The Fetishization of Sexual Violence in International Security

‘That thing of human rights’: discourse, emergency assistance, and sexual violence in South Sudan's current civil war

“…This is akin to what Mertens and Pardy () call ‘sexurity’, or the colonisation of discourses on wartime sexual violence and the production of the worlds of ‘us’ and ‘them’, where the international community becomes the agent and voice of sexual violence in conflict and conflict‐affected populations are the subjects. In the same way that the ‘securitisation’ and ‘fetishisation’ of sexual violence in conflict have marginalised the root causes of acts such as rape (Meger, ), ‘sexurity’ has been responsible for the disenfranchisement of ‘local knowledge and desires’ in war‐torn areas (Mertens and Pardy, , p. 9).…”

“…Furthermore, as demonstrated by population‐based surveys in conflict‐affected environments, many victims report that perpetrators are intimate partners, or non‐combatants (cited in Cohen, Green, and Wood, ). In this way, concentrating exclusively on conflict‐related sexual violence, or rape and other related offences by combatants against non‐combatant populations, leads to the construction of what Meger (, p. 150) refers to as the ‘de facto hierarchy of atrocity’, where sexual violence by armed actors is ‘inherently worse than “everyday” rape and civilian‐perpetrated sexual violence’.…”

End Impunity! Reducing Conflict-Related Sexual Violence to a Problem of Law

“…Reviews of the contemporary knowledge base concerning the causes of conflict‐related sexual violence often highlight two prevailing “knowledge camps”: one that understands rape and sexual violence as sexual opportunism, and another that explains conflict‐related sexual violence as a weapon of war (Houge ; Meger ). According to Meger (: 150), scholars in the opportunism camp suggest that soldiers rape because war provides them with ample opportunity to do so, as if there is something inherent in either men qua men, or in the conditioning of men into soldiers, that make them rape unless it is prevented. These approaches are best understood along a continuum and take in various degrees of inherent, situational, and/or societal or structural factors that condition and encourage soldiers to rape for the purpose of self‐gratification (Houge ).…”

“…These approaches are best understood along a continuum and take in various degrees of inherent, situational, and/or societal or structural factors that condition and encourage soldiers to rape for the purpose of self‐gratification (Houge ). These understandings emphasize the opportunities created by the chaos of war, which suggest that “preventing conflict‐related sexual violence requires stricter enforcement policies, norms, and codes of conduct to curtail this behavior” (Meger ). That is, the command lines must be clarified, and leaders need to sanction subordinates that do not follow established codes of conduct.…”

“…It has become so dominant the last decade that “to claim that rape is a strategy or tactic of war is seemingly to state the obvious” (Baaz and Stern : 42; see also Crawford ). According to Meger () this narrative emerges particularly from advocacy work, but it also relates to feminist research on high profile conflict cases, such as the wars in the former Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s. In contrast to earlier feminist analyses, however, the current weapon of war‐narrative separates conflict‐related sexual violence from the continuum of gender‐based violence that springs out of gender inequality and permeates both war and peace.…”