When Sexually Assaulted Women Are Not Believed: “Ideal Victims” and the October 7 Hamas Attack

• In Event: Understanding and Preventing Crimes Against Targeted or Vulnerable Groups

Abstract

This study investigates the reasons for the silence, disbelief, and denial of the sexual abuse perpetrated by Hamas in the October 7 attack. It employs Christie’s “ideal victim” conceptualization as adapted by van Wijk for international context to explain the silence of international organizations and women-led civil society groups about the abuse of Israeli women. The reasons for and functions of rape in war to effect political and demographic changes are discussed and how the sexual violence on October 7 exemplifies these functions. The evidence for the October 7 sexual violence is presented and efforts to question/deny it are contrasted with other international cases of wartime sexual abuse in Iraq and Nigeria in which victims were believed. We conclude that, over time, the determination of who is a victim deemed worthy (or unworthy) of the international community's sympathy and recognition, is a political judgment. Nils Christie’s concept of the “ideal victim,” is heuristically useful but politically contingent on the vicissitudes of the international zeitgeist of the moment, but not one based on forensic evidence, or documentation of gender-based crimes.

Authors

• Mia Bloom, Georgia State University

• Edna Erez, University of Illinois Chicago