RAPE, CHILDREN, and GENOCIDE

IAGS SESSIONS ON RAPE, CHILDREN, and GENDERCIDE/GENOCIDE

Myrna Goldenberg

The sessions dealing with gender and genocide raised issues seldom discussed in genocide conferences: the ubiquity of rape in genocide, the intersections of class/gender/rape, women��s anxieties over witnessing their husbands�� /fathers�� suffering, gender differences in memory, the relationship of women to food in ghettos and camps, the emphasis on sexuality in references to women and genocide, violence against women as a strategy of war, and the use of children as a tool of ethnic cleansing.

Highlights

Carol Rittner explored the use of rape in both the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda as a tool to interrupt the ethnic continuity of the group. The Serbs set the pattern, she explained, in 1992, and the Hutus used the practice in Rwanda where rape was the rule and its absence, the exception. Although the Catholic Church condemned both genocides in these predominantly Catholic countries, it failed to confront the crime of rape and to condemn the rapists.

Indeed, as another panelist pointed out, rape as an international crime is but ten years old. Women, JoAnn Palchak explained, are instruments of genocide. In her presentation on the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal of Yugoslavia), the ICTR (International
Criminal Tribunal of Rwanda) and the ICC (International Criminal Court), Palchak cited landmark cases��䉥�Gender Crime��the History of an Entirely New Jurisprudence.�� Details about the cases revealed their impact: Rape was defined as a crime in international law (September 1998), as a crime of torture (November 1998); sexual violence was defined as a war crime (December 1998), sexual slavery and rape as crimes (February 2001), and rape as a form of persecution (November 2001).

Jasna Balorda analyzed the search for and identification of children of rape victims in Zagreb and other countries where rape is still considered a woman��s responsibility and the children of rape are thought to carry ��polluted genes.�� These children, the ��product of violence against the mother,�� are often abandoned. In a society in which genetics and biology are important markers of status, these children have many problems developing a positive identity. Children who were kept by their mothers often face other conflicts, especially poverty and isolation because of their mothers�� status as rape victims.

Children, Morgan Blum, told us were victims of race ideology in Western Australia where aboriginal children of mixed race were forcibly removed, retrained to ��remove any traces of aboriginal culture,�� and mated with ��lighter�� children to produce ��whiter children.�� This practice, the removal of mixed children from their environment, was part of a global eugenics movement of the 1930s. Also discussing the forced removal of aboriginal children from their families was Nine Silove, who reported on the shift in such policy in the 1950s from biological absorption to cultural assimilation. These children, known in Australia as the Stolen Generation, are the subject of a 1997 government inquiry which generated Bringing Them Home, a provocative report that concluded that the removal of these children was ��properly��labeled ��genocidal.�� Silove demonstrated a clear continuity in policies; both had the same genocidal intent.

Helene Sinnreich spoke about the occurrences of ��rape without issue.�� During the Holocaust, rape was usually followed by immediate killing. Although documentation of rape is found on the ��edges of testimony�� and in the ��corners of diaries,�� there are witness reports. One document recounts a rape for medical experimentation and was the subject of a post war lecture at Humboldt University; that is, a woman was raped, then murdered, and dissected to track the migration of sperm. Sinnreich also echoed Rittner��s description of a raped woman used as an envelope to send a message to the enemy; thus, the crime or act of rape is deflected in that the woman becomes an instrument to convey power.

Myrna Goldenberg distinguished between forced sex by Nazis of Jewish women and sex as an exchange strategy in concentration camps for survival. She explored the nuances of sex given in trade for food or other necessities as well as sex as exploitation by Jewish and non Jewish men camp prisoners. Goldenberg discussed rape of Jewish women by German men as a political crime rather than as an act of sexual violence��a crime of race-mixing that was considered serious and, at times, bordering on treason.

What became clear through all these presentations is that the relationship of the status of women in patriarchal societies directly influences the depth of the victimization of women and, by extension, children, in times of violence. It is hoped that much more research and analysis will bring the matter of sexual violence against women to the attention of scholars, jurists, and activists.