Feminist State Crime Theory- What makes Sexual Violence Genocidal?

• In Event: Atrocity Crimes: Types of Offending (ECACTJ)

Abstract

This research promotes the elaboration of a new theoretical approach to improve the criminological understanding of the use of sexual violence as a means of ethnic cleansing by using the case of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s as a point for departure. The newly proposed theory is called feminist state crime theory and its elaboration results from the application of Fairclough's (2001) model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to the victims' testimonies of sexual violence collected within the ICTY digital archive and those already present in the literature, since the rapes perpetrated during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s have been described as “the best-documented ones in the annals of war” (Mann, 2005: 357). The analysis of findings has led to the identification of what makes the deployment of sexual violence genocidal in the context analyzed. It does so by shedding light to the social and cultural connotations of practices such as forcing victims to either witness or perpetrate sexual violence on family members and fellow prisoners within detention camps, forced impregnation and what the implications of such violence are when these crimes are committed against non-Bosnian Muslims. The research investigates how the interrelation between gender and ethnicity plays a pivotal role in determining why certain acts of violence, especially sexual violence, are intently used against a targeted group of individuals for the purpose of ethnic cleansing. The project aims to overcome the hierarchy of victimhood (Christie, 1986) that overlooks the experiences of victimization of individuals belonging to the same ethnic group as the perpetrators (Golubovic, 2019) and has led to the representation of the conflict as a one-dimensional attack by the Serbian and Bosnian Serb forces against Bosnian Muslims (Buss, 2014), even though sexual violence has been perpetrated “by all sides of the conflict” (Bassiouni Report, 1994: 60).

Author

• Annalisa Battista, University of Edinburgh