much of this hardship. Sexual violence summarily and irrevocably deprived them of the honor and inviolability that attaches in patriarchal societies only to unmarried virgins, wives, and mothers.
I selected this first narrative because it so clearly emphasizes the interruption of motherhood and its fruits through stigmatization, ostracism, and a perpetual sexual objectification of the survivor of enslavement.
When I reached my house, my husband received me very warmly while in the presence of the American soldiers. However, when the soldiers had left he immediately distanced himself from me. He told me to sleep in a separate room and made it very clear that he would not share a bedroom with me anymore. I swallowed this insult because of the fact that I could at least be near my children. However, he would not allow me to share my children’s bedroom. I was thus isolated in my own house. Thereafter, I noticed that my husband also treated me just like a comfort woman. He would come to me whenever he felt the need for sex. He said he did not want to restore our original relationship because he termed me as a leftover of the Japanese soldiers. He could not reconcile himself to the fact that it was not my doing and that I was not at fault. My husband never fully understood or even tried to understand my plight. (Dogopol and Paranjape 1994: 74)
Another woman’s testimony describes the interruption of motherhood through the loss of reproductive potential: “Because of her experiences she had to have a hysterectomy and continues to rue the fact that she has never been able to have children. At the age of 28 she married a man twenty-three years her senior and lived with him and his five children for three years, but as she had not been able to have any children, his family refused to give her any property after his death. She lived for many years in a Buddhist temple, helping the monks by cooking and cleaning and doing general chores” (ibid., 81). The ICoJ report places the sexual abuse of women into a patriarchal framework where male hegemony is absolute. The report duly decries this structural inequality yet also shows that the victims of sexual violence recount their experience of rejection long after the armed conflict in the patriarchal language of “shame,” “virtue,” “honor,” and “impurity.” The loss of access to family life and marriage, sexual intimacy, childbearing, and child rearing is lamented throughout the testimonies. This gendered presentation of victim testimonies does not obscure the fact that many women do in fact embrace the gender roles of mothering and childbearing as sites of social affirmation and personal fulfillment. Without acknowledging this, the resultant legal narrative of justice and remedies would have missed the fact that “the acts of brutality committed against these women go beyond the immediate suffering of having to endure a continuous rape … the pain these women endured has continued throughout their lifetime” (ibid., 57).
Ní Aoláin’s study of a gender and sex based view of the Holocaust, which I have referred to above, also responds to the postwar enterprise of justice, which fell short of naming many harms that women experienced. To illustrate the failure of the laws of war to engage with the totality of harm experienced by women, Ní Aoláin focuses particularly on the harm arising from the separation of mothers from their children upon arrival at concentration or labor camps (2000b: 63). She makes clear that mothering is a gendered undertaking and both the Nazi captors and their victims understood it as such (ibid., 58).
Ní Aoláin recognizes the problematic nature of privileging motherhood over individual personhood; however, her analysis individualizes the harm of forcible separation by arguing for its categorization as another quantifiable harm occurring in the realm of the sexual self and not exclusively in the realm of the familial self (ibid.). Ní Aoláin points out that many women also articulate such separation from children as a physical act of aggression against their own person, concentrated on their own experienced sense of being female, aimed at undermining their sexual identity by taking away the expression of that reproductive self or product of sexuality, namely, the child (ibid., 61–62). I fully concur with Ní Aoláin when she judges the laws of war a failure in the wake of the Holocaust because they did not recognize forced separation as sex based harm targeting the woman’s body, both in its symbolic and actual manifestations (ibid.).29
Sexual violence, whether inside or outside of armed conflict, carries a unique stigma because of its general perception as a specifically sexual violation, a view that tends to subsume its violent nature and gravity as a gender-specific offense (Mitchell 2005: 247). There are few modern societies that do not valorize purity and fertility in women. Acknowledging this valorization is a necessary step toward investigating the power of rape to destroy the fabric of society through the gendered targeting of women and, more important, toward finding social, political, and legal responses that can diminish this power. The call for the individualization of gender-based violence within international humanitarian law and a focus thereon as an act of aggression rather than an honor crime or a crime against a community is a valid one. However, a focus on the individual need not exclude her relationship with her community and its dominant constructions of gender, be they contested or accepted in whole or in part.
My brief accounts of the repatriation of Indian-Hindu-Muslim women and of Korean women highlight the fact that women’s experience of gender-based violence is not extinguished with the end of armed hostilities. Hostile legal, social, and political responses often pursue women survivors of violence such that a state of conflict persists, at least in their private lives. It is therefore a striking omission that while international humanitarian law protections have moved from international conflicts to encompass internal conflicts involving nonstate actors, they have failed to expand their temporal jurisdiction, which is restricted to active hostilities. Thus, the scope of protection provided by international humanitarian law ends abruptly with the official ending of hostilities. The resultant narrative suggests that gender-based violence is temporal and unique to armed conflict. This short-sightedness results in a lost opportunity for policy makers (such as members of the Council of Europe responsible for the drafting of reports on sexual violence in armed conflict), who are charged to dismantle and reconstruct political and social structures that contribute to the conditions for the perpetration of widespread sexual violence against women in war and its aftermath. Leaving these structures intact generates new forms of sexual exploitation exacerbated by postconflict conditions.
Sexual exploitation proliferates in the immediate aftermath of armed conflict. Peacekeepers, humanitarian workers, invaders, occupying forces, demobilized fighters, and retreating forces are regularly implicated in the sexual exploitation of women and girls made vulnerable by months or even years of armed conflict. In the aftermath of World War II, Susanne Zwingel (2004: 8) describes how in the French, British, and American occupation zones, the situation of material deprivation generated considerable dimensions of “occasional prostitution” in exchange for basic goods.30 Richard W. McCormick (2001: 106) reviews Helke Ander’s film BeFreier und Befreite (1992) (U.S. title: Liberators Take Liberties) and presents as evidence of mass rapes an interview with a doctor who treated German women raped by the French on a massive scale in Freudenstadt, a town in the Black Forest, as a reprisal for atrocities committed against French civilians.
Yuki Tanaka has written about the widespread incidence of sexual violence by Allies in occupied Japan. He describes American soldiers breaking into the homes of civilians and raping women and girls, fondling girls and women clerking in public offices, and abducting girls and women for sexual violence (Tanaka 2002: 121–22). Most disturbing, however, is Tanaka’s revelation that the defeated Japanese government created a “comfort woman” system for the occupation forces. Duplicitous police officers recruited Japanese geishas and prostitutes and coerced women and girls impoverished by the war into volunteering for a “special task” (ibid., 136–39). GIs typically gang raped “volunteers” repeatedly before they were sent to comfort stations also referred to as “recreation” and “amusement” centers (ibid., 140). Tanaka’s account of the normalization of widespread and systematic sexual violence by Allied occupiers emphasizes that women’s security remains precarious even as transitional governments appear to commit to democracy, rule of law, and good governance projects.
These postwar situations of gender-based violence are equal in scale to violence committed
