Making Mass Rape Legible: Specialized Post-Rape Care and Medical Documentation in Humanitarian Emergencies

• In Event: 097 - Section on Human Rights Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 05. Human Rights and Gendered Violence

Abstract

Contemporary global networks of human rights activists, doctors, and nurses have advocated for providing specialized medical care to survivors of sexual violence in conflict-affected countries, both during and immediately following armed conflict, episodes of mass violence, and other humanitarian emergencies. Some also advocate for increased medical documentation of injuries to facilitate prosecution in domestic and international courts. The linking of specialized medical care with medical evidence collection for survivors of sexual violence has become codified as best practice in model guidelines developed by the World Health Organization and adapted for use in humanitarian emergencies. In this paper I ask: what are the origins and implications of recent attempts to introduce specialized medical care and documentation of sexual violence in the context of humanitarian emergencies? Drawing on archival research and interviews of activists, healthcare practitioners, lawyers, investigators, and other experts, I argue that the introduction of this model into healthcare settings as disparate as maternity wards, hospital emergency departments, and rudimentary health clinics in refugee camps and war zones appears to signal the emergence, global circulation, and increasing uptake of a relatively new paradigm of medico-legal approaches to treating and documenting human rights violations within medicine.

Author

• Jaimie Morse, Northwestern University