Title: Gender Crimes: Genocidal Sexual Violence and Rape

Abstract:
The last years of the twentieth century were particularly savage for
women. While men and women alike suffered the ravages of genocide,
women's bodies were used as envelopes to send messages to the perceived
'enemy'. Women experienced forced pregnancy, abduction and sexual
slavery; they were infected with HIV/AIDS and murdered by having their
unborn babies ripped from their wombs. They were sexually tortured, and
mutilated. Women were abducted and gang-raped, deliberately
impregnated, denied access to medical assistance and abortions, and
forced to bear children conceived in rape. In both Rwanda and former
Yugoslavia,  rape was used as a mechanism of genocide. In his response
to violence against Blacks, Abraham Joshua Heschel said that some
[American Whites] are guilty but all are responsible.  The same may be
said about sexual crimes against women.  Such crimes, especially on a
mass scale, reflect societal attitudes towards women.  Where women are
devalued or commodified as economic or political tools, rape is, at
best, overlooked and, at worst, encouraged and rewarded or mandated as
policy. In this panel, we will explore various aspects of such
genocidal rape in the Armenian genocide, the Nazi Holocaust, Rwanda,
Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Darfur.  Panelists will use of variety of
lenses--literary, legal, religious, rhetorical--to discuss the
perception and recognition of genocidal rape, the silence of victims,
the denial by societies, how genocidal rape has been defined, how it
has been prosecuted, and what the churches have said to the
perpetrators.

Panelists:
Moderator: Elizabeth R. Baer (Gustavus Adolphus College)
Charli Carpenter (U of Pittsburgh) "The War Babies of
Bosnia-Herzegovina: Post-Genocide Humanitarian and Nationalist
Discourses"
Myrna Goldenberg (Montgomery College, Emeritus) "Rape During the Holocaust"
Jo Ann Palchak (Stetson University College of Law) "The Jurisprudence of 
Gender Crime; As a Crime Against Humanity and Instrument of Genocide."
Carol Rittner, R.S.M. (The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey)
"Rape, Religion and Genocide:An Unholy Trio"