Gendered Warfare: How Sexual Violence Compares to Other Forms of Abuse

• In Event: The Role of Gender in Political Violence

Abstract

To what extent is sexual violence a distinct form of wartime violence? Do rebel groups that engage in high levels of sexual violence also victimize civilians in other ways, or is sexual violence somehow unique in its frequency and causes? Since the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s, scholars and policymakers have given more attention to the use of sexual violence in war. Instead of treating it as an inevitable consequence of conflict, researchers have sought to explain varying levels of sexual violence across conflicts. Building on the concept of militarized masculinity, people such as Cynthia Enloe, Elisabeth Jean Wood, and Dara Kay Cohen have identified factors that motivate rebel commanders to strategically promote or restrain the use of sexual violence by their recruits. Recent work by Amanda Hoover Green and others on repertoires of violence shows that the relative proportion of different types of violence varies among armed groups. Some may engage in high levels of one type of violence and low levels of another, while others are consistently high or low in their use of violence, suggesting that sexual violence may not always be associated with other types of violence.

Drawing on existing literature, this paper examines whether sexual violence is in fact a distinct form of wartime violence. Using a newly-coded global dataset of human rights abuses by rebel groups each year from 1990 to 2012, we identify group-level and country-level factors that are associated with a higher frequency of sexual violence. We then test whether those same factors are associated with a higher frequency of other types of violence, including killings, detention, forced recruitment, and property destruction. Preliminary analysis shows that sexual violence is generally used in conjunction with most of these other human rights violations, suggesting that rebel groups use these abuses for similar reasons. However, we also find that sexual violence is unique in its relationship to gender when compared to the other types of violence. More specifically, rebel groups in conflict-torn countries with higher percentages of women in the workforce are more likely to commit sexual violence, while this variable is not significantly related to rebels’ use of the other abuses. This suggests that sexual violence may be motivated at least in part by gender roles within these societies, a possibility that warrants further research. These findings are important for helping to understand why armed groups use sexual violence and how these motivations might be addressed to help reduce gender-based violence in war.

Authors

• Hannah Stephens, UNC Charlotte

• Beth Elise Whitaker, University of North Carolina, Charlotte