watch says that the governments and the international community should make every effort to address health issues for women resulting from sexual violence. They recommend that specific rape programmes be implemented into broader rehabilitation programmes for survivors of conflict.⁹ One example of such a programme is conducted by the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture (see last month's studentBMJ for more details about their work).¹⁰

Kofi Annan, the United Nations Secretary General, summed up the entire problem and what should be done when he said, "Men and women everywhere have the right to live their lives and raise their children free from the fear of violence. We must help them enjoy that right by making it clearly understood that violence is preventable, and by working together to identify and address its underlying causes."¹¹ Chibuzo Odigwe Clegg scholar, BMJ
Email: codigwe@bmj.com

May 2004

1. Amnesty International. Rwanda: "Marked for death," rape survivors living with HIV/AIDS in Rwanda. London: AI, 2004. http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGAFR470072004 (accessed 21 Apr 2004).
2. Papinenni P. Children of bad memories. Lancet 2003;362:825-6.
3. Human Rights Watch. Bosnia and Hercegovina: "a closed, dark place": past and present human rights abuses in Foca. New York, HRW, 1998. www.hrw.org/reports98/foca
4. Physicians for Human Rights. War-related sexual violence in Sierra Leone: a population based assessment www.phrusa.org/research/sierra_leone/pdf_files/07_future.pdf (accessed 14th April 2004).
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8. Coalition on Women's Rights in Conflict Situations. Rwanda: Akayesu sentencing a victory for women's rights. 1998. www.essex.ac.uk/armedcon/story_id/000 054.pdf (accessed 21 Apr 2004).
9. Human Rights Watch. World report: Sierra Leone: sexual violence within the Sierra Leone conflict. New York: HRW, 2001. www.hrw.org/backgrounder/africa/sl-bck0226.htm (accessed 21 Apr 2004).
10. Grandville-Chapman C. Rape and other torture in the Chechnya conflict: documented evidence from asylum seekers arriving in the United Kingdom. London: Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, 2004.
11. World Health Organization. World report on violence and health: milestones of a global campaign for violence prevention. London: WHO, 2002. www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/resources/en/milestones_wrvh.pdf (accessed 21 Apr 2004).

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