WUNRN
Foreign Policy
WHAT DO WE REALLY KNOW ABOUT WARTIME RAPE? CALL FOR MORE
GLOBAL DATA + SEXUAL VIOLENCE PEACE VS. CONFLICT
Why do current insights on sexual violence not drive
public policy as they could?
There's more will than ever before to fight sexual violence in conflict,
but the world can't stop what it doesn't understand.
By Paul KirbyPaul Kirby is a lecturer in
international security the University of Sussex, where he teaches courses on
the politics of war and gender violence., Kathleen Kuehnast
Kathleen Kuehnast is the director of the Center for Gender and Peacebuilding at
the U.S. Institute of Peace.
December 10, 2014 - Whether spurring mass protests in India or being
covered up on American university campuses, rape and other
forms of sexual abuse are being discussed openly as never before. This goes too
for sexual violence committed in war. And with that openness are increasing
calls to change the way the world handles these crimes.
This fall, reports of sexual violence perpetrated by Islamic State kidnappers (including violence committed against minority communities in Iraq)
were met with international outrage. There have been similarly troubling
reports about sexual assaults committed by African Union troops in Somalia and by all sides of the conflict in the Central African
Republic. This summer, then-U.K. Foreign Secretary William Hague and U.N.
Special Envoy Angelina Jolie co-chaired the largest-ever gathering on the subject, with 1,700
delegates from 123 countries convening to discuss the promise of “ending sexual
violence in conflict.” Although concrete commitments were few, government
ministers promised to address impunity, extend a range of services to those who
have suffered sexual violence in war, take responsibility for their country’s own
armed forces, and improve international cooperation.
Those pronouncements are welcome, of course. But their ability to foster
real change depends on understanding sexual violence in all its complexity,
whether in conflict or outside of it. Which begs the question: What is actually
known about the scale and forms of sexual violence, and how what happens in
peacetime affects what happens in wartime — and vice versa?
In some respects, a lot is already known. Despite complaints that sexual
violence is not yet a sufficiently studied topic in political
science, networks of dedicated scholars exist and are
growing. Research over the last decades has shown that not all conflicts are marked by sexual violence
to the same extent or in the same way, an important corrective to ideas of it
as inevitable. New and extensive efforts at data collection also suggest that,
in contrast to common assumptions about rebel groups and civilian
victimization, state armed forces are the major perpetrators. We know that sexual violence persists
— and can even increase — after war’s end, and that it has a complex relationship to peacetime abuses. There
is good reason to think that under-reporting is a problem, but that this can be
corrected somewhat by creating a better and safer environment for the victims
who report such crimes. And we know that men
and boys are survivors too.
Yet unfortunately, such important insights often do not drive policy as much as they could.
In part, this is because for all that is known about sexual violence in
war, there’s much more that remains unclear.
One major problem is how difficult it is to get a
reliable picture of the global level and distribution of sexual
violence. The bulk of well-researched human rights reports focus on specific
conflict zones, and the pattern of atrocities they sketch out often is not
comparable to other studies, making a comprehensive view frustratingly elusive.
For instance, studies don’t always use the same conceptual frameworks. Some
define sexual violence to include sexual slavery, while others do not. Some
include sexualized torture against men held in detention, while others only
look at crimes against women. It is still regrettably common for gender to be
used as a synonym for women, ignoring that men’s experiences of war are also
gendered. Some themes — such as the connection between violence against men,
especially those who are abducted as boys by armed groups, and the violence
they go on to perpetrate — are not even visible without that inclusion. These
are not merely technical questions, but political ones. The exclusion of some
from the role of survivor reinforces political narratives about victims and
perpetrators, narratives that in turn shape who gains political recognition and
agency.
Without more accurate data — such as reliable baseline surveys on sexual
violence before war begins — researchers can only make rough judgments about
where violations are greatest, and what role conflict plays in driving them.
Decisions over where best to focus limited resources are more robust, or at
least more transparent, when changes in sexual abuse committed over time
and different events are better understood. Without this kind of effort, it is
too easy for individual cases and horrifying scenarios to drive both policy and
media attention.
Of course, sexual violence is infamously bedeviled by problems of
measurement. One of the most reliable methods — the large, nationally
representative survey — is rarely employed, and often cannot be, in conflict
situations. Moreover, fluctuations in reporting, driven by factors such as
relative security and confidence in authorities, can produce a false sense of
precision.
The U.S. military serves as a case in point. The latest
investigation of sexual violence in the military by the Department
of Defense (DOD) reports a 50 percent increase reported cases in 2013. This is
the largest year-on-year jump in a steadily rising trend that began in the
mid-2000s. Although critics are right to identify a range of failures in DOD
programs, it is highly unlikely that the rate of perpetration has shifted so
dramatically in 12 months. Instead, the change points to a willingness to report,
attributable either to better procedures within the military or greater
confidence on the part of survivors, who are perhaps now more aware that their
cases are not isolated ones. After all, up until a few years ago, the issue of
rape in the military was not much discussed in the media. Today, however, the
experience of assault is better documented and has gained the attention of
policymakers.
Even where reliable figures exist, misleading statistics
often persist. In the case of wartime sexual violence, mythical numbers can
linger not only as under-estimates (because of low reporting) but also sometimes as over-estimates. In the
aftermath of the Liberian war, for instance, it was often claimed — including
by influential commentators like Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times
— that 75 percent of all Liberian women had been raped, a conclusion
derived from one study by the World Health Organization that
had in fact only sampled women who had experienced gender-based violence. In
other words, the original research had been on the prevalence of rape amongst
survivors of all forms of gender-based violence (including humiliation, sexual
beating, and other human rights abuses), not the prevalence of rape
among Liberian women in general.
As scholars Dara Kay Cohen and Amelia Hoover Green argued
in the Journal of Peace Research in 2012, such figures persist in part
because there are incentives for advocacy groups to base their campaigns on
dramatic claims. Assuming that a global public is ever more inured to tales of
horror, it becomes tempting to choose the most shocking number over the most
accurate one. This is not to say that advocacy groups maliciously distort known
data, but to warn that the periodic fixation on extreme cases necessarily means
that responses are less consistent than they could be, and may fail to address
the social and conflict dynamics that lie beneath shock figures.
Global responses to sexual violence depend on how it’s counted, and whom researchers
think counts. The willingness of policymakers to take sexual violence seriously
in recent years has largely come from a framing of it is a weapon of war — that
is, a mass atrocity deliberately adopted as a tactic of war to access economic
resources or conquer strategic zones. The result has been an over-emphasis by
media and activists on military perpetrators. Studies that focus on testimony
from war zones or that foreground stories of attacks by soldiers are likely to
discount the high levels of intimate partner and civilian-perpetrated sexual
violence that also occur in conflict situations. Although there is no universal
ratio to rely on, existing evidence from several studies suggest that a
significant proportion (and perhaps the majority) of sexual violence is not
carried out by armed groups at all. This remains an ongoing controversy in
places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, where most media and policy focus
has been on the idea of rape as a weapon of war, rather than on non-military perpetrators or much more complex dynamics of violence. If the
global response focuses mainly on formal military hierarchy, many survivors
will go unrecognized.
The challenge for policy professionals is identifying when sexual violence
is being orchestrated for the purpose terror, and when it is a spontaneous
criminal act. On the one hand, they must deal with gaps in data and the
considerable complexity of sexual violence across diverse settings, and on the
other, they cannot allow ongoing debates over that complexity to stand in the
way of concrete action. Women — and men — will continue to need medical
interventions, psychosocial support, justice, and conflict resolution
regardless of whether agencies are working with the best data. But improved
methodologies in collecting data could provide a better evidence foundation not
just for well-designed government interventions, but also for a consistent
standard against which governments can be held to account.
This tension between knowledge and action can in part be resolved by seeing
reliable research not as a distraction from, but as in fact integral to,
effective policy. Organizations — whether governmental, non-governmental, or
inter-governmental — need to invest in knowledge. Too often, the relationship
between research and policy is framed as a failure of academics to speak the
right language, or present their findings in the right way. But the obligation
flows both ways. It is also the duty of practitioners to base their
interventions on the best of current research, and to push for greater investment
where that research is not comprehensive enough. The alternative is to see only
some violence, and then in distorted ways. A greater alignment between research
and policy is not a luxury, but essential to realizing the bold promise of
ending sexual violence.
Paul Kirby is a lecturer in international security the University of
Sussex, where he teaches courses on the politics of war and gender violence.
Kathleen Kuehnast is director of the Center for Gender & Peacebuilding at
USIP.