Rape and other forms of sexual violence have often been prevalent in times of war. For centuries, the rape and sexual enslavement of civilians by soldiers were widely accepted and even legitimized as “the spoils of war.” Sexual violence has also been used strategically as a means to punish and humiliate enemies and systematically destroy, in whole or in part, groups of people based on their ethnic, cultural, or religious affiliations. It was not until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that international organizations began to classify wartime sexual violence as a human rights violation and a war crime. The first international prosecutions for rape in wartime occurred in the 1990s for atrocities perpetrated in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Nevertheless, sexual violence in conflict zones continues to be a serious global security problem in the modern world, and the international community is still working to address this phenomenon in a better way.