Gaps and traps.
The politics of generating knowledge on sexual violence in armed conflict.
As a community of researchers and practitioners who participate in the workshops and seminars of the International Research Group ‘Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict’ (SVAC) we recognise that our work presents unique challenges. Like all scholars we are committed to producing credible accounts of our research. Like all scholars we understand the limitations of our situated positions. In providing analyses of sexual violence, however, we find that the epistemological relationship between us as researchers and the issues we investigate is complicated by the affective horizon of the social and cultural imaginaries that surround sexual violence in general and sexual violence in armed conflict in particular. We also recognise that our work is inherently political in the sense that in seeking to understand this violence we cannot avoid addressing such political questions as: What is the relationship between sexual violence in war times and times of peace? What power structures are served by this violence? How is this violence normalised/excused by social and cultural ideas/ideologies?
The following conversation shows how these issues have arisen in our discussions; how we have struggled with them; how we see our role as scholars and activists who, in exposing the realities of sexual violence, are committed to undoing the politics that enable it.
A conversation with Debra Bergoffen, Pascale R. Bos, Joanna Bourke, Kirsten Campbell, Louise du Toit, Júlia Garraio, Elissa Mailänder, Gabriela Mischkowski, Regina Mühlhäuser, Fabrice Virgili, Gaby Zipfel
First published in Gaby Zipfel, Regina Mühlhäuser, and Kirsten Campbell (eds), In Plain Sight: Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict, New Delhi: Zubaan books 2019, xix-xlix.
Regina Mühlhäuser: The challenge of exploring sexual violence in armed conflict appears to involve more than typical scholarly problems of producing impartial or rigorous knowledge, or of recognising the subjective/situated position of the researcher or practitioner. Instead, it seems that sexual violence both presumes and provokes particular ideas, images and affects. Such imaginations shape the approach of the researcher and practitioner towards conflict-related sexual violence as well as the knowledge she/he produces. Furthermore, this epistemological relationship is not removed from the wider social imaginations of practices of sexual violence in armed conflict. Rather, we confront the complex emergence of this research field in and through such ideas, affects, and images.
In order to unpack these issues and to explore the politics of generating knowledge on sexual violence in armed conflict, it is necessary to reflect on the practices of investigation. How can we approach the subject? What kind of problems arise?
Louise du Toit: When discussing rape and sexual violence during wartime we are in a sense always too late: we discuss it, not as it is happening, but in hindsight. A clear picture of the extent and duration of wartime criminal violence normally only emerges after the worst excesses have subsided, peace of a sort has been brokered, and space has been cleared for a move beyond the armed conflict. Talk about the meaning of rape in war is thus inevitably tied up with the post-war situation of legal processes of attributing accountability for war crimes, processes of mourning, healing and commemoration, and of nation-building or secession or other such larger political processes. Partial or selective memory is common to all of us, because memory of the past cannot be separated from present imperatives of survival, and so for example we may actively forget things we have lived through because the trauma is too devastating to bear, or because to acknowledge the crimes of the liberators would destroy hope for the future. To forgive or forget what one knows may also be crucial for the survival of one’s group—nation or ethnic grouping.
I have thus become intensely aware of how discussions of wartime rape cannot be separated from either the pre- or the post-conflict situation (is this what we normally call peace?). Looking at rape in the situation of war sheds some light on rape during peace time and vice versa. But in another sense rape also links war and peace: looking at these supposedly straightforwardly distinct categories from the viewpoint of women as (potential) rape victims, there seems to be no clear boundary between war and peace, because so-called post-conflict societies such as South Africa and southern Sudan have extraordinarily high rates of rape. Clearly much more research has to be done on this phenomenon, but it seems as if the very establishment of a new social and political order somehow calls for the high levels of sexual violence against women and perpetrated by men. A state of transition is inherently complex and ambivalent, because one is consciously still recovering from a traumatic past with lingering effects and at the same time trying to invent and establish a new legitimate order on the ruins of the old, illegitimate one. There is thus a strong narrative of ‘from’ and ‘towards’, and how sexual violence and the status of women both during and after the war are narrated, constructed and understood within this broader frame, is often a function of political agendas that have very little to do with women (Alcoff 2018). It is thus no wonder that, when women do enter the traditionally male-dominated spaces where transition is discussed, they disrupt the simplistic ‘from’ and ‘to’ structure of the narrative, as they talk about ‘everyday’ sexual violence that they experience in the community and at home at the hands of men in their supposedly ‘liberated’ or democratic societies. The sexual abuse of women before, during and after war thus complicates and disrupts simplistic grand narratives of oppression, liberation and nationhood—narratives that often more closely reflect the reality of politically powerful men. As Brandon Hamber (2007) has pointed out, women’s experiences draw attention to “the multiple layers of power that exist within society and the continuities between past and present” (ibid.: 389) and thus to the need for “a broader view of justice that embraces social and economic justice” (ibid.: 375), and thus to a moral imperative associated with an appreciation of complexity.
Gaby Zipfel: Sexual violence does not occur without prerequisites from pre-war times and does not falter after a war. Practices in the so-called ‘state of emergency’ of war are written into the experience and potential for action of a society and are passed on from one generation to the next. This raises the question of the extent to which war and wartime violence affect the way gender characters are shaped, how the sexes relate to each other and how their options for action develop.
Today, for example, the First World War from 1914 to 1918 is generally understood as “one of the formative experiences of the century, perhaps even the decisive factor in shaping it”, as Gerd Krumeich (1993: 11) has assessed, as an event that each generation examines anew “in the light of old insights and new experiences, and the theoretical approaches gleaned from their own lifeworld.” If this is the case, then it seems high time to ask about the extent to which this war a century ago influenced the gender positions and gender hierarchy in the Western world. Three aspects are elementary in determining the subject status of the sexes in a given social system: firstly, the question of economic independence, that is, the possibility of supporting oneself financially; secondly, the question of citizenship rights and possibilities for participating in the public sphere, and thirdly, the question of sexual self-determination, that is, of control over one’s own body and reproductive capacity. Accordingly, it must be asked to what extent the First World War influenced, changed or reorganised and fortified the gender hierarchy based on complementary public and private spheres.
Characteristic for the First World War was, first of all, the integration of the entire society for the purpose of waging war, an integration that made obsolete not only classical conceptions of the spatial segregation of the theatres of war, but also the allocation of tasks according to a gendered division of labour. In lieu of which, the war took on highly complex, manifold meanings for men and women. After the introduction of general compulsory military service in the nineteenth century, the early twentieth century saw, as Karen Hagemann (1998: 17) observed, “the mobilization of expanding sectors of the male population for war, and ever larger parts of the female population on the ‘home front’”, which “peaked in the first industrialised and technologically highly advanced ‘people’s war’”. In the scenario of the First World War, women can for the first time be identified as the ‘home front’, where they were assigned positions that lent meaning to the conflict—the hero’s mother, the devoted wife, the sweetheart longingly awaiting her lover’s return—and where they replaced male workers and provided for their families. As nurses in military hospitals at the front, as auxiliaries in the Women’s Army Corps, as farmers to whom prisoners of war were allotted as workers, women were not only close to the field of soldiers’ experience and to what soldiers experienced and did in war, they were actually directly involved.
Characterising the First World War as a “so-called people’s war legitimated by national interests” implies perceiving it as a state of society, the defining of which, as Ute Daniel (1993: 132) establishes, would first require clarification as to how it was perceived as an event by the various societal groups, classes, and so on, that is “in a sense, how many First World Wars there were and what each of them was like.” What needs investigating is this: how the various actors were positioned over the course of the conflict, which options and which impositions the war had in store for them, and how it served to establish, modify or overcome structural orders of society—decisively so in the case of the structural order of a gender hierarchy and a gender-specific division of labour that complemented one another. Further attention should be paid to what sacrifices the war demanded from whom, and what rewards it had in store for them.
Regina Mühlhäuser: To date, however, it seems as if we still know little about gendered and sexual violence during WWI?
Gaby Zipfel: In their comprehensive study on the events of World War I in Belgium, John Horne and Alan Kramer (2001: 75) state: “Rapes occurred quite widely, but calculation of the total number is impossible given the difficulty of recording this crime.” But what, we have to ask ourselves, exactly is the nature of the difficulty?
For one thing, it is apparently tacitly agreed that, in contrast to other acts of violence, sexual violence is located on the interface between an act of war and an act that is practiced in civilian life. Horne and Kramer (2001: 196) cite the Allied Investigation Commissions that considered that “rape had happened with what the French termed ‘unheard-of frequency’” and comment “They were, however, uncertain how to account for it. They felt it had less connection than other types of ‘atrocity’ to what they saw as the German policy of systematic terror and they placed it at the individualist end of the spectrum of war crimes”.
Secondly, Horne and Kramer refer to the role of the victim in the process of keeping such acts secret, or even taboo: “The shame felt by the victims tended to cause understatement of its incidence. […] As the Belgian Commission commented, cases of rape ‘are naturally hidden by the families’” (ibid.). This ‘consideration’ of the ‘shamed’ victims of sexual violence makes sense only if the deeds themselves were regarded as self-evident and unavoidable, and the victims were assumed to share the responsibility for their occurrence.
These types of gender stereotypes function to govern social order. They belong to the deep structures of social knowledge, in which what is everyday and presumably natural is stored—unscrutinised circumstances that are ‘known’ intuitively, but seldom reflected upon, let alone questioned.
Joanna Bourke: One problem that we see in research on war and armed conflict is that many scholars do not seem to think that sexual violence is wrong. The historian Kenneth Maddock (1991: 163), for instance, argued that “the rules of war are like the rules of the road: any honest and realistic person will expect them to be broken, but some drivers will commit more frequent and more serious violations than others. […] Judged by their own standards, however, the covert operators [units which he admitted routinely committed atrocities] were not necessarily exceeding any ‘speed limit’.”
Maddock is refreshingly blunt. But it is easy to find more insidious ways that atrocity is normalised within mainstream history. I want to give you another example: Peter Schrijvers, a respected military historian, writes about the mass rapes carried out by American troops in Okinawa. He interviewed a corporal who told him of an occasion when he passed a group of ten Marines, who were (in the corporal’s words) “quite animated […] taking turns raping an oriental woman”. The corporal reported that “I was furious, but our outfit kept marching by as though nothing unusual was going on” (Schrijvers 2005: 211f). Both the corporal and, by implication, Schrijvers seem to regard the negative emotional response to be the correct ethical response. Moral righteousness existing without any action being necessary.
Schrijvers goes even further, blandly stating that wartime rape “serves to sharpen the aggressiveness of soldiers” and “helps to steel the male bonds between warriors”. The clichés are so familiar that it almost seems churlish to ask why gang rapes would, in fact, do either of these things. Why doesn’t witnessing atrocities carried out by one’s comrades make men ‘disillusioned’ or ‘politicised’ rather than keen to kill? What is it about the insecurity of male identity (or, indeed, the shallowness of commitment to the rightness of the cause) that requires the unequal and disproportionate rape of one vulnerable woman by many armed men to facilitate ‘bonding’? To repeat these clichés as explanations is precisely to replicate the mantra of senior officers overseeing atrocity. In the words of one: it was important not to “jeopardise the new toughness of spirit”. That spirit was “more important than whether or not a few Japanese prisoners got kicked around or killed.” All’s fair in war.
There is no clear distinction in this history between what the eyewitness thought and Schrijvers critique. Of course, it is the job and duty of historians to trace carefully and accurately the languages used at different times. But it is also the job and duty of the historian to critique those languages, investigating their origins and uncovering the hidden assumptions. As Barbara Johnson (1981: xv) explained, we must read backwards, “from what seems natural, obvious, self-evident, or universal in order to show that these things have their history, their reasons for being the way they are, their effects on what follows from them and that the starting point is not a (natural) given but a (cultural) construct, usually blind to itself.”
Regina Mühlhäuser: What is perceived as sexual violence can change over time and vary from culture to culture. What do we actually recognise as sexual violence? Which forms and constellations do we integrate in our study of the subject?
Joanna Bourke: My definition of ‘sexual violence’ involves the identification of a particular act as sexual, however the term ‘sexual’ is defined, and a claim that the act is non-consensual, unwanted, or coerced. This opens the way for including acts that were prior not identified as practices of sexual violence, for example military hazing. Hazing rituals in state armies as well as armed groups often involve forced public masturbation and forced imitation or performance of fellatio. In ‘sweat parties’, naked men are confined in steam-filled shower-rooms; during ‘blanket parties’, they are stripped naked, wrapped in blankets and beaten. ‘Greasings’ involve a naked man being smeared in machinery grease and buggered with a plastic tube. Military spokesmen justify such forms of sexualised abuse in functional terms that are both gender-negative and gender-positive. The negative is that it gets rid of ‘sissies’, ‘wet tarts’ and ‘powderpuffs’. The positive function is seen in forging powerful group ties and acting as a rite of passage into manhood. It is taken for granted that pain and distress are necessary in constructing martial masculinities. Furthermore, the warring institution itself is reproduced through instrumental violence against its own members. The appeal to the ‘separate culture’ of military institutions allows hazing to be justified as a morally relative practice. This belief that elite corpsmen belonged to a culture ‘set apart’ meant that many victims, too, do not take hazing to be morally wrong. This is why hazing has proved impossible to dislodge.
Military culture (especially of elite units) can assimilate considerable sexualised violence because it defines itself as ‘set apart’, especially from ‘political correctness’, feminism and civilian values. Sociologists such as Lionel Tiger—who invented the term ‘male bonding’—claimed that the public furore over hazing was due to ‘feminisation’ or the ‘norms of female behavior’ being “increasingly and successfully applied to male behavior”. It was a fact, he claimed, that women neither enjoy enduring painful ordeals (especially ones that attacked their genitals) nor did they become ‘effective contributors’ to the “traditional draconian immersion of young men in Marine culture” (Tiger 1999: 215). In other words, they didn’t ‘enjoy’ attacking in return.
Such discussions were particularly vocal in the aftermath of the Tailhook scandal. At the thirtyfifth Annual Tailhook Association Symposium in Las Vegas in September 1991, a two-day debriefing of US Navy and Marine Corps aviation in Operation Desert Storm, 83 women and seven men alleged sexual assault and harassment. Amongst other humiliations, they had been forced to walk down a corridor lined with men who groped them, a form of hazing that is common during ‘crossing-the-line’ ceremonies, that is, when sailors cross the equator for the first time. In the subsequent public furore, the distinction between hazing and sexual abuse was blurred. For instance, writing in the Marine Corps Gazette in November 1992, leading American cultural conservative William S. Lind confessed to being puzzled by the public reaction to the abuse. “After all”, he wrote, “no one was raped at Tailhook. From what was in the newspapers, it didn’t sound much different from a Dartmouth fraternity on a Friday or Saturday night. Unless the women officers who are protesting their treatment so loudly went directly to flight school from a convent, they surely had some idea what to expect.” (Lind 1992: 38)
Kirsten Campbell: International criminal law can help us to clarify how we understand sexual violence. In the context of international criminal law, sexual violence is ostensibly a gender-neutral term that refers to violence of a sexual nature against either women or men. The sexual distinguishes violence—such as assault, defined as an unlawful application of force to another—from sexual violence—such as sexual assault, defined as a non-consensual sexual act. For example, there is no intrinsic reason to understand either a person’s mouth or an object such as a bottle as sexual, whereas the use of a bottle to simulate fellatio can be a sexual crime, and not simply an assault. As Ann Cahill (2001: 139) points out, “those objects or orifices not always perceived as sexual become sexualised in the context of the assault.” This model of sexual violence defines the criminality of the act in terms of its sexual nature, and its sexual nature derives from the sexual meaning given to the interaction of particular acts and bodies. For example, the definition of the criminal conduct of ‘sexual penetration’ generated during the trial against Dragoljub Kunarac at the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) identifies parts of the body that carry sexual meaning, such as penis, vagina, anus or mouth.
However, the difficulty of this notion of the ‘sexual’ in crimes of sexual violence is that it is always gendered. Judith Butler points out that ‘the sexual’ is a particular representation of acts and bodies. It represents this act—but not that—as sexual; this body part—but not that—as sexed; this body as female, but that as male. As such, it relies upon ‘regulatory ideas’ or norms that delineate certain acts as sexual, certain body parts as sexual organs and certain bodies as male and female. These norms give meaning to the otherwise abstract notion of sexual violence because they structure the imaginary content of those harms in relation to masculine and feminine bodies. For example, the definition of sexual violence found during the trial against Jean-Paul Akayesu at the International Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) includes acts that do not involve physical contact, such as forced nudity. However, the sexualization of nudity depends upon the classification of particular bodies. In certain social contexts, forcing a female victim to remove her shirt is sexual, whereas forcing a male victim to do the same is not. In Butler’s terms (1993: 2), the “regulatory norms of ‘sex’ […] materialise sexual difference (and consolidate) the heterosexual imperative.” As these ‘regulatory ideas’ constitute bodies as masculine and feminine, they also structure sexuality in terms of a heterosexual norm, since desire for the opposite sex defines normative masculine and feminine sexuality (Butler 1997).
‘Sexual violence’ can then be understood as materialising ideas of masculinity and femininity, ideas of what it is to be a man or a woman, through its repetition of norms of sexual practices, which acts are appropriate to men or women, that in turn rely upon notions of ‘biological’ difference, what it ‘means’ to have a male or female body. If the notion of ‘sexual violence’ relies upon certain models of sexual acts, organs and bodies, those models in turn draw upon ideas of masculine and feminine acts, organs and bodies. Their construction as masculine and feminine acts structures the ‘sexual’ as heterosexual. If sexual violence is commonly understood as referring to both women and men, nevertheless, the ‘sexual’ nature of the offence relies upon ideas of masculinity and femininity, which signify bodies and acts as sexual in specific ways.
Gabriela Mischkowski: While international criminal law defines sexual violence in gender-neutral terms, the evidence generated at tribunals does indeed suggest that certain gendered understandings about men and women and their sexuality shape acts of sexual violence, their forms and how they are understood. When we look at sexual violence in the context of attacks committed by various Serb forces against the Muslim population in Bosnia?Herzegovina the dominant narrative is quintessenced in the topos of ‘ethnic cleansing rape’. This topos typically refers to the rape of women and girls. This construction rests, among others, on the claim of widespread ‘public rape’ of women as a means of particular terror, destruction and humiliation of her collective. While the term ‘public rape’ appears randomly in many newspaper articles and scholarly works, it is hardly ever defined what ‘public’ means. But since the ascribed function of ‘public rape’ in cases of ‘ethnic cleansing’ is to instil a particular terror and humiliation in the victim’s community, it can be assumed that the alleged audience belongs to the victim’s community which is forced to watch: family members, neighbours or fellow prisoners. This claim of widespread public rape of women and girls, however, is not reflected in the rape accounts that were generated at the ICTY. Just like in domestic rape trials, wartime rape of women tried before the ICTY is a crime without eyewitnesses. Based on my knowledge of ICTY records on sexual violence I would estimate that about 98 per cent of all rape incidents, which are either relevant to the charges or mentioned in testimonies, did not take place in sight of other victims.
Only two situational settings surface in which women or girls were raped in the presence of others than the rapist and the victim. One such setting pertains to the presence of other enemy agents in the context of gang rapes or during interrogations. The other setting pertains to the simultaneous rape of two or, in one case, four women in one room. However, the overwhelming majority of rape accounts before the ICTY describe situations in which women or girls were singled out, separated from their parents, husbands, children, neighbours or fellow detainees, taken to other rooms or buildings and then raped by different men ‘in privacy’. This refers to detainment situations, such as camps, as well as situations of attack or occupation, such as house searches. Even in cases of serial rapes, the first man would most often leave before the next came in.
In contrast, demonstrative sexual violence ‘in public’ did play a major role in cases of sexual violence committed against men. According to the ICTY records, these incidents took place in detention situations either in camps or police stations. Such acts always included a larger audience not only of other soldiers or guards but also, and in the first place, of other detainees. The five or six indictments of the ICTY that pertain explicitly to male?to?male sexual assault focus on one form: Forcing two prisoners to assault each other by committing fellatio, or to mutilate the other by biting off his testicles.
The ICTY mentions no incident of male?to?male rape in the form of penile penetration by a Serb perpetrator of a Muslim victim. If such male?to?male rape took place—as it is often claimed—we must assume that it did so like in the majority of situations of male?to?female penile penetration rape, that is ‘in privacy’. As Dubravka Žarkov (2007: 166) noted: “In Balkan norms of sexuality, both men involved in the sexual act are homosexualised.” We can thus ask whether this public humiliation of the enemy man through penile penetration would not have fit the self?image of Serb masculinity and was therefore a no?go.
Non-penetrative forms of sexual violence, in contrast, might not even have been considered as sexual. Eric Stener Carlson (2006), who analysed for the ICTY hundreds of cases of sexual assault, draws our attention to the hidden prevalence of, what he calls, ‘blunt trauma to male genitals’ (BTMG). He distinguishes between two forms of BTMG. One pertains to regular beatings on male genitals with blunt objects without producing any physically observable consequences. He suggests that this is often not recognised as sexual violence, because hitting each other’s genitals is normal male behaviour, for example in contact sports like American football, or in street fights. The second form of BTMG pertains to severe genital mutilation effecting male reproductive abilities.
In order to get a better picture of what is actually happening it seems important to me to distinguish between a) enforced fellatio between prisoners, b) beatings on covered and c) naked genitals without physical consequences, and d) severe genital mutilation. Also we need to take into account the positionality between the different actors, that is the detainees who perform these actions to each other and the perpetrators who are initiating, threatening and watching them.
Elissa Mailänder: In order to better describe and understand such forms of violence, it might be helpful to follow the French anthropologist Véronique Nahoum-Grappe’s conception of cruelty (1996). She defines cruelty as a specific form of violence that is distinguished by its intensity and motivation. Violence causes different grades of pain, but cruelty has not only the explicit aim to inflict pain and suffering upon the victim, but also to bring degradation. It can only be implemented in the context of an asymmetrical power relation.
For instance, by humiliating concentration camp prisoners, Nazi camp guards, both female and male, experienced and expressed their overwhelming dominance. Considering Elias Canetti’s theory of power (1960), the cruel act can be seen to have provided the perpetrator with a vital and lustful exercise of power. Certainly, from the victim’s perspective, violence is destructive.
Yet from the perpetrator’s perspective, violence is not only attractive and ‘creative’, violence is—in a Foucauldian sense—also productive. It is a medium or instrument with which to gain prestige, to perform before an audience of colleagues, to realise oneself—and to keep running the system. Especially with regard to cruelty, it is the manner in which such violence is perpetrated that is particularly important, as, both, the body language and the gestures bear meaning.
In my research I examined violent acts by female and male SS-personnel at the concentration and extermination camp Majdanek (1941–44) in German occupied Poland. Interrogating the situational context, the social dynamics and the cultural meanings of the ‘everyday culture’ and society in the concentration camp, I found three different exemplary forms of concentrational and genocidal violence: extermination, physical ill-treatment and cruelty.
The National Socialist concentration camps were on the one hand sealed-off and tightly regulated, yet at the same time, within these enclosed spaces—so long as violent actors could count on mutual support and secrecy—everything was possible. Officially, SS personnel were strictly forbidden from engaging in sexual contact with so-called Untermenschen (‘subhumans’). Yet the camps were sites of permanent transgression, where the most routine official duties—inspection of the barracks, supervision of prisoners at work, the monitoring of screening, surveillance of prisoners during bathing, the everyday roll call and so forth—constantly provided opportunities for violence and domination, and consequently for sexual violence as well. Carried out by various actors, such acts of violence were largely connected to verbal, gestural and physical violence, which aimed at the sexual integrity of prisoners, humiliated and hurt them.
In the context of the camps that the Nazis established during the war of annihilation in Poland and the Soviet Union, we also find examples of guards who forced prisoners to perform sexual acts with each other. In some cases the camp prisoners were male and female, in others they are both male. In the latter constellation, such acts have typically been perceived as humiliation and violence, not as sexual violence. Currently, this may change. What impact have these perceptions of the historical agents and their respective societies not merely on our understanding of sexual violence, but also on our understanding of men as gendered and sexed beings?
Kirsten Campbell: Acts of sexual violence constitute bodies and their sexual difference along axes of identity, ethnicity and power, in context of conflicts in which those persons were often not previously ascribed those identities, and in which those identities are at stake in the conflict itself. Sexual violence in armed conflict works to constitute these identities, making individuals into the social categories of the perpetrator—for example, a ‘Jewish man’ or a ‘Muslim woman’. This reduction to social identities as defined by the violence of the perpetrator, and in particular to one’s sex in the case of sexual violence, can be seen as an integral part of the harm.
However, if we take this approach then it is necessary to understand ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ as norms that are constituted in relation to each other. For example, male sexual assault involves the feminisation of its victims (‘you are not a man’), while female sexual assault involves the reduction of women to their non-masculine role of femininity (‘you are a woman’). Moreover, these relational terms are filled with imaginary content in relation to specific social contexts—in this society, this is what it is to be a man, and this is what it is to be a woman—and the content of these is itself subject to contestation in conflict. To identify the specific harms of sexual violence in particular conflicts, it is therefore necessary to identify how notions of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ are given meaning in that social context.
Regina Mühlhäuser: If we understand sexual violence as a performative act, that is, an action that through its enactment constitutes norms of masculinity and femininity through force or violence, then the question arises: What do we recognise as force or violence? In my own research on the Second World War I look at the whole spectrum of sexual encounters during war—from violent to non-violent, from forced to consensual, from commercial to non-commercial—and I often find that the boundaries are fluid. On occasion, sexual violence, sexual barter and consensual encounters can merge. And, indeed, ‘consensual’ does not mean that such encounters in wartime are based on mutual understanding or affection. Women often become involved in such relationships on account of specific needs, pragmatic choices and fears caused by the war. How do we then understand the grey zones between the grey zones between violent and non-violent gendered behaviour?
Pascale R. Bos: One extremely difficult form of sexual violence to analyse and understand is (forced) prostitution. Under normal circumstances, brothels are imagined as sites of transactional sexual encounters between men (who pay) and women (who get paid), and as such they represent a symbolic space somewhere in between the private (sex in the context of a love relationship) and the public (sex as a business transaction). Moreover, as prostitution is marked by the implied consent of the woman, it is not traditionally associated with sexual violence. In the case of sexual enslavement this dynamic becomes blurred. Because the site of the brothel still suggests that this is a space in which transactional sex occurs which is voluntary on the part of the woman rather than that it represents organised, institutionalised sexual violence, the sexual violence becomes normalised as sex and ceases to be read as violence by the men who participate in it, and by its bystanders. In turn, the women who are forced to perform this labour become implicated in this dynamic. If they ‘submit’ and ‘consent’ to sex with the enemy (soldiers) and survive, it will seem as if they participated in a form of transactional sex and ‘bought’ their survival by participating in a sexual exchange. The entirely non-voluntary nature of this labour becomes erased. Thus imagined, the experience of sexual enslavement in a brothel leaves women both physically and morally (spiritually) compromised. As such, they cease to be victims or martyrs and instead come to epitomise how the moral corruption of the perpetrators also ‘pollutes’ its victims.
We can find such a reading of forced prostitution/sexual enslavement, for instance, in the case of the ‘comfort women’ of the Japanese Imperial Army during the Second World War. To date, Japan insinuates that the women volunteered to do this ‘job’, and thus the survivors are denied the unequivocal status of victims. This constellation becomes even more complicated, however, when the ‘customers’ of sexual enslavement are not perpetrators, but male detainees, themselves victims, for example in the case of the concentration camp brothels.
Between 1942 and 1945, the Nazis set up brothels in ten concentration camps. They selected non-Jewish women whom, according to the Nazi social hierarchy, were categorised as ‘asocial’. Contrary to widespread belief, these brothels were not for the male guard personnel. Rather, sex was intended as an incentive for a certain group of privileged male inmates to enhance their work performance. To analyse this constellation of sexual violence is very difficult, last but not least because in the context of a brothel the sexual contact is usually understood to be about pleasure rather than about violence and as transactional. This particular imaginary—sexual enslavement—thus complicates matters: it does not only make the actual women who worked in actual camp brothels seem less like victims and more complicit in their own victimisation and survival (they ‘paid’ for it with their bodies), it also makes for a complicated narrative when it is applied to male prisoners. In fact, male prisoners tried to hide and obscure the existence of camp brothels after the end of the war—not so much because they feared to be accused of complicity (which they have been sometimes in recent years), but because they feared to conjure up the picture that life in the concentration camps was easy and enjoyable.
Regina Mühlhäuser: A problem we face when examining sexual violence in armed conflict in detail seems to be a lack of sufficient data. Still, when one begins to take a closer look, a variety of possible source materials can be uncovered. These include oral and written testimony by civilians as well as combatants, by victims, witnesses and perpetrators of sexual violence; military documents; NGO-reports; judicial material generated during or after an armed conflict; and sources of perception, for instance media reports or cultural productions like literature and film. In order to tap the full potential of existing sources, researchers need to move beyond conventional approaches. Since the use and interpretation of sources varies considerably in different academic disciplines and political fields, it seems helpful to reflect our material and methodological approaches. How do you approach your sources?
Elissa Mailänder: The experience of violence, and in particular of sexual violence, is challenging to reconstruct, since we have very limited testimonies of personal experience. In my research I examined violent acts by female and male SS-personnel at the concentration and extermination camp Majdanek (1941–44) in German occupied Poland. For the victims, ‘experience’ in this context must be understood as survival first and foremost, even before we can begin to determine the many forms of suffering, surveillance and dying that characterised their life under the rule of the SS. As for the camp guards, it is very difficult to grasp their everyday experiences of violence. The only moments their narratives about their camp experience was documented was in the context of post-war trials, at which point, whenever it came to the question of violence, they wrapped themselves in silence or engaged an ‘exculpatory discourse’.
Since the testimonies on violence from the perpetrator’s side are fragmentary, survivor testimony is precious, especially coming from those who worked close to the SS and had so to speak a role as ‘participant observers’. With their descriptions we can certainly obtain insight into practices of violence. However, to take into account only the experience of the victims—as Nazi concentration camp research usually does—is problematic, since acts of violence cannot be fully understood exclusively from the victim’s perspective. Historians thus get only glimpses of these experiences of the violence, including sexual violence, in the camps by reading carefully between the lines and comparing the perpetrator’s statements with other sources and perspectives.
Gabriela Mischkowski: I look at court testimonies as historical sources, since they tell us on the one hand about different forms of sexual violence and sexual encounters during a war, but they also give us on the other hand an impression about how sexual violence is interpreted and understood at a specific historical point in time. There are, of course, many limitations as the narratives are guided and restricted by legal rules and requirements to determine the guilt or innocence of the accused, or by exaggerations and omissions by the witnesses, and so on. However, reading the stories against the legal grain can reveal some surprising clues. When you look, for example, at the trials before the ICTY that deal, among other things, with rape and sexual assault in detention camps, you will find that the prosecution strategy typically allows only religious, racial or political discrimination as legally relevant intentions for rape when charging it as part of persecutions. Indeed, legal prosecution tends to negate the differences in the acts by adjusting them and the context in which they take place to pre-defined elements of crimes. The actual testimonies, however, simply do not adhere to this logic and reveal multifaceted ways sexual assaults are staged by the perpetrators which reveal conflicting interests and motives.
Take the example of one witness who testified at the ICTY trial against Zenjil Delali?, Zravko Muci?, Hazim Deli? and Esad Landžo. The trial took place in 1997 and was about acts committed against Bosnian Serb men and women in summer 1992 in the so-called ?elebi?i Camp under the Joined Command of Bosnian Muslim and Croat forces in Konjic municipality, about 50 kilometre south-west of Sarajevo. One witness testified that she was raped six times while she was detained in ?elebi?i. In addition, there was one attempted rape. Her detailed testimony reveals that the rapes and the attempted rape took place in four different scenarios indicating different functions, intentions and motives on the side of the rapists. However, only the first rape could be termed to be functional for the armed conflict and was integrated into the material for the judgment. A close reading of a court testimony can, in this way, provide us with a new view on different patterns, functions and forms of sexual and gender-based violence as well as the different dynamics that produce, promote and foster it.
When we use court testimonies as sources to analyse acts of sexual violence, however, an ethical problem arises. As a researcher you base your interpretation on witness accounts which were given with the main intention to achieve justice, to hold the perpetrator responsible, to voice the victims’ suffering and perception. Your intention, however, is necessarily a different one; you might, for example, filter the court narratives to find patterns and motives or deviations from patterns and motives of sexual violence in a particular war situation. Thus, in a certain way, you use the narrated painful experience of a woman for the purpose of your research. Some women might find the way you make use of their perception or lived experience abusive. But since most witnesses testify anonymously you cannot ask for their permission.
Indeed, the fact that the witnesses often do not testify under their name also poses a problem. To protect their privacy in the public, they receive pseudonyms, usually combinations of letters and numbers. For researchers this poses a challenge, because even if you do not cite someone’s name, when you analyse someone’s testimony, you place the individual statements made at a trial in a context. This may make it possible to reconstruct the identity of witnesses in spite of the pseudonyms, especially when witnesses come from villages and small towns where everyone knows each other. In situations of on-going conflict or tense post-war negotiations this may put witnesses and their families in danger.
Debra Bergoffen: I would like to raise another trap that I worry about with increasing concern, that is the voyeur/pornography problem. I provide accounts of victim testimonies, because I think that hearing from survivors in their own words is the best way to touch the horror of their suffering. I know what I want readers to hear. I have no way of controlling what they hear. Gang rape, naked dancing before a crowd of men, sexual humiliation are pornographic tropes. In citing the women’s testimonies am I reinforcing these tropes? Can I say that in noting the parallels between pornographic tropes and humiliating sexual violence I am revealing something about the perpetrators’ pleasure, the role of the spectacle in using rape as a military tactic, and the continuity between peace time and war zone images of women, or am I reiterating the spectacle and reinforcing the voyeuristic pleasures of the pornographic gaze?
The discrepancy between the publicity given to sex trafficking and labour trafficking is one manifestation of this trap. The first form of trafficking makes the headlines, the second does not. I do not know how to (re)solve this problem. It may be that seeing the faces of the women who have been subjected to sexual violence will force us to respond to their demand for respect, the principle of the moral demand of the face articulated by Emmanuel Lévinas (1985), but the continued vilification of the so-called ‘comfort women’, that is, the women and girls who were sexually enslaved by the Japanese army between 1932 and 1945, gives me pause. Having seen their faces and heard their accounts of abuse many people do not respond ethically. The moral demand of the face is destroyed as they are accused of being whores, of being responsible for their plight—of not being ‘real’ victims. Thus their assailants escape censure. If only ‘real’ victims have the power to elicit a moral response from us, I cannot avoid asking: what does it take to be a real victim? What assumptions are at work when we distinguish real victims from those who are not really victims? Here it is a case of a trap—the pornographic trap—exposing a gap—the assumptions at work in our definition/concept of victim, the relationship between the ideas of innocence, agency for example, and the perception of a ‘real’ victim.
Regina Mühlhäuser: Such ideas also play into the way testimonies are generated. What are women authorised to say, and which parts do they remain silent about? How can we grasp the conditions of speaking?
Pascale R. Bos: We generally need to reflect more deeply on how testimonies are constructed, be it in court, in interviews, in memoirs, be it by victims-survivors, by perpetrators or by witnesses. In my field, Holocaust scholarship, for example, testimony has often been read or interpreted as if it were a reflection of an easily accessible truth. Toril Moi dubs this tendency ‘reflectionism’. A reflectionist reading fails to see the narrative as a reconstruction of a confusing, multi-faceted experienced reality; instead it considers the text “a more or less faithful reproduction of an external reality to which we all have equal and unbiased access.” Reservations about reflectionism are central to more recent historical approaches, which rely on poststructuralist notions of language. Language and textuality occupy a pivotal place in this kind of historical analysis, for, as Kathleen Canning (1994: 370) suggests, “Rather than simply reflecting social reality or historical context, language is seen instead as constituting historical events, and human consciousness.”
This kind of analysis can be of use to our research as it considers that reality is not only positional and subjective but also constructed in and through language. The process of narrating is embedded in both the cultural understanding and the linguistic capacities of the witnesses, including the victim-survivors. Individuals’ experience or consciousness of what happened needs to be seen in relation to their previous experiences as well as in relation to how they conceptualised these experiences and articulated them. Where individuals were positioned in relation to the discourses that determine their reality will affect their narrative. Understanding and analysing experience along these lines means that testimonies (by either women or by men) do not allow us simple access to historical reality. Experience is both uniquely personal and positional, influenced by the different lenses and discourses through which we at different times understand and describe ourselves and the world. As academics, we are engaged in performing historical analyses of these reconstructions, these representations. We need to ask, how is sexual violence constructed—through what kind of language, images, constellations? And what effects does this particular discourse produce in the listener or reader—what affect, and what kind of call for political, cultural or legal mobilisation?
Júlia Garraio: I think it is also important to look at the strategies of mediating sexual violence, in the way rape stories result from processes of giving meaning to certain forms of violence. Consider, for instance, the use of digital cameras as empirical sources for generating knowledge about sexual violence. The democratisation of access to digital devices has made them increasingly present in contemporary wars. Though they are imbued by expectations of objectiveness and immediacy, their reliability as evidence is often evasive because what is at stake is not necessarily the materiality of the captured images but the credibility of the narratives that are created to signify those images, to make a story out of them.
You probably remember that during the 2011 war in Libya there was much media interest in the videos of rape that the rebels claimed to have found with government soldiers and militiamen and which, so it was often suggested in the media, might indicate the use of rape as a weapon of war by the government. Those videos circulated mostly as an absence: politicians and military commanders affiliated with the rebellion referred willingly to them, but said that they had destroyed them to spare victims from ‘shame’. Cultural codes regarding female sexuality (the assumption that the rapes tarnished the ‘honour’ of the family of the victims) were put forward as explanation both for the recording of rapes and for the destruction of their evidence. There were, nonetheless, at least two videos of sexual violence that reached mainstream media. Both depict someone in a situation of extreme vulnerability and pain. The first video shows a naked woman being held by two men in civilian clothes who insert a broomstick in her anus; the second shows an old bleeding man surrounded by fighters while one of them inserts what seems to be a bayonet in his anus. We don’t know the identity of the people in the first video nor their fate, but we know who the old man was and that he was killed shortly after.
Now it is interesting to look at how CNN dealt with both videos. The first is used in the report “Libyan rebels say captured cell phone videos show rape, torture” (Sidner 2011). The journalist, who is with the rebel forces in Misrata, informs that she could not confirm the authenticity of the video. However, a skilled process of editing—blurring of images “to protect the victim” and stressing the audio element—stimulates the public to imagine the visuality behind the screams of the woman. Despite the wording that signals insufficient evidence (“it appears”, “alleged”, “unable to verify its authenticity”), the framing of the video alongside the introduction of other elements (for example the testimonies of a rebellion commander and a psychologist from Benghazi) encourages an interpretation of the footage as possible proof of a massive campaign of rape by the government forces.
The second video is one of the many cell-phone videos taken during the capture and lynching of Gaddafi. When reporting on the death of Gaddafi, CNN remembered extensively the victims of Lockerbie as part of a long list of crimes committed by the dictator. It broadcasted footage of his last moments recorded by his captors, but not the images suggesting the stabbing with the bayonet, that is, CNN simply avoided addressing the possible sexual dimension in the lynching of Gaddafi. How does the constellation ‘rebel/sexual offender versus dictator/sexually abused’ challenge dominant conceptions of wartime rape? The first video, the one with the raped woman, can easily be read according to a familiar ‘script’: raped in war equals victim, female, vulnerable and civilian; rapist in war equals aggressor, male, virile and part of the military (or of a militia, that is, a group in the possession of weapons). CNN, which had paid so much attention to sexual violence in the war in Libya (as you can see in its extensive reporting on the case of al-Obeidi), becomes silent when the dichotomy underlying the abovementioned script is not upheld.
Indeed, Gaddafi’s last moments drastically challenge the constellation framing that script, especially if we bear in mind the crimes commonly attributed to Gaddafi’s regime, the image of strength, defiance, military power and virility that he cultivated, as well as sexual fantasies often projected in his relationship with women. Male orientalist fantasies of potency had been pervasive in much of the Western media coverage of his private life (just think of reports about his female bodyguards, the alleged relationship with his Ukrainian nurse or rumours surrounding the inspiration for Berlusconi’s ‘wild parties’). The Western public could identify in Gaddafi the attributes that are often associated with sexual aggressors: male, violent, military, virile, sexually edacious. Precisely this imaginary makes it harder to imagine him as a victim of wartime sexual violence. Male rape, in general more resistant to public discourse, becomes even harder to address when the target is imagined as a hyper-male and, as it was the case of CNN, as the ultimate incarnation of evil in the conflict, the dictator himself.
This example highlights some of the constraints that frame the mediation of evidence of wartime sexual violence: rape stories become public more easily when they can benefit political agendas and when they corroborate hegemonic gender constructions. What I find so striking with the Western media coverage of the 2011 Libyan war is to see how easily widespread imaginaries of wartime rape were activated right from the beginning of the conflict, thus determining which rape stories were perceived as paradigmatic of the conflict itself. Common strategies of othering sexual violence through a culturalist approach were much present in this process: the effectiveness of rape as a weapon of war was sustained broadly on the assumption that societies dominated by Islam are patriarchal, primitive and prone to stigmatise victims of sexual abuse. But well entrenched processes of gendering were crucial as well: rape victims are imagined as civilian women, while rapists are imagined as men involved in armed violence. In the context of a broad Western support for the rebels who tried to topple the dictatorship, the acts of sexual violence which fell out of the ‘script’ tended to be sidelined. There was evidence suggesting rapes committed by the rebels, the existence of male victims, the sexual torture of male combatants, as well as the massive sexual abuse of black migrants caught in the civil war, but none of these stories made headlines in Western mainstream media in 2011.
Fabrice Virgili: The question how sources on sexual violence are understood, appropriated and mediatised at a particular time in a particular socio-historical context is also crucial when we look at World War II. When I was preparing an exhibition on the topic ‘Love, wars and sexuality’ in Paris in 2007, I found four photos ‘found on a German soldier’ in the collection of the Resistance Museum in Champigny. In these photographs we see four soldiers obtaining by force a woman. She is lying on a pile of planks. On the first shot, she struggles when the soldiers undress her. On the following two images, men open her legs, showing her sex/genitals to the photographer. He is the fifth man, did he stay behind the camera or did he also rape the woman? On the last image, one soldier lowers his head looking closer at the victim’s vagina. He holds a paper, maybe a picture in his hands. On all the images, we see the grinning faces of the soldiers. On the contrary, the woman’s face is always hidden. We only see her lower body. She is reduced to her sex. What happens before and beyond: penetration, assault, murder? We don’t know.
That cameras were widespread in the Third Reich is well known. The most popular picture motifs of soldiers were the landscape in France, monuments in Paris, the civil population in the occupied countries, the POWs, the soldiers’ everyday life and also the destruction, ‘war scenes’. In spite of the ban to photograph the death of the enemy, many soldiers disobeyed and continued these violent snapshots when the war in Russia started. Why have soldiers taken these photos? What meanings do this kind of photos carry?
During the exhibitions on the crimes of the Wehrmacht by the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung (which took place from 1995 to 1999 and 2001 to 2004), these questions have been widely debated. But what about pictures of rape? Are these photos a trophy? Is this a demonstration of militarist and masculine power? But if this would be the case, why is the face of the victim hidden, contrary to many pictures of captives or executed persons? Should we regard these photos as more pornographic, because only the woman’s sex is shown? Did one soldier or all soldiers keep the photos secretly or did they show them to their comrades in the ‘brotherhood’ at the front? And in case of the latter, did the photos present ‘good memories’? And did the men boast about it?
Because this kind of source is very scarce it is difficult to know what they mean for their owners. But we know for sure that these photos interested the investigators of the War Crimes Enquiries Commission (Service de recherche des crimes de guerre ennemis—SRCGE). Found during the search of German soldiers, dead or alive, photos become a very important clue for the investigators. The photos moved from memories to proof. Since 1943, a commission investigated at first clandestinely the war crimes committed in France or abroad against French nationals. Then police investigations were organised on all territories after the liberation of France. For the SRCGE, a rape was considered to be a war crime, like the execution of civilians, torture, looting or arson. All these crimes were listed for investigation. Some of them are well known until today like in Oradour-sur-Glane (Destruction of the village and massacre of 642 inhabitants by a Waffen SS company on the 10 June 1944), others remain unknown. However, rape was neither charged at the Nuremberg trials nor in the trials before French military courts.
While these four photos didn’t serve as evidence in court, they were used as evidence to the public. Similar to World War I, rape committed by German men became a theme of propaganda. Sexual violence was an effective way to denounce the enemy. In July 1945, the interministerial commission of war crimes chaired by M. Coste-Floret organised an exhibition on ‘Hitlerian crimes’ at the Grand Palais. Despite the horror of the images shown—the entrance was prohibited under 16 years of age—the visitors were numerous. Two catalogues were published. The hardcover version, the more luxurious one, contained the photos of the rape. But a sheet of tracing paper covered the photos. Behind this, the pictures could only be seen in a blurry way and the title was superimposed in English, French and Russian. At the same time, the organisers chose not to put the photos of the rape in the second catalogue, a cheaper, more easily accessible booklet. Despite these restrictions, rape by German soldiers was no taboo at that time. Still, the forced exhibition of this woman, the smiling men around her suggesting their pleasure could (and can) cause suspicion of voyeurism against him who looks at the picture. Yet we must also consider these sources. The images are essential to understanding the event: the conduct of the violence, the imaginary of perpetrators, the political use and the memory of these rapes committed in wartime.
Júlia Garraio: The concepts of legitimate/illegitimate violence are essential to make sense of the public identification of sexual violence and its perpetrators. Bernd Hüppauf (1997) has pointed out the constitutive relationship between violence and the modern condition. He notices how the Enlightenment’s faith in progress and a civilisation increasingly ruled by reason and free of wars was accompanied by the emergence of a new concept of legitimate violence (a violence that could be justified by moral reasoning). The awareness that modernity was not only unable to ban violence, but was also constructed on violence, led to ‘techniques of relegation’, essential for that legitimisation. While the acceptable violence was interiorised as an exception to the rule of a peaceful reality, the illegitimate violence was banished to the ‘other’, that is, it was attributed to another space, time, ideology, political system, social class, etcetera.
Rape stories which go public tend to lend themselves to strategies of othering, while the ones which are silenced are the ones that could challenge the process of othering. When we talk about World War II: How does it come that in the West there is a widespread assumption that equates rape in WWII with the Red Army, even though there is solid evidence documenting widespread sexual violence perpetrated by the German forces and by the Western allies as well?
It is often claimed that victors write the history of the past. In the case of sexual violence in Europe during WWII one has to look further than 1945: one must consider who won in 1989 and look deeper into the ideological conflict of the precedent decades. And it was the Western allies and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), in the meantime part of the Western alliance, who won 1989 and who were therefore able to project their perception of the rapists.
The existence of two rival German states and consequently of two competing reconstructions of the past enables us to see how deep ideology and political agendas determined the memory of the past and the perception of the perpetrators of sexual violence. Though both states had a common past until the spring of 1945, when regarding their post-1945 discourses we might be led to think that two different pasts were at stake. The FRG made no taboo of the widespread sexual violence in WWII, but it was quite selective in the identification of the perpetrators and very keen to integrate that violence in the ideological battlefield of the cold war. The rapes committed by the Red Army were used as an effective tool to discredit Communism, the Soviet Union and ultimately the neighbouring German Democratic Republic (GDR).
To gain a better understanding of this, fictional texts like novels can help us. I read fiction as representations in the sense put forward by Stuart Hall (1997), who, departing from a constructionist approach to language, understands representation as a construction of meanings through language as a representational system. Hence, I assume that fictions cannot be used as data to inform us about the sociological realities. However, I assume that works of fiction can unveil how a member of a given culture/society produced meanings about his/her reality through the use of the language he/she disposed of, that is, I assume that fictions may help us grasp how sectors of society understood their reality and tried to act on it and to form it by coming forward with explanatory narratives for contested social phenomena.
Consider, for example, the American bestseller The Big Rape (1951) by James Wakefield Burke: the representation of the Russian/Slav as a hard-drinker, barbarian and sexual predator and the representation of the Red Army as being full of ‘Asian faces’ follows a clear propaganda agenda. The rapes are signified as a feature of a whole group (the Eastern nations) and their explanation is full of racist undertones. This Eastern barbarian masculinity and ‘destructive violence’ has its counterpart in the American troops, who embody a ‘protective violence’ and potent and civilised masculinity.
The representation of the soldiers of the Red Army as brutal rapists, which can also be seen in the literature of the ‘expulsion of Germans from the East’, was favoured both from ‘above’ and from the ‘ground’: for the State it was a useful strategy to combat Communism and to justify its adherence to Western military, political and economic institutions; for ‘ordinary Germans’, many of whom had undergone violent encounters with the Red Army, it enabled them to see themselves as victims of war.
Contrary to a widespread assumption, which claims that the rapes committed by the Red Army were banned from the public sphere of the GDR, there were several attempts to address the subject. But the rapes were clearly among memories of the past, which were uncomfortable for the State, as the ‘Djacenko-case’ shows.1 In 1958, the authorities banned the sequel of Boris Djacenko’s novel Herz und Asche (1954). Carla, the German lover of the Russian hero, is raped in the sequel by three Red Army soldiers. Djacenko was a man of the regime, his aim was not to discredit Communism nor demonise Russians. He tried to address the suffering endured by raped women and at the same time discuss why the sexual violence had taken place, giving the perpetrators a chance to explain their acts. One of them, for example, invokes the wartime crimes committed by Germans in the Soviet Union. How would the perception of the perpetrators have developed in the GDR if the authorities had allowed the subject to be discussed in the terms of Djacenko? Would his text have opened the way for a narrative, which is very common in other contexts: the rapist soldier as a victim of war, who was brutalised in a spiral of violence? This narrative could have led to potentially exculpatory discourses; nonetheless by focusing the ambiguities of the perpetrators it could as well have fostered a deeper scrutiny of the subject.
In that sense, a comparative analysis of post-1945 German practices of remembrance signals the pervasiveness of processes of ‘othering’ sexual violence. It tends to be attributed to the Other, to social/ethnic/national groups which are perceived as different ‘from us’. This segregation of the perpetrator and the act of ascribing him and his deed to certain groups open the way for the demonization of this Other as our absolute counterpart.
1. On the cultural memories of the rapes in the GDR and the ‘Djacenko case’ see Dahlke 2000.
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Based on papers presented at the SVAC workshops 2012-2017.
© Debra Bergoffen, Pascale R. Bos, Joanna Bourke, Kirsten Campbell, Júlia Garraio, Gabriela Mischkowski, Regina Mühlhäuser, Louise du Toit, Fabrice Virgili, Gaby Zipfel / Zubaan books