Women stand next to a car after a shelling in Odessa, Ukraine, April 3, 2022. As
in other conflicts, women are used as spoils of war and are victims of sexualviolence. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris) ---- The following article is written bySandrine Ricci , doctoral researcher and lecturer in sociology/feminist studies,University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM). Link to the original on The Conversationwebsite, over here . ---- When I learned that Russian soldiers had rapedUkrainian women as soon as their country was invaded, I was heartbroken, butunfortunately I was not surprised. ---- Historically, sexual violence has beenassociated with most armed conflicts, sometimes on a massive and organized scale.Putin's army has already resorted to sexual torture, notably in Chechnya. Thework of documenting the abuses currently being committed by Russian forcesobviously remains to be done, but some initial analyzes of Ukraine, as well as abody of research concerning other armed conflicts, highlight the ideological andstrategic dimensions of what commonly referred to as war rape.We must indeed be careful not to simply consider sexual violence, such as thatcommitted by Russian soldiers in Ukraine, as the consequence of individual"slippages".The following analysis is based on 18 years of qualitative and quantitativeresearch undertaken on and with women victims of sexual violence in differentcontexts. This article is particularly based on my book "Before you kill women,you must rape them!"»: Rwanda, gender relations and the genocide of the Tutsi .Testimonies and calls for help are multiplyingWomen politicians, media personalities and feminist activists in Ukraine quicklyraised the alarm about sexual violence committed by Russian troops, and began toorganize support for women victims.MP Maria Mezentseva first reported a case in Brovary , a suburb of Kyiv, wheretwo soldiers allegedly raped a woman in front of her child after her husband wasshot dead. There are also cases where children have been abused in the presenceof their mothers or parents, according to a news report quoting KaterynaCherepakha, president of Strada Ukraine. The latter also told the Guardian thatshe had received several calls from women and girls on the emergency line of hernon-governmental organization whose mission is to fight against humantrafficking, without being able to help them, because of the fighting.Refugee women and girls at the Central Station in Warsaw, Poland, on April 7,2022. Testimonies are increasing in Ukraine on sexual violence suffered by womenand girls at the hands of Russians. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)The "Feminist Workshop" collective based in Lviv, near the Polish border,collects funds to support its fieldwork. Masha Efrosinina, a TV presenter,meanwhile appealed to Ukrainian women to report sexual assaults to the authorities.It seems that after the withdrawal of Russian troops from certain cities andsuburbs of Ukraine, women and young girls began to tell the police, the media andfeminist or human rights organizations about the sexual violence that Russianmilitary inflicted on them. Human Rights Watch set out to document abuses in thecontext of the war in Ukraine, confirming that a Russian soldier repeatedly rapeda woman on March 13 at a school in the Kharkiv region, where she had taken refugewith his family.In the testimonies reported by the media, there is often talk of gang rapes,which sometimes precede the murder. Corpses of naked women lying on a highwaynear kyiv were photographed by Mikhail Palinchak. Another terrible photo iscirculating on social networks, showing the body of a Ukrainian woman rapedbefore being murdered, a swastika engraved on her stomach by her executioners.Rape of women, rape of the nationA Ukrainian militant under the name Yosh within the "Feminist Workshop" spokeabout the meaning to be given to this violence in a series of publications onTwitter which I translate here freely. @yo_sh first reminds that women don'tbecome weapons of war just because the aggressor is a crazed dictator. Thisphenomenon is also possible, she writes, because of certain beliefs that stemfrom a patriarchal culture, on which a totalitarian government is based.The first of these beliefs is that men cannot live without satisfying theirsexual needs by using women. A second belief is that women should satisfy men'ssexual needs. A third belief is that a raped woman becomes a damaged andworthless woman. A fourth belief, still according to Yosh, conceives of women asproperty of the state. By harming women, the aggressor harms the state, sheconcludes.As weapons of war, sexual violence physically and emotionally affects women, whoare its primary targets; and as strategic tools, they constitute a means ofachieving objectives diversified enough to impose political domination. Globally,the body and sexuality of women are requisitioned to implement the rape of thenation.A woman stands near a shattered window in her apartment, after a Russianbombardment in Kyiv, Ukraine, March 14, 2022. Ukrainian women have been the maintargets of Russian sexual violence since the invasion of their country. (APPhoto/Efrem Lukatsky)This refers to the unspoken rule that women can be "conquered" along withterritory. We rely on the shame produced by the aggression, on the feeling ofhonor linked to the more or less symbolic belonging of the woman to her communityand to the men themselves indirectly targeted by the attack. In the event of agang rape, the executioners can demonstrate their virility to each other. Sexualservitude is imposed on women taken as spoils of war. Sexual violence thuscontributes to establishing a climate of terror, to destroying the social fabric,to scaring populations away, accelerating their subjection.Crimes too often unpunishedFormally condemned by the Geneva Convention since 1949, sexual violence has morerecently been the subject of international legal recognition as crimes againsthumanity and war crimes, then as an act of genocide, within the framework of atrial concerning Rwanda.However, Ukraine has just been added to the long list of armed conflicts andgenocides which have resulted in the strategic instrumentalization of sexualviolence against girls and women by opposing troops. The Ukrainian government iscalling for the establishment of a Special Criminal Court which could make itpossible to punish this violence, but international law is still struggling totake into account the gendered dimensions of armed conflicts and genocides. Thedisappointing record of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR),among others, raises fears that Ukrainian women will not obtain more justice thanRwandan women.Testimonies from Ukraine support an analysis that conceives of rape in situationsof armed conflict as a war within a war. In this sense, Ukrainian women must,alas, also fear the men of their "camp". The Guardian is already reporting that amember of Ukraine's Territorial Defense Service has been arrested afterattempting to rape a teacher he dragged into the school library.Finally, as far as the "international community" is concerned, what about the menwho storm refugee aid structures or marriage agencies to "host" a beautiful blondUkrainian woman aged 18-30, intelligent and neat? We must therefore never losesight of the fact that in so-called peacetime, many women live under theconstraint of patriarchal violence of all kinds. More and more of them aredenouncing it so that it changes.Posted 13 hours ago by Collectif Emma Goldmanhttp://ucl-saguenay.blogspot.com/2022/04/le-corps-des-ukrainiennes-comme-champ.html_________________________________________A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C EBy, For, and About AnarchistsSend news reports to A-infos-en mailing listA-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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