The consequence of our refusal to concede female contributions to violence are manifold. It affects our capacity to promote ourselves as autonomous and responsible beings. It affects our ability to develop a literature about ourselves that encompasses the full array of human emotions and experience. It demeans the right our victims have to be valued. . . . Perhaps above all, the denial of women’s aggression profoundly undermines our attempt as a culture to understand violence, to trace its causes and to quell them.1
—Patricia Pearson, When She Was Bad: How and Why Women Get Away with Murder
This chapter looks to investigate women’s commission of sexual violence in war and conflict in the spirit of Patricia Pearson’s concern. We will return to this point at the end of the chapter, but it is worth discussing for a bit at the outset: this book and this chapter do not strive to enumerate all of the instances of women’s perpetration of sexual violence in war and conflict, or the demographic traits of women perpetrators, their motives for doing what they did, or the sex- or gender-specific consequences of women’s engagement in perpetration. While all of those are laudable (if possible) goals, the goal of this analysis is to demonstrate that “the impossible woman”—the woman perpetrator of sexual violence in war and conflict—exists, and that her existence is more than an anomaly. “She” exists not only in one conflict or in one part of the world or in one period of time, but across a wide variety of conflicts, a wide variety of time periods, and a wide variety of cultural, religious, language, national, class, and gender orders in global politics.
As discussed previously, it is not that women perpetrators of sexual violence in war and conflict do not make appearances in legal, scholarly, and even media coverage of war criminals. Instead, when those women appear in those accounts, the timing of their appearances, the framing of their actions, the significations of gender stereotyping, and the analysis of their motivations all serve to reify a notion of their impossibility similar to the implication of the majority of accounts of sexual violence in war and conflict, which are silent as to not only the existence but the possibility of women perpetrators.
The complexity of how female perpetrators of sexual violence in war and conflict are presented and understood, with the complexity of thinking about that sexual violence in light of women’s perpetration, can be seen in many accounts of women’s involvement across many conflicts. For example, a 2004 Amnesty International report implicated women in encouraging men to rape by singing songs of racial hatred and destruction of the feminine in Darfur, as the Janjaweed committed a high level of racially targeted sexual violence.2 As Amnesty reported:
The songs of the Hakima, or the Janjaweed women as the refugees call them, encouraged the atrocities committed by the militamen. The women singers stirred up racial hatred against black civilians during attacks on villages in Darfur and celebrated the humiliation of their enemies, the human rights group said. . . . Amnesty International collected several testimonies mentioning the presence of Hakima while women were raped by the Janjaweed. The report said: “Hakima appear to have directly [physically] harassed the women who were assaulted, and verbally attacked them.”3
This report was repeated in a large number of news sites and internet blogs, and included in academic accounts of the conflict. The Hakima4 play a role in conflict in Sudan historically, as anthropologist Isam Mohamed Ibrahim explains: “they sing the bravery, strength, and cavalry values. The Hakima plays a dominant role here. She incites the men to fight bravely. She also sings the defects of others.”5 This is consistent with psychologist Phyllis Chesler’s description that the Hakima women provide support to the men and “utter racial insults to the women being raped.”6
Chesler, a psychologist who focuses her scholarly attention on “deviant” women, attempts to explain the motivation behind women’s participation in the Sudanese ethnic conflict in an article for Frontpage magazine. She first explains that she is “not surprised by the behavior of the Janjaweed women” because, “like men, women also internalize sexist values [and] . . . cling to the status quo; even to one that demeans them.”7 Chesler accounts for women’s participation in and encouragement of sexist sexual violence by their internalization of sexist norms, given the power of sexist norms in society. Chesler suggests that the sexual violence is masculinist, even when women are committing it. The women committing it are characterized as snowed by sexism, and therefore inadvertently, rather than knowingly, perpetrators.
This sort of analysis, however, is uncommon among scholars, media outlets, and legal analysts who pay attention to the existence of the Janjaweed women who were accused of inciting sexual violence in the conflict in Darfur. Instead, what most of the depictions of these women have in common is a characterization of women’s participation in violence against women as both unique and somehow more twisted and more serious than men’s “normal” perpetration of sexual violence against women in war and conflict. News articles discussing the Janjaweed women are about women’s encouragement of rape, rather than about the rapists that they encouraged to commit rape, or the victims of those rapes.
Several layers of difficulty shroud coverage of and discussions of women’s perpetration of sexual violence in war and conflict. Like in Darfur, many discussions of sexual violence in war and conflict omit both the existence of female perpetrators and the possibility of that existence, framing perpetrators as male and victims as female. Also like in Darfur, much of the coverage of women’s engagement in sexual violence in war and conflict sensationalizes it, overfocuses on it, and creates gendered and distorted images of the female perpetrators. This chapter looks to recognize the existence of women’s perpetration of sexual violence without perpetuating distortions or sensationalizing.8
A 2007 report identified the existence of sexual violence in war and conflict within ongoing or recent conflicts in 51 countries across the globe.9 Most of those conflicts give evidence of women’s perpetration of political violence; in many, there is evidence of women’s perpetration of sexual violence in war and conflict. Determining how many women commit sexual violence in how many conflicts is a different project than this book looks to accomplish. Instead, this chapter looks at several cases of women’s perpetration of sexual and sexualized violence in conflict since the beginning of the twentieth century, selecting for variety in type, location, circumstance, and conflict. It does so not claiming that the cases presented here are representative or typical—quite the opposite, in fact. I argue that there is not a representative or typical female perpetrator of sexual violence in war and conflict—or a representative or typical perpetrator of sexual violence in war and conflict more generally. Instead, my purpose in exploring these cases is to explore the twinned existence and invisibility of female perpetrators of sexual violence.
This chapter explores five cases of women’s perpetration of sexual violence in war and conflict: in the Armenian genocide, in World War II Germany, in the former Yugoslavia, in the Rwandan genocide, and in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It provides some information about the conflicts in which this violence occurs, but, for purposes of space, very little detail about the background of each conflict situation. In providing information about these female perpetrators of sexual violence in war and conflict, this chapter looks neither to downplay the horror of the crimes that women (were alleged to have) committed nor to sensationalize sexual violence in war and conflict either generally or because women were its perpetrators. Instead, it provides background information for the analysis in later chapters for leveraging women’s perpetration to contribute to understanding gender, women, and sexual violence, and the relationships among them.
The Armenian genocide, or Armenian holocaust, is the name generally given to the slaughter of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, which reached its peak in 1915–1916.10 While the term “genocide” is not used by the Turkish government, it has been used by a number of states in the international arena, as well as a number of scholars.11 Helen Fein’s characterization of the Armenian genocide as the “first modern ideological genocide of the [twentieth] century” has garnered a fair amount of consensus both among historians of the late Ottoman Empire and among scholars of genocide.12 Conservative estimates suggest that around 700,000 people died during the extermination of the Armenians and other minority groups,13 while others suggest that it could have been as many as 1.5 million.14 During the commission of these killings, there was a significant amount of documentation, both from foreign state intelligence and from missionaries and journalists who were in the Ottoman Empire at the time.15 The Ottoman government suggested that they were simply putting down pro-Russian revolutions, but even their allies in World War I stopped believing that and made it clear that they would hold the Ottoman government responsible for the crimes against humanity that were being committed.16 While the word “genocide” did not arise until later,17 scholars of genocide suggest that what happened in the Armenian genocide is one of its textbook cases.18 In 1998, the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly resolved to “commemorate the anniversary of what has been called the first genocide of the 20th century” and “salute the memory of the Armenian victims of crimes against humanity.”19 Recently, the Armenian genocide has been recognized by the government of Brazil,20 and the subject of controversy about President Obama’s failure to recognize it formally.21
Katharine Derderian argued that, in the perpetration of the Armenian genocide, there was a “definite link between genocidal and gender ideologies.”22 Derderian’s description is consonant with many of the historical accounts put forth by scholars who study the Armenian genocide, which recount a significant amount of gender-based abuse, including but not limited to rape, sale into sex slavery, and targeted killing. S. D. Stein’s description is an example: “at one place, the new bride of a priest was raped repeatedly by the raiders, while her husband, the priest, watched her torment. The priest saw her die before his eyes, and then he himself was killed after being mutilated terribly.”23 A number of other terrible experiences for women are chronicled in histories of the Armenian genocide.24 This has led scholars like Derderian to suggest that the link between genocidal and gendered ideologies during the genocide ran deep, with gender being a key axis on which genocide was perpetrated.25 As she details:
Gender ideology influenced the perpetration of the Genocide, beginning with the separation and massacre of men, which left Armenian women and children defenseless. Rape, kidnapping, sexual slavery, and forced conversion to Islam furthered the genocidal program, in which women and girls represented a productive and reproductive forced targeted for forced labor and biological assimilation.26
Most historical accounts describe this genocide as one carried out by men against men and women.27 Several close studies of the genocide, however, have revealed that there were women perpetrators of genocide generally and of genocidal sexual violence specifically. As Stein notes, witnesses to the genocide pointed out that women played a role in the killings.28 He recounts one incident where victims “had their hands tied behind their back and were rolled down steep cliffs. Women were standing below and they slashed at those who had rolled down with knives until they were dead.”29
A study by Eliz Sanasarian notes that women were indeed involved in the Armenian genocide as perpetrators, and their perpetration often victimized other women. Sanasarian interviewed a number of survivors of the Armenian genocide, and recounts stories of women beating other women, killing other women, sexually violating other women, and selling other women (and girls) into sexual slavery.30 The commission of sexual violence in war and conflict by women towards women is left out of most accounts of the Armenian genocide.
Sanasarian explains that, while women were more likely than men to survive the genocide, both as perpetrators and as victims, they were more likely than men to have been sexually violated during it. In other words, women did constitute the majority of the victims of sexual violence in war and conflict in the Armenian genocide. Still, the victimization of women did not mean that all women were either overall peaceful or left out of the realm of the perpetration of sexual violence specifically. Sanasarian expected that she would find that women played stereotypically feminine roles during the genocide, as rescuers, or protesters for peace. It turns out, instead, that women were represented in the ranks of the perpetrators, and not overrepresented in the ranks of the rescuers. Women’s roles in selling other women into sexual slavery were particularly salient in the narratives of the survivors whom Sanasarian interviewed. In the survivors’ words and in Sanasarian’s telling of their stories, (most often Turkish) women were described as sexually abusing and then selling Armenian women who had been brought into their households (often, ironically, by their husbands for protection) because they were jealous of their husbands’ (imagined or actual) sexual relationships with these women (who were often in their early teen years).31
Sanasarian relates first-hand accounts from personal interviews with women who experienced the Armenian genocide, often as children or young adults. She explains that “one survivor’s story was typical. She was abducted by a Turk during the deportation. He took her home; his wife and neighborhood women tied her up and tattooed her. Tattooing was the primary mark of slavery.”32 Another one of Sanasarian’s interviewees describes being forced into marriage by a woman in the household that was supposedly protecting her from being hurt or killed. The victim’s sister recounted the story, starting with the man who had taken her and her sister in. Sanasarian provides details:
To assure their safety, he took them to his house. The mother-in-law of the officer pressured the respondent’s sister into marrying a Turkish neighbor. When she refused, the woman beat her and called soldiers telling them to take her away. The frightened sister then consented to the marriage.33
Women’s participation in sexual violence in war and conflict in the Armenian genocide, when it is recognized, is often described in terms of their status as jealous housewives, rather than in any terms that would make them either responsible for their violence or comparable to male perpetrators. Even Sanasarian looks to gendered household dynamics for an explanation of how and why women could come to do such heinous violence to other women. She wonders if women wanted to “rid their lives of the presence of young female intruders” in part because they were “perceiving the child as a future second-wife in the household.”34 Sanasarian notes that the perpetration of sexual violence by women on women did not stop at the end of the formal killing, or with the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. Instead, she documents a “post-genocide” practice of selling girls who had been orphaned by the genocide as mail-order brides from the orphanages where they were staying.35 Her article does not have an account of women’s motivation for engagement in selling other women as mail-order brides.
Sanasarian’s study of the roles that women played in the Armenian genocide concludes that “women acquired all possible roles traditionally ascribed to men; they were perpetrators and collaborators in genocide.”36 While there is not any evidence of women raping other women in the Armenian genocide, that does not mean that women did not commit a variety of other offenses that constitute sexual violence in war and conflict, including forcing other women to have sexual relations with men. Sanasarian’s study, while it samples a relatively small number of victims, suggests that a not insignificant percentage of victims have stories of their experiences of the genocide that include female perpetrators. Female perpetrators sold or forced other women into sexual slavery or other nonconsensual sexual relationships, women tattooed and enslaved other women themselves, and women engaged in physical torture of other women. In the Armenian genocide, the “impossible” female perpetrator existed, if hidden just outside of the reach of traditional analyses of war rape and below the surface of most accounts of what constitutes both genocide and sexual violence in war and conflict.
The Nazi genocide needs little introduction—it is one of the most historically memorable events in the twentieth century.37 Under the control of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party, the German military, German police, and everyday Germans engaged in an extermination attempt targeted at Jews, Roma, Slavs, communists, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others whom the Third Reich considered to be genetically inferior to Aryan Germans.38 These killings took place not only in Germany, but in the many places Germany occupied and/or controlled during the lead-up to and fighting of World War II. In the Holocaust, as it has come to be called, it is estimated that more than 60 percent of the population of Jews residing in continental Europe were killed, along with literally millions of other people.39 Tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of Germans and other Europeans became killers during the Holocaust.40
Most of the attention in history, political science, and legal literatures to the Nazi genocide focuses on the killing that occurred therein, and with good reason. The overall death toll of the Nazi genocide is a unique distinguishing feature—it was, both in scale and in level of cruelty, historically with few if any precedents, and therefore shocking.41 A new body of international law developed in response to the Nazi genocide in order to classify what the Nazis had done as a different sort of crime than normal “war crimes” or “crimes against humanity”—but as genocide.42 As other genocides have unfolded over the years, however, it has become obvious that they often if not always included tools of dehumanization and extermination in addition to and other to killing—including but not limited to sexual violence, enslavement, forced impregnation, and forced migration.43 Looking back at the Nazi genocide, the historical record suggests not that it was without sexual violence, but instead that, in contemporary accounts, the violence of mass murder overshadowed the reports of sexual violence that did exist.44
Another part of the genocide that often slipped under the radar was the existence of women perpetrators.45 As I suggested in the introduction to this book in the discussion of the image of Ilse Koch, very few women were recognized as perpetrators of the Nazi genocide.46 While it was well-known that women participated, their participation was rarely discussed or prosecuted.47 When women were recognized as perpetrators, it was often in their capacities as the wives or mistresses of male perpetrators, or with the understanding that they were mentally ill, depraved, or crazy.48 Women’s engagement in sexual violence was, to the extent that I am able to find, not mentioned in official jurisprudential or policy discussions, despite discussions of men’s sexual violence and even of women’s engagement in other forms of perpetration of genocide.49
Still, there is a significant amount of evidence that women participated in sexual violence against other women, both at prison, concentration, and extermination camps and in situations where women were responsible for providing other women medical care.50 While the “image of Ilse Koch” carried over to many women who either were at the time or have since been recognized as perpetrators of the Nazi genocide, many of them received significantly less attention than Koch herself.51 Still, we have some information about other women who are alleged to have engaged in sexual violence at prison camps. For example, Dr. Herta Oberheuser, resident physician at Auschwitz, was alleged to have committed a number of crimes of torture against the women prisoners there.52 Among the crimes she is said to have committed are rubbing glass and sawdust into wounds, amputating limbs, removing vital organs, and killing by injecting oil into women and girls, all the while suggesting that these actions were for the sake of experimental science.53 She was well-known for operating on healthy women as a part of her “experimentation.”54 Sources that did recognize Oberheuser’s engagement in torture and sexual violence during the Nazi genocide often paired that recognition with a characterization of her as a mentally unstable monster incapable of normal social interaction.55
Another woman whose perpetration of physical and sexual violence in prison camps has been alleged is Dorothea Binz, who also worked at Auschwitz, as a guard.56 Binz’s job was training other guards to keep order at concentration camps, and she is credited with training some of the most brutal guards who worked at Nazi camps during World War II.57 At the height of Binz’s career in the Nazi prison camp system, she was in charge of training the guards who controlled around 50,000 women and children prisoners. During that time, she allegedly supervised gas chamber killings, shootings, starvations, and freezings.58 Binz is reputed to have set trained fighting dogs on prisoners. In addition to her supervisory roles, there is evidence that she personally beat, slapped, kicked, shot, whipped, and sexually abused women prisoners.59
Irma Grese has also been accused of sexual violence towards other women. As Sarti explains:
Survivor accounts related repeatedly that Grese not only beat prisoners, she sexually abused them as well. Sexual abuse, in one sense, is more humiliating than physical abuse alone, but both abuses combined and administered by one’s own sex were among the most horrifying of all crimes perpetrated by these women.60
These women are a few whose stories have made it into the history books, and sometimes into the realm of political and legal analysis. Some of them had greater roles of authority than the women whose names did not make it into the history books, others had traits (or alleged traits) that caught the fancy of potential audiences. While it is possible to know these women’s names and piece together some stories of what they did during the Nazi genocide, there are many other women who were clearly either perpetrators of or complicit in genocide, and who may or may not have committed sexual violence within the scope of that perpetration or complicity, but whose names and stories remain untold. Still, it is possible to know that these women existed, as many historical accounts now recognize women prison guards by numbers if not by name. For example, James Waller notes that there were around 3,950 women guards at Ravensbrück, another Nazi prison camp.61 Very little information is available about those women, individually or collectively.
Most of the information that is available about female prison guards characterizes them as pawns of their husbands, or as teenagers who were carefree and unable to grasp the broader consequences of their actions. Stories that suggest that women perpetrators of sexual violence (or any violence at all) under the Nazi regime made choices pair that suggestion with characterizations that the women were mentally ill or emotionally unstable, or even examples of the creativity of femininity carried to its (dangerous) extremes.62 They were, therefore, characterized as at once having committed crimes that constituted genocide and having been incapable of the intentionality that made their actions truly disturbing.
Nowhere is this internal contradiction more obvious than in the telling of the stories of the women who seem to have been responsible for the most systematic sexual violence that women committed against other women during the Nazi genocide: women who engaged in the forced sterilization of other women in hospitals, mental facilities, and even concentration camps.63 Nazi ideology that motivated the commission of the genocide relied on a notion of the production of a genetically ideal, and genetically pure, population.64 Many Nazi policies, therefore, focused on encouraging reproduction of Germans whom the Reich and the Nazi Party saw as ideal, and stopping the reproduction of populations seen as genetically inferior.65 This stopping of reproduction included not only killing, but eliminating the reproductive abilities of people who were not killed.66
In many genocides, sexual violence included forced impregnation as a major element of the strategy of extermination—using pregnancy to destroy the purity of the racial or ethnic group that was under attack.67 The Nazis thought about this differently—they were not interested in destroying the purity of Jews or other groups; instead, they were primarily focused on destroying their existence.68 As such, the Nazi regime often actually punished between-race sexual violence, particularly rape—not because it was a violation of the rights or the humanity of the victim, but because it was a violation of Nazi population policies that could have a negative impact on the achievement of the party’s goals.69 There is, perhaps for this reason, little if any evidence of the use of forced impregnation during the Nazi genocide.70 Instead, the great majority of Nazi sexual violence towards victims of the genocide came in other forms—including medical experimentation on pregnant women, whipping the groin and breast areas, and forced sterilizations.71
Nurses and other medical professionals in Nazi Germany played a large role in the sexual violation of other women.72 The best evidence of this phenomenon is in psychiatric facilities, where Nazi doctrine suggested that the mentally and physically handicapped patients were a part of genetically inferior groups whose reproduction needed to be prevented.73 As a historical study on nurses in Nazi Germany notes, “there was no question in the minds of the Geisteskrankenpflege’s contributors that proposed eugenic measures, and especially sterilization, were necessary and justified.”74 In nurse training, it was emphasized that “eugenics was not an intellectual fad but rather a decades-old science whose ‘significance’ had finally been recognized and incorporated into state policy.”75 Characterized as “grading fertility according to racial value,” Nazi policies suggested that “just as the prevention of infectious diseases was obviously preferable to treating them once they had appeared, preventing the spread of genetic deficiencies by taking analogous steps was a matter of common sense.”76
Eugenic policies included both “positive” incentivization, like providing “marriage loans for nonpredisposed partners” for the purpose of “filling the gene pool with racially pure and healthy offspring,” and “negative” ones that “would ensure that undesirable elements tapered off and eventually disappeared.”77 This framed sterilization as a positive public policy contribution to shaping the population, rather than as an individual punishment for being undesirable. When nurses were being trained to sterilize undesirable people, the humanity of sterilization was emphasized, particularly inasmuch as the ability to both have and enjoy sex was maintained. Forced sterilization targeted women, who were framed as the source of the problem of substandard reproduction.78 Nazi policy statements suggested that many mothers were dirty, ugly, poorly behaved, and into drinking, smoking, and other vices, and passing those vices on to their children, characterized as “genetically ill” and “asocial.”79 The category of “genetically ill” people were split into two subcategories: “the ‘good’ ones demonstrated their sense of responsibility by volunteering to be sterilized, while the ‘bad’ ones reproduced with abandon.”80 Good or bad, though, “all were subject to sterilization” which was discussed as deserved, but not punitive.81 Often, patients in psychiatric institutions were offered the opportunity to leave in exchange for submitting to sterilization, which was an alternative to remaining at the psychiatric institution and paying for one’s ‘hospitalization’ there.82
We know that forced sterilization was a part of Nazi official policy, both in psychiatric institutions and in situations where sterilization looked to be more efficient than killing to end the target genetic line. We know that these sterilizations, like many of the euthanasia programs in Nazi Germany, were largely carried out by health professionals, particularly nurses.83 We know that the overwhelming majority of the nurses who perpetrated forced sterilizations did so in response to both trainings and commands that instructed it both as a matter of policy and as medically necessary.84 We also know that the majority of nurses who perpetrated forced sterilizations were women.85 While some of these nurses stood trial after the defeat of Nazi Germany,86 many neither took nor were forced to take any responsibility for their actions.87 Historians estimate that tens of thousands of nurses participated in the forced sterilization of about half a million people over the course of the Nazi reign.88
Between tens of thousands of women prison, concentration camp, and death camp guards, and tens of thousands of nurses, it is clear that a number of women engaged in the perpetration of the Holocaust, and their participation has been heavily documented elsewhere. In fact, women’s participation in sexual violence—whether it is sexual violation in concentration camps or compulsory sterilizations in hospitals—is also relatively well documented (in contrast to many other conflicts across history, but in line with other Nazi atrocities). At the same time, most if not all of these accounts of women’s engagement in sexualized beatings, women’s sexual violation of other women, and women’s sterilization of other women stop short of accounting for the violence as sexual violence. As mentioned above, that may be because the horrors of the killings in the Holocaust tend to overshadow detailed and pointed analyses of other violence. It may also be because of the impossibility of women perpetrators of sexual violence against other women—especially given that most accounts of women’s engagement in these acts focus either on the insanity of the female perpetrator or on the ways in which the violence was “sold” to women by their superiors to appear acceptable or even humane. While, in the Holocaust, there is little evidence of women’s direct engagement in the rape of other women, there is evidence that women engaged in a number of acts that constitute sexual violence, sexualized beatings, sexually assaulting women prisoners, and sterilizing women patients against their will. The impossibility of these women sexual perpetrators may have kept accounts of their behavior out of mainstream scholarly, media, and legal accounts of the Holocaust for quite a while, but the combination of new evidence and rereading old accounts of the Holocaust provide ample evidence that the impossible Nazi woman engaging in sexual violence in war and conflict not only existed, but was a systematic part of the perpetration of the Nazi genocide.89
A series of political crises in the 1980s among the republics that made up the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia developed into a series of conflicts during and after the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.90 Yugoslavia had been a federation composed of six states: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia, where each republic had its own governmental system and the federal government mediated.91 The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was governed for most of its history by Josip Broz Tito, who had been president-for-life.92 After his death in 1980, Yugoslavia was less politically stable.93 One trigger for the conflict that ensued was Slobodan Milošević’s coming to power in Serbia in 1987. Milošević sought control over the autonomous province of Kosovo (which was within Serbia, and where a number of Kosovar Albanians had been advocating for independence since the early 1980s).94 This was met with opposition from the other Yugoslav republics, an issue that came to a head in a number of 1990 elections at the end of the Cold War, where communist parties lost power everywhere but Serbia and Montenegro.95 Many of the communist parties were defeated by explicitly nationalist leaders who led four of the Yugoslav republics to declare their independence from Yugoslavia.96 These declarations of independence, however, did not resolve either rising ethnic tensions among the former Yugoslav republics, or the fate of the ethnic minorities of Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks within the other republics.97 Intense negotiations for a peaceful breakup of the former Yugoslavia with the European Union and other interested parties ended without much success,98 especially since Serbia’s leadership was unsatisfied with guarantees of Serbian territorial integrity and protection of Serbs outside of Serbia.99 On April 6, 1992, the European Union formally recognized the independence of Bosnia and Herzegvina, and the Republika Srpska, or the Republic of the Serbian People of Bosnia and Herzegovina, declared its independence with a stated interest of joining the Serb Republic.100 Years of war ensued, with the most intense conflict going on in Bosnia and Herzegovina.101
What ensued has been characterized as both ethnic cleansing and genocide, with some debate on how to categorize it within the historical record.102 Whatever the label, more than 100,000 people (80 percent Bosniak) died in the next few years.103 One of the most well-known incidents of mass killing and violence happened in the summer of 1995, when the Bosnian government had lost control of all but a few towns in eastern Bosnia, but held Srebrenica, Zepa, and Gorazde, which the United Nations had declared “safe havens” to be protected by peacekeeping forces.104 On July 11, 1995, however, Bosnian Serb forces defeated the Dutch peacekeeping forces in Srebrenica and took control of the civilian population there.105 The Bosnian Serb forces separated the civilians on the basis of their sex, sending women and children on buses to Bosnian-controled territories (sometimes while or after sexually assaulting them), and killed the men and boys onsite.106 More than 8,000 men died that day, which the ICTY recognized as an act of genocide.107 At the end of the conflict, between 100,000 and 200,000 were killed, with ten times as many displaced.108 While most of the ethnic cleansing was perpetrated by Serbia and the Serb Republic against Bosniaks and Croats, ethnically motivated killings took place on all sides of the conflict.109
Women participated in, and sometimes led, the violence in the wars that broke up the former Yugoslavia.110 One of the most high-profile female perpetrators is a woman named Bijana Plavšić, who served as acting president of the Republika Srpska both shortly after it declared its independence in 1992 and then again from 1996 to 1998.111 Before going into politics, Plavšić had a successful career as a biologist, which she later used to further her political agenda of ethnic cleansing.112 As one academic observer noted, she “used her knowledge of biology to convince people to share her ethnic hatred” and argued that “Bosnian Muslims were ‘genetically deformed Serbs.’”113 Plavšić’s academic addresses and political speeches advocated ethnic cleansing and ethnic purity, and sometimes even implied that rape was a tactic that could or should be used to achieve these goals.114 There is evidence that troops under both her direct and indirect commands engaged in commanded, ethnically targeted rape. Many of her comments involved sex and sexuality in the discussion of ethnic purity.115
After the conflict died down, the ICTY charged Plavšić with a number of war crimes, including “genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes for a series of crimes, including rape crimes, committed by the Serb military, political, and government authorities,” which were alleged to have been committed with her blessing and sometimes under direct her command.116 It is alleged that Plavšić both conceived of and oversaw the Serbian use of rape as a weapon of genocide.117 The passage that starts chapter 1 in this book is a small part of hundreds of pages of accusations against Plavšić that were discussed explicitly at her ICTY sentencing hearing.118 They include accusations of repeated rape, sexual mutilations, and forced commission of sexual assault.119
Plavšić’s sentencing hearing was the only airing of charges against her in international court, because she never stood trial, reaching a plea bargain instead.120 Plavšić pled guilty to crimes against humanity charges, including accepting responsibility for rape charges.121 She received a sentence of eleven years, truncated in part because of her willingness to admit responsibility for her crimes.122 While she was serving her sentence, Plavšić retracted her admission, arguing that “she had admitted to committing war crimes because she was unable to gather enough witnesses to testify on her behalf” and because she did not want to endure the unpleasantness of a trial.123 She was released early, having served about 60 percent of her sentence, because of her poor health and because it was judged that she had demonstrated adequate remorse.124
Media and scholarly retellings of Plavšić’s involvement in the genocide in the former Yugoslavia are often narrated with gender-based characterizations, as well as the language of sex and sexualization. Several accounts put forward rumors of Plavšić’s sexual involvement with warlords, and discuss her military leadership sexually.125 Often alongside these sexual characterizations, there are narrativizations of Plavšić mothering the men who committed the actual violence, including challenging their masculinity and engaging in “goading.”126 Other stories told of her mental instability. For example, many newspapers repeated Slobodan Milošević’s calling her a “female Mengele.”127
Gender was also prominent in discussions of what punishment Plavšić would receive once she pled guilty to some of the charges against her.128 At her sentencing hearings, people who testified on Plavšić’s behalf suggested that, as a woman, she was inherently less responsible for her behavior and merited a lighter sentence.129 Many elite world leaders also came to Plavšić’s defense, suggesting that she was either personally or as a result of her sex unable to have committed the crimes of which she was accused.130 These defenses characterized her as a caring, feminine peacemaker who was being unfairly accused of men’s crimes.131
While Plavšić got significant attention both from international jurisprudence systems and from media (in both a positive and negative light), most of these accounts portray her as if she was the only woman who was involved in the commission of mass atrocities during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. Her singularity is emphasized over and over again, especially in stories that engage in the most sensationalist coverage of the combination of her gender and her crimes. At the same time, it is incredibly unlikely that Plavšić was the only female perpetrator of ethnically motivated violence generally or sexual violence specifically in this context, both given its widespread occurrence and other, lesser-known accounts of female perpetrators.132 Whether or not there were other women in the former Yugoslavia who participated in the planning and perpetration of sexual violence in war and conflict, Plavšić is another “impossible” woman perpetrator—a woman whose defenders hailed her femininity as evidence of her innocence, and whose critics faulted her hypersexuality and “hysteria.” While there is no direct evidence that Plavšić engaged in sexual violence in war and conflict herself, there is ample evidence that she was responsible for that violence, both in the planning stages and as a commander when it was being carried out.133 This “impossible” woman led the perpetration of sexual violence in war and conflict as a national leader, while president, vice president, and a member of the command of the Republika Srpska military forces, and, if her most recent interviews and writings are to be believed, remains convinced of the justice of her actions.134
Like the histories of the other conflicts in this chapter, the history of the genocide in Rwanda is long and anything but simple.135 Rwanda was one of Africa’s first organized states, composed of people understood to be Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa, with an organized government before the European colonization of many African states.136 Rwanda managed to avoid some of the worst consequences of the slave trade,137 but was ultimately colonized, first by Germany and then by Belgium.138 Movement among the groups in early Rwanda was fluid, where a change in a person’s economic status could be read as a change in their ethnic group membership.139 In 1890, the German Empire was given Rwanda and Burundi in exchange for renouncing its claims on Uganda, but border disputes stopped the final borders from being set until 1900.140 Upon their arrival in the late nineteenth century in Rwanda, the Germans found a monarchy which considered the Tutsi King semi-divine, crediting him with the economic prosperity of the country, which was biased in favor of Tutsi citizens.141
Colonization seems to have put a halt both to fluidity and to peaceful interaction between Hutu and Tutsis in Rwanda.142 Perhaps the Germans’ biggest influence on Rwandan government was their importation of the extremes of European thinking about race to the country.143 The Germans characterized the Tutsis in Rwanda as descended from Europeans, citing evidence that Tutsis were taller, friendlier, and more willing to convert to Catholicism, and favored them.144 Control of Rwanda shifted from Germany to Belgium at the end of World War I,145 and, while the governmental structure did not change much, Belgian involvement in Rwanda was more active than German involvement had been.146
The Belgian government instituted the system of forcing Rwandan residents to carry ethnic identity cards which ultimately both killed the flexibility in group membership and was used to identify victims in the 1994 genocide.147 They did so because they became convinced that the combinations of Tutsi’s larger skull size (which was read as a larger brain size), taller height, and lighter skin made them more akin to Europeans than Hutus, and therefore racially superior.148 Both the colonial government and the Roman Catholic Church, which provided most of the education in Belgian Rwanda, reinforced differences between Hutu and Tutsi, segregating them in educational institutions, residence areas, and professional situations.149
Rwandan independence was marred by ethnic violence, when, in 1959, assassinations of Hutu politicians at the alleged hands of the Tutsis occurred.150 A number of Tutsis were killed in retaliation, and Tutsi leaders accused the Belgians of helping the Hutu killers.151 This violence was accompanied by a change in the local authority in Rwanda, which became dominated by Hutus to the exclusion of Tutsis, many of whom who fled Rwanda for Uganda and the Congo.152 An elected president, Grégoire Kayibanda, was in office for about a decade, but his administration was plagued by inefficiency and corruption.153 In 1973, the defence minister, Juvénal Habyarimana, overthrew the government, suspended the constitution, and imposed a ban on political activity.154 Habyarimana, who held power until he was killed in 1994, was characterized as a moderate on racial and ethnic issues in Rwanda.155 From his takeover in 1973 until 1990, he ran Rwanda as a one-party state, but in 1990 announced his openness to multiparty governance.156
On October 1, 1990, Rwanda was invaded by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a majority-Tutsi group of veterans of the Ugandan war.157 In theory, an August 1993 ceasefire called the Arusha Accords ended that invasion. In that agreement, Habyarimana agreed to share power with the RPF and the Tutsi population.158 Before much progress could be made in the establishment of that government, however, Habyarimana was assassinated.159 Extremist Hutu groups (including the president’s wife, Agathe) have most often been held responsible for the assassination.160 The president was killed April 6, 1994, and an interim government of extremist Hutus started killings on the morning of April 7, with evidence that a list of targets had been developed before the assassination.161
The Rwandan genocide has been characterized as the most “efficient” genocide in the history of the world, measured by the percentage of the target population that was killed and by the speed with which the killings took place.162 In the hundred days of the genocide before the RPF took power in Rwanda, it is estimated that between 800,000 and 1,000,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed, and more were raped or otherwise injured.163 The final death toll accounted for between 70 and 80 percent of the Tutsi population of Rwanda being killed over the summer of 1994.164
More than 100,000 Rwandans were ultimately arrested for the perpetration of the Rwandan genocide, including a number of women.165 Reva Adler, Cyanne Loyle, and Judith Globerman explain that “statistics from the Rwandan justice system indicate that in 2004 approximately 3,000 women, representing some 3.4% of the Rwandan prison population, were incarcerated in Rwandan prisons for genocide-related crime.”166 The participation of women in the Rwandan genocide was not, according to observers, unprecedented. Women had participated in ethnic violence in large numbers in Rwanda before, including during the conflict over the 1973 coup, which the British organization African Rights suggest was “the beginning of their [women’s] widespread participation in violence.”167
Perhaps this history of women’s involvement in government is why women’s engagement in the perpetration of the Rwandan genocide in 1994 is among the best-documented instances of both ordinary women and those in leadership positions engaging in political violence. As Donna Maier notes, “the involvement of female leaders in the Rwanda genocide (cabinet officials, nuns, journalists, nurses, and teachers) is striking and well-established.”168 Adler, Loyle, and Globerman suggest something similar, explaining that “women’s involvement in the planning and implementation of the 1994 genocide at all societal levels has been well-described.”169 Adler and her collaborators suggest that the high visibility of women in the Rwandan genocide “compels us to re-examine the specific roles of women in collective ethnic violence.”170 For that reason they look to “develop a theoretical model explaining why rank-and-file Rwandan women assaulted or murdered targeted victims during the 1994 Rwandan genocide” with the goal of identifying “attitudinal risk factors for genocidal behavior” in female perpetrators.171 In this endeavor, the researchers sought to identify the range of women’s perpetration of the genocide, and discovered that “women’s participation ranged from working as main architects of the violence to acting as individual killers in small communities. Most commonly, women denounced victims and looted victims’ homes as well as their bodies.”172
A number of high-profile women have been accused of perpetration of genocide without explicit reference to their committing sex crimes, though there is no way to know whether that omission is because those women did not commit such crimes, or because their commission of such crimes went under the radar. Those women included, but are not limited, Agathe Habyarimana (the president’s wife);173 Agnes Ntamabyariro (the minister of justice in the provisional government in Rwanda in the summer of 1994);174 prominent radio journalist Valerie Bérmeriki (who worked for Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines);175 and Odette Nyirabegenzi, Rose Karushara, and Euphrasie Kamatamu (part of the Kigali local government).176 While the first lady of Rwanda has hailed Felicitee Semakuba as a heroine during the genocide who used her power to save Tutsis with whom she was close,177 witnesses who talked to African Rights told a different story, suggesting she perpetrated genocide, from shooting into crowds to throwing grenades. Her crimes were characterized as all the more serious because she committed them while pregnant.178
Adler and her collaborators then looked to find out what they could about the women who had perpetrated these and other crimes during the Rwandan genocide, but suggested that perpetrator-narratives were more available from men than from women.179 While many men were willing to talk about how and why they did what they did during the genocide, the researchers explained that “much of what we know about female genocide participants in all of these realms has been gathered from the eyewitness accounts of victims and bystanders; little has come from the perpetrators themselves.”180 The researchers therefore looked to interview female perpetrators, and found fourteen women who were willing to talk about their involvement in the genocide.
Many of their interview subjects discussed the ways that they had been perpetrators of the genocide, including leading militias to the potential victims, participating in attack groups, revealing victims, killing victims, and distributing weapons.181 Others admitted to committing crimes during the genocide but were unwilling to describe them directly.182 Among Adler, Loyle, and Globerman’s interviewees, there was a wide range of the level of responsibility that the women took for their actions. While most of them admitted to having made bad decisions or engaged in poorly considered behavior out of fear or some other motivations, “some participated deliberately and with conviction.”183 Those included “a small number of women . . . [who] used the genocide as an opportunity to improve their financial circumstances or to advance ‘professionally’ by assuming positions of authority during the time of upheaval.”184
Many victims of the genocide have identified a number of the perpetrators as female. An observer explained that some women “‘were actively involved, killing with machetes and guns’ while others ‘acted in support roles—allowing murder squads access to hospitals and homes, cheering on male killers, stripping the dead and looting their houses.’”185 Victims told of women being beaten, and children being killed, by female perpetrators.186 Still, the prosecution of female perpetrators has been characterized as uneven—women perpetrators have protested being disproportionately punished and international observers have expressed concern that women perpetrators were let off more easily than their male counterparts.187
Those who see women as underprosecuted point out that the death penalty for the crimes associated with the genocide (when it was still legal in Rwanda, before 1998), was given out disproportionately to male perpetrators, where “only six women (.2%) have been sentenced to death for genocide-related crimes, and only one woman was in fact executed.”188 They also point out that there is a differential conviction rate for women who had been arrested within Rwanda for the genocide, where “the acquittal rate for women charged with genocide-related crimes is 40%.”189 The acquittal rate for men was only 27.6 percent.190 This unwillingness to prosecute, convict, and punish women, critics argue, is replicated in the international legal arena, where “only one woman, Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, has been indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, on charges that she incited troops to rape and kill hundreds of women in the university town of Butare.”191
At the same time, Mahmood Mamdani noted that many Rwandan women felt singled out by prosecutions, because they thought that they were being prosecuted for lesser crimes than men were in order to prosecute women because they were women.192 Mamdani quotes Aloysius Inyumba, the RPF minister in charge of women’s affairs, in 1995, explaining that “I have 838 women in prison. One woman said to me, I have only killed eight; there are people who have killed more and are free.”193 While this shows the difficulty of finding perspective in who counts as a perpetrator in a conflict with such unspeakable horrors, it also shows tension when gender becomes a key descriptor of either perpetrators or victims of genocide.
While media and legal coverage of women’s involvement in Rwandan genocide far exceeds the attention given to women’s violence in other conflicts, it still remains quite limited, both in substance and in quantity. This is especially true when it comes to discussions of women’s perpetration of sexual violence. While there is some discussion among scholars and in the media of Pauline Nyiramasuhuko’s involvement in both murderous and sexual violence during the genocide, her engagement in political violence is often treated as singular and her engagement in sexual violence is minimized.194 While victims testified that Pauline raped and ordered the rape of young girls before they were killed,195 this feature of her perpetration is deemphasized in a number of accounts of the genocide.
Pauline, it appears, was nowhere near the only woman who perpetrated sexual violence during the Rwandan genocide. African Rights, a British organization that conducted a number of victim interviews in 1994 and 1995, published a book detailing the perpetration of genocidal violence by dozens if not hundreds of women, told through the accounts of their victims and other observers. Many of these descriptions include accounts of women personally perpetrating, ordering the perpetration of, or facilitating the perpetration of, sexual violence. For example, African Rights provides descriptions of Léoncie Nyirabacamurwango victimizing a girl who was being protected by her mother during the genocide. The girl, described as a daughter of Sylvestre Muhiza who held a fake Hutu ID, lived with Nyirabacamurwango’s mother to protect her from the genocide. According to an observer, “Mme Leoncie forced her to take off all her clothes and took her to the roadblock herself where the girl was once again raped before being killed.”196 Here, Nyirabacamurwango committed sexual assault (by forcing the girl to take her clothes off) and facilitated rape (by bringing her to the roadblock to be raped) and murder (by delivering her to killers when she had been in no immediate danger).
Another account depicts a Hutu woman named Maman Aline as committing rape on a wealthy Tutsi businesswoman, Speciose Karakezi.197 As African Rights explains it,
The Interahamwe refused to kill her because she had given them money. Maman Aline demanded to kill the woman herself. There were some displaced women from Gizozi who had pointed sticks. They tried to penetrate her vagina with them. They opened her legs and Maman Aline penetrated her vagina with a stick.198
Other women are alleged to have offered rape as a spoil of war to the soldiers under their command for dutiful obedience to killing orders. For example, Bernadette Mukarurangwa “recruited bands of men and used rape (as well as other incentives) to bribe them into killing.”199 She is described as commanding soldiers to “take up your machetes, kill all the Tutsis, don’t spare a single one.”200 During one killing spree, a witness recounted that “certain Interahamwe had taken in Tutsi girls to rape. Bernadette ordered them to be killed [too], as well as the children of Hutu women married to Tutsis, regardless of sex.”201
These women came from different economic backgrounds, different sources of authority, and different areas of Rwanda. All they shared were the perpetration of sexual violence during the Rwandan genocide. These and other women are identified as not only having committed sexual violence towards other women, but as engaging in behavior that encouraged an air of permissibility surrounding attacking women because they were women, which led other men and women to see this sort of violence as part of the “war” against Tutsis, and therefore acceptable behavior during the genocide.
Women were also identified as “cheerleaders” for male rapists throughout the genocide, similar to the description of the behavior of Sudanese women that begins this chapter.202 They are described as engaged in “support” of male rapists by singing.203 One woman who is accused of genocide by engaging in this sort of singing insists that she did nothing wrong, because she did not individually either rape the women who were raped or shed their blood.204
The accusation that a woman physically committed rape seems to throw off more readers than the suggestions that women assaulted other women, sold them into sexual slavery, performed forced sterilizations, and ordered women’s rapes. Still, while the Rwandan genocide is the source of the most detailed descriptions of women’s perpetration of acts described as rape, it may be the available level of detail about these acts, rather than the acts themselves, which is unique to the Rwandan genocide.
As Janie Leatherman details, “in the Rwandan genocide, both men and women were among the perpetrators. Hutu women from all segments of society (even nuns) carried out rapes, either using objects or ordering men to commit rape of Tutsi women.”205 The Rwandan genocide is the first of the cases explored in this book where there is direct testimony evidence that, in addition to committing other forms of sexual violence and ordering or commanding rape, women actually engaged in the commission of rape and sexual assault against individual women victims. It was not just one “impossible” woman, or a nameless group of “impossible” women—but a significant and documented group of perpetrators, both of genocide and of sexual violence. The volume and range of sexual violence perpetrated on women by “impossible” women in Rwanda further debunks the idea of the impossible female perpetrator of sexual violence in war and conflict, and suggests that it is important to look actively at sexual violence when interested in where women are in war and conflict, and at women when looking for the perpetrators of sexual violence in war and conflict.
The conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo cannot be seen as unrelated to the Rwandan civil wars and genocide, but it cannot be seen as the same conflict, either. The 1994 genocide in Rwanda saw the mass exodus of Rwandans.206 Most of the refugees to the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo were Hutus who migrated there after the RPF gained control in Rwanda in the late summer of 1994.207 Estimates of the number of Rwandan Hutus who took refuge in the DRC range from one to two million.208 The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) suggested a nontrivial number of those refugees were perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide.209 Most of those were perpetrators from the Interahamwe.210 A 1996 invasion of the Eastern DRC (then called Zaire) by Rwanda and Uganda (aided by then opposition leader Laurent Kabila) was ostensibly to rid the area of perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide, but Congolese leaders and some observers expressed concern that other motivations also played a role.211 In 1998, Kabila, now president, ordered Rwandan and Ugandese forces out of the DRC, and enlisted the military aid of Angola and Zimbabwe.212 Nine states total have fought in the conflict, which has taken place almost entirely on Congolese soil.213
Laurent Kabila was succeeded upon his 2001 assassination by his twenty-nine-year-old son, Joseph.214 When Joseph Kabila won a 2006 election in the DRC, a Tutsi-led organization, the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP), increased its military activity in pursuing Rwandan Hutus in the Eastern DRC.215 A 2008 peace agreement that included twenty-two armed groups looked promising, but fighting continued.216 Military cooperation between the Rwandan government and the Congolese government began in early 2009, with the goal of removing the last of the Rwandan genocide perpetrators from the Eastern DRC.217 This cooperation has increased the stability of the region, but between government military activity, the remaining Rwandan opposition factions, and the presence of the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in the region, a significant amount of instability remains in the Eastern DRC at the time of this writing, and some believe that it may be getting worse.218 Over almost two decades of off-and-on fighting, it is estimated that 5.4 million people have died.219 The conflict has been described as one of the worst in the world in terms of the high prevalence of rape and sexual violence, as well as the death rate.220 Language labeling the DRC a failed state,221 and the war an intransigent conflict,222 has been used with increasing frequency.
A 2010 Washington Post report suggested that “the prevalence and intensity of sexual violence against women in eastern Congo are ‘almost unimaginable,’” where, for example, “4500 cases of sexual violence have been reported in just one eastern province since January [nine months], though the actual number is surely much higher.”223 A United Nations official described rape in the area as “’almost a cultural phenomenon’” which had become “’all too common’” such that “’intensity and frequency is worse than anywhere else in the world.’”224 The intensity of the sexual violence is paired with the intensity of the killing, where reports suggest that the combination of the conflict and “conflict-driven humanitarian crisis” continue to kill 45,000 Congolese every month, which, put into perspective “is equivalent to the entire population of Denmark or the state of Colorado perishing within a decade.”225
A significant amount of the coverage of this conflict suggests that it is one perpetrated by groups of men fighting, and that women and other civilians are their collateral damage. Stories tell of women victims:
Mukeya Ulumba, 28, recounts the epic losses she has suffered in recent months. Several of her relatives and neighbors were killed when antigovernment rebels stormed their village last November, moving from house to house in a murder spree that lasted for hours. Ulumba and her husband managed to flee with their four children, leaving behind their life’s possessions, a ravaged community of torched houses, and the bloodied corpses of family members and friends.226
While there is overwhelming evidence of the gender-based abuse of women in the long-running conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, there is also evidence that a significant amount of that violence, including sexual violence, is perpetrated by women. A team of doctors did a population-based survey of almost 1,000 households in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in 2010 to get a sense both of the prevalence of sexual violence and of who the perpetrators were, and who they victimized.227 They noted that previous population-based surveys had used narrow definitions of rape and failed to ask for any information “about perpetrators, circumstances, mental and physical health consequences of the violence, or establish if the violence was community based, conflict-related or violence against men.”228 In the survey, 29.5 percent of women and 15.2 percent of men had been exposed to conflict-related sexual violence.229 Of those, “41 percent reported a female perpetrator, most typically a female combatant.”230
This statistic seems oddly placed in a conflict where there are whole studies of sexual violence in war and conflict, often with focus groups and ground-level interviews, that do not acknowledge either the possibility that men can be victims or the possibility that women can be perpetrators.231 Also, unlike the accounts that surface in other conflicts, the women perpetrators in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo have not been identified by name, singled out, or sensationalized. Still, a number of victims are speaking out about the prevalence of women committing sexual violence in war and conflict in the area. A Congolese United Nations employee explained to Time magazine, “women who were raped for years are now raping other women . . . some take sticks or a banana, others take bottles or knives.”232 Accounts of women’s perpetration often leave the perpetrator nameless and faceless:
In 2005, Valerie, who was then a 17-year-old girl, was going to farm her family’s land in Congo when she met a group of bandits on the edge of a forest stealing crops—two men, two women and a girl. While the men cut maize and dug out cassava roots, the women removed Valerie’s clothes and started to touch her. They used their hands and sticks “like animals,” Valerie recalls. The first time she was raped by an unidentified armed man, at age 15, she was left to bear her assailant’s child, but this time, her uterus was destroyed. Valerie will never give birth again and no man will marry her as a result.233
This victim’s narrative ends by characterizing being raped by a woman as “‘an unforgettable wound,’” where “‘male rape is everywhere, but when it’s women, it’s incomprehensible. Its like a curse.’”234
Unlike in a number of other conflicts, there is evidence of the prevalence of women’s commission of sexual violence in war and conflict—and that prevalence is fairly high, with more than a third of the victims of sexual violence reporting a female perpetrator. That high percentage is all the more notable in that the conflict in the DRC is one with a high volume of sexual violence. Impossible women perpetrators have raped and violated men and women in this brutal conflict. In the Eastern DRC, not only is the impossible woman perpetrator of sexual violence possible, she borders on the norm.
As mentioned at the outset of this chapter, the conflicts explored in depth here are not the only conflicts in which there is evidence of women’s perpetration of sexual violence. There has also been empirical work done exploring women’s engagement in sexual violence during the Cambodian genocide,235 during the civil war in Sierra Leone,236 and during the ongoing conflict with ISIS/Daesh in Iraq and Syria.237 Still, whether it is the cases detailed in this chapter or others, there is not a lot of information about women’s perpetration of sexual violence in war, conflict, and genocide available, especially compared to the available information about sexual violence in war and conflict more broadly.
As those who did the empirical study of sexual violence in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo noted, a significant amount of women’s sexual violence in war and conflict probably goes under the radar when focus groups, interviews, and other on-the-ground studies do not ask questions about the perpetrators of the violence, particularly as relates to their sex and/or gender.238 As inquiries into women’s sexual violence in the Armenian genocide and in the Nazi genocide show, sometimes definitions of sexual violence in war and conflict are so narrow (often limited to penetrative rape by a person with a penis using that penis) that behavior that is clearly women’s sexual violence towards other women (including forced sterilization, selling into sexual slavery, and forced marriage) are not recognized in the same analyses that attempt to quantify, explain, and account for sexual violence in war and conflict. As the Rwandan situation shows, even studies that pay a significant amount of attention to women’s violence tend to gloss over or sensationalize (or some combination of both) occurrences of women’s sexual violence towards other women. As the case of the former Yugoslavia demonstrates, sometimes women who are held accountable for the commission of sexual violence in media, political, or legal narratives are made singular in analysis and discussion of their behaviors. The unavailability of names or descriptors of female perpetrators in the Eastern DRC seems to stand in stark contrast to the naming of the women who committed sexual violence in Rwanda and in the former Yugoslavia at first glance, but when it is looked at in a different light, there is a lot of similarity in these moves. One erases the impossible woman while the other emphasizes her impossibility.
A 2013 Time magazine article on the women rapists in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo helps to frame these discourses and put their commonalities into perspective.239 The article asks “How can a woman rape?” (before answering the question), suggesting that it is appropriate women’s capacity sexual violence in war and conflict seem mysterious to readers.240 This appropriateness of mystery, echoed in a number of other news reports and even scholarly articles which acknowledge women’s perpetration (though such reports remain a very small minority of surveyed discussions of sexual violence in war and conflict), can help to provide an understanding of the ways that women’s perpetration of this sort of violence can be alternatively (or even simultaneously) ignored, silenced, or sensationalized. It contributes to the taboo attached to women’s perpetration of sexual violence in war and conflict.
If this book were a study of the women who commit sexual war crimes, of their demographics, of their motivations, or of their testimonials, the evidence of women’s commission of sexual violence in war and conflict in this chapter would be woefully inadequate, and present significant problems for data analysis. In some of the older conflicts, it is possible that evidence of women’s perpetration of sexual violence in war and conflict worthy of data analysis, if it ever existed, has disappeared with the deaths of the victims and/or their families. In some of the more recent conflicts, finding comprehensive data about women’s perpetration may be possible with extensive fieldwork, working around taboos, different definitions of sexual violence, continuing violence in some regions, idealized collective memories, gender essentialisms, and victim fears. This work is very important, and has the potential to provide a significant amount of leverage on important questions about the nature, causes, and consequences of sexual violence in war and conflict, both in particular conflicts and generally.
This book is meant to encourage that sort of inquiry, but it is secondary to the point of its particular analysis. The argument of this book is less interested in the frequency, causes, and consequences of women’s commission of sexual violence in war and conflict than it is in the simultaneous existence and silencing/marginalization of women perpetrators, in media, scholarly, and legal analyses. The puzzle it looks to account for is how constructions of women, femininity, and sexual violence in war and conflict reinforce the impossibility of women perpetrators, and how recognizing their possibility as subjects changes the nature of thinking about (and prosecuting) that violence. It is to those questions that subsequent chapters turn.