Sexual violence
[3][4] It occurs in times of peace and armed conflict situations, is widespread, and is considered to be one of the most traumatic, pervasive, and most common human rights violations.
Sexual violence remains highly stigmatized in all settings, oftentimes dismissed as a women's issue, thus levels of disclosure of the assault vary between regions.
In addition, sexual violence is also a neglected area of research, thus deeper understanding of the issue is imperative in order to promote a coordinated movement against it.
[5][6][12][13] From a historical perspective, sexual violence was considered as only being perpetrated by men against women and as being commonplace and "normal" during both war and peace times from the Ancient Greeks to the 20th century.
[1] WHO's definition of sexual violence includes but is not limited to rape, which is defined as physically forced or otherwise coerced penetration of the vulva or anus, using a penis, other body parts or an object.
Sexual violence consists in a purposeful action of which the intention is often to inflict severe humiliation on the victims and diminish human dignity.
It may also occur when the person being attacked is unable to give consent – for instance, while drunk, drugged, asleep or mentally incapable of understanding the situation.
For instance, a 1987 study concluded that college women reported being the victims of unwanted sex that was the result of men using verbal coercion and physical force to manipulate them into it, and alcohol or drugs to intoxicate them into it.
Sexual violence, in particular rape, is often considered as a method of warfare: it is used not only to "torture, injure, extract information, degrade, displace, intimidate, punish or simply destroy," but also as a strategy to destabilize communities and demoralize other men.
[17] The practice of sexually assaulting males is not confined to any geographical area of the world or its place of commission, and occurs irrespective of the victim's age.
[43] The prevailing view amongst scientists is that this form of tonic immobility occurs in humans when no other options to avoid the sexual violence are available anymore, and the brain paralyses the body in order to allow it to survive with minimal damage.
[55] Data on sexually violent men are somewhat limited and heavily biased towards apprehended rapists, except in the United States, where research has also been conducted on male college students.
[56][57] Among the factors increasing the risk of a man committing rape are those related to attitudes and beliefs, as well as behavior arising from situations and social conditions that provide opportunities and support for abuse.
[88] Men are even more reluctant to report sexual violence due to extreme embarrassment and concerns about opinions of other people, their masculinity and the fact that they were unable to prevent the assault.
It has been reported that victims who attempt resistance or escape from the situation are more likely to be brutalized by the offender,32 thereby giving an inflated sense of power to the abuser as was seen in the New Delhi gang rape case of Nirbhaya in December 2012.
They have proposed that the root causes of sexual violence lie in the social structure characterized by severe inequality, in which the male is dominant and the female exploited.
Among other countries, feminists and women's rights activists in Egypt faced extreme challenges in combatting the grave issues of sexual violence.
[106] A linguistic clue can still be found in verb to rape, which derives from Latin rapere, which originally meant 'to steal, seize, rob, carry away'; any infringement or damage to a woman or girl was primarily considered to be an offence against her husband if she was married, or against her father if she was not, and a crime against the community and public morality instead of a crime against the individual woman or girl herself.
[108] During armed conflict sexual violence, particularly rape, was perceived as a normal byproduct of war, as "a socially acceptable behavior well within the rules of warfare".
In Alta California, for example, the Catholic clergy relied heavily on corporal punishment such as flogging, placing in the stocks or shackling of Amerindian women within their programs of Christianization.
On 24 April 1863, President Abraham Lincoln tried to inter alia regulate the sexual conduct of Union soldiers towards civilians in hostile territory with the Lieber Code, which contained one of the first explicit prohibitions on rape.
[119][120] This view was expressed for the first time after Nuremberg and Tokyo in the second series of trials for the prosecution of "lesser" war criminals in Allied-occupied Germany, where the Allied Control Council Law No.
[121][122] After 1945, an extensive amount of both hard and soft law instruments have set rules, standards and norms for the protection of victims of sexual offences.
IHL mandates special protections to women, according to their additional needs when they are more vulnerable, such as widows, the sick and wounded, migrants, the internally displaced, or those held in detention.
[125] Meanwhile, second-wave feminists launched the anti-rape movement in the 1960s and 1970s, leading to national legal prohibitions on marital rape by most countries around the world by the 2010s,[126] while marry-your-rapist laws were increasingly abolished in the same decades.
[131][132] The first trial solely focused on the perpetration of systematic sexual violence (rape camps) and on crimes against humanity committed against women and girls was the Foča case, a ruling before the ICTY.
[12][135] The UN Security Council, ECOSOC and the UN Commission on Human Rights do not take into account the nature of the conflict with respect to the protection of women in war time.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1888 (2009), in particular, created the Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary General for Sexual Violence in Conflict (SRSG-SVC).
[5][6][12][13] Sexual violence against women in modern warfare constitutes a grave violation of human rights, with devastating consequences that persist long after conflicts cease.
In conflicts such as the Bosnian War in the 1990s, women endured widespread sexual violence, including systematic rape camps, as a tool of ethnic cleansing.
